Micro-evolutionary bursts of change

This miniblog isn’t just for news, it’s also a place for me to share thoughts about something I’m thinking about currently. Usually something will come to me while I’m on Twitter, but 140 characters is extremely limiting, and I’m not about to put up half-baked ideas on the main blog, so the miniblog is the way to go, I think.

So, when I was visiting my grandmother today in hospital (she’s in for a knee infection, nothing too serious), the topic of childbirth came up via my mother talking about a friend of the family inducing their pregnancy early in order for her mother, who would be leaving the country before the baby was naturally due, to see the newborn child. My mother, who’s a higher-degree maternal and child health nurse, mentioned something along the lines of “People shouldn’t get it into their heads that inducing a pregnancy is a good thing to do – it will probably lead to a cesarean section, then trouble breastfeeding, which causes a whole lot of other problems later in life. People should learn to leave things like that to run their natural course.”

She, of course (she’s my mother what did you expect? :p), has data to back up what she’s saying – she’s looked at the peer-reviewed scientific evidence on these topics and has come to the conclusion that such a thing can have long-term harmful consequences to a child’s development. But – and here comes the point of this rant-esque post – would some skeptics have accepted her claims as she said them? I’m going to have explain this further…

Skepticism, as a large, popular and interconnected movement, is relatively new, and its rise has been strongly tied to the prevalence of the new media forms: podcasting, blogging, tweeting etc., in other words, things that use the Internet. Now, such popularity and ability to spread the message of critical thinking and the scientific method is obviously good for skepticism, bringing in new people all the time – but I fear, in my own paranoid little way, that the type of behaviour that is being promoted by these new communicative forms is not one that we should, as independent thinkers, be encouraging.

People have always been drawn to celebrities, and the rise of podcasting and blogging as skeptical media has thrust many popular providers of such content into what could be considered a kind of “skeptical celebrity scene”. People who I would place in this category include the cast of the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast, James Randi, Phil Plait, Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Brian Dunning, Richard Saunders, and many others. They each have huge (and vastly overlapping) “fanbases”, with people like Phil and PZ having the ability to literally change the outcome of large online polls or send thousands of people to a blog or website, simply by mentioning it on their own blogs. In this regard, they have enormous power.

But, clearly, this isn’t the only power they wield. Due to the sheer number of people who listen to what these people say every time they open their mouth and put out a podcast (or wiggle those fingers and publish a blog post), they also have a great deal of influence over what people in the skeptical movement think about various topics. If one of these people endorses some particular thing, lots of people are going to think that it’s great, and-

…

Yes, I hear you. I hear you shouting at the screen (in your minds though – you don’t want to wake the neighbours, I understand). I hear what you’re saying about skeptics being “freethinkers” and “not bound to particular ideologies”. I understand that. You’re right… in a limited sense, though.

Sure, the concept of “thinking for oneself” forms the basis of skepticism, and a healthy distrust of authority is what tears some people away from the uncritical, cult-like grottos of religion and pseudo-science, BUT (and the size of this “but” depends on many things) I’ve been thinking about this, and it seems to me, hypothetically, that the celebrity-like status of the various well-known skeptics combined with the mass new-media consumption of material by the members of the movement could lead to a kind of… “anti-ideology”. Yes, that’s right, a form of active reaction against a particular pseudo-scientific ideology.

The one that springs to mind easily, simply because it formed the basis of my (probably forgotten, by now) introductory story, is the reaction by the skeptical movement against the pseudo-scientific notion that things that are natural (eg. herbs, crystals, growing long hair, running barefoot, a lack of EMF etc.) are the best things for you. Skeptics, rightly so, point out that other natural things are harmful, like sharks and arsenic, so this thinking (called the naturalistic fallacy) is flawed. Great. All fine here. However, I fear that with the growth of easy-access podcasts about these topics and the soundbite-esque nature of gathering information on the Internet, that some, if not many, of the people listening to the podcasts where the naturalistic fallacy is mocked and refuted may come away with the idea that the natural course of action isn’t the best, in other words: it forms an “anti-ideology” against natural things.

Clearly this is a bit extreme. Nobody is going to think that everything natural is unsafe or unhealthy just because someone on the Internet said something “like” that (which could be taken out of the context and distorted). But that’s not really my point. Not all naturopaths think that all of Western medicine is rubbish – usually they’ll just want to promote their brand of pseudo-science as a “complimentary” therapy. The same could go for this “anti-ideology” against natural things. These people wouldn’t think that aspirin is bad because it has a natural source, but they could believe that the things that my mother said about inducing pregnancy and the dangers of not breastfeeding are not true, on a gut reaction, simply because they are natural. They would react against what they perceive as the naturalistic fallacy being employed, even though, in this case, it is not, and is actually backed up by peer-reviewed study.

Yes, yes, it seems like this could be a little unlikely, and that situations such as the one I described might not happen very often. But what about other examples? What if, hypothetically, a study came out that was completely peer-reviewed and valid, great sample size, triple-blind methodology, which showed that vaccinations were harmful, or at the least, ineffective? What would happen then? Of course, the skeptics that had medical knowledge might accept it, but what of the masses of people in the movement without that? With the constant barrage of arguments against the ideology of the anti-vaccinationists fresh in their minds, would they so quickly switch from vaccine-defense to vaccine-rejection?

Of course, in that example I assumed that the skeptics with medical knowledge and therefore the ability to set the record straight would not be able to do so, but the methods by which the “anti-ideology” of vaccine safety was originally spread could easily be used to switch the perceptions of the skeptical movement about the study from disbelief to informed acceptance (I’m looking at you, Steven Novella).

But what if some of the skeptical masses don’t accept the word of the experts anymore? What if they become so attached to their “anti-ideology” that they split from the mainstream? Some of you are laughing at this idea, but it’s something that has me at least a little bit worried. Communities on the Internet can quickly become insular – just look at the Australian Vaccination Network – not accepting criticism or dissenting viewpoints.

So, my main point here is that the skeptical celebrities that we hold up and adore so much need to push that message of thinking for yourself a lot more than they already do, and with that remind their audience that any ideology, whether it be original or reactionary, is a bad thing. I think a great example of someone actually doing this at the moment is Brian Dunning, who has the podcast Skeptoid. Brian stresses in his podcast that he shouldn’t be held up as the pinnacle of knowledge, and often makes sure to balance everything with the relevant facts and shows where the “anti-ideology” could lead if it were followed through with (I’m not sure if he does this on purpose, but it doesn’t matter – the important thing is that he does it).

I’d love to see more skeptical podcasts and blogs remember to think about going over the critical thinking tenants of skepticism every once in a while, just to remind their audience to always go where the evidence leads, not where their hearts, who may have picked up an intellectual bias, tell them to.

(As a side note, it’d also be good for these high-profile skeptics to fact-check as much as possible and tell people when they’ve made mistakes – because their errors can carry into the collective knowledge of the skeptical movement. I guess that’s true of any popular person, but it’s especially necessary in skepticism – we like to have beliefs that are correct and justifiable.)