Getting to the truth

Author's remedies for the disinformation crisis will be controversial.

- THOMAS LUMLEY

DISTRUST: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science, by Gary Smith (Oxford University Press, $US30 hb)

The theme of Distrust is attacks on both the process of science and its popular credibility. The book is generally accessible and readable, a polemic in the genre of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science. It will be most interesting to people without much knowledge of the area; many of the examples will already be familiar to those who follow discussions about the conduct of science.

Three reasons are given for a credibility crisis in science: disinformation, data torturing and data mining. Disinformation is part of a populist backlash and is mediated by the internet and social media and reinforced by those who profit from it. Data torturing is "driven by scientists' insistence on empirical evidence", and data mining is the automated version "fuelled by the big data and powerful computers that scientists created".

The stories of Gary Smith, an economics professor in California and author of The AI Delusion, with the possible exception of digressions on Bitcoin, are compelling illustrations of a problem for science.

One of the inside-cover blurbs compares the book to Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, a comparison that actually highlights one of the book's problems. Distrust has many historical examples, but its thesis of a modern crisis is somewhat weakened by the similarity of past and present errors.