Anticipating CSICon 2024: A Video Interview with Andrea Love

This is part of my series of video interviews with the speakers scheduled to appear at CSICon 2024. This conference is run by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and will take place in Las Vegas from October 24–27. (You can find all the details and register right here.) 

For this episode, my guest was Andrea Love, who is a biomedical scientist and science communicator with a PhD in microbiology and immunology. She has over a decade of experience in basic sciences, translational medicine, and clinical research. She is a subject-matter expert in infectious disease immunology, cancer immunology, and autoimmunity and is adept at translating complex scientific data and topics for the public and healthcare providers. Love works full time in life science biotechnology in the fields of vaccinology, immunology, immunotherapy, cancer, cell and gene therapy, and other relevant areas. 

Love has a passion for helping the public understand complex science topics to navigate the world better. She teaches continuing medical education courses for healthcare professionals and is passionate about improving science literacy starting from an early age and encouraging children toward a career in STEM. She is the creator of ImmunoLogic.org, a science information hub that communicates evidence-based information on science and health topics. She is also the executive director of the American Lyme Disease Foundation and a columnist for Skeptical Inquirer.

This is how the conference’s website describes her upcoming CSICon talk, “Echo Chambers vs. Evidence: Ideological Conflicts in Science Acceptance”: 

In a world increasingly polarized by differing ideologies, acceptance of scientific evidence becomes a battleground shaped not only by facts but also by the echo chambers of social and political beliefs. These insular groups and resultant identity communities cultivate selective trust in science, which substantially influences public and individual perceptions of scientific facts.

Drawing from case studies in contentious fields such as vaccines, food ingredients, and genetic technologies, this presentation explores and illustrates how ideological biases lead to the selective rejection of evidence. This rejection is further exacerbated by psychological phenomena such as confirmation bias and belief perseverance.

By shedding light on the challenges of effectively communicating science in a polarized society, this talk aims to propose strategies for bridging the ideological divide. It emphasizes the importance of fostering productive discussions on topics frequently targeted by misinformation campaigns in order to minimize far-reaching and pervasive harms to public health and science literacy.

In the interview, Love and I discussed a wide range of topics in addition to her upcoming talk. These included the potential harms of at-home wellness industry test products, the exaggerated concerns concerning “toxic mold,” and whether “Long COVID” is a real thing. We also talked about the three articles in her new Skeptical Inquirer online column, as well as “A Skeptics Guide to Glyphosate” which will be published in an upcoming issue of the print magazine. 

We also discussed the vitriol directed at her colleagues due to their efforts countering medical pseudoscience claims and how this impacts her as well as other science communicators.

As Love is the executive director of the American Lyme Disease Foundation, and as I have a long-held concern about getting this illness, we had an in-depth conversation about chronic Lyme disease, including discussing its questionable legitimacy. I learned that we can all thank Andrew Wakefield for, among other things, creating the environment that put the kibosh on the development of an effective Lyme disease vaccine in the late ’90s. Also, to my relief, I learned that most Lyme infections are cleared by the immune system without the infected person ever developing a disease, never mind anything that would be called chronic Lyme disease.

I hope you enjoy this interview. Perhaps it will even make you consider attending this year’s CSICon, where you can meet and mingle with Love and the other speakers in person. If you do come, make sure to stay for the Sunday Morning Papers session, which I will be cohosting and will feature short talks on a wide variety of interesting skeptical topics! (If you are unfamiliar with the Sunday Morning Papers, you can learn all about them in an article I published on the topic right here.) Also, be aware that next year will be a year off from CSICon, so keep that in mind when contemplating travel plans!

You can find my other interviews with this year’s CSICon speakers, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, in my online column. And if you are interested in watching any of my interviews with speakers from previous CSICons, including Bill Nye, Eugenie Scott, Richard Wiseman, Susan Gerbic, Melanie Trecek-King, and Penn & Teller, you can find those there as well.

Видео Anticipating CSICon 2024: A Video Interview with Andrea Love канала Center for Inquiry