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NASA chief scientist weighs in
Americans are "under siege" from disinformation designed to confuse the public about the threat of climate change, Nasa's former chief scientist has said.
Speaking to the Guardian, Ellen Stofan, who left the US space agency in December, said that a constant barrage of half-truths had left many Americans oblivious to the potentially dire consequences of continued carbon emissions, despite the science being unequivocal.
"We are under siege by fake information that's being put forward by people who have a profit motive," she said, citing oil and coal companies as culprits. "Fake news is so harmful because once people take on a concept it's very hard to dislodge it."
During the past six months, the US science community has woken up to this threat, according to Stofan, and responded by ratcheting up efforts to communicate with the public at the grassroots level as well as in the mainstream press.
"The harder part is this active disinformation campaign," she said before her appearance at Cheltenham Science Festival this week. "I'm always wondering if these people honestly believe the nonsense they put forward. When they say 'It could be volcanoes' or 'the climate always changes'... to obfuscate and to confuse people, it frankly makes me angry."
Stofan added that while "fake news" is frequently characterised as a problem in the right-leaning media, she saw evidence of an "erosion of people's ability to scrutinise information" across the political spectrum. "All of us have a responsibility," she said. "There's this attitude of 'I read it on the internet therefore it must be true'."
No editorial comment included.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 12 2017, @08:16AM (1 child)
The one that can publish the most valued scientific articles in a science that can stand up to deterministic falsification?
Inventions?
Plain IQ test?
Ie there could be other ways than money to assign influence weight.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Tuesday June 13 2017, @03:26PM
Of course there could be "other ways" to assign weight to a vote, but they're all terrible.
"The one that can publish the most valued scientific articles in a science that can stand up to deterministic falsification?"
Who decides the most valued scientific articles? And science is already often very political; if being deemed 'valuable' by some sort of 'valuation process' gave your votes more weight (ie power) it would be extremely competitive ... not to produce good science, just to produce more 'valuable articles', 'influence the valuation rules', etc...
"Plain IQ test"
Who writes the test? Who approves which questions are on it? Who decides when its free enough of cutural or racial biases? Political biases? Which languages can it be taken in? (ie are we testing your english fluency or your IQ? -- they aren't the same thing.) How high should the weighting on abstract maths be vs linguistic prowess? Who administers the test? Will their be a national holiday to take the test or will poor people need to take time off work and risk losing their job to travel to testing sites chosen to be difficult to reach by public transit, where they will be required to present a valid passport and two letters of reference? Can you go to any test center, or do you need to preregister, and then visit a specific center? How will the test content be kept secret and how will it be updated to prevent people from just memorizing the test or teaching to the test... will the administrators of the test be disallowed from voting since they will have access to the recources to the answer keys...? How do you deal with cheating?
The *concept* of a voter test, to assure that people are some how qualified to vote isn't bad... but any implementation of that concept is such a minefield of implementation issues that one misstep results in massive disenfranchisement; and there will be lots of interest groups actively seeking to tilt things for or against various other groups.