The world of science communication has changed dramatically over the last two decades, and it’s useful to think about those changes, both for people who generate and consume science communication. The big change, of course, is social media, which has disrupted journalism and communication in general.

Prior to this disruption the dominant model was that most science communication was done by science journalists backed up by science editors. Thrown into the mix was the occasional scientist who crossed over into public communication, people like Carl Sagan. Science journalists generally were not scientists, but would have a range of science backgrounds. The number one rule for such science journalists is to communicate the consensus of expert opinion, not substitute their own opinion.

Science journalists are essentially a bridge between scientists and the public. They understand enough about science, and should have a fairly high degree of science literacy, that they can communicate directly with scientists and understand what they have to say. They then repackage that communication for the general public.

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It’s been a while since I discussed artificial intelligence (AI) generated art here. What I have said in the past is that AI art appears a bit soulless and there are details it has difficulty creating without bizarre distortions (hands are particularly difficult). But I also predicted that it would get better fast. So how is it doing? In brief – it’s getting better fast.

I was recently sent a link to this site which tests people on their ability to tell the difference between AI and human-generated art. Unfortunately the site is no longer taking submissions, but you can view a discussion of the results here. These pictures were highly selected, so they are not representative. These are not random choices. So any AI pictures with obvious errors were excluded. People were 60% accurate in determining which art was AI and which was human, which is only slightly better than chance. Also, the most liked picture (the one above the fold here) in the line-up was AI generated. People had the hardest time with the impressionist style, which makes sense.

Again – these were selected pictures. So I can think of three reasons that it may be getting harder to tell the difference between AI and humans in these kinds of tests other than improvements in the AI themselves. First, people may be getting better at using AI as a tool for generating art. This would yield better results, even without any changes in the AI. Second, as more and more people use AI to generate art there are more examples out there, so it is easier to pick the cream of the crop which are very difficult to tell from human art. This includes picking images without obvious tells, but also just picking ones that don’t feel like AI art. We now are familiar with AI art, having seen so many examples, and that familiarity can be used to subvert expectations by picking examples of AI art that are atypical. Finally, people are figuring out what AI does well and what it does not-so-well. As mentioned, AI is really good at some genres, like impressionism. This can also just fall under – getting better at using AI art – but I thought it was distinct enough for its own mention.

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Humans (assuming you all experience roughly what I experience, which is a reasonable assumption) have a sense of self. This sense has several components – we feel as if we occupy our physical bodies, that our bodies are distinct entities separate from the rest of the universe, that we own our body parts, and that we have the agency to control our bodies. We can do stuff and affect the world around us. We also have a sense that we exist in time, that there is a continuity to our existence, that we existed yesterday and will likely exist tomorrow.

This may all seem too basic to bother pointing out, but it isn’t. These aspects of a sense of self also do not flow automatically from the fact of our own existence. There are circuits in the brain receiving input from sensory and cognitive information that generate these senses. We know this primarily from studying people in whom one or more of these circuits are disrupted, either temporarily or permanently. This is why people can have an “out of body” experience – disrupt those circuits which make us feel embodied. People can feel as if they do not own or control a body part (such as so-called alien hand syndrome). Or they can feel as if they own and control a body part that doesn’t exist. It’s possible for there to be a disconnect between physical reality and our subjective experience, because the subjective experience of self, of reality, and of time are constructed by our brains based upon sensory and other inputs.

Perhaps, however, there is another way to study the phenomenon of a sense of self. Rather than studying people who are missing one or more aspects of a sense of self, we can try to build up that sense, one component at a time, in robots. This is the subject of a paper by three researchers, a cognitive roboticist, a cognitive psychologist who works with robot-human interactions, and a psychiatrist. They explore how we can study the components of a sense of self in robots, and how we can use robots to do psychological research about human cognition and the self of self.

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It’s interesting that there isn’t much discussion about this in the mainstream media, but the Biden administration recently pledged to triple US nuclear power capacity by 2050. At COP28 last year the US was among 25 signatories who also pledged to triple world nuclear power capacity by 2050. Last month the Biden administration announced $900 million to support startups of Gen III+ nuclear reactors in the US. This is on top of the nuclear subsidies in the IRA. Earlier this year they announced the creation of the Nuclear Power Project Management and Delivery working group to help streamline the nuclear industry and reduce cost overruns. In July Biden signed the bipartisan ADVANCE act which has sweeping support for the nuclear industry and streamlining of regulations.

What is most encouraging is that all this pro-nuclear action has bipartisan support. In Trump’s first term he was “broadly supportive” of nuclear power, and took some small initial steps. His campaign has again signaled support for “all forms of energy” and there is no reason to suspect that he will undo any of the recent positive steps.

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The world produces 350-400 million metric tons of plastic waste. Less than 10% of this waste is recycled, while 25% is mismanaged or littered. About 1.7 million tons ends up in the ocean. This is not sustainable, but whose responsibility is it to deal with this issue?

The debate about responsibility is often framed as personal responsibility vs systemic (at the government policy level). Industry famously likes to emphasize personal responsibility, as a transparent way to shield themselves from regulations. The Keep American Beautiful campaign (the crying Indian one) was actually an industry group using an anti-littering campaign to shift the focus away from the companies producing the litter to the consumer. It worked.

This is not to say we do not all have individual responsibility to be good citizens. There are hundreds of things adults should or should not do to care for their own health, the environment, the people around them, and their fellow citizens. But a century of research shows a very strong and consistent signal – campaigns to influence mass public behavior have limited efficacy. Getting most people to remember and act upon best behavior consistently is difficult. This likely reflects the fact that it is difficult for individuals to remember and act upon best behavior consistently – it’s cognitively demanding. As a general rule we tend to avoid cognitively demanding behavior and follow pathways of least resistance. We likely evolved an inherent laziness as a way of conserving energy and resources, which can make it challenging for us to navigate the complex massive technological society we have constructed for ourselves.

There is a general consensus among researchers who study such things that there are better ways to influence public behavior than shaming or guilting people. We have to change the culture. People will follow the crowd and social norms, so we have to essentially create ever-present peer pressure to do the right thing. While this approach is more effective than shaming, it is still remarkably ineffective overall. Influencing public behavior by 20%, say, is considered a massive win. What works best is to make the optimal behavior the pathway of least resistance. It has to be the default, the easiest option, or perhaps the only option.

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On September 11, 2001, as part of a planned terrorist attack, commercial planes were hijacked and flown into each of the two towers at the World Trade Center in New York. A third plane was flown into the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed after the passengers fought back. This, of course, was a huge world-affecting event. It is predictable that after such events, conspiracy theorists will come out of the woodwork and begin their anomaly hunting, breathing in the chaos that inevitably follows such events and spinning their sinister tales, largely out of their warped imagination. It is also not surprising that the theories that result, just like any pseudoscience, never truly die. They may fade to the fringe, but will not go away completely, waiting for a new generation to bamboozle. In the age of social media, everything also has a second and third life as a You Tube or Tik Tok video.

But still I found it interesting, after not hearing 911 conspiracy theories for years, to get an e-mail out of the blue promoting the same-old 911 conspiracy that the WTC towers fell due to planned demolition, not the impact of the commercial jets. The e-mail pointed to this recent video, by dedicated conspiracy theorist Jonathan Cole. The video has absolutely nothing new to say, but just recycles the same debunked line of argument.

The main idea is that experts and engineers cannot fully explain the sequence of events that led to the collapse of the towers and also explain exactly how the towers fell as they did. To do this Cole uses the standard conspiracy theory playbook – look for anomalies and then insert your preferred conspiracy theory into the apparent gap in knowledge that you open up. The unstated major premise of this argument is that experts should be able to explain, to an arbitrary level of detail, exactly how a complex, unique, and one-off event unfolded – and they should be able to do this from whatever evidence happens to be available.

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Australia is planning a total ban on social media for children under 16 years old. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese argues that it is the only way to protect vulnerable children from the demonstrable harm that social media can do. This has sparked another round of debates about what to do, if anything, about social media.

When social media first appeared, there wasn’t much discussion or recognition about the potential downsides. Many viewed it as one way to fulfill the promise of the web – to connect people digitally. It was also viewed as the democratization of mass communication. Now anyone could start a blog, for example, and participate in public discourse without having to go through editors and gatekeepers or invest a lot of capital. And all of this was true. Here I am, two decades later, using my personal blog to do just that.

But the downsides also quickly became apparent. Bypassing gatekeepers also means that the primary mechanism for quality control (for what it was worth) was also gone. There are no journalistic standards on social media, no editorial policy, and no one can get fired for lying, spreading misinformation, or making stuff up. While legacy media still exists, social media caused a realignment in how most people access information.

In the social media world we have inadvertently created, the people with the most power are arguably the tech giants. This has consolidated a lot of power in the hands of a few billionaires with little oversight or regulations. Their primary tool for controlling the flow of information is computer algorithms, which are designed to maximize engagement. You need to get people to click and to stay on your website so that you can feed them ads. This also created a new paradigm in which the user (that’s you) is the product – apps and websites are used to gather information about users which are then sold to other corporations, largely for marketing purposes. In some cases, like the X platform, and individual can favor their own content and perspective, essentially turning a platform into a propaganda machine. Sometimes an authoritarian government controls the platform, and can push public discourse in whatever direction they want.

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At CSICON this year I gave talk about topics over which skeptics have and continue to disagree with each other. My core theme was that these are the topics we absolutely should be discussing with each other, especially at skeptical conferences. Nothing should be taboo or too controversial. We are an intellectual community dedicated to science and reason, and have spent decades talking about how to find common ground and resolve differences, when it comes to empirical claims about reality. But the fact is we sometimes disagree, and this is a great learning opportunity. It’s also humbling, reminding ourselves that the journey toward critical thinking and reason never ends. On several topics self-identified skeptics disagree largely along political grounds, which is a pretty sure sign we are not immune to ideology and partisanship.

I spent most of the talk, however, discussing the issue of biological sex in humans, which I perceive as the currently most controversial topic within skepticism. My goal was to explore where it is we actually disagree. Generally speaking skeptics don’t disagree about the facts or about the proper role of science in determining what is likely to be true. We tend to disagree for more subtle reasons, although often the reason does come down to a lack of specific topic expertise on questions that are highly technical. The most important thing is that we actually engage with each-other’s arguments and positions, to make sure we truly understand what those who disagree with us are saying so that we can properly explore premises and logic.

Jerry Coyne, author of the book and blog Why Evolution is True, was also at CSICON and gave a talk essentially taking the opposing position to my own. His position is that biological sex in humans is binary, that this is the only scientific position, and anything else is simply ideology trumping science. His talk was after mine so I was very interested in how he would respond to my position. He essentially didn’t – he just gave the talk he was going to give and then included a single slide with his “responses” to my talk. Except, they weren’t responses at all, just a list of standard talking points that really had nothing to do with my talk.

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I was away last week, first at CSICON and then at a conference in Dubai. I was invited to give a 9 hour seminar on scientific skepticism for the Dubai Future Foundation. That sounds like a lot of time, but it isn’t. It was a good reminder of the vast body of knowledge that is relevant to skepticism, from neuroscience to psychology and philosophy. Just the study of pseudoscience and conspiracy thinking themselves could have filled the time. It was my first time visiting the Middle East and I always find it fascinating to see the differences and similarities between cultures.

What does all this have to do with alternating vs direct current? Nothing, really, except that I found myself in a conversation about the topic with someone deeply involved in the power industry in the UAE. My class was an eclectic and international group of business people – all very smart and accomplished, but also mostly entirely new to the concept of scientific skepticism and without a formal science background. It was a great opportunity to gauge my American perspective against an international group.

I was struck, among other things, by how similar it was. I could have been talking to a similar crowd in the US. Sure, there was a layer of Arabic and Muslim culture on top, but otherwise the thinking and attitudes felt very familiar. Likely this is a result of the fact that Dubai is a wealthy international city. It is a good reminder that the urban-rural divide may be the most deterministic one in the world, and if you get urban and wealthy enough you tend to align with global culture.

Back to my conversation with the power industry exec – the power mix in the UAE is not very different from the US. They have about 20% nuclear (same as the US), 8% solar, and the rest fossil fuel, mostly natural gas. They have almost no wind and no hydropower. Their strategy to shift to low carbon power is all in on solar. They are rapidly increasing their power demand, and solar is the cheapest new energy. I don’t think their plan for the future is aggressive enough, but they are moving in the right direction.

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