| | | Some would call that a lie; others would say "total bullshit."
Solving for Doomsday - Cal Alumni Association (berkeley.edu)
Harold Camping ’42 thought he had calculated when the world would end. Ten years after his death, he still has plenty to teach us about the dangers and appeal of “doing your own research.
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Tellingly, though, even as many moved away from the scientific establishment, they continued relying on its vocabulary. Championing the horse drug Ivermectin as a cure-all, or asserting that 5G networks wreak havoc on immune systems, people still cited statistics, provided infographics, and quoted people with multiple degrees. The paradox belies the fact that, even with the drops in trust, “science as an institution has built a pretty strong reputation,” says West. “When you use the language of science, and you use numbers and statistics, it’s more convincing. It almost seems like it drops straight from the heavens.”
West is the coauthor of Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World and the inaugural director of the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington. He cofounded the center in 2019 as a way to combat the tide of human, and now often AI-generated, misinformation. Last year, for instance, he and his colleagues examined millions of posts from a Twitter antivaccine community to see if it mattered whether users purported to be experts or not. One might expect that, in an anti-science space, Ph.D.s and lab coats wouldn’t guarantee influence. But results showed the opposite: Those few “perceived experts” were the central figures in the community. They were almost twice as likely to be retweeted as those without the aura of expertise. In the case of this particular community, West says, “the conclusion we came to is they’re not anti-science. They just have different experts.” |
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