What is “well-informed”? We think it means:

  • having access to multiple sources of information
  • not just believing everything you hear or read
  • making up your own mind about issues, based on the information available, and
  • when new information comes to light, reviewing it – and changing your mind if appropriate.

Oh yes – and also encouraging other people to do the same thing.

Simple.

Except that…

  • all information sources are not created equal, and
  • you can’t necessarily trust a source to be telling you the full facts – even (perhaps especially) when it’s a “trustworthy” source such as a government site, or the BBC.

Critical thinking

This is an essential skill that should be taught in schools – but isn’t. It is taught to some extent in universities, with the intention of students using it for their studies. However, we believe this needs to be applied far more widely. Here are a couple of links for information:

https://www.ed.ac.uk/institute-academic-development/study-hub/learning-resources/critical

https://www.monash.edu/learnhq/enhance-your-thinking/critical-thinking/what-is-critical-thinking

Essentially, it’s about:

  • Collecting information
  • Being open-minded
  • Analysing and interpreting the information
  • Self-checking – do I have enough information? Also – are the sources biased? Am I biased in my thinking?

Nudging

Depressingly, our governments are increasingly working to “nudge” us in the direction they prefer. It’s important to be aware of this.

Sometimes it’s fairly subtle, sometimes it’s sneaky and sometimes it’s an in-your-face deluge, such as the never-ending messages pushing everyone to do their part and get vaccinated with the (experimental) mRNA shots “to prevent transmission”. (Spoiler alert – they don’t, and weren’t even tested to see if they might do this.)

Disinformation wars

Alongside the nudging, governments have been working with the big social media companies to restrict information, under the guise of “countering disinformation”. This might at first sound like a reasonable idea – but who decides what is “disinformation” or “misinformation”? When companies are employing “fact checkers” it means that somebody else is deciding what information you get to see.

We’d like to see the alternative points of view and make up our own minds, thanks. Stop torpedoing people’s credibility, whether they’re dissenting or asking questions. Free speech and open discussion should be the standard.

It’s probably always happened, but this practice of openly criticising and discrediting people to shut down any disagreement by torpedoing their credibility has really taken off in the covid-19 era.

Top signs that someone is being discredited…

Words are weapons – these are some to look out for that might indicate someone is being discredited, especially if found on Wikipedia (you don’t control your own Wikipedia information). They’re also used by the mainstream media in news reports.

  • Being described in the media as discredited or controversial
  • Being accused of spreading disinformation or misinformation
  • Being called an anti-vaxxer
  • Labelled as right-wing or far-right, or perhaps trans-phobic or anti-Semitic

These descriptions could be true – but how about we make up our own minds, rather than having someone else decide for us?

Why no open discussion?

Wouldn’t it be lovely to be treated like independent human beings, and allowed to make up our own minds?

We should see discussions take place openly, not people being silenced because they disagree with the approved narrative. After all, if these dissenting opinions are so nuts, why aren’t governments, health agencies, etc willing to have discussions out in the open? Surely they would be able to immediately demonstrate how foolish these other opinions are?!

Anyway, here are some more notes regarding the mission towards being well-informed.

What is the source?

Information might come from:

  • Mainstream media, e.g. the BBC, big newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph or the Sun, or local papers and television. Mainstream organisations are more likely to “follow the narrative” and less likely to question the status quo.
  • Independent or non-mainstream media. These are independent publishers and sites.
  • The government, government agencies and government-linked organisations e.g. the NHS;
  • Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) – often these are charities, but you could also include organisations such as those that represent patients, and think tanks;
  • Businesses – these can range from tiny one-person businesses to giant multi-national corporations such as Shell and ICI. This category also includes banks and pharmaceutical companies;
  • Individuals – who might be journalists, concerned citizens, bloggers or social media users. They may or may not have qualifications relevant to what they’re talking about.

A couple of things to bear in mind, whatever the source, are:

News is designed to grab attention – to be shocking. Everyone wants to create a headline that makes you watch or read. Headlines can range from clickbait to emotive to shocking… and from slightly misleading to deliberately so.

Every person and organisation has some sort of bias. It’s hard to be completely “factual” because we all have pre-existing information, bias and preferences. It’s good practice to not only consider possible biases, but also to ask – is this the whole story? Is there another point of view? And importantly – what is not being mentioned or discussed?

What are the numbers…?

When information is presented, are you being told statistics, or numbers?

Numbers without content are unhelpful. “Five people died of covid” will always be awful for the people who died and their families. But there’s a huge difference if this is given as “information” on the number of deaths occurring, that you might interpret as representing the possible risk to you. Five from how many? Five people dying from a village of two hundred  represents 2.5% of that village’s population and is huge, while five people dying from a town of 10,000 people (0.05%) or five from a city of 500,000 (0.001%) are very different.

You may remember that governments were very fond of giving numbers of covid deaths during the pandemic, rather than percentages.

Statistics are usually more helpful, i.e. percentages or something you can more easily visualise – say, 2 out of every hundred people. But these can be misrepresented, especially regarding health data and risk. For example, you might read a headline that says “X triples your likelihood of getting cancer” – but is this misleading? Probably. There are two types of risk – absolute and relative.

Absolute risk measures the likelihood of a specific thing occurring over a period of time. It gives the probability of that thing happening, but it doesn’t guarantee that it will happen.

Relative risk measures the difference in absolute risk between two groups based on some difference – for example, “smokers are 2 to 4 times more likely to develop heart disease than non-smokers”.

Headlines in the media are very likely to be talking about relative risk – but without knowing the absolute risk this is related to, the numbers say absolutely nothing useful about the actual odds of something occurring. They just sound scary.

Also, humans are also renowned for finding it difficult to judge risk. And finally, everybody’s perception of risk is different – it’s something you need to judge for yourself.

For more information on risk and misleading numbers in a medical context, here’s a useful article: https://atlasbiomed.com/blog/absolute-vs-relative-risk/

Another note on statistics generally – the best data is likely to be data that hasn’t been overly interpreted. There are many ways to play with data, and a skilled person can often make it appear that something is X when actually it’s Y. Or Z. There are some helpful books on this – see our book list – and you could start with Darrell Huff’s book How to Lie with Statistics.

Power corrupts

Those in power like it and want to keep it. That influences what they say and what they do.

There are a couple of issues here: one is that people with political power seem terribly prone to forgetting that they are supposed (in a democracy) to represent the people and that that is not the same things as thinking they know best and telling us what to do.

The other is that we seem to be heading towards less of a democracy and more of an oligarchy – nope, it’s not just a Russian thing. Oligarchy = rule by the few. Essentially, anyone with enough money can buy their way into political influence. An “oligarch” could be a person or family, or a business.

Which brings us to…

Show me the money

If you look for the money, you can often see where biases are likely to be found, and corruption and influence happen. For example:

Pfizer is apparently planning to charge $100-$130 for covid-19 shots in the USA in 2023. The population of the USA is 335,726,106 at the time of writing. If only 10% of the US population to get a vaccination, that’s 33,752,610 people. Let’s say they charge $110 per shot – that’s an income of $3,692,987,166 (assuming my arithmetic is correct). Whatever the production cost and profit margin, that’s a big payday. So naturally Pfizer is going to be inclined to be in favour of the narrative “everyone should get vaccinated” and a lot less keen on free speech, and questioning of safety or efficacy.

When medical research is carried out, who’s funding it? What outcome are they looking for? If they’re providing the funds, they’ll probably get the answer they want.

Remember: business is all about the money. Sure, there are some companies that have morals and are good for people, especially if they’re small and local. But most are focused squarely on the bottom line, their CEOs captured by their fat salaries and stock options. Their duty is to their shareholders, NOT their customers and NOT the public.

And supposedly “independent” organisations like the MHRA? They are heavily funded by the companies that they are supposed to be regulating. Because that wouldn’t ever make any difference, would it?

  • Australia – TGA (Therapeutic Goods Administration) – 96% funded by the pharmaceutical industry
  • Europe – EMA (European Medical Agency) – 89% funded by pharmaceutical industry fees
  • UK – MHRA (Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency) – 86% of funding from the pharmaceutical industry

Remember, these agencies decide what information we receive. And incidentally, the supposedly “independent” MHRA is in fact an executive agency of the Department of Health & Social Care – so not exactly independent of the government then.

The WHO’s 2nd largest contributor (2020-21) was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with US$751m. Hmm, what influence could that possibly have?

It’s not just pharmaceutical companies – for example, think tanks can hugely influence politics, but who funds them? openDemocracy recently created their Who Funds You report reviewing the funding of think tanks in the UK. They found that a third of think tanks received donations of £14.3m, yet there was no or negligible information on where this came from.

Scepticism is your friend…

Stay sceptical, and think critically. We hope this helps.