Calling Out the Wrong is Right
- Admin
- May 29, 2024
- 4 min read
It’s seen as negative in many ways but criticising wrong ideas is as important as just trying to be ‘right’. As a non-expert and not a professional in anything, I can’t be ‘right’ on many things, without having a deeper knowledge of them. But I can certainly recognise when some things are wrong – therefore putting my approximation of the truth in a more accurate place, in a climate where there are many more wrong answers than right. It requires much less knowledge to be wrong, but a specific kind of knowledge to understand why something is wrong.
Think of it like a jigsaw – you could test 50 pieces to fit another piece, knowing confidently that each one prior to the correct one was wrong. However, you might not know the right one yet. Without yet having the right, definitive answer, you’ve still eliminated 50 wrong answers, so you’re that many pieces or chances more likely to be correct now. You’re 50 pieces closer to the truth.
Sound Reasoning Helps Discover Truth
If you can reason well then you can spot poorly reasoned ideas. If an idea is reasoned poorly using flawed logic or low prior probability, then I can understand that it is wrong without having the right answer, or even without wasting the time to test it. You can use the jigsaw analogy here too. If the piece you’re looking for is mainly blue with no red edges, then you don’t even need to try the bright red pieces yet. This, in a world which is saturated with wrong answers marketed as miracles, is an invaluable skill.
This gets to the heart of my in depth post “What’s the Harm? Pseudoscience Cultivates Wider Ignorance”.
It would be logically wrong to suggest that because I don’t have the right answer, I can’t know that your answer is wrong; or similarly, that because we don’t know the right answer, that any old answer has merit.
Science Communication Included
This post is not just about calling out pseudoscience, magical and harmful ideas, but also about poor science communication. This is as important.
This short video perfectly summarises the problems with science communication when wrong answers are not called out or criticised visibly enough. The solution, of course, is better science communication – which directly involves calling out wrong ideas, especially when it’s a science source getting it wrong.
I want to point out two substantive comments on this video:
Comment 1
*DISCLAIMER: I will point out that the notion that you shouldn’t trust “something you haven’t personally observed” is wrong, in the sense that it’s often your personal observations which are wrong or biased, which science can rule out. Furthermore, if it’s the scientific consensus that has found it, then your personal observations will not mean much there either.
Also, the term ‘subjective truths’ does not gel with science, as a truth is by definition objective. The word for a subjective truth might be a belief, or a feeling, a point of view, context depending - but not a ‘truth’.
Largely a sensible comment though.
Comment 2
This one is a good example of some of the usual sort of headlines you see around marketed health claims. The commenter then points out what our biased brains love to do.
Does the wrong here being pointed out mean that the commenter can’t continue to enjoy coffee and red wine? Of course not! It’s just better that they are honest about the simple fact they enjoy it, and not believe and spread the many junk health myths that surround them.
Calling Out Scientific Institutions
As mentioned, science institutions are especially important to call out when wrong, as this can have major consequences for the public perception of science and the credibility of trusted institutions in general.
Luckily, that’s what the global science community does – such as this article in which the prestigious Mayo Clinic is rightly criticised for promoting Reiki:
It also gets to the question of how such things are able to happen, and again you will see if you read, that the heart of the problem starts where people fail to call out one wrong individual or idea, or think properly about it.
Of course, this did not go unnoticed by independent and more vigilant scientific institutions, and at this stage the article in the Mayo Clinic appears to have been retracted thankfully. This is how progress, not just scientifically, but societally, works.
“Science: If you don’t make mistakes, you’re doing it wrong. If you don’t correct those mistakes, you’re doing it really wrong. If you can’t accept when you’re mistaken, you’re not doing science at all.”
Calling Out Government Institutions
The same logic and act of calling out the wrong applies strongly to government-funded institutions and programs, which is a necessary way to act on the real kind of free speech – that is to validly criticise the government for flexing power and money in questionable ways. The 'free' part of it being safe from imprisonment and other criminal punishments.
This article from Scientific American is a perfect example of how whacky ideas such as alien visitation, ESP and the like find their way into ‘serious’ (at least serious sounding) levels like the Pentagon and Congress. The wrong here has been vehemently criticised by countless credible scientific institutions of course – and will continue to be so, for as long as that freedom of intellect exists.
What’s the Harm?
Calling out the wrong can seem petty or unnecessary when you think it’s a harmless topic, whatever that may be in your view. But all of the smallest to the largest wrong ideas can feed into harm – and normalising lots of small ones builds acceptance for large ones. As I always stress, the same flawed logic underlies the least harmful to the most harmful ideas – the mental mechanisms are the same.
Ignorance Breeds More Ignorance. Excerpt: Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World
These excerpts get to the heart of my in depth post “What’s the Harm? Pseudoscience Cultivates Wider Ignorance” –
Sagan published this in 1994, speaking to the profound importance of critical thinking, skepticism, and of challenging ideas, to a free society.
He follows it with this:
In which he recognises that failure to call out, (and importantly to understand) what went wrong in previous ideas, ancient traditions, and unscientific superstition, is itself the main underlying harm of allowing uncritical thought to endure. Pseudoscience breeds more pseudoscience. Superstition, more superstition. Ignorance breeds more of the same. It keeps people controlled.
Pets and Animal Harm
Consider beloved pets, who have no say in the matter of their own healthcare, for example. This below snippet (start at 55:37) talks about just that, getting down to the fact that failing to call out wrong ideas, even from a place of genuine care and concern, leads to worrying consequences:
This study (link to study in article) shows that “Majority of US dog owners now skeptical of vaccines, including for rabies”. This, along with human-concerned vaccines, all feeds into society from people who don’t understand the things they’re talking about, from dangerous anti-science perspectives.
Again, allowing pseudoscience to go unchallenged feeds a wider societal ignorance of the truth and how to seek it, and by extension their rights and freedom to make informed decisions in their best interests! It goes far, far beyond the matter of pet health.
Holocaust Denial
The memory of one of the most terrible events in recent human history is already beginning to ebb away in online young groups, such as Tik Tok. In the below episode (47.20-57.15), statistics find that the younger the generation, the greater acceptance of misinformation and Holocaust denial tropes:
63% of Gen Z and Millennials don’t know that 6 million Jews were murdered.
36% think the number is 2 million or fewer.
48% cannot name a concentration camp (there were over 40,000 throughout Europe).
20% of survey participants in New York feel the Jews caused the Holocaust.
These are the highest percentages, who were the 18-28 age group. This percentage increased by younger generation.
This is where a growing proportion of the younger generations get their news. This is a terrifying notion of what future politics looks like, and it begins with harmless-sounding, loosely related ideas.
Even more fundamentally, with people critical thinking skills, underlying logical skills, fact checking skills, education and understanding of how to tell right from wrong.
Witchcraft: Oppression, Fear and Control
A recent study showed that over 40 percent of people may still believe in witchcraft (article below). Torturing women publicly in the most horrendous ways imaginable, to keep fear and compliance in place via superstition, and a political power over populations, has dwindled and all but vanished in more civilly advanced countries.
However, we still see that the weaker economic and social populations in poorer, less free areas of the world, have higher percentages of such beliefs. There is a clear correlation between areas starved of secure living and democratic rights and the prevalence of superstitions used to cope with life traumas and disasters. A step further, some powerful leaders in such places know how to exploit those intellectual holes in the population’s education, using it to lever their power.
Historically, this exploitation of people’s lack of understanding the natural world reached extreme levels worldwide including Europe – supposedly the most advanced area of the time. This disparity of knowledge between the rich leaders and the uneducated majority of the population truly signals that knowledge and intellectual freedom is a democratic human right.
People in the modern world still believing and practicing the superstition of witchcraft flies in the face of the many thousands of women, even men, and children, who burned and suffered standing for truth and intellect, and in many more cases, for literally nothing.
As though the accusations of the ones condemning innocents to die horribly ever had any real merit or could ever have been considered as fair; by believing witches can use curses, spells, or influence others’ lives magically, one must concede that those rich tyrants ever had a point.
It's obvious in hindsight, who the superstition of witchcraft really served.
Conclusions
We’ve all been there: a disagreement or criticism of your point of view feels like a personal attack. But a valid criticism of an idea or point of view is absolutely not that, and how are you to tell the difference if you don't listen to the criticism? Personal attacks are indeed often…less palatable.
When it comes to accepting valid criticism of our beliefs, we all need to develop slightly thicker skins. Standards begin to slip ethically and practically in all areas of life and society when mistakes or old habits are allowed to pass; especially when no one wants to experience the discomfort of pointing it out.
Being wrong is not a tragedy, and allowing for correction is the kind of freedom we need to exercise.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist.
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