Current Issues

Yes, I’m getting a late start this morning because I took advantage of the opportunity to sleep. Fat Guy did wake me up to feed the cats at 6:25, but I went right back to bed and slept until 8:00. The dogs didn’t seem to mind one bit. In fact, they’re already back to napping. This is going to be one of those days where I don’t dare promise anyone anything because there’s a good chance that nothing gets accomplished.

Kat came home yesterday afternoon, giving us a chance to chat a little bit before the kids arrived. I’m finding it difficult to explain how incredibly weak she is at the moment. She spent the night in an oversized chair so that she could sleep sitting up. The cats didn’t give her a lot of rest, though. Fat Guy was noisy all night and the other cats were running around, knocking over side tables and making a mess. She’s still coughing up dark masses of blood. She’ll go back up to Brandon’s this afternoon where it will be quieter. She can have her own room there and Brandon watches over her like a mother hen.

Both kids came home in a good mood, having had decent days at school. Tipper is spending tonight with some of her Furry friends, which means G and I will have the house to ourselves. Don’t worry, that just means he’ll be playing games in his room and I’ll be watching football in mine. There’s no wildness of any kind on tap. That’s not who G is, and I’m too damn old.

I’m fighting against a lot of pain this morning. My right forearm feels as if it’s on fire and the right side of my head seems to have someone stepping on it. I’m assuming all the other aches and pains are a result of this morning’s frosty coldness. Even now, it’s still only 34 degrees out. The heater works well, but that still doesn’t seem to affect the way my body responds to the meteorological changes. I’m doing my best to not let depression take over but the struggle is severe and there’s a part of my brain that just doesn’t give a shit.

As we know, most Saturday news is just a rehash of the previous week. So, I want to take a look at what’s going on in the world of science, particularly in the field of battling misinformation. At the center of the research is Kate Starbird, at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle.

“Starbird and her colleagues have spent more than 4 years studying the rumors that swirl around elections. It’s not purely an academic interest: As they amass data, the team writes rapid research blogs explaining to journalists, election officials, and the public what rumors are circulating and where they are coming from—and correcting the record. “I jokingly call our group the ER [emergency room],” Tomson says. “What we do is triage information.”

What has all this work gotten her? Harassment and threats, particularly from Republicans in the US House of Representatives. As Starbird and her team sift out truth from fiction, their work often blunts the ideological rhetoric that the GOP has been putting forth. So far, Starbird, whom colleagues describe as ‘tough as nails,’ has stood firm, waving off the nonsense from people who don’t know what they’re talking about. They’ll be going strong all the way through the election.

Fighting misinformation, from a scientific standpoint, is far from easy. An article in Science magazine, supported by the Pulitzer Center, identifies five significant obstacles.

1. Defining what is misinformation. “A committee convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that is currently working on a report on misinformation in science adopted an early working definition: information that counters the consensus in science. That phrasing raised two difficult questions, acknowledges Kasisomayajula Viswanath, a researcher at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health who chairs the committee: When is something a consensus? And when is it legitimate to dissent? After all, the consensus can turn out to be wrong, too, Viswanath says. “You want to be very thoughtful and careful of labeling something as misinformation.” Researchers around the world are all using different definitions which then leads to confusion. This isn’t an easy obstacle to overcome.
2. Politics gets in the way. Bottom line here: Republicans absolutely hate misinformation research because it frequently skews to the right. Funny, the GOP doesn’t seem to realize that it’s their own damn fault. “It’s possible that Republicans are more likely to share a given piece of misinformation they come across, or there simply may be more of it being produced on the right in the first place. Either way, the rightward skew of misinformation creates a problem for researchers, says Lisa Fazio, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University, because they can appear politically motivated. “You look like you’re being harder on the right than the left,” she says.” Unfortunately, the attacks work, causing critical research to be shut down.
3. The harms are tough to pin down. Linking misinformation to specific real-world consequences is a challenge. People are quick to blame social media, but that’s not nearly as accurate as it may seem. Researchers are urged to stop blaming misinformation as the cause of all the world’s problems because that’s as false as the misinformation itself. Complicating matters is the fact that correcting misinformation rarely changes people’s beliefs. The “pizzagate” scandal of 2016 is a good example. The truth was out there, but a large group of people refused to believe it. Proving anything definitively is an almost impossible job.
4. The data is not public access. “Previously, scientists could access a treasure trove of data shared through Twitter’s application programming interface, enabling researchers like Pierri to routinely collect millions of tweets a day for their studies. Twitter’s easy access made it a kind of model organism for social media research. But in early 2023, a few months after Elon Musk took over the company, it shut off free access, instead charging scientists tens of thousands of dollars per month for much more limited data.” Because social media companies control most of the data, they’re able to influence how it is studied, potentially skewing the results. A new law in the EU is promising to some extent, but there are still plenty of obstacles.
5. Research is not global. Lesser developed countries, such as the Philippines, are just as subject to misinformation as are the big guys such as the US and EU. However, most of the research is being done in the United States and the United Kingdom. Misinformation can be more prolific in non-English speaking countries because most of the research is done in English. The field tends to focus on the US and its two-party system, but the problem is much broader as other countries are subject to rumors and lies that affect their populations in very different ways.

Those are extremely tough issues to overcome and the more one digs into them, the more confusing and hopeless it can seem. I’ve been down the rabbit hole and, damn, it’s depressing. One wonders if there is any hope of solving the problem of misinformation.

So, what if there was a vaccination? Oh, this gets good. We’re talking about taking a Cold War strategy to prevent people from believing lies and misinformation. What the fuck? As head of the Social Decision-Making Lab at the University of Cambridge, Sander Van der Linden, whose family were Holocaust victims, is studying the power of lies and how to keep people from believing them. He has become academia’s biggest proponent of a strategy pioneered after the Korean War 
to “inoculate” humans against persuasion, the way they are vaccinated against dangerous infections.

There are two steps to Van der Linden’s method: “First, warn people they may be manipulated. Second, expose them to a weakened form of the misinformation, just enough to intrigue but not persuade anyone. “The goal is to raise eyebrows (antibodies) without convincing (infecting),” No, it’s not an actual shot that you can get at your doctor’s office. Damnit.

Van der Linden’s focus on stopping the spread of misinformation comes under a lot of criticism. His approach doesn’t target the source of the problem at all. The medical analogy confuses in its own way as well. Still, by his estimation, it has a better outcome than other methods being studied. Is that enough for it to be more widely adopted? Probably not, but at least someone’s trying.

This is an important topic because, should the Orange Felon win, he’s likely to put Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in charge of a lot of health issues. Exactly how that would work, no one seems to know. However, Kennedy’s long-standing war against vaccinations would certainly be a point of concern. His extreme views are certainly a large reason for why his own attempt at running for president failed, but they’re also scaring the shit out of a number of researchers. They fear that giving Kennedy any control over federal programs could cause the misinformation and lies to become mainstream. This would severely set back disease research and, as a result, millions of people could die if they are denied access to critical medicines.

Yes, there are real-world consequences to how you vote.

The fact is that science and politics don’t mix well. Science relies on facts and has ways of ensuring that what is published is as true as possible based on current understanding. Politics, on the other hand, relies on unproven conjecture, misinformation, and rhetoric. To the extent that one believes the politicians over the scientists, the world suffers. Politicians, as a whole, aren’t nearly as smart as they pretend. They rely on their staff to tell them what to say and when they go off script they usually get themselves in trouble.

I would very much like for you to delve deep into this week’s NYTimes interview with Peter Singer, perhaps the world’s most influential philosopher who’s still living. A hard-core utilitarian, Singer believes that it isn’t enough to do what is best for ourselves, but that we should focus on what is ultimately best for all beings, and by all beings he does not mean only humans. There’s a lot to unpack in this interview, so carve out some time for yourself. This gets deep.

This is as far as I go for now. My brain is overloaded with all the reading I’ve done over the past couple of hours and my head was hurting before I started. Am I deeply concerned about what happens over the next week? Yes. I hope you are as well. The fight is real and the battles, unfortunately, may get bloody. I’m not willing, at this point, to dismiss even the wildest of outcomes.

I think I’ll refill my coffee cup and put Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on the Victrola. There will be football to watch this afternoon, naps to take, snacks to eat.

Be safe, my friends.