(2022-04-27) Hoel Elon Musk's Twitter And The Crisis Of Scientific Misinformation

Erik Hoel: Elon Musk's Twitter and the "crisis" of scientific misinformation. (Musk Buys Twitter) Let’s say you are a psychiatrist. A good one, renowned in your field, although you aren’t a public name. At some point, you begin to suspect that there is something rotten within your discipline—a rot that goes beyond misapplications or misdiagnoses. No, something is wrong with the foundations of psychiatry itself. Particularly around depression.

So you begin to criticize the field.

No one seems to care. The whole field goes about their business.

This hypothetical person might not come across as realistic.

So let’s firm up our example with some specifics. Let’s say you’re a real person: Alexey Guzey, the founder of the excellent New Science. He’s been diving into the science of sleep, and these are his conclusions: "I have no trust in sleep scientists.".

Did any sleep scientists voice the concerns they with the book or with Matt Walker? No.

Did any sleep scientists voice their concerns after I published my essay detailing its errors and fabrications? No. . .

I don’t believe that a community of scientists that refuses to police fraud and of which Walker is a foremost representative (recall that he is the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley) could be a community of scientists that would produce a trustworthy and dependable body of scientific work.

A pretty savage criticism

And I don’t think Matt Walker should lose his job based off of Alexey’s criticisms.

And why do I, personally, care about this issue? Well, for one, I’m writing a nonfiction book for Simon & Schuster. And in it I criticize neuroscience a great deal as being pre-paradigmatic, as not even wrong, and a lot of neuroscientists (not all, of course, but a significant amount) as being somewhere between wasting money and defrauding the public

What’s the solution? Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter, there are already warning by regulators (including some threats by EU officials) that loosening of restrictions on misinformation will have consequences.

it appears to me that current debates around “scientific misinformation” look a lot like the debates around “pseudoscience” of the 1990s. I think this is because both are an expression of the demarcation problem. The demarcation problem asks “What is a science, and what is a pseudo-science?", which turns out to be an incredibly tricky question to answer

Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, all had their shots at solving the demarcation problem, and yet there is no agreed-upon solution.

Of course, at a coarse-grained level, the demarcation problem is easy to solve. As a Supreme Court justice once said about pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

But at a fine-grained level the demarcation problem is essentially impossible to solve. And shutting down criticism of scientific consensus, especially by credentialed experts who are seriously engaged with the literature, implies having solved fine-grained demarcation.

distinguishing between legitimate criticism vs. illegitimate criticism is equivalent to solving the demarcation problem

This entire situation has been thrown into high contrast due to the coronavirus epidemic.

I won’t belabor such an obvious application, especially as there are some just-as-obvious complexities involving the seriousness and immediacy of a world-wide pandemic. Those extenuating circumstances exist, and to deny them is to deny reality.

see, for example, this Vanity Fair investigative breakdown of how the lab leak hypothesis, despite being a viable scientific hypothesis of the virus origin (albeit being an unproven one), was made verboten for over a year

The result was that Facebook only removed its ban on mentioning the lab leak hypothesis in May of 2021.

But this hasn’t stopped the recent Bill AB-2098 in California, which makes the punishment for spreading COVID-19 misinformation the loss of one’s license (and keep in mind, until May of last year, any talk of the lab leak was labeled misinformation).

consider that just a few weeks ago in Science there was a glowing review of the work of Carl Berstrom, who is calling for the study of scientific misinformation to become a “crisis discipline”

It is clear from the PNAS paper that the notion of scientific misinformation by Berstrom et al. is not limited to issues around the COVID-19 pandemic, but include claims about artificial intelligence, climate change, economics, psychology, and so on.

In many cases there is indeed widespread scientific misinformation in those fields! And many of these are obvious coarse-grained demarcations of we “know it when we see it.” But in other cases, it’s extremely difficult to know.

In Elon’s new Twitter, it seems likely that fine-grained demarcations by the company (such as being the final adjudicators of scientific debates between experts in their field) will significantly reduce in frequency. And I’ll be honest: I think that, when it comes to science, that’s the right move.