 So our next speaker is more of getting the word out there again and do novel techniques. So Shane Greenup is a graduate of the University of New South Wales where he studied molecular biology, philosophy and history of science. So naturally he founded and owns an internet business and is the creator of Arbutter or Rebutter and today he's going to tell us about what he hopes is the great global debate. So please welcome Shane. So thanks Dr. Hall. As I said I'm going to talk and tell you a little bit about my story on working on my project for Rebutter and then I'm going to tell you where I think it's all heading. So you see the idea behind Rebutter really didn't start out as an idea. It was more of a frustration that I had. See a friend shared this article on Facebook one day and I went and read the study behind it and it was quite clear to me that the article was severely flawed. It was junk science and it was rubbish. But that left me with a problem because a good friend of mine had just shared this on Facebook. So that meant not only do they think this was a good article with good information but it was good enough to share with everyone they knew. So I felt obliged to try and help them correct that perception. I needed them to see what was wrong with it, the errors of the study and why it wasn't good information and should be ignored. And to do that you can't just say this is crap. You can't do that. They'll ignore it. They'll say that you're biased and move on. So what I really needed was a well written, clear, compelling rebuttal of this article. Not just, you know, I couldn't send them to Wikipedia that says vaccination is safe because this is a new study that's just been released that says vaccines are harmful. So I needed a rebuttal of this article. Now of course I could have written one myself. I knew what was wrong with the study but that would have taken me a couple of hours maybe and I knew the internet well enough to know that someone else had already done it. So why add another redundant article to the pile that was already there when I could just use one of them? So all I had to do was find one. So where do you go to find things on the internet? Google. So I went to Google and I tried to find rebuttals to this article. The problem is Google is useless at finding rebuttals especially to new articles. But what happens is particularly for an article like this they do a press release and you get hundreds or thousands of copies of the original article. Google has no way of knowing who's rebuttal and what. It's a keyword search engine, not an intent search engine. They don't know the intention of the author. So Google was no help to me. And of course the article that I was trying to find rebuttals of itself wasn't going to tell me where they were. So I knew what I wanted. I could picture it in my head. I just needed something which listed all of the articles which rebutted this article. Just show me a list of it preferably sorted by best to worst. Like Google when you search for a keyword you get a list of articles best to worst. I wanted that but directly related to this article, rebutting it. I spent almost a year looking for someone else who had done this. It seems too obvious. Connect rebuttals to claims. How to have been done. Couldn't find it. So that frustration became rebuttal. Let's make a list of rebuttals for each page on the internet. So this particular image here is how we represent that relationship on our website. The page on the left is a Wall Street Journal article and on the right is a list of articles which argue against that specific article. We have 11 in this case. If our users write or find a rebuttal they can connect it to the article that they're rebutting and then anyone who looks at that rebutted page can find those rebuttals either through a plugin that we've developed or they can just search our website and find the listed rebuttals. The core idea behind rebutter is that simple. Connect rebuttals to the claims and it's already up and running. But what I think is far more interesting than how rebuttal works is what I think successfully mapping all of these rebuttals can achieve over the coming 10 or 20 years and that's what I want to talk with you about today. First I think we need to look at the current state of affairs. Something is broken. We live in a world which is permanently connected to all human knowledge and somehow we still have people that believe things which are just demonstrably not true. They're crazy things which are just disproven centuries ago even. And I think while the sentiment expressed in this image is very appealing I believe it misses the point entirely. It's funny Eve was talking about Mark Twain because I think Mark Twain's got it right. I don't believe ignorance is a problem. Ignorance doesn't spread. False beliefs on the other hand are scourge and they're all over the internet propagating and promoting themselves. So why is this the case? How did misinformation become so prevalent in our information age? Isn't Wikipedia well-known enough? Are our science communicators failing somehow? Well of course not. Wikipedia is one of the most well-known websites on earth and we've had and continue to have amazing science communicators as well as numerous organizations, media outlets all doing their best to try and share science and knowledge with the public. So it isn't lack of trying or lack of availability of the information which has allowed this misinformation to spread. I think the disconnect between this permanent connection to all knowledge and the huge number of people who don't seem to understand basic science, logic and evidence-based analysis and comes down to two main things. First of all, the internet rightly offers equal opportunity to express all ideas equally. And secondly, our brains have a whole list of psychological flaws and biases towards our current beliefs over new information. So this creates a situation where people are free to go to the internet to find information that they want to find and reaffirm their current beliefs rather than have their false beliefs challenged. And even if they do happen to find a page which challenges their current beliefs thanks to the power of confirmation bias they'll be able to easily ignore or distort or reinterpret the contrary argument anyway. So no amount of having the correct information available is going to make a difference. I'm slightly generalizing here because minds can be changed but it's really hard. So I think it's worth saying though that we can't just give up on this because it's really hard to change minds but at the hands of this epidemic of false beliefs they cost us. They cost us resources. They cost us lives. They distract us from spending our time and money working to improve what does work and making the world a genuinely better place. So just to recap, we have a situation where people believe things which aren't true and merely presenting them with the factual evidence which contradicts their beliefs, doesn't change their minds and these false beliefs cause us individually and as a whole to make bad decisions which waste time, money and energy. So how do we destroy these false beliefs and fix this situation? I think the key is the philosophy behind skepticism. Now I know this is awesome this weekend we covered this quite a bit I think and of course we're all skeptics here but I think we often get lost in the outcomes of skepticism and sometimes forget what skepticism really means in a philosophical sense because skepticism isn't a body of knowledge. Philosophically it isn't arguing with homeopaths it isn't protecting people from balanced bracelet bands or about convincing people that vaccinations are safe, effective and beneficial skepticism isn't about trying to change people's minds. Skepticism is about rigorously interrogating the universe it is about demanding evidence for claims it is about critically appraising all information before you form a belief and that is the key right there catching people at that magical moment before they form their belief changing minds may be hard but getting people to be careful in their belief formation process I believe that that is doable you see no one wants to be wrong so helping people get better at forming the right beliefs to begin with I think this is something that everyone will sign up for so this is my suggested approach instead of fighting back against false beliefs by telling people what to think we instead work to build a framework around the internet which communicates question this to everyone who uses it on every page that they hit every page that provides some sort of argument makes a claim give them the sense that they should be questioning this information and then give them examples of how to question it sure this framework may not change your minds but it will change some and far more importantly than changing people's minds I want you to think about all of the people that haven't made up their mind yet about the millions of ideas and claims out there we all know something about a couple of things or maybe experts in one or two fields but there's far more that we don't know than what we do know and far more and even more importantly than that think of 134 million new minds which join us every year and the growing number of teens who use the internet every day now and how they are just starting to form beliefs which will guide them for the rest of their lives if we could encapsulate their experience of browsing the web with the constant question this vibe maybe they will carry that skepticism with them into adult life maybe every belief they form will be well informed critical analysis and evidence backed reasoning this is my long term vision for Rebutter for me Rebutter is not a tool for skeptics Rebutter is a tool for making skeptics I see a future where every single page on the internet is connected to numerous rebuttals some are great, some may be terrible but every time someone reads a claim on the internet they will be able to access one or more criticisms of that claim and when I say every page I mean these rebuttals too each one of them on the list on the right hand side should have their own rebuttals to them we won't be telling people that they are wrong we won't be sending them to just one belief over all others we will be teaching them how to critically analyse all claims, all beliefs and doubt everything simply through exposing them to examples of critical analysis in action the good and the bad and through this repeated exposure they will quickly learn to recognise weak claims and flimsy evidence faulty logic, the weak rebuttals will be ignored the strong will shine through and sure enough false claims will be easily identified I think the first generation who grows up in this world will become master skeptics the false beliefs will have no new vulnerable minds to take root in before that can happen though we need to build the map and build the users we need help we need more users like Bob who you saw up here yesterday talking about the Buzinski clinic, the other patient group we used David Gorski's article on science-based medicine and systematically submitted that to over 100 different pages supporting the Buzinski clinic we need more users like Pepin who wrote an article himself debunking a series of articles that were published in newspapers and magazines that claimed that students had shown that Wi-Fi kills plants he wrote that article and submitted it to all of the copies of the article that he found and he then used a Twitter widget which we've developed and tweeted his rebuttal at people that were sharing the rebutted page he ended up driving over 50,000 visitors to his article we need more users like Mary who uses her passion for the GMO debate to regularly submit rebuttals of topical articles in that field and we need more users like Out on a Boat who submitted her first rebuttal and used the Twitter reply widget to send two tweets to people who had shared the rebutted page and within minutes her rebutting tweet was retweeted to 112,000 people so how's that for impact on the fight against false beliefs? but what we really need is you we need all of you we need you to help us build this map of rebuttals and to help reach out to others because more than anything else rebuttal is a community of people who care about the spread of false beliefs and the losses of time, money and lives which they cause help us build this technology help us build this map help us build a huge community and maybe we can turn the internet from a passive information delivery system into an educational system which creates critical thinkers thank you and we have time for questions for Shane do you have any statistics about the success rates of your algorithms in terms of false indicators or whatever that and an idea of how it might be trending toward 100% it's hard to hear some of that regarding the success of your algorithm how many, was it 4 out of 5 how many false ones do you get and how is it improving? oh so in finding the rebuttals we don't have an algorithm it's all crowdsourced so we need people to as you're browsing the internet whenever you read a rebuttal and you identify it as such you submit it so at the moment there's no natural language processing software capable enough to identify the intention of the articles to identify whether they're rebuttals or not first of all congratulations on a fascinating I think very important tool I was wondering do you have any concerns you mentioned the all important confirmation bias effect that it can be used in fact to enhance that effect or for people who are looking for those rebuttals which simply confirm their own bias and perpetuating that I can see that perspective but I think that the current situation is far worse because the confirmation bias is saying it allows people to go to the internet and just look for what they're after and never accidentally come across the opposing perspective if you start at answers in Genesis you will never see talk origins but with this sort of process if someone goes to answers in Genesis then the next rebuttal connection will be to something like talk origins or skeptical rational wiki or whatever it's automatically a pro against pro against all it's not um and one of the things I do know a lot of people worry about is false balance in the media for us we are providing effectively as the name of this talk is a global debate we're providing a discussion a claim, a rebuttal, a counter rebuttal so it's not black and white for against it is reactions to each previous article so I don't see definitely someone gets exposed to an article they disagree with it then they click straight through to the side that agrees with them but at least they're looking at the side which disagrees with them somewhere in the mix yeah I thought this was a great idea last year's time and since then I've sort of looked around for it and it really hasn't made a huge impact yet and I was wondering if you've looked into possibly having the rebutter add-in come up by default in Firefox and maybe have keyword searches automatically bring up a reference to rebutter when there's something that might be of interest in skeptical basically negotiating with Google and Mozilla absolutely when they'll listen to me we'll do that but this is the start we need to start somewhere we need to build the map at the moment we're small, small user base small number of rebuttals but systematic growth we need to have a solid foundation and something to offer before they'll be interested but absolutely in the end default in Firefox, default in Chrome that would be fantastic but that's the long term a two-stage question first stage is there any moderation or is this completely free and open to the crowd? there is a level of moderation but at this point in time it's purely for spam and having said that we haven't had any yet so far things have been great as we grow we will react to the problems as they arise because there's a risk there's only two of us working on the project at this point with some assistance and it's very easy to fall into the trap of trying to predict everything that can go wrong and every possible risk and get stuck at the beginning not even getting the first step done so it's a reactionary thing the second part of that would have been are there concerns about say the democratization of knowledge or false balance for that matter if you just allow any rebuttals to grow from whatever I think this was I sort of answered this a little bit before but it is the most common question I get and it's definitely worth saying again is that the internet already has a democratization of knowledge anyone can access anything I think the value of this as I try to in the talk I try to sort of really convey this fact is that I think the idea of skepticism of just knowing that when you encounter a claim you should critically analyze it and ideally you know how to critically analyze it that's the value that we're conveying it's not about hey you've read this you should read this as well consume more information it's not about consuming information it's about how you consume information and I don't know of any other tool on the internet which teaches people how to do that while they consume information thank you Shane