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Hey all, it’s Max. In just a few hours, Donald Trump will regain control of the United States of America. I’d like to share my new related essay, inspired by a reporting trip I took to Las Vegas. I'd love if this story resonates and maybe inspires a few drops of hope-adjacent feelings within you. If so, please forward this along to a pal. Special thank you to Sequencer subscriber Franziska Bright for tipping me off to the “skeptics conference.” Tell me what you don’t knowScientific misinformation is a community problem. We can fight back by embracing uncertainty. Twenty-five floors above the clouds of indoor cigarette smoke at the Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, hundreds of self-described “skeptics” gathered to discuss science, health, and paranormal claims. But far from conspiracy thinking, this group organized by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry defines skepticism as questioning facts in good faith. They arrived to learn how to recognize and combat misinformation. And ten days before the 2024 presidential election, I traveled to their Las Vegas conference as a science reporter with a similar goal. We should all be concerned about the misinformation percolating in our communities. Donald Trump’s reelection has confirmed many fears about scientific misinformation’s cancerous upswing. Thus far he has tapped problematic choices for important roles — such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an outspoken obfuscator of vaccination. The president-elect himself peddled disinformation about recent wildfires in Los Angeles. Corrupt leaders pose direct threats to public health. Defeating pseudoscience is not about strategizing a coalition for a particular candidate or particular party every four years. It’s about building up people’s ability to sniff out bullshit. That’s what led me to Vegas. I wondered why our friends and family succumb to dangerous misinformation. What flaws in my own thinking make me vulnerable? And how can we move toward a shared reality, rather than away from one? Literacy in the limitsShortly after driving in from Los Angeles, I elevatored up the Horseshoe to meet Andrea Love, an immunologist scheduled to speak about the health pseudoscience blossoming in echo chambers. To Love, “skepticism” means not accepting information at face value. And danger flanks from both directions: When someone doubts so harshly that they reject logic or consensus, they veer cynically into conspiracy; if someone absorbs information from niche communities based on personality, rather than credibility, they may be misled. Misinformation is partly a community problem. Just consider the stats on Americans’ media diets. One in five of us gets news from influencers, and more than half get news from social media, according to Pew Research. Parasocial relationships lay tracks for biases and fear-mongering to crisscross our society like high-speed trains. Hours into the conference, I could see fault everywhere: scientists, journalists, and dodgy influencers. Exercise scientist Nick Tiller lectured about how “bad science” and weak peer review nourishes false claims, like the disproven assertion that concussion risk increases with elevation. Rina Raphael, author of The Gospel of Wellness, compared sloppy media coverage of the multi-trillion dollar wellness industry to entertainment. Health policy expert Tim Caulfield exposed charlatans hawking the “manly man” flavors of health misinformation behind trends like testicle tanning, eating raw liver, and drinking urine. You know things are getting weird when textbook cancer prevention practices like wearing sunscreen gets demonized as “unnatural” or “not masculine.” Grappling with the meaning of my own work, I wondered why it’s gotten hard to know who to trust. Traditionally, an expert “looks” like a fancy degree and “sounds” like certainty. But where has that gotten us? Florida Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, completed an M.D. and Ph.D. at Harvard, a professorship at NYU and UCLA, and brazenly lies about vaccines for political gain. Credentials and confidence don’t make the expert. To me, expertise is more about uncertainty. As a journalist, I’m encouraged when experts are upfront about their uncertainties. This is not a radical concept. Any good scientific article will trace the edges of its own confidence. Scientific literacy is about understanding what something is and isn’t. In Vegas, I noticed that Love and Caulfield consider our discomfort with uncertainty to be a true anxiety. Fear and hope sharpen the bite of pseudoscience. Fear of falling ill and hope of healing; fear of wasting money and hope of becoming rich; fear of a grim future and hope that it’ll be fine. When wildfires recently broke out across town from me in Los Angeles, it felt as if the whole metro area clung to local news and social media for the latest information. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. It filled me with dread to refresh my Watch Duty app and hear newscasters point out new “spot fires” in the canyons and hills I love. To grifters, uncertainty is an opportunity — primetime to sell unproven “lung detoxes” to people fearing post-fire air. We know that after wildfires burn homes, cars, and other structures, they release toxic organic compounds into the air. The messy truth is that we don’t know the long-term health effects of breathing air after mass structure fires. I can’t tell you where these toxins linger in the atmosphere above LA’s many valleys, nor what to do after exposure. But the more we can encourage our friends and family to expect messy answers and eschew people (literally) selling solutions, the more resilient we can be to people peddling misinformation. Uncertainty could also help counter misinformation. One Instagram grifter cited her own out-of-body experience, called remote viewing, as evidence of “three or four organizations” starting LA’s wildfires and faking the hot gusty Santa Ana winds that contributed to the fires’ spread. Conspiracies are inherently seductive, especially for those of us who distrust the rich and powerful. Rather than attempting to persuade with your own certainty — remember that we often don’t have all the answers either — misinformation experts recommend cultivating dissonance with questions, like "Who are ‘they?’" "What do ‘they’ gain?" We’re all vulnerable. We should neither withhold empathy, nor forget that nobody wants to believe falsehoods. Fear and hope sharpen the bite of pseudoscience. Fear of falling ill and hope of healing; fear of wasting money and hope of becoming rich; fear of a grim future and hope that it’ll be fine.
Let me practice what I preach by admitting where devotion to uncertainty falters. Bad people can profit from an expert’s candidness. Earth scientists’ acknowledge that it’s hard to predict how local climate will change this century; vaccine scientists acknowledge severe but rare side effects. Bad actors weaponize doubt. Straight answers are more alluring. As trust in journalists continues its distressing 50-year collapse and a handful of obsequious billionaires ooze into popular media, I simply do not know what agonies await. Still, nuanced answers are intellectually honest. While not as immediately gratifying as simpler answers, uncertainty is a vital piece of scientific literacy — the weapon we need to protect nature and human health in a democracy. A hopeful noteOn my second day at the conference, I noted to Caulfield that spending so much time thinking about scientific misinformation is, frankly, a huge bummer. So I asked him for some good news. He obliged: The battle against misinformation is expanding into online communities with more creators debunking lies faster and directly to audiences on social media and newsletters. “You're seeing all these great, diverse, smart, creative individuals who understand the mediums putting out great content,” Caulfield said. I wonder if we can elbow our way into even more optimism. Trust in scientists has recovered slightly from pandemic lows, from 73 to 76 percent. Those gains appeared in responses from both Democrats and Republicans. According to Pew’s Alec Tyson, there is clear bipartisan support for investing in basic science. Science is popular. Plus, it’s plainly in a person’s best interest to trust scientific consensus — whether for vaccination, supporting climate action, or avoiding wellness scams. According to Caulfield, fear-mongering narratives about masculinity provoke anxieties and habits that worsen wellness. Macho ideals make a person less likely to reach out for help with disease or depression, less likely to use prophylactics from masks to seatbelts, more likely to drink, smoke, feel isolated, more likely to have sleep issues, relationship problems, and, ironically: less satisfying sex. Once again: nobody wants to believe falsehoods. Those of us communicating science in good faith don’t have to manipulate our friends and family to act against their interests. The facts are on our side. Descending the casino elevator before my drive back home, I again smelled a cloud of cigarettes. The smoke was a noxious reminder. Scientists hypothesized smoking’s lung cancer risk 100 years ago. They proved it in the 1950s. After decades of tobacco industry lies, today’s public widely accepts that smoking is unsafe. Still: smoke. I know it’s not enough to side with facts. So I’ll hope that baseless health claims and climate denial are less addictive than nicotine — a gamble, no doubt.
What we’re working on:Kim: I’m finally back in DC, having completed a round-the-world trip in the last 30 days! I spent Christmas and New Year’s on the West Coast, then swung by my ancestral home, Malaysia, right after that. But as I painstakingly adjust back to East Coast time, my travels haven’t ended just yet. Like Maddie, I too have a career update: starting next week, I’ll be a fellow at High Country News! I’ll be covering issues about the American West for the magazine, but that means I’ll have to uproot myself once again to be based out of where I’ll be finding my stories. California, here I come! In case you’re wondering, I don’t plan to hit pause on Sequencer. Max: Huge congrats to Kim! We’re all so damn proud of her. I have a Q&A set to publish on here this week, so stay tuned to our website or socials (Bluesky, Instagram) if you want to catch it before next newsletter. Also, amid the TikTok chaos and Mark Zuckerberg being a giant fetid turd (allegedly/opinionsmyown/etc), I'm also hosting Sequencer’s shortform videos on YouTube. Subscribe to follow along. Here’s a video I produced about the Supreme Court allowing climate lawsuits against oil companies to proceed. Maddie: One cool story I worked on recently was about a community science project seeking volunteers to better understand the vaginal microbiome. I think that’s a neat way to engage people and (ideally) allow for decision-making about one’s own body and the science of it. It seems like there are sister projects around the world, so if you’re interested, I say do a quick Google to see if there are any in your area. What we’re reading:Kim: I don’t need to tell you how sucky the LA fire situation is, but this excellent Guardian piece highlights another kind of hellhole that humanity is finding itself in after the fires: the injustice of crowdfunding. Do you think that the internet is a democratic force that can correct for social inequalities? That crwdfunding works better than federal assistance, helping every disaster victim equally? Think again! Max: I just ordered the 1976 bicentennial magazine issue of National Geographic for a little side project, and it featured a cool science fiction story written by Isaac Asimov titled "The Next Frontier?" There’s probably a law preventing me from scanning the pages myself and sharing it with you on Sequencer .....… on an unrelated note look at this Flickr album. A couple other links: Maddie: Of note following Max’s stellar newsletter — thinking about the growing trend of eschewing fact-checkers and relying on…wisdom of the crowd? Vibes? I’ve been giving an annual presentation on the ins and outs of fact-checking for a group of budding science journalists for a few years now, and what I’m often struck by when I hear about fact-checkers losing their jobs is that the people in power making these decisions probably don’t understand how fact-checking works. And if they do, they’re pointing a finger at fact-checkers to purposely scapegoat them. And I’m on the hunt for a new time suck post-TikTok (if indeed it is post TikTok.) Something where I can turn my brain off. Any ideas?
Thanks for reading and forwarding. With love, The Sequencer Team Ø
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