Society General Meeting

Talk: Recognising and Interpreting Reliable Information

Prof. Peter Townsend

 Communication of information is never perfect. Even with the best of intentions both the source and recipient will rarely have identical interpretations. Problems arise from different backgrounds, focus, and language, as well as factual emphasis. Surprisingly many people totally ignore any views or information presented with graphical or tabulated data. Politicians rarely have any deep understanding of science. Many scientists and medical people tend to believe what they learnt when training and have immense difficulty accepting new opinions, especially if they are in conflict with their earlier ones, or political views. We are human and only see and hear what we want to believe.

Peter will emphasise the immense problems in factual communication, especially when there are vested interests. There are even musical and visual errors where the brain interprets non-existent material. One may use tricks to display identical data to generate opposite interpretations, and we need to identify the numerous examples of deliberate “fake news”.