Lessons from Carl T. Bergstrom

Carl Bergstrom is a professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. — Unsiloed Episode 137: Carl Bergstrom.

I. The Nature of Bullshit

• On Situating Your Work: carl-t-bergstrom: "Be deliberate in framing and situating your work in this context." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On a Duty of Care With Preprints: carl-t-bergstrom: "If your study has health implications, you face an extra duty of care — if you are not ready to see your manuscript appear as is in a leading medical journal, you should think carefully before posting it as a preprint." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Enthusiasm Versus Exaggeration: carl-t-bergstrom: "Your press office is charged with promoting your work as broadly as possible and will welcome your help in walking the line between enthusiasm and exaggeration." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Social Media Being Powerful but Not for Everyone: carl-t-bergstrom: "Public engagement on social media is not for everyone, but it can be a powerful tool to combat misinformation." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Liars and Bullshitters: carl-t-bergstrom: "A liar knows the truth and is trying to steer you in the opposite direction." — Second City Works | Getting to Yes, And - Carl Bergstrom: Calling Bullshit.

• On Loving to Talk About Science: carl-t-bergstrom: "I was involved to some degree in the so-called evolution wars and arguments about intelligent design and creationism." — Science, politics and trolls: How Carl Bergstrom became a voice of clarity on the coronavirus.

• On Hoping Public Interest in Science Lasts: carl-t-bergstrom: "Hopefully we’ll come out of this with some public good and public interest in science, and I hope we’re not so exhausted that we fall down on the job in terms of being there to keep engaging with people once this is all over." — Science, politics and trolls: How Carl Bergstrom became a voice of clarity on the coronavirus.

• On Misrepresentations That Keep Spreading: carl-t-bergstrom: "Even when you directly repudiate a gross misrepresentation of your work, it may continue to spread virally." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Accusations of Bad Faith: carl-t-bergstrom: "What I and a lot of other scientists don’t like are accusations that we’re not acting in good faith." — Science, politics and trolls: How Carl Bergstrom became a voice of clarity on the coronavirus.

• On Faking the Science: carl-t-bergstrom: "When people say you’re faking the science in order to advance a political agenda or whatever, that’s a terrible accusation to make." — Science, politics and trolls: How Carl Bergstrom became a voice of clarity on the coronavirus.

II. Data Literacy & Statistics

• On Research Turned Against Us: carl-t-bergstrom: "Many of us went into this profession to advance human health and wellbeing, but misinformation has the power to turn our own research against us." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Societal Relevance: carl-t-bergstrom: "Working in the biomedical sciences, we are blessed and cursed with societal relevance and public interest." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Data Visualizations Shared Widely: carl-t-bergstrom: "Recognize that data visualizations are widely shared on social media and that they can be used for good or ill." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Contextualizing Work for the Press: carl-t-bergstrom: "Understand the most common sources of error in the reporting of medical research and contextualize your work to the press with the same diligence that you use in a scientific paper." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Missing a Few Cases: carl-t-bergstrom: "If you miss a few cases, things get bad fast." — Science, politics and trolls: How Carl Bergstrom became a voice of clarity on the coronavirus.

• On Data-Driven Bullshit: carl-t-bergstrom: "So much of the bullshit is data-driven today because the world is so intensely quantified both through the prevalence of all kinds of sensing in the world that we live in, ambient sensors and everything else being recorded and monitored, but also because of this intensely online nature of our lives." — Episode 137: Carl Bergstrom — unSILOed Podcast with Greg LaBlanc.

• On the Information Landscape: carl-t-bergstrom: "Be aware of the information landscape into which you are releasing your work." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Heading Off Likely Abuses: carl-t-bergstrom: "Where specific abuses of your findings are likely, take steps to head these off." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Preprints and Public Understanding: carl-t-bergstrom: "Biomedical papers often have immediate public relevance and preprint servers have been invaluable for rapid communication during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the press and public do not necessarily understand their provisional nature." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

III. Science, Metascience, and the "Prestige Economy"

• On Exaggerated Press Releases: carl-t-bergstrom: "Exaggerated university press releases are a major driver of inaccurate health reporting." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Avoiding Hype: carl-t-bergstrom: "Avoid creating hype around your work or making tenuous claims about its significance." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Correlation and Overreach: carl-t-bergstrom: "Research in animal models should not be accompanied by incautious claims about human applications; in the absence of causal information, correlations should not be taken to suggest causation; and modeling should never overstate its scope." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Scientists Responding to Incentives: carl-t-bergstrom: "Scientists are just as human as anybody else and they start responding to these incentives and that often involves doing less good science." — Second City Works | Getting to Yes, And - Carl Bergstrom: Calling Bullshit.

• On Specifying Uncertainty: carl-t-bergstrom: "Be meticulous in specifying sources of uncertainty." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Broadcasting Into a Media Ecosystem: carl-t-bergstrom: "When biomedical researchers publish, we are not merely sharing our work with colleagues; we are broadcasting it into a broader media and social media ecosystem in which our findings can be misused, misapplied, misinterpreted and misrepresented in the service of any number of causes." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Figures That Stand Alone: carl-t-bergstrom: "Make sure that your figures stand on their own, separated from your manuscript." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Talking to Journalists: carl-t-bergstrom: "Journalists who take the time to reach out to you will be invested in getting the story right, so take their calls, be patient and forthright, and help them author the accurate stories they seek to write." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Correcting Misrepresentation: carl-t-bergstrom: "When a paper is misrepresented online, a correction from the authors themselves can be a powerful remedy." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On an Obligation to Clear Information: carl-t-bergstrom: "We have an obligation to provide clear and accurate information to a society hungry for such information, while curtailing inadvertent misinformation and stymying deliberate disinformation about our work." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

IV. Misinformation, Social Media & The Pandemic

• On Persuading People About Vaccines: carl-t-bergstrom: "Our ability to convince people that this was a vaccine that was going to save a lot of lives and that everyone needed to take was much, much worse than most of us imagined." — Carl Bergstrom in Science Magazine on his efforts for countering misinformation | Department of Biology | University of Washington.

• On How Misinformation Harms: carl-t-bergstrom: "Misinformation harms people by directly misinforming them, as we saw with hydroxychloroquine." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Prevention Over Cure: carl-t-bergstrom: "In dealing with misinformation, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." — Eight rules to combat medical misinformation | Nature Medicine.

• On Social Media and Engagement: carl-t-bergstrom: "Social media is designed to maximize our engagement, not to maximize information." — Second City Works | Getting to Yes, And - Carl Bergstrom: Calling Bullshit.

• On Not Understanding the Media Environment: carl-t-bergstrom: "We don’t really understand how having this kind of media environment affects the way that people get information and make decisions and respond to crises like COVID." — How to Decode Scientific Data | STANFORD magazine.

• On Politics Over Whether a Pandemic Existed: carl-t-bergstrom: "It never occurred to us that if a pandemic actually broke out, there would be political lines drawn over whether it even existed." — Science, politics and trolls: How Carl Bergstrom became a voice of clarity on the coronavirus.

• On Anticipating a Crisis Worsened by Information: carl-t-bergstrom: "We couldn’t anticipate that it would be this particular thing, but we could anticipate that we were going to face a serious crisis that would be exacerbated by the way information is exchanged and the way that communication networks become polarized." — Science, politics and trolls: How Carl Bergstrom became a voice of clarity on the coronavirus.

• On How Technology Changes Opinion Formation: carl-t-bergstrom: "My sense is that social media in particular — as well as a broader range of internet technologies, including algorithmically driven search and click-based advertising — have changed the way that people get information and form opinions about the world." — Why biologists like Carl Bergstrom are warning that social media is a risk to humanity | Vox.

V. Evolutionary Biology & Honest Signaling

VI. Critical Thinking & Education

• On Catching Up to Our Environment: carl-t-bergstrom: "We do need to catch up to the realities of the environment that we live in and we need to adapt the way that our education system works to the way that our culture is changing." — Episode 137: Carl Bergstrom — unSILOed Podcast with Greg LaBlanc.

• On Teaching Critical Thinking: carl-t-bergstrom: "We need to be deliberate in teaching critical thinking." — Episode 137: Carl Bergstrom — unSILOed Podcast with Greg LaBlanc.

• On Lateral Reading: carl-t-bergstrom: "We need to teach concepts like lateral reading so that people know how to look into that." — Episode 137: Carl Bergstrom — unSILOed Podcast with Greg LaBlanc.

• On Helping People Understand: carl-t-bergstrom: "Helping people understand what’s going on and why we need to take the steps we’re taking helps people to be willing to make the sacrifices they need to and helps create the political will to put strong steps in place to slow down the pandemic." — Science, politics and trolls: How Carl Bergstrom became a voice of clarity on the coronavirus.

• On a Crisis Discipline: carl-t-bergstrom: "For me, a crisis discipline is a situation where you don’t have all of the information that you need to know exactly what to do, but you don’t have time to wait to figure it out." — Why biologists like Carl Bergstrom are warning that social media is a risk to humanity | Vox.