Open access notables
It's always a special pleasure to note an article including Skeptical Science's founder John Cook in the author roster. Misinformation and the epistemic integrity of democracy includes not only Cook as a collaborator but also a cast of other familiar authorities on human cognition in connection with climate science, in particlar how our mental equipment struggles with following a continuous thread of truth through a tangled knot of disconnected confusion in the form of misinformation. We're not necessarily very good thinkers in the best of circumstances. We often fail to think clearly when we're in the presence of misinformation or synthetic ignorance, especially when it's calculated and crafted exactly for the purpose of paralyzing competent thinking. In their abstract the authors note 'Democracy relies on a shared body of knowledge among citizens, for example trust in elections and reliable knowledge to inform policy-relevant debate.' One can extend that thought (and the article implicltly does); not only democracy is at stake, but arguably all of what we currently consider to be 'civilization.' If we hear and believe that a virus is less likely to be causing a global pandemic than 5G cellular phone equipment and we've been fostered to be in large company, our public health systems begin to break down. Similarly, if our heads are stuffed with confusing rubbish about how Earth's climate functions, our societal cohesion and hence collective ability to govern side-effects of industry such as CO2 emissions and climate change malfunctions— as we're now acutely aware. We can be thankful that not only this team but also a small army of other researchers are figuring out how to thicken our mental armor against bunk. In this work Lewandowsky et al. identify how misinformation has evolved to more efficiently attack and degrade public confidence in science, and specific tested methods of amelioriating this harm.