Another part of what drives me is that I’m consistently alarmed at the nature of discourse I see online with regards to science. People look at all of the nonsense that is indeed going on at the edges of conventional theory, and they take this as reason to view every claim against textbook theory with scorn and ridicule. There comes a point where this pseudoskeptical culture feeds back into science itself, and then this mass of stereotyping behavior dampens our ability to innovate in science.
I call it fake skepticism because it’s not applied equally. It’s more like a bias towards the textbook theory in spite of controversy and enigma; the skepticism is selectively applied. Enigmas and controversies are frequently ignored, and the few who do pay attention to them, and bring them up online, are not exactly thanked for bearing the message.
For instance, from a paper titled “The Speed of Gravity – What the Experiments Say” …
A thorough review of online scientific discourse will reveal that people tend to look to simplistic narratives about how science generally works in order to search for shortcuts to actual reasoning, when they are confronted with an actual scientific controversy which involves the questioning of textbook scientific theory. As a culture, we have to re-introduce the processes of critical thinking and philosophy back into our discourse, if we wish to maintain the standard of living we’ve come to expect. The debunking culture takes the whole lot of ideas and casts them away indiscriminately – including the gems that are buried in all of the crud. We can do better than that. There are very important innovations which affect our health and our technology which will become apparent once we build discourse systems to differentiate pseudoscience from critical thinking and thinking like a scientist.
Changes are already underway. If you look at the types of things that are happening right now with the W3C (our Internet standards-making body) with respect to annotation technology, it will become apparent that I am hardly the only person who understands that something is very wrong with online discourse.
Google’s PageRank was inspired by the online annotations idea …
The first web browser came with annotation technology. It was switched off once it was observed how much overhead was required to maintain it. The Mosaic team could not afford to sleep any less, so they shut it off.
It’s time to take a closer look at the benefits of this technology for online discourse.
The W3C understands that what’s happening with online discourse today is not what was intended, and that is why – if you go to these iAnnotate conferences – you will see people from the Critical Thinking Institute talking to people who make internet standards. The annotation technology will in just a few years become embedded into the internet standards. This technology has the potential to facilitate the re-introduction of critical thinking and philosophy standards back into our conversations about science. A new wave of discourse technology is emerging, and it’s a direct response to the problems we see online today. But, the first step towards these objectives is to identify or create a model for how people tend to react to these unconventional claims – so that the systems which emerge are actually a solution to these problems.
We really need to make sure that we are moving forward towards ever more scientific thinking. Carl Sagan probably said it best …
The worst aspect of the Velikovsky affair is not that many of his ideas were wrong or silly or in gross contradiction to the facts. Rather, the worst aspect is that some scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky’s ideas. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge. And there’s no place for it in the endeavor of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system. And the history of the study of our solar system shows clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong – and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources.
