How to distinguish between minority opinions and misinformation

Great Debates
1

As internet and other censorship and demands for more of the same have increased, this has become a bigger and bigger issue, IMHO. There have always been disagreements among the scientific community as well as in other fields, and sometimes the minority turns out to have been correct. The prevailing attitude has been that debate and minority opinions are healthy for the field. This seems to be falling by the wayside.

There have always been quacks, who have no track record of having accomplished anything in their lives, and suppressing the positions of unqualified people has always been accepted. But what if the people being suppressed have essentially the same qualifications as the ones doing the suppressing, but just happen to be a minority? I think that’s a fundamentally different situation.

What got me to thinking about it was the issue surrounding a Joe Rogan interview with Robert Malone. Malone was said to be spreading mininformation about Covid-19 in that interview. He has also been suspended from Twitter for covid misinformation. But Malone is no quack, and has had a very distinguished career as one of the pioneers of mRNA technology.

Robert W. Malone - Wikipedia

But I don’t think he is the first, and some of the other dissenters are also highly qualified people as well.

Personally, I tend to go with the majority opinion on scientific and medical matters, not being a scientist myself. But I am uncomfortable with supression of minority opinions, and the fact that this seems to be increasingly happening makes me less trustful of the purported consensus of scientific opinion rather than more. (That’s because it makes it difficult to determine whether a given minority opinion is held by 1% of scientists or 35%.) But beyond that, I think it’s also unhealthy for the field itself, in that it undermines the possibility of ideas being considered purely on their merits.

So the question is how to draw the line.

2

When you review a scientific paper it is not the conclusion that should get evaluated, but the process leading up to that conclusion and the results that support that conclusion.
There is a difference between opinion and information. Opinions are interesting, especially from qualified writers, but shouldn’t be confused with research results, and they are clearly distinguished in journals. I’m not sure the average person understands this.
I’m sensitive to this because I have a column in a journal where I comment on the topic of the issue, humorously if possible. No one should base anything on my opinions/comments - though several publishers have written me asking me to consider writing a book on a topic I commented on but know very little about.
So this counts for both minority and majority opinions.

3

Not just in that interview. From your own link, he started out with an idea about a potential treatment for Covid-19 that never got tested (apparently not his fault, but it did not in fact get tested). His main focus since then has been to attack the vaccines. From Wikipedia:

Malone received criticism for propagating COVID-19 misinformation, including making claims about the toxicity of spike proteins generated by some COVID-19 vaccines;[3][19][5][31] using interviews on mass media to popularize medication with ivermectin;[32] and tweeting a study by others questioning vaccine safety that was later retracted.

I am not a scientist and I tend to draw the line based on process. Replicable research is on one side of the line, unsupported allegations are on the other side of the line, regardless of the qualifications of the person making the allegations. Qualifications by themselves are not enough to move unsupported allegations over the line to believability.

4

Facts and opinions aren’t the same thing. In science, if you lack the peer reviewed evidence to make your claim, you don’t push it as fact. You don’t need to make your hypothesis popular by appearing in media. You need to use what resources you have to show it is worthy of testing in the scientific community.

None of this applies to opinions, though you may want to choose which opinions you give time to. But actual opinions (rather than facial claims) are not misinformation.

5

This, this a thousand times this. My wife is :crossed_fingers: working on getting her research published to finish her long delayed PhD, and is in her second stage of peer review. She has immensely valued the feedback she’s gotten, as it lets her examine her own prejudice and tunnel vision (this is for physics and magnetism, which is far less subjective than most for that matter).

I’ve seen plenty of credentialed individuals that are using said credentials to support their pre-existing POV, along with what anyone else could see as low-value ‘research’ that was flawed, subjective, or so small scale as to be little more than noise at best.

But you’re absolutely right in that it can be difficult to be a minority believer in an issue - because often times that means you’re arguing in the face of strong evidence. If you have good evidence, then that PoV can and should be investigated further. But far more often that POV is based on a pre-existing agenda, trying to create evidence to support said idea - such as energy company based climatologists, or Tobacco industry doctors of a prior generation.

I mean, I am happy to listen to theories, but if you’re Dr. Stella Immanuel you’re going to have a long row to hoe even if you have medical qualifications.

[ that’s the demon sperm doctor of high renown in Trump circles, if you don’t want to click on the link ]

6

One’s educational qualifications and professional CV are irrelevant to one’s quack status. If one is advocating hypothetical conclusions in the face of actual tests with contradictory results, if one is advancing arguments as being scientific without having established the framework of the scientific process around those arguments, then one is a quack.

On this subject, Malone is a quack. Or, rather more specifically, I would call him a crank, which is a particular flavor of quack.

I favor the consensus drift of the thread: it’s about the process. If you can show you have an actual basis for what you are saying, even if it’s counter to the prevailing wisdom, then it’s a minority opinion, and should be respected as such (albeit not necessarily accepted). If you cannot show your work, so to speak, if you have started with the desired conclusion and fabricated a rationalization to support it, then it’s misinformation, and may be dismissed.

7

It’s fairly obvious from a scientific point of view that the line between minority opinion and misinformation should be drawn so that Malone’s recent efforts fall on the “misinformation” side. Yes, he’s an accomplished scientist, but his COVID-related “work” is quite obviously biased and lacking in quality evidence.

He doesn’t “just happen to be in the minority”. He actively ignores the mountains of evidence against his positions and the weakness of evidence for. He doesn’t even have the excuse of “the evidence isn’t in yet” that many highly educated and accomplished individuals have had who promoted hypotheses that were eventually proven wrong.

8

If you ask Malone he would probably say the exact same about those who disagree with him. ISTM that it’s very common in scientific (and other!) disputes for each side to believe that the other side is ignoring mountains of evidence which contradicts their position etc. That’s the nature of disputes. Check out this MB, for example. :slight_smile: I don’t see anything different in this case other than that one side has a majority of support and thus their position that their opponents are ignoring the weakness of their position is prevailing.

Re scientific “process”, I don’t think Malone is arguing that he has some research that he personally has done which supports his position. Rather, his overall assessment of various published studies leads him to one conclusions, which differs from the conclusion that others would draw from those same studies. Question is: does Malone have the knowledge, understanding, experience and intellectual ability to draw valid assessments from an assortment of published studies in this field? His history would argue that he does.

9

And, his current view would say that he’s an anti-vax conspiracy theorist whack-job.

People go off the rails all the time. If he actually has research and evidence to back up his claims, he should get them peer reviewed and save potentially millions of lives.

10

Isn’t this the basis of the scientific method? Testing a theory by experiment, then when those experiments provide support for that theory, it becomes accepted? Having the majority of studies/evidence supporting a theory is supposed to give that theory more credence over differing theories, right? Or am I missing something?

11

If I asked Malone for anything, it would be to back up his critiques of the current Covid paradigm with detailed point-by-point analysis that supports his view. Has he provided this? (This needs, by the way, to be aimed at the scientific community, not at TV audiences. )“What do you think?” is not the question that needs to be answered. “Why do you think so?” is the critical bit. Science is all about “how do you know?”

Why is the word “process” in quotes? Do you think concern with process is not valid or important?

Then he needs to show his work. His qualifications aren’t worth the effort to expel them from his nasal cavity, if he can’t or won’t show his work.

12

I have to get my pith on, simply because others have already made the point oh-so very well.

The Race Is Not Always to the Swift, Nor the Battle to the Strong; But That Is the Best Way to Bet

SOURCE (?)

Meaning: like logic, avoiding logical fallacies doesn’t guarantee that your conclusion will be correct, but it’s a good bet.

Aim and practice don’t ensure marksmanship, but …

Blind squirrels probably do occasionally find acorns, but …

The scientific method, in short:

R - recognize the problem
O - make observations
H - create an hypothesis
E - conduct experiments to test that hypothesis
C - draw conclusions based on those experiments

And it’s overwhelmingly iterative (ie, wash, rinse, repeat)

Too many get stuck on R, O, or H. That’s enough for Op-Ed pieces, but it’s simply a beginning, not an end.

There’s a recent Ivermectin thread that cites a study with /bad/ methodology. These are important reasons to call into question the conclusions of such study.

Opinions can be the basis/es for interesting hypotheses, subject to rigorous testing and evaluation. Opinions and hypothesis – like statistics – should be the beginning of conversations, not the end of them.

Replication is de rigueur. If it really works, then it should work in my study, too. If it doesn’t then other confounding variables are likely at play. Those variables should be accounted for, controlled for, and explained.

13

The R O and H steps long preceded the scientific method. Humans are intuitively extremely good at inventing hypotheses about cause and effect. But we lack the intuitive toolkit to reject hypotheses when the evidence does not support them - we get caught out by cognitive flaws such as confirmation bias. That’s why (for example) folk medicine includes a few things that do actually work, swamped by a vast number of things that don’t.

The development of the scientific method gave us the toolkit to test hypotheses against reality using rigorous methods that do not allow our cognitive biases to distort the results. The foundation of the expansion of human knowledge since the Enlightenment is not so much the imagination of great scientists as the fact that we learned how to sort through ideas and reject the bad ones.

14

That’s true, but Malone would be full of shit when he says this.

15

Edited. Addition in bold.

And … well said @Riemann

To quote Richard Feynman for just another smidgen of pith:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

16

To be less snippy about it - Malone is making specific, verifiable claims. Those claims do not line up with the actual evidence. It’s not a matter of opinion; he is claiming that the facts show one thing, when in fact they show another. This makes him a quack, whatever qualifications he may have.

17

So, to answer the OP, once the minority opinion has been shown to be so wrong, even by the non-medical people in this thread, if someone continues to spout that kind of opinion, it becomes misinformation.

Malone has better access to better journals and information than we do, so he’s just spouting misinformation at this point.

18

It doesn’t matter what Malone’s opinion of everyone else is. It matters what facts he has, compared to the facts against him.

There’s the fact that none of the current science supports his claims, and the fact he has not given vidence that science is wrong. That is what matters.

Not his opinion. Opinions aren’t facts.

19

How to distinguish between minority opinions and misinformation

Above: the thread title

Above: how not to do it

20

As my sister once said, “It’s my opinion that we didn’t go to the Moon, and opinions can’t be wrong.”

Problem is, opinions are not facts. If a minority has an opinion, that’s worth investigating to see if it has merit. If they have facts on their side, all the better.

If they are in the minority because they don’t have the facts on their side, and anyone who does any research or experimentation comes to a different conclusion than their opinion, then that opinion is wrong.

Many in this country get confused when “experts” debate. They don’t understand the actual material being discussed, so base their opinion on other things, things that have nothing to do with the actual facts. If someone seems more confident and sure of himself, if that person asks questions and points out flaws that the other person, who seems less sure of himself, cannot answer or refute quickly and simply, then people will tend to take that person’s side, which is why quacks employ the Gish Gallop as their favored tactic. They don’t have the facts on their side, so they try to get the ignorant on their side (and by ignorant, I am not being dismissive, I mean anyone who is not well versed in the field that is up for debate.)

The simple explanation will often win over the right one.