Reaching Intellectual Herd Immunity

Since posting my last blog entry, I’ve remembered something which, upon consideration, makes me realize my hope for what I called a “Cloud Based BS detector” was a faint one. 

It was during the early days of the internet.  I might have been using AOL to get online.  For those who don’t remember it was one of the first services to allow people to get online and connect with each other.  Their CDs to get you started used to be ubiquitous.  

I was a big lover of the internet in it’s early days.  It made my computer (a Macintosh Performa at the time) more like the computers on Star Trek that anything had been up until then.  That had been my standard of what computing was supposed to be like.  You’d say, “Computer…”, ask your question and then get an answer.  It may not have had Majel Barrett’s voice, and it didn’t necessarily point out the best, most accurate answer from the list it brought up, but I remember running my first search online and thinking to myself, “Yes!  This is what I’ve been waiting for!” 

It was the day I encountered the flip side of that coin, that still plagues us today, that I’m considering.  

As something of a futurist and a science fiction writer, I spent a lot of time looking for state of future technologies.  Fusion power was one in particular that I had an interest in.  It was about that time that I think I first encountered the quip, “Commercial fusion power is twenty years in the future.  And it always will be.”  

This one day, though, for a moment, it looked like it might be right around the corner.  I don’t recall how I came across it, but I found a website that seemed to indicate that researchers had solved problem of creating a reaction that produced more power that it took to initiate or run.  This is one of the hurdles fusion power has yet to solve, except in the most extreme and  inconvenient example of a hydrogen bomb.  

I was plowing through the pages of results offered, trying to understand it all, if only enough to be able to explain it to others and use it in a story, when I found a page that identified the organization that was posting this information on line.  It was the organization created by Lyndon  LaRouche.  

For those who don’t remember or never heard of Lyndon LaRouche, he was a political activist from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s.  He was also the first person I knew about that I would dub a “conspiracy theorist” before I had heard of the term.  From the time I was a senior in high school until his death in 2019 he was nominally a member of the Democratic party, though it was an uncomfortable relationship from what I recall.  He did run for President in every election from 1976 to 2004.  

One of the issues he advanced was about fusion energy and the reasons it always seemed to be twenty years in the future.  I was aware of his beliefs at the time, and when I saw his name on the page my enthusiasm fell precipitously.  I went back and went over the information presented and read more closely the introductory pages of the presentation.  There I found the statements of why the information being provided was being “kept from us.”  I can’t remember the forces he named, but it’s a familiar story told in different versions multiple times.  

At that point, I checked the sources referenced in the data presentations, double-checked more reputable sources, and came to the conclusion that it was what I had become afraid it might be.  I deleted the bookmark I had made to return to the page later and moved on.  

Remembering that search and my response, I think I did exactly what everyone should do when presented with information about something that concerns you, particularly a topic you find important.  I verified the truth in the presentation as best I could and found it lacking.  A collection of half-truths, backed up by speculation and “evidence” that had been edited to delete anything that detracted by what the person presenting it believed.  It was disappointing.  

What’s even more disappointing is that this action, if we were employ it every time we are confronted with misinformation, would take up almost every waking hour that we have in a day.  So many out there are throwing out some of the most outlandish beliefs at such a rate, that the best we can do is glean over it, make a decision about what you think you know, or what you remember hearing from a source you trust, and then move on.  And, hope that others more gullible that you are (or hope you are) don’t fall for it and try to take us down a disastrous path.  Judging by the numbers for some of the more recent batch of conspiracy theories, that is a faint hope.  

A passage from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens comes to mind.  It’s the scene when Ebenezer Scrooge notices something under the cloak of the Ghost of Christmas Present.  The ghost opens his cloak to reveal two starving children huddled at his feet.  They are mankind’s children, he proclaims, though he takes care of them.  They are a boy named Ignorance and a girl named Want.  We are to beware of them both, the ghost declares, but especially we are to beware of Ignorance.  

We are in the midst of two pandemics.  One is the physical pandemic of Covid-19.  There other is the intellectual pandemic of misinformation.  Like the physical pandemic, the intellectual one has very likely infected more people than we’ve counted.  The keys for defeating it, like the one for Covid-19, depends on everyone being responsible and diligent in protecting themselves.  Using masks of critical thinking to screen out viruses or memes that would infect us with bad information and spread it to others as if it were truth.  

And like the physical virus, fighting the spread of the virus of misinformation, lies, and falsehoods, is going to take a long time to defeat.  Even as vaccines are finally getting out to people, we’re still looking at weeks and months before we reach “herd immunity” with Covid and can face each other as we did before.  

Reaching an intellectual form of herd immunity will take much, much, MUCH longer, I’m afraid.