PaulT @P3f@social.cleverlibre.org

(2) Recall that arch-antivaxxer Andrew Wakefield himself aimed to profit from demonstrating vaccine harm. When he published the notorious 1998 Lancet paper claiming vaccine harm from the MMR vaccine, he was not only consulting for a law firm suing vaccine manufacturers; he had recently filed a patent on an alternative "safer" vaccine.

Endnotes:

(1) Fauci is the director of the NIAID, a division of the NIH, and thus oversees a budget roughly a sixth of what Kennedy claims.

We need to teach people enough about how science works that they can see through these conspiracy stories at a glance. That is going to require major changes in how we teach at all levels. Otherwise, our friends, family, and neighbors are easy prey for those who seek to distort and deny science in pursuit of their own selfish agendas.

It's infuriating and exhausting to see lies from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and like get traction on social media. It's outright discouraging to see them amplified by the world's second richest man who ought to know better. If we want make progress against disinformation like this, however, we need to do more than refute it at the source.

As a working group, we also published a long-form report on the matter:

https://sciedandmisinfo.stanford.edu/

My argument, at its core, is that to do that, we need to teach people why science deserves their trust – and this requires teaching how science works as a social institution. I've written about this in brief in a Science American article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-fight-misinformation-we-need-to-teach-that-science-is-dynamic/

We need, in the words of Noah Feinstein, to make sure that everyone is at least a competent outsider to science: someone who has "learned to recognize the moments when science has some bearing on their needs and interests and to interact with sources of scientific expertise in ways that help them achieve their own goals." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sce.20414

In a world of scientific misinformation that can lead to nationwide vaccine refusal, climate change denial, and any number of other problems, we need to do more than train a subset of the population for scientific careers. We need everyone in the country to be fluent in the sphere of science.

A big part of the problem is the aim of science education in the US. We are still operating in a post-Sputnik model, where the aim of science education is to create a cadre of insiders who can form the next scientific workforce upon which our economic, technological, and military strength relies.

While a few programs provide welcome exceptions, in general we don't teach any of this in the classroom.

To understand how they do this, people need to understand how science is structured. Who does it? Where, and paid by whom? What motivates them? What are their incentives and reward structures? What makes someone credible as a scientist? What constitutes expertise, and how is it acquired and demonstrated? What is the role of peer review in science? How does the scientific community deal with uncertainty and disagreement? What is scientific consensus? How is it formed? How can it be overturned?

But the reason that we should trust science over other forms of knowledge is not because someone follows a particular set of steps in the laboratory. It's because the social institutions of science have proven highly effective at developing (at a bare minimum) empirically adequate theories to the explain the world.

What we don't teach is how science functions as a social institution that allows tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals to work together collectively to undercover the workings of the physical universe. Everything we teach about the process of science involves that which one can do alone at night in an empty laboratory.

We teach how to execute the technical procedures used in science and technology: how do you sequence a genome, design a regression, or implement a random forest algorithm. We even teach some aspects of a so-called "scientific method"—making observations, forming hypotheses, designing experiments, testing against data, refining hypotheses, and back around again (3).

To dispell disinformation about science, we need to teach people why science is trustworthy. Right now, I think we're failing to do that in the K-12 classroom and even at the college level. We teach the settled facts of science: how does photosynthesis work, what is special relativity, what explains the often exquisite fit of organisms to their environments.

My initial views came down strongly in favor of teaching more data reasoning, more critical thinking, and more media literacy. Indeed, all of things are necessary. But they're not sufficient to combat disinformation about science. Over a series of meetings with the working group, I came to view that I lay out below.

In addition to all of these, I think that there reasons specific to science why people struggle to see through lies like these. I believe that misinformation and disinformation about science spreads because our current system of science education is inadequate. Last year I joined a Moore Foundation working group charged with identifying the ways in which science education needs to change to adapt to our current misinformation environment.

So why not? Why does anyone believe this nonsense? There are any number of domain-general factors involved that contribute to the spread of any sort of disinformation. People fall prey to conformation bias. People consume social media for entertainment, and share social media posts as signifiers of group membership rather than because they believe they are true. The rise of tribal epistemology leads readers to set aside critical thinking in deference to the in-group nature of the source.

One could go on and on in this vein, unpacking the reasons why Kennedy's story — and Musk's affirmation — are ridiculous. That's not my aim here, however. What I want to do with this post is look at why people aren't able immediately to see through this brazen dishonesty.

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Moreover the conspirators would have to somehow ensure that none of these tens of thousands breath a word of the conspiracy itself—this in a world where everything gets leaked even from tight closed circles: the Supreme Court, the White House, corporate boardrooms.