I am not a young man… middle aged at best. Over the hill at most. I jokingly frame my current age of 50 by saying that I’m half a century old and that’s perfectly fine with me. I’m aware I have more life behind me that in front of me and that’s OK too. I still have the skeptical edge that has served me well as a young man and it continues to help me discern fact from fiction in my daily life.
“An alien mothership is coming.” a man said to me at work the other day. He’s not dumb and he’s usually a pretty sensible guy, so why would he believe this? I mean, sure… aliens exist and all that. With billions upon billions of habitable planets statistically scattered throughout the universe, it would be the height of hubris to believe that we’re alone in the cosmos. That being said… they’ve never been here and probably wouldn’t come if they could. When I heard about the “alien mothership” that will arrive in October, my “bull-shit-o’meter” went off. I did what I do and I looked it up. I saw articles from the Daily Mail titled “Exact date ‘alien probe’ is set to arrive at Earth as chilling warning is issued” and the article goes on to misinterpret the paper. Yahoo said “Possibly Hostile ‘Alien’ Object Could Arrive in November 2025, Wild Research Paper Says” and that artlce references the New York Post article “Rare interstellar object the size of Manhattan could be an alien probe: Harvard scientists” and that article calls the “probe” a “technological artifact”. I was flabbergasted and still, the gauge on the “bull-shit-o’meter” was still spinning wildly.
I quickly discovered… no one bothered to read the paper! I highly encourage everyone to go there and click the “View PDF” button and read it but if you don’t, the take away is this – “We strongly emphasize that this paper is largely a pedagogical exercise, with interesting discoveries and strange serendipities, worthy of a record in the scientific literature. By far the most likely outcome will be that 3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet, and the authors await the astronomical data to support this likely origin.” It’s a thought experiment about how to determine if an extrasolar object is a craft / probe or a hunk of rock and ice just passing through. That’s it. It’s not saying that we’re all screwed because definitely aliens! All this co-worker read was the article titles… maybe even just one article title.
Our post’s title is part of a quote by Dr Shelly Taylor at UCLA paraphrasing her finding on older people and their propensity to believe whatever is presented to them. The paper was published in the PLAS and is titled “Neural and behavioral bases of age differences in perceptions of trust“. In the paper, she stresses it has nothing to do with intelligence and I would agree with that based on my interactions with some of the people I have known that were much older than me. I’ve known older relatives to open their hearts and homes to people who would take them for everything and it was because of a sob story or because they were a trusted relative… how could they lie to their dear old mom or auntie? It was not lack of intelligence that made them believe the ex-con was just down on his luck, it was because they were just geared to believe. I would take it a step further and say I think, it’s because they were geared to believe a preconception. If you think a certain group of people is not great, then you hear something about them being terrible and you are already believing everything you hear, you believe that too and it reinforces your bias. You might even be inclined to interact with the news article or YouTube video and then the algorithm has you and you end up in an echo chamber. This would explain why the “baby boomers” are they way that most of them seem to be.
So… how do I avoid the trap? I’m getting up there and I’m likely to start taking everything at face value. It may have already started as my wife points out how wrong I am pretty frequently. My plan is NOT to share anything I see until I’m run it through rigorous checking. News articles on line aren’t great sources as we’ve seen with the alien mothership / Object 3I- Atlas. If you can find papers that corroborate each other or historical documentation, the that’s what you can believe.
“Older adults are more likely to believe false information, not because they’re less intelligent, but because they’re less likely to question it.”
— Shelly Taylor, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at UCLA