I was just over reading Orac’s post on tomorrow’s PBS Frontline special, The Vaccine War. The post is excellent, and he included a quotation from Barbara Loe Fisher, the anti-vaxxer who co-founded the National Vaccine Information Center. I think it’s an interesting seed point for one of my usual babbles, and on a topic I find interesting. Barbara says, “People now have a way to get the information they couldn’t before, to communicate it to other people, and to have a robust public debate that is not controlled by money or political power or by government policy.”

I agree wholeheartedly. No civilization has ever had the access to information that we currently have, and that information just continues to increase at a ridiculous rate. However, what’s missing here is validation of the information. And ultimately, we don’t want validated information because it puts control of that information in someone’s hands. I don’t want to see that. I’d much rather have an internet that has a lot of misinformation and disinformation than one that is censored.

Especially in the west, almost everyone now has access to the single largest library on earth, often anywhere and anytime they like. That’s probably the most significant alteration to how humans interact and learn in human history. We have built-in knowledge in the form of DNA and we have learned knowledge in the form of memories, and we have nearly direct access to the largest store of information that has ever existed. When you think about that idea, it’s staggering.

People are not always good researchers, and I know that there are times when I fall into that simple laziness trap. I don’t honestly believe that we can make it through a single day without making assumptions that the information we are relying on is actually valid. We simply do not have the resources to fact-check every fact. But most people have very poor research skills, and as such they lack the capacity to ferret out what is valid and what is not.

I remember doing a paper in college about the Branch Davidians at Waco. A then-friend of mine, when he heard that I was doing this paper, started rambling about how the Davidian “strong men” who were Koresh’s lieutenants had to prove their devotion to him by crossing a swimming pool filled with anacondas. It was such a ridiculous idea that I laughed out loud, but he had read it in a book and as such was convinced it was the absolute truth. He felt no need to read additional books on the topic to get a balanced perspective, nor did he know anything about the tenets and beliefs of the church. To him, all that mattered was that they were nuts and that obviously it was for the best that they had been killed.

Barbara Loe Fisher’s remark, as I have said, is true. But the problem is in understanding the information you find, the motivations of the people who communicate it to other people, and how to tell the difference between someone who is passionate and someone who is knowledgeable. How do we rigorously evaluate all the information on a topic in order to make an informed decision? The truth is, we can’t. But we can do our best, and this does not mean going to like-minded web sites and reading all the articles they have to say, it means understanding the issue by seeing as many sides as you can in as much detail as you can, and putting all this information through your own baloney detection kit.

And that’s the danger in her quotation. At no point is responsibility thrust on the individual to verify the information that they are reading, and she goes on to say “Physicians are going to have to get over the idea that they tell people what to do, and people are going to do it without questioning.” Again, this is a true statement, but it is the manner of questioning that needs to be improved upon. By presenting the argument in the way she does, she gives a sort of empowerment to the general public in dealing with their physicians, but we must always remember that with power comes responsibility.

Jim