Pseudoscience and post truth. Part 3.
June 27, 2017
By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com
- We know damn well in this business that metrics in the digital space are rife with fraud and tainted with misleading analytics.
- We simply choose to believe something we don’t fully understand.
- In many cases, something we don’t understand at all.
- What is an algorithm?
- Has anyone in the room seen one?
- Qualitative research is certainly not immune to misrepresentations.
- It is not unhealthy to look at the garden variety focus group with suspicion.
- Were the interviewees really randomly recruited?
- Or are they the usual F&F (friends & family)?
- “Trust, but verify,” as Ronald Regan supposedly said.
- Then again, we can all choose to collectively look the other way and believe the reports at face value.
- If you like sausages, laws, digital metrics and market research just don’t ask how they are made.
- Client, agency, research facility, we’re all in the same boat, after all.
- Why rock it?
- Hey, I’m playing devil’s advocate here.
- We have the right to be suspicious.
- The same applies to “science”.
- Unfortunately, the credibility and social currency of whatever it is that we collectively call “science” is quite devalued.
- Because?
- Because it seems to change its mind every five years.
- Today’s carcinogenic poison might be tomorrow’s antioxidant.
- And vice versa.
- If you are old enough to have spent a few decades on this planet you know this quite well.
- It only takes a five-minute google search.
- Everyone can find “science” that suits their prejudices, feelings, beliefs and worldview.
- Can you blame those California hipsters who claim that vaccines produce autism in children?
- I think they’re nutz but, hey, we live in a free country.
- Some people are adamant about the “fact” that the theory of evolution is blasphemy.
- That we humans were created by “intelligent design” just a few millennia ago.
- Others believe Mary Mother of God was a virgin when she conceived and gave birth to our savior.
- Hispanocatholics, like yours truly, practice a peculiar brand of syncretism and certainly cannot cast the first stone if we consider our notorious penchant for magical thinking and the occult.
- Pseudoscience & superstition come in all shapes and sizes.
- One man’s pseudoscience is another man’s belief system, another man’s laughingstock and another man’s bogeyman.
- The proverbial “post truth”: these days it seems that everyone is entitled to his or her own facts, based on individual interests, brittle feelings and personal bias.
- Deal with it.
- We can’t complain when our political opponents use post truth against us if we used it against them in the first place.
- If you tell me that a dude with male reproductive organs is actually a woman because he feels like it -or vice versa- well I will have to believe that climate change is a hoax.
- Once again, I couldn’t care less about judging or cataloguing other people’s self-image, perceived gender or sexual inclinations and I’m not denying that human activity is seriously affecting our planet.
- We produce an awful lot of trash and pollution.
- My point is: it is self-inflicted, y’all.
- Post truth begets post truth.
- We just gave climate-change deniers the rope they’ll use to hang us all.
- Just like the imminent pollution Armageddon, we brought this upon ourselves.