Tyranny of Truth
America’s Rejection of Science and Expertise
(Republished from a personal blog post written February 10, 2016 and updated in December 2017)
This tweet hit a nerve. I will agree scientists need to be better communicators because the terminology we use (with obsessive accuracy) often has easily misinterpreted meanings to the general public. I discuss such explanatory difficulties in “Answering Mom: What is Cloud Computing?” While this seems fairly benign, the pointy tip of the importance for clarity is aimed at some of today’s most delicate topics (and both Republicans and Democrats have their own political disinterest in the facts):
vaccines, fracking, nuclear power, climate change, firearms policy, immigration, women’s health, education, nutrition, food safety, artificial intelligence, drones, individual privacy, transportation infrastructure safety, extreme weather, energy independence, trade policy, recreational drug use, criminal justice policy, voter rights and districting, etc.
This table shows some great examples of the kinds of problems with terminology and different meanings:
(Source: Getting Science Through: Misunderstood Terms In Science Communication, Science 2.0)
On top of the delicate issues above being sources of potential controversy, what frustrates me the most is the rejection of expertise as elitism. The hypocrisy-exposing jokes aside about trusting a (non-expert) “Regular Joe” to pilot your flight. operate on your heart, etc., the modern American reality is expertise (except in business or the military) is a liability to the point that politicians go out of their way to point out their lack of expertise. This all seems so profoundly ignorant and ironic given the founders of the United States were famously curious and thoughtful about the natural world. But it’s so much more dangerous than that.
Science as a Discipline & Process
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Isaac Asimov, in Newsweek‘s “My Turn” column (January 21, 1980)
I have seen this first hand, in friends and family so beholden to a notion of democracy as a Master Truth that it surpasses all else. John Oliver recently hit this on the head:
Opinion does not trump fact. Reality is not a vote — one person can know the truth and 6 billion are wrong. Further, the distrust of science for being “fluid” (flip-flopping) overlooks one of the most significant aspects of science:
self-questioning.
How many other belief systems inherently invite critique and demand clarity, reproducibility, peer-review and methodical rigor? A democracy relies upon making good decisions in the voting booth as a citizen and in the legislature as an elected official. How did a disciplined process for discovery of the truth (with specific safeguards against bias and subjectivity) become a political pariah? Does that imply explicitly endorsing making decisions in the absence of understanding or by way of unqualified or sloppy approaches to information-gathering?
(Update Dec-2017) I am reading Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World (1995) as suggested by @KStreetHipster — the book appeals to all of us to become critical-thinkers and understand the importance of applying the methods of science to ferret-out the “baloney” in the world — from pseudo-science to god of the gaps mythology. The passage she highlights below is chillingly prescient of today:
An additional quote from the book, framing a critical contrast:
This is not to say that all of science is correct. No, there have been plenty of mistakes in science […] With science, hypotheses are framed in a way that they can be tested by experiment and observation. Nature has the final veto power in whatever explanation we come up with but scientists are human (yes, they are) and subject to emotional attachments to their explanations.
Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed in a way that makes them untestable. “Practitioners [of pseudoscience] are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced”
Fortunately, resources to promote Digital Literacy, now crucial for critically consuming information, are available — see: US Digital Literacy, The News Literacy Project and Common Sense Education: Digital Citizenship.
Truth as Tyranny
I puzzled over this incredulous situation for months and only recently (thanks to Michael Shermer’s The Moral Arc) came across Hannah Arendt, whose writings afforded me a new insight. She observed that within a democracy, people whose core values are rooted in freedom (as defined as “a state of being capable of making decisions without external control”) instinctively oppose any form of coercion. She writes, “Truth carries within itself an element of coercion” — and thus — “it precludes debate and must be accepted by every individual in possession of her rational faculties”.
Therefore, to those who place Freedom above all else, Truth is an external control that can suppress their capability to make decisions based upon their Opinion / Belief / Understanding, and thus they perceive Truth as a threat to Freedom itself.
The nuance is that in a societal way, the discourse among perspectives — the political deliberation and debate necessary for a Democracy, relies upon those opinions being formed (ideally) based on truths, and (at minimum) not upon falsehoods or (at worst) deception. Given this — I would argue that those who deceive with false information or are close-minded to considering information objectively are in fact the ones suppressing peoples’ capability to make decisions without external control.
The Watchmen
“The Media” should own the responsibility for calling to task these agents, as communication itself is its domain. Ironically, a result of the Information Age has been erosion of the perceived value of journalism, dividing it into “Entertainment” or “Free” for the most part, so any funded, authoritative media entity is now beholden to profit-motive and thus some interests or target audience. We have wider sources of expression but in leveling the soapboxes, the speakers’ relative expertise or authority — and fear of retribution and critique by others — the very self-questioning to pursue truth, is gliding into the noise of a million voices.
Originally published at rickarthur.net on February 10, 2016.
