Pseudoscience

• Others think concern over disinformation is just a moral panic or merely a symptom rather than the cause of our societal ills.
• Given that nearly 25% of elections are decided by a margin of under 3%, mis- and disinformation can have important influence.
• By contrast, among prior Obama voters who believed at least two fake headlines about Clinton, only 17% voted for her.
• There are more indirect consequences of disinformation too, such as eroding public trust and participation in elections.

The power of prebunking

• In contrast, “prebunking” is a new way to prevent false beliefs from forming in the first place.
• Such “inoculation” involves warning people not to fall for a false narrative or propaganda tactic, together with an explanation as to why.
• Misinforming rhetoric has clear markers, such as scapegoating or use of false dichotomies (there are many others), that people can learn to identify.
• Like a medical vaccine, the prebunk exposes the recipient to a “weakened dose” of the infectious agent (the disinformation) and refutes it in a way that confers protection.
• For example, we created an online game for the Department of Homeland Security to empower Americans to spot foreign influence techniques during the 2020 presidential election.

• Lee McIntyre advises the UK Government on how to fight disinformation.
• He also receives funding from Jigsaw (a technology incubator created by Google) and from UK Research and Innovation (through EU Horizon replacement funding grant number 10049415).

• In the past century, there have been three waves of opposition to transgender health care.
• In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, they cracked down on transgender medical research and clinical practice in Europe.
• In 1979, a research report critical of transgender medicine led to the closure of the most well-respected clinics in the United States.

The 1930s − eugenics and sexology collide

• In the field of sexology – the study of human sexuality, founded in 19th century Europe – scientists were excited about research on animals demonstrating that removing or transplanting gonads could effectively change an organism’s sex.
• Several trans women also received care at the institute, including orchiectomies that halted the production of testosterone in their bodies.

• Nazi ideology was based on another prominent field of science of that time: eugenics, the belief that certain superior populations should survive while inferior populations must be exterminated.
• In fact, Hirschfeld’s sexology and Nazi race science had common roots in the Enlightenment-era effort to classify and categorize the world’s life forms.
• But in the late 19th century, many scientists went a step further and developed a hierarchy of human types based on race, gender and sexuality.

The 1970s − making model citizens

• In 1966, Johns Hopkins became the first university hospital in the world to offer trans health care.
• By the 1970s, trans medicine went mainstream.
• Nearly two dozen university hospitals were operating gender identity clinics and treating thousands of transgender Americans.
• Jon Meyer, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, was skeptical of whether medical interventions really helped transgender people.

• Meyer and Reter believed that gender-affirming surgeries were successful only if they made model citizens out of transgender people: straight, married and law-abiding.
• In their results, the authors found no negative effects from surgery, and no patients expressed regret.
• They concluded that “sex reassignment surgery confers no objective advantage in terms of social rehabilitation,” but it is “subjectively satisfying” to the patients themselves.

The 2020s − distrust in science

• Legislators have removed books with LGBTQ content from libraries and disparaged them as “filth.” A recent law in Florida threatens trans people with arrest for using public restrooms.
• Donald Trump’s campaign platform calls for a nationwide ban on trans health care for minors and severe restrictions for adults.
• But widespread distrust in science and medicine in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has affected how Americans perceive trans health care.

• Instead, many trans activists today call for diminishing the role of medical authority altogether in gatekeeping access to trans health care.
• Medical gatekeeping occurs through stringent guidelines that govern access to trans health care, including mandated psychiatric evaluations and extended waiting periods that limit and control patient choice.
• For now, trans health care remains a question dominated by medical experts on one hand and people who question science on the other.

G. Samantha Rosenthal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• The science of consciousness is particularly hard, beset with philosophical difficulties and a scarcity of experimental data.
• And that might have been that, with researchers continuing to investigate these and other theories of how our brains generate experience.
• The science of consciousness has its factions and quarrels but this development is unprecedented, and threatens to do lasting damage.

What is integrated information theory?

• Italian neuroscientist Giulio Tononi first proposed integrated information theory in 2004, and it is now on “version 4.0”.
• Roughly, this means the information the system as a whole has over and above the information had by its parts.
• Instead, integrated information theory begins with “phenomenological axioms”, supposedly self-evident claims about the nature of consciousness.

Three criticisms

• First, it argues this is not a “leading theory of consciousness” and has received more media attention than it deserves.
• The third claim has provoked the most outcry: integrated information theory is “pseudoscience”.

Is integrated information theory a leading theory?

• Whether you agree with integrated information theory or not – and I myself have criticised it – there is little doubt it is a “leading theory of consciousness”.
• By one account, integrated information theory is the third-most discussed theory of consciousness in the scientific literature, out-stripped only by global workspace theory and recurrent processing theory.

Is it more problematic than other theories?

• According to the letter, integrated information theory says “human fetuses at very early stages of development” are likely conscious.
• Are the implications of integrated information theory more problematic than those of other leading theories?
• That’s far from obvious, and there are certainly versions of other theories whose implications would be every bit as radical as those of integrated information theory.

Is it pseudoscience?

• It also claims integrated information theory wasn’t “meaningfully tested” by the head-to-head contest earlier this year.
• But none of this justifies treating integrated information theory – or indeed any other theory of consciousness – as pseudoscience.
• In effect, it’s an attempt to “deplatform” or silence integrated information theory – to deny it deserves serious attention.

• The effects of ancient slavery, on the other hand, aren’t as tangible today – and most Americans have only a vague idea of what it looked like.
• Some people might think of biblical stories, such as Joseph’s jealous brothers selling him into slavery.
• But to understand slavery from that era – or to combat slavery today – we also need to understand the longer history of involuntary labor.
• As a scholar of ancient slavery and early Christian history, I often encounter three myths that stand in the way of understanding ancient slavery and how systems of enslavement have evolved over time.

Myth #1: There is one kind of ‘biblical slavery’

• Most importantly, the Hebrew Bible – what Christians call “the Old Testament” – emerged primarily in the ancient Near East, while the New Testament emerged in the early Roman Empire.
• Rather, some people were temporarily enslaved to pay off their debts.
• The most anyone can say is that no biblical texts or writers explicitly condemn the institution of enslavement or the practice of chattel slavery.

Myth #2: Ancient slavery was not as cruel

• Like Myth #1, this myth often comes from conflating some Near Eastern and Egyptian practices of involuntary labor, such as debt slavery, with Greek and Roman chattel slavery.
• By focusing on other forms of involuntary labor in specific ancient cultures, it is easy to overlook the widespread practice of chattel slavery and its harshness.
• But even in an ancient world in which slavery was ever present, it is clear not everyone bought into the ideology of the elite enslavers.

Myth #3: Ancient slavery wasn’t discriminatory

• Slavery in the ancient Mediterranean wasn’t based on race or skin color in the same way as the transatlantic slave trade, but this doesn’t mean ancient systems of enslavement weren’t discriminatory.
• Much of the history of Greek and Roman slavery involves enslaving people from other groups: Athenians enslaving non-Athenians, Spartans enslaving non-Spartans, Romans enslaving non-Romans.
• Ancient slavery still depended on categorizing some groups of people as “others,” treating them as though they were wholly different from those who enslaved them.