User:Michael.C.Wright/Lunatic fringe

“ Lunatic fringe

In the twilight's last gleaming

But this is open season

But you won't get too far

'Cause you've got to blame someone

For your own confusion

We're on guard this time (on guard this time)

Against your final solution

”

— Lunatic Fringe by Red Rider

This is an attempt to collect and organize my thoughts around the experience of editing a biographical article of a scientist involved in controversy.

Underlying difficulties

• The broader topic (COVID-19) is polarizing and how governments and the public deal with it is also polarizing

A COVID culture war is taking place, with two warring narratives - the COVID thesis and COVID antithesis. When you embody each of these views, each has fear, with a different directionality. Those on the side of the thesis fear dying and never going back to normal. Those on the side of the antithesis fear losing their freedom and entering an Orwellian new normal.

— Peter Limberg, 2021

• The broader topic is both complex and complicated
• The Declaration was written entirely by scientists, but regarding public health policy
  • Therefore has a (large/majority) political goal
    • This has implications on wiki policy (is it WP:SCIENCE, WP:MEDRS, WP:FRINGE/ALT, etc,?)
  • Was poorly written for lay reader
    • (overly) broad/generic/reduced
    • Made for easy straw-man attack as unscientific or not sound science
    • Made for easy straw-man attack as 'herd immunity' strategy
    • Likely an attempt to bring a debate happening in the scientific community to a larger audience
  • However, it helped spark an important, public conversation
    • But is the public informed-enough, educated-enough to participate effectively?
    • If not, public is too easily misled by partisan misinformation/disinformation
    • If not, public uses different metrics to verify 'scientific' information
      • Metrics could include ingroup/outgroup membership (halo effect), political party affiliation (halo effect)

The editing environment

• Convoluted, vague, and loosely enforced policies are easily gamed
• Group of articles 'guarded' (squatted?) by group of editors interested in topics related to fringe science, pseudoscience, etc.
  • Some links and similarities to an arbitration case
• Difficulty in maintaining neutrality
  • Broad misunderstanding of what neutral writing is
  • Wiki as a tool to 'educate' the reader
  • Editor creep (coatracking)
• Editors often forget the articles are for the reader Editors often see wiki as a way to ensure "good information" gets out there
  • Goal too often to make a point rather than write a good article that remains on topic
• Talk pages as forums to make/argue a point, engaging in the dispute
• Signaling, tribe-affiliation

Perspectives can become less unique when people decide to merge perspectives, either because they trust each other and can trade information on that basis, or because people are conforming and/or responding to social pressure. In extreme cases large groups adopt an authority’s stated heuristics wholesale, which that authority may or may not also share.

— Zvi, On Bounded Distrust

• With few exceptions, mostly attempts at being abrasive, aggressive, hostile, intimidating, denigrating, dismissive, etc. (see 'honey badger behavior' below)
  • Often results in poor argument/debate about the content and devolves into ad hominem attacks
  • Very few positive interactions
  • Very little enjoyable collaboration
• Culture of policy/essay quoting as a signal of wiki-expertise
  • Has become a pseudo-language using wiki short-links in place of nouns and verbs
  • Makes tribe-affiliation signaling more effective and less overt
  • Initially slows down and confuses debate/consensus process as newcomers learn the subtleties of the language
  • Too often policies are vague suggestions that are loosely enforced but are often weaponized as 'rule of law' when needed/favorable
  • Consensus too often becomes tyranny of the majority (this can and will bite both "sides" eventually)

GSoW

Some of the editors common across related articles show a level of coordination and cooperation and some have links to GSoW.

• Membership/affiliation makes them feel like part of a group, part of something bigger.
• May feel like they are being activists [1], [2]
• Believe they are righting great wrongs (making a difference)[3]
• Very clear understanding this is about manipulating public information [4], [5], [6], [7]

It has had 3,389 views. So we managed to reach 3,389 people in a week-and-a-half, which is more than any other form of activism would get.

• No depth or understanding encouraged, instead encouraged to just dump information from secondary sources [8]
• There is a Facebook group for off-wiki organization/collaboration (they call it the 'secret cabal')[9]
  • Labelling it a secret cabal is interesting:
  • Why secret? Because it violates wiki norms of non-coordinated editing?
  • Why a cabal, which is "a group of people who are united in some close design, usually to promote their private views or interests in an ideology [emphasis added]" ergo biased
  • That could also add to the romantic appeal for those interested in being an activist and a part of something they feel is important and bigger than them
• They have a focus on anti-vax
  • Which presents as a clear, even stated bias and choosing of sides rather than documenting the dispute: [10]

...when people are looking for information, we know that they are getting good information

• Because there is a structured training process, their editing style will appear similar
• {{tinc}} (There Is No Cabal) affiliated?
• Encourage editing without expertise [11]
  • Comes through in poor writing, in poorly defending writing, etc
    • Comes through in biased edits and insistence such as "I see him saying x, y, and z" (which is obvious, original research)
• Emboldened by support from admins: [12]
• Encouraging more 'honey badger' behavior (aka disruptive editing) in vaccine-related articles [13], which may be what I am seeing
• New branding? Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Adventure

There is an obvious need for training to edit wikipedia and there is obviously a need to combat bad information in articles. However, it should not be done from a biased position, which GSoW explicitly condones and embraces. They clearly understand it is against the rules of wiki (i.e., discussion regarding admins "on their side" and also re: team honey badger and also editing in large chunks making it more difficult to change information). This is also clearly activism, not documenting disputes and portraying accurate, honest information.

Standards of Evidence – Wikipedia Edition

Article (25 March, 2014)

We need a process to ensure that our collective thinking is logically valid, balanced in it [sic] judgments, and properly accounts for all available evidence.

and...

As Orac points out, however, you have to be careful about using publication in peer-reviewed journals as a dominant criterion. The infiltration of nonsense into academia is such (combined with the proliferation of low-quality journals) that this is an insufficient criterion.

Orac is/was a pen name for Gorski. Many of these editors cling to his statements. Acolytes.

I have on several occasions come across statements and paraphrases similar this:

What we won’t do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of “true scientific discourse"

— Wales, Jimmy, cited in theness.com

The lay person, i.e. your average wikipedia editor likely does not have the skills or training to accurately assess the quality of research and is falsely secure in their understanding of how things work—the illusion of explanatory depth (IOED):

People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion—an illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion is far stronger for explanatory knowledge than many other kinds of knowledge, such as that for facts, procedures or narratives.

— Rozenblit, Leonid & Keil, Frank

Therefore the wiki policy on neutrality can be an effective check on this, as it dictates editors document the dispute, not engage in it.

The problem articles such as Standards of Evidence present is making editors believe that they can effectively evaluate research and other evidence without sufficient training and/or experience. It has been my experience that too often, either

1. they can't from a technical point of view or
2. they can't keep their own biases in check when doing so.

This presents as highly editorialized pieces used as evidence, clear hit-pieces used as evidence, poorly sourced articles used as evidence, etc. This presents as statements such as 'the entire article is about X' used to explain/justify misquotes, mischaracterizations, etc. It can also present as a misunderstanding of blanket approval for 'generally reliable' sources on WP:RSP, despite the clear statement that "context matters."

Therefore, the goal of presenting "good information" as opposed to documenting the dispute too often results in biased content.

Wiki policies and guidelines

• Requirement for secondary sources makes wikipedia a mouthpiece for or an extension of the mainstream media

Requiring secondary sources may help in the absence of a structured editorial process within wikipedia to vet and ultimately approve scientific content. However, when the media in-general has lost its ability to report on science, this inevitably deranges wikipedia's coverage of science due to the requirement of secondary sources for citation—a knock-on effect.

The lay public's understanding of medical science and its perceptions about recent advances in research are primarily mediated by mainstream news sources. Unfortunately, media coverage of science and health news is often sensationalized, inaccurate and dumbed down for the masses.

— Namrata Kotwani, 2007

There is a difference between how science works and how journalism works. Science relies on skepticism and peer-review, where journalism relies on sensationalism and reductionism.

By contrast, most commentators in the media are not held to the same [scientific] standard: they have not had the habit of caution and scepticism beaten into them by their Ph.D. supervisor. Some editors may pursue an agenda, and most journalists count on people to forget and move on quickly. The media thrive on conflict, and at least tacitly believe conflicting opinions usually have equal validity – quite the opposite of science, which is built on the weeding out of bad ideas.

— The Conversation, 2011

Scientists complain that journalism gets it wrong:

One of the main problems in dealing with journalism from the scientists’ point of view is a lack of control over the communication process. In the five-country study of biomedical researchers, “risk of incorrect quotation” and “unpredictability of journalists” were the two items from a list of possible concerns that found the strongest agreement

— Hans Peter Peters, 2013

Media sensationalism often results in creating false authority and enabling misinformation/disinformation:

“It’s time to stop giving these people visibility, which can be easily spun into false authority,” professor Alex Petersen said. “By tracking the digital traces of specific individuals in vast troves of publicly available media data, we developed methods to hold people and media outlets accountable for their roles in the climate-change-denialism movement, which has given rise to climate change misinformation at scale.”

— Lorena Anderson, 2019

There are perverse incentives driving scientist-to-journalist interactions:

Catalysts for this change of the scientist’s role [in communicating with journalists] are research organizations (e.g., universities), which consider visibility in the media as an important way to secure public and political support (51, 52), and high-ranking journals such as Science and Nature, which aim not only at scientific resonance but also at a wider public impact (53). A large proportion of scientists believe they have profited in their careers from media visibility whereas only a very small minority experienced mostly negatively impacts (47). This suggests that media visibility of scientists, by and large, conforms to normative expectations in the social contexts relevant for scientists and is perceived as an indicator of the broader impact of their work.

— Hans Peter Peters, 2013

Possibly related essays

User:SMcCandlish/Wikipedia's self-management and future

WP:CANDOR

Beyond civility (especially 'don't repeat yourself')