The MIT article was headlined: Why you don’t really know what you know. To cut right to the chase, the reason I am linking to the article is because our system for dispersing knowledge is breaking down. It is under attack by misinformation.
To paraphrase from the linked article, if society undermines its traditional systems of evidence and trust, our
ability to know anything and do anything will break down. I fear the breakdown has begun.
In the above cartoon, the angel is a little hard on the deceased. He was told convincing lies and he had no way to judge the merits of those lies. Journalists write good stories and talk show hosts are experts at pushing their personal agendas. The poor patient in the blue hospital gown was simply out of his league. He was no match for the purveyors of COVID-19 half truths and outright lies.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been an eye-opener. First, I am shocked at how little was in place to fight a global disease. It is not as if one could not see this coming. Heck, in just this century there have been at least three other pandemics. Pandemics are NOT rare. There have been about six pandemics in my lifetime alone. Our leaders let us down. Society's lack of cohesion prevented the launching of a strong, synchronized, educated response. A more unified response might have decimated the virus and minimized its ability to mutate.
COVID-19 appeared on the scene in late 2019 and by early 2020 I was wearing a mask when going to the grocery store. A newspaper reporter tweeted that if he saw me in a store wearing a mask, he would tell me to "get the hell out." His tweet resulted in my first "Aha!" moment.
The numerous horror stories I was told about mask-wearing reflected the stories appearing in the media. One thing all these stories shared was a lack of scientific rigour. A year and a half
later the scare stories aimed at mask use are hard to find except when
one does some Google research. The news media has moved on leaving the truth in tatters.
I actually got an apology of sorts from one reporter. He took down the error-filled info on masks that he had posted online. He admitted my mask wearing was probably a good idea. He said, he and his wife now wore masks when outside the home.
He blamed confusing information from medical authorities for causing him to make mistakes. I'd argue he should have associated with a better grade of medical authority. My authorities said wear a mask. Period. They did not waver on important points.
COVID-19 is a new viral disease. It is no surprise that there is a lot to be learned about this disease. The flip side of this is that there is often little solid to report. This fact does not stop journalists. Journalists are masters at packaging thin stories as completely fleshed out tales.
It is often too soon to point to a COVID-19 story and to be able to scream false with complete certainty. For an good example of what bad but creative journalism can accomplish, we must look back a few decades and examine the 1982 documentary, DPT: Vaccination Roulette, an incredibly flawed anti-vaxx report that won acclaim that led to a Peabody Award. DPT: Vaccination Roulette inspired changes in American law that are still being applied today. Bad science, in the right hands, can make for a damn persuasive story.
As a society, we insist on instant gratification. With certain news stories, the fast response is the wrong response. Journalists goad scientists for fast answers. Often the scientists comply. The scientists should be goading journalists to slow down, show some patience and wait for the release of peer reviewed and peer rated research.
I cannot speak for you, but I have been mislead more times by the mainstream media than by Facebook. Do you recall when COVID-19 was said to be no worse than the annual flu? In the States, that was 700,000 death ago. The MSM has published so many myths about the virus that there are Internet pages devoted to dispelling these myths and they number in the dozens.
There were vaccines for fighting COVID-19 ready to roll by late last year. Hundreds of millions of doses were made available in the States and tens of millions of Americans said, "No thanks." Many died.
The Americans who died were not, for the most part, stupid. The angel in the cartoon is being too harsh. The anti-vaxxers have been mislead and the misleading information came from a wealth of trusted sources.
The following is based on a post by Boston University.
The university noted, when so much wrong information is readily available, convincing people to get vaccinated has proven to be a huge challenge. Many myths have taken hold such as the vaccines are too new, the vaccine itself will give me COVID, I’m immune because I had COVID, getting the shot is more dangerous than getting COVID and there are more. None are true.
MYTH: The technology used to create the COVID vaccines is too new to be safe.
FACT: The technology used, called messenger RNA, or mRNA, is not new. Research on it began in the early 1990s, and two diseases that are very close to COVID—SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome)—helped bring the mRNA vaccine development to present day use.
MYTH: I already had COVID, therefore I don’t need the vaccine. I’m immune.
FACT: After people recover from a viral infection, the immune system retains some immunity. Studies have been unclear on how long this natural immunity lasts but most experts believe it will be anywhere from 90 days to six months, though it could be longer. In these cases, vaccination acts like a booster shot bringing the strength of the patient's immunity up to that achieved by the standard two-shot COVID vaccination regimen.
MYTH: Children do not need to be vaccinated because they do not become sick from COVID-19.
FACT: As a rule, children have much milder symptoms and are less likely to be hospitalized. But since children can become infected and transmit the virus while remaining asymptomatic, they can serve as an insidious and ongoing source of disease transmission. Such children can infect older, at risk, family members such as grandfathers and grandmothers or pregnant friends and relatives.
Children have a role to play in society achieving “herd immunity.” This is the point of community immunity that stops the disease from continuing to spread. Now, with the Delta variant, an even higher percentage of the population must be vaccinated to reach “herd immunity.” It will be harder to get back to some normalcy if a large proportion of the population, the children, remain unvaccinated.
MYTH: I’m vaccinated. So I can drop all my COVID precautions, right?
FACT: No!
Studies have shown that a person infected with the Delta variant of COVID has roughly 1,000 times more copies of the virus in their respiratory tracts than a person infected with the original strain. On the plus side, Delta is causing outbreaks mostly in unvaccinated people. But Delta is more easily spread, and we are quickly learning that it can lead to vaccine breakthrough infections and even be spread from one vaccinated person to another.
The vaccines are safe, and remarkably effective. But what precautions we decide to take depends on a lot of factors. For example, where you live. Are you in a place with high vaccination coverage, like Massachusetts, or a southern state with low vaccination coverage and a high case rate.
It also depends on what activity you are engaging in. Outside not in a crowd, that’s safe. You don’t need a mask, but inside in a crowd where you don’t know who is vaccinated or unvaccinated, then you may want to follow strict public health measures.
If you have children less than 12, you must be a little more cautious. In addition, if you have a compromised immune system (a pregnant woman, for instance), then you also need to take some extra precautions. And, of course, there is your level of comfort with risk.
On occasion, newspapers are among the poorest sources of accurate information. I was wearing a mask in March of 2020. A journalist with whom I once worked was retweeting to his followers that if they wore a mask into a store they should be told to get the hell out. Masks were not welcome in public spaces according to this long time reporter.
I got into heated discussions about the value of masks with a number of reporters. I was told that pushing the wearing of masks made me a troll. They all argued that they, not I, were following Science with a capital 'S'. And they were all wrong. The trolls, if you insist on using that word, were the reporters attacking those who disagreed with them. I was stopped on the street once and verbally attacked by an irate reporter.
Many people are fearful of vaccines and vaccination. These people often have doubts about the value of masks and social distancing as well. I do not hold these people totally responsible for their negative views, of their fears, for their wildly inaccurate beliefs. They are inundated with bad information. It is not fake news. It is not produced with the goal of deceiving people but it does deceive people. And if journalists think that they never mislead, they are deceiving themselves as well as the public.
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-misinformation-advisory.pdf
Journalists, editors, and others must recognize, correct, and avoid amplifying misinformation.
Attacks on evolution, often very complex arguments rooted in religion, leave me shaking my head and thinking, "Here we go again. Dancing on the head of a pin." One of the more popular dance numbers is Young Earth Creationism. This Christian fundamentalist argument against evolution sells God short. It diminishes God.
I like to think God's approach to creating our world was done in the spirit of the following aphorism: give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
The evangelicals claim their God is all powerful, all knowing, all wise, yah-da-yah-da-yah-da. Then these religious folk toss out evolution and all the evidence surrounding it. Anything is possible for their Lord, it seems, except for evolution.
A favourite argument against evolution involves the eye. They claim the eye is proof evolution is a fraud. Something as complex as an eye just didn't happen; it didn't evolve. Impossible. These fundamentalist are certain that something as complex as an eye must be created at once, complete, fully functional.
Balderdash! That's the thinking of a human. That is hardly the thinking one expects from an all wise, all knowing God. That's the limited thinking of a child. These are people whose God was made in the image of man.
I prefer believing that God created our universe with potential, great potential but unrealized potential. Evolution is but one way this potential is realized. Study the eye and and the more you learn about it, the more its evolution seems reasonable. (Read: Evolution of crystallins for a role in the evolution of the vertebrate eye lens.)
I had the lens in my right eye surgically replaced with a plastic, man-made lens. That plastic lens did not evolve. It took a lot of human effort to make that little plastic disk: chemical factories, sophisticated manufacturing facilities, imaginative surgical procedures and, in the end, it is not as good as the amino acid one it replaces. For instance, the plastic lens suffers from flare when viewing a strong light. Before the cataract damaged my sight, the unusual amino acid compositions of the natural lens worked exceedingly well. No flare.
God didn't have to create a fully developed eye, God took a more complex, more Godlike approach, and created a universe where eyes could develop or evolve. Only about 22 amino acids are needed to make all the proteins found in the human body and that includes the lens in the eye. Creationists diminish God. And who knows, maybe God is not above putting a thumb on the evolutionary scale.
As I mentioned in my last post, a close relative has tumbled down the Extreme Religion Rabbit Hole. This person told me that even as a child they were wise enough to recognize the false nature of the theory of evolution. They had no interest in Charles Darwin and his theories. There is no way, in their estimation, that humans and monkeys shared a common ancestor.
I'm an ex-Sunday school teacher but I quickly discovered I am not up to the task of defending science from the likes of my relative. Admitting that, I found the following essay by Michael Ruse, a philosophy professor with a background in the Quaker religion:
If you don't have time to read the entire essay at this time, please study the following:
The essential characteristics of science are:
Creation Science … fails to meet these essential characteristics. Whatever Creationism is it is not science and should not and cannot be taught in science class.
A close relative has tumbled down the Extreme Religion Rabbit Hole and entered a veritable Alice in Wonderland world. One of the strangest beliefs she now espouses is the belief in young earth creationism. According to YEC, the earth is no more than 10,000 years old.
My relative can mount quite the defence of what many would immediately label indefensible. It is not. If a an argument is posed outside the normal restraints of logic, it can be damn near impossible for someone just encountering this madness to argue successfully against it. The totally illogical can be an amazing solid position for a believer once all reason has been sacrificed on the alter of Christian evangelical fundamentalism.
And so, admitting that I am not to the task, I am posting this link:
What exactly is socialism and why should we fear it? First, it is democratic socialism that most of the West's left-wing politicians embrace. According to the World Population Review, a democratic socialist believes that the government should provide a range of essential services to the public for free or at a significant discount, such as health care and education.
Unlike socialists, democratic socialists do not believe the government should control everything. Government should only provide support for basic needs and help all of its citizens have an equal chance of success. Democratic socialists are committed to democracy and so are guided by an adherence to democratic principles.
Doesn't sound so bad, does it? So, why are so many folk so frightened by the term? Right-wing lies. It is that simple. Think of the term cancel culture. The Republicans in the States have managed to brand the Democrats with the term. Yet, it was the Republicans who tried to upend the 2020 presidential election, toss out millions of legitimate votes, and shove their candidate back into power in a very undemocratic power play. Now, that is cancel culture.
What countries have democratic socialist parties and, in some cases, democratic socialist governments? The following are but a few.
The following is from World Population Review:
Swedish workers do pay more in taxes than workers in non-socialist countries, like the United States. The reason they do so is so that the government has money for generous social services, including maternity and paternity leave for new parents and the school voucher system. There is also more income equality in Scandinavian countries than in the United States.
However, Sweden is not a “pure” socialist country. It has a free-market economy with very few government regulations, something that is a capitalist’s dream. Perhaps the lesson from Sweden is that both socialism and capitalism can co-exist. Now, does that sound so bad?
Then there is Finland. The land of compassionate capitalism. Finland has a free-market economy with minimal government regulation and interference. The government supplies free schooling, including college, for all students and generous maternity and paternity leave for new parents. Healthcare will not bankrupt someone living in Finland.
The last democratic socialist country we will look at is Denmark. Denmark is probably more capitalist than the United States. Its government encourages businesses to run solely on market principles rather than government policies. Additionally, it has better rates of healthcare, education, and social security than many other capitalist countries because the high tax rates create a redistribution of wealth in the form of social programs.
One caveat: There are concerns that Denmark’s social programs are unsustainable. In the coming decades, substantial changes may be necessary and the social programs may suffer. Time will tell.
