No true Scientist commits fallacies

Every single time the weather gets colder someone tells a joke about global warming. Every single time someone does that a logical fairy dies. I don’t know how extinction works with imaginary beings, but I believe their population is pretty thin right now, with all the anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, climate change deniers and other “it’s just a theory” guys and gals.

Look what you have done!

But…why does a logical fairy die? Shouldn’t it be an environmental fairy? Well… those have been gone for a long time, and besides that, the whole argument is a fallacy, i.e. it sounds right, but has a big logical flaw. In this case it’s a kind of suppressing evidence fallacy or cherry picking. Cherry picking happens when someone selectively picks one or a few data points that fit the fallacious presumption in order to convince a naïve public. Accordingly, when your foolish friend sees you wearing a jacket, trembling in the cold, and says “what about global warming, huh?!”, or when a US senator tosses a snowball down the senate floor (it has happened, google it) they’re both committing a fallacy.

Do you see what he did there?

A fallacy is an invalid, faulty, misleading or just absurd argument used intentionally or unintentionally. There are fallacies with inner logic errors, like an appeal to probability, or the gambler’s fallacy (independent events are, well, independent, so if you toss a coin four times and gets three heads in a row you won’t have a higher chance of getting tails in the fourth), or informal fallacies, like the slippery slope (when one establishes a series of catastrophic events starting with an argument and culminating in a major disaster, e.g. “if we open our doors to immigrants they won’t incorporate our traditions and will preach their culture and religion to our kids, and then in a few years our traditions will vanish”).

Seriously?!

The use of fallacies is common in everyday speech, like in social media arguments and informal talks, and unfortunately also in formal media outlets, political hearings and rallies and even in some scientific discussions. Yep, scientists, like every other human being, eventually commit fallacies in the middle of their arguments, sometimes unknowingly but sometimes intentionally. The reasons are many; at times the scientist just makes an honest mistake, but at other times they actively protect the interests of corporations and other groups, like the Robert A. Kehoe and Ethyl Corporation case (see more in the Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey episode 7).

The thing about identifying, understanding (sometimes pointing out) and countering fallacies is that they are, by their own nature, a tool in every jerk’s rhetoric toolbox, used to mislead or manipulate public opinion or to try and undermine whole groups and their members. Even though fallacies can be present in any kind of conversation, debate or interview, not only scientific ones, I believe it is our job as researchers to inform the general public about science and its logic, hence it is also our job to educate the public on this kind of fallacious rhetoric.

Everywhere, everyplace, everytime

The first thing to do is identify the fallacy. There is a great website here that details 24 types of fallacy with examples and also has a big nice poster about it. We have already talked a little about three of them (cherry picking, the gambler’s fallacy and the slippery slope), but let’s look at some other common types.
The strawman fallacy is really common in both scientific and non-scientific environments, and consists of a misrepresentation of a theory, concept, idea, etc, in order to try to debunk the whole theory.

Dude, it’s just pizza.

Another really common and eventually innocent fallacy is the false correlation, where someone argues that if two or more thing happens simultaneously or at the same rate they are necessarily connected. This happens a lot since we normally assume that correlation is a symptom of causation, which it isn’t. To see how correlations can be spurious a website named Spurious Correlations gathered around 30,000 of them. My favorite one is about Nicolas Cage films and cases of drowning in pools. This kind of fallacy is regularly used by a majority of frightened parents and by some unreliable doctors and policy makers supporting the anti-vaxxer movement.

Well, we can never be sure…

There are many other examples you can find in rhetoric books, the internet, your philosophy or logic classes and so on, and I strongly encourage you to read more about them, learn about these kinds of argumentative strategy, spread the word about the differences between reliable and fallacious arguments and crush those trolls and science deniers on Facebook.

P.S. Remember: this is never about convincing the troll/denier, in fact it’s about shedding some light on a misunderstood subject so everyone interested in it can grasp it correctly (but go crush those morons nonetheless).

Flat Earth, anti-vax and a new perspective for scientific divulgation

When Carl Sagan published The Demon-haunted World, in 1995, he warned about the problem of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, noting the importance of spreading skeptic and scientific thinking for the lay population. Past more the 20 years, probably Sagan would be disappointed seeing that, after two decades, the overview is identical (even worse in some aspects) than in the 90’s on the USA.

Brazil lives nowadays the rebirth of conspiracy theories, long dead ideas, that are coming back, this time, in a most auspicious context: the age of instantaneous share and tireless seek for clicks and likes. From laughable theories with theoretical basis imported from middle ages like the idea of flat earth, to real harmful chains as anti-vax, the fact is that they only have a large space to replicate because of real science divulgation is still incipient.

To analyze the problems in scientific divulgation, we can divide it in two types. The first one is the propagation of scientific discoveries, the second the propagation of the science methods and philosophy. In first moment may not seen like a big difference, however as we’ll see next, this apparent subtlety is reflected as an abyss in the practice.

Propagation of scientific discoveries is a fundamental part of scientific practice and it must be one of the pillars of research, after all produce knowledge to keep it under lock and key sounds really selfish and useless. However there are a lot of problems which prevent scientific dissemination, between them we can mention: lack of incentive for disclose, difficulty of researches to reconcile their job with science spreading and unconcern of science agents about the relevance of divulge their work. But even if its small, the first type is considerably better explored than the second, fact that, as we shall see below, seems like a big mistake.

An article of 2003, from the University of Tennessee evaluated, through a simple quiz, what would be the correlation between level of scientific education and skepticism about themes like popular superstition, conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. This paper showed a weak correlation among scientific education (same as at graduation level) and denial pseudoscience and conspiracies. In short, the belief in these ideas are not reduced with scientific education.

Table available in the article of Tennessee University, showing the percentage of deniers of each pseudoscience, according to the major (science or non-science).

Another study, performed in Taiwan, about fortune-telling, shows that exist a positive correlation between scientific education and predicting the future, which confirms the misconception of thinking that our efforts to spread science are increasing, or at least influencing, the grow of skeptical think among people. However, there is an interesting issue to be analyzed on that paper. The researches distinguished people’s knowledge in two categories: the factual knowledge, in other words, how much did they know about scientific facts, and the knowledge about scientific method.

When the categories are analyzed apart, something interesting can be noticed. People with just a common sense understanding of scientific facts really do tend to believe in fortune-telling. However, among people who show good knowledge about the methods or philosophy of science, the level of acceptors of fortune-telling drastically decrease.

This research gives a good idea of what science promoters can do to minimize the damages and decrease the support to these conspiracy theories and pseudoscience: spread, besides the facts, also the way by which scientist arrived at this conclusions. They must stop teaching just physical theories or biological ideas and start promoting the philosophical tools and the method that can allow the lay public to recognize what is or isn’t real science.

We need more promoters who look at epistemology and philosophy of science not only as useful in science practice, but also as a knowledge of great relevance to be divulgated. Knowledge that can’t remain stuck on books and universities, but rather be object of spread in large scale, so that someday we can see that kind of misinformation and unfounded theories just like ghosts of a forgotten past.

Literature:

Sagan, Carl. The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995.

Johnson, R.M. 2003. Is knowledge of science associated with higher skepticism of pseudoscientific claims? University of Tennessee Honor Thesis Projects.

Paichi, P.S.; Li, Y.; Huang,T. 2004. Relationship between scientific knowledge and fortune-telling. Public Understanding of Science, 23, pp. 780-796.