Tag Archives: pseudoscience

Lie with confidence

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Be controversial but wrong, say it with confidence, and watch the likes and re-shares come your way. I had an Instagram video shared with me. The ‘influencer’ who posted it has over 600,000 followers and she claims to be an autoimmune specialist.

“You’ve got to see this,” she says, after saying that a man tested his blood before and after EMF (Electric and Magnetic Field) exposure. Then the clip changes to a guy looking at an image on a screen of what he claims to be red blood cells in “pretty perfect blood… I, mean these cells are absolutely amazing cells… it may even be hard actually to mess them up.”

Then they do a ‘phone test’ where the test subject sits between two cell phones, and has a third one between his legs on the chair, to test how “these EMF’s are affecting his ‘perfect blood’… Admitting that this is, “A bit of a risky game,” He then pricks his finger to draw a drop of blood after this supposed EMF exposure. They put a drop of the blood on a microscope plate and we switch views to see the screen again.

The contrast from the original image is comical. Worse yet the person is scrolling on the screen to a point that would go far beyond the edge of a drop of blood on a microscope plate. The difference in the slides is described as “A lot of inflammation. It’s all over.” After a very non-medical, exaggerated analysis, it concludes with, “None of this is good.”

When the video got to me it had 336,000 views and over 9,500 likes. And again, it was sent to me by someone who was concerned by this and wanted to share it.

We live in an era where confidence trumps competence. Be controversial and convincing and you are going to get not just attention, but believers. If I were to make a video debunking this, it wouldn’t get traction. Even scientists with large followings would likely not get 336,000 views on a debunking video.

So the inventive is huge. This influencer probably gained thousands of followers from this video. She made hundreds if not thousands of dollars from it going viral. And so it pays to put intentionally fake pseudo-scientific crap on the web. Just pick a controversial topic, lie with confidence, and watch the profits flow in. No backlash, no consequences, just greed, and incentives to continue to lie.

My fear? I see this getting worse, not better. AI will only serve to exaggerate the problem with more convincing lies that cater to wider audiences. It feels like as a society, we are actually getting dumber and social media is incentivized to make the problem exponentially worse.

Where else have we seen lying with confidence working? Everywhere from biased news outlets, to product advertising, to politics. Whether selling ideas, products, or partisanship, lying with confidence seems to gain far more traction than telling the truth.

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Update: After posting this, (and probably thanks to re-watching the above video a few times to get the quotes right), I opened Instagram and the first post had dramatic music and warned against wearing polyester on planes:

I took the screen shot and didn’t watch the rest of the video. People actually fall for this crap? 🤦‍♂️

Fringe science versus science at the fringe

I’ve started watching Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix by Graham Hancock. Hancock is a journalist that believes that civilizations have bern around since the last ice age. To some up a few of his premises:

  • There were full civilizations around 11-12 thousand years ago, at the end of the ice age.
  • The ice age end ended abruptly with meteor(s) causing a mass melting which caused massive flooding.
  • That flooding destroyed a lot of the early civilizations that nestled themselves on shorelines and coastal areas.
  • There was a significant loss of knowledge during this mass flood, a flood which almost all ancient cultures have stories about.
  • The Sphinx by the Egyptian pyramids are far older than the civilization that built the pyramids close to 5 thousand years ago. So that was not the birth of great civilizations as many believe.

I am not an archeologist, but I think there is something to these claims. The discovery of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, believed to have been built around 11,500 years ago, throws conventional beliefs about early civilizations out of whack. And this isn’t the only ancient sight doing this. More and more evidence suggests that perhaps there were civilizations far older than previously thought possible.

This is science that’s definitely on the fringe, challenging what’s known, and creating very plausible hypothesis. I think in the next 50 years we will consider a very different agreed upon history of civilizations than what we have today.

The challenge is that many people like Graham Hancock tend to be the same people who believe in fringe science. I heard a podcast with Hancock where in addition to ancient civilizations he was also talking about telepathy and moving Egyptian pyramid stones using mind power. The extrapolations seem far fetched and more based on pseudoscience than actual science.

It’s hard to sieve through a lot fringe science to find the science on the fringe… the science that isn’t necessarily conventionally believed, but has significant evidence and merit based on growing bodies of knowledge, as opposed to crazy speculation. This is challenging with people like Graham Hancock, as well as others like Deepak Chopra.

But I think when it comes to ancient civilizations lost to an ancient apocalypse, Hancock really is on to something, and we are going to see this science on the fringe make it into conventional science fairly soon. Our textbooks of tomorrow will tell a very different story about the birth of civilization compared to the history books of today.