The Event Horizon Of Truth

In astrophysics, an event horizon and singularity are the two basic components of a black hole. According to study.com, an event horizon is “A boundary within spacetime itself beyond which events that happen can't affect you. Events beyond this boundary are either so far away, or so disconnected from you, that you cannot see them, hear them, or receive any kind of knowledge that they happened.” 

Whatever happens beyond an event horizon cannot be seen, and in many ways this can serve as an apt metaphor for how our seemingly infinite access to information is actually drowning us in a sea of misinformation right now, along with facts, breaking news, conspiracy theories and the like. It’s nearly impossible to know who to trust or how to see what’s really going on anymore. The axiom “Trust but verify” has now evolved into “Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not.”

The scientific method

Either social media has destroyed the scientific method or we have hit the event horizon and better learn to live with it.

As you would see in any eighth grade biology book, “Learning about the scientific method is almost like saying that you are learning how to learn. The scientific method is a process used by scientists to study the world around them. It can also be used to test whether any statement is accurate.” The scientific method breaks down as the process of coming up with a hypothesis, performing experiments to test that hypothesis, refining the idea, performing more experiments, and then coming to a final conclusion.

Social media, however, operates on advertising revenues from clickbait articles just as news sources rely on sensationalist coverage for more eyeballs. Any bit of information or misinformation is shared, covered and discussed. The more absurd, the more attention it receives. Meanwhile, actual scientific voices amid the Covid-19 pandemic have been largely silenced or ignored in many of the world’s most powerful countries. If something reported is wrong, news sources will print a retraction at the most, but the advertising dollars will still stay in their pockets.

The amount of censorship, politics and class disparity in the supposedly “pure data” has now contaminated that data. It’s been altered to such a degree that we can no longer predict the future of human behavior. Even looking at past events seems to only offer us limited insight at this point. 

This is all out of a playbook

There’s a lot of true stuff in the news lately that sounds like it’s crazy and vice versa. But it’s clear that there’s enough true stuff not being covered, and we should be concerned about the censorship. Every “expert” advertisement or well designed obfuscation feels and reads like gaslighting. Even something like the recent conspiracy viral video “Plandemic” which was quickly banned by Facebook and YouTube, plays a part in our web of information. The mere act of tech companies banning that video gave the story a certain credibility to its anti-vaccine audience and helped Judy Mikovits sell even more books. The hot button topic then becomes “Who qualifies as an expert?”

If we demanded a commitment to the scientific method before allowing governments and news media to broadcast something as truth or breaking news, these sorts of conspiracy theories would hold less credence and wouldn’t even be mentioned by serious journalists, or banned by our tech companies. There would be no reason to if we all cared enough about the truth to follow proven science. Because of our current flow of information, these theories attract the skeptical among us. Anyone with any theory can find confirmation bias just as easily as finding information contrary to their opinions.

On the same day, you could find an article online that says that Hydroxychloroquine may be effective in treating Covid-19, and you could find an article saying that it isn’t effective. You can hear that the president of the United States himself is taking that drug, and you can hear claims that he probably isn’t. You can find disagreement over whether masks work or don’t work. You can find a piece that says that children don’t get seriously ill from the virus, and you can find a piece that says that children may be at risk from the virus. You can read that the tests are unreliable, and you can also read that the tests are accurate. Even the reporting metrics for tests has been wrought with issues state by state. There is no lack of contradictory claims or news stories on a daily basis right now. That misinformation then breeds even more misinformation.

More than a fifth of people in England believe that Covid-19 is a hoax and half of Fox News viewers in the U.S. believe that Bill Gates wants to use virus vaccines to track them. According to Carnegie Mellon University, nearly half of the Twitter accounts discussing “reopening America” may be bots. The public is left operating out of confusion and fear while the federal government has opted out of providing any sort of leadership or clarity, or any sense of respect for the scientific method. In Russia, doctors keep falling out of windows. In China, news of the outbreak had been suppressed since December. And in the United States, well, we basically invented modern propaganda. 

The text most applicable here is "The Medium is the Message" by Marshall McLuhan, in which he explains that, “The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be considered.” Social media has helped to weaponize and destroy the scientific method, and now fake news aggregators are making up facts without sources. 

Everything seems difficult to piece together these days, and so we may be at an event horizon where so much crap has contaminated the raw data that we're just unable to predict the future anymore, at all. In South Korea, schools were reopened and then closed hours later, which in hindsight seems like it would have been predictable or preventable. We do need all types of input and debate. We don't need "protected" from even the craziest of ideas. Even if there were 100,000 tin foil flat earthers protesting outside with assault rifles, there would surely still be enough people who are able to see around corners and have unique enough insights that could lead us in the direction of truth and reason. 

We need to return to the scientific method

At the end of the day, the logical conclusion is that we desperately need credible data that can be openly debated without influence or censorship by governments or tech companies. The fact that debate and engagement is how these companies make money is another reason to discredit the claims of media ownership creating fake news. It's capitalism at its finest, and its worst. The irony is that any CEO would insist that their company should use the right data points to promote a marketing campaign on social media, and yet the information the public receives on these same sites regarding our health and safety during a pandemic is itself riddled with inaccurate data points. 

We’ve reached something similar to what Aviv Ovadya predicted as an impending “Infocalypse.” Science is politicized and has now essentially become about marketing. The data we are given is badly skewed at the very least. How about just pushing for a return to respecting the scientific method and rigorously challenging a hypothesis? Failure to do this is the cause of fake news. Facts are facts and should withstand rigorous debate. It's the debate that should spread ideas.