MISINFORMATION AND DISINFORMATION IN THE AGE OF INSTANT “INFORMATION"

When I was in college I had the wonderful opportunity of working with a dentist who lived in my neighborhood. He allowed me to come into his office and work as an unpaid volunteer assistant in order to gain additional knowledge about dentistry in general. I remember one afternoon I picked up a copy of the Journal of the American Dental Association and began to thumb through some of the articles. I found that even though I was reaching the end of my undergraduate college education, it was very much like trying to read an article in a foreign language. I was amazed at how little I was able to understand out of the articles that were proffered and frankly I was worried that I would ever be able to obtain an education on the level that would allow me to understand the scientific articles. Like most undergraduate pre-dental or pre-medical student I wondered how often I would really use my degree in biology and minor in chemistry in providing care for patients. I certainly wondered if I could ever use calculus. I have since come to appreciate that our basic education should really be designed to teach us how to approach and solve problems, to work out the “truth” and hence guide our steps. A recent guest editorial published in the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial surgery by Charles N Bertolami, DDS, DMedSc is the source of much of the following information and I strongly recommend it to all.

We now live in an age of “misinformation” which is defined as false information shared with no intent to harm and “disinformation” which is defined as false information shared with an intent to harm. Both involve false information with the only difference being that of intent. We live in an age when many people now turn to science as the final arbiter of truth. They fail to understand the following statement. “In science all questions are valid and all answers are tentative.” The general public is simply uninformed as to how science really works. They think that you go from hypothesis to discovery in a linear fashion guided by method and logic. While these play a role, intuition and creative insight are just as important and it has been stated that the “origin of discovery is protoscience.” They fail to understand that much of the published scientific literature is simply not true and can therefore be categorized as misinformation. This applies to simply not true and can therefore be categorized as misinformation. This applies to articles published in peer-reviewed well-respected scientific journals. It has been found that somewhere between 65 and 75% of studies cannot be duplicated as reported. It has also been reported that the greater the “financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true”. Conflicts of interest in biomedical research can be financial or simply the prejudice of the investigators themselves. Maybe they need the research to obtain tenure or promotion. When a phenomenon is investigated by someone who believes in it they are more likely to find the desired result. In other words you find what you’re looking for regardless of the actual truth.

Disinformation is now mingled with misinformation and it is difficult to separate the two. For example a letter published in the Lancet on March 7th 2020 expressed support of the medical professionals in China combating COVID-19. The real intent of the letter, however, was to state a natural origin and not a laboratory based origin of the COVID-19 virus. Many of the signatories of this letter has obvious conflicts of interest with potential ties to the Wuhan Laboratory. The article invited readers to add their support to this statement by signing an affirmatory letter online. The implication is that if enough people agree then it must be true. This is not how scientific literature is supposed to work but it is how social media works. The laboratory origin is now favored in many circles as additional information has come to light.

People that “follow the science” perpetuate an enduring myth that science is a consistent, compact, institutionally guaranteed body of knowledge without a separate interest or agenda. The actual operation of science is contingent and tentative and messy. Now add in artificial intelligence such as Chap GPT and it becomes very difficult to differentiate truth from innocent misinformation and from malicious disinformation. A quote attributed to Joseph Goebbels must be remembered “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it and eventually they will believe it.” Lies that may be repeated by artificial intelligence are still lies but now repeated billions of times a day. Unpopular research findings can be deplatformed and dissenters delegitimized and disciplined simply because it doesn’t conform with the “popular truth.”

I now have the opportunity to work with young men and women who want to be part of Dentistry and Medicine in the future. I remind them that the reason they take calculus, physics, biology and other science classes is to try to teach them how to approach problems and how to think and hence to be able to make correct decisions by learning to question and pursue the truth no matter where it leads. Hopefully we as practitioners are sophisticated consumers of the published research meaning that we can tell what is likely true from what is likely not true and be able to apply it to proper care of our patients.

Dr Ken Baldwin ADA Delegate