In Science, There’s No Misinformation
In 1632, the person who is today revered as the “father of modern science,” found himself at odds with the established thinking of his time. Galileo’s assertion that the Earth was not the immovable center of the universe was met with strong opposition from other astronomers as well as the one of the dominant institutions of its time, the Catholic Church. The Church, in particular, was deeply disturbed that Galileo’s controversial thinking might confuse people and dissuade them from the conventional understanding of how the universe works.
For advocating unacceptable thinking, Galileo was tried by the Inquisition, found suspect of heresy, had his books banned, and was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life. The consequences for questioning the accepted view of reality can be quite severe, even if you are the father of modern science.
A new term that has emerged in our everyday conversation is “misinformation.” This term is used to describe any opinion that is inconsistent with the thinking of the dominant institutions of our time. If this term were in vogue in the 1600’s, Galileo would have certainly been accused of promoting misinformation. And those who might have made this assertion would have been wrong because, with the perspective of almost six hundred years of hindsight, there are few, if any, who would dispute the incontrovertible evidence that the Earth is not the immovable center of the cosmos.
Nevertheless, despite the poignant lessons learned from Galileo’s saga, history appears to be repeating itself. Today, should you challenge the policies of public health experts, the pedagogy of academic elites, or the ethos of the mainstream media, you may suddenly find yourself the subject of a modern day inquisition that finds you guilty of misinformation, demonetizes your social media platforms, suppresses or cancels your digital presence, and may even deprive you of your livelihood. What is most interesting is that much of the modern day inquisition is happening in Galileo’s bailiwick: the realm of science. How is it that the practices of medieval religious orthodoxy have become the tools of our present day scientific institutions? To answer this question, we need to understand what reality is and how it works.
Two Realities
Reality is defined as the state of being actual or true. When something is actual, it has a verifiable existence. When something is true, it is a fact. Thus, reality consists of verifiable facts. While this concept may seem rather straightforward, the reality is that reality is not as simple as it may seem. That’s because one of the things that separates humans from other species of mammals is that we are capable of living in two distinct realities at the same time. These two realities are governed by two very different sets of laws and both realms are essential for human existence. Where humans get into trouble is when we mix and confuse the workings of these two sets of laws to determine what are verifiable facts.
The first reality is physical reality. This realm is experienced through the operations of the universe whose laws apply uniformly to all elements and are oblivious to human influence. The laws of physical reality are objective and cannot be altered by human action. Thus, for example, no political body could legislate a change in the speed of light or suspend the laws of gravity. The operating principle for physical reality is: It is what it is. However, while we can’t modify physical laws, we can use these laws to control how we navigate the physical world by discovering and understanding how they work, as happens when pilots fly airplanes. This is the domain of science.
In science, there is no such thing as misinformation. When you are attempting to understand objective physical laws, information is either true, false, or a hypothesis. A true statement is a fact that is based on valid and reliable evidence. Thus, in the realm of physical reality, numbers are the primary tools for constructing mental models and discerning truth. While there are times when truth is a constant, such as the speed of light, there are other times when truth is variable, depending upon the context of physical circumstances. For example, whether H2O is a vaper, a liquid, or a solid depends upon the temperature, but once the temperature is known, the verifiable fact is clear and the extent of human action is limited by the laws of physics. While we can manipulate the temperature, we cannot manipulate the immutable laws that determine how the interaction of H2O and temperature work. If the temperature is below freezing, we cannot turn ice into water.
As for the other two informational possibilities, a false statement is an assertion that is definitively untrue based on valid and reliable evidence, and a hypothesis is any statement about the workings of physical reality that cannot be proved or disproved by evidence and remains a hypothesis until sufficient data can be gathered that clearly proves the proposition is either true or false.
The second reality is social reality. This is the world of interpersonal relationships among family and friends that make up our day-to-day lives. We also experience social reality in the economic and political systems we construct that allow large numbers of people who are unknown to each other to engage in reliable and meaningful social exchange. Unlike physical reality, which operates according to objective immutable laws, the rules of social reality are humanly constructed. Thus, they are malleable and subjective and can be modified as societies evolve, especially in response to changing circumstances and new technologies. Social reality is the domain of ideology.
This ability to construct social reality is a distinctly human characteristic. As Yuval Noah Harari discusses at length in his book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, the reason humans rule the world is because we are capable of creating shared fictions that allow us to cooperate with countless numbers of strangers. For example, money is a shared fiction. If you were to present a five-dollar bill to a store clerk to purchase a soft drink, the clerk would give you the soda plus change in exchange for the bill. The currency has value only because we have a social agreement about how money works. As a physical reality, the five-dollar bill is just piece of paper. However, as a social reality, the bill has real value, but only as long as we continue to accept the shared fiction.
Because it is fiction, the primary tool for constructing social reality is language. Words are the ingredients of stories, and stories are the foundation for the myths and narratives that reflect how we imagine the world works. Thus, the mental models of social reality are products of human imagination that are shaped by perceptions and assumptions rather than evidence. Throughout the ages, our ability to use language to construct social reality has allowed us to build highly advanced civilizations. Without language we could not have built the comprehensive legal, political, economic, and religious systems that are the pillars of developed societies. These social systems are built upon strongly held beliefs that reflect assumptions, norms, and rules that are either shared or coerced upon communities of people.
These beliefs are usually useful for supporting productive social exchange, as happens when economic activity is fostered by a strong fiat currency. However, belief-based mental models can sometimes become poor guides, or even harmful, if people in authority become true believers who persist in maintaining a socially constructed reality that conflicts with evidenced-based physical reality. The consummate flaw of these zealots is that no amount of evidence, as Galileo painfully learned, can shake their beliefs. This is especially dangerous when the true believers claim to be scientists because when truth is defined by dogma, anything to the contrary—even incontrovertible evidence—gets labelled as misinformation.
A true scientist would never label differing opinions as misinformation. Only a true believer invested in a socially constructed reality would characterize opinions and findings that he or she does not agree with or can’t disprove as misinformation. Anything that can’t be proved or disproved is a hypothesis and not misinformation. The proper scientific response to hypotheses is not silencing the voices of those who think differently, but rather collecting valid and reliable evidence that definitively shows whether the supposition is true or false. And certainly, true information that is supported by evidence should never be labelled as misinformation, as happened far too often during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Landscape of Covid Information
Over the course of the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, we were told by our public health medical experts that the following information was true:
· Lockdowns are an effective way to diminish the spread of the virus.
· Face masks are effective tools to prevent the acquisition and the transmission of the virus.
· Schools need to be closed to protect children from the hazards of the virus.
· A novel experimental vaccine that uses mRNA technology to engineer human cells to produce replicas of the virus spike protein is safe.
· If people receive this experimental vaccine, they will not get or transmit the virus.
· Mass vaccination of populations is the most effective way to eradicate the proliferation of the virus.
· Natural immunity is not an effective substitute for the vaccine.
While this information was amplified by public health agencies, the pharmaceutical industry, mainstream media, and Big Tech, a number of reputable scientists and clinical doctors saw things very differently. Based upon their professional experience and analytical research, they came to a different set of conclusions, which were labelled by the established authorities as misinformation and proactively censored in a now well-documented partnership between government agencies and social media platforms:
· A focused protection approach, which had been the standard practice for managing pandemics for centuries, is the most effective way to diminish the spread of the virus.
· Because the virus spreads by inhaling aerosols rather than droplets, masks do not prevent the acquisition and the spread of the virus.
· Except for those with pre-existing health conditions, children are not at risk for adverse effects from the virus.
· The experimental mRNA vaccines are not safe for two reasons: first, the short-term adverse reactions are significantly higher than all other vaccines combined over the past three decades, and second, the long-term risks are unknown and may not be known for years.
· The experimental vaccines do not stop the acquisition and the spread of the virus.
· Mass vaccination during a pandemic will provide an evolutionary advantage for the virus to morph into a multitude of variants.
· As known for centuries, natural immunity is the most effective protection against the virus.
The institutional response to the dissident views was rapid and forceful. Just as Galileo was aggressively censored by the established institutions in his time, the differing views of highly qualified scientists were vigorously banned by a working coalition of Big Government, Big Tech, and the mainstream media. This coalition was committed to the operating principle that the opinions of the official experts represented “the science” and that any contradictory information was to be labelled as misinformation and eradicated from the public square. However, it appears that those who presented themselves as acting according to the “the science” have fallen victim to the hubris of advancing a mental model based upon a socially constructed reality that turns out to be rather misaligned with physical reality.
When physical reality and socially constructed reality are at odds, physical reality ultimately wins. In the end, even though it didn’t happen is his lifetime, Galileo was vindicated. We are witnessing a similar dynamic in the Covid episode. That’s because the supposed truths advocated above by the public health experts have turned out to be false myths. On the other hand, the views of the dissidents are being continually validated by evidence. Thus, the centuries-old focused protection approach, which was employed by Sweden, provided comparable mortality and morbidity results without the substantial social and economic harms experienced by countries that locked down. Populations that mandated masks did not have better outcomes than those that didn’t. Closing schools was far more harmful to children than a virus that posed much less risk to them than riding in a car. As more and more adverse effects are recognized, it is apparent that the vaccinations are not as safe in the short-term as we were led to believe, and with nagging and steady increases in all-cause mortality, there are serious concerns about the long-term safety of the single largest medical experiment in history. Natural immunity is finally being recognized—as it had been for centuries before Covid—for providing robust protection. And what is most disturbing, the vaccine failed at its basic job: It did not stop the acquisition and the spread of Covid. Today the vaccinated are just as likely as the unvaccinated to get and transmit the virus. And this failure has enabled the virus to thrive by evolving into a multitude of variants that guarantees Covid will be endemic for the rest of our lives.
Once again, ideology has failed to accurately describe how physical reality works. The social constructed reality of the public health authorities has turned out to be a social fiction. The common lesson that we learn from the Galileo and Covid episodes is that, when scientists label differing opinions as misinformation and actively engage in censorship, they are not practicing evidence-based science; they are instead propagating a belief-based mythology that attempts to substitute medical religion for medical science.
There are no true believers among true scientists. That’s because science is a never-ending humble inquiry to expand our understanding of how physical reality works. As much as we may know, there is always more to learn in an ever-expanding complex universe. In science, questions are just as important—if not more important—than answers. That’s why the true scientist leads with questions. The true believer, on the other hand, portends to have the answers, rendering questions unnecessary and even dangerous should large numbers of people be swayed to think differently in response to reasoned inquiry. Perhaps that’s why, in reacting to the focused protection strategy put forth in the Great Barrington Declaration, Francis Collins, in an email to Anthony Fauci, called for a “quick and devastating takedown” of the three learned scientists from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford whose document has been signed by over 63,000 medical health scientists and practitioners. A true scientist would debate or refute the validity of different points of view with facts and data. As we learned from Galileo’s odyssey, only a true believer dismisses verified facts or reasonable hypotheses as heresy or misinformation.