One of the best parts about working at Telus World of Science – Edmonton must be the look on kids’ faces as they learn new facts that blow their tiny minds. Every day, people like Director, Science Experience Trevor Prentice get to see true, childlike wonder beam out from adolescent audiences, knowing that they were the ones flipping the switches.
“It’s truly one of the best feelings to be a part of their moment of discovery, when it clicks in their brain and they just ‘get it.’”
So there must be few things more disappointing than when an adult walks in with a more determined look on their face and a dirty rock in their hands.
“When I worked more on the astronomy team about 15 years ago, we would get people all the time coming in with these rocks, claiming they were meteorites and thinking they were worth a million dollars or something,” Prentice starts. “I still think of this long discussion I had with this one guy who was like, ‘Well it wasn’t in my field yesterday, and it was there today, so it must be from outer space!”
Weak-reasoning, wannabe galactic millionaires and flat Earthers are one, mildly funny thing — when they aren’t aggressive. But with COVID came anti-vax anti-maskers, and, while Prentice hasn’t seen a significant uptick in visits from people who are just asking questions, he says the pandemic has “put a lot of heat into the particular topic” of science misinformation.
Most people go to the science centre to expand their own minds, not berate people with PhDs about their lives’ work. But the centre sees all kinds, so senior staff train employees to expect and respond to even the most ignorant questions from people who’ve never read — let alone published — peer-reviewed papers, and to do so diplomatically.
“A lot of the staff are students, still at the U of A, studying science in different fields,” Prentice says. “And for people who study science in depth, who really dig into the nitty gritty, best parts of science, it can be hard to connect with someone who’s that far from their understanding.”
Scientists aren’t typically salespeople. So in addition to question prep, Prentice says much of the training looks like standard customer service: “How do you build rapport with a customer? How do you just pause your own thoughts for a minute and really try to get into the mind of that person and think about how you could sort of chip away at their understanding?”
Chipping away is all you can do in personal conversations, too. If people in your life are always spouting off misinformation, meet them where they are, Prentice says. Start asking questions and get them talking about what they know about the world, and how they’ve come to know it. “If you’re too forceful, and you’re not having a conversation with the person, you’re only going to do more harm than good.”
But while misinformation spread around the dining room table can ruin Thanksgiving, misinformation spread by authority figures can ruin lives.
“It’s really important to recognize that, in terms of practical consequences, misinformation is killing people.” For decades, University of Alberta Professor of Health Law and Science Policy Timothy Caulfield has studied and written books on the effects of scientific misinformation, and receives regular hate mail and death threats for doing so. But in recent years, his research has shown a “huge uptick” in health and science misinformation for at least two reasons.
One is the sheer mass of misinformation available to most humans for the first time in history, and the social-media companies that happily spread it for revenue. The other reason might be as old as society itself.
In a 2017 interview on his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, European historian Timothy Snyder said that what “we’re dealing with now about the alternative facts and post-factuality is pretty familiar to the 1920s. It’s a vision that’s very similar to the central premise of the fascist vision.”
Caulfield agrees. “The goal of the misinformation mongers, as I call them, is to create distrust in institutions. There have been many studies showing how state actors like Russia — their goal is to create distrust in our health, scientific and democratic institutions, because that creates chaos, division, and polarization,” Caulfield says, adding that he thinks it’s only going to get worse, because it’s become ideological. “Look at jurisdictions like Florida, where they’re passing laws to outlaw masks or calling to outlaw vaccine mandates. Misinformation has become an official part of the party platform. And we’re starting to see that here, too.”
His words echo what Snyder also said in 2017: “Without trust, without respect for journalists or doctors or politicians, a society can’t hang together.”
If COVID didn’t exist, it would still be a good idea to mask during flu seasons to ensure fewer grandparents pass away each year. But from people portraying masks as tyranny, to using their last breaths to say “fuck you” to doctors about to put breathing tubes down their throats, to Caulfield, it’s clear: The misinformation mongers are winning.
“The COVID vaccines are held up as some kind of big pharma crime,” he says, “when the reality is, it was a remarkable scientific achievement that demonstrated what the world can do when we have the will and resources. The strength of the misinformation is phenomenal.”
Misinformation also messes up the economy. Because when democracies spend money on disproving misinformation, it hurts innovation.
“Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine — we had to spend tens of millions of dollars researching that, because of the misinformation that suggested they were efficacious. And there’s evidence that came from state actors, too. So think of what a success that is, if you’re trying to screw up a country by causing it to spend resources on something that was implausible to begin with.”
Caulfield emphasizes that making the public think there is some huge divide in the scientific community when it comes to COVID, climate change or anything else is the misinformation mongers’ entire goal. Because if “Who can really say?” becomes the average person’s response, it’s only a matter of time before a wannabe dictator stands up and replies, “I can.”
State actors and online trolls can send bot armies to drown signals of truth in noise. But the scientific method, and democracy itself, are slow and messy things. So Caulfield says that journalists equating scientific rigour with baseless claims out of fear of appearing “biased” only compounds the problem. If someone says the Earth is flat, he says, or vaccines cause autism, putting that person on TV to “debate” an expert awards that side victory before anyone says a word.
“Those pushing misinformation don’t have to worry about facts, and that makes it easier. They use fear mongering to play to our emotions and make their message more palatable than a nuanced discussion of how evidence evolves.”
“Scientific consensus” is not a memo that all researchers get from some head scientist, Caulfield says — it’s independent scientists doing independent research and coming to the same conclusions. “But that’s less sexy than someone going on Joe Rogan — the single most popular podcast — with sound bites that might get tweeted around the world, all while claiming they’ve been ‘cancelled.’ I would love to have my message be that ‘cancelled.’”
With fire season starting early again, and long COVID doing long-term damage, science communicators may be fighting in the most important battle of our time — one that, for now, people like Caulfield and Prentice are losing. But they’ll never give up the fight.
“Just because it’s not easy doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take up the cause,” Caulfield — who helped create Science-UpFirst, a national collective of experts working to stop the spread of misinformation (TWOSE is also a member) — says. “It’s a call to arms, and we need to partner with artists, writers and comedians to create science-informed, exciting, engaging content. I think we can do it.”
But Caulfield clarifies that while we “shouldn’t pull any punches” when it comes to wannabe dictators and podcast supplement sellers, when it comes to personal relationships, “it’s so important to listen to other people, to really get a sense of what their concerns are and to empathize with what brought them to this place.”
Back at Telus World of Science, Prentice still thinks about the children he sees every day, and his Meteor Man from years ago — without much difference. “The kids might have less of a shared vocabulary, but they also don’t have this hard-to-break-down scaffolding most people have after years of building up preconceived beliefs. I think we should treat adults like kids and kids like adults, because we’re all on our journeys of scientific discovery, and we can all experience that child-like wonder, no matter our age.”
This article appears in the May 2024 issue of Edify
