DISCOVERING YOUR OWN
In George Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Truth was the country’s official propaganda agency, charged with falsifying historical records and other documents to reflect the administration’s agenda. The Ministry also advanced counterknowledge when it served their purposes, such as 2 + 2 = 5.
Nineteen Eighty-four was published in 1949, half a century before the Internet became our de facto information source. Today, like in 1984, websites can be altered so that the average person doesn’t know that they have been; every trace of an old piece of information can be rewritten, or (in the case of Paul McCartney and Dick Clark) kept out of reach. Today, it can be very difficult for the average Web surfer to know if a site is reporting genuine knowledge or counterknowledge. Unfortunately, sites that advertise that they are telling the truth are often the ones that aren’t. In many cases, the word “truth” has been co-opted by people who are propagating counterknowledge or fringe viewpoints that go against what is conventionally accepted as truth. Even site names can be deceptive.
Can we trust experts? It depends. Expertise tends to be narrow. An economist in the highest echelons of the government may not have any special insight into what social programs will be effective for curbing crime. And experts sometimes become co-opted by special interests, and, of course, they make mistakes.
An anti-science bias has entered public discourse and the Web. A lot of things that should be scientific or technical problems—like where to put a power plant and how much it should cost—are political. When that happens, the decision-making process is subverted, and the facts that matter are often not the ones that are under consideration. Or we say that we want to cure an intractable human disease, but mock the first step when tens of millions of dollars are spent studying aphids. The reality is that science progresses by gaining an understanding of basic cellular physiology. With the wrong frame the research looks trivial; with the right frame it can be seen for the potential it truly has to be transformative. Money put into human clinical trials might end up being able to treat the symptoms of a few hundred thousand people. That same money put into basic-level scientific research has the potential to find the cure for dozens of diseases and millions of people because it is dealing with mechanisms common to many different types of bacteria and viruses. The scientific method is the ground from which all the best critical thinking rises.
In addition to an anti-science bias, there is an anti-skepticism bias when it comes to the Internet. Many people think, “If I found it online it must be true.” With no central authority charged with the responsibility of monitoring and regulating websites and other material found online, the responsibility for verifying claims falls on each of us. Fortunately, some websites have cropped up that help. Snopes.com and similar sites are dedicated to exposing urban legends and false claims. Companies such as Consumer Reports run independent laboratories to provide an unbiased assessment of different products, regardless of what their manufacturers claim. Consumer Reports has been around for decades, but it is no great leap to expect that other critical-thinking enterprises will flourish in the twenty-first century. Let’s hope so. But whatever helpful media is out there, each of us will still have to apply our judgment.
The promise of the Internet is that it is a great democratizing force, allowing everyone to express their opinions, and everyone to have immediate access to all the world’s information. Combine these two, as the Internet and social media do, and you have a virtual world of information and misinformation cohabiting side by side, staring back at you like identical twins, one who will help you and the other who will hurt you. Figuring out which one to choose falls upon all of us, and it requires careful thinking and one thing that most of us feel is in short supply: time. Critical thinking is not something you do once with an issue and then drop it. It’s an active and ongoing process. It requires that we all think like Bayesians, updating our knowledge as new information comes in.
Time spent evaluating claims is not just time well spent, it should be considered part of an implicit bargain we’ve all made. Information gathering and research that used to take anywhere from hours to weeks now takes just seconds. We’ve saved incalculable numbers of hours of trips to libraries and far-flung archives, of hunting through thick books for the one passage that will answer our questions. The implicit bargain that we all need to make explicit is that we will use just some of that time we saved in information acquisition to perform proper information verification. Just as it’s difficult to trust someone who has lied to you, it’s difficult to trust your own knowledge if half of it turns out to be counterknowledge. The fact is that right now counterknowledge flourishes on Facebook and on Twitter and on blogs . . . on all the semi-organized platforms.
We’re far better off knowing a moderate number of things with certainty than a large number of things that might not be so. Counterknowledge and misinformation can be costly, in terms of lives and happiness, and in terms of the time spent trying to undo things that didn’t go the way we thought they would. True knowledge simplifies our lives, helping us to make choices that increase our happiness and save time. Following the steps in this Field Guide to evaluate the myriad claims we encounter is how we can stay two steps ahead of the millions of lies that are out there on the Web, and ahead of the liars and just plain incompetents who perpetrate them.