Skip to main content

Distrust - Gary Smith ***

There is a lot in the news on misinformation and disinformation - Gary Smith explores the way three factors of this kind can tarnish the public's attitude to science. He suggests that there is rising distrust of science and scientists as a result of: disinformation (telling fibs), data torturing (where data is selectively used, for example choosing the time period that most emphasises the desired result) and data mining (where big data is misused by picking up on the inevitable random correlations that occur in large quantities of data without there being a causal reason for the correlation).

Smith makes the important point that in a world where we are presented with interpretations of so much data, a clear understanding of these three factors is essential if we are to make any sense of what we hear and read. While disinformation is often a problem when non-scientists present 'their truth' that is often used to attack science, data torturing and data mining is often undertaken by scientists themselves, reducing public trust in something that is essential for the functioning of modern society.

We then get a shorter section on AI, which makes the important point that most AI is not intelligent, nor is it flexible. Here he also takes on earlier versions of ChatGPT and the like and reasonably assesses their shortcomings, though he doesn't mention some of the areas where the technology is genuinely worrying, such as generating plausible student essays. But the nature of AI's intelligence or lack of it is better covered elsewhere, notably in Smith's excellent title The AI Delusion, and isn't the main thrust of this book.

Finally, Smith pulls it all together, looking at poor reproducibility, where scientists' results, for example, don't actually match the underlying data, highlighting the replication crisis, where attempts to replicate experiments fail, and delivering his solution for 'restoring the lustre of science'. The reproducibility and replication sections are excellent. The solutions are less so - but that's not really a criticism. It is just very difficult to come up with answers to these problems. There's a lot more chance with those involving scientific misdemeanours, such as the suggestion to reduce the importance given to statistical significance (as opposed to value of a result), and more importance given to quality, replicability and reproducibility - but almost inevitably the solutions on the disinformation side are much less likely to have much of an impact.

So far, so good - an important point is being made here, and though I've seen a lot in the media about the disinformation aspect, Smith does a service in making clear how easy it is to distort the interpretation of data using the other two means. Unfortunately, though there are some aspects of the book that didn't quite work for me. In part it's the way it's written, and in part a worry about the handling of a particular piece of data.

Smith has a light style despite the topic, but I sometimes found it too jaunty for a serious science book. For example, he refers to inhabitants of the UK as 'Brits'. If a UK-based writer referred to Americans as 'Yanks' in a science book I think it would rightly raise a few eyebrows. Sometimes, too, the structure doesn't quite work. For example, Smith gives us chapters on specific areas where the three factors come into play. In one of the disinformation chapters on 'Elite conspiracies', some of the subsections are on conspiracy theories driven by disinformation, but others, such as the Pentagon Papers, use of animal 'spies', and 24/7 surveillance, are about examples where the conspiracies were effectively real - however, there's no distinction made between the sections in the flow of the chapter. This doesn't work well - and this unusually unstructured approach continues through other chapters.

The factual error (entertainingly in a chapter on 'the post-fact world') was that Smith tells us 'The Sun, a UK tabloid newspaper that publishes all sorts of nonsense, has long included the disclaimer "SUN stories seek to entertain and are about the fantastic, the bizarre, and paranormal... The reader should suspend belief for the sake of enjoyment."' Unfortunately this disclaimer is taken not from The Sun, which is one of the largest circulation UK national newspapers, but from Sun, a now-defunct US supermarket tabloid. It might seem heavy-handed to point this out, but Smith claims a tool for spotting disinformation is when it looks doubtful. No one in the UK would fail to spot that this is wrong - the error demonstrates well how that ability to uncover disinformation is highly dependent on context and on your personal experience.

The concerns don't undo the fact that this is an important topic and Smith highlights issues in the areas of data torturing and data mining extremely well that haven't been exposed as much as they should be. It's a useful and timely book, but perhaps could have benefited from a more forceful editor.

Hardback:   
Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

  1. I don't see how you can discuss public distrust of science without mentioning those who deliberately generate such mistrust; for example the entire climate "scepticism" industry, "scientific" creationism, and, as we have seen in the case of Covid with deadly results, those who for political reasons undermine government mandates simply because they come from government.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Those aspects are definitely included under the 'disinformation' part, but have been fairly widely covered elsewhere - I focused more on the other two parts because they are less written about. They are also used as ammunitions by those who do deliberately generate mistrust.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that â€˜Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...