An age of manufactured data

James David Dickson commented yesterday on a video that purported to show an irate mother tearing down a rainbow flag which is, oddly, covering up a map in the front of a classroom. I don’t know where the video originally came from… it does somewhat have the feel of “actors running a script”, but it could be real, I don’t know. (And that’s sort of the whole problem of this post actually, “it could be real, I don’t know”.) But Dickson wrote:

Could be so. Whether this particular video is fake or not, I think it’s clear that we now live in an age of fakery, an age of manufactured data. This is at least the result of:

1. Technological changes that have made it easier than ever to produce fake stuff. A while back a friend passed along an article that was apocalyptic about AI software on this point, suggesting that AI is the ultimate “people are no longer going to be able to tell the real apart from the fake” technology, and that’s super dangerous.

2. The information overload of the information age which already, even without tech like AI, makes it hard to tell the real and fake apart. The main propaganda technique today is using mass media to engage in mass repetition. You’re going to tell the truth three or four times, they are committed to telling the lie five hundred times. So many people believe the lie is reality. Limited humans, and you can hardly blame ‘em as this is surely just part of standard human wiring, think they if they “hear everyone” saying something, it must be true. (This fact has also made me less concerned about saying the same thing over and over again. People need it.)

3. And, the fact that we live in a pseudoscientific age, by which I mean we are concerned to pretend to be following the science in all we do, although often we don’t and many of the people who say “follow the science” most often also don’t seem to particularly care a whit about what the data actually says. But this does mean it is important to at least make it look like the data is on your side.

And so, what do you do if the data is not actually on your side? Just make some up.

To that end, and really just out of a desire to make people aware of the problem, I wanted to point you to two other publications with recent examples. Unfortunately I do not know how to solve this problem or how it ends (be happy for your comment on that). So for now I’ll do my duty to “raise awareness”.

Mike Solana on Orwell’s ADL

For the first, a couple of weeks ago the good Mike Solana had a nice post, “Orwell’s ADL Prepares for 2024”. The article is about how organizations like the ADL, and fake research groups like the “Center for Countering Digital Hate”, have been trying to scare advertisers away from using Twitter since Elon Musk has committed the great evil of, much as he is able, allowing free speech on the platform. First relevant section from Solana’s post:

A couple weeks back, in A Tale of Two Karens, I covered the role of another group in this rotted, authoritarian ecosystem called the Orwellian “Center for Countering Digital Hate,” a fake “research” group. The CCDH, I wrote, is in fact an activist organization focused on creating fake studies indicating a rise of “harmful” speech on platforms like X. The “studies” are then fed to the anti-tech press, and woven into stories used to terrify advertisers.

I didn’t mention it above, but this is another aspect of living in a pseudoscientific age. Journalists want to appeal to “experts” in all of their stories. But what if there are no experts saying what you want to hear? No problem, just manufacture some experts! And so people who are nothing but ideological activists give their organization a pleasant sounding name and claim to be experts at a research organization. Journalists are either in on the scam or happy to be deceived by it all… if you’re telling them what they want to hear, they aren’t going to ask any questions that would threaten that.

And then the second relevant section, the “he” here is Elon Musk:

He also hinted at something else, which most of us have long suspected: is it possible the activist groups responsible for the fraudulent research, and the defamation, have themselves led, or in some way assisted, the “hate campaigns” central to their attack on the company? It’s not hard to create accounts and astroturf a bot-y “movement.”

My reaction the first time I read that was, in 2023, that is so totally believable. So in other words, the suggestion is:

1. “Anti-hate” activist organizations create a bunch of fake accounts on Twitter and have them starting writing hateful content!

2. They then author studies that point, in part, to the bot accounts they themselves created and say “look, since Musk took over, there has been a rise in hateful content on Twitter”.

3. They then take those studies to advertisers and persuade them to stop advertising on Twitter.

Totally and completely believable that this would be done in 2023. And this is a case where we should expect that AI software will make it worse. Again, we saw obvious bot campaigns during COVID all sharing the same fake “I work in the ER and it’s overwhelmed with children!” posts, stuff like that. It was easy to identify the bot campaign because all the bots were writing exactly the same tweets. AI will make it easy to give every bot a slightly different message to write, so it won’t be as easy to identify the fakery. (Indeed it might be nearly impossible to identify the fakery which is… not great.)

The Free Press on Climate Change

And then, I will point you to an article by climate scientist Patrick Brown called “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published”. Just as a heads up, this is not a “climate change is all a hoax!” kind of guy, but he does see dysfunction in his field, and this is a courageous piece for someone working in the field to publish. And it makes the point that, for our scientific journals too, tell them what they want to hear and they won’t ask too many questions. Contradict what they want to hear and they will nitpick your research all the way to death, they hope.

(On that subject, actually, here is a now-deleted tweet from the editor-in-chief of Science magazine, perhaps considered the most prestigious science journal in the world, from August 28th of this year.

But I’m sure such a person is totally objective in evaluating scientific research, right? Not a chance. After all the criticism he received for this, his account is now locked, he has removed “Science EIC” from his name, and his bio mentions his opinions are not those of the AAAS.)

But back to Patrick Brown’s piece… I recommend you just go read the whole thing. It’s about a scientific paper about the effect of climate change on wildfire activity, which intentionally ignored all the other influences on wildfire activity (forest management, human arson - 80+% of wildfires are ignited by humans!, etc.) Let me give you an excerpt from the middle:

In my paper, we didn’t bother to study the influence of these other obviously relevant factors. Did I know that including them would make for a more realistic and useful analysis? I did. But I also knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.

This type of framing, with the influence of climate change unrealistically considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers.

Everyone in our day needs to know that science as actually practiced is a messier and, nowadays, more ideological business than that pretty picture you were taught in high school. “95% of papers concluded X and only 5% concluded not X” might not be the great evidence in favor of X that you think. Maybe oh, I don’t know, the community is just shunning and threatening anyone who wants to study the harms of gender transition, for example. As Brown says in his piece, when your career depends on your publications, and certain publications are easy to get and certain are very hard to get, that’s going to influence the behavior of many people.

THE END. Your comments on how to solve everything that is wrong with the world are welcome.

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