Exploring the Problem of Fake News and Science Reporting
During and even after the recent US election campaign, there were numerous reports of fake news, made-up news, and other kinds of news that were deemed either outright fabrication or inaccurate or incomplete reporting of something to skewer it into one point of view or another. While the outright-fabricated news can easily be spotted eventually, there are other kinds of news reporting that were not as easily spotted, and worse still, continue to be cited by numerous news organizations, websites, and even political figures.
Most of this news involves inaccurate or misleading reporting of either data or facts. One such example is the recent report of the unemployment rate in the US that had been used in the recent political campaign. One can see why it isn’t really wrong, technically, to indicate that the US unemployment rate can be anywhere from 4.6% all the way to, get this, 40.3%! Anyone can take one or the other extreme number and claim to be “correct”. But what about the public listening to such claims? Are they aware of the two extreme numbers, and are they aware of why they are so different? Can they understand the context where those two numbers were derived?
So that was the setup for what I’m about to tell you here. This is a continuation, or maybe a reinforcement of the point that I had tried to make in my earlier article on The Most Important Thing You Can Learn From PhysicsForums. You see, in that article, one of the important points that I tried to emphasize is the constant “nagging” of senior members of this forum for members to clearly pay attention to their sources of information, and to CITE those sources clearly:
We try to enforce many things here on PF, and some of them to the dislike of many members. I’ve mentioned our insistence that members who wish to understand about stuff they read, heard, etc. must cite their sources clearly. This is a normal practice in science and engineering. We includes tons of citations in our papers, our funding proposals, our reports, etc. It is part of our standard operating procedure, making sure whoever reads it knows where the source of such-and-such information comes from. This is not a common practice for the general public. Newspapers very seldom provide such exact citations. Politicians are even worse – they seem to claim A causes B without even providing any justification, something we can’t do in science. Maybe, just maybe, if you learn how we arrive at our ideas in science, then you might set your acceptance level of what is valid to be higher, where you demand to know what is the evidence to support that A causes B? What is the nature of the source that support this? There is no reason to not demand valid supporting evidence even in dealing with political and social issues. Otherwise, it becomes just a matter of opinion or tastes without any rational justification. This is what science set as a standard, and this is why HOW we arrive at the conclusion we have is something important that you can learn from this forum.
I hope that you can already see the connection between where I’m going and the issue of “fake news” that I reported at the beginning of this article. If you care that much about knowing the unemployment rate in the US (for whatever reason), then you simply should not rely on the news reports, and certainly not from the mouths of politicians, for those numbers. What this means is that you have to go dig out the source, read how these numbers were arrived at, and maybe even try to understand how they were obtained, and then understand why there were such variations and ranges in the numbers reported. You have to go back to the source, rather than rely on news media reporting or 2nd, even 3rd-hand news! The source of your information requires to be scrutinized!
So how does this relate to physics or science in general? The impetus for my writing this article happened very recently, but this type of “fake news” has happened numerous times before. This is not outright fabricated news, but rather misleading news. But what is even worse is that this misleading information, once it has appeared online, gets propagated by other news media, and thus, giving an unsuspecting general public the wrong impression of what actually was going on.
The story in question is the recent publication on the verification of the magnetic field topology for a fusion reactor or Stellarator known as Wendelstein 7-X. This is a significant milestone in the process of commissioning the stellarator because the geometry of the magnetic field inside this reactor is extremely complex and with tight tolerances. In fact, you can read the actual publication of this paper since it is open to the public.
So then, what’s the problem? Now, remember what they are reporting here, i.e. the accuracy of the magnetic field topology that they had designed. This is important if they want to continue on and possibly generate a fusion process when this beast is finally running.
But along comes the various sites reporting this work and this is where things become misleading very quickly.
From Popular Mechanics website:
Germany’s Wildly Complex Fusion Reactor Is Actually Working
However, the stellerator design is still relatively untested, so a group of researchers spent the past year studying the W7-X reactor to ensure that it was working the way it was supposed to. They found an incredibly small error rate, less than 1 in 100,000, which the researchers characterized as “unprecedented accuracy.”
Here’s something from Space.com:
“Star-In-A-Jar” Fusion Reactor Works and Promises Infinite Energy
In a study published in the latest edition of the journal Nature Communications, researchers confirmed that Germany’s Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) fusion energy device is on track and working as planned. The space-age system, known as a stellerator, generated its first batch of hydrogen plasma when it was first fired up earlier this year. The new tests basically give scientists the green light to proceed to the next stage of the process.
The unsuspecting public (remember them?) might read either of these articles and (i) pay huge attention to the title and (ii) will get the message that I highlighted above from each of these articles. The result? People will think that the stellarator is now working and they’re moving on to the next phase. This is completely wrong! They have not reported such a thing, even though this is an important step towards making the device work. What these two news articles focused on was the “sexy” side to the story, i.e. a fusion reactor and the promise of “infinite energy”. Reporting that the group confirmed the shape and strength of the magnetic field is boring (other than the neat picture that accompanied the paper). So they stretched the truth a bit and went for the non-existent jugular. This is “fake news”.
Now I will be fair to both of them. Unlike regular news articles, these two at least provided links to the source. So anyone with any keen interest can pursue this further and read the actual paper. But how many of the members of the general public will (i) do that and (ii) be able to understand the technical details of the paper? They rely on news summaries such as these to give them the gist, and presumably, ACCURATE information. Otherwise, if they have to actually dig the source each time, what’s the point in such a news summary in the first place?
It is disheartening to see “established” websites reporting and/or propagating misleading news such as this. We on PF have often seen members coming in and citing many such sources. These members can become frustrated, usually with us, when we tell them that they either didn’t understand what the real thing was or that the news they read is incorrect or inaccurate. Worse yet, we get crackpots who rely on this inaccurate news to propagate their ignorance.
The moral of this story is caveat emptor!
Unless you are ready to dig a bit deeper into what you read and get your hands on the source, you have to be aware that you are relying on someone’s interpretation, motive, agenda, etc. in whatever you are reading. It is why we insist that you pay attention to the quality of your source of information and that you cite the source you are using to back your claims. Otherwise, there is no way for us to know if you misinterpret/misunderstand what you read, or if you read another “fake news”.
PhD Physics
Accelerator physics, photocathodes, field-enhancement. tunneling spectroscopy, superconductivity
What's interesting is the reaction by Vox and Slate and others. Their position is that scaring people is important – more important than getting the facts right – because political action is necessary. It's a thin line between that and "if we told the people the truth, they might not do what we want", which is a heck of a position for a journalist.It's seemed that way to me for a long time.
It's a thin lineI would say it's no line at all.
New York magazine last week published an article by David Wallace-Wells entitled "The Uninhabitable Earth". This article claims, among other things, that in 73 years or less "parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable". This piece has been criticized as inaccurate by, among others, Michael Mann – hardly a climate change denier. (But I confess it's fun to hear him called that)
What's interesting is the reaction by Vox and Slate and others. Their position is that scaring people is important – more important than getting the facts right – because political action is necessary. It's a thin line between that and "if we told the people the truth, they might not do what we want", which is a heck of a position for a journalist.
Adding more fuel to the fire……
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/multimedia/2017/jun/15/how-politicians-misuse-and-mangle-science
Zz.
I wasn't sure exactly where to put this one (also fits into the "March for Science" thread a bit), but it has been bugging me for a week:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie…ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-03-14-17-17-34
For the un-initiated, a "Nor'easter" is a storm system unique to the northeastern US, where a cold front comes in from the north west and collides with warm, moist air coming up the coast. The collision of the air masses produces a severe and rapidly intensifying storm. In the summer they rival hurricanes and in the winter, they produce massive blizzards along the Washington-Boston corridor.
Because they involve a cold and a warm air mass, there is a potentially wide variation in impacts across the storm from east to west. In the east, you might get all rain and in the west it is all snow. There will be a gradient of each, with the center generally producing the most snow, along a swath 10-50 miles wide and up to several hundred miled long.
Last week's nor'easter was late for a snowstorm, which produced a forecasting problem. Early indications were that it would be a classinc winter nor'easter, almost entirely snow, and cutting straight through the population centers from Philly to Boston. But hours before the snow started (Monday morning), the models started showing the warm air from the east would win and produce mostly rain along the coasts and a snow/sleet mix further inland, only producing all snow much further inland. These models were correct. The National Weather Service held a meeting on Monday afternoon and decided against updating the forecasts, "out of extreme caution" (quote) and "…they didn't want to confuse the public." (AP paraphrase).
Wait, what? A coherent message is more important than the quest for accuracy?
So along the east coast, we went to bed last Monday night expecting to wake up to a foot+ of snow and actually finding totals less than half of the low-end of the forecast (NYC predicted: 18-24", actual: 7"). Scientists can claim somewhat of a win in that the mass of precipitation was actually accurate, it was just denser than predicted, but that difference matters a lot in how you respond to the storm. Particularly when eastern Delaware and NJ saw mostly rain instead of a foot of snow! You can't un-cancel school if it doesn't snow. As for me, I did notice something was off when I woke up, but I was sicklazy and stayed home from work on Tuesday though many of my colleagues ended up going in.
This is from a division of the same government agency responsible for collecting, interpreting and disseminating climate data. Which begs the question: is the climate data/warming predictions we get filtered with the same bias?In the first bolded and underlined section, it is illustrated that they were choosing between two messages based on how they wanted the public to respond. The message that was chosen to be delivered was selected because they desired the response that it would illicit from the public.
In this scenario, they have demonstrated that they do indeed believe that its okay to deliver alternative "facts" with the intent of shaping public response.
If a politician were to discover that this organization had this trait, he/she could coerce them to deliver numbers that are convenient to use as "scientific evidence" proving the need for whichever legislation he/she wanted to pass.
If you combined P-hacking with their willingness to deliver information purely based on the desired response from the public, a group of like-minded politicians would be able to "scientifically prove the existence of" faux problems that can only be solved, conveniently, by giving those politicians the very power over the means of production/commerce that they have demonstrated wanting throughout their entire career.
That is not speculation, either. Analogous things have been done before. Only, instead of basing their justification in the words of "scientists", the kings/chiefs/emperors claimed that "prophets" had delivered the word of god/gods to them. Then the peasants believed the claims of their leaders and dutifully participated in whichever war, sacrifice, or relinquishment/reallocation of resources it was that the king/chief/leader wanted them to participate in.
That's why threads like this are important for us. Bad science can be used as a political weapon, and that needs to be acknowledged.
Sabine Hossenfelder:
No, physicists have not created “negative mass”
This is by no means to say that the result is uninteresting! Indeed, it’s pretty cool that this fluid self-limits its expansion thanks to long-range correlations which come from quantum effects. I’ll even admit that thinking of the behavior as if the fluid had a negative effective mass may be a useful interpretation. But that still doesn’t mean physicists have actually created negative mass.
Ultimately, at a subconscious level, our mind seeks to reduce anxiety, keep it under control. so, unless we pay
conscious attention, we believe what makes us feel better, what allows us to make sense of the world.