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SUMMARY:Disinformation\, denial\, and the assault on truth - Lee McIntyre 
 (Boston University)
DTSTART:20250501T143000Z
DTEND:20250501T160000Z
UID:TALK230218@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr. Rosanna Dent
DESCRIPTION:Disinformation is the scourge of the information age\, causing
  both science denial (climate denial\, anti-vaxx\, etc.) as well as the mo
 re recent 'reality' denial (Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stole
 n\, Q-Anon conspiracies\, etc.). People do not wake up one day wondering w
 hether there are tracking microchips in the Covid vaccines or a Jewish spa
 ce laser causing the California wildfires. They are led to those ridiculou
 s\, false beliefs through strategic lies\, told by those who created them\
 , in service of their own economic\, ideological\, or political interests.
  The problem\, however\, is that once disinformation is in the information
  stream\, it does not just tempt someone to believe a falsehood\, but also
  polarizes them around a factual issue\, which undermines trust and poison
 s the path by which they might revise past beliefs and embrace future true
  ones.\n\nHow to address this? Engaging with deniers is one path. In a rec
 ent study in _Nature Human Behavior_ Cornelia Betsch and Phillip Schmid pr
 ovide the first empirical evidence that science deniers can sometimes be l
 ed to give up their false beliefs. Most intriguing\, one of the methods fo
 r doing this has nothing to do with the content of the belief itself\, but
  focuses instead on the path of reasoning that led them to it. 'Technique 
 rebuttal' thus provides a ray of hope for philosophers and other non-scien
 tists to address science (and reality) denial\, even if they are not conte
 nt experts on the topic of denial. But there is a hitch. This method doesn
 't always work... and it is slow.\n\nWhat might work better? In my talk I 
 will explore a few ideas from my most recent book _On Disinformation_ (MIT
  Press\, 2023)\, in which I claim that the pinch point on the disinformati
 on highway from creation to amplification to belief is to clamp down on th
 e spread of disinformation.
LOCATION:Hopkinson Lecture Theatre\, New Museums Site
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