 University of Washington. Being a strong man, tap Seattle's premier, tent-based science outreach activity. Astronomers hate this one weird trick. Seven tips to reduce your gray matter fat. Insert other clickbait titles. You've seen them. I've seen them. We're going to talk about them. And because I feel like I'm here with 100 of my closest friends, I want to give this talk on slightly a personal note. This is something that I haven't really talked about before, so come along with me on this journey. Be a little forgiving as I explore this thing that's been bothering me. And I want to get it off my chest. And I want to talk to you about this. But before we dive in, I want to set some ground rules for what I'm going to say and what I'm not going to say. And the first thing I want to say is, thank you for coming out. Thank you for supporting science, local scientists, local business, local beer, local vegan hot dogs. And thank you for supporting knowledge and truth in a time when we really need more of that. Thank you. Give yourself a round of applause for that. OK, good cheesy audience interaction. Check. Next. OK, the first thing I want to say is, am I this way? OK, there we go. The first thing I want to say is, I am a huge fan of science. I love, yes, I love science, right? There's a reason that I do this for a living, and it's not the pay, and it's not the glamorous office. Though UW is a lovely campus, you should all visit. But I fucking love science, right? It's awesome. And I love, every time I see in the news, cool headlines, amazing graphs. I love that graphs become part of our narrative and part of our news media. It's an exciting time to be a fan of science, to be part of the sort of cultural movement that appreciates knowledge in the search for truth. Thumbs up science. OK, so first, I love science just like you. I'm a fan of science. The second thing, which I think is actually just restating the first thing, is that when you're a scientist or when you're a fan of science, you love failure. You love being wrong. Being wrong is just nature telling you that, no, try again. Come up with a better idea, a better explanation for how the universe is working. So if you love science, you have to love the struggle, and you have to love truth, OK, truth. And that's what this talk is about. It's about rooting out the BS and discovering the truth and appreciating and celebrating the truth. Being wrong is OK. I'm going to talk about clickbait articles and headlines that didn't turn out to be true or were over-exaggerated or pictures that were like, oh, that was photoshopped. And let me just say I have shared and retweeted a bunch of these myself. So we're not here to dunk on people who are just enthusiastic. We're here to help get everybody on team truth, team root out the BS. So being wrong is OK. Let's move forward from there. So with those ground rules in place, come with me as we talk about clickbait, misunderstandings, and maybe even some outright lies. All right, the first example I want to talk about is one that started many years ago, something like almost 20 years ago, which is this so-called the Mars hoax. I'm sure people have seen this in their inbox with like forward, forward, re, forward. Go outside and see Mars. It's going to be the size of a ham sandwich in the sky. I've seen this email repeatedly over the years. This is called the Mars hoax. It even has its own Wikipedia page called Mars underscore hoax. And it tends to crop up every August, sometime in late August. Usually August 25th or 27th, something like that. And the claim is that go outside, because Mars is going to be so big in the sky that it'll be giant and it'll be awe-inspiring. It'll be as big as the moon or as big as, again, a ham sandwich or something. I don't know. It'll be huge. It'll be spectacular. It'll be the last time in 40,000 years you'll see it. And you've got to go outside. And then you go outside and you're like, OK, I don't see anything. These people are idiots. And then you're disappointed. And you're like, science is stupid. There's a reason I didn't do this in college. And you move on. And little by little, we chip away at your interest and your excitement and your enthusiasm and your belief and your trust in science as an institution. OK, the funny thing about this hoax is that it was based largely on the truth. Is that about 20 years ago, there was a time when Mars was the closest it had been in like 40,000 years. It was slightly closer than it usually is, which made no perceptible difference whatsoever. Mars is like a dot. You go outside, it's like, yep, it's that one. And that was Mars at its closest opposition. And it was cool. And Hubble, I think, actually even took this photo. The Hubble Space Telescope actually took this photo at that point, because it was slightly closer. I think it was cool. But this has morphed and recurred, because it's so spectacular and ridiculous. OK, here's another great one that I see a lot. Any time there's an eclipse, any kind of eclipse, really, you see this thing floating around Reddit and Twitter. Like, oh my god, the astronauts leaned out the window and took this picture of space. Wow. And it's awesome. Look, that's just objectively awesome looking. There's the Milky Way, and there's a shadow, and there's contrasts and colors. And this is somebody's work from an art website, DeviantArt. This is somebody's Photoshop, where they were trying to show off cool stuff. This was not meant to deceive you. It was meant to be like, hey, look at my Photoshop skills. And instead, it's been co-opted into this hoax about this amazing picture has only been seen by astronauts eating ham sandwiches once in 40,000 years. And it's nonsense, right? This is not what an eclipse from space looks like, and you wouldn't see the Milky Way. But the enthusiasm is good, right? That's the point. People aren't sharing this because they're trying to get you to buy something. They're sharing it because space is cool, and science is cool. And I've hit like on this before, and then be like, ah, damn it, this is the Photoshop one, right? Eclipse from space. OK, the third one that I want to talk about right here is the super blood wolf coyote moon thing, right? Like, we did have some amazing eclipses. Some amazing, this was from space.com, but like some amazing eclipses. This is all good. I'm happy here. I don't love the title. I don't know what a blood wolf moon is or what makes it super. But like, I'm fine. Go outside, watch the eclipse. It's cool. It's amazing. Take a picture. It's great. This is fine. This is a problem. This is Rio de Janeiro, plus, I don't know, like a Ridley Scott movie, right? This is problematic, because you go outside and you're just like mad disappointed, like, what? What? Right, you can go, I mean, this should tell you this is a problem because it's even on Snopes, right? There are BS websites, Snopes.com, the super moon nonsense. This is a problem. OK, the point of part one of this talk is science communication is important. We've got to communicate what's true. This is a great headline from Aronely, I fucking love science. They retweeted, this is yesterday I took this screenshot, so it's 15 minutes plus 24 hours. Millions of Americans think chocolate milk comes from? Brown cows. Come on, what? No, that's not true. Right? I don't think so. The survey that they link to says 7% of adults in America think chocolate milk, this is not astronomy for all those playing along, this is just milk. 7% of adults in America think that cows produce chocolate milk. And what's funny about it is also this survey was kind of garbage, like if you go back and look at the survey, they did do a survey, but the survey is not rigorous, so the whole thing is just nonsense, and it bounces back and forth. And what I love about this is that the guy is offering the cow, there's two straws, the two straws slays me. But then he's like, there you go, cow. OK, but the point, if there is a point, the point is that science communication is important, and chocolate milk is delicious. Let's talk about some real science. OK, so that's popular culture stuff. This is the stuff that pops up in your news feed, in your email. This is what I work on. I've written a paper on this star. I've worked with the lead author of this study before. This is a really amazing, true, amazing detection of what's called Boyajian star, named after Tabitha Boyajian, a professor who discovered this amazing object. And here's the deal. This is why we all went, whoa, it did this. It had these wiggly lines. And to scientists, that's a huge deal, wiggly lines. Because the shape of these lines were totally unexpected. Something passed in front of this star to make it go dim for a day or two, and it had a really weird profile. And we don't really know what it is. And that's the God's honest truth. We don't really know what it's probably dust, or a comet, or a bunch of comets, or something. That's not that exciting. Nobody's going, wow, out there. OK, so the Atlantic picked this up, because it's kind of cool. It's a really unusual discovery. The most mysterious star in our galaxy. All right, that's fine. That's fine. I don't have any problem with that. Astronomers have spotted a strange object. Yeah, it's fine. Scientists study extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a look. I get a little worried. We're OK. It's fine. It's fine. It's the Atlantic. It's a good publication. You should subscribe or whatever. Here's a funny outfit called the Washington Post. The flickers are consistent with an alien mega structure like this artist concept of halo or something. Is it flickering because of aliens? Show more. It says no. It should say no. OK, this gets better. This is the fine folks at Discovery. Again, we're not trying to dunk here. We're just trying to point out interesting facts. Here it is. Has Kepler, the space telescope that discovered this, has Kepler discovered an alien mega structure? I love this one because the artist's rendition is so, so pointless. Like it looks like firefly. Why did they cancel it? OK, here's one more on Boyajin's star. Have aliens built huge structures around Boyajin's star? Probably not. But alternative explanations are hard to come by. This is true. Here's another good artist rendition. It looks like a bunch of iPhone 8s centered around a campfire, which is funny. And here's the really funny part about this one. Scientific American is a pretty reputable publication. Here's the funny thing about this one. This guy, Jason Wright, is a professor of astronomy at Penn State University, is an absolutely brilliant scientist who I've worked with. And he, and this is a former graduate student of his Kimberly Cartier, they are the real deal. And this is the problem. You've got to write this, or at least the editors think you've got to write this headline to get people to click to read the article. The article is completely sensible. But the headline is ridiculous. And I'm making fun of Jason because he's smart, and I love him. But we do look for weird stuff. We do look for weird exotic patterns. This is an illustration that I drew of exotic patterns we might see in data that could be indicative of aliens. Jason himself actually works on the honest to God search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It's a fascinating topic that's finally getting subtraction and not being just laughed at. I'm hoping to come back and, yeah, thank you. It's awesome. We ought to look. I want to believe, and we ought to look. So there is real science here, but oh, golly, we need to be careful about reporting them. These searches and these finds, we got to be really careful. We have an obligation as scientists to be really careful. And I worry. I worry that we're not. But ominous logo hiding off the side of the screen. But we are faced with an even bigger challenge, a challenger who has a lot bigger machinery behind them that we are going to have a hard time beating. And that is the social media science fan accounts. So I'm not trying to pick on I fucking love science because they do great work. Occasionally get it wrong, but they actually do really care about science. I don't want to pick on them, but I'm going to pick on some other people here. OK, here is an account called atPhysics-Astronomy, or atOrgPhysics. They got a really cool domain name. Here's a picture they posted September 6th. View of Hurricane Dorian from the coast of Florida. Spoiler, no, it ain't. And hurricanes are a big deal. We don't get a lot of them here. But they're a big deal. They kill people. They're not really that funny. And if you saw this on the TV, and you went outside and freaked out, like, oh, we got to pack up and run because I recognize this coastline, we got to run. This is not great. I don't like this. This is unethical, I think I would categorize this as. And they have 110,000 Twitter followers. This post had 100,000 retweets. That's a huge impact for something that is just garbage, just a lie. Here's another one, from atInterestingSci1. To their credit, they don't try to explain what it is. They just say, wow. But this is like a baking experiment gone wrong. What is this, Toronto or something? Shout out, shout out Toronto. Yeah, this is Tim Hortons. They have 143,000 followers. This has 15,000 views. It is, I don't know what, I mean, it's fine if it's art. It's fine if it's art. It's cool, it's engaging to your eyeballs. But it ain't science. And it's not science and nature, the account title. You know, I worry about this. This is what's causing me worry. How do we fight back against this? Here's one more. AtZonePhysics, which is a sweet Einstein logo and a cool banner. Oh, they've got a great URL, physics-astronomy.org. That's cool. That's a great URL. I wish I had that domain. And 800, almost 850, better part of a million followers. And they posted, this is yesterday, November 20, 2019. Yesterday morning, when I grabbed this, it had 250 retweets. It's since grown. Pluto has been reclassified as a planet. Rejoice. No, it hasn't. That is a lie. Not only that, if you click on their silly website and you go to the article that's linked, it's a link to an April Fools article. What do we do about this? OK, yeah, physics, yeah, whatever. Here we go. They're a big deal. They've got lots of followers. This is a huge impact for nonsense. This is going to cause people a lot of confusion about what we do. That upsets me a little bit. Not like, damn it, you've got to get it right. Or like, you should know better. But the due diligence, where is the celebration of truth? You got it wrong. I'm not worried about that. I'm worried about, oops, we screwed up. Where is that post? Where is the integrity to say, we messed it up? It's OK to get it wrong. I get it wrong all the time. At 850,000 followers, there are only two astronomers in the world with more Twitter followers than that. One is Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson in New York, TV celebrity. The other is Dr. Brian May, also known as the kind from Queen. He was only in one of the biggest fans of all time. And he's only got a million followers. So go follow Brian May, huh? And then this account slides in above Phil Plate, the bad astronomer who is one of the biggest deals of astronomy communication. If you're not following Phil Plate, man, get on your phone right now. Ignore me. I got 2,000 followers. Ignore me. Go follow Phil Plate. He's the real deal. These people are crushing him. This is concerning. Why? Does this page exist? Here's your answer. This page has nothing to do with physics and astronomy, of course. It has to do with affordable islands and a man turning an airplane into a house, which actually does sound really cool. And look at the deepest hole the planet has. And this yacht, right, these are ads. I think this is self-explanatory. I think this, you can understand what I'm saying here. This is a machine to get you to click on things, to get your eyeballs on things, to get you to engage with things so they make a few pennies. And they do that a million times a day. That's depressing with my beer. Dramatic interlude. So what can we do about it? And I don't mean just like, what can we, the noble astronomers, I mean like, we, you, what can we do about this? Because the fact that you're here gives me a lot of hope. The fact that this is the 56th event for astronomy on top of Seattle. Shout out to astronomy on top of Seattle, 56th event. Amazing, it's freezing in this place, it's still full of people. It's not actually freezing, thank you, that's true. I was wrong. Thank you. Keep them honest. What can we do about this? Because I don't want you to be like, man, the internet sucks. Because the internet doesn't suck, the internet is why we're all here. The internet is how you found out about this event likely. The internet is how I reach people every day and communicate science. The internet's a great thing. This is like a cultural problem that we can address. I want to end this on a hopeful note. So I have three action items, three things that we in this room need to do. Number one, we need to communicate about science. We as scientists need to communicate science. There's a great little blog post by Professor Michelle Franco from Bryn Morrow College and she ends it by saying, if we don't tell them what we do, the pseudoscientists will. They will fill that vacuum with nonsense. Now she's a chemist and so people are worried about putting chemicals on their hair and vaccines and stuff like real problems. Vaccines, vaccines are good. Vaccines are, they're a good thing and chemists worry a lot about bad reputations. Yeah, if we don't tell them what we do, the pseudoscientists will. That's a real threat. So to the scientists and the science folks in this room, tell them what you do so that nobody thinks these things. So nobody thinks that chocolate cows make the super blood moon or whatever. We gotta tell them about the science. We gotta spread truth. It's important. Number two, you more broadly than people in this tent can help share and intervene. One of the only ways that we can beat fake news. Oh, I hate that term. One of the ways we can beat, we can so-called beat this kind of phenomenon is by intervening and telling people, actually that was garbage. And it feels so helpless in the moment when you have these tiny interactions, when you're butting heads with your great aunt or whatever on Facebook, but like, look, 253 tweets, we gotta try. We gotta try to intervene and tell people that wasn't true. There is research. There is research. I should have put a citation here. There is research that shows that by making these interventions, by telling people that like, hey, that was not a really reputable source that you linked to that one time. Maybe you should try. People actually do tend to get a little better. There is some hope that by elevating the discourse of people about science and about truth more broadly, that we might hope to center around something in this world that is true again. I think that's an important thing to strive for. And you all can help. It matters when you subscribe to somebody like Phil Plate and retweet the things that are cool about science. And it matters when somebody retweets the super blood moon over Rio de Janeiro with a cow jumping over it, that you say, that doesn't, that looks like Photoshop to me. I don't think that's real. Those things help. And third, and I think this is a more subtle point, but because we're in Seattle, I think it's worth standing up here and trying to make at least, we need the help of technology and technology companies with this problem. Now, I'm not the only one saying this by any stretch of the imagination. Finding spam and finding falsehoods and fake news is a huge deal right now. And a lot of really smart people are working on it. I took this screenshot of the Google Optimized Resource Hub, which is just like a documentation hub for how to get people to like look at your website and click your links. This is a really useful resource for developers who are trying to make websites that are pleasant to look at and great. Because they want eyeballs. Because the entire economy of the internet is based around eyeballs. We need other solutions besides just eyeball time equals dollars equals the only thing that matters on the internet. We need tools that help us optimize for things besides just eyeball time. We need tools that help us figure out what's the most efficient way to get knowledge across. What's the most efficient way to identify bad actors who are spreading misinformation and intervening when people are trying to share that content saying, just so you know that that's BS. How do we get these tools? I am not a programmer by trade. Some people in this room probably are. This is something important that matters to us. That matters to scientists. That we want, we need tools and we want tools to help build partnerships that will reward people who are creating science and science knowledge. So one thing, yeah, whoo. Also, Dr. Jesse Christensen, another amazing astronomer, Vlogbrothers, I think the best channel on YouTube. Yeah, right, shut up, Vlogbrothers. Hank and John, there you go. There's the AOT bump. We already do this to an extent, right? These platforms verify or put fancy check marks or stars, nice people's names. Why not little brains? I don't know, this is like a cute idea. Why not, these are good sources of reputable truth and knowledge. Why not reward this by helping draw the reader to these kinds of sources? This is one trivial example. And going back to number two, technology companies and advertising companies will care if we all care. If we are subscribing to scientists and broadcasting that message of truth, then they will pay attention. And if we just succumb to the garbage that is floating around on the internet, then they will help continue optimizing for garbage. So subscribe to your local homegrown scientists and to your truth. All right, and in conclusion, again, these three action items, we need to do science outreach, we need help from everyone to spread truth and identify falsehoods. And we need the help of technology companies. And with that, I will thank you all. Thank you all for coming out again tonight. Thank you.