Nick Bilton writes about technology for the Style section of the New York Times. He's not a reporter; he does commentary, and as such nobody expects him to be right all the time. But his latest piece---which purports to outline scientific evidence that wearables like Apple's recently announced Watch could cause diseases as serious as cancer---isn't just wrong. Nor is it merely over-cautious, underreported, and purposefully provocative. It is dangerous.
This article is not about Nick Bilton. This article is about science, and how conspiracy-miners like Bilton misrepresent science to manufacture support for controversial ideas. The problem is not that Bilton believes that technology can cause diseases like cancer. That’s an old hypothesis, and one that science should (and does) examine. The problem is that he delivered his argument by targeting the most admirable hallmark of the scientific method: uncertainty in the face of incomplete evidence. And that makes his essay a pernicious attack on science itself.
Bilton’s argument follows a familiar formula: Make a provocative claim, back it up by cherry-picking from the scientific literature, throw in commentary from an "expert" or two, and season throughout with attacks on less-than-complete scientific data.
To start, Bilton presents a cautionary tale about the very real campaign tobacco companies waged to disguise the health consequences of smoking in the 1940s. The flag is up: Better hear this one out, because the stakes seem pretty high. That misapplied cross-reference lends the theory legitimacy, giving Bilton room to sow the seeds of conspiracy in the reader’s brain. This, by implication, has all happened before. Then Bilton speaks with one doctor, primarily known for selling homeopathic remedies on his website. The doctor is also a frequent writer on the risks of cellphones, but has never actually published research on the topic.
Once the writer has hollowed out a little hole of doubt, he fills it out with misinterpreted or bad science. Bilton hangs his thesis on a few examples suggesting that cell phones (not wearables, mind you) can cause cancer. He says the the most important of these is a World Health Organization panel that concluded there may be a chance of developing brain tumors when using cell phones over a long period of time. But in nearly every sentence, he mangles the WHO's results.
For example, he writes:
In fact, they did not. The WHO panel suggested that the farther away the device is from one's head, the lower the exposure to radiation---and its potential harms. It's a subtle difference, one that could have been an honest misunderstanding by Bilton, but significant if you are talking about getting a tumor in your head. He's making it sound like the harm has been proven. The risk is still hypothetical. If non-ionizing radiation like the stuff a cellular phone pumps out is harmful, then yes, holding a cell phone closer to your head is going to be more harmful. But the WHO review did not do any actual investigation about how much cell phone use would lead to a tumor, or even how non-ionizing radiation from the phone would cause the DNA inside the brain cells to mutate and become cancerous.
Now, that doesn't mean that the WHO paper was useless, or junk science. But Bilton homes in on the phrase “possibly carcinogenic,” implying that it suggests some sort of bet-hedging on the part of the scientists. That's the dangerous part of Bilton's article. Scientists don’t say things like “possibly,” “inconclusive,” and “more research is needed” to hedge their bets. These words and phrases are how scientists pay research forward, so future researchers can know where to focus their efforts.
But in the hands of Bilton, these words become a part of the antiscience meme---that uncertainty equals inadequacy. It's how evolution deniers twisted the idea of a "missing link" into a weapon that is handicapping biology education in US public schools. It's how people converted legitimate ecological concerns about genetically modified organisms into weapons against technology that could help stave off famine. In fact, the word "uncertainty" is a favorite turn of phrase for climate change deniers, whose incessant attacks on the nuances in well-constructed research have resulted in a political stalemate on environmental policy changes within the government of the only nation on Earth that can singlehandedly enact meaningful legislation to tackle global warming.
So forget about watches and fitness trackers and augmented reality headsets. Their relative efficacy---and even safety, though nobody's really questioning that---aren't the issue. Bilton's claims about cancer are part of a long line of cancerous arguments. Scientific uncertainty is the most important, and most widely misunderstood aspect, of scientific progress. It lets scientists describe their best assessment of the shape of the universe, and still focus on problems that have yet to be solved. And the antiscience stance---that uncertainty is cause for skepticism, disbelief, or worst of all conspiracy---lets fear-mongers use good science to leverage the next bad idea.
Science is our most reliable source of truth---the way we know that the planet is warming, vaccines save lives, and your next watch probably (probably!) won't make your hand fall off. If a writer at this country's newspaper of record wants to write about the health dangers of technology, he has a responsibility to understand what the science actually says---and more importantly, how the science says it. Otherwise, that writer isn't warning people that wearables are the Soylent Green of the 21st century. He's poisoning the well for future scientific discourse. Only science---not ignorance, not fear-mongering, not conspiracy-theorizing---will ever tell us whether a watch is going to give you cancer.
