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I think civil discourse is great.
However social media itself encourages outrage culture. Without a concerted effort by social media platforms to discourage this, outrage culture will continue.
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However social media itself encourages outrage culture. Without a concerted effort by social media platforms to discourage this, outrage culture will continue.
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And responding to outrage and conspiracy theories that garner thousands of shares with calm, patient, evidence-based responses that get a dozen just feels wrong.
So I say that science communicators should take their gloves off and go just as hard as the quacks do.
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So I say that science communicators should take their gloves off and go just as hard as the quacks do.
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They should say the truth: that 99% of diet industry books are grifty, at odds with evidence, cynical, etc.
They should say that quackery is rampant, in fact it is overwhelmingly dominant, in pop health because it sells.
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They should say that quackery is rampant, in fact it is overwhelmingly dominant, in pop health because it sells.
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They should say that all the biggest respected figures in pop health are quacks. Because they all are.
There are like two exceptions. And that's being generous.
They're pseudoscientific, and there is no legitimate scientific debate with these people. It's all trash.
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There are like two exceptions. And that's being generous.
They're pseudoscientific, and there is no legitimate scientific debate with these people. It's all trash.
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I think we should say this openly, because we all say it in our private DM groups and between each other.
We all agree on the same basic facts, yet those of us on the "good team" will often tie our hands behind our backs because we don't want to be uncivil.
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We all agree on the same basic facts, yet those of us on the "good team" will often tie our hands behind our backs because we don't want to be uncivil.
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I think we should punch and punch hard, because that gets engagement and puts us on an equal playing field with people who are simply not decent humans in my opinion, and who will not stoop to any low to promote themselves and their crap.
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But I am definitely open to people who want to talk about how we can make things more civil.
All of the good guys want a media ecosystem where good information is communicated in a civil way.
For sure. All of us.
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All of the good guys want a media ecosystem where good information is communicated in a civil way.
For sure. All of us.
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But there is, between myself and many people who I have a huge amount of respect for, a disagreement or at least a discussion about exactly how civil the "good guys" should be.
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If someone can come up with some solutions or some ideas that we can work toward, that would be great.
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For my own part, I think social media platforms need some sort of quality check services. They need to have some way to siphon through and filter misinformation. Or need to work with third parties who want to provide this service.
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Because if social media platforms don't disincentivize quackery, misinformation, conspiracy theories, outrage, etc., then it will continue to proliferate.
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So part of the solution to more civility needs to be some way to reign in the incentives that make misinformation and outrage so appealing.
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I believe that civility and information integrity are two goals that go hand-in-hand, and you can't do one without the other.
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In my opinion, this means that we cannot make things more civil by ourselves, through our own will. We also need to politically engage with and force the social media companies to do a better job.
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When Trump was banned from social media, that solved a huge part of the problem. I believe that this tells us something important. We don't need to necessarily ban the grifters, but we need a way to seriously curtail how well social media works for them.
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Because until we do, we can talk civility all day long. But if the incentives push toward incivility and grift and misinformation, incivility and grift and misinformation is what we will have, no matter how much we want otherwise.
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We need to talk about the sorts of politics we need to make social media better. Which is a going to be a very difficult discussion, because it touches on many values that Americans hold dear. But in my opinion, it is a discussion that we have no choice but to have.
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