Part 2 - THE ART OF SPIN

There are many areas of science where, if you scratch beneath the surface, you find presentation triumphs over content. If the presentation is done right, by the right person with the right letters after their name, most are willing to give that message a great deal of credibility.

Presentation over content is nothing new. Politicians, especially, have managed to turn this into a virtual art form and refer to it as ‘spin’

The term ‘spin’, when used in this context, comes from cricket where bowlers will place a spin on the ball in the hope that it will give his side an advantage and make it harder for the batsman to hit the ball.

There are many people who specialise in the presentation of information in this way and they are referred to as spin-doctors. Governments, especially, spend small fortunes on such people.

Spin comes in many forms. You have the simple but effective technique of the selective use of facts. Another favourite technique is the non-denial denial. This is where a politician might say, with feigned indignation, that they will not dignify a certain question with an answer or turn round and say that a certain allegation is absurd or ridiculous without actually saying the allegation is untrue.

Spin is nothing more than being evasive with your answers through your wording of those answers. While spin made be employed to tell you something that is true, often it not the truth of the matter.

One of the most famous examples came from the United Kingdom when the leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair, was interviewed for a newspaper called the Evening Standard just prior to the 1997 general election. He was asked if Labour would introduce fees to students seeking higher education. He said, and I quote – “Labour has no plans to introduce tuition fees for higher education." Labour won that election with a landslide majority and very soon introduced those fees.

You might think that Tony Blair had lied on the basis of doing one thing and saying another but the quoted statement was very carefully thought out.

It was true that the Labour government had no plans to introduce such fees but what it didn’t say was that it had no intention of introducing those fees. The intent was there but the plan to bring that intent to fruition was not yet in place so Tony Blair could legitimately say that the Labour Party had no plans to introduce such fees. What he said was true but not the truth.

I’m laboring this point for a very important reason. There is a great deal of spin in many areas of science. Many theories are presented to the general public as fact but are based on suppositions and assumptions.

A fact is something that can be verified. It’s a scientific fact that grass is green. It’s a scientific fact that the sky is blue. But it’s a scientific theory as to how old the Universe is. It’s scientific theory as to how it was created. Yet such theories are presented to you and me as facts.

It’s easy to see how that can happen. These theories are taught to our children as facts and they are taught in our universities as facts to the next generation of scientists who will conduct their experiments and research with those theories as their frame of reference. They have no reason to question what they were taught as a child or a student. They are merely building their knowledge on top of what they believe was already known.
Too few scientists work with primary sources and the errors or misconceptions of others are repeated and propagated. Add to that the fact that scholars are often led by their biases more than by the evidence any way.

But the more our technology advances, the more we are beginning to realise that some of our best known and accepted theories aren’t standing up to scrutiny.

Theories are born when we observe something we cannot explain so we use a mixture of the facts known at the time and mix them with assumptions and guess work.

We see the sun rise above the horizon and the sun set behind it. The horizon stretches off into the far distance, straight out in all directions. With that evidence, is it not reasonable to assume that the world must be flat? It was perfectly reasonable thousands of years ago. It was believed at that time the world was shaped like a huge disk and you would fall off if you got too close to the edge.

The scientists of the time took facts (the sun rises and sets beyond the horizon) and mixed it with a hypothesis (that horizon must form so sort of boundary) to get a theory – the Earth is flat. This was a gravely flawed theory that, with the benefit of our 21st century hindsight, we can snigger at from a distance. But we are still doing the same thing, even today.