Disinformation is Power
It is posed to you, most likely since your childhood, things that you came to state as your values. These shape your perspectives and most likely your decisions in life. We are going to discuss this topic with information based on the work of Changiz Pezeshkpur and an article by the authors Patrick E. Connor and Boris W. Becker. The purpose of this analysis will be tied with an analogy between the work of historian of science, Professor at Harvard, Naomi Oreskes and the book Purgatory, the middle book from the series of the Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri. Hopefully, by the end of it you’ll be able to conclude your own ideas based on what is illustrated here and from your own perspective.
In the work from Changiz Pezeshkpur, The Effects of Personal Value Structures on Decision Making, he was able to evaluate how a few personal values come into play in courses of action. For that, we had six different values: Economic, Political, Social, Religious, Aesthetic and Theoretical. Now, even with some limitations that this study had (for example, the limited number of analyzed individuals and possible poor interpretation of the questions, especially for the undergraduate students), there are results with significance posed in the study.
Even though there was a difference of interpretation between graduate and undergraduate students and also considering the limitations of the study previously mentioned, we have that “In summary, the results of multivariate analysis of variance demonstrated that the undergraduate students had significantly different personal value structures and hierarchies of preferred courses of action than the graduate students.” (p. 115).
Nonetheless, the work made by Mr. Pezeshkpur shows that there is clearly a direct relationship between personal values and course of action, which is going to follow a certain path based on what the person believes in. All the six sectors mentioned above should be taken into account. Just to note, the religious correlation coefficient was the highest for the graduate and undergraduate students. The latter had no significant coefficients based on theoretical and social personal values.
For matters not only of comparison, but also to structure this premise on a more solid ground, we can take a look into the other article, written by both Mr. Connor and Mr. Becker. In their abstract alone you can check how much it adds to our narrative: “This study investigated the question of whether public managers’ personal values are related to their decision-making styles. One hundred sixty-one state government managers participated, completing the Rokeach Value Survey and the Rowe Decision Style Inventory. Results indicate that there is an identifiable relationship: Of Rokeach’s 14 clusters of values, 12 were significantly related to particular decision-making styles.” (article is linked above).
The reason why this is important, is that it works as a premise to our main idea, which is how we let our values be the almost indisputable major component of our decision making. That in itself may pose neither an objection nor a problem, but in reality the severity of it depends on what field this course of decision making is being applied.
For this part, it is almost crucial that you are familiar with Naomi Oreskes and the Purgatory, Dante. Talking about the former, we have not only the study of the history of science, but also how science skepticism works politically and socially, how and why people keep this continuing denial of simple and proven things, like the shape of the earth or even the efficiency of vaccines. In second, we have the middle book of one very famous trilogy, where Dante is repenting for his sins as he goes up the mountain of purgatory in thirty-three Cantos. This will be important for the context, because facing your mistakes and learning from them is exactly the way out of said skepticism.
Overall, doubting things can be healthy. Hank Davis, a Canada Professor Emeritus of Psychology, wrote in the popular magazine (which is, just to mention, not peer reviewed) “Psychology Today” about this topic. He raises a comparison between faith and doubt, standing on the side of doubt, because “Faith is not a virtue.” In this article, he argues the importance of doubting what you hear and challenging yourself and others to look for answers if something doesn’t make sense to you. This is important to note, because, in fact scientists, just like everybody else, can be wrong. The problem lies when people don’t have the proper discerning and often doubt things that they shouldn’t, at least not in the way it’s done.
Especially nowadays, considering what we’ve been all going through to fight the health and economic crisis that followed the wave of this COV-Sars-2 pandemic, there is a portion of the world’s population, at least in the western world, that distrusts science. According to an interview that Mrs. Oreskes gave The Guardian, “public opinion polls in the US consistently show that most people still trust science.”. Where I live (Brazil), we also have a majority of the population trusting scientific claims However this number has been getting lower. According to a local magazine called “SuperInteressante”, the Brazilian trust in science has been going down while in the US it has gone up. Still today (almost one year later), the claim from Naomi Oreskes is the reality, where scientific credit with the nation’s population is bigger than government, religion, school principals, politicians, journalists. They even go a little further (60% of the population), saying that specialists should be involved with decision making that regards science.
Now, let’s analyze what we’ve seen so far. First of all, it’s highly recommended that you read every bit of data by yourself from the original posts. This is nothing but an individual’s interpretation and you should have your own. Second, putting together the data that we got from Changiz Pezeshkpur, Patrick E. Connor and Boris W. Becker with their articles, together with these polls and a few claims from the historian Naomi Oreskes, also with the opinion of Professor Hank Davis, we can realize that this scientific skepticism, this distrust and sometimes denial of science (and sometimes reality) is a real thing. Percentually, it might not look like much, but in numbers we actually have a lot of people.
In the book Merchants of Doubt, authors Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, which also became a documentary directed by Robert Kenner in 2014, we have the posed idea of doctors which were paid in order to spread misinformation and confusion among people. If you didn’t read the book nor watched the film, it’s highly recommended regardless of this essay. Here, they talk specifically about some given topics that revolve around Global Warming. The book starts by stating that ‘Doubt is our Product” and finishes with the conclusion “Of Free Speech and Free Markets”.
The whole idea behind the book and the documentary is easily perceived and received by those who have either not been wronged by this system or that have been, but accepted change. This last part is of crucial importance, probably the biggest one here so far. Naomi calls it, when the person has a hard time changing his or her mind, “implicatory denial”. This has been briefly mentioned in a previous article of mine, called A New Parallel. This term is to say that “we reject scientific findings because we don’t like their implications”.
To quote the Professor in an interview she gave to the The New Yorker, “So if you ask yourself, Why do people reject the evidence of evolution? It’s not because evolutionary theory is a bad theory, or a weak theory scientifically, or that we don’t have good evidence for it. It’s because some people think that it implies that there’s no God, or that it implies that life is meaningless and has no purpose, or that it’s all just random and nihilistic.”
According to her, we have different ways to approach people that believe the wrong idea or simply distrust something that is obvious and, more pressing, given to them by a trustworthy source. Here we can take a look at Dante’s journey on Purgatory and how he repents. It is here, in the mountain, that Dante has to purge himself of all the capital sins.
For those who haven’t read the poem, which is my biggest recommendation yet, we have seven capital sins: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice (Prodigality), Gluttony and Lust.
In this climb, Dante has dreams and obstacles, he sees the representation of earthly figures thrown into that place (which, might I add, is much less gory than Hell). To us, the important thing of the climb is this: it is arduous. Every step has a difficult moment, something new, something hard, what have you. We can consider the Purgatory Mountain as being knowledge itself and Dante as being us. Nowadays, we have access to a lot of information coming from several different sources. This in itself is amazing if you look for it and, very important, know where to look. There’s a misconception where people believe certain things just because it makes sense to them, whereas this has nothing to do with good or bad knowledge. Something making sense to you can seem good, but in reality it doesn’t mean anything, especially if that something is not from your area of expertise.
This knowledge mountain is, just like the island of Purgatory, very unique. For most of us, if not all, you have to choose one topic if you want to be an actual expert, so that you might be able to finish the climb in a lifetime. That does not mean you’re going to be ignorant in other topics, but you certainly won’t be an expert. Accepting your own limitations is the very first thing we learn when we start to understand knowledge. There’s a hint that could help most of you: if you think you know something of which you have never studied before, chances are you don’t even know how much you don’t know about it. This is why and where the era of misinformation is getting very strong and dangerous ground.
Basically in science we have hierarchically five steps when coming up with something “new”, which are: Hypothesis, Findings, Model, Theory, Law. Popularly, what people call a “theory”, is nothing but a very simple “hypothesis”. In other cases, we have people demining accepted and corroborated theories as “just a theory”, whereas this claim makes absolutely no sense, given how complex, proven and observed by peers something has to be in order to become a theory. The very lack of these basic scientific concepts is what makes a portion of the population susceptible to conspiracy theories, distrust in specialists, in science and medicine. People tend to follow politicians, influencers and anything or anyone else that tells them “what they want to hear”.
The sins of ignorance can only be repented by going up the mountain of knowledge. Just as Professor Naomi states to The Guardian, “Discrediting Science is a Political Strategy”. The very title of this essay is a quote from Vladimir Putin himself. It isn’t by chance that the polls show an increasing number of voters signing in with the politician that better uses demagogy. The “game changer” number of voters are going to vote for the person that goes together with their values (parallel with what was illustrated in the article of Patrick E. Connor and Boris W. Becker), their religion (just like stated in the work of Changiz Pezeshkpur) and not with facts, nor science, nor anything of substance.
In order to avoid these traps and to be able to discern whether or not something is “Fake News”, don’t simply trust your instincts, personal values and religion. Look up the information, do a little bit of research; realize that scientists as individuals are not authority, but the scientific community and science itself is. At the very least, it is our best source. Obviously, it can change, but that also has a process. Leave the change to the experts, because changing what is accepted is much harder than simply understanding it and our job is the latter. For this to have a solid ground, scientists also must have an indisputable deal with honesty. The more individual scientists lie for personal gain, political pressure or any other reason, people will see that as justification to distrust scientific claims.
In conclusion, this is a battle that even with the best help possible, still is uphill and takes time. Dante had Virgil as his guide so he could know his way throughout both Hell and Purgatory. We have more information than we can fandom and more than enough experts at our disposal, because data has never been so available. In this day and age, your values and personal beliefs can be one of your biggest obstacles.
