Science Fact vs. Science Fiction: Can You Tell the Difference?
Today's growing distrust of science is not an academic problem. It can be a matter of life and death.
Take, for example, the tragic incident in 2016 when at least 10 U.S. children died and over 400 were sickened after they tried homeopathic teething medicine laced with a poisonous herb called "deadly nightshade." Carried by CVS, Walgreens, and other major American pharmacies, the pills contained this poison based on the alternative medicine principle of homeopathy, the treatment of medical conditions by tiny doses of natural substances that produce symptoms of disease.
Such "alternative medicines" take advantage of the lack of government regulation and people's increasing hostility toward science.
These children did not have to die. Numerous research studies show that homeopathy does not work. Despite this research, homeopathy is a quickly-growing multi-billion dollar business.
Such "alternative medicines" take advantage of the lack of government regulation and people's increasing hostility toward science. Polling shows that the number of people who believe that science has "made life more difficult" increased by 50 percent from 2009 to 2015. According to a 2017 survey, only 35 percent of respondents have "a lot" of trust in scientists; the number of people who do "not at all" trust scientists increased by over 50 percent from a similar poll conducted in December 2013.
Children dying from deadly nightshade is only one consequence of this crisis of trust. For another example, consider the false claim that vaccines cause autism. This belief has spread widely across the US, and led to a host of problems. For instance, measles was practically eliminated in the US by 2000. However, in recent years outbreaks of measles have been on the rise, driven by parents failing to vaccinate their children in a number of communities.
The Internet Is for… Misinformation
The rise of the Internet, and more recently social media, is key to explaining the declining public confidence in science.
Before the Internet, the information accessible to the general public about any given topic usually came from experts. For instance, researchers on autism were invited to talk on mainstream media, they wrote encyclopedia articles, and they authored books distributed by large publishers.
The Internet has enabled anyone to be a publisher of content, connecting people around the world with any and all sources of information. On the one hand, this freedom is empowering and liberating, with Wikipedia a great example of a highly-curated and accurate source on the vast majority of subjects. On the other, anyone can publish a blog piece making false claims about links between vaccines and autism or the effectiveness of homeopathic medicine. If they are skilled at search engine optimization, or have money to invest in advertising, they can get their message spread widely. Russia has done so extensively to influence elections outside of its borders, whether in the E.U. or the U.S.
Unfortunately, research shows that people lack the skills for differentiating misinformation from true information. This lack of skills has clear real-world effects: U.S. adults believed 75 percent of fake news stories about the 2016 US Presidential election. The more often someone sees a piece of misinformation, the more likely they are to believe it.
To make matters worse, we all suffer from a series of thinking errors such as the confirmation bias, our tendency to look for and interpret information in ways that conform to our intuitions.
Blogs with falsehoods are bad enough, but the rise of social media has made the situation even worse. Most people re-share news stories without reading the actual article, judging the quality of the story by the headline and image alone. No wonder research has indicated that misinformation spreads as much as 10 times faster and further on social media than true information. After all, creators of fake news are free to devise the most appealing headline and image, while credible sources of information have to stick to factual headlines and images.
To make matters worse, we all suffer from a series of thinking errors such as the confirmation bias, our tendency to look for and interpret information in ways that conform to our intuitions and preferences, as opposed to the facts. Our inherent thinking errors combined with the Internet's turbine power has exploded the prevalence of misinformation.
So it's no wonder we see troubling gaps between what scientists and the public believe about issues like climate change, evolution, genetically modified organisms, and vaccination.
What Can We Do?
Fortunately, there are proactive steps we can take to address the crisis of trust in science and academia. The Pro-Truth Pledge, founded by a group of behavioral science experts (including myself) and concerned citizens, calls on public figures, organizations, and private citizens to commit to 12 behaviors listed on the pledge website that research in behavioral science shows correlate with truthfulness.
Signers are held accountable through a crowdsourced reporting and evaluation mechanism while getting reputational rewards because of their commitment. The scientific consensus serves as a key measure of credibility, and the pledge encourages pledge-takers to recognize the opinions of experts - especially scientists - as more likely to be true when the facts are disputed.
The pledge "really does seem to change one's habits," encouraging signers to have attitudes "of honesty and moral sincerity."
Launched in December 2016, the pledge has surprising traction. Over 6200 private citizens took the pledge. So did more than 500 politicians, including members of US state legislatures Eric Nelson (PA), James White (TX), and Ogden Driskell (WY), and national politicians such as members of U.S. Congress Beto O'Rourke (TX), Matt Cartwright (PA), and Marcia Fudge (OH). Over 700 other public figures, such as globally-known public intellectuals Peter Singer, Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer, and Jonathan Haidt, took the pledge, as well as 70 organizations such as Media Bias/Fact Check, Fugitive Watch, Earth Organization for Sustainability, and One America Movement.
The pledge is effective in changing behaviors. A candidate for Congress, Michael Smith, took the Pro-Truth Pledge. He later posted on his Facebook wall a screenshot of a tweet by Donald Trump criticizing minority and disabled children. However, after being called out that the tweet was a fake, he went and searched Trump's feed. He could not find the original tweet, and while Trump may have deleted it, the candidate edited his own Facebook post to say, "Due to a Truth Pledge I have taken, I have to say I have not been able to verify this post." He indicated that he would be more careful with future postings.
U.S. Army veteran and pledge-taker John Kirbow described how the pledge "really does seem to change one's habits," helping push him both to correct his own mistakes with an "attitude of humility and skepticism, and of honesty and moral sincerity," and also to encourage "friends and peers to do so as well."
His experience is confirmed by research on the pledge. Two research studies at Ohio State University demonstrated the effectiveness of the pledge in changing the behavior of pledge-takers to be more truthful with a strong statistical significance.
Taking the pledge yourself, and encouraging people you know and your elected representatives to do the same, is an easy and effective way to fight misinformation and to promote a culture that values the truth.
When doctors couldn’t stop her daughter’s seizures, this mom earned a PhD and found a treatment herself.
Twenty-eight years ago, Tracy Dixon-Salazaar woke to the sound of her daughter, two-year-old Savannah, in the midst of a medical emergency.
“I entered [Savannah’s room] to see her tiny little body jerking about violently in her bed,” Tracy said in an interview. “I thought she was choking.” When she and her husband frantically called 911, the paramedic told them it was likely that Savannah had had a seizure—a term neither Tracy nor her husband had ever heard before.
Over the next several years, Savannah’s seizures continued and worsened. By age five Savannah was having seizures dozens of times each day, and her parents noticed significant developmental delays. Savannah was unable to use the restroom and functioned more like a toddler than a five-year-old.
Doctors were mystified: Tracy and her husband had no family history of seizures, and there was no event—such as an injury or infection—that could have caused them. Doctors were also confused as to why Savannah’s seizures were happening so frequently despite trying different seizure medications.
Doctors eventually diagnosed Savannah with Lennox-Gaustaut Syndrome, or LGS, an epilepsy disorder with no cure and a poor prognosis. People with LGS are often resistant to several kinds of anti-seizure medications, and often suffer from developmental delays and behavioral problems. People with LGS also have a higher chance of injury as well as a higher chance of sudden unexpected death (SUDEP) due to the frequent seizures. In about 70 percent of cases, LGS has an identifiable cause such as a brain injury or genetic syndrome. In about 30 percent of cases, however, the cause is unknown.
Watching her daughter struggle through repeated seizures was devastating to Tracy and the rest of the family.
“This disease, it comes into your life. It’s uninvited. It’s unannounced and it takes over every aspect of your daily life,” said Tracy in an interview with Today.com. “Plus it’s attacking the thing that is most precious to you—your kid.”
Desperate to find some answers, Tracy began combing the medical literature for information about epilepsy and LGS. She enrolled in college courses to better understand the papers she was reading.
“Ironically, I thought I needed to go to college to take English classes to understand these papers—but soon learned it wasn’t English classes I needed, It was science,” Tracy said. When she took her first college science course, Tracy says, she “fell in love with the subject.”
Tracy was now a caregiver to Savannah, who continued to have hundreds of seizures a month, as well as a full-time student, studying late into the night and while her kids were at school, using classwork as “an outlet for the pain.”
“I couldn’t help my daughter,” Tracy said. “Studying was something I could do.”
Twelve years later, Tracy had earned a PhD in neurobiology.
After her post-doctoral training, Tracy started working at a lab that explored the genetics of epilepsy. Savannah’s doctors hadn’t found a genetic cause for her seizures, so Tracy decided to sequence her genome again to check for other abnormalities—and what she found was life-changing.
Tracy discovered that Savannah had a calcium channel mutation, meaning that too much calcium was passing through Savannah’s neural pathways, leading to seizures. The information made sense to Tracy: Anti-seizure medications often leech calcium from a person’s bones. When doctors had prescribed Savannah calcium supplements in the past to counteract these effects, her seizures had gotten worse every time she took the medication. Tracy took her discovery to Savannah’s doctor, who agreed to prescribe her a calcium blocker.
The change in Savannah was almost immediate.
Within two weeks, Savannah’s seizures had decreased by 95 percent. Once on a daily seven-drug regimen, she was soon weaned to just four, and then three. Amazingly, Tracy started to notice changes in Savannah’s personality and development, too.
“She just exploded in her personality and her talking and her walking and her potty training and oh my gosh she is just so sassy,” Tracy said in an interview.
Since starting the calcium blocker eleven years ago, Savannah has continued to make enormous strides. Though still unable to read or write, Savannah enjoys puzzles and social media. She’s “obsessed” with boys, says Tracy. And while Tracy suspects she’ll never be able to live independently, she and her daughter can now share more “normal” moments—something she never anticipated at the start of Savannah’s journey with LGS. While preparing for an event, Savannah helped Tracy get ready.
“We picked out a dress and it was the first time in our lives that we did something normal as a mother and a daughter,” she said. “It was pretty cool.”
A sleek, four-foot tall white robot glides across a cafe storefront in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district, holding a two-tiered serving tray full of tea sandwiches and pastries. The cafe’s patrons smile and say thanks as they take the tray—but it’s not the robot they’re thanking. Instead, the patrons are talking to the person controlling the robot—a restaurant employee who operates the avatar from the comfort of their home.
It’s a typical scene at DAWN, short for Diverse Avatar Working Network—a cafe that launched in Tokyo six years ago as an experimental pop-up and quickly became an overnight success. Today, the cafe is a permanent fixture in Nihonbashi, staffing roughly 60 remote workers who control the robots remotely and communicate to customers via a built-in microphone.
More than just a creative idea, however, DAWN is being hailed as a life-changing opportunity. The workers who control the robots remotely (known as “pilots”) all have disabilities that limit their ability to move around freely and travel outside their homes. Worldwide, an estimated 16 percent of the global population lives with a significant disability—and according to the World Health Organization, these disabilities give rise to other problems, such as exclusion from education, unemployment, and poverty.
These are all problems that Kentaro Yoshifuji, founder and CEO of Ory Laboratory, which supplies the robot servers at DAWN, is looking to correct. Yoshifuji, who was bedridden for several years in high school due to an undisclosed health problem, launched the company to help enable people who are house-bound or bedridden to more fully participate in society, as well as end the loneliness, isolation, and feelings of worthlessness that can sometimes go hand-in-hand with being disabled.
“It’s heartbreaking to think that [people with disabilities] feel they are a burden to society, or that they fear their families suffer by caring for them,” said Yoshifuji in an interview in 2020. “We are dedicating ourselves to providing workable, technology-based solutions. That is our purpose.”
Shota Kuwahara, a DAWN employee with muscular dystrophy. Ory Labs, Inc.
Wanting to connect with others and feel useful is a common sentiment that’s shared by the workers at DAWN. Marianne, a mother of two who lives near Mt. Fuji, Japan, is functionally disabled due to chronic pain and fatigue. Working at DAWN has allowed Marianne to provide for her family as well as help alleviate her loneliness and grief.Shota, Kuwahara, a DAWN employee with muscular dystrophy, agrees. "There are many difficulties in my daily life, but I believe my life has a purpose and is not being wasted," he says. "Being useful, able to help other people, even feeling needed by others, is so motivational."