Disinformation
Objective information is often found by looking deep into a subject using science and a microscope. The issue with this is the data points which are collected and published behind paywalls and then interpreted by bias institutions and regurgitated as news. With the advent its a common fallacy but an argument flat earthers always come up with is have you ever seen the world as a sphere? There are under 1,000 people on earth[1] who have done so however the majority of the earth populace believe the earth to be a sphere, so how did they come to this conclusion?
The human mind has evolved heuristics which allow weighting of information based upon its perceived authority. For instance, story of the BOY who cried wolf, might have ended differently if the protagonist was a middle aged doctor in a lab coat[2]. We have negative weighting to younger people when exchanging information, it seems the older a person is the more wisdom and weight. This may have made sense during the pre-internet era as information was less dynamic, however today longevity is more of a hindrance than a benefit as it have been found that neuroplasticity which is of the utmost importance during crisis wanes with age.
Irregardless of perceived authority, the flat earth conspiracy theorist has a point, how do you know information is from a non bias source without being able to check the source yourself. This is where the open information age has become indispensable.
Sci-Hub
A huge amount of science is done every year in universities and laboratories around the world scientists unlike designers do not hide their secrets behind closed doors as they welcome criticism in the form of peer review. As such scientific papers are published behind a public paywall and are only free to university boffins. The issue with this is that the majority of scientists in the world live outside of the Western university structure and cannot access this raw data as it is placed behind a corporate paywalls maintained by corporates such as:
- Academic Press (Elsevier)
- Cambridge University Press
- Oxford University Press
- Sage Publications
To get the most accurate view of a hazy subject the best way is to get as many data point as possible however the system is set up to conversely punish whoever wants to achieve this by associating a cost to every extra paper which is downloaded. A clever computer scientist named Aaron Schwartz (a co creator of Reddit) figured this out in 2011, he learnt for the world to emerge from a fake news dystopia barriers to access to as many data points as possible was imperative. As such he downloaded as many papers from MIT and JSTOR as possible and then uploaded it to the web for any scientist to access. This one event in history just in the medical sciences has saved countless lives as doctors from China and India for the first time could access this raw knowledge, free of charge.
Unfortunately, Schwartz was caught by the FBI and subsequently committed suicide as he faced 35 years in jail. However, fortunately, the banner of open access information has now been picked up by Alexandra Elbakyan, "the pirate queen" and this information is now published via her website sci-hub, which is the main resource of knowledge for burnzero.com.
References
- ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_travelers_by_nationality#:~:text=5%20Notes-,Statistics,according%20to%20the%20American%20definition.
- ↑ Chaput de Saintonge DM, Herxheimer A. Harmessing placebo effects in health care. Lancet. 1994;344:995–8. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]