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
Comment 2
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
Pets and Animal Harm
Holocaust Denial
Witchcraft: Oppression, Fear and Control
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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