Last week I went to a Rose Cafe where we talked about fake news. We talked about what it is and why it is so widespread. While we were talking, I realized that “fake news” is not just limited to news organizations, it also exists in science. It is common knowledge that recently many of the papers that have been published either exaggerate their findings/p-values or just straight up make up data. This is a very real problem facing the scientific community with consequences that can affect the general public. For example, there was a paper published a couple decades ago that suggested that there was a link between vaccines and autism. It claimed that vaccines cause autism. Since then, there have been numerous studies and papers published that prove that vaccines do not cause autism. But, the damage has already been done. There are many people who choose not to vaccinate themselves/their children because they believe that vaccines cause autism. We have already seen the rise of diseases like measles that could have easily been prevented by vaccinations, all because of one fraudulent paper. This is why we have to wary of “fake news” both in the scientific community and in general because it can have far-reaching consequences.
Rose Scholars Fall 2017
Endless possibilities
I also agree that thinking about fake news as it relates to science was really interesting! There is definitely these two sort of juxtaposing but arguably equally misleading problematic responses to science—in some cases, individuals unquestionably accept science as fact when that may not be the case or they, and in others, individuals refuse to accept scientific knowledge that has been so extensively researched and widely accepted that it is essentially fact. In this way, Professor Schwartz’s question about at what point printing news articles denying that evolution is a scientific reality, for example, becomes fake news was especially interesting.