Deliberate deception

Paradoxers can be made, as well as born.

We haven’t talked about paradoxers for a while, though their characteristics should be familiar.  A paradoxer hasn’t learned, or has misunderstood, a certain topic in science or mathematics; has come up with his or her own analysis, which is flawed in some way; and has decided that the experts in the field are wrong, and he or she is right.  Typically, the paradoxer cannot be convinced otherwise; we coined the term “semi-paradoxer” for those who can be.  The name “paradoxer” comes from the nineteenth-century mathematician Augustus de Morgan, who collected their writings (in a dense book that you might dip into, if you can find a copy).  This is background to an episode from last week.

Our tutoring consultant was shown a posting on Tik-Tok by one of the other tutors.  The authors (posters?) identified themselves as NASA scientists, and said they’d found two or three stars in Hubble and JWST images that had just disappeared, with no apparent explanation.  This is plausible so far.  But they then used the wrong term for scientific equipment, and attributed observations to instruments that could not have made them; eventually they wound up charging that NASA had discovered proof of alien structures around distant stars, and was hiding the fact.

Now, there are paradoxers who have taken observations made public (there are more of those all the time) and misinterpreted them.  Not these authors.  A paradoxer believes in his or her error; these had constructed a lie, start to finish.  They were not NASA scientists; there were too many obvious errors.  Most of the observations they cited were impossible, not just misinterpreted.

But this posting will (almost certainly) create paradoxers.  The tutor who showed our consultant the post didn’t have the background to discredit it, which is why he asked about it.  Others will not have an astronomer or physicist at hand to ask.  Some of them will take it as truth, and we have new paradoxers.

Well, deliberate, pernicious lies are (sadly) not new.  But they seem to be characteristic of our age, encouraged by social media and by the sophisticated means we now have to create fakes.  There are whole websites dedicated to correcting errors that appear in the media; unfortunately, they are far less visited than the erroneous media themselves.  This example is actually relatively harmless.  Many others are not.  You could cite several without even trying.

We don’t have a good answer for what to do about it.  We can point out deceptions when we see them.  But we’re not everywhere.