Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part Nine

In part six of my conversation with Marie Snyder I wrote about the importance of group decision-making in the critical thinking process. In this instalment, we go back to this issue but from a different angle. Some of the biggest problems we find with how people reason is because they either suffer from motivated reasoning or outright lying.

Cartoon from xkcd, CopyLeft provision

Motivated reasoning is when one's objectivity gets overwhelmed by an emotional commitment to a specific group, ideology, religion, professional obligations, etc. Unfortunately, this is a very common failing among politicians who become extremely loyal to their political party, either because they are thoroughly indoctrinated into it's point of view, or, because they have built strong, personal connections to the party. Politics is much more about emotion and human connections than it is about facts, which means that politicians are probably worse than the statistical average when it comes to looking at a complex issue objectively. 

The difference between motivated reasoning and lying is whether or not the person arguing for something has the self-awareness to know that their arguments for a position are or are not reasonable. 

The system that Snyder introduces, Sortition, gets around this problem by randomly selecting members of the public to form a committee, instead of allowing politicians to select the members it wants to see on it. This means that the individual decision-makers get selected from a pool of people who aren't nearly as prone to either motivated reasoning or outright dishonesty---simply because they have a lot less "skin in the game".

Cloudwalking Owl · Sortition

Sortition has a long history and probably the example most people would think of is ancient Athens. But as I mentioned to Snyder, people shouldn't think that it has died out since then. Guelph had it's own experimentation with sortition in the late 20th and early 21st century.   

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The problem that the city faced was that scientists had found out that there was a build-up of pesticide residue in some of Guelph's stormwater detention ponds. These are the water bodies you sometimes see in subdivisions. They are engineered by the city to collect the rainwater that comes off things like roads, driveways, parking lots, roofs, etc. The problem is that these sorts of surfaces won't allow rain to seep into them. This means that if a sudden thunderstorm hits, they can create a mini-flash flood that can sweep into a stream or wetland. Not only does this sort of quick flood create erosion problems, the water itself is often a lot hotter than what's already in a stream or wetland---which will create a thermal shock that can kill wildlife. Moreover, it will often have pollution like oil that can poison aquatic life too. The common engineered solution is to dig a depression and channel this water to it. That way, when it rains the overheated, contaminated water can collect in a place where it can cool off, sediment can fall out of the water column, and, micro-organisms like algae can digest whatever chemicals (like fertilizer) are in it before it gets out into either a stream or the water table.

Google calls this a "stormwater detention pond", but there are subtle differences between these sort of things that have profound importance to civil engineers. For the purposes of this article, all you need to know is that it's an engineered low spot in a city that collects rain run off.

What had happened was when scientists looked into the water quality of these ponds they found that they had relatively high levels of certain pesticides, which was not a good thing. Moreover, when surveys were done of homeowners in the city, researchers found out that a surprisingly high amount of pesticides were being used on suburban properties---both by home owners and lawn care companies that serviced them. (I checked my memory by looking through a reprinted journal article that I found on-line:  Environmental Concentrations of Urban Pesticides.) Given the fact that almost all the pesticides that get applied to suburban yards were for cosmetic reasons instead of food production, reasonable people of all political persuasions decided that there needed to be some sort of law reducing their use.

The political problem was that if City Council decided to regulate or even ban the use of these pesticides, it ran the risk of facing a very strong backlash from both lawn care companies and home owners who had a strong emotional attachment to their lawns. 

The way it dodged this sticky trap was by creating a citizen committee using the principle of sortition. That way elected officials couldn't even be accused of selecting the wrong people to sit on the panel. It was formed by randomly selecting fifty Guelph citizens and asking them if they would take part in the process----only six people actually agreed to join, but that was enough.

In addition, six other expert consultants were added to the committee to help the members make sense of the technical issues: three were city staff members and three worked for a hired environmental consulting company. The result was a report that many considered a model of good public policy. (You can see the published report of the committee at this city on-line archive.) 

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Another example of sortition that readers should be aware of happened in 2006 and involved creating a Citizen's Assembly by randomly selecting one citizen per riding who were then tasked with looking at the evidence and suggesting what sort of system the province of Ontario should use in future elections. Again, the system worked extraordinarily well at sifting through all the information, listening to the experts, and, prepared a good proposal and creating created a document that explained it things very well. 

Unfortunately, I suspect that they did too good a job. It became obvious to me that when their report was published and during the run-up to the referendum, that the Liberal government got cold feet and decided to not fund anything more than a token education campaign. According to a Canada.com article, Elections Ontario only budgeted $6.8 million for this task. 

It's hard to find information about past Ontario elections on line, but what I did find says that the Progressive Conservative Party head office spent a little over $8.5 million in the 2018 election campaign. Please note, this figure only counts what the PC head office spent. What each individual candidate's local campaign spent is added on top of this. Just by way of a comparison, Mike Schreiner's successful local campaign in Guelph spent about $41,500. There are 124 Electoral Districts in Ontario and three major parties. Kathleen Wynn spent about $92,700, Doug Ford about $66,000, and, Andrea Horvath spent $110,500. 

Let's be conservative with our calculations. Let's forget about the Green Party and just assume that there are two of major parties instead of three. (I suspect the average candidate spends less than a party leader. Moreover, in many Electoral Districts there are only two real contenders plus "also rans".) I'll use the Conservatives as the baseline $17 million for the head offices (ie: the Conservative head office times two), and, $16.4 million for local campaigns (ie: Doug Ford's campaign times 124 Electoral Districts times two parties). That comes to $33.4 million spent on promoting political party's messages---and that's what I suspect is an extremely conservative number! 

Given this context, $6.8 million to explain a complex change to our electoral system does seem like a small number. And indeed, according the article cited above, British Columbia spent twice as much as Ontario to do this.

Moreover, in a CBC article, one of the Assembly members, Arita Droog, complained that in a misguided attempt to be unbiased, the public education campaign that did exist didn't explain what sort of benefits would come from the proposed system. 

"It's so neutral, it's so unbiased, that it doesn't say anything … I understand their position that they want to be neutral and unbiased, but in doing so, they went beyond" providing useful information. [sic]

Indeed, if we can believe the above article, only two days before the General Election---which included the referendum---3 million voters didn't even know that there was a referendum on electoral reform. And that was 36% of the total!

To end the suspense, the referendum didn't pass and we still labour under the idiotic first-past-the-post system that we inherited from Great Britain.  😡 

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I think that the lessons we can learn from the above two examples illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of sortition. The system works well at assimilating complex information and coming up with good policy. It also allows elected officials the ability to avoid being personally attacked by extremely polarized members of the community. 

What it isn't able to do, however, is mobilize the citizenry to support whatever decisions it makes. This didn't matter much with regard to cosmetic pesticide use because there already was a very strong support for the ban in the community. But with regard to proportional representation most people hadn't thought much about the issue. It's something that requires a significant understanding of the electoral process---and most people simply don't know enough about that to see how it would be a profound improvement. 

Our old buddy the FUD campaign. Fair Use Provision.

We should also remember that electoral reform is something that the existing political parties don't generally like. That's because the parties who do well in the present system almost by definition like the present system because it gives them power. Conversely, the parties that do like proportionality tend to not have any power at all---because of the present system. 

Because of this fact, none of the mainstream parties were willing to devote any of their resources to encourage voters to vote "Yes". Moreover, the Liberal government---who I suspect were surprised how well the Citizens Assembly did---strangled the process by starving its ability to get the word out to the people. This left the door open for people opposed to mount local Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) campaigns---which are generally successful in situations where great numbers of people know very little about a complex issue. 

Sortition's Achilles Heel in our political environment is the flip side of it's great attraction---it doesn't involve the creation of political parties. Unfortunately, our representative democracy can't function without political parties. But that's an article for another day. 

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It appears that our latest lock down is ending soon because our disease numbers seem to be declining. But we still have to be careful because the new Delta variant of Covid seems to be a lot more transmissible than the others. Moreover, it seems like the limited protection that one dose of the vaccines gives seems to be significantly lower with it too. So keep wearing your mask and get your shot---both the first and second one---when your number comes up.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part Eight

Marie Snyder, in a "no nonsense" pose. (Photo supplied by her. Image manipulated by Bill Hulet.) 

Cloudwalking Owl · Community Pushback

I'd wanted to get a primary source for the Texas Republican party resolution opposing critical thinking skills, but it seems to have been scrubbed from the Wayback Machine. So I'll have to settle with a secondary source. Here's the exact language (the last paragraph directly deals with critical thinking---but the three earlier ones might be of interest too): 

I'm not about to say that the sky is falling because some politicians in Texas voted for a dumb resolution during a policy convention. But I think it is important to understand that right from the very beginning of critical thinking various parts of the community have fought to suppress it. Indeed, the most famous of early critical thinkers---Socrates---was executed because he was supposedly corrupting the youth of Athens. 

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Talking about corrupting the youth----. 

Snyder makes the point that the most push back she gets is from students who complain that her reading assignments are just too darn hard. I don't think that in my time high school students were much better at working through difficult concepts. If there is any evidence of this, it is probably only because there was such brutal "sifting out" of the student body. This involved "the great cull" in grade nine when the students who were deemed "not high school material" were shunted off to special places where they learned to be barbers, hair stylists, brick layers, etc. The majority of the rest were put into the four year program with only a small minority entering the five year stream with the expectation they would head off to university. My limited understanding is that nothing like this sort of process currently happens at public schools. 

But having said that, there certainly are a lot of philosophers who demand a little more attention than the average teen is used to. Consider the following quotes I found from Immanuel Kant, who was someone I found very hard to understand when I was at university. If memory serves, his academic prose is turgid and boring as Hell. But having said that, his ideas are really worth thinking about. 

I do think, however, that we should be very concerned about whether or not we are creating a generation of people who have the attention span of a gnat. 

I'm a little concerned about this because my read of history says that in the past people seemed to have had a lot more toleration for what we would call "boring stuff" today. Take, for example, the difference between the front cover of the Globe and Mail newspaper in the early 20th versus 21st centuries.

Comparing these two front covers, it seems obvious to me that publishers and editors at The Globe and Mail definitely think that readers are a less willing to read dense stories and are instead much more addicted to "eye candy". 

People seemed a lot more willing to listen to long political speeches in times past too. Consider the Lincoln/Douglas debates that were held in 1858. These were between the Republican and Democratic candidates to be the Illinois representative to the US Senate. The format consisted of one candidate opening up with an hour-long speech, followed by the other having an hour and a half speech, followed by a half hour response by the original speaker. There were seven different debates, with one candidate starting first half the time and the other the other half. 

Compare this with the first Trump/Biden debate, where the format supposedly consisted of six, fifteen minute segments. They were each supposed to answer questions put to them by the moderator and only had two minutes for response followed by thirteen minutes of "back and forth".

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My gut instinct about this change is that this has come about for a variety of reasons. First of all, the velocity of human life has increased dramatically. Secondly, we all have a lot more things fighting for our limited attention. Also, technology has dramatically increased our ability to add audio and visual elements to what used to be a pretty-much print-driven communications system. 

McLuhan, Wiki Media

I'd draw reader's attention specifically this last point. The famous philosopher of media, Marshall McLuhan, said that "the medium is the message". Social media neatly fits into this point of view. 

Twitter restricts the length of a post to one or two sentences and doesn't lend itself to back-and-forth conversations. That means that it has an inherent bias towards cliche, provocation, and, prejudice. Donald Trump loved it. 

Similarly, Instagram has a bias towards images. That's why if you look at the top "influencers" on that medium, they tend to not much more than celebrities posing like models. And like famous people posing to sell perfume, clothes, watches, etc, they charge fees for "product placement". 

The prognosis isn't entirely negative. The explosive growth in podcasts seems to have created a whole new industry that involves creating "deep dive" stories about abstruse subjects---Pushkin Industries comes to my mind. And the same thing can be said about You Tube channels---probably the Green Brothers' Crash Course series are the best example of this. There has also been an explosive growth in "long-form" news blogs, most notably the Vox media empire.

The problem is, however, not that individuals cannot find good stuff on line---it's that there is also lots of bad stuff too, and it's really popular. And, as this pandemic has pointed out, there are lots of situations where it isn't enough to just let the smart people do the right thing, the dumb ones have to do it too! And if you are teaching critical thinking to a room full of kids who spend a lot of time looking at models on Instagram or watching dumb videos on TikTok, it is inevitable you are going to get a lot of complaints that they just can't get Kant. 

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Another point I raised was whether or not the reason why Snyder isn't getting any more grief from parents about what she is teaching is whether the ones that might complain have simply removed themselves from the educational system. Here are a couple of graphs from the Fraser Institute that suggest that much more people are either sending their children to private schools (the Fraser Institute calls them "Independent"---I suspect for ideological reasons) or homeschooling than when I was a child. 

  

 

There's another wrinkle that needs to be understood. In 1985 the government fully-funded Catholic schools in Ontario. According to 2017 numbers from the Ontario Government, in grades Kindergarden to twelve, the numbers break down this way:

• Publicly funded, secular schools: 1,368,125
• Publicly funded, Catholic religious schools: 638,576
• Private schools of all types: 138,412
• Homeschooling: 8,565

Add together the students who go to a Catholic or private school, plus the ones who are homeschooled, and you get 785,553, or, 36% of the total student body. 

I don't think that it strains credibility to suggest that the small number of parents who would have given Marie Snyder grief could easily fit into that 36% of the population who have removed their children from the public school system. This might make the lives of both teachers and parents in the public system easier, but I think this might not bode well for the future of Ontario. There is a standardized curriculum for Catholic, private, and, home-schooled children, but I suspect that critical thinking is probably not really encouraged for many of them. If it was, I suspect it would cause a lot of drama for the people in charge because the kids might question the whole reason why they have been removed from the public, secular system in the first place. 

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I think that this is enough info for one week. Remember to keep on wearing your mask, keep your distance, and, get your vaccine. It may look like we are near the finish line---but don't forget that the Indian mutation is gaining on us fast! We still have to keep the pace up if we are going to miss having yet another COVID wave hit us. 

 

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with! 

Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part Four

I had intended to include more than one audio clip in this post, but once I started unpacking some of the issues we discussed, things expanded pretty quickly. Never mind, whatever I don't deal with this week will come up in future articles.

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Before I dig into it, I'd like to add my usual plea for support. I put a fair amount of work into this blog, so if you can afford it, why not buy a subscription? It's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.

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Cloudwalking Owl · Conservative Versus Liberal Bias

The bit about Bob Altemeyer and "a conservative point of view" opens up a bit of a nest of complex, inter-related issues so I'm going to take some time explaining what we were talking about. 

Altemeyer is famous for his research into a specific type of politics. He was a professor in Manitoba who convinced a lot of politicians and supporters in both Canada and the US to fill out surveys. The results suggest that there is a specific type of human being---what he calls the "authoritarian personality" who make up significant subset of the population. They consist of two groups of people who were made for each other: a lot of people who want someone to tell them what to think and do, and, a much smaller group that want to do the telling. (You can download a free book about this phenomenon here.) The evidence that he found shows that this sort of person tends to support right-wing political parties in Canada (the Conservatives) and the USA (the Republicans). In contrast, the other people in both countries---who I will just label "liberals"---support one of the other parties. (Please remember that this is a statistical generalization---there will be examples of other personality types in all parties.)

I mentioned that people routinely ask why universities can't have a "conservative point of view" expressed more often in classes. The problem seems to be that authoritarians and liberals have very different ways of processing information---and that gets back to my question about "judging each issue on its own merits".

Let's consider a recent example that illustrates what I'm talking about. When the Supreme Court ruled in favour of gay marriage there were a lot of plaintive cries that the sky was falling. If memory serves, our local MP broke with government policy and voted against the bill that legalized it and a local official refused to officiate at same sex marriages and lost her job. I also remember hearing politicians say "the biggest issue facing Canada right now is same-sex marriage". Now it's a great, big "nothing burger". How come?

At the time I personally looked at the issue. I found out that there are several different elements to the issue: practical, ecclesiastic, and, moral. 

The first thing to understand is that there are a whole list of practical benefits that accrue from being married.

• pension survivor benefits, drug and dental plans, etc
• legal issues: hospital visitation rights, adoption, immigration sponsorship, etc
  

I realized that part of this was about something as prosaic as whether or not your life partner could get her teeth fixed. This seemed to me a really good, practical reason to allow same-sex marriage. (Although it can be argued that the real solution would be to change all of these things so they aren't based upon marriage. This could include extending OHIP to include drug and dental---but that would involve a much bigger battle.)

Secondly, several religious organizations said they were being discriminated against when the government said it wanted to legalize same sex marriages. No one was saying that Roman Catholic priests would be forced to perform gay marriages, so it was hard to understand what exactly they were upset about. If any religious group was being interfered with, it was the Unitarians who did want to perform gay marriages but who were forbidden by law. I came to the conclusion that various Christian groups were upset because they were losing some undue influence on society. Loss of privilege often seems like discrimination to people who have had it all of their lives. Not being a Christian, however, that argument didn't put butter on any of my parsnips---.

Finally, if you believe that being gay is "immoral" then you think that supporting it in any way shape or form is also doing something evil. This is the foundational issue, IMHO, because if people think that gay marriage is "sin" (to quote the Pope), then having the state support it is also "sin". When I looked into this issue, however, I saw lots of research that said being gay isn't a "choice"---it's instinctual. Moreover, when biologists look into the behaviour of other animals they found that lots of other species seem to manifest gay sub-populations. So in actual fact, contrary to popular opinion, being gay is actually totally "natural". (And, being a Daoist, being "natural" does put some dairy lipids on my favourite root veggies.)

I know that many Christians believe that all sex is sinful and that our instinct for it is actually the promptings of Satan. But, frankly, I think all of that is errant nonsense and I don't think that our legal system should have anything at all to do with it.

What I was doing in the above is dealing with the issue of gay marriage "on its own merits". As near as I can tell, authoritarians looked at the issue very differently. Their response was to look towards their traditions and the authority figures in their lives. Then they came to the conclusion that gays are "outsiders" and "weird"---and as such should not be "encouraged". 

According to Altemeyer's understanding, therefore, the reason why the uproar over gay marriage dissipated was because during the kerfuffle over gay rights a lot of closeted gays to came out to their families and friends. And when that happened, opposition to same-sex marriage deflated like a soufflé during an earthquake. According to the authoritarian hypothesis this was because most of the people opposed to the law were folks who believed that gays were "outsiders" that they believed were "weirdos". But when they found out that their beloved aunt Sally was a lesbian and that guy they really respected at work was gay, they realized that homosexuals are "real people" just like them. And because they knew "good people" who said that the law was about getting the people they love on their dental plan instead of destroying Christendom, the "penny dropped" that same-sex marriage was a good thing instead of a plot by the anti-Christ.    

I've made such a fuss about the authoritarian hypothesis because understanding it is so important to making sense of what Snyder is saying about "liberalism is just true". I think it's important to really understand what is going on here. The point is that thinking critically about what we do and do not know isn't something that can be incidentally polluted with "liberal bias", thinking critically is what being "liberal" is all about. If you doubt this, consider the following definition that I got from just typing "definition of liberal" in Duckduckgo:

Favoring reform, open to new ideas, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; not bound by traditional thinking; broad-minded. synonym: broad-minded.

Now look at the following mission statements from two Canadian universities. First the University of Guelph:

The University of Guelph is a research-intensive, learner-centred university. Its core value is the pursuit of truth. Its aim is to serve society and to enhance the quality of life through scholarship. Both in its research and in its teaching programs, the University is committed to a global perspective.

Now the one for Ambrose University, a "Christian university" in Alberta:

Ambrose University prepares men and women for wise, joyful and redemptive engagement in the church, society and the created order through excellent Christian post-secondary education.

As you can see, Guelph University is committed to finding the "Truth" and broadening student's understanding according to a "global perspective". In contrast, Ambrose University "prepares" students for "engagement" with "the church, society and the created order". What this ultimately means is that the Guelph school is saying that students need to follow the facts where ever they lead, while the Albertan one is saying that the point of education is get young men and women integrated into the existing religious and social framework. These are two very different goals.

Another piece of evidence that points towards the way authoritarians understand the world comes from a Texas Republican policy plank that seems to specifically oppose their school boards from running the sort of program that Snyder teaches.

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Again, from the authoritarian point of view, education shouldn't be about teaching children how to make up their own minds based on evidence or reason, it should instead be about reinforcing and solidifying the existing belief systems of the community and parents.

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Just in case someone is wondering about the various factual statements that Snyder makes in the rest of the above clip, here's a graph that cites one of the most controversial ones. It does a good job of showing how much the US tax system has changed in the last hundred years or so. (Click on the image to get a clearer version.)

From VisualizingEconomics.com . Public Domain image registered under the CopyLeft Agreement.

As you can see from the above, during the time when the American economy boomed the most, it also had---by far and away---the highest tax rates in its history.

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I can back Snyder up about poor people not wanting society to help folks like them because they hope to eventually be wealthy themselves. I can remember presenting a policy plank to a party convention over 30 years ago. I was arguing for a Guaranteed Annual Income plus a maximum allowable income. (Something that the USA pretty much had under the Eisenhower administration.) Only one person in the group didn't support it, and he was very poor. As he explained it, "I have an idea about how to make much more energy efficient windows. If my patent takes off and I become a millionaire, I don't want to have to pay excessive taxes on my wealth."

This is the same sort of idea that is expressed in the Ronald Wright quote:

"John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

Snyder raises Charles Taylor's use of the concept "social imaginaries" to label this phenomenon. I haven't read any of his work, but from what I could see on-line, this seems very similar to the old Marxist idea of "False Consciousness". This does an excellent job of explaining that weird spiritual experience I mentioned to her. The conversation between my older sibling and our drover from about 50 years ago is a classic case of false consciousness. Both of them had so bought into the "system" that they didn't understand how it was rigged to ensure that people with manure on their boots handing over money to people who never have any on their shoes.  

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I've done a lot of "unpacking" in the above. But I think it was important to work out the nuances of what Snyder and I were talking about in the clip that began this post. Anyway, that should be enough for this week. Until my next post, please take care of yourself. Wear a mask, keep your distance, and, when you can, register for vaccination (I have). 

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Moreover I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency! 

Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part One

This week I start a series on how one goes about helping youngsters develop one of the most important skills a human being can have: the ability to tell the difference between fact and nonsense. There is an academic discipline that makes studies this process, philosophy. But unfortunately, most people don't have a great deal of respect for this subject---and given the current state of the world, that really shouldn't come as any great surprise. This week I begin a conversation with a high-school teacher who has been instrumental in getting local school boards teaching philosophy to teens.

Cloudwalking Owl · Who Is Marie Snyder

One of the things I've learned from writing this blog is how important newspapers can be for creating a written record of the day. When I wanted to find out how the Carnegie library was built and torn-down in Guelph all I had for information were microfilms of the "Guelph Mercury". Without a local news source recording the facts in at least a little detail, future generations will have nothing to go on. That is part of the job of the "Guelph-Back-Grounder". These articles preserve part of our local history---and the people who are making it, like Marie Snyder. I back everything up on the Internet Archives "Wayback Machine" in the hope that this will preserve significant fractions of our history. If you think this is as important as I do, why not subscribe? It's easy to do with Patreon and Pay Pal.

Cloudwalking Owl · Can People Be Taught How To Think Critically

Pay attention to the point Snyder is making where she talks about how labourious it is to a teach critical thinking. 

 

 

When uncle Fester starts unloading about how he's heard the Rothschilds were behind a Jewish plot that involved space-born laser devices setting last year's California wildfires, we need to remember that it is simply impossible to come up with an argument that will change his mind. That's because the problem isn't the argument he is putting forward, it's the way his mind operates. Teaching children philosophy is not just stuffing facts in their minds, it's about helping them learn how to use their brain to its full potential.

As for the ranking of newspapers and journals, I've mentioned NewsGuard in the past, but I think it might be useful for readers to see what you get when you subscribe to the service. I have the app as an extension in my Thunderbird web browser and when I click on the notorious Breitbart News Network, the little shield on my Thunderbird app turns red and a white exclamation mark pops up on it. When I click on the icon, I get a short synopsis that looks a bit like this. (I couldn't get a screen shot of the pop-up window, but this is pretty much the same thing---only it comes from another part of the message.) 

This is just the synopsis. If you choose to learn more, there is a very long "deep dig" that goes with the ranking that describes things like who owns it, what it's history has been for publishing fake or misleading news stories, and, a lot of hypertext links that allow the interested reader to learn a lot more if so inclined.

If someone throws around a reference to a scientific journal, most people don't really know what to do. There are, however, as Ms. Snyder says, ranking services that allow people to "separate the wheat from the chaff".

There are several of these, but one of the most used is the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR). It creates a rank based on the number of times a given article gets cited as a reference in other articles. The naive reader might think that a "popularity contest" is a weak reed to lean upon, but contrary to the myth perpetuated by countless bad science fiction books and movies, science doesn't advance because of isolated individuals "proving" something in their basement or garage. Instead, it's a collective activity where various institutions with groups of employees share information around the world and collectively piece-together a picture of the world that slowly becomes clearer and clearer. A large part of this process comes by publishing journal articles that allow all the relevant experts to pool their expertise. In effect, science is a consensus-building exercise and the SJR tracks how much a specific article (and the journal that publishes it) fits into the emerging consensus. 

Here's a screenshot of one particular listing for an academic philosophy journal, Noûs. (Click on the picture to get a better image.)

I'd suggest readers pay particular attention to the second set of graphs. That's because it compares the "Total Citations" to "Self-Citations". This is an important thing to understand, because some fake journals try to "spoof" the ranking systems by doing a lot of "self-citations". That is, if your article/journal is ranked according to how often they get cited by another article/journal, it might be possible for a big publisher to "juice the ranking" by just inserting a lot of unnecessary citations. 

 

No one expects the general public to be able to navigate the nuances of an academic ranking system. The NewsGuard system is something that might be more generally used. (I have the app because a local business pays for it in lieu of a subscription to the Back-Grounder.) But the really important thing is for the general public to learn to be a little more humble about their ability to understand what is going on when someone throws a reference to a scientific article into some post on social media. If you don't know how, or don't have the time, the rational thing to do is just tend to follow with the recognized experts are saying instead of someone who says they have "scientific proof" that Jewish space lasers set the California forest fires.

 

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There's a lot to digest in the above, so I'm going stop here and come back to the conversation next week. Until then, wear your mask, keep your distance, try to get along with the people you live with, and, remember that the epidemic will end soon.

 

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with.