To Fight Misinformation, We Need to Teach That Science Is Dynamic

Sixty-five years ago, a metal sphere the size of a basketball caught the US's intelligence community by surprise. The U.S. policy makers realized that they were falling behind in educating and training scientists after Sputnik 1. The government started investing in science education at all levels. To scale up the nation's scientific workforce and improve the public's understanding of science was the aim.

A group of experts was created by the Sputnik-era reforms. The reforms failed to help the public understand how science works, why science matters, and when it should be trusted. There is a period of uncertainty and disagreement before settled facts and models emerge. Some people think that the absence of consensus is a sign of scandal or malfeasance instead of the way science is done. One might be inclined to question the whole system.

It is easy to see why so many of us have trouble distinguishing between trustworthy and flawed science. When we don't know the nature of consensus, how science tends to be self-correcting and how community as well as individual incentives bring to light discrepancies in theory and data, we are vulnerable to false beliefs. Misinformation is a serious threat to security and well-being.

People need more facts. We need a populace that can tell which sources of information are reliable even if the science is not up to date, so that they can identify when they need scientific information in their own lives. People need to understand how science tries to reduce error. Every member of our society needs to be a competent outsider.

Science can help students become competent outsiders. Our educational system is not doing as well as it could. The process of science is a sequence ofposing problems, generating hypotheses, designing experiments, observing nature, testing hypotheses, interpreting and evaluating data, and determining how to follow up on the findings. The social nature of science needs to be taught at all levels. Five core topics should be included in this list.

There's uncertainty. Scientists spend most of their time dealing with questions that aren't settled. When science-in-the-making is thrust into the public eye, it can be hard to comprehend. Scientists usually consider some explanations more likely than others, and hold open the possibility that any of a number of alternatives is correct. When a new study is published, it is more likely to be a pebble on a scale favoring one of several hypotheses.

The peer review is done. Peer review does not guarantee that a conclusion is correct. It filters for work that is plausible and methodological. Reviewers don't replicate the original experiments so it's not designed to detect fraud. The process of determining whether a paper will be published is still going on. When a project is first proposed, it faces peer review, as the scientists working on it make progress, and later after publication, on social media sites, discussion boards and in the formal scientific literature.

There is expertise. The experts who make a claim are considered when evaluating scientific claims. The competent outsider must ask if the person has the right skills. It is not always practical to comprehensively evaluate a person's training, qualifications, track record, standing within the field, employment, and potential sources of bias. For example, if a scientist works for a company that makes a product, is he endorsing that product? The more the topic under consideration is from an individual scientist's expertise, the more cautious they should be. A life scientist is not likely to be a good authority on how polar ice sheets are contributing to sea level rise.

There's a consensus. This is consensus when scientists agree on observations or interpretations of data. The earth's climate is changing because of human activity, but other issues are not settled into a broad consensus. There is good reason to be skeptical of people who claim to know the answer with certainty. Consensus is never based on a single publication and is established by extensive, thorough, empirical work that other scientists and reviewers look at at all stages. A strong scientific consensus can be hard to get. The causes of climate change and evolution by natural selection are two of the most important scientific claims. There are people who have serious scientific arguments and people who have no evidence. It's possible for a contrarian to be qualified in a discipline that promotes fringe views about AIDS. Consensus prevails in science.

Agnatogenesis is a type ofogenesis Agnatogenesis is the creation of doubt to undermine confidence in scientific findings. The goal is to create enough uncertainty to prevent regulatory action. Fossil fuel companies have tried to undermine scientific evidence of climate change and the tobacco industry has tried to cast doubt on the link between smoking and cancer.

Some may argue that our proposal to teach students to be competent outsiders adds another subject to the curriculum. There are courses at the University of California, Berkeley that show it can be done. Public health and medical practitioners have seen how misinformation can undermine their work. High vaccine refusal rates were caused by the dismissal of the iterative process of science and consensus. If we aren't prepared to explain and defend the tools and processes that will help us deal with the next epidemic, mass extinction and climate change, we won't be able to complain.

The views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those ofScientific American.