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I found this while trawling for the weekly Plagues & Pandemics post. Matt Morgan, at the British Medical Journal:

… Wandering through the Enlightenment gallery, I came across something unexpected. Behind glass lay a small, shrivelled figure, the upper half of something vaguely simian stitched to a fishtail: a Japanese “mermaid.” She was assembled nearly two centuries ago from monkey, fish, wood, and papier-mâché and was shipped to Europe to delight, deceive, or both. She looks like the outcome of a drunken bet with a taxidermist.

She is, however, not a creature of the sea but one of belief. Early collectors cared less about authenticity than spectacle. If a mermaid brought visitors through the door, who cared what was under the stitches? Mermaids were debunked long ago, but this revelation didn’t kill them—it created an industry. “Feejee mermaids,” as they were sometimes known, toured fairs for decades. Being fake was simply another marketing hook.

As I stood there, my phone buzzed with updates from the UK’s covid inquiry: muddled messaging, communication failures, public trust quietly combusting. It felt appropriate—we’re still surrounded by mermaids. They now arrive by WhatsApp rather than sailing ship, sometimes with official logos attached.

Psychologists call this the illusory truth effect. Repeated statements feel more believable, regardless of accuracy. Familiarity does the work. The effect is stubborn and democratic, fooling experts and amateurs alike. Evolutionarily, repetition once served us well. Reliable information rarely echoed endlessly unless it mattered. Then we built the internet, a machine that can repeat anything forever. We weaponised a useful shortcut.

During the pandemic I spent what little time I had outside intensive care trying to debunk misinformation. Vaccines don’t alter DNA. The 5G network doesn’t cause covid. Masks are irritating but are not a rehearsal of government tyranny. In each interview I had to use phrases I’d rather not have mentioned: when I said that “vaccines don’t cause infertility,” some listeners simply stored “vaccines plus infertility” in their memory again. The illusory truth effect doesn’t care which side you’re on—it just counts repetitions. “This is not a mermaid” posters are, to the mermaid, still free advertising…

The writer Naomi Alderman has argued that we’re living through a third great information crisis, after the invention of writing and printing. Her advice includes finding fact checkers you trust and not wading into hopeless online arguments—a form of social distancing for the frontal lobes. For doctors this avoidance feels like heresy, but replying to every mermaid only serves as unpaid public relations…

Back in the museum, the mermaid has been defanged. She’s no longer a fraud but a teaching aid. We see the stitching. We understand the history. We can enjoy the story without believing the biology.

The lies we now face are harder to keep behind glass. They arrive from people we love, wrapped in friendly fonts and “just asking questions.” Perhaps our task is the same as the museum’s: illuminate the construction, explain the motives, and make sure that a better story is already in place. Because the more we parade the myth, the more real it can seem.

Interesting Read: <em>“What mermaids can teach us about misinformation”</em>Post + Comments (47)