By MARTY LEVINE
The “Science Revealed” series of free public conversations starts again April 1, with “Science vs. Pseudoscience: Let ‘s Get Real” at 7 p.m. via Zoom.
This first entry in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences series (focused overall on how science works) aims to help people separate myth from reality. Two of the panelists, Melanie Good and Eric Swanson, are physics and astronomy faculty members who recently teamed to create a learning module that helps students put aside “unwarranted beliefs.”
“When talking to a Pitt audience,” says Good about their approach to the upcoming panel, “there is an underlying assumption that we are among rationally minded individuals, so that we can talk about more things in an evidence-based way.”
But “none of us is immune” to the temptation to believe the unbelievable. “There’s a thin veneer of credibility to some things you hear about,” particularly on the Internet and in social media, “but if you scratch the surface” its plausibility falls apart, she says. “There is now a tendency for, if I say it loud enough and say it enough times, it is true. It doesn’t matter whether I am lying.”
And the situation has only taken “a step backwards” recently, Swanson says. Not only do we have promulgators of pseudoscientific beliefs in government, he says, but new and different popular fallacies “seem to crop up all the time. I’m always taken by surprise.”
They often take the form of correlation equaling causation — the notion that, say, ice cream sales increase in the summer, as does swimming, therefore ice cream causes more deaths by drowning.
“And yet you hear decisions being made based on these claims,” Good says. Even in her own family, she says, “my kids will get on YouTube and hear someone (saying) something that is obviously not true, but they do it in a compelling way.”
It’s not easy sometimes to tell that a confidently asserted notion is untrue, she notes. She recalls one video of popcorn supposedly popping because it was placed within a circle of cellphones, allegedly proving the devices give off a significant amount of radiation and are harmful. “Particularly young folks get trapped by it,” she says.
Although there is no scientific formula for raising skeptical adults, “with my kids I try to point out when things are fabricated. I don’t know if all families do that. I am maybe being real with my kids to a fault,” she adds, including telling them early on that (spoiler alert) Santa Claus is not real.
“Kids are sponges and they’re learning about the world — they are just absorbing everything that is coming their way,” Swanson says. One encouraging note is that schools are now regularly aiming to help kids develop skills to distinguish good information sources from suspect ones. The pair hope to provide Science Revealed participants with illustrations of how to accomplish that very task.
Conspiracy theories and pseudoscience “are sisters,” Swanson notes. And humans also regularly suspend our disbelief in order to enjoy a good yarn, such as the TV series “Severance,” whose central assumption that our memories could be strictly separated into workday and home time halves sounds scientifically possible — unless you know something about how memories appear in multiple places and iterations in our brains.
“I always try to be a proponent of the idea that the actual science is far more interesting than pseudoscience could ever be,” Good says.
“People like us just have to keep fighting the fight,” says Swanson. “Even though science shows that directly contradicting someone’s pseudoscientific belief is not very effective, we still have to try.”
Good compares the effort to introducing new foods to a picky eater, and trying over and over again: “They need to hear these messages. You are planting a seed. Maybe one day a more robust point of view will come to mind.”
Find the Zoom link and passcode on the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences website.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
Have a story idea or news to share? Share it with the University Times.