What is misinformation for?

A new article on how many people in the US are increasingly hostile to reality has much to contemplate, but I wanted to briefly muse on this:

So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information.

I see the point, and agree with it to some extent, but I think this underestimates the persuasive power of misinformation.

It neglects the “rabbit hole” effect that misinformation has had on fostering conspiracy theories and radicalization. It neglects the slow corrosion that has been happening in political discourse. It’s not just that political parties (particularly in the US) are polarized, but that some have gone ever more extreme.

I can see a connection between Caulfield’s “misinformation helps maintain beliefs” and persuasion. People’s beliefs are informed by different points of view. Without countervailing points of view, those existing beliefs can become more certain and more readily drift to ever more extreme versions of that belief.

Misinformation is often better described as straight-up propaganda, though. But we seem to have lost that word through fear of calling lies, lies.

External links

I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is

“Equal contribution” statements don’t mean much: Nobel prize edition

This is not a post about the Nobel prizes. It is a post about authorship.

The Nobel Prize for chemistry was given two people for protein folding. I told students in my introductory biology classes for years that whoever could solve that problem should book a ticket to Stockholm, because it would get a Nobel, and I’m pleased to see I was right on that count.

On Bluesky, Michael Hoffman pointed out that the key paper about AlphaFold has an equal contribution statement:

(T)he AlphaFold paper has 19 authors who “contributed equally” but only two of them (Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper - ZF) get part of the Nobel Prize 🤔 

So why those two people out of all the 19 who made, allegedly, equal contributions? The paper has a “Contributions” statement:

J.J. and D.H. led the research.

I don’t think there has ever been a clearer demonstration that “equal contribution” statements don’t mean much of anything except to maybe the people involved. And their relatives.

Also worth noting that in the 19 equal contributions were, I believe, two women. (Guess based on given names, which is not ideal, I know. Still.)

More generally, authorship is a terrible way of assigning credit. I have, and will continue to, argue that the CRediT system of identifying specific contributions should be adopted just across the board.

References

Jumper J, Evans R, Pritzel A, Green T, Figurnov M, Ronneberger O, Tunyasuvunakool K, Bates R, Žídek A, Potapenko A, Bridgland A, Meyer C, Kohl SAA, Ballard AJ, Cowie A, Romera-Paredes B, Nikolov S, Jain R, Adler J, Back T, Petersen S, Reiman D, Clancy E, Zielinski M, Steinegger M, Pacholska M, Berghammer T, Bodenstein S, Silver D, Vinyals O, Senior AW, Kavukcuoglu K, Kohli P,  Hassabis D. 2021. Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold. Nature 596: 583–589. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2

Losing your academic email cuts you off from the scientific community

I haven’t had a job in a university for a while, and I’m realizing how much I cannot do and how many opportunities I am missing because I don’t have a university email address.

One of the biggest issues is Google Scholar.

Google Scholar still has my last institutional email from last year. I could leave my email blank, but I don’t want to, because “Unverified profiles can’t appear in search results.” That is bad for me professionally – I want people to be able to find my papers in Google Scholar search. It’s also, it must be said, bad for research more generally. I wonder how many people realize that profile search are filtered by institutional emails.

if journal editors find my Google Scholar profile, they will only see my old email. If they send a request to that email for me to review a manuscript, they won’t get a response. Given how many editors complain about how they “just can’t find people willing to peer review some articles,” I wonder how many potential reviewers are lost because they change email addresses?

Other examples:

Pubpeer won’t accept a Gmail address in their signup.

ResearchGate warns you about deleting an institutional email but allows you to do it.

My pitch for Space: 2099

We just passed the 25 anniversary of Breakaway Day, September 13, 1999, when 311 people on Moonbase Alpha were lost when the moon was blown out of Earth orbit by a nuclear explosion.

At least, that was what happened in the TV series Space: 1999.

Because of this (fictitious) anniversary, and seeing a panel about The Eagle Obsession, a documentary about Space: 1999, I’ve been thinking about this show quite a bit. Which is strange, because I never loved the show. I’m a fan of the Eagle transporter, but not a fan of the show.

I was never a fan because the characters couldn’t win. The moment the people on Moonbase Alpha found a home, that was the end of the show. This is not a format I’ve ever found appealing. And it is one that gets used a lot in science fiction. Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, The Time Tunnel, Battlestar Galactica (both versions), Land of the Lost, and Star Trek: Voyager, to name a few. At least the Battlestar Galactica reboot and Voyager got final episodes that tried to wrap things up, but shows almost never got proper conclusions in the 1970s.

The best the characters of Space: 1999 could hope for was to survive — to earn a temporary reprieve from execution by an uncaring universe. 

There has been talk time from time about rebooting the show. It’s mentioned in the panel. There were some plans that went so far as getting some promo material out. Space: 2099.

The tagline for Space: 2099: “Man’s giant leap was just a stumble in the dark.” It’s a good line, but it’s still pretty bleak.

So I was turning over in my mind about what a reboot would look like that I would actually enjoy. I thought, “Humans alone on a hostile alien environment, cut off from help… wait. That’s The Martian.” 

I enjoyed The Martian about as much as I did not enjoy Space: 1999. There were two key differences. The first was hope. This was clear in the poster tagline, “Bring him home.” Getting Watney back home was going to be almost impossible, but the story lives in the “almost.”

The second key difference was Mark Watney’s character, who might be described as “an excellent player playing excellently.” (I’ve heard the movie described as “competence porn.”) The audience pulled for him as he solved problem after problem.

I would like to imbue some of that more hopeful attitude into Moonbase Alpha. Something a little closer to The Martian or For All Mankind than Werner Herzog. 

If I were to pitch a Space: 2099 reboot:

A disaster cuts off Moonbase Alpha from Earth. But Moonbase Alpha is crewed not just by 300 random humans, but by 300 explorers. They are resilient. They are adaptable. They are highly skilled. They know they are in the most dangerous environment that any humans have ever been, but they will not. give. up. They will not settle for mere existence on an airless rock. They want to go home – but if they don’t, they are determined to create a base where they can thrive and live as richly as they did on Earth.

P.S.—I have one of the Eagle stories on The Eagle Obsession website! It’s submitted one of my old blog posts about why the Eagle is my favourite spaceship.

Related posts

Space: 1999 is now further in the past than it was set in the future 

My favourite spaceship (It’s the Eagle)

Eagles and Falcon

Big blue sky

 

Bluesky is become my main social media platform now.

I mean, they called me an “elder”! Not just in an, “Wow, you old” way. In a nice way!

Yes, Threads has picked up, and I still poke around Mastodon sometimes, but Bluesky has left me feeling... nice? As of right now, it probably has more of the online science crowd. The developers seem to be making decent decisions. And it’s not overrun with ads and company accounts. I’m sure those last will come, eventually, but not yet.

I will probably start to occasionally pull from Bluesky and write about it in the way as I have done before, but I don’t want to add another tag to my blog. I will be using “Twitter” as the tag for my social media posts here on the blog. Because from my current point of view, that tag is more about the microblogging format now than about the specific platform.

P.S.— Blusky game now is to see who’s enrollment number is a prime. Mine isn’t, but 265,499 is 13 squared times 1,571. Pretty good.

Scholarly publishers sued

Complaining about academic publishing is somewhere between “hobby” and “righteous cause” for many researchers. So I imagine that many will be cheering loudly at the news that six major academic publishers are getting sued.

People are likely to focus on the three things the case says makes for unfair business practices:

1. That peer reviewers aren’t paid, and that this is enforced by a “tit for tat” system where journals won’t publish your paper if you don’t review. (I know zero well documented cases of this.)
   
2. That journals will not consider work submitted or published elsewhere (the Ingelfinger rule, I think).
3. Submitted papers can’t be shared while under review.

If I wanted to sue academic publishers, I’m not sure these are the lines of attack I would use. These claims seem hard to stick to the publishers.

The first two points are about practices go back decades, well before the consolidation of so much academic publishing into a few companies. Publishers can say, “These were practices established by the community that we adopted.”

And there are many journals not run by these companies that do the same things. I suspect that the “We don’t consider work under review elsewhere” is common across all publishing, not just academic journals. Publishers can say, “If all these other publishers have these practices, we are just in line with industry standards. And by the way, why are we being selectively prosecuted?”

The third point, that journals “prohibit scholars from sharing advancements in submitted manuscripts while those under peer review” seems to pretend that preprint servers don’t exist.

But these counterexamples are beside the point, because legal question here isn’t whether journals do these things or that they are bad for research. The legal question is whether the publishers conspired to create those conditions.

I think that will be hard to show.

Now, may the plaintiffs can produce something like internal memos or emails between the publishers trying to kill proposals to pay peer reviewers. The academic equivalent to the tobacco industry’s “Doubt is our product” memo. That would be truly devastating. And, in all honesty, I wouldn’t put it past publishers to have some of these emails buried on servers someplace. 

This lawsuit will be interesting to watch. Maybe the plaintiffs aren’t expecting to win, but are doing some consciousness raising. Even if they lose, this lawsuit might do some good by getting academics talking about publication, and maybe by prodding publishers to do better work.

External links

Academic Journal Publishers Antitrust Litigation

Prodding the behemoth with a stick 

Banzai!

Yes, this post is a not too subtle acknowledgement of the fact that I be old, but I don’t care. Buckaroo Banzai is one of those movies that just shaped such a huge part of my mental furniture that I have to acknowledge that today is the 40th anniversary.

The attraction for me is the lead character. I wanted to grow up to be Buckaroo Banzai. Still do. I always loved the portrayal of someone smart and a willing to go full bore into pursing passions: science, music, and helping others. And maybe that I also had a name that evoked Japan increased my identification with the character a bit.

Just before he utters one of the film’s most famous lines, “No matter where you go...”, there’s another moment that underscores the character:

“Don’t be mean. We don’t have to be mean.”

It reminds me a lot of a line that is shared often around on acadamic social media: Lots of people are smart. Distinguish yourself by being kind.