One of the central lessons I have learned from my time in the Skeptic community is that the veracity of information isn’t the primary factor in determining what people accept as true. Some groups have known this for a very long time. The practices of the advertising and marketing sectors are largely determined, whether they realize it or not, by the psychology of belief. In our highly connected, ad driven world, the importance of how to use the largely unconscious factors that affect attention and acceptance is central to success. This has worked its way into almost every aspect of our lives. One of my favorite science YouTube channels recently did a video about some of the things that affect the popularity of a video and interactions with the algorithm that determines how often that video is presented and to whom. The subject has also come up in print as various science communicators talk about the importance of headlines and the way they present information. As all of these people get better and better at presenting information in a way that appeals to our psychology they are able to make content that is more convincing and more likely to “go viral”. I see this as a significant, and essentially ignored, danger. People can be wrong. The more expertise you have in a field the less likely you are to be wrong. This is a particular danger in science communication. The material is often quite subtle. Without sufficient expertise in the subject material, it is likely that the message will misinform as much, or even more, than inform. This is fairly well understood and recognized, at least in the abstract. As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it recently in the ad for his MasterClass: “One of the great challenges in life is knowing enough to think you're right but not enough to know you're wrong”. As science communicators get better and better at presenting their material in a convincing manner the material is more likely to stick in people’s memories. When they present incorrect information, in this more convincing manner. their audience accepts it and remembers it even better. Let’s consider a specific, quite narrow, topic: waste from Thorium reactors. The amount of misinformation on this subject is enormous. I’ve seen trusted science communicators assert that the waste from thorium reactors is far less radioactive and has a shorter half-life than that of current reactors. This is not only wrong, it reinforces a fundamental misunderstanding of the subject. If something is less radioactive it has, by definition, a longer half-life. That’s simply what the words mean. It is impossible for something to be both less radioactive and have a shorter half-life. The half-life is the length of time needed for half of the sample to decompose due to radioactive decay. A substance with a very long half-life is very difficult to distinguish from one that is not radioactive. This mistake is often made in the opposite direction. You will see pronouncements about the danger of “highly radioactive materials with a long half-life”. Such materials, by definition, can not exist. One science communicator, popular among skeptics, explained that material in a thorium reactor is “completely burned” so it “has had almost all its radioactivity already spent”. As if radioactivity is a substance that is released in nuclear reactors. Not only is this not the way it works, it encourages people to think of reactors in ways that are simply wrong. Such misinformation can only make things worse. When that misinformation is skillfully communicated it does so to a greater extent. I have written about this type of problem before. That post was about the use of “whiz-bang” visuals, one of the many ways a video is made more appealing. So what can be done? A simple, fairly effective solution is both obvious and not practical. Restrict science communication to people that are true experts in the field being communicated. Another, slightly more practical option, is to get science communicators to confirm what they say with subject matter experts. Yet another option is for topics, like the characteristics of spent fuel from thorium reactors, which need lots of background information to be comprehensible, to be out of bounds for science communicators
