Déjà vu: HIV, Wikipedia, thought-vigilantes, and Science Studies

Hardly had I posted the retrospective piece about HIV [1] than a recently acquired and very compatible friend asked me, apparently out of the blue, “Are you really an AIDS denialist?”

I asked how she had happened on that topic. It was because she had wanted to find out more about me, resorted of course to the internet, and naturally found the piece about me on Wikipedia.

That reminded me of how frequently I had  referred to that libelous Wiki-entry on an earlier blog  [2]. Over the years, favorable facts about me have been added, I don’t know by whom, but the innuendos and false and derogatory statements remain, for instance that I resigned as dean as protest against affirmative action, which is not only wrong but wrong by half-a-dozen years.

I had not looked at that smear-piece for some time. The latest version has added that I “believe” (whatever that means) in UFOs, citing a talk that was not about UFOs at all even though it was given to a MUFON group.

The Wiki entry had been originally created by a member of AIDStruth.org, Kenneth W. Witwer, who describes himself as a Wikipedia editor since January 2007 [3], 2007 being the year in which my critique of HIV/AIDS theory [4] had been published. Witwer had also posted a review of my book on amazon.com, but soon withdrew it, I suppose because it had been so full of rather obvious falsehoods. However, his equally flawed review of Culshaw’s Science Sold Out was still on amazon.com as of the date of this writing. In it, among other plain falsehoods as well as derogatory innuendo, Witwer criticizes Peter Duesberg for stating that the officially estimated HIV prevalence in the United States has remained constant from the beginning; yet that is indeed the case, as attested by official mainstream sources (CDC, Science, JAMA) up to at least 2005 (pp. 1-2 in [4]).

I was reminded of the truth-ignoring shenanigans of social psychologist Seth Kalichman as he had tried, with quite remarkable ineptness, to infiltrate the “denialist” community [5].

This nostalgic train of thought led me also to the description of the derogatory and unreliable Wiki entry [6] created about Brian Martin [7], who over several decades had infuriated many mainstream dogmatists by campaigning persistently against the suppression of responsible evidence-supported dissent.

Kalichman, Witwer, and innumerable others — probably the vast plurality of humankind if not actually all of us — want to be certain about at least some things. Sadly, absolute certainty is unattainable. Large numbers of people nevertheless rely on religious faith and religious authorities as possessing absolute truth, no matter the tangible evidence against some of the details. In modern times, many people have come to rely on “science” as though this represented certainty, no matter that the history of science demonstrates the opposite; and, in any case, that “science” cannot speak for itself, and that what believers in “science” actually accept are the opinions and interpretations offered by people who claim, with varying degrees of justification and plausibility, to speak authoritatively for “science”.

Philosophy and philosophers have grappled most explicitly with the difference between knowledge and opinion, fact and belief, reality and faith, without arriving at anything like unanimity about some possibility of attaining true knowledge of actual reality, or any absolute truths at all; albeit some philosophers of science have muddied the water by claiming that it is possible in principle to distinguish between science and pseudoscience, in other words between certain truth and demonstrable falsehood.

In criticizing Duesberg for accepting as fact what is demonstrably fact, Witwer is merely one exemplar of individuals who see themselves as scientists, as going by the facts and by reality, yet who are just as fallible as the human beings frequently cited [8] for displaying the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, failing to see or acknowledge or recognize the significance of realities that are contrary to their strongly held belief.

The thought-vigilantes of scientism [9] include both scientists and non-scientists, “groupies” of science. Their activism is exemplified by the self-styled “Skeptics” groups whose initiator was the former CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) [10].

The way in which scientific capabilities had helped the Allies to win World War II, notably through developing atomic weapons, led many people to think and worry about the problem of ensuring that policy makers be given the soundest possible advice about what science understands and can do. A number of those associated with the atomic bomb project founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as well as organizations with similar aims. In academe, similar considerations led to increasing numbers of interdisciplinary programs and ventures in which philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science joined with active scientists, including social scientists. Those combinations have been variously called “Science Studies”, “Science and Technology Studies”, “Science and Technology in Society”, and the like, all conveniently allowing the acronym “STS”. These ventures culminated in formal degree-granting academic departments with such designations as Department of Science and Technology in Society [11].

As time has gone by, the difficulty of maintaining genuinely interdisciplinary activity between humanities-based attitudes and science-based attitudes has seen an erosion of contributions from the science-based side, with the result that “STS” is now all too often rather like plain sociology of science.

Genuine interdisciplinarity is greatly hampered by the fact that the intellectual so-called disciplines are actually much like cultures [12], with the result that STS activities face similar difficulties as do multicultural societies. My awareness of this was re-triggered by Evelyn Fox Keller’s recent memoir [13]. It saddened me that this highly original thinker, greatly appreciated by those with the best understanding of the issues, worthy recipient of a MacArthur Award, found her work to be sorely under-appreciated — to put it mildly — not only by some from the scientific community but also by her putative colleagues in the STS program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (see especially p. 151 ff. in [13]). STS people were inclined to think that Fox Keller inclined too respectfully to science for what it can accomplish; active scientists, for their part, were not inclined to accept Fox Keller’s insights into how the use of language in science can actually influence the work itself.

As to the latter, consider how common it is to talk about the relative influences of “nature” and “nurture” in the development of human beings. The heresy propounded by Fox Keller is that the dichotomy is in itself misleading, that the process of development is thoroughly what she calls relational, with influences from both “nature” (genetics, heredity) and “nurture” (parenting and environment) interacting and active at all times.

The general point is that science and scientists cannot avoid the use of language; and that inevitably the work of science, and the dissemination of its results, will sometimes commit false dichotomies.

That train of thought brought to mind a small example from my own work. Having learned from the demography of HIV tests that false positives stem from a large number of possible sources, I emphasized that HIV is not a harmful virus. But that is not the same as saying that testing HIV-positive can always safely be ignored: the very fact of the innumerable  possible false-positives means that one should remain aware of the possibility that testing “HIV”-positive might be an indicator of some other kind of health stress — in the most general sense, one might regard a positive “HIV”-test as an indicator of physiological oxidative stress [14].

The perennial problem remains, of distinguishing trustworthy knowledge from mere opinion,  including the opinions of experts or the mainstream consensus of expert groups. One potential way to lessen the possibility of public actions being based on mistaken opinion would be the establishing of a Science Court [15].

[1]        https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/hivaids-deja-vu

[2]        https://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/2017/03/07/the-scourge-of-wikipedia

[3]        https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennethwitwer

[4]        The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007

[5]        https://hivskeptic.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/jekyllkalichmantale.pdf

[6]        https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/16wp.pdf;
https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/18sscr.html

[7]        https://www.bmartin.cc/index.html

[8]        L. Festinger, H. W. Riecken, , & S. Schachter, When Prophecy Fails. University of Minnesota Press, 1956; L. Festinger, A theory of cognitive dissonance, Row, Peterson, 1957 (Row, Peterson later became Harper & Row and, later again, HarperCollins).

[9]        Scientism is the religion-like belief that science, and science alone, is capable of arriving at indisputably true knowledge.

[10]      A comprehensive description, history, and critique of this activist project is by George Hansen, “CSICOP and the Skeptics: An Overview”, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 86 (1992) 19-63;                                   http://www.tricksterbook.com/ArticlesOnline/CSICOPoverview.htm

[11]      For example, at Virginia Tech: https://liberalarts.vt.edu/departments-and-schools/department-of-science-technology-and-society.html

[12]      “Barriers against interdisciplinarity: Implications for studies of Science, Technology, and Society (STS)”, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 15 (1990) 105-119; “A dialectical discussion on the nature of disciplines and disciplinarity, Social Epistemology, 4 (1990) 215-227

[13]      Evelyn Fox Keller, Making Sense of my Life in Science — A Memoir, Modern Memoirs, 2023.

[14]      Oxidative stress is mentioned in this connection in many articles cited at “The case against HIV”, https://thecaseagainsthiv.net

[15]      Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland, 2017, chapter 12.