Two Years Ago Today: Is some kind of real world lurking out there?

An invitation to read a recent NY Times article

By Moristotle

[Originally published on August 27, 2015, not a word different, same image as then.]

Ordinarily I would have included this as a “fish” for tomorrow’s column [August 28, 2015]. But George Johnson’s August 24 [2015] NY Times article, “The Widening World of Hand-Picked Truths,” offers so insistent a caution about competing subjectivities that I couldn’t resist devoting today’s column to it.
    But, in Friday’s Fish fashion, to whet your appetite, I do so only by offering the Times’s web synopsis - “More than ever, the best available science doesn’t seem to change minds in a civilization of competing ideologies” - and a four-paragraph excerpt:

With astronauts walking in space, and polio and other infectious diseases seemingly on the way to oblivion, it was natural to assume that people would increasingly stop believing things just because they had always believed them. Faith would steadily give way to the scientific method as humanity converged on an ever better understanding of what was real.
    Almost 50 years later, that dream seems to be coming apart. Some of the opposition is on familiar grounds: The creationist battle against evolution remains fierce, and more sophisticated than ever. But it’s not just organized religions that are insisting on their own alternate truths. On one front after another, the hard-won consensus of science is also expected to accommodate personal beliefs, religious or otherwise, about the safety of vaccines, G.M.O. crops, fluoridation or cellphone radio waves, along with the validity of global climate change.
    Like creationists with their “intelligent design,” the followers of these causes come armed with their own personal science, assembled through Internet searches that inevitably turn up the contortions of special interest groups [emphasis mine]. In an attempt to dilute the wisdom of the crowd, Google recently tweaked its algorithm so that searching for “vaccination” or “fluoridation,” for example, brings vetted medical information to the top of the results.
    But presenting people with the best available science doesn’t seem to change many minds. In a kind of psychological immune response, they reject ideas they consider harmful. A study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggested that it is more effective to appeal to anti-vaxxers through their emotions, with stories and pictures of children sick with measles, the mumps or rubella — a reminder that subjective feelings are still trusted over scientific expertise.

   Note the reference to special interest groups. Alice Dreger’s 2015 book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, about which we reflected on May 28 [2015] (“Authority versus independent thinking”), shows how both scientists and non-scientists distort science in support of special interests.

Copyright © 2017 by Morris Dean