Today, it is all too common to find would-be Montaignes starting with an opinion and using it as though it were fact. This leaves us with the difficult problem of separating reliable, objective fact from opinion. If two people present diverging views on a subject, whom should one trust? Which one is presenting fact and which opinion?
This should be a relatively simple exercise, but, because of sophistry, spin and the deliberate misinterpretation of information, it has become increasing difficult to distinguish true facts from the plethora of dubious opinions with which we are constantly bombarded. Fact is verifiable information, numbers or observations, spontaneous or experimental, that can be reliably reproduced, and is compatible with the existing web of knowledge. Unfortunately, the misinformation explosion has swamped factual stories. The improbable sells more newspapers than the probable. The more times an improbable, unsupported story is reported, the more it enters into the folklore of what ‘everybody knows’.
Ask anyone how many people died in the Chernobyl disaster and the response is likely to be that ‘everyone knows’ it was hundreds or thousands. We have been deliberately led to believe this story by those opposed to nuclear energy. In fact the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported in 2003 that there were fewer than 40 deaths in the 20 years following the disaster. Although there was a significant increase in the number of cases of cancer of the thyroid, there was not any increase noticed in the incidence of leukaemia or birth defects.
Who is going to give us accurate, unbiased information that we can trust? We should be able to trust various governmental bodies and independent broadcasters such as the BBC. Unfortunately, even these usually reliable bodies fall into the misinformation trap. The BBC, the government, its Chief Medical Officer and the Food Standards Agency, to take some examples, may not set out to be partisan or to push deliberate falsehoods, but the information presented, even by these authoritative bodies, is subject to the bias of the presenter and his or her particular interpretation of information. The result is that too often opinion becomes presented as fact.
There seems to be a mistaken belief within the BBC that equal weight must be given to both sides of a problem. The author Douglas Adams put it succinctly when he wrote, ‘All opinions are not equal. Some are a great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.’ The concept that fair play demands that all opinions be treated equally is nonsense. But today we frequently see warriors against reason paraded as heroes on the BBC, representing this or that irrational pressure group. The BBC gives them credibility. Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour recently gave air time to an advocate of coffee enemas who claimed it had cured his cancer. They failed to explain why taking coffee by this somewhat curious route should be better than taking it by mouth. By giving this contributor the same opportunity as an expert, to present a totally ludicrous opinion on the air, the BBC implied that his views have the same legitimacy as those of an informed spokesperson on the subject. The BBC bestows an undeserved and inappropriate authority on the advocates of silly therapies, unproven diets and irrational scare stories. Their ideas gain an undeserved credence as a result of the media obsession with providing a ‘balanced debate’.
The government warning against eating too much salt sits uneasily with its own advice to replace both the water and salt lost in hot weather, and also with the statement in its own briefing document, published by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) in 2004, that the ‘Intersalt study (1997), the largest ever carried out, found no correlation between salt intake and blood pressure’.
The report of the Parliamentary Select Committee in 2004, as reported by the BBC, stated that obesity has increased 400 per cent in 25 years – when international agreement on the interpretation of the measurement of obesity by the body-mass index (BMI), was established only about fifteen years ago. Before that time the very different, Metropolitan Life Insurance tables were used as an index of obesity.
The Food Standards Agency, usually a source of reliable information, has become a political, pioneering body that believes children will not get fat if vending machines sell fruit juice and milk rather than cola, despite the fact that fruit juice contains slightly more calories. A recent pronouncement that as a result of the epidemic of obesity the present generation will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents is silly specious propaganda: how can one know the life expectancy of a generation until most of them have died?
So how can we tell?
This, then, is the problem: how do we know that what we are being told is reliable and factual? The first step is to exclude the phoneys, the Flat Earth Society proponents and those who claim that meditation, wearing blue beads or standing on your head for half an hour each day or similar will cure cancer. Their ideas are so ludicrous that they can be readily spotted. It is a failing of our society, with all its laws to protect the consumer, that we allow such charlatans to prey upon the desperate plight of sick or ignorant people.
More plausible are the self-promoting experts who try to scare us with stories of impending doom. They talk in meaningless slogans such as ‘freeing your spiritual self’ (from what? one asks); ‘the flooding of Leningrad and London’ (there was little evidence of a rise in the sea level, in the vulnerable Seychelles, in the five years up to 2003); ‘concreting over the countryside’ (looking down on the British countryside from an aeroplane at a few thousand feet, you cannot even spot the motorways); Frankenstein foods (GM food has been on sale in many countries for years and no ill effect has been reported); ‘epidemic of obesity’ (since when has fatness been a contagious disease?); and so on. The ideas behind their slogans are scientifically improbable, but refuting them with absolute certainty is virtually impossible.
So, when an interviewer asks a scientist, ‘Can you rule out the possibility that London may be flooded in the future?’, to which of course the scientist cannot categorically answer no, it results in the headline: ‘SCIENTIST CONFIRMS LONDON MAY FLOOD’.
Having eliminated the pedlars of the irrational, one is left with the advocates of the plausible. Unless one is particularly well informed, one has to rely on the advice of an expert as to what is likely to be fact and what is opinion. The problem then becomes, who is an expert?
We tend to look to the universities for scholarly advice. By and large the older, major universities are more demanding in the qualifications of their academic staff than the newer ones, and the older mainstream areas of study have a more predictable level of scientific attainment. Experts from universities with a well-established reputation for research are likely to be more reliable, but may also be more reluctant to accept valid but novel or iconoclastic ideas. Few of us can check the curriculum vitae or the source of information used by everyone claiming to be an expert, but in certain circumstances credibility can be inferred from the publication in which it appeared. Table 1 indicates a progression of reliability of the information in peer-reviewed journals to statements by propagandists and pressure groups.
TABLE 1
Medicine is a more rigorous course of study than that of nursing or one of the allied therapies. It is reasonable, therefore, to believe that the opinion of a medical doctor is more likely to be credible than that of a therapist. Like all broad generalisations, this is subject to notable exceptions. There is no essential course of study that qualifies one to be called a ‘health expert’, or to call oneself a ‘noninterventionist surgeon’. It is not necessary to study human physiology to become ‘an expert’ on nutrition or food (indeed a former chairman of the Food Standards Agency was a zoologist), whereas there is an essential core course of scientific study in order to become a doctor. Academic doctors are not necessarily more expert than practising ones, but because of the nature of their work they are more likely to question an opinion and to be more demanding in the standard of evidence before they will accept a statement as true.
Life would be much simpler and safer if we could immediately recognise an expert and rely upon his or