The internet was meant to be an “information superhighway” – a place where all human knowledge could be available, allowing humanity to find the truth of any situation at the touch of a button.
Instead, it’s a place where anti-vaxxers tout deworming tablets for viruses and people pretend that birds aren’t real. It’s a wild west of pseudo- and anti-science – and a recent paper into the two phenomena has now outlined just how dangerous it can get.
What is pseudoscience?
As therapeutic techniques go, few have quite as established a pedigree as acupuncture. It goes back, most scholars agree, at least a couple of millennia, and even today people swear by its healing power. There are regular calls across the Western world to incorporate the practice into standard medicine, with proponents pointing to its effectiveness for pain relief, addiction recovery, and even as a fertility treatment.
So, here’s a question: how does it work?
The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. The benefits are mostly down to the placebo effect – you’re told these magic needles are going to help you feel better, and so they do. But that’s not what you’ll be told by acupuncture believers – ask them how it works, and you’ll be told something about connecting meridians in the body, stimulating blood and lymphatic fluid flow, or tweaking nervous system regulation.
It can all sound very scientific – but it isn’t. And it’s that quality that defines pseudoscience: the term refers to “any discourse that kind of mimics the style of science,” explained co-author of the paper Tommaso Venturini, a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and associate professor at the University of Geneva’s Medialab.
“So, particularly when we’re talking about conspiracy theories […] they tend to pretend they are scientific,” he told IFLScience. “If you consider the type of writing that they use, for example, it does resemble a lot that [which] neuroscientists and researchers use.”
This is why articles on, say, acupuncture will often cite research supposedly supporting their claims – and it will take a deeper dive on your part to find out just how low-quality or damning those papers really are. Pseudoscientists “quote the same way as researchers do,” Venturini said; “they tend to present what they write, in, you know, sort of similar pseudo-rationalist [ways].”
“Of course, it’s not the same thing,” he added. “But it looks the same.”
What is anti-science?
If acupuncture is pseudoscience, then anti-science would be something like the anti-vax movement. It is, essentially, exactly what it sounds like: an explicit rejection of science and scientific authority, often in favor of thought-terminating cliches such as “trust your gut”.
“People will very [openly] present their argument as unscientific, or anti-institutional science,” Venturini told IFLScience. “[They will say,] we don’t trust those institutions, we don’t trust the epistemic authority that you have.”
They are not trying to sound scientific – in fact they are specifically trying not to sound scientific.
Tommaso Venturini
Of course, skepticism of science is not intrinsically a bad thing. “Science is not the only social authority in our society,” Venturini pointed out, “and to some extent, I think that’s right. It is a very specific approach, which people have sometimes criticized, and rightfully so.”
Indeed, for some sectors of society, there are good reasons not to trust the scientific establishment. Women and people of color have notoriously been mistreated by scientists over the years, being at best ignored entirely and at worst experimented on without their knowledge. There are still doctors around today who are taught, and believe, stereotypes about various ethnic groups that affect their treatment in dangerous ways.
The problem comes, however, when “the scientific method is flawed” becomes “and so I shall trust this meme.” Anti-science doesn’t aim to ape real science, Venturini explained; instead, it “can be something more like entertainment.”
“Donald Trump is a very good example of this,” he told IFLScience. “He [has] more of a television style, […] a talk show type of style, which is clearly not one of classic science, right?”
“That is very deliberate,” he said. “They are not trying to sound scientific – in fact they are specifically trying not to sound scientific.”
Case study: Flat Earthers
For an illustration of the difference between pseudo- and anti-scientific views, let’s turn to one of the oldest conspiracies out there: the Flat Earth.
Now, despite what some proponents of the idea suggest, the Flat Earth conspiracy is likely much newer than you realize. “It originated in the mid-19th century,” Venturini and his colleagues explain in their paper, “when Samuel Rowbotham, writing under the pseudonym ‘Parallax,’ published a pamphlet titled ‘Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe’ in 1849.”
“This publication laid the groundwork for the modern belief that the Earth is flat,” they write.
It took the internet, though, for the idea to really take off. The first website dedicated to spreading the gospel of the flat Earth appears to have turned up in 2004, three years after the Flat Earth Society had already disbanded, and since then it’s gone from strength to strength. Quote-unquote “proofs” of the supposed pancake-like nature of the planet abound on YouTube; there are dedicated subreddits and websites pushing the mythology; there have even been a few spurious celebrity endorsements over the years.
And with this new frontier came a change in how the conspiracy was disseminated, Venturini and his colleagues discovered. What was once a mythology at least nominally supported by an attempt at scientific reasoning has now morphed into a virulent anti-scientific meme – and that is likely to make debunking it ever harder, the team predicts.
And when Rowbotham first presented his unorthodox idea, he made a real go at proving it. He carried out a series of experiments along 6 miles (10 kilometers) of the Old Bedford River in Cambridgeshire, England – an artificial waterway, chosen for its lengthy and extremely straight path, as well as the stillness of the water within.
“If the earth is a globe, and is 25,000 English statute miles in circumference, the surface of all standing water must have a certain degree of convexity – every part must be an arc of a circle,” he wrote, correctly.
“From the summit of any such arc there will exist a curvature or declination of 8 inches in the first statute mile. In the second mile the fall will be 32 inches; in the third mile, 72 inches, or 6 feet […] after the first few miles the curvature would be so great that no difficulty could exist in detecting either its actual existence or its proportion,” he concluded, incorrectly.
Rowbotham’s problem was that he had not accounted for atmospheric refraction – as a highly-publicized redo in 1870 by naturalist and qualified surveyor Alfred Russel Wallace made clear.
Of course, that didn’t stop believers. “[Rowbotham’s] growing following led to the formation of the Universal Zetetic Society, which aimed to investigate and propagate the belief in a flat Earth,” the paper notes; even after his death, others like William Carpenter picked up the mantle, authoring books with titles like One Hundred Proofs the Earth is not a Globe in an attempt to “prove” their ideas were correct.
And over the next century and a half – and despite a few setbacks such as “literal photographic evidence that the Earth is a ball” – the Flat Earth Society “maintained an unwavering commitment to its core principles,” Venturini and colleagues write, “centered on the provision of empirical evidence to substantiate its theories, and actively participating in debates with the scientific establishment.”
In other words: they’re wrong, but they’re trying.
But while pseudoscientific ideas like this may rule the older, more traditional Flat Earth forums, the modern age has ushered in a new and aggressive form of debate – the anti-science approach.
Amply typified by the discourse on Reddit’s r/flatearthsociety, anti-scientific arguments are – well, very much arguments: there is “a high presence of critical and oppositional voices, including mockers or haters who intervene in threads as trolls,” the paper notes, which “makes the communication atmosphere tense and reactive.” Discussions are characterized by “ad hominem attacks, cursing, and personal offenses” along with “a profound diffidence and skepticism also against any internal hierarchy.”
Countering anti-science can be difficult precisely because the “debates” are so charged and vague: “the conversational style is simplistic and vague, characterized by highly ambiguous statements, open-ended terms, tongue-in-cheek allusions and vague empirical correlates, which all lend themselves to ex-post reinterpretation according to needs,” the authors write.
People who accept the oblate spheroid nature of the Earth are labeled “Globetards”, and extreme paranoia, even about fellow Flat Earthers, is encouraged – even celebrated.
“The goal of the conversation is not to establish truth as an intersubjective compromise, but to hammer one’s truth to everyone else through a hyper-simplified logic,” the paper explains. “For example [with] the recurrent claim about photos: ‘Pictures are not valid evidence.’”
What can we do about it?
Okay, so a few people have some bizarre ideas about the shape of the planet – so what? But what’s behind it is precisely the same kind of conspiratorial thinking that has led to climate change denial, anti-vaxxers, and Pizzagate.
“Maybe 10 or 20 years ago, I would have said, just laugh at them, how much traction are they going to get? I no longer feel that way,” Lee McIntyre, a philosopher from Boston University and an expert in the phenomenon of science denial, told Physics World in 2020.
“The sort of reasoning that they use is infectious and if you don’t push back against them, it just gets worse and they’re able to recruit new members,” he warned.
So, it’s in our best interest to counter this kind of thinking when we see it. But how?
Well, it depends on what you’re faced with. “For a long time, conspiratorial thinking tended to abide by a scientific style – which did not make it easier to counteract, but at least we knew […] what we should do.”
Indeed, countering pseudoscience is fairly straightforward: “It’s probably best counteracted by debunking – by fact checking what they’re saying,” Venturini told IFLScience. “Because they are at least claiming the argument is accurate scientifically. So it makes sense to fact check, and show that it is not the case.”
It’s not a guaranteed slam-dunk, he cautioned – there are always those who will dig their heels in deeper, or turn up some obscure not-yet-discredited paper or professor to back up their claims. “But there are other people that may say, well, if we are if we are discussing on this level – the level of scientific arguments and demonstration – then one side can provide the best argument, and the best demonstration.”
Unfortunately, those are precisely the tactics that will fail hardest against anti-science arguments. “Anti-science is precisely saying ‘don’t trust this type of argument,’” Venturini explained – rather, anti-scientists are more likely to make jokes or memes to support their point.
Countering it, then “depends on the precise type of anti-science,” Venturini told IFLScience. The key, however, seems to be to meet them on their own terms – don’t try to rationalize them out of the argument, because let’s face it: they certainly weren’t rationalized into it.
“For example, if I write a poem about the Flat Earth, it doesn’t really make sense to answer with a mathematical demonstration,” Venturini told IFLScience. “If I’m making a joke about the fact that the earth is flat, [don’t] answer ‘well, but look at these measurements.”
“What you should say,” he advised, “is that this is bad. This is bad poetry [and] the joke’s not funny.”
The paper is published in the journal New Media & Society.
Source Link: Pseudoscience Vs Anti-Science: How To Tell The Difference And Fight Both