Ethics of checking facts

Checking facts today is incredibly hard. We have a moral obligation to check facts and very few tools that actually work. The suggested solution is not perfect: we check more what requires closer attention. The priorities are guided by our moral compass and practical needs. More reading here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Why has checking facts become so hard?

I have some religious friends, for whom checking facts is as easy as asking their rabbi. From there it is a chain of unbroken respect and authority to some semi-mythical accounts of semi-mythical events, and unbroken faith.

For those of us who prefer something more scientific, there is the scientific approach of collecting evidence, building a theory that can predict future events, and verifying that the prediction worked. This method is not ideal, but if it works life is significantly easier.

If neither reputable sources nor scientific approaches worked, people used to trust their own eyes. Unfortunately, today there are AI systems that can create information more trustworthy than the truth itself. Science is limited, biased, and expensive. Reputable sources have been found corrupted, and there is very little we can do to check facts.

Why do we need to check anything?

One approach to fact-checking issues would be garbage in garbage out. Social media is full of not-very-trustworthy influencers translating shocking eye-catching information as soon as they see it themselves. This effect is incentivized by social media and it is often used by ruthless and malevolent criminal elements and propaganda machines.

If we do not check the facts before transmitting them the following effects happen:

1. People will retransmit the information further, generating havoc and disinformation.
2. We will not be trusted if by some miracle we uncover something truly newsworthy.
3. While we may enjoy increased traffic, the value per user will decrease. Smart people follow trustworthy sources.
4. Somebody might get hurt and retaliate, for example launching a legal campaign.
5. We may be banned from running the media that is our main income source, like a YouTube channel.

None of these effects is good. If we write down something small and boring, our mistakes might not become visible. When we say something huge, the penalty for misleading can be equally huge.

Is skepticism dangerous?

More often than not skepticism is annoying but not very dangerous. It becomes ethically dangerous when people tend to disbelieve in authorities performed by Nazis or by terrorist organizations. When individuals and groups that need to be stopped are not stopped, our entire way of life is in danger.

It is very easy to doubt reports of victims of sexual abuse, genocide or totalitarian regimes. These victims cannot bring sufficient proof, and even when they provide such proof, the mind fails to accept the evidence. It does not help that many powerful organizations are invested in misleading public opinion. For example, Qatar is the biggest investor in American Ivy League Universities and in the terrorist organization Hamas. Clearly, Qatar has both means and interests to undermine the distribution of evidence of atrocities performed by Hamas.

Thus misplaced skepticism can be ethically as bad as gullability.

 Self-perpetuated claims

Some myths tend to self-perpetualize. When we see the same answer everywhere we look, finding the root cause is hard. Some examples.

The IQ of Benjamin Netanyahu is 185. That claim appears in multiple sources and originated from some poorly edited businessinsider article more than a decade ago. While there is no reason to doubt high IQ level, the actual measured score was never published.

People do not cheat after reading the Bible. This claim was generated by Dan Arieli. Since Dan Arieli holds a Ph.D. in psychology and his work was published in top scientific journals, people had no reason to doubt this claim. Unfortunately, the claim was not reproduced in several follow-up experiments. After a decade, the original methodology was investigated. Unfortunately, the claim was based on fabricated numbers. The claims are still cited, even though the research was invalidated.

There are multiple quotes attributed to Albert Einstein. After all, it is very hard to argue with a genius of this caliber. Unfortunately, the majority of these claims are attributed incorrectly. This does not invalidate the claims. Possibly Einstein would gladly approve. Simply Einstein himself never talked about specific subjects or formulated his opinion differently.

Scientific and business publications have a good reputation, and whatever is published there is retransmitted through the media. It is often very hard to stage experiments verifying scientific results. It is a common consensus that about 60% of published scientific results are incorrect, typically due to some measurement error or statistical variation. As long as the results do not contradict common sense, they are not being questioned.

Reputation-based evaluation

Search engines and journalists usually evaluate facts based on reputable sources. If the information arrived from multiple reputable sources, it is probably true. In case of doubt, some experts are asked, and experts themselves often perform a similar search. Staging experiments to verify known facts and checking hundreds of pages of math formulas can be hard and not financially rewarding. However, multiple reputable sources can simply copy from a single origin, perpetuating the fallacy.

This issue is as old as humanity. In the epicenter of every cult and religion are charismatic and typically not very trustworthy people generating amazing information. Immediately after them are trustworthy people who benefit from retransmitting the message most compellingly, and who are possibly equally misguided by the creators of the myth.

We cannot fully discard these ideas, as they are often formulated in a way that cannot be proven or contradicted.  Instead, we may use cautious phrasing, quoting our source of information. Alternatively, we may skip any attempt to prove something and claim our own beliefs or experience.

If possible, it is recommended to look for controversy and check the history of the idea. There are dedicated scholars who try to track common memes and misconceptions, and their results are typically trustworthy as they check each other.

Anecdotal evidence

We can quote anecdotal stories, as long as we label them as personal experiences. Such experiences do not have to be statistically sound. Every year there are multiple victors of huge lotteries – these outliers are incredibly rare, and yet they exist everywhere. Quoting a large number of people who win the lottery does not change the statistics. The chances of winning are negligible.

In our lives, we see many events of all kinds. Predictable events are usually ignored, but outliers catch our attention. It is OK to quote personal experience, especially for an expert. Usually, there is no reason to doubt such experience, as long as there is some sort of statistical information showing that we deal with something usual or with a rare outlier.

Statistics are inherently trustworthy but can be manipulated in so many ways that we instinctively do not trust statistical results. Yet we often forget that statistics are more reliable than any sort of hearsay.

Moral violation theory

We cannot really test all possible claims that we analyze. Scientific experiments are expensive. Instead, we may focus on violations. These included violations of loyalty, fairness, authority, care for others, as well as violations of social norms. Violations of purity (like watching deviant videos) and liberty can be treated differently. The theory assumes that if a person made one violation of a category (say authority), they were also likely to make another violation of the same category.

Some people will violate the codes of society, but not their moral codes. For others, moral codes tend to be iffy. All of this is contextual. Normal people in abnormal circumstances will do terrible things. This is especially horrible when we analyze the behavior of war criminals and cult leaders.  Not all war criminals are psychologically deviant. Some of them are seemingly normal or even heroic.

The opposite mistake is also common. Prisons are full of people who were convicted of something they did not do simply because they satisfy a negative stereotype.

Sherlock Holmes was wrong

The stories of the notorious detective inspired the creation of criminology. While a flawed science is better than no science, following the logic of the original detective stories would be a very bad idea. One needs to establish crime beyond reasonable doubt, and not insist that the most reasonable idea is actually true. In fact, Conan Doyle had one experience of discovering a true crime, and several experiences of falling for mystification. There are stories when Conan Doyle believed that Houdini was full of true magic.

Science can be magical, but magic is rarely scientific. Moreover, even science like criminology was not very reliable before DNA analysis. Most people have very common blood types and many are ambidexterous and choose which hand to use.

Science fails when predicting the future.

An easy way to check the validity of any theory is by verifying its predictive capabilities. Science like economy should be able to predict macroeconomic economic trends and the results of economic policies. This does not happen. Even the best economists like Kaynes or Black & Scholes were notoriously bad investors. We should not blame the scientists. Simply the science of economy is not sufficiently reliable to predict the future and avoid crisis.

Even when every factchecking way we know supports the results, possibly the theory fails this most basic criterion of the scientific method. Whatever we do, it is etically a bad idea to try and implement iffy economic theories in governance of countries. As a clear example, I can state communis,

Conclusion

We can try to check reputable sources or apply scientific method. This is better than nothing. However, we should not trust our detective skills completely. Instead we should address the possible damage of our actions. Both promoting false allegations and failing to promote truth can be ethically problematic. When everything fails, we can still state our believes and quote our resources, trusting our readers to make their own moral choice.