New Zealand’s chief science adviser urges better “bullshit detectors” and the end of paywalls
Publishing paywalls need to be “torn down” to restore the credibility of scientific research, New Zealand’s chief science adviser has said.
Speaking at a Royal Society Te Apārangi seminar in February on the lessons to be learned from Covid-19 misinformation, Juliet Gerrard said that science needed “humility” in the way it presented its findings, and to understand the other demands on policymakers.
As part of a discussion on how to increase the credibility of research, Gerrard said: “I think the financial piece [of the problem] is deeper. So making researchers bid for funding just places everyone in a position where that’s becoming a conflict. And it threatens the perceived integrity, even if it doesn’t threaten the [actual] integrity.”
She continued: “The other point I’d add is open access. We need to tear down the paywall. We’ve created a world where all the good peer-reviewed stuff is inaccessible to anyone on the internet and it’s going to get worse with artificial intelligence.”
Misinformation “can be fabricated” by AI, she said. “We’ve skewed the landscape horribly so that the stuff that we produce in research institutions isn’t available and we have to find a way through that.”
Gerrard said there were lessons to learn from the pandemic about science communication, including the importance of different messages at different stages of a crisis, and the need to consider political cycles. “Science is never the only advice. Science can help inform the decision-makers, [but] scientists are not making the decisions,” she said.
“In the beginning of Covid…science communication really came to the fore in New Zealand. I was privileged to work for someone [then prime minister Jacinda Ardern] who really wanted details and evidence and rang me up at seven o’clock on Sunday morning and said: ‘Can you talk me through viral mutation again?’ Which was not a common experience around the world.”
She added: “In the middle, it got complicated. People were tired and the message was getting muddled.” As an example, she pointed to the question of whether or not to wear masks.
By the end of the pandemic, when there was a major protest in Wellington, “clearly we missed chunks of the population, clearly there were certain demographics that were left behind and alienated by this ‘team spirit’, this sporting talk. But at the time, in the beginning when we didn’t know how long the crisis was and we needed everyone rallying around the flag, as people say, I think it worked.”
The public health behaviour messaging was “solid”, she said, “but we lost the connection between the science and the public health messaging just simply because of the complexity”.
She said that under different circumstances, she might have been a protester herself. “When you walked around the Beehive lawn [outside the parliament buildings, where protests took place], you had this festival atmosphere and you had food trucks and it was kind of nice, but then you also noticed that you were on the list of people [the protesters] wanted to execute…which kind of messes with your head.”
There was “a chunk” of New Zealand that did not want evidence, and “that is a real challenge to science and that happened all over the world”.
Gerrard said that a recently released report from her office outlined ways to help combat what she called “polluted information”, particularly by better equipping teachers to develop young people’s “bullshit detectors”.
Canadian viewpoint
Julia Wright, a Canadian academic who specialises in literature, also spoke at the seminar. She said the pandemic had highlighted “fundamental problems in our information ecosystem” and risks to the “flow of current credible information to decision-makers and the public”.
Wright chaired the Royal Society of Canada’s taskforce on Covid-19 for three years. The taskforce reported on protecting expert advice and on how the humanities interact with health policy.
Canada had suffered “chaos” in its information ecosystem, Wright said, caused by various cutbacks to education and the use of consultancies rather than in-house government expertise.
Wright said that misinformation—“faulty information that causes harms”—could include active “disinformation”. She said there needed to be “information hygiene”, where people check information before they pass it on.
Another problem is “missed information”, where information is spread out of context or without other relevant information.
“How we summarise can have a misinformation effect,” she said. Items such as masks are not “context-free objects”.
Canadian researchers were suddenly required to be “amateur communicators” during the pandemic, while official communications around Covid “floundered”.
Her committee’s policy briefing on expert advice suggested ways to “mitigate this mess”. This included universities providing protection for researchers against abuse and publicly detailing how they ensured the integrity of their research.
“We need to do more to establish the credibility of universities if they are to function effectively as information providers in the public interest,” she said.
Pushing all researchers into the “chaotic” public media space was not a good idea, she added, arguing for more targeted information strategies.
The popular phrase “Believe in science” mixed up faith with the scientific method, she said. “Framing science in the language of faith positions it in relation to polarising alternatives: all or nothing, right or wrong.”
Some public information campaigns during the pandemic used metaphors and figures of speech to explain how vaccines worked that did not reflect actual science, she said.
“Bring a humanities scholar into pandemic planning,” she advised. “We have centuries of cultural material about pandemics and people’s response to them.”