The Age of Approximation

New map reveals distrust in health expertise is winning hearts and minds online
May 2020, phys.org

Communities on Facebook that distrust establishment health guidance are more effective than government health agencies and other reliable health groups at reaching and engaging "undecided" individuals, according to a study published today in the journal Nature. 

Distrust in establishment health guidance could spread and dominate online conversations over the next decade, potentially jeopardizing public health efforts to protect populations from COVID-19 and future pandemics through vaccinations. [link]

Medical science is an interesting subset upon which to study the dynamics of memetics. Ludwig Fleck used medical science to study his idea of the "evolution of a scientific fact" using the history of syphilis. He showed how the ideas that characterize syphilis (the syphilis meme) evolve via the sharing of experimental data between scientists.

Unlike some other sciences, medical science has a specific purpose -- to releive suffereing, or something to that effect. It can be measured, in controlled experiments, by the amount of people who are sick or well. If it works, or in another way of saying it -- if it's true -- then people get well. In a twist on the Feynman Psalm, you can't say that you understand syphilis until you can cure someone of it.

Let's shift from syphilis to vaccines. If we know how vaccines work, why, and not only if but how much of a positive health outcome we can get from them, then it should be safe to say that our understanding is the truth. And yet, as with many public health interventions, it is difficult to get people to believe this truth.

But this is something that Fleck also discussed in his meta-scientific discourse. He described two networks among which ideas are shared. One is a network of scientists, the esoteric network. This is where syphilis, or vaccines, are really studied, observed, worked with and thought about. The other network is the exoteric, the laypeople, the public. Scientists and the public.

Within either of these networks, the evolution of a scientific fact, as Fleck describes it, starts with an initial anomalous, ambiguous observation. This first idea, formless, spreads through the network with minimal restrictions, recombining with other facts from other disciplines and theories, in a prodigiously creative affair.

Over time, as the idea of syphilis begins to take shape, the network splits in two; all the rampant theories self-organize by their correlated characteristics and relative fitness, until there are two.* At this point the debate becomes ultimately controversial, and the scientists break sharply into their opposing sides. Eventually, one wins, and sets the final limits, or rules, on how we can think about syphilis, what it really is, does, and how to make people better if they suffer from it, and in the most effective way possible.
*In this case, fitness is "making people well".

The lesson we get from the current anti-vaccination network, circa the year 2019, is that science has to go through one more transformation to really be considered the truth. It needs to traverse the public network of laypeople, and self-organize within --their-- epistemological constructs, --their-- ideas of what things are.

A stark contrast, the exoteric network of the general population has a wild conflagration of code in its operation. This lets the network expand into all kinds of experimental dimensions as it searches for the best fit. Consider, the group of global scientists, large as it may be, is nothing compared to the overall population.

Yet, the popular exoteric network needs to self-organize. The more people, the more iterations it may invoke before it finds a fit that satisfies all the people in it. (Note that we're talking here about the idea being satisfied within your belief structure, not whether the idea is medically effective or not, because in the public sphere, that's not good enough.)

The meme takes shape when the network bifurcates, or polarizes. It trims the innumerable variety of personal theories, forcing or constraining the conversation. Those with outlying views, the undecided referenced above, get picked-off, drawn to one side or the other, and until there is only one.

What we're seeing firsthand is the exoteric vaccine-memetic-network crystallize and organize itself, through the data that comes from digitally mediated social transmission (ie Facebook posts). This new spread of misinformation is a growth spurt, if you will, in the evolution of the exoteric network.

A larger pattern being described here is that because the pool of people in the general population, through which this idea has to travel, keeps getting bigger, and keeps changing people, the truth is never really achieved, as it is a moving target. This comes to the same conclusion as Fleck, and the one that has most people flummoxed about it, which is that there is no such thing as absolute truth. Big data begets the age of approximation.

Study Data:
100 million Facebook users in vaccine community networks during the 2019 measles outbreak.

Post Script:
What is not mentioned in the summary article referenced at the outset, is how many of these users were known or suspected to be socialbots or composite intelligentities, vs real people. And therefore, we don't see the effect of non-human interference, ie socialbots programmed to amplify an idea, "artificially". I think we can just call it deception, and say that people have been doing it forever. Yet, we should keep in mind their effects, as they're only bound to increase.

Notes:
The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2281-1. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2281-1