While we are all shuttering at home, especially as the weeks drag on, many people are looking for some constructive things to do. Of course some of use can work from home, others have essential jobs and still have to go to work, but even then we are spending the rest of the time at home rather than going out. This has been a boon to streaming services, but also has changed perceptions about certain online activities, including telehealth, telemental health, online conferences, and online learning. Since we are basically forced to do this, some who were resistant to such things are learning that it’s not so bad. I do wonder how long this effect will last. Will this be a short-lived phase and we quickly revert to our past attitudes and standards, or will this permanently change the world? We’ll know in a few years.

Meanwhile, it’s good to know empirically if online learning, for example, is as effective as in person learning. This has already been the subject of many studies, and a recent study adds to the list. A 2010 meta-analysis of such research found that online learning was superior to traditional in person learning in terms of outcomes. However, these conclusions were criticized because the studies focused on well-prepared college students and may not generalize to the underprivileged or the general population. Overall the research shows that online learning is at least equivalent to in person learning, and may be superior in some cases.

The recent study is in line with this general trend in the research. This is what they did:

The experiment involved 325 second-year engineering students from resource-constrained universities. Students took two courses hosted by the national Open Education platform. Before the start of the course, they were randomly divided into three groups. The first group studied in person with the instructor at their university, the second group watched online lectures and attended in-person discussion sections (i.e., a blended modality), and the third group took the entire course online and communicated with instructors at the course’s forum.

They found that all three groups had the same learning as measured by testing. However, the online group had slightly higher grades on assignments, but slightly lower overall satisfaction.  The lower satisfaction was related to unfamiliarity with online learning and some difficulty with self-time management. This suggests that online students need some structure and support.

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When I was in high school in the 1970s, computers were just entering the school environment. We had a small computer lab with embarrassingly primitive computers by today’s standards, but at the time they were cool. I remember using one very simple DOS-based program that taught the user how to use chemical nomenclature. It was a simple game where you get asked to solve a problem and then are given immediate feedback. I was impressed at how quick my learning curve was using this simple individualized feedback mechanism. Basically this was a video game designed to teach one skill, and it worked really well.

At the time, and really ever since, I figured that in the near future schools and education would be transformed by this technology. Now, four decades later, I am surprised at how little such technology has been incorporated into the classroom. My teen-aged self would be shocked.

For sure there is great educational software out there. But they are mostly commercial products intended to use at home. If you want to learn a language, or improve your child’s reading skills, there are apps for that. It is still a lot less than I would have figured, and less than it should be. And what’s missing is a comprehensive virtual educational curriculum designed for use by schools. The bottom line is that I don’t think we are leveraging this technology as much as we should, by at least an order of magnitude.

I was reminded of this by a recent study that finds that young children learn basic math skills more quickly from an AI virtual character.  What they call “parasocial” interaction (because it is with a virtual character powered by AI) improved the math skills of children beyond computer learning without the virtual character.

I am seeing moves in this direction. Certainly many schools (those with adequate resources) have access to computers for their students, and often they are incorporated into their assignments. I have a daughter in college and another still in highschool, so I just witnessed a standard public education in a fairly affluent part of the country. My overall assessment is that computer learning is an afterthought. It has not been integrated into the learning experience. Their education was and is still essentially based on teachers and text-books. This style of education is obsolete, and extremely inefficient compared to what it can be.

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Like many activist skeptics I have spoken to, on several occasions I have been summoned to jury duty, which was a short-lived experience. On voir dire I was asked what I do and the fact that I host a skeptical podcast came up. This lead to my almost instantaneous dismissal. Lawyers, apparently, don’t want a skeptical jury. They want jurors they can manipulate. Likewise, politicians often appreciate a pliable electorate, willing to internalize whatever slogan or propaganda they feed them. Democracy, however, functions best when citizens are informed and can think critically about the information politicians and their government are feeding them.

This is why there is so much hand-wringing over what many feel is a crisis of “fake news.” As is often pointed out, fake news is nothing new, but we do seem to be entering an era of “truth decay.” Media contains more appeals to emotion, and fewer verifiable facts. Social media is certainly playing a role in this, but of course it is complicated to fully define this. The prevailing question is – what do we do about it?

As CNN reports, Finland’s answer is to do something radical – teach media literacy to all citizens. As CNN also points out, Finland is a small homogeneous country with a particular culture and national identity, which means we cannot simply extrapolate their experience to other countries. The media landscape in the US, for example, is very different. But, there is also likely considerable overlap in the challenges being faced. Finland also faces Russian propaganda exploits, and is dealing with the same array of social media outlets as everyone else.

What is media literacy? The National Association for Media Literacy Education (which ironically has the horrible acronym NAMLE), defines media literacy as:

The ability to ACCESS, ANALYZE, EVALUATE, CREATE, and ACT using all forms of communication.

One example of good communication would be, for example, not overusing all caps. But seriously, the goal is essentially to teach critical thinking in the context of consuming all media. This goal might be familiar to the readers of this blog. This is also the exact topic of my recent book, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: How to know what’s really real in a world increasingly full of fake. The subtitle is another way to frame media literacy.

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The usual caveats apply – this is one study in a limited context showing only correlation and using a psychological construct. I also have to be careful because the study confirms what I already believe. Having said all that, it is interesting and is probably telling us something about people with extreme political views, especially when other research is considered.

The study involves individuals with radical political beliefs, as measured by a standard questionnaire. It has already been established that those with more extreme beliefs espouse greater confidence in their knowledge and beliefs. However, it is not clear how much this is due to an overconfidence bias vs a failure of metacognition. In other words – do people who are overconfident about their political beliefs like to portray themselves to others as being confident, or do they simply lack insight into the correctness of their own beliefs (a metacognitive failure). The current study tests the latter factor.

The researchers, lead by Steven Flemming at University College London, looked at, “two independent general population samples (n = 381 and n = 417).” He gave them a challenge in which they had to estimate the number of dots on two images, and decide which one had more. They also had to say how confident they were in their judgement. Further, if they got the answer wrong, they were given further information in the form of another image with dots which should have helped them improve their estimate. They were then asked to restate their confidence.

The study found that those with more radical political views indicated higher confidence in their choices, even when they were wrong, and less of a tendency to update their confidence with new information. In other words – you might say they are opinionated and stubborn.  This comes as absolutely no surprise if you have ever interacted with someone with extreme political views.

What this study cannot tell us about is the arrow of cause and effect. One possibility is that those who lack the metacognitive ability to properly assess and correct their own confidence levels will tend to fall into more extreme views. Their confidence will allow them to more easily brush off dissenting opinions and information, more nuanced and moderate narratives, and the consensus of opinion.

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Are you a visual learner or an auditory learner? Perhaps you learn best when studying material hands on. Or perhaps it doesn’t matter, and the entire concept of different people having different learning styles is not valid.

A new study adds to the pile of those that find little evidence to support the notion of learning styles, but we’ll get to that shortly.

The basic concept is that different people have different strengths and weaknesses that relate directly to how well they learn new information. Further, these strengths and weaknesses can be codified into specific styles, that can then be measured in some valid way. Finally, if you teach a student material in their preferred style, their outcomes will be superior to if they are taught the same material in a manner not in line with their preferred style.

Layered on top of this basic concept are different hypothesized schemes of learning styles – different ways to break up learning strategies. There are visual vs verbal learners, or perhaps abstract vs personal, more or less interactive, problem-solving, etc. One researcher estimated that there are more permutations of different learning styles than there are people on Earth. So really we have to ask – is the basic concept of learning styles valid, and if so which learning style scheme is more helpful?

The answer appears to be no and none.

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The battle between truth and fiction is asymmetrical. While that seems to be the case, now we have some empirical evidence to back up this conclusion. In a recent study researchers report:

To understand how false news spreads, Vosoughi et al. used a data set of rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. About 126,000 rumors were spread by ∼3 million people. False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed.

This reflects the inherent asymmetry. Factual information is constrained by reality. You can also look at it as factual information is optimized to be true and accurate. While false information is not constrained by reality and can be optimized to evoke an emotional reaction, to be good storytelling, and for drama.

We see this in many contexts. In medicine, the rise of so-called alternative medicine has been greatly aided by the fact that alternative practitioners can tell patients what they want to hear. They can craft their diagnoses and treatments for optimal marketing, rather than optimal outcomes.

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The fight over science in public education continues, and if anything picked up considerably in 2017. Earlier in the year Nature reported on various state laws designed to water down science education or allow for equal time to be given to unscientific views. They report:

Florida’s legislature approved a bill on 5 May that would enable residents to challenge what educators teach students. And two other states have already approved non-binding legislation this year urging teachers to embrace ‘academic freedom’ and present the full spectrum of views on evolution and climate change. This would give educators license to treat evolution and intelligent design as equally valid theories, or to present climate change as scientifically contentious.

New Mexico took a more direct approach – simply scrubbing “controversial” ideas from the state’s science standards. The standards no longer mention “evolution”, human contributions to climate change, or even mentioning the age of the Earth. This is not a back door approach – this is straight-up censorship of accepted scientific facts.

A new Florida bill also includes this problematic language:

Controversial theories and concepts must be taught in a factual, objective, and balanced manner.

This is part of the latest strategy. First, don’t mention any one theory (like evolution) by name. That is likely to trigger a constitutional challenge. Second, make the bill sound like it is promoting something positive, like academic freedom, democracy, or just being fair and balanced.

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One of the (perhaps) good things to come out of the recent political climate in the US is a broader appreciation for the need to teach critical thinking skills. I hope we can capitalize on this new awareness to make some longstanding changes to our culture.

For example, a recent NYT article is titled: “Why People Continue to Believe Objectively False Things,” and begins:

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” goes the saying — one that now seems like a relic of simpler times.

The article also discusses recent evidence showing that belief in the “birther” Obama conspiracy decreased after Trump admitted that Obama was born in Hawaii. Shortly after that admission 62% of people stated they believed Obama was a US citizen, but a more recent poll shows the number dropped to 57%. (Over that period of time fewer Republicans believed he was a US citizen, while more Democrats did.) The authors conclude that over time people forget specific information while they revert to old tribal beliefs.

A recent study looking at Twitter activity also reinforces the evidence that people generally follow their instincts rather than critical thinking. They showed that people will rate the believability of a tweet as higher, and are more likely to share that tweet, if it already has a high number of retweets. This creates a positive feedback loop in which retweets beget retweets, regardless of the inherent reliability of the information.

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As we enter a new legislative session in many states we are also faced by a new wave of anti-evolution bills. Creationists have been trying to undermine the teaching of evolution in public schools since Scopes in the 1920s. They have essentially been unsuccessful legally but successful culturally. For the first half of the 20th century they made the “e” word too controversial for textbooks. Since then they have provided cover for teachers in the Bible Belt to teach creationism or falsely criticize evolution.

In a 2011 survey, only 28% of high school biology teachers reporting following National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences recommendations in teaching evolution, and 13% reported that they openly advocated creationism.

This, of course, refers only to public schools. Private schools can openly teach creationism, which is exactly why Trump’s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has spent so much effort and money promoting school vouchers and private schools.

Legally anti-evolution efforts have consistently run up against that pesky First Amendment, which guarantees religious freedom. The Supreme Court has interpreted this to mean that the government (Federal or State) cannot promote any specific religion or religious belief. Creationism is a religious belief, not science, no matter how creationists try to dress it up, therefore it doesn’t fly.

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Donald Trump has just named Oklahoma attorney general, Scott Pruitt, to head the EPA. Pruitt is a known denier of the science of anthropogenic global warming, and in fact has spent much of his time as attorney general suing the EPA over the issue. The conspiracy theorists are now running the show.

This is just the latest in what has been an eye-opening year, which has seen “post-truth” named as word of the year, and has also seen a surge in the notion of “fake news”.

In a recent editorial published in Nature, scientist Phil Williamson argues that:

Challenging falsehoods and misrepresentation may not seem to have any immediate effect, but someone, somewhere, will hear or read our response. The target is not the peddler of nonsense, but those readers who have an open mind on scientific problems. A lie may be able to travel around the world before the truth has its shoes on, but an unchallenged untruth will never stop.

He recounts that his awakening occurred after he had a run-in with Brietbart news over their gross misrepresentation of the science of global warming and ocean acidification. Now he is on a crusade to fight back against pseudoscience online.

For greatest effect, I suggest that we harness the collective power and reach of the Internet to improve its quality. The global scientific community could learn from websites such as travel-review site TripAdvisor, Rotten Tomatoes (which summarizes film and play reviews) and alexa.com (which quantifies website popularity), and set up its own, moderated, rating system for websites that claim to report on science. We could call it the Scientific Honesty and Integrity Tracker, and give online nonsense the SHAIT rating it deserves.

While I completely agree with Williamson that this is a problem and the scientific community should take responsibility for it, I was struck by the complete absence of awareness in his editorial that there is already a movement of scientists, science communicators, and science enthusiasts who are doing this – the skeptical movement.  Continue Reading »