Andrew Revkin posted an
interesting article a few weeks back:
Lately, I’ve come to
frame the challenge as a question: Can we foster an online (and real-life)
culture in which veracity is cool? You’ll see more on this here in the coming
months.
As social primates, we are instinctively motivated to seek
higher status in our given troop hierarchies. The word cool is sometimes used as a synonym for impressive. Impressive denotes
a measure of status. Coolness is any marketer's primary weapon. I like Andy's
idea of making veracity cool, but I'm skeptical it could ever take hold. How
would car marketers ever convince us to buy their cars? Although, certainly,
he's on the right track in that, if you want to change behavior, like getting
people to drive electric cars (or Hummers), convincing them it's cool to drive one will
work wonders.
What I think we need is to teach critical thinking skills in our
schools as part of every math and science course, from grade school through
college, and test for competency like we do for math and science.
His post led me to Climate Feedback, a website
designed to fact check climate change articles. I was struck by how similar
the format was to the Disqus comment software where you can use a little
hypertext markup language to highlight quotes from an article and then discuss
it in detail with links to sources, photos, graphs etc. They also made use
of a veracity score which I have half-seriously used a few times myself, here
and here.
The first question that came to mind was why the scientists didn't
simply post in the comment field under the article? I suggested as much in a comment under
Andy's article and interestingly enough, at least to me, my comment never made
it past the Dot Earth moderator. So, maybe that was the answer to my question.
