he graph below shows that discussion of ‘misinformation’
has skyrocketed since Covid (resembling, one might say, a ‘hockey
stick’). As of today, there are 1689 articles with the M-word in
the title, 238 of which associate it with the Internet, and 139 that
blame ‘Elon Musk’ or ‘Twitter’.
There are 7374 articles that discuss it but don't have in the title.
‘Misinformation’ doesn't mean the other person's facts are incorrect. It means you think the person is lying: deliberately promoting false information for some nefarious purpose. There is no concept more inimical to truthful inquiry. It is not a valid scientific concept, but a tool to demand censorship. So why are scientific journals treating it as a problem?
Number of articles with 'misinformation' in the title listed in PubMed. Data point for 2024 is incomplete and has been scaled to one year
A big percentage of the articles (33%) are about Covid. Most are either in journals like PEC Innovations and Journal of Medical Internet Research that nobody ever heard of, or in political ones like Nature, which appears to be obsessed with it (33 articles). Science has fewer, mostly editorials, with one just yesterday from a guy named Stephan Lewandowsky blaming Trump for everything:
A survey of nearly 1500 experts by the World Economic Forum ranked misinformation and disinformation . . . as the top global risk during the next two years. . . . Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are fearful of the future after Trump baselessly alleged . . . racist trope dating back centuries . . . .
This rant posing as a scientific paper might sound like an extreme example, but it's not. What's ironic is that those who complain the loudest about hate speech are often the ones who produce it.
We can write off the news media as a lost cause, but science and medicine are important institutions whose survival depends on their credibility and political neutrality. Their survival is our survival. That is why discussions of “misinformation” in scientific journals are so disturbing.
In most cases, it is the purveyors of misinformation—the media and the “experts” that are complaining about it. People have compiled huge lists of media hoaxes and falsehoods. Falsehoods promoted by government and the media force people to seek alternative sources of information, threatening the media's monopoly over the public discourse. They're using Covid as a stalking horse, but what they want is control over everything you believe.
The solution to the problem of misinformation is simple: stop lying.
Sterile science
So, how do you define misinformation? Is bad science misinformation? What about findings that conflict with each other? Or falsified results? A good case could be made that they are. But they're not counted because they aren't being produced by ordinary people but by researchers.
Last month a famous Alzheimer researcher, Eliezer Masliah, who works at the giant NIH government lab complex in Bethesda, was exposed for allegedly falsifying published research papers over several decades. Is there any merit to the accusations, or is some GS-19 making a power play? I've seen too many bad forensic analyses to say. But biologists collect tens of thousands of images of their cells. To duplicate one on purpose, you'd have to be one step away from being brain-dead.
Even so, I never cited this guy's research. Not because I believed it to be fraudulent (though it might be, if Science's allegations are true) but because none of it had any explanatory power. Likewise with the Aβ*56 story, the amyloid story, and the phospho-tau theory that's now starting to replace it. It was all sterile.
This, not misinformation, is the problem that science should be addressing: Not ordinary people believing things that are unfactual, but the vast reams of sterile, useless research coming from science itself. Researchers are rewarded for getting their names on as many papers as possible, even if they know it's worthless, because they need grants and papers to survive, which means they are slaves to whatever the bumbling bureaucrats in Bethesda want to pay for. That topic is almost all academic scientists ever talk about: not “Is it important?”, but “Will our Dear Leaders want to pay for it?”
I'm retired now and I couldn't care less what happens to academia. Out here in the real world, science is becoming a joke—from the days when everything was found to 'cause' cancer, now recognized as mostly artifacts, to the disastrous dietary advice that medical researchers insisted for years was infallible truth, to today's health claims in the press about questionable dangers like microplastics, and the attempts of the science establishment to use fake problems like ‘misinformation’ to absolve itself for its devastating mistakes about Covid, the masks, and the vax.
The Dear Caroline syndrome
People can't face the fact that the problem they're studying can't be solved with the technology that's available. So we get one ‘breakthrough’ after another that turns out to be wrong, but it gets published because the investigator needs a paper and no equipment is available to do the experiment that he knows needs to be done.
I once stumbled across something called a “Dear Caroline” advice column, where a guy wrote in to say he's worried his new girlfriend wants to go back to her ex-fiancé. Caroline told them to talk it over, but it's obvious that the girlfriend is just acting out her genetic programming. If I were Caroline, I'd tell this guy his task is to become rich and demonstrate higher social status and more physical prowess than his rival. She'll be back in his harem in a second. That might mean I wouldn't be a great psychologist, but people overestimate the amount of control they have over emotional feelings. They're mostly products of a person's situation, not the cause. People don't want to admit that, but it's true. All they can really control are the situations that elicit them through their programming. Focusing on the effect and denying the cause makes things seem unsolvable.
In the same way, we jam solutions into existing paradigms because admitting that the cause of the problem is something we can't solve—or the solution is something unpalatable—would mean starting over. We can't, for instance, cure heart disease, so let's pretend it's caused by cholesterol so we have some way of treating it: by getting rid of the bad molecule. With the depopulation crisis, the cause is so unpalatable we get criticized for saying it; so let's pretend it's something else, like phytoestrogens or those scary little bits of plastic, that's safe to talk about. That is the Dear Caroline syndrome in a nutshell.
Abolishing Tenure Is Not the Solution
One commentator recommends eliminating academic tenure and replacing it with well-crafted contracts (which sound a lot like tenure) that protect them from retaliation. The rationale is that academics need to be held accountable for giving politically motivated misinformation to the students, which leads to declining trust in higher education.
Abolishing tenure has been on the conservatives' plate for decades. Lawyers would love it, but it won't solve the problem. The problem is not just tenured academics banging out falsehoods. Get rid of tenure, and all those evil bureaucrats would have even more power, and all those government agencies would still demand more studies that tell them that what they want to do is backed up by science, adding more misinformation to the scientific literature.
What's needed is a three step procedure:
Privatize grant funding agencies to make them independent of government. The only legitimate problem for science to solve is ‘lack of knowledge.’ Any ‘problems’ the government might invent are by definition not real and don't deserve one red cent.
Research grants should go directly to the people doing the research. The current policy of one bureaucrat sending the funds to another gives bureaucrats enormous power not just to pad their salaries, but to exact revenge on anyone at the school they disagree with. If you've ever been in academia, you know what a hotbed of revenge, deceit, and resentment it is. I hated every second of it.
If there are any ‘overhead’ expenses the academic bureaucrats think they need, make the bureaucrats write their own grant, not leech off research funding. I'm sure NIH would appreciate that a new carpet in their office is essential. And those drapes—eeewwww!
Eliminate the stranglehold that scientific journals have. Academics accuse ordinary people of spreading misinformation because they don't know facts that are hidden behind a paywall that ordinary people can't access. This must end. It could be done in a variety of ways, such as moving to Internet-based models like biorxiv. For that to work, the ‘publication count’ model for measuring productivity must be replaced with something else.
These would-be feudal information overlords know they are the real source of misinformation. Just as with the falsehood that there are many different sexes, it's not a battle over truth. It's a battle over who's allowed to lie and who must pretend to believe the lie.
Censoring people signals a lack of trust in the power of argument. In the long run it can't succeed. Their ideology will suffer the fate of all ideologies based on falsehoods: to disintegrate when it gets close to achieving their goal. If science joins in, science will go down with it.
oct 05 2024, 6:12 am. minor update oct 13 2024
