3. About the Author

Dr. Joseph Ross

As I'm espousing skepticism, I would be remiss not to point out that you should first be skeptical about who I am!

I am an extremely objective, evidence-based decision-maker. I am a scientist. I'm about as analytical as a person can get. You should marvel in wonder at the spreadsheets that I generate when I'm shopping for auto loans.

A formative time when I was a child was around my late elementary school years, when I got obsessed with categorizing things. I think this story might resonate with many scientists. First, it was fruits and vegetables. My father being a botanist, I knew from an early age the key difference between fruits and vegetables, but as I got older, I realized that there were so many fruits and vegetables! So I started making lists. First on paper, but then I wanted to alphabetize the lists so I could more easily tell if I had already read (usually in an encyclopedia) about that food before. So, I moved to a spreadsheet format. And then I realized that herbs and spices are also plant products, but not necessarily classified as fruits or vegetables, and that spawned another spreadsheet or two.

And then I moved on to geography and, in my case, seas. Mind you, this was all before Wikipedia, so, to my knowledge, I was the only person poring over atlases and maps of all kinds and trying to make a comprehensive list of all of the seas. The inland ones (like the Salton Sea), the big ones (Mediterranean), and the obscure ones (like the Moluccan Sea). A huge resource for this project were National Geographic maps. Every so often, an issue of National Geographic (which my parents had subscribed to for decades - there were piles of them all over the place) came with a separate foldable map of some part of the world - either a country or a region with a few countries. I kept these in a huge stack in a cupboard and regularly pored over them. And then, of course, I had to know how seas and bays and coves and oceans and other bodies of water are defined. And then I realized that the definitions of these were all relatively arbitrary, so I went on a permanent project hiatus.

So, in some ways, I think I ultimately became a practicing geneticist partly because I'm intrigued at least a little bit by definitions and also by the real impact on effective communication of developing and sharing precise definitions.

After that, I earned a B.A. in Biochemistry degree, then a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology, and since then have practiced genetics and molecular biology, running an academic research group with graduate and undergraduate students and teaching classes in, among other topics, genetics. My trainees and I have published in reputable scientific journals. Through these efforts, my objective-compulsive perspective has been even more finely honed as I've been increasingly tasked with helping others learn how to be productive scientists.

None of this means you should trust me or my opinions. But, at least now you know a little bit about me. And, in my opinion, that's one of the most important things we can do to battle misinformation, is to get to know people well. It is one thing to read things that somebody posts on social media, but if you've never met that person (if it is a person!) and gotten to understand them, their proclivities, habits, and motivations, then you might want to place less weight on what they say.