The newsletter from Stuart Ritchie of The Studies Show (sidebar), Science Fictions, is checking out what is up with the field of Misinformation, which he does not hesitate to call a bullshit field.
So maybe it is not a shock that a Misinformation expert from Harvard (now BU) is spreading misinformation. The Distortions of Joan Donovan. She says that Meta pressured Harvard to get rid of her. But according to the Chronicle of Higher Education
Donovan presented no firsthand evidence that Meta was behind her ouster. And when I tried to get to the bottom of what actually happened at Harvard, a different narrative emerged from interviews, documents, recordings, texts, and emails.
Eleven Technology and Social Change Project ex-members and Shorenstein staffers told me they had seen no evidence that Meta exerted pressure on Donovan’s team or that its influence is what ended it. Several of Donovan’s other claims about her time there are misleading, untrue, or contradicted by people directly involved. Some former colleagues say they no longer trust the scholar they once admired.
This is on the heels of a Nature article Misunderstanding the harms of Online Misinformation. In Journal-speak, the Nature article is telling us that the terms are undefined, it is unclear what if anything is being measured, and the researchers have little idea what all the people making claims about how damaging misinformation is are talking about.
So far, there's no there, there, just people talking about how bad it all must be.
And attempting to outlaw misinformation seems guaranteed to backfire both short-term and long-term.
ReplyDeleteShort-term, those who define it officially WILL be dead wrong sometimes, and since admitting as much would constitute admitting incompetence, their ranks will be thinned of those who don't simply double down. Privyet, Trofim Lysenko.
And then long-term, as elephants in the room multiply, people start to wonder, What else do we need to know that we're not supposed to? The longer it takes to reach that inevitable point where forbidden truths can no longer be ignored, the more vulnerable truth in the party line becomes to discrediting by the association fallacy.
Functionally, misinformation is an attempt to proclaim “truth” in the face of uncertainty, and in so doing, create a narrative. Any narrative, once created, is hard to change, and indeed, any effort to change it is bitterly resisted. It would be fair more effective, and honest, to admit uncertainty, and to present the information available, allowing uncertainty to resolve organically.For those invested in a narrative,this is the exact opposite of what they seek. Thus, in my eyes, declaring something to be misinformation is at best an attempt to guide discussion, at worst, a cynical and ultimately obvious attempt to lie.
ReplyDeleteTom, very much check out Steve Hsu interviewing Philippe Lemoine on his "Manifold" podcast (sidebar). In the midst of discussing Aristotle and how even his bad ideas about science are important philosophically, and the uselessness of Heidegger, he goes on an extended discussion of uncertainty in science and the importance of acknowledging it. Warming the cockles of my heart, anyway, he shows out the dishonesty of both the authorities and the skeptics in the Covid information, and gives some indication how we can protect ourselves against this even when everyone around us is losing their minds on one side or the other.
ReplyDeleteAnd sheepishly, we all should have known, at least in part.