The Case for "Misinformation"
Movements Start Small #35
In the early 19th century, up to one in six mothers died after child birth from puerperal fever.
In 1849, Ignaz Semmelweiss ran several experiments demonstrating that basic sanitary precautions, including doctors washing their hands, almost completely eliminated the deaths. He could not explain the mechanism driving success but was confident in the results and implications. Semmelweiss was quickly ridiculed by the medical establishment as a crank and naive fool.
More than 20 years later, Louis Pasteur developed a theory to explain Semmelweiss’s claim: germs!
TWENTY years later.
In the meantime, the deaths simply continued.
The story is an important one and relevant to all of human history - including now.
Why?
Semmelweiss was spreading misinformation. At least as defined by the consensus at the time.
While a dramatic example, this story is not a one-off. Pretty much all knowledge emerges from contrarians taking on the experts. After all, what else is a new insight but a rejection of the current beliefs? The earth is round, it rotates around the sun, it is billions of years old…these were all once the views of heretics - some killed for their views. Evolution, genetics, cells and atoms - once all silly stories told by the uninformed. The list is endless. And we are not done. Plenty of what we believe today will be uncovered as ignorance. As Galileo said, “In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” He should know!
Of course, as Carl Sagan cautioned taking this too far, “ The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.”
And therein lies the problem. We need to rely on expert consensus to make sense of the world…but be open to them being wrong! How do you do both and not go crazy? It’s an eternal struggle - today as much as ever.
So who do we listen to and how do we navigate this world?
To many today, the answer is to limit information. If we get the best experts to validate bad opinions we can keep them from causing harm.
There are many issues with this claim - despite its allure.
First, experts by definition represent the consensus. And the consensus by its nature is unstable. True knowledge is never discussed as having won a voting contest. We talk about consensus when things are not fully known. Do masks work for COVID? Will more spending cause inflation? Does Saddam have WMD? Experts have much to say on these things - and a consensus almost always emerges. They will often be right. But, true knowledge is quite different. We don’t say 2+2 is the consensus view. Or “experts” believe fetuses are a product of sperm and egg.
Why are we so scared of dissident views?
Yes, its easy to see how bad ideas can mislead people. But, the simple fact is contrarian views need oxygen to thrive in any meaningful way. A small group of believers alone is not enough. Even today, 12% of people think the moon landing was staged. One in 8 people! Does it matter? Should we ban all talk of it? Could continued belief undermine trust in government? Of course, but not nearly as much as the trust eroded from active censorship.
The “misinformation” that persists widely has oxygen - in some form of expert backing, factual support that can’t be squared with consensus and a growing adoption of belief. The staged moon landing ideas have none of these qualities. But, think about the school opening battles during COVID. Despite being in a tiny minority, very smart epidemiologists from Stanford and Harvard viewed extended closures as a mistake. Europe had opened schools much earlier with good results. As time went on parents views increasingly went this direction - and time has proven them right. Crank ideas eventually sink into moon landing territory, skeptical inquiry based on facts often grows from small questions into new knowledge.
This is the marketplace of ideas in action. When an issue is unresolved, the debate must continue. Only ideas with facts behind them will last long or gain wide acceptance. In exchange, we have to accept that small minorities will always believe crazy things - as they alway have!
But, what about the “harm” of misinformation. Well, our laws have evolved to deal with most direct harms. Libel, threats of violence, child pornography - all of these are indeed illegal. Could other harms emerge from bad beliefs? Well, of course. False beliefs and misunderstandings cause problems all day, every day in our relationships, families, businesses and yes, in our politics. How can this possibly be regulated? Furthermore, we can and should deter people from taking harmful actions based on beliefs - regardless of whether they are true or false. Actions are much easier to regulate. Believing an election is stolen is one thing, acting on that belief with violence is another - and must be restricted legally.
Today the challenge of “misinformation” is viewed as uniquely dangerous. Yes, our digital world makes it easy to publish any idea you might have. But refuting them is just as easy. The marketplace of ideas is adjusting to new dynamics, but over time seems to still be working. And, any attempts to institutionalize arbitrating truth end up using alternative goals as a filter - safety, harmony, productivity - to name a few. This is how you get the CEO of Wikipedia (now NPR!) to say things like, “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.” No! Common ground is nice, but it is not how liberal, pluralistic societies are run. Nor how we get to real truth.
Think back to Semmelweiss. Would it have taken 20 years today to get to the right answer around delivery room hygiene? Absolutely not. Semmelweiss’s ideas got no oxygen because the gate keepers on spreading information were all powerful as information flowed strictly through formal channels. They were protecting mothers. Common ground! Misinformation - good and bad - was not allowed. Today, that is not the case. He could publish his ideas and doctors (or others) around the world could contribute to the body of evidence. I have no doubt the truth would emerge much more quickly.
More information means a lot more crazy (and wrong) ideas - but it also means a much faster path to real knowledge. Let’s be very careful about giving up on this trade.
More Reading
Michael Crichton’s must read speech at CalTech twenty years ago on how politics corrupts science. “When did skeptic become a dirty word in science?”
Nothing has inflamed the anti-Isreali movement more than the statistic of 30,000 Gazans dead. It is shocking and troubling. Is the number right? How many are Hamas vs innocent citizens? Why is it being reported with so little critical examination?
David Brooks highlights how emotion, not evidence sparked aggressive medical interventions in transgender children…and got the SAT cancelled…and more.
Oops…sorry, turns out plant based Beyond Meat is actually bad for you. Shocker!
Behind the scenes at the expert factory, McKinsey (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver):
Good stuff. Read it out loud to my husband and sending to my kids.