| BNFO 301 |
Who is a Trustworthy Authority? |
Spring 2016
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High school teachers
delight in giving lists of things to look for when deciding whether information is trustworthy.
Near the top of the list is invariably "credentials": You're told to believe someone who has authority.
Oh? Try this article:
A proposed structure for the nucleic acidsThe journal is amongst the most prestigious in scientific literature. Both authors were highly respected and worked in a high profile university (Cal Tech). Pauling won the Nobel prize in chemistry. But while their observations are true (based on crude Xray diffraction images of DNA), their conclusion -- that biological DNA exists as a triple-stranded helix -- is mistaken. This is actually quite common at the edge of what's known. And just as geniuses can sometimes be wrong, idiots can sometimes be right (and no, I won't give an example). You can't rely on credentials. What, then, can you rely on? Credentials are a matter of opinion (and of little use in any case). So it doesn't matter that a boatload of PhD's subscribe to global warming, just as it makes no difference that other PhD's disagree. What is true beyond the vagaries of human judgement is an experiment and its result. No matter who did it, if you understand what they did and what they observed, you have grasped immutable truth. Of course, their interpretations may be wholly fanciful -- that's something else. You might argue that even reported observations are not examples of the truth. After all, authors may lie about what they did. While you occasionally hear about cases of this sort, they are very, very rare. If the experiment is important and well described, then it will be repeated and the fraud will be discovered, and if the work is neither important nor well described, then it probably isn't worth your while. So don't worry about fraud. Worry about what is common and warrants your constant consideration: the universal human practice of self-deception. Authors (all humans) draw conclusions that make sense to them but that go beyond what their results will support. Our brains seem to be wired to draw conclusions rapidly and only then seek reasons to justify them [1], often driven bit by a desire to determine the truth but to reinforce a group identity [2]. It is generally conclusions, not results, that are reported on web pages, and that, not lack of credentials, is why most web pages, though perhaps useful, cannot be trusted. For the same reasons, neither can newspaper articles -- I don't care if it is the National Enquirer or the New York Times. And neither can text books. Skim past the pretty stories and zoom in on the observations. There you will find the truth. REFERENCES
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