Timothy Caulfield might want to consider having “champion debunker” tattooed in a prominent place so people would ask him about his mission to combat “how science and health are misrepresented in the public sphere through spin, exploitation and less-than-ideal representations of science,” as he describes it.

In four previous books, the 61-year-old University of Alberta law professor has used ironclad research and a vibrant, accessible writing style to expose the special interests that twist science into lucrative but potentially harmful marketing. His 2015 book, The Science of Celebrity… or Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?, for example, cast a skeptical eye on the efficacy of celebrity health endorsements.

Caulfield’s latest, the reliably pithy The Certainty Illusion: What You Don’t Know and Why It Matters, casts perhaps his widest net over the pernicious spread of disinformation in, paradoxically, an age of abundant resources that should help distinguish fact from fiction, but oftentimes fuels the confusion.

Humans, he writes in the introduction, “are bombarded with information through our smartphones, tablets, TV shows, and internet searches. It has been estimated that humans process about seventy-four gigabytes of information every single day. Neuroscientists Sabine Heim and Andreas Keil have noted that, just five hundred years ago, 74 GB of information would be what a highly educated person consumed in a lifetime through books and stories.’”

In The Certainty Illusion, Caulfield groups his myth-busting arguments into three buckets. There’s “The Science Illusion,” in which sloppy or questionably funded science is used to sell products or points of view (i.e. climate-change denial) that are advantageous to someone or something, though generally not the targeted audience. Here, Caulfield deploys terms like “scienceploitation” and “science washing” to illustrate his point.

“The Goodness Illusion” happens when products or services are framed by a “health halo” of often meaningless or misleading language, like “natural” or “clean,” to appeal to our fundamental desire to be good, do good or at least be perceived as being those things. Finally, “The Opinion Illusion” is the seductive persuasion of things like online reviews that reinforce our choices and allow us to see ourselves as part of a larger, discerning cohort, even if many of those online reviews are hyperbolized, incentivized or just plain bogus. 

If Caulfield has one overarching point to make, it’s that critical thinking is as essential now – maybe even more essential – in the age of lightning-fast, super-easy access to information as it was in our knuckle-dragging, pre-internet days.

“This incredible paradox – that there is so much information and thus, so much room for disinformation – is very consequential for the public, for journalists, for policymakers and, increasingly for academics, clinicians, and people who work in the science space,” Caulfield says in a phone interview from Edmonton. 

In addition to author and documentarian, the U of A prof is the former Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy and research director of the Health Law Institute. He is also, by his own admission, a pop-culture obsessive, which, in addition to greatly enlivening his writing, makes him a  frequent radio guest and engaging public speaker.

“The environment has become so incredibly noisy,” Caulfield continues. “There is all this research that looks real, and unless you really take the time to consider what’s being said, who is saying it and where it’s being published, it can feel like part of the scientific discourse even when it’s not.”

A major bee in Caulfield’s bonnet is what he describes as “predatory publications” churning out slapdash articles that spread disinformation and then are picked up by the media. Dr. Charles Runels, the inventor and trademark holder of the notorious O-Shot, for example, claims that injecting a woman’s vagina with platelet-rich plasma will enhance her sexual response. Caulfield and his colleague Dr. Jen Gunter challenged Runels’ research, published in a journal called Women’s Health Care, which, Caulfield contends, contains multiple red flags.

“In the study, Runels is listed as the corresponding author, and his address is ambiguously referenced as ‘Medical School Birmingham,’” Caulfield writes in the book. “I used Google Street View to look at the location and found a modest, two-storey building with a dumpster out front. Another red flag: how quickly the paper was published.”

Caulfield notes the O-Shot study was submitted for publication on June 12, 2014, and accepted two weeks later, an impossible deadline in which to have a paper properly assessed, peer reviewed, potentially defended by the author and then edited. 

“You should be totally enraged [by predatory publications],” he writes. “Resources that should be used for rigorous research are being squandered on useless publications that harm science and line the pockets of fraudsters.” 

So why do false and formally retracted studies, like the one Caulfield cites from now-disgraced British doctor Andrew Wakefield linking vaccines to autism (a refuted concept nevertheless widely perpetuated by the actor Jenny McCarthy, among others) persist in the public consciousness?

“There are some practical problems,” Caulfield says. “Studies aren’t retracted fast enough or the retraction becomes part of a conspiracy theory, proving a scientist must be right because [his work] was retracted by the evil forces that are controlling the world which heightens its perceived legitimacy. 

“Being allegedly marginalized or cancelled is a badge of honour when, in fact, that’s not what’s happening at all. It’s the marketplace of ideas assessing what the evidence says and concluding it’s incorrect. But those who spread misinformation have done a good job of making disagreements seem like censorship.”

Despite the precarious picture Caulfield paints in The Certainty Illusion, he hopes that readers will find reasons for optimism while using his often-humorous book as a roadmap for maintaining healthy cynicism in a raucous online environment caffeinated by social media and, more recently, by artificial intelligence.

“It is such a dark time and there are so many profound issues with our information environment right now,” he says. “Deceiving the public about what science says warps our knowledge base, and that can do grave harm to scientific institutions, to public trust, and it can take a long time to correct. The stakes are incredibly high.”