About "Information Heals"
Purpose. Design. Disclaimer.
Welcome to “Information Heals”, an Informal Database containing scientific matters that are hard to find and difficult to debate in the current era of severe political polarization.
About “Information Heals”
| Last updated on: 08/19/24
Disclaimer:
The information posted here is not to be considered medical advice, and is not intended to replace formal medical consultation. Scientific knowledge is undergoing an exponential rate of advancement, therefore the information posted here may become obsolete soon after being posted.
Language and Terminology:
In the current era of intense political polarization - ideologically opposing camps are essentially speaking two different languages. An ideological language barrier is forming between two opposing each other political sides. This linguistic schism is caused by their conflicting views on most basic aspects of reality (Ref). To ensure accuracy, analytical clarity and educational value - texts written for “Information Heals” employ divisive political terms and language in the manner utilized by the hostile to each other political groups. Therefore, the use of partisan terminology or language in “Information Heals” articles does NOT constitute the endorsement of any partisan ideology.
Design:
It is an informal database of information about matters - which its authors or their colleagues consider to be relevant. Therefore, it is not intended to be a formal textbook. By its very nature it is bound to include errors, inaccuracies, omissions and other blemishes, etc.
Purpose:
This Substack was created in response to its authors’ concerns about pervasive problems - which put constrains on the practice of medicine and interfere with scientific research. Those problems include:
Pernicious Political Polarization.
Politicization of Medicine and Science.
Political Narratives replaced Objective Reporting.
Discredited Scientific Orthodoxy.
Imperfect Heterodoxy Sphere.
Power Asymmetry between Scientific Orthodoxy & Heterodoxy.
Misinformation, Disinformation and related problems such as:
Monetization of Ideological trends,
Audience capture,
Brandolini’s law,
Kruger-Dunning Effect.
Underestimation of Reality Denialism.
Misunderstanding of Evolving Medical/Scientific Knowledge.
Pernicious Political Polarization
As never before in its history the American Society became divided into two distinct and mutually exclusive political, ideological, cultural and economic camps.
Politicization of Medicine and Science
Politicization is defined “as undue encroachment of (partisan) politics into seemingly neutral or non-political arenas, institutions, activities and realms, such as sport, religion, the arts, science, the civil service, etc. Politicization of science and medicine are especially perilous. They cause the epistemologically precarious partiality of the fields that should be impartial. This perverts the role of the medical and scientific experts. Instead of serving as the objective qualified arbiters in the scientific disputes involving contentious matters – such corrupted experts aid and abet their political leaders in the execution of the unsavory, hidden agenda driven schemes.A phenomenon which has been historically referred to as Lysenkoism and recently was dubbed the Orwellian Science.
Political Narrative Replaced Objective Reporting
Political narrative is a term used to denote the manipulative method of storytelling. Such narratives are deliberately designed to change the perception of facts by the members of the public - in order to distort their understandings of reality.
Politicization of science led to replacement of the objective reporting of facts with the political narratives. Weaponized narratives are used by various groups to gain and keep power and such narratives are created by both sides of the political spectrum.
Moreover, the experts and journalists who claim to espouse the same political views as their target audience may lie to their followers too - for variety of reasons (including audience capture - see below). The misinformation disseminated by such false allies - while different on the surface - may be as dangerous as the propaganda pushed by the opposing side.
The best way of seeking the truth in the epoch of Narratives is to abandon the tendency to automatically accept any information without scrutinizing it. Even if the information comes from the favored source. Instead of uncritically believing in one version of the story, one should start to assign probabilities to all its potential variants. In this process, it is necessary to leave the comfort zone of absolute certainty. One cannot know everything all the time and certain things will remain unknown. Yet, despite this uncertainty, one’s diligent guesstimate about what is going on will be more accurate than a made to order narrative prepared by manipulative experts or media.
Silicon Curtain
Term Silicon Curtain (analogous to Iron Curtain) is used in the “Information Heals” database - to denote the virtual barrier that is separating the Left and Right Wing Filter Bubbles. It acts as an impenetrable metaphorical fence, stopping members of the two opposing political camps from seeing the partisan narratives of their adversaries. Such use of this term differs from its traditional application. Monicker Silicon Curtain is typically used to describe a legal barrier to technology transfer and sale of advanced computer equipment between the West and China (Ref, Ref, Ref). Sometimes it was also applied to describe the Great Firewall of China - that is an electronic Firewall that prevented free flow of information between China and the outside world (Ref).
Discredited Scientific Orthodoxy.
Due to the rampant politicization - public trust in the previously highly respected scientific institutions and affiliated with them experts has been eroding. The dramatic events of the COVID-19 pandemic have delivered the final blow into the already crumbling trustworthiness and prestige of many previously venerable institutions. Large segment of the public became disillusioned with the old scientific Orthodoxy and stared to yearn for the new type of “Heterodox” medical experts.
Imperfect Heterodoxy Sphere
The described above twilight of the scientific gods created a vacuum that has to be filled by the new authority figures. This void was fulfilled surprisingly fast. The large sphere of the scientific and medical dissidence blossomed virtually overnight from the small seed of the hibernating medical freedom movement. This miracle growth occurred despite the aggressive censorship and persecution of heterodox scientists by the old orthodoxy. After being banned from the legacy platforms such as YouTube or Twitter, medical dissenters migrated to alternative digital outlets.
However it would be naïve to assume that anyone who identifies as scientific dissident and questions the official narratives is an honest, impartial and well qualified person. There are unfortunately many bad actors in the sphere of the scientific heterodoxy. Some of such unsavory characters push their own manipulatory narratives motivated by greed or ideology. The noisy battle of competing political narratives further muddies the water and imperils the quest for the objective truth.
Power Asymmetry between Scientific Orthodoxy & Heterodoxy.
There is a significant asymmetry between the capacities and powers of the orthodox and heterodox scientists. The heterodox researchers are heavily out-funded and out-done in terms of the access to the modern research equipment, ability to hire technical staff and to be advised by consultants - by the orthodoxy. This lack of essential resources precludes the dissident researchers from performing the complex research projects which orthodox scientists can easily conduct.
Furthermore, heterodox scientists and physicians are very vulnerable to the repressions which are being unleashed on them by the politically powerful orthodoxy . The crumbling orthodoxy is keenly aware about the dangers associated with the successful questioning of their official narratives by the heterodox researchers. Therefore, under the guise of combating “misinformation”- scientific orthodoxy started to implement a vast array of the aggressive strategies aimed at silencing of the heterodox dissenters. The non-conforming scientists and physicians are targeted by the malicious lawsuits, which can impose devastating monetary penalties. They are subjected to the administrative actions by their licensing and certifying boards, resulting in the revocation of their specialty certifications and medical licenses. Hence they are deprived of the ability earn money by working in their professions.
Misinformation and Disinformation
Misinformation is “an erroneous or misleading information to which the public may be exposed, engage with, and share”.
Disinformation refers to “the purposive strategy to induce false belief, channel behavior, or damage trust”.
The pretense of combating the “lethal mis- and disinformation” is being used by the orthodoxy to destroy its ideological and economic heterodox competitors. However, as noted above the heterodox sphere is imperfect. While heterodoxy aims for the truth its sphere still contains so much of speculation, misinformation and even outright lies hat it is sometimes very hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. There are numerous reasons for this situation. We will discuss briefly just few.
Monetization of Despair and Ideological Trends
The false accusations of “medical quackery and political grifting” are frequently leveled against those who dare to question the orthodox narrative. However, both of those phenomena are real today and have a long history.
Medical quackery has been an unwanted companion of sensible medicine from its birth. There were and there always be unscrupulous people eager to make fortunes by exploiting naive and desperate patients. Such bad actors typically excelled at three things: taking advantage of new market opportunities, building a brand name, and advertising their product.
Political grift is as old and as real as the quackery is. There were and there always be dishonest conmen who get into politics, and stay in it - only because they want to line their own pockets.
Audience capture
In brief, the audience capture is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that involves telling one's audience what they want to hear and getting rewarded for it. In his paper “The Perils of Audience Capture: How influencers become brainwashed by their audiences” Gurwinder has summarized it as follows: “(…) I've watched many political influencers gradually become radicalized by their audiences, starting off moderate but following their increasingly extreme followers toward the fringes.”
Both right and left wing influencers can be affected by this phenomenon. They are starting as balanced and objective analysts but with time they evolve into the irrational fanatic endorsing the most baseless nonsense. They gravitate to their corresponding political fringes - being pulled by both psychological adulation of their audiences and financial incentives involving promotion of the idiotic but popular concepts. Admiration of the crowds and increase in earnings from “internet clicks” are powerful incentives. Those can corrupt the best.
Brandolini’s law
Brandolini’s law states that “The amount of energy needed to refute large amounts of poor quality bunk is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it.” In other words the deceiver can produce large amount of bunk much faster and much easier than the debunked can debunk it. It is much easier to create and promulgate misinformation than to correct it.
Kruger-Dunning Effect
Kruger-Dunning Effect describes the proclivity of people who have low expertise in certain area to overestimate their skills and knowledge causing them to act with the overconfidence leading typically to the disastrous outcomes. It is a form of the cognitive bias, that is a pervasive and uncorrectable tendency to engage in erroneous reasoning and exerting misjudgment. People affected by KDE may be wrongly recognized as “real experts” by the lay people, which leads to proliferation of misinformation.
Underestimation of Reality Denialism
Let’s consider the following:
Misinformation is “an erroneous information to which the public is exposed and which public considers to be true”.
Disinformation refers to “the purposive strategy to induce false belief, channel behavior, or damage trust”.
Reality Denialism (called also Misperception) are strong and non-correctable beliefs that are inconsistent with the best available evidence.
Reality Denialism includes:
the irrational acceptance of obviously false claims despite the evidence to contrary,
the irrational rejection of obviously true claims - despite seeing the preponderance of evidence supporting veracity of such true claims.
In computer science, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is the concept that nonsense (garbage) input data - will always produce nonsense output.
Concept of “GIGO” is also used to describe failures in human decision-making do to fact that the incomplete, or imprecise data are being analyzed.
Misinformation and disinformation follow the GIGO principle. If one replaces inaccurate data with accurate ones the output will be correct.
Reality Denialism is a human phenomenon that contradicts GIGO. In Reality Denialism the Treasure (Truth) goes in - but the outcome is still Garbage (Lies).
Reality Denialism understood that way is not caused by a neurological defect. It is results from person being blinded to facts. This is sometimes due to the overzealous ideology. Frequently it is caused by the adverse economic situation in the presence of moral defect which overrides the imperative to act honorably and ethically.
The left is particularly prone to Reality Denialism as evidenced by fallacious theories such as Transgenderism or Climate Change Cult.
Misunderstanding of Evolving Medical/Scientific Knowledge
Last but not least many members of the public and even some physicians and scientists do not understand the evolving nature of science as it was formulated by J.H. Baron:
“Science involves the conception and construction of refutable hypotheses, and their testing by repeatable experiments, followed by publication of the results. Thus, science is uncertain, tentative, probabilistic and universal. Every scientific statement remains tentative forever.”
CONCLUSIONS:
In summary, we live in the era of the rampant politicization of medicine and science which eroded the trust of the public in many previously respected scientific institutions. It is the time when agenda drive political narratives are replacing the objective truth. All of this is very sobering. Still we can find a consolation in the knowledge that while misinformation is a disease, INFORMATION IS THE ULTIMATE CURE.