HIV DENIAL IN THE INTERNET ERA

I was linked to this study in the PLOS on the apparent spread of science denial and disinformation that has become symptomatic of the Internet Age.

Below are my somewhat lengthy comments in response to Twinxor’s concerns in the D&D thread. For the Record, PLOS is a legit peer-reviewed scientific journal, but is licensed under Creative Commons, so it free and open to the public. What’s more, they allow commentary by readers. I am thinking of revising this comments and attaching them to the article, so any editing advice would be appreciated.

Twinxor posted:

I can live with the existence of wackos with silly beliefs. The trouble is their influence – widespread doubt of HIV’s importance is very bad, because it leads people to ignore safe sex practices and a lot more people die. As I see it, the big challenge is to demonstrate the reliability and correctness of science, which inoculates the public against conspiracy theory.

This is a strange claim to make, because the job of science is to demonstrate the reliability and correctness of its claims, and at least in these cases science has already done an admirable job of justifying its conclusions. Moreover, this article demonstrates that science is already well inoculated against pseudoscience, so much so that it can incorporate pseudoscientific practice as part of its dataset.

This suggests that science is not challenged by pseudoscience. Leaving aside the obviously huge problem of scientific funding, pseudoscience seems to present no epistemological problems for the status of science itself. If science is primarily an epistemological enterprise, then what’s the challenge?

The answer, I think, is mentioned in the title of the paper, but seems relatively absent from the article itself: namely, the effect of the ‘Internet Era’ on scientific practice. Before internet, people were obviously free to practice folk medicine and other pseudoscientific treatments for illness; in fact, you don’t have to go too far back in history to reach a point where such folk medicine was the norm. In the interest of brevity, I’ll greatly oversimplify history by dividing it into three ‘eras’. Call them the Folk Era, the Professional Era, and the Internet Era.

In the Folk Era, folk medicine (and folk science) dominated health (and scientific) practices. Even when more rigorous methods were available, they were not widely used and distributed for a variety of social and economic reasons. Folk Medicine was successful (in a memetic sense) because it is easy to transmit via verbal instruction and mimicry. Folk medicine does not mean bad medicine; folk medicine might work surprisingly well. But Folk medicine is infected by superstitious memes that propagate from a lack of systematic control and rigor.

The Professional Era is probably best marked by the radical successes in medicine and science in the past few centuries (think of the discovery of germs, penicillin, vaccines, etc). These practical successes gave Professionals the power to enforce systematic and rigorous control over the propagation of information. This doesn’t mean that Folk Medicine was eradicated, or that Professional Medicine was inoculated against Folk Medicine; people were still free to practice the old Folk Medicine. However, given the choice between the two paradigms, and the readily available success stories and overblown hype surrounding Professional Medicine (cf “Its time to close the book on infectious diseases.”), it is easy to see why the Professional Era memes were successful. But Professional Era medicine wasn’t merely successful, because the scientific practice itself guards the collected body of knowledge against infection by superstitious and other undesirable memes. (Note that science can’t guard against any particular person, even a scientist, from getting infected by these memes, but it can protect the collected body of knowledge itself.)

The Professional Era’s greatest strength proved to also be its greatest weakness in the Internet Era: that is, close control over the flow of information, and keeping that information in the hands of a few (‘elite’) professionals. The Internet engenders two radical changes in the paradigm: information is free and easily accessible, wresting it from the rigor of professionalism; and the transmission of information between individuals has become almost as easy as it was prior to the Professional Era, allowing people to coordinate and unify their practices as they did in the Folk Era without worrying about disruption from the Professionals.

As I said above, neither of these changes pose challenges to science or medicine as an epistemological enterprise. However, these changes do act as a kind of fertilizer for the superstitious memes that the Professional Era was otherwise able to avoid. When people have free access to information without systematic oversight or control, they believe that they are free to make up their own minds and generate their own conclusions from the information available. And when these free thinkers can coordinate their activity and present a united front against the established orthodoxy, those that were left feeling disenfranchised or helpless under the elitism of the Professional Era become particularly susceptible to infection from superstitious memes.

None of this should be new, but I hope it makes the role of internet explicit in the debate. So what do we do?

Many Internet critics plea for a return to professionalism, and decry the tyranny of amateurs on the Internet. Others, like Dennett, suggest a kind of Social Darwinism will eventually settle the matter: let the memes battle it out, and may the best meme win. Dennett’s suggestion seems superficially repulsive, because as you say it represents a real threat to lots of gullible but otherwise innocent people. On the other hand, if I’m right then this battle for memetic dominance isn’t going to pose a threat to science, and one might argue that our collective body of knowledge is more important than any individual, or even a whole lot of individuals.

I do think there is a third option, but it is subtle and hard to see because the internet is still so new. Part of the problem is that we are evaluating the debate taking place in the Internet Era with standards developed during the Professional Era. When a vocal minority voice their opinions, we still treat their opinions as worth consideration. We don’t quite think they are authorities, but we do think they are legitimate contenders for authority if their arguments bear fruit. In other words, the problem with the internet isn’t the tyranny of the amateur; it is actually quite the opposite– with the internet, everyone becomes a professional, because everyone is a potential candidate for the class of elites.

The solution, of course, is to realize that not every voice is a candidate for authority, and that the standards of the Professional Era do not disappear when information is wide spread. But that doesn’t mean that we should try to close up Pandora’s Box, either; we couldn’t even if we tried. What we need is a way of easily and reliably evaluating information on the internet, and a systematic way of tracing information to its source. The Internet doesn’t replace the standards of the Professional Era, but those standards do need to be expanded, because we need a way of systematically tracking information once it is out of the control of the Professionals.

When you look at it in this light, the problem seems much less overwhelming. Specifically, internet resources like Wikipedia are explicitly involved in the project of systematically tracking public information. And anyone who wants to know about the HIV/AIDS controversy can see a whole page and systematic discussion of the controversy. If they still want to indulge their superstitions, that’s up to them.

The only caveat is that mainstream media sources, hungry for scandal and controversy, pay inordinate attention to these pseudoscientific debates. The social and political power these media sources hold throws a big fat wrench into the battle of the memes, and provides a clear example of a big deficiency in the Professionalism model. But that’s a subject for another post.