THE END OF REALITY
Every one of us knows about climate change, but what if I told you that concerns surrounding climate change are highly exaggerated. Climate change is just part of the natural cycle. Changes are due to sunspots/galactic cosmic rays. CO2 is a small part of the atmosphere — it can’t have a large heating effect. Scientists manipulate all data sets to show a warming trend. Climate models are unreliable and too sensitive to carbon dioxide.
Above mentions “facts” are the part of the disinformation campaign run by oil and automobile companies, who are constantly lobbying to block struck climate laws and funding millions in research, selectively and smartly accelerating and promoting research that moves the needle in their interest.
There are a lot of advice swirling on the web about food and nutrition. You can find this disinformation scrolling through any of the social media platforms. The problem is that many of these nutrition claims are not science-based and are coming from so-called experts who haven’t studied nutrition or had any hands-on experience with food.
Until very recently, common wisdom held that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. We’ve anecdotally tied all sorts of ills to a failure to sit down to a “complete breakfast.” But health research has proven that skipping that fried egg or bowl of cereal does not, in fact, lead to weight gain, health issues or underperformance. Our reverence for breakfast is actually relatively recent. Before the late 19th century in the US, breakfast didn’t have any particular importance ascribed to it. But all that was changed by a small group of religious fanatics and lobbyists for cereal and bacon companies.
In the 1960s, the sugar industry-funded research downplayed the risks of sugar and highlighted the hazards of fat. An industry group called the Sugar Research Foundation wanted to “refute” concerns about sugar’s possible role in heart disease. The SRF then sponsored research by Harvard scientists that did just that. The result was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, with no disclosure of the sugar industry funding. The sugar-funded project in question was a literature review, examining a variety of studies and experiments. It suggested there were major problems with all the studies that implicated sugar, and concluded that cutting fat out of American diets was the best way to address coronary heart disease. That for the past five decades, the sugar industry has been attempting to influence the scientific debate over the relative risks of sugar and fat.“It was a very smart thing the sugar industry did, because review papers, especially if you get them published in a very prominent journal, tend to shape the overall scientific discussion.
Commercial firms also rely on fiction and fake news. Branding often involves retelling the same fictional story again and again, until people become convinced it is the truth. What images come to mind when you think about Coca-Cola? Do you think about healthy young people engaging in sports and having fun together? Or do you think about overweight diabetes patients lying in a hospital bed? Drinking lots of Coca-Cola will not make you young, will not make you healthy, and will not make you athletic — rather, it will increase your chances of suffering from obesity and diabetes. Yet for decades Coca-Cola has invested billions of dollars in linking itself to youth, health, and sports — and billions of humans subconsciously believe in this linkage.
Well, one might say this is a different age, and today we may well just google stuff to find out what is true and what's not. Well, good luck with that.
Don’t get me wrong, the democratization of information in the age of the internet has its perks, but the issue of trust is just as important.
Today you will find thousands of article and blogs spreading disinformation like never before. Disinformation and fake news existed since the dawn of humanity, but its recent acceleration and expansion in scale has made it impossible for us humans to catch up with. We will find multiple versions of even well established scientific facts on the web. How does one decide what is the truth?
It gets scarier when the government use this vulnerability to their advantage, and fool an entire nation. For example, in the recent CORONA VIRUS crisis, China allegedly hid information that created the mess, all around the world.
While some campaigns are easy to spot, others are as good as truth itself. Disinformation campaign at this scale steals from the public the power to know about the truth. People are given a choice to choose from contradicting stories, they choose the one that suits them, with complete disregard for reality.
This is a win-win for both sides. Only truth loses.
Humans have a remarkable ability to know and not know at the same time. Or, more correctly, they can know something when they really think about it, but most of the time they don’t think about it, so they don’t know it. If you really focus, you realize that money is fiction. But you usually don’t think about it. If you are asked about it, you know that soccer is a human invention. But in the heat of a match, nobody asks. If you devote the time and energy, you can discover that nations are elaborate yarns. But in the midst of a war, you don’t have the time and energy.
This is the post-truth era we live in. Not to say that with recent advances in deep fake technology this is just going to get worse.
Top minds all over the world are racing to find a solution, but till the time we have one, a careful thought before forwarding a Whatsapp message, or proof-checking before retweeting may help.
