Sjors Provoost

A friend of mine brought to my attention an article with the Top 5 Threats to science-based medicine. It mentions the usual state sponsored quacks, but the most interesting one is #5: New Media.

Of course, “user generated content” and unvetted health advice and claims are easily made by anyone anytime. And thanks to the magic of Google, a health claim need only be popular to be promoted.

So far, so familiar: it’s very hard to separate truth from nonsense when it comes to health information online.   Not that this is easy offline. It doesn’t help that even supposed authorities contradict each other and have conflicts of interest.

But what got me thinking is this bit:

Truth, accuracy, and scientific rigor aren’t always rewarded in this brave new world of digital influence. Being right has been uncoupled from being influential. The “wisdom of crowds” now decides what people see first when they attempt to educate themselves about health matters.

Because I just watched an episode of Beagle, my mind is primed at evolution theory, natural selection and in particular some of the painful consequences that can have to ordinary life. This leads me to the following question: in this evolutionary battle, can disinformation win from information?

This article and my intuition seems to suggest that it can, at least in the medium term (a couple of decades) . Not just for health: the problem exists in creationism, the housing bubble, politicians deciding on economic stimulus packages, the way we don’t properly deal with climate change, etc. There are always a few people who know the truth about these things, but these voices are not heard through the noise. As long as popularity and not truth is the strongest selection criterion for the stuff is in our collective minds, we are screwed.
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I’m going to TEDxBG in Bulgaria on January 9th. The speaker line-up looks great, but there’s only one issue: not all talks will be in English. Now there’s several ways to deal with that.

I could learn Bulgarian. According to Tim Ferriss it’s a piece of cake and won’t take much time.  I already speak a bit of Slovak and I can read the Кирилица alphabet, so that gives me a head start. I could request English subtitles, which someone could write live during the talk. Or someone could dub the talks. But are there enough non-Bulgarians in the room to make that worth the effort?

Here I’d like to propose a different solution: who can build me an iPhone application that listens to Bulgarian speech, translates it and then shows the translated text on my screen? You would do me and the rest of the world a huge favor.

My suggested approach is to use a speech to text library that supports Bulgarian, send the resulting text to Google Translate and display the translation on the screen.