Fict or Faction - How Much Do We Care About the Truth? | Psychology Today - 0 views
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shared by julia rhodes on 02 Jan 14
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Many books and hundreds of articles have been written about how drug companies have “gamed every system” to push their products. Negative clinical studies are suppressed; claims are made for larger usefulness that have no real basis in fact; side effects are ignored or deliberately underreported; and companies pay fines in the billions that still represent small fractions of total sales.
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Spending enormous amounts of cash looking at cancer, cardiovascular and “women’s health” research, the Bayer scientists could corroborate less than a quarter of the studies they tested. In other words, 75-80% of these major research findings could not be confirmed.
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Science lives on replication. Yet these clinically critical attempts to corroborate research findings could not confirm them. Why? Ironically, the reasons resemble many that are used to describe the malfeasance of drug companies – the need for money, grant support, major findings to achieve tenure – and a desire for others not to have the “secret sauce” of methodology needed to create the research.
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The author retorts “I really have an issue with the word hoax.” He regards himself as a performance artist. His response – “It’s the people who reported it who are deceiving their audience.”
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Why is fake news so popular on newssites? Here are two reasons: first, it provides emotional “buzz.” Second, because it can make a lot of money. As the Washington Bureau chief of the Pulitzer winning Huffington Post lamented, “If you throw something up without fact checking it, and you’re the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it’s proved false, you still got those views. That’s a problem. The incentives are all wrong.”Especially when, as at places like Bloomberg, remuneration is based on the number of hits an article receives. But incentives are wrong not just for news gathering organizations.
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Americans continue to believe important historical “facts” that are untrue. After 9/11, Americans were incensed to hear that the many in the Middle East thought Osama bin Laden’s horrifying attack was the product of a CIA-Mossad plot. To this day, large majorities in countries like Pakistan think the massacre of 9/11 was created in Washington or Tel Aviv.
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Yet close to a majority of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein, tyrant of Iraq, was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda, especially before the 9/11 attack. The Bush administration told them so.Which people in the Middle East rightly regard as preposterous.Saddam Hussein was the leader of a boldly secular, Arabist tyranny. Sunni fanatics like Al Qaeda were his regime’s blood enemies. That they would work together rather than murder each other was just insane. Welcome to the world of fict and faction.
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What can we learn from this? Plausibility is not truth; when something is “too good to be true” it generally isn’t; institutions increasingly do not back up what they proclaim and sell.And the “free informational marketplace” of the Internet is a wonderful site for fraud, scams, lies, plausible lies, and pleasant, beautiful untruths. So we all need our own truth detectors.