Guerilla enlightenment: Defending science online

Pro-reason bloggers are doing a better job than scientists at challenging alternative medicine. Long may it continue

ALTERNATIVE medicine has never enjoyed such popularity and respect. Therapies once dubbed "pseudoscience" or "quackery" are now typically referred to as "alternative", "complementary" or "holistic". Practices that used to circulate on the fringes are now accepted as mainstream.

The rise of alternative medicine poses a problem for defenders of science. Many see the fightback as a lost cause. I don't. I believe that the factors that allow quackery to prosper can and are being harnessed for a counter-revolution in defence of science.

In the past, those exploring alternative lifestyles joined groups of like-minded people and subscribed to countercultural magazines. They now participate in online communities and surf the internet, where they encounter alternative websites by the dozen, but also come across mainstream scientific viewpoints.

The web has proved to be a crucial mobilising instrument for pro-science activists. When the British Chiropractic Association sued writer Simon Singh for libel, his supporters used Twitter and Facebook to keep abreast of the case. A community of pro-science activists and bloggers has also sprung up. Their actions are not merely intellectual. Singh's supporters flooded the British Chiropractic Association with complaints about individual chiropractors, all of which required investigation.

As British activist and physician Ben Goldacre wrote in 2009: "A ragged band of bloggers from all walks of life has, to my mind, done a better job of subjecting an entire industry's claims to meaningful, public, scientific scrutiny than the media, the industry itself, and even its own regulator. It's strange this task has fallen to them, but I'm glad someone is doing it, and they do it very, very well indeed."

In other words, the defence of science is increasingly being undertaken by members of the public. Such defence was once conducted primarily by scholars; today the battle is often fought at an individual level via cut-and-thrust debate in blog postings.

This social phenomenon of "angry nerds" and "guerrilla bloggers", dedicated to defending evidence-based medicine and challenging quackery, is important. Rather than relying on scientists to defend the boundaries of science, we are seeing a much more socially embedded struggle - a popular enlightenment project.

Can such a project work? Reasserting goals of progress through reason and evidence is one thing, but whether it has any effect remains an open question. How easy is it to persuade people through factual corrections?

The answer seems to depend a great deal on the individual. For example, AIDS deniers are generally impervious to corrective evidence. They are impossible to argue with, and indeed it may even be counterproductive to do so. According to recent research, providing people who are ideologically committed to a particular view with incongruent information can backfire by causing them to dig their heels in and support their original argument even more strongly.

This problem is a general one. A substantial body of psychological research suggests that humans tend to seek out and evaluate information that reinforces their existing views. The digital revolution has exacerbated the problem because, as journalist Farhad Manjoo writes, you can now "watch, listen to and read what you want, whenever you want; seek out and discuss, in exhaustive and insular detail, the kind of news that pleases you; and indulge your political, social or scientific theories... among people who feel exactly the same way".

I believe such pessimism goes too far, though. The boundary between mainstream and alternative knowledge may have become more permeable, but the world has yet to enter what political scientist Michael Barkun of Syracuse University in New York calls "complete epistemological pluralism". The fact that quacks and AIDS deniers keep trying to get the imprimatur of science for their discredited ideas, by trying to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals, for example, speaks to the continued public prestige and power of science.

Furthermore, their support base is far from fixed in stone. Some people are so committed to unorthodox views that they cannot be moved, but they are the exception. People motivated to explore the "cultic milieu" - that fluid countercultural space in which alternative therapies and conspiracy theories flourish - are open to changing their minds.

In his seminal work on the cultic milieu, sociologist Colin Campbell of York University, UK, stresses that it is not a space where firm opinions are held, but rather a "society of seekers" - people who "do not necessarily cease seeking when a revealed truth is offered to them".

This creates the space for pro-science activists to compete for attention. When they do so, the internet becomes a tougher place for people to sequestrate themselves in a comfortable cocoon of the like-minded.

This is good news for the enlightenment project. People may be biased in favour of interpretations that align with their prejudices but this does not mean that they just believe what they like. Faced with information of sufficient quantity or clarity, people do change their minds.

So the challenge for the pro-science movement is to keep an active and credible online presence. The web is an anarchic space where defence of science ranges from ridicule and banter to serious discussion about findings along with links to scientific articles and reports. It looks, in other words, like the space that used to be the preserve of the cultic milieu - but with greater informational depth. The weapons of science and reason are still very much in contention.

Nicoli Nattrass is director of the AIDS and Society Research Unit at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her new book is The AIDS Conspiracy: Science fights back (Columbia University Press)

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