Honestly a closely related element for me is the idea that say the NYT is selling you 60% fact, 30% contested opinion and 10% bullshit, and Tucker is selling maybe 50% bullshit, and 40% contested opinion and 10% fact.
And that the people whose general position is "everything Tucker Carlson says is wrong and everything the NYT is right" are just generally going to find themselves wrong about a lot more stuff than people who are more willing to withhold judgement and think for themselves.
And the common response is something like "yeah but the people who believe everything Tucker says are much worse than the people who believe everything the NYT says and I want to be on the side of the righteous".
To which my main response is "Fuck sides, you damn sheep. Not everything is about "them" and "us" .".
"I was totally raised one and the condescension from other people is insanely real. "
The first time I can recall this personally was after the OKC bombing, when Connie Chung was interviewing the local authorities with undisguised disbelief that Okies could possibly organize rescue/recovery/relief supplies/blood etc. She just would not accept that the locals weren't abject primitives in need of federal expert assistance.
"a" as in "father"? (This would make it identical to the third syllable of "Kav-an-Aw"...)
In some parts of Ireland, including my own, "father" is pronounced more like "faader" so not really the same as standard English there. The American version is more heavy on the last syllable and more "awe" as here:
I mean, yes, *but* this is sort of the reverse of the observation that prediction markets actually have extremely limited capacity to magically apply to all possible questions precisely because things that don't fall into this category are generally too thinly traded to yield helpful information.
I thought your ivermectin post was great. It provided something more than just a dismissive, "the experts say ivermectin doesn't work so you shouldn't take it". There is an underprovision of writing for people who want more than a news article but don't want to spend a week ready peer reviewed publications.
Scott demonstrates here that “doing the legwork” has always been his thing. Which I now realize is why I got into ACX- I appreciate having science I can understand but not personally interpret from academic papers explained to me at a level more granular than journalism can and will support.
I am afraid this may be a market with a supply shortage because explaining complicated issues thoroughly and without oversimplifying while also staying below the word count and domain knowledge requirements of a bundled dozen scientific papers is really hard, and most people who are not Scott can't do it.
And for people who couldn't understand the science even if they *did* spend a week reading peer reviewed publications. (I'm probably in that group; I'm no dummy and I have basic science literacy skills, but many of these things have conventions and shorthand that grow up in that specific branch of science. Anyone reading those studies in that branch understands how they are interpreted, but good luck if you're not.)
I'm sympathetic to this, but academic publications are, by and large, not that hard to read. Yes, you won't understand it as well as the reviewers, but you can become proficient at quickly assessing them for relevance and methodological quality. Look at what journal they're in, what the citations are, sample size, whether they're obsessed with p values, effect sizes, etc. Pay walls are a somewhat bigger problem, but there's always arxiv and SciHub.
If you can't read the papers, consider hedging your life against the thing in question rather than wasting time figuring it out from the internet.
You are overestimating how quantitative I am and how much time I have. I have read papers and know more or less what they’re saying, but I can’t do what Scott does in assessing the methodology and results. I have read several explanations of what p values or effect sizes are and what they really mean and still do not really understand what they are arrived at or how to tell if the authors are overly obsessed with them or just normally obsessed. Also, it takes *a lot* of time that I don’t have to discover, parse and weigh this information. But “hedging my life against the thing in question” sounds a lot like groping in the dark. If reasonably intelligent but non-quantitative people, or simply people with busy lives, have to resort to this, then *what is the point of science*? People need information to make better, more rational decisions. Why should anyone begrudge that? Shouldn’t there be some level of analysis available to help ordinary people make sense of science and do a better job than the cursory and distorted treatments that dominate the press? The popularity of this blog speaks to a demand for better public-facing scientific analysis. I’m here because what Scott does seems so rare. If we could have a bunch of ACXs analyzing and debating a range of scientific and social topics that would be great for the world.
Honestly, even if you are perfectly able to parse the reports, you should probably be hedging your life to the thing in question — and many scientists do behave this way about the products of their own inquiry.
I love ACX and similar resources, and agree with you that there should be more of them, but you are deeply underestimating them if you see them as merely summarizing what the actual scientists have done.
I don’t think the lofty purpose of “science” (if it exists) has much to do with the interpretation of any single scientific result or real-world problem. The purpose of a single scientific study is substantially narrower. As a rule, these are laser-focused on ontology (what is) and epistemology (how do we know) — which comes with drastic tradeoffs in their ability to answer ethical questions (what should be done). Generalizing the result of a carefully controlled scientific study to the real world is a perilous process, and _this_ is part of what blogs like ACX (or public health officials, think tanks, etc etc) attempt to do. The meta-analysis done here is knowledge in its own right. Further it is much more valuable, contextualized, actionable knowledge than the studies that went into it. However, it is not a scientific study, and bundling it under a big umbrella of “science” is confusing at best. There is substantial wisdom in risk management, economics, skeptical empiricism, life experience, etc that goes into these posts. Reading ACX and making decisions w it is much closer to “hedging your life” than it is to doing science.
So my main quibble is not that you should just read papers yourself. It is that the main value being provided here is not really reading and understanding papers at all.
So much this. I've gone on and on on this issue. The state of science reporting is truly abysmal. The only other person I've found doing what Scott does—honestly evaluate and report on the validity and quality of scientific studies—is Emily Oster.
Yes, I only wish Scott had studied Covid vaccine safety instead. I could've shown my father that. I don't know what good it did to argue against ivermectin.
I think the difference is that there weren't studies showing vaccines were unsafe. We've known about vaccines for a long time, so the antivax position is regarded as a perennially wrong & worthless one like creationism.
People still need to see reviews of whatever data exists. Also, it would be really helpful if someone would explain in detail How The System Works. I have seen neither kind of review; when it comes to depth of coverage, antivaxxers dominate the media landscape.
Slow cooling and the inherent symmetries present in crystals is the generic answer. If you cool molten salt very, very slowly, it will form one enormous perfect cube, because that's the underlying symmetry of the crystal. If you cool silica slowly enough, it will form enormous six-sided prisms, and so on.
This would be applicable in the case of hexagonal columns in igneous rock such as at Giant’s Causeway in Ireland , but the example in Japan posted above is in sedimentary rock, which was never hot enough for cooling fractures. Better explanation there would be a combination of vertical tectonic joint planes (presumably ~E-W-running and associated with stress from the convergent plate margin off the Japanese coast) and older horizontal depositional layers in the rock (“bedding planes”).
Ah yes good point, thank you. I guess the general answer is the underlying symmetries of the mineral crystal structure, plus sometimes symmetries generated by the method of formation. I kind of had Devil's Postpile in mind, which is rather mind-blowing that it's natural.
He seems to resent people for being curious, in the same mold that the folks who criticize others for "just asking questions" seem to do: just because he's afraid they'll come to a conclusion he doesn't like. I think one consequence of this that he is missing that many of the questions people are asking have implications far beyond whatever narrow culture war issues he's caught up in.
Here he is complaining that people are trying to figure out how robust ChatGPT's guardrails are:
He is a Twitter brained culture warrior. I used to follow him and his shtick is basically “grey tribe bad”. He’s made some good/valid points but that shtick will lead you to places like making fun of people for bothering to investigate both sides of a controversy.
I'm reminded of my biology teacher in secondary school who asked me if I believed in evolution. I answered that I wasn't sure because I felt like I hadn't, as you put it, investigated both sides of the controversy. She rolled her eyes.
Nobody "believes in" evolution, or they shouldn't anyway. You may believe evolution is true or at least the best-fitting theory right now, but it's not religious dogma.
Evolution is a model for how the living world came to be, which explains what we see *really well*. It's hard to imagine a discovery that would change that, though there can certainly be (and have been, and will continue to be) stuff that requires new explanations, or stuff whose currently-accepted explanation is wrong.
Well, the current explanation of evolution is certainly wrong. But it's wrong in details. And most of those details are small. It's really difficult to imagine a better theory.
OTOH, epicycles worked correctly, the only problems known were in small details, and it was really hard to imagine a better theory. (Epicycles were more accurate than Copernican theory, but Kepler fixed that. The real initial advantage of Copernican theory is that it was simpler to calculate.)
I think the essential component of his objections is that it's not about what people do, it's about what people do *in front of an audience*.
The charitable version is saying something like 'If there's a conspiracy theory that only .1% of people believe, and a careful and fair analysis of the evidence will cause 99% of the people who read it to conclude it's definitely fake for sure, and convince 1% of people who read it that hey that's a lot of evidence maybe there's actually something to it, then exposing everyone to that careful and fair analysis will increase the number of people who believe in the conspiracy tenfold. Bad on consequentialist grounds even if it does help some of the .1% escape their mistakes.'
The less charitable version is that he's like the people who think kids playing violent video games will turn them into murderers, and wants everyone to censor what they say in public spaces in the interest of not accidentally giving anyone 'bad ideas'.
Fair comment. I think the "charitable" version, let's call it the "don't give it oxygen" story, is basically fashionable amongst the twitter set when it comes to any number of alternative stories related to covid (vaccines, ivermectin, lockdowns, masks) and probably other alternative accounts to things as well (the Hunter Biden laptop comes to mind immediately).
I think folks glammed on to the "don't give it oxygen" argument probably in one or two cases where it might have been at least rational, from a group conflict point of view, if not a fully reasonable approach. Then guys like Kavanagh overextend it to just about any case they can pattern-match it to. It sort of makes sense it *might* apply to ivermectin too but I think Scott is right that actually, what the Ivermectin story needs is some people (preferably shady blogs online, no one as high profile as Fauci or whatever) willing to engage and speak honestly and clearly to people who genuinely want to know.
On a platform like Twitter "don't give it oxygen" might be the best course of action. Twitter doesn't seem like the best place to lay out nuanced, well researched analysis. OTOH I don't actually participate in the platform so maybe I'm missing something.
You are. Of course there's plenty of awfulness and stupidity, but there is also serious discussion and debate, and threads that explore ideas in some depth. And of course you can always link to long blog posts.
On the other hand, if nobody responds, the conspiracy side then use that as proof that they *can't* answer the questions put to them and that the conspiracy 'science' is correct. So damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I think this Chris Kavanagh bloke has picked the worst of both worlds: don't respond and treat it seriously because it is self-evidently rubbish and they're all conspiracy theorists, I know because I'm the expert on conspiracy theorist mindset.
But it wasn't crazy to think ivermectin would treat covid. There were prominent experts advocating for it, and national-level public health authorities using it, and randomized trials investigating it.
The tragic reality about medical treatments is that they're super hard to get right, so that you can genuinely have a lot of serious well-intentioned experts and health care systems doing pointless or counterproductive stuff for *years*, just because figuring out whether they really work is hard to do and subject to subtle errors. And you can have useful treatments lying around unused for years for the same reason.
So, people ran careful RCTs and it looks like ivermectin doesn't do much for covid (though it's great at treating parasitic infections). A lot of the early hopeful information turned out to be fraud or random noise+publication bias or confounded with other results of treatment. This sucks--it would have been really nice to have this cheap, widely-available thing treat covid. But it's also the normal way that things work out--all kinds of promising treatments turn out, when finally subjected to careful testing, not to work.
You left out placebos. Of course, that's a part of why it's difficult to determine what works, but it's also true that there are many drugs whose effectiveness isn't that much better than that of a placebo. Which should often raise the question of "Are they worth the cost and side effects?".
Besides, the charitable interpretation still omits the -admittedly very low- probability that the conspiracy theory may be in fact true. If that were the case, making that 1% of people engage with the argument may have a huge positive impact.
So, given what Scott said about him, that he spends much of his time mockingly quoting every ivermectin "conspiracy theorist", does his own behavior pass the consequentialist test? Anybody who's inclined to trust "experts and Science" by default would dismiss ivermectin after the first CNN denouncement, so I don't see what Twitter mocking could possibly achieve beyond that, other than further radicalizing red-tribers.
I get the impression that he and Alexandros have their own beef going on - how else does Kavanagh know so much about him? - and while I'm happy for the pair of them to have a Twitter ding-dong, leave Scott alone!
> Bad on consequentialist grounds even if it does help some of the .1% escape their mistakes.'
Since this charitable version can be answered empirically, unless they provide evidence that that actually happens I'm not sure why I should prefer it as compared to long, proven history of "informing people causes them to become informed".
I don't know about evidence, but I think the primary factor which should cause you to expect that old rules like that no longer apply is engagement algorithms on social media, which is basically a hostile AI trying to expose as many people as possible to ideas that will cause the most disagreement and strife possible because their owners can monetize the resulting pageviews.
It's somewhat reasonable to think that the optimal rhetorical strategies under that regime are different from the optimal strategies where that is not happening.
This raises in my mind the question "Is this a good substitute for war?". I don't really take that seriously, but I'm not totally sure I shouldn't. Many people seem to feel like they need more aggression in their lives.
I'm still not sure why the hostile AI means writing a factual rebuttal to misinformation would hurt more than help. At best, it sounds like it would do nothing, but not that it would actually increase harm.
I can't count the number of times I've given people the benefit of the doubt that they were being curious in good faith – and reply back with long, reasoned arguments and zero rancor – only for them to ignore my entire argument and retreat to the worst rehashed conspiracist talking points, making it clear they were just shitposting the whole time. It does tend to jade one.
That's fair. I have listened to one or two of Chris's podcast episodes, and if there's one thing you can call him, it's jaded. But he doesn't seem to give others the benefit of the doubt, so I don't feel disposed to give _him_ the benefit of the doubt unless he himself explains he used to do that until it backfired on him too much. For all I know, he just thinks people who disagree with him on certain key issues are evil and dangerous and ought to be shut down.
The other problem is for every Scott Alexander, there are 99 other people out there *doing their own research* who are not remotely equipped actually evaluate the evidence, validate the sources, understand nuance, etc. For those people, just going with the experts will produce a far better outcome on average than trying to play amateur climatologist/statistician/epidemiologist/metallurgy expert/etc. There will of course, be spectacular failures of conventional wisdom along the way.
But if you aren't scientifically literate, "just going with the experts" isn't so simple in itself, because different people will be telling you different stories about what the scientific consensus is.
The pro-Ivermectin people aren't saying "trust Ivermectin because Jesus came to me in a dream and told me it works", they are saying "here are 30 peer-reviewed studies by respectable mainstream scientists in prestigious scientific journals showing that Ivermectin works". And their websites aren't written in Comic Sans with lots of grammar and spelling mistakes; they look pretty much the same as the websites telling you what the anti-Ivermectin consensus is. Maybe they even look more professional. Now what?
Then they should find an expert they trust, like their doctor. Not a youtube doctor who makes money off clicks, but an actual doctor. During an all hands on deck global pandemic, your doctor is likely to be up on the current research (unlike say some rare condition where a person doing their own research can supplement their doctor). Doctors can be wrong of course. But at least they understand how medical research and science work. On an issue like Ivermectin, a random doctor is going to get it right orders of magnitude more often than a random person going down internet rabbit holes.
Also in the course of doing your own research, it's not hard to see that the same people pushing Ivermectin were also pushing HCQ, and probably covid/mask deniers as well. Somehow the people who go down rabbit holes never seem to hold their sources accountable for being dead wrong in the recent past.
The fundamental problem imo is that for someone like Scott, doing his own research is going to yield much better information than a random doctor, or whatever the government is pushing in the moment. But how do you explain to a random person who doesn't have a science background that they're not only not equipped to do their own research, they're not even equipped to pick an expert they trust like Alexander? I follow Peter Attia and trust him unconditionally on this kind of stuff. But for the average person, their Scott Alexander or Peter Attia is Dr. Drew or Dr. Oz, who lead them to guys like Berenson. I don't know how to solve that.
Even Scott reads to me as way sharper on subjects that touch on psychiatry than he does on other topics where he's more of a smart amateur. I'm not surprised by this. This is only natural and is quite typical of public intellectuals as they move further away from their core expertise. We're all affected by this and try to balance personal humility with the our desire and sometimes need to have an opinion.
If you trust your doctor, fine. But according to what I've been reading many doctors have NOT been keeping up with health researchers. Perhaps they've been too busy. And many of them are required to say or deny certain things by their employers.
I don't think there's any simple answer as to how to find an expert you can trust. And this isn't only true in health care. Look into the replication crisis in many fields of science.
Perhaps they has always been the case, and we're just noticing it now because of improved communications.
Why would you trust your doctor on something like this? He graduated medical school long before COVID was a thing, and since then he's almost certainly been too busy doing by-the-book medicine for many, many patients to do a deep dive into every contrarian medical opinion just in case one of his patients picks that one to ask him about.
OK, maybe you're paying big bucks for a concierge physician who will take the time to do the research if you ask. But probably, your doctor is just going to tell you the same thing that Dr. Fauci told you, because that's where he learned it. Through different channels, but without doing any independent research.
MartinW is right. Finding independent experts you can trust to give you a straight answer about anything remotely controversial is not a trivial undertaking.
Chris's post speaks to people developing the skills necessary to tell the difference between something that superficially looks like it is representing reliable sources, but isn't and reliable sources. You can't escape the need to do this, but you can escape the need to do this without developing the level of knowledge that typically takes years and paying lots of money to achieve. His comments weren't "Pfft." They were, "these red flags were enough."
> Chris's post speaks to people developing the skills necessary to tell the difference between something that superficially looks like it is representing reliable sources, but isn't and reliable sources.
I believe you can do this. I believe I can do this. I have zero faith that most of the people out there fervently doing youtube research will ever be capable of this.
We're not wired for it. I know someone who is 100% convinced her first kid has been sickly his whole life because of vaccines.
Her second kid got 1 shot, she prayed to God for a sign, the second kid got sick, she refused to let him get any more shots. Good luck ever convincing that person that vaccines are safe. It can't be done.
> only for them to ignore my entire argument and retreat to the worst rehashed conspiracist talking points, making it clear they were just shitposting the whole time. It does tend to jade one.
Sure, but maybe don't go in with the mindset of "I'm trying to convince this person", go in with the mindset, "I'm trying to convince anyone who might see this person's post and be convinced by their argument". Much harder to get jaded by the outcome.
If it helps, I've found it useful to ask someone to accurately paraphrase some aspect of the topic that they don't agree with. The people who are not willing to argue in good faith will almost universally refuse to do this or be unable to do it accurately. It's like a cognitive wall that exists, independent of their native intelligence.
Hi, but Troy was very likely real war. Of course not in the exact form in the Illiad but close enough and there might be a conflation of separate stories. But the more you find out about the history the more it is likely there was some kind of Greek expedition against the city. See Trevor Brice and Eric Cline books on the subject. Of course no one can definitely say for sure there was a war but they come close enough.
Ironically, the idea that there was an orthodoxy that Troy wasn't real, pre-Schliemann, is itself a misconception: All he did was to prove that the site of the city called Ilium (which was inhabited into the 13th century) and associated for centuries with the city of the Iliad, was the place the city had been from antiquity, as opposed to it having moved from a nearby location. The press, however, failed to understand the nuances of this, and Schliemann was in no hurry to disabuse it of its misconception
I know I did too! von Daniken indeed, but I was also very impressed by a theory explaining the different geological eras by different moons slowly approaching the earth, then collapsing on it and creating great catastrophes and extinctions. I thought this explained the appearance of the giant faunas very well: the very close moon had a tremendous upward force of gravity, and allowed the appearance of the huge dinosaurs at the end of the secondary ear, or the monstrous insects before that. Such a beautiful theory!
I believe this is a plot point in the original Frankenstein novel. A young Victor gets obsessed with fringe biology texts, which eventually sets him on the road to creating his monster.
Actually you probably are, for a literal definition of "arcane", there's so much interesting stuff published each month that some of it must be forgotten.
He is an autodidact so he's obsessed with alchemical texts, then he finally goes to university and finds out that is all rubbish, but luckily he also discovers Science! as the next best thing for necromancy. It is the early 19th century after all, now it's all galvanism not summoning demons at midnight. Still involves digging up graveyards, though.
I think Frankenstein found that the combination of his modern education and his past obsession with old alchemy texts let him find valuable insights hidden in the nonsense that other scientists had missed, which was why he was the one to discover how to make his creation and bring it to life.
I was so annoyed that he had been fine with necromancy and gravedigging, but when the "experiment" hadn't ended up with a pretty face, all commitment to scientific norms had fled and he'd reacted like a hysterical teenager. It's amusing that the popular adage "it's not Frankenstein, it's Frankenstein's monster" is actually wrong, Frankenstein was the real monster all along.
Victor *is* a hysterical teenager with a lot of parental issues and chips on both shoulders. He's like a version of the typical Byronic brooding (anti)hero, and I do wonder how much Bryon's presence and the tangle of sexual/romantic relationships going on in that tiny set influenced Mary Shelley,
He messes around, becomes a single dad, and isn't capable of taking care of the kid so he abandons and neglects the creation. Are we surprised the monster turned out the way he did? Textbook social work case! 😁
As someone or other once said: Knowledge is knowing that Frankenstein is the name of the creator, not the monster; wisdom is realising that Frankenstein was the true monster all along.
Yes, and the narrator makes Scott's exact point. If his father at the time explained why those texts were wrong in a respectful manner, he would have been convinced and dropped it. But his father dismissed them as unserious rubbish, and he was hooked. Its his fathers fault (might have been an uncle. Insert relevant authority figure). Brilliant.
How can we reconcile the fact that our societies and cultures grow, on the one hand, every day more technoscientific and, on the other, more ambivalent towards science and scientists and, necessarily, their authority [Bauer, Pansegrau and Shukla, 2019]? To answer this question, one must go back to the 1970s and 1980s and the first postwar mass media pseudoscientific wave. Until then, although present here and there, pseudoscience was largely confined to the fringes of mass media or to fiction, the separation between the real and the fictional remaining clearly demarcated. Yet, on 5 January 1973, when there were only three main channels on U.S. television (ABC, CBS and NBC), NBC broadcast In Search of Ancient Astronauts, the first pseudoscientific documentary shown on U.S. television, which was a 1970 German documentary based on the bestselling Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (Memories from the Future) [1968] — translated as Chariots of the Gods — and dubbed, reformatted and adapted for U.S. audiences. In his pseudoscientific bestseller, the Swiss Erich von Däniken proposed, from a reinterpretation of founding myths and sacred texts in the light of the possibilities opened by the Space Age, that extraterrestrials had influenced the development of human societies in the remote past. The ratings of the broadcast were such that NBC produced two more documentaries on the same theme (In Search of Ancient Mysteries, broadcast on 31 January 1974, and The Outer Space Connection in February 1975) before giving the go-ahead to a TV documentary series, In Search of …, exclusively covering fringe topics from ghosts to the Bermuda Triangle.
Those three documentaries were narrated by Rod Serling, who was expected to reprise his role for In Search of …, if not for his premature death, which led to Leonard Nimoy being cast instead. Both were closely associated with the then minor genres of fantasy and science fiction — Serling as the narrator of The Twilight Zone (1959–1964) and Nimoy as Star Trek’s Spock (1966–1969) — and owed their fame to their 1970s reruns [Beeler, 2010; Geraghty, 2010]. And it must be stressed that the U.S. public had for decades already been exposed to those themes through comics, pulps and B movies [Stoczkowski, 1999]. The documentaries were all produced by Alan Landsburg, who had previously left his mark on award-winning science TV documentaries, a genre he helped create [Colker, 2014], lending them credibility (statements became plausible and assumptions believable), without providing the public with the necessary tools to evaluate their scientific validity. In short, a half-century ago, celebrity was already being disputed to expertise, while the demarcation between the real and the fictional was being deliberately blurred. The programs were widely broadcast and rebroadcast internationally, and many would-be imitators sought to capitalize on their success. They were helped by the transition to cable, which rapidly multiplied the number of channels, the content of which could be tailored to specific audiences. That format has since become dominant."
1969 had been the moon landing. All the SF stories looked to be coming true. No wonder the 70s went mad for 'scientific' versions of the old stories.
FYI: I had lessons on ESP and the Bermuda Triangle in the Gifted and Talented classes in school, alongside how to communicate with aliens that was popular back in the days of Voyager and Arecibo.
You're lucky, some people wind up in even less socially acceptable corners of idea space as their first "let's doubt the mainstream consensus" experience.
Pity those poor teenagers who wind up as Holocaust skeptics instead of Atlantis believers.
Holocaust denial is probably the easiest rabbit hole to fall into by the means that Scott outlined. Given that expressing doubt in the most minute detail of the Official Narrative instantly brands one as Exactly As Bad As Hitler, it's probably the least acceptable area for independent research, and thus very enticing for a certain variety of contrarian.
On the other hand, the holocaust is probably one of the best documented events in human history. The lengths people go to to catalogue and publicly display every piece of evidence is honestly astounding. I doubt there are very many holocaust survivors who were never asked to record an interview about their experience, and that's on top of all the meticulously archived records and physical evidence
We have holocaust museums in every major city, whereas I don't see a lot of "Atlantis is fake" museums.
Sea levels in various places rose during the last 10,000 years, or roughly the time period when at least some humans were building towns in places like the Middle East. If the Black Sea was one of those places where the water level used to be lower, it seems plausible that people would have built their town down near the water for the mildest climate, access to fishing, and other reasons that waterfront real estate is usually more expensive.
But perhaps people had time when the water started to rise to dismantle their towns and carry their carved stone building blocks to higher elevations? Or maybe they just hadn't gotten around to building anything impressive there by the time the water level rose?
Similarly, the English Channel used to be above the Ice Age ocean level and the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine. Human artifacts constantly turn up on beaches at places like Dunkirk. One Dutch nurse who walks everyday on her local beach has found hundreds of Stone Age artifacts from now inundated Dogger Land.
There are a couple of submerged ancient Egyptian cities that are being dug up, such as Heracleion. Pavlopetri is a submerged Greek city discovered in 1967. I vaguely recall a submerged Greek city that was a tourist attraction for boaters in Roman times.
Personally, I'm a great fan of Sunda, the submerged lowlands of Southeast Asia and western Indonesia.
Then of course one can go even further back to the Messinian age 6 million years ago, when the Mediterranean dried up, and the lost elephant civilization on its bottom...
That's not the only one. There's also the connection between Britain and the continent, that was drowned. I'm sure there are lots of others of various sizes. And they probably all spawned local tales of catastrophe, some of which were picked up and elaborated upon.
FWIW, some Athenian versions of Atlantis have the civilization placed in North Africa. And their symbol was the King Bee. Which was later(? no evidence it wasn't continuous!!) picked up by the Bavarian Illuminati. We've only got fragments of their literature, but perhaps it was Plato who moved their location to "beyond the Pillars of Hercules".
The stories are real. Believe them as history at your own peril.
Reading those comments, I am *so ready* to get into a(n Internet) fist fight. I'm happy for Kavanagh to go after Marinos and his fanboys, just leave us out of it. I want to sit on the sidelines with my fruit salad watching, not be on the field participating!
> Even though the geographical difference (Greece vs Macedonia) is rather tiny.
Huh? Greece speaks Greek and the local version of the name would be Alexandros. Macedonia speaks South Slavic and the local version of the name appears to be Aleksandar.
(Macedonia is also a weird scammy name for that country. They are not related to Macedon, being located in a different geographic region and speaking an unrelated language, but they constantly claim that they should get credit for Alexander the Great. As far as I can tell, they aspire to be the Stamford University of countries.)
I meant Stamford University. The idea here is that the only significance of the name "Stamford" is that, if you're lucky, it might be confused for "Stanford". Lots of people care about Stanford University; nobody in the world cares about Stamford University.
This is also the relationship between Macedonia and Macedon.
The most ridiculous line of Kavanagh's: “If studies had supported Ivermectin as an effective treatment it would have been adopted by medical and public health authorities.”
Evidently, Kavanagh's mental model is that authorities operate according to a neutral, objective rationality and are not subject to their own institutional biases. As if we did not see a very great deal during the pandemic that demonstrates the opposite.
Yes, this is the standard “trust the Science” line. Go on IFLScience or The Credible Hulk on Facebook and argue a contrary position (to ‘Trust Science’) sometime. It’s enlightening. They really, genuinely believe that Science works in the way it’s described in high school science classes, and that trying to publish valid results that contradict the Standard Narrative will result in laudits and massive career advancement, rather than isolation and ostracization.
Decent chance this is a "Trump did nothing wrong" claim on his part, but you will see people criticizing presidents for going against the consensus of American intelligence agencies.
Given that the CIA is an international joke and the others also struggle on a not-infrequent basis, I think you can see that there are at least some problems with such criticisms. Among other things, US intelligence consensus leaned heavily toward Saddam having WMDs.
"Among other things, US intelligence consensus leaned heavily toward Saddam having WMDs"
TBF, as far as I know, the *entire world* thought that.
Because, as I understand the gambit, Hussein was very interested in having *Iran* believe that, to deter a second war - that Iraq would lose - thus all the runarounds with the investigating agencies and such.
He was fine with the UN et. al believing he had them, because they weren't going to *do anything about it*.
And then 9/11 happened and he learned why brinksmanship is dangerous.
The "entire world" had no informed opinion on the subject that was independent of US intelligence, as propagated in the media. To the extent that, say, bureaucrats in France had an opinion, it was heavily influenced by what US officials were confidently asserting.
A huge part of the debate around the Iraq War (at least outside the US, anyway), was whether US intelligence was right or UN weapon inspections were right. It was very much NOT international consensus that he had them any more.
Also, Canadian intelligence got it right off the same exact information as the US. This rather suggests that it was possible to get the decision right.
The consensus of the intelligence community was certainly not supportive of the claims about wmd, aluminum tubes etc. The politicians hoovered up raw intelligence and interpreted it the way they wanted, which differed a lot from what the actual spies thought. Smart guys doing stupid shit. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/27/the-stovepipe
Fair. I certainly don’t mean to imply it *never* works that way, but it seems strongly to me that attacking the “consensus” view in highly politicized fields is very unlikely to turn out well.
"For if it prosper, none dare call it pseudoscience."
Excuse me, I need to go make everyone in my organization take an IAT to gauge their racism. Though I need to make sure I don't imply to anyone that white people are more likely to be racist in these tests, since that would probably cause some stereotype threat.
If recently updated vaccines were better - we would have them. If European baby-formula were as good as US-formula, it would be freely available in the US. If non-US airlines had the know-how to do flights inside the USofA, they would be welcome ( I heard, they are not - but that can not be true, or?). If nuclear power was safe, we would no longer burn coal. - Or as Zvi put it last week:
"We have a new drug that cuts Covid risk of hospitalizations and deaths by about half with no major side effects. You can’t have it. Maybe ever. Because FDA."
Thing is, the public health authorities *did* update their models based on contemporaneous studies. They found that ventilators work better if you rotate the patient to face down. They found that certain generic steroids made a big difference. They found that SSRIs and particularly fluoxetine had a measurable effect.
What they didn’t do is start a podcast and accuse everyone who didn’t recommend ivermectin or vitamin D or hydroxochloroquine of being in the pocket of Big Pharma.
What they did do was affix their signatures to a public letter that said it was fine to gather in crowds as long as you were protesting the death of George Floyd, because racism is deadlier than COVID.
I mean I wouldn’t go that far. But I think it’s an excellent example of the difference between trusting science and trusting scientists. You should trust scientists only insofar as they are disciplined practitioners of science, and trust experts only insofar as they remain in their lane of expertise. Once they deviate from that and start acting like pundits and political activists, their credentials don’t make them any more trustworthy than any other pundit or political activist.
Which would be fine, *if they weren't speaking with the authority of their discipline when they made political pronouncements.* It calls into question everything they have done, on suspicion of it *all* being political.
Thanks. It’s something that always grinds my gears - the IFL Science crowd seems to buy way too deeply into the Hollywood idea that a “scientist” is a general purpose expert in a lab coat that can deploy “science” at any problem and quickly arrive at a clear solution.
Were there effective treatments for Covid that no medical establishment ever adopted?
I feel like you're making a mistake about what types of errors groups like this do and don't make. Wildly flailing to try to show you're doing stuff in ways that create unnecessary procedures and costs, is not at all the same as looking at a trillion doll bill on the ground and leaving it there.
I think the generic argument is more that they have a lot at stake if they fuck it up. For example, if ivermectin had turned out to be a miracle cure, and *you* were the fool at the FDA who blocked it, you will certainly put a disagraceful end to your career, if not end up hanged from a lamppost, once the truth becomes apparent -- and it always does, sooner or later. That is, it's not any hypothetical altruistic nature but the Sword of Damocles that we tend to think keeps authority honest.
That's why the best guarantee of honesty in authority is not searching for the magic algorithm to select only saints for the positions, but a vigorous culture of free speech, skepticism, and access to data so that the time between official decision and the manifestation of the truth or falsity of the decision is worryingly (for the official in question) short -- not enough time to get out of Dodge when the brown stuff hits the flying vanes.
That is really, really, really not the incentive structure at the FDA. Blocking good things comes with zero cost. Approving bad things is career-ending.
Actually, you've just presented evidence that it *is*. And I agree. The greater the authority, and the heavier the sword hanging over them, the more CYA conservative they become. Failing to approve modest advancements is low-risk, beause nobody expects them and even whey they are later proved out, they're not sufficiently wonderful to get people furious. Approving Thalidomide is a nightmare. That's the way they operate when things are going kind of well on average. It's only when things become dire that they reverse, and the risk of not approving something that might heal the crisis becomes higher than the risk that you might approve something that makes it a little worse. As Admiral King said, in a time of war you send for the sons of bitches, and their allies, the crazy idea guys. But in time of peace you sink back into caution.
So who lost their jobs for blowing the one chance we had to keep the pandemic in check before it was too late, i.e. the testing fiasco? That’s much much worse than invermectin working.
The problem is that this is a minority opinion. For better or worse, most people don't see it that way, so yeah there are no serious political consequences. So it goes. A sine qua non for the Sword to fall is that it has to be the will of The People, like most or all of them.
Exactly. There are no consequences for not approving things, and there would be no consequences for those who did not approve Invermectin had it turned out to be a miracle drug, as there will be no consequences for those who do not approve Interferon λ, which seems to actually *be* a miracle drug. https://thezvi.substack.com/p/covid-2922-interferon
I think we have evidence, because of the pandemic, that the conservative cautious take-it-slow approach will CYA in the long run. See the vaccines that were zoomed through without the usual long trial periods, because we needed to cut through the red tape for this emergency.
Now there are people claiming this was a terrible idea because the vaccines are killing young people via heart attacks.
Were I an official of the FDA, the lesson I'd take away here is "CYA, nobody ever got in trouble for buying IBM, the old ways are the best".
The vaccine acceleration was a calculated risk, definitely, but I think it worked. Unless someone discovers something truly hideous buried in the 1 in 1 million weeds --- produces babies with no faces when given to teen black mothers between the ages of 17 and 19 -- it looks to me like they won that bet. Vaccines were developed and deployed in a time and at a scale that is without precedent, just amazing. The definitely called for an unusual level of commitment and government money (e.g. Trump's Operation Warp Speed), and it called for a certain level of bureaucratic boldness, to just send it out to 300 million people after testing on 20,000 or so.
But as I said, it seems to have worked. It definitely seemed[1] to have put a stop to the big repeated waves of re-infection and death among the older crowd[2] that freaked at least some people out. We can look at China, which lacked, and still lacks, vaccines that are as effective to see the social cost of not having them[3]. Not good.
By historical standards, of human response to pandemic, it's pretty good, solid B territory. Nobody drowned all the cats, did a pogrom on tne Jews, bled or cupped people, shoved everyone into lepers colonies, gave them grams of aspirin until their livers quit (supposedly a thing that happened in 1918). There was certainly a fair amount of official overreaction, but it's hard to blame officials for overreacting to what The People themselves, bless their hearts, were overreacting. I do blame them for not collecting data early and often, and for every time the temptation to pretend to more knowledge than they had got the better of conservative common sense -- but that's what people are like. They don't develope much sturdier characters once thier job description goes from J. Random Internet Commenter to Senior Poobah In Charge Of Big Decisions. My expectations were low, because my expectations of people are always low, and they kind of met them, so....passing grade.
It *is* an interesting question what lessons for the future will be taken away. Big fast bets on novel biotechnology seems like one of them, which is not necessarily a good thing in all respects. Probably a greater caution in emergency orders to refashion social activity -- but maybe not as much as people hope (or fear), because work from home kind of mostly worked. Definitely a greater investment by all factions in the importance of My Tribe Being In Control, lest the Untermenschen from the other side make all the critical decisions -- which is bad by any measure.
I would give the species as a whole a D on its performance, but mostly because of that last factor, because of our inability, when the chips were down, to behave with restraint, compassion, and consideration for each other.
-------------
[1] I am cautiously saying "seemed" because the role of natural acquired immunity is still unknown. Maybe it was so important the vaccines only changed things on the margin, or maybe the vaccines bought valuable time, or maybe the vaccines were essential.
[2] I realize the younger crowd, who were never in any danger, can afford to be contemptuous about that. Geez, you're already 78, why fuss because you die today instead of 2-3 years hence? What's a few years of life?
[3] And this in a place with a ruthless powerful regime, a population that is used to following orders, and where news that shows the state in a bad light is highly repressed.
I also think it worked—objectively. But on a PR level, it was a disaster. The vaccines were nowhere near as effective as advertised, the testing in many cases was not as thorough as they made it seem, they refuse to release their actual data in anything like a timely manner, etc., etc. And yes, people seem to be dying suddenly at an unusual rate.
On an objective level, it was probably all worth it. But the FDA doesn't operate objectively. They operate on public opinion. And so they will be even more cautious next time, when the actual empirical lesson is probably that they should be far *less* so.
And I would say that the lack of "restraint, compassion, and consideration" is almost entirely due to official overreach. If the lockdowns and mandates hadn't made this a hugely political issue, most people would not have treated it as one.
I doubt that anyone will end the career in the FDA for approving Aduhelm (aducanumab). At worst, they will now work for big pharma in some important position.
While it was atrocious that they pushed through approval, on this one I do give the FDA some benefit of the doubt. People have been complaining for years that they hold up life-saving treatments out of over-regulated caution (who had the last post on here about DALYs lost due to the FDA not regulating faster?), the pharma company engaged in a canny PR blitz, and they were faced with the very real likelihood of media coverage along the lines of "heartless bureaucrats block miracle treatment, read this heart-wrenching account by a family member of how this has ensured their loved one suffers". Political pressure was applied and they folded.
It is to the credit of those involved who protested about this, and the Aduhelm fiasco is going to overshadow all future attempts to get rushed-through approval for 'life-saving' treatments. The only fault of the FDA is that they did yield to having their arms twisted here, and maybe this result (the drug was an expensive boondoggle) will mean they can resist future such attempts.
The problem remains that everyone will be convinced *their* pet treatment should be given speedy approval and leapfrog all the regulations, while the rival treatment is rubbish and should not be approved.
EMA clearly said that they are not going to approve Aduhelm because the data is not convincing therefore the company withdraw the application.
It may indeed play the role that it will now silence the critics who complain that the FDA hesitate to approve every snake oil they consider a life-saving treatment. We will see.
In the modern scientific era, It's very uncommon for a major consensus of relevant experts to be wrong about a major area of scientific dispute, and when they are, it's almost always for interesting reasons where their position was reasonably defensible given what was known at the time. The sexy examples of this happening are sexy because it is so uncommon, and even then, those are often over-exaggerated or not quite right because one template pop science writing loves is a maverick taking on the establishment and proving to be correct. Facts get twisted and oversimplified to fit that framework. H. Pylori stories where something like this really happened are unusual.
The pandemic provides a great example of people not understanding this leading them to adopt all sorts of poor beliefs because they think they can easily dismiss popular views of experts who know vastly more than they do as just captured by their biases. We are now drowning in examples of people holding dubious opinions about COVID, its risks, and how to mitigate them driven by people's forays into amateur epidemiology grounded in flippant dismissal of actual epidemiologists.
So one easy counterexample seems to be the usefulness of masks worn by the public to slow the spread of a respiratory pathogen. The consensus among most US experts and authorities was that making the public mask wasn't useful, and then switched pretty quickly to it being useful. At least one of those positions has to be wrong. (My impression is that in a lot of Asia the consensus was different, but I don't know enough to be sure.)
Or how about the huge replication crisis in the social sciences. Stuff that social psychology professors taught their students was very solid (most priming effects, for example) turned out not to really exist. That was a consensus in a social science field that was wrong. I think you can find about a dozen solid counterexamples to your claim there.
We can also look at radical mastectomy for breast cancer treatment. As I understand it, there was a really bitter dispute there, with the mainstream supporting radical mastectomy and a minority persisting in demonstrating that it did more harm than good.
Or we can consider the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder or not. That was something that changed in the last 50 years or so. Which instance of the consensus scientific position there was the really solid one that we should have confidence in?
Now, none of this means that you're better off finding a rando on the internet to listen to about some field of science than listening to someone with actual expertise. But i do not think it is rare for scientific consensus, even on practically relevant questions, to be quite wrong.
Radical mastectomy is an interesting example, because it illustrates one of the limitations on empirical science when it comes to medicine. The problem is, you generally *can't* get approval to do a study where your experimental arm gets anything *less* than the "standard of care." So let's say you have an idea that you don't have to remove the *whole* breast, just a chunk (which is what they do now). How do you prove you're right? You can't just sign a bunch of women up and say "OK some of you will be randomly assigned to just get a lumpectomy, which we kind of hope is just as good as taking the whole breast, but maybe not, you might die earlier than those in the control arm." That's totally unethical, and nobody would approve or fund it. So you're left with stuff like studying the relatively rare case that happens accidentally, for other reasons, until you've accumulated enough evidence.
Actually it is quite easily. Read Vinay Prasad how it is routinely done by pharma companies in cancer drug research. The ethics committee work is a boring, honorary post that is usually taken by old geezers and half-senile profesors who have lost acuity for better jobs. It is quite easy to get an obsolete standart-of-care past them because it is probably the one they used to have while they were doctors themselves. While at the same time it is quite hard to propose more progressive trial designs because those old people are too conservative and afraid from anything new.
Not even going to bother. Any argument that begins "everybody's corrupt! Check out this one guru on the Interwebz!" strikes me as so a priori implausible that it's not worth my time to even glance over it.
Impossible of what? Vinay Prasad is not so much known on internet, he has written several books and some of them like "Reversal" are included in the reading list for university studies of therapeutics. You probably didn't know that judging from your response.
I even don't see why you couldn't make a controlled trial as you described it if we have serious evidence that it might be better.
People in this group used to say that human challenge studies infecting people with covid are unethical. The reality is that we do such studies all the time. The UK did but it took quite long time to get the approval.
The previous expert consensus on masks I'm fairly familiar with as I used to sit on a committee regarding influenza harm reduction in a particular vulnerable community and this topic came up several times, prompting me to read publications on it. It's hard to summarize in a post, but a "for/against" position is an oversimplification. The idea was that for influenza-like respiratory illnesses specifically, poor compliance with proper mask use washed out its benefits and encouraged risk taking behavior such that it wasn't worth the effort. At the same time, epidemiological models were pretty clear that there were different circumstances where there would be a benefit and compliance levels themselves are fluid. Masks would be advisable in theory in the right circumstances. There was no consensus that they were generally useless, which should be obvious given that they're standard PPE in certain settings.
Then COVID comes around and the initial reaction is that previously received wisdom, but we learn very quickly that COVID contagious properties are different such that there's a likely benefit. At the same time, the overall efforts to mitigate COVID spread, of which widespread mask use was one, absolutely crushed the not-as-contagious influenza rates. So does that mean it turns out that masks actually would be helpful to stop influenza spread? Summarizing what I've read, the answer is now, "Yeah, probably" with a side of "should keep looking into it."
Regarding various examples of received expert consensuses being wrong, I will unfortunately again insist that it doesn't happen all that often. It's more often than a prior understanding is incomplete and requires elaboration and embellishment. When something is truly upturned, it's usually the case that a prior consensus was held for reasons that made it the reasonable position to hold. The "scholars just got this completely wrong; what were they thinking?!" stories are rare, but heavily played up in popular media because they are catnip to people. Most of what people learn in the course of getting a science degree will stick around, though some of it will prove to have severe limitations or be only partially correct in a way that calls into question its value. At the same time, they'll learn things that are appropriately qualified in their field that, when translated for a popular audience, are taught with a level of simplicity and confidence that just gets it wrong.
>Then COVID comes around and the initial reaction is that previously received wisdom, but we learn very quickly that COVID contagious properties are different such that there's a likely benefit.
Perhaps, but we "learned" that at the same time anyone paying any attention at all would have noticed that the American public no longer had any access to the sort of masks that had been previously determined to be mostly-useless-but-sometimes-useful-under-unusual-circumstances. Only cheap imitations built to no specification or standard and sold on Etsy or wherever. If the real thing is understood to be mostly useless but marginally useful under unusual circumstances, it is not even remotely scientific or rational to insist that the untested cheap imitation that *looks* like the real thing, *must* be used.
Really, given that risk compensation is one of the down sides of masking, it was grossly irresponsible to recommend improvised masks under any circumstances unless clearly hedged with "don't even think about trusting these things to keep you safe". And that wasn't the messaging.
Wouldn't THAT "messaging" been (seen as) counter-productive? When communicating to all, i.e. millions of IQ below 100 and low willingness of compliance), you do not want to kill your aim (ppl. using masks) by emphasizing how limited their effect really is. - btw, during the low-supply-time, DIY-masks were recommended by many experts (In Germany e.g. by Prof. Drosten ): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8006937/How-make-coronavirus-mask-Hong-Kong-officials-release-DIY-video.html
This is all downstream of: Kavanagh thinks learning and understanding things is relatively easy, while Scott thinks learning and understanding things is very, very hard. Kavanagh sees the light blinking *Science*, and stops, while Scott never stops.
Going by his Twitter potted bio, he's some kind of sociologist. So he's going for the soft science angle of "but think of the mindsets involved" that sociology likes to invoke; you don't go by the numbers solely, you have to interpret the context of the lived experience and so forth.
That's why he's able to be so sure about "LOL dumb" on the ivermectin question; you see, *he* understands the conspiracy theorist mindset and so can dismiss them out of hand, and addressing their questions is merely giving them the dignity of being worth taking seriously.
Sociologists also have a much stronger incentive than anyone else to insist on no-one doubting their results - their whole field is simultaneously laughable and easy for laymen to poke holes in.
I think both? It appears that in his mind it's easy to know which scientists and studies to believe (if in doubt, just ask him and he will tell you which ones are legitimate, I'm sure). Since it's clear in his mind, he wants others to believe that it should be clear in their minds too. Anyone who thinks it's difficult is probably just listening to the wrong sources.
I happen to disagree with him on all of that, and that's the crux of Scott's post.
No, Kavanagh probably doesn't think learning and understanding things is so easy. Bring up one inconvenient but well-supported research result or fact and you will see this in action, suddenly he will bring up how "you have to take everything with a grain of salt" and "something something p-values" and "muh X is a complicated field and you have to be careful with generalization". I haven't even heard of him half an hour ago, but I will literally bet my house on this.
What Kavanagh wants is to (performatively) be amazed at how utterly easy and no-brainer his ***conclusions*** are, so he can better wage war on those who disagree and insult their intelligence. This is a standard culture war practice, here's the 1400 year example that first came to my mind :
>Every human is born a Muslim, it's their Jew parents who make them Jew and their Christian parents who make them Christian.
--A hadith. (Sayings by the prophet of Islam, treated as holy and second only to Quran by most Muslims)
Which is funny, because if you actually take a look at 2 year olds you will find they make terrible Muslims, not a single word of the Quran do they know, they don't even understand how God is One (or God, or how bathrooms work).
But the actual message here is something along the lines of "All those other religions are fake and has to be indoctrinated to kids in order to survive, but ours ? ours is superior, it didn't have to be invented, people are just born knowing it."
Kavanagh is doing something slightly more sophisticated than this, but only slightly. Truth is really out there in the observable world and is indeed figured out by experimentation and you can in fact see it for yourself, but the catch is that you can't disagree with our published conculsions. Any disagreement where you're actually *conflicted* about the final say (i.e. any serious disagreement) just proves how utterly peanut-brained you are, our conclusions are so blindingly obvious that, once we have additionally written them in published papers, disagreeing anymore is just stupidity and ignorance and bad faith zealotry on your part.
I believe everyone has their own version of this, sometimes without realizing.
I like Chris, but I do think Scott is not a good target for him. Scott has spent many years writing hundreds of thousands of words on all manner of topics, most of them non-political, so there’s more basis for good faith.
Brett Weinstein and most of these other cranks are basically political actors who profit from controversy, not accuracy.
It's the opposite. Kavanagh thinks that learning and understanding things is hard, so 25,000 word debunkings for a popular audience from personal investigation have a lot of potential to mislead people. Kavanagh argues that understanding the meta-signs that someone is a crackpot should be sufficient and risks less misunderstanding. Scott, by contrast, is optimistic about the ability of ordinary people to weigh critiques and counter-critiques and come to the right decision.
Scott is the person who thinks he can debate a creationist and the audience - or at least enough of the audience to matter - will figure it out where as Kavanagh is worried that the audience will be bamboozled by the debate itself. If anyone thinks understanding is "easy" in this scenario, it's Scott.
I don't know what the right answer is here. It's an old dilemma. But I do think a lot of the comments are misunderstanding what the issue is.
I agree that it is important to discuss the signs of crackpottery (and that Scott could've done more in that department) but if you want to convince fence-sitters, there is no substitute for putting in work and showing your work, as Scott did. Because Scott is right, the errors made by crackpots are (1) errors that non-crackpots also make and (2) there are also crackpots who promote a message that is more or less true, e.g. Steve Kirsch was very worried about anthropogenic global warming. Therefore, pointing out that several ivermectin supporters appear to be crackpots is arguably a Chinese Robber Fallacy (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/) though it is, of course, still evidence.
Plus, you can't just say "the signs of a crackpot are X, Y and Z, and see how my opponent shows the signs!" because the people who are fans of your opponent have now stopped listening to you. And if you're not really careful about your X, Y and Z, people might think that better sources of truth also exhibit those signs. And most likely, better sources of truth sometimes do... nobody's perfect.
Fence sitters are not necessarily convinced by the superior argument. You're insisting that, and I'm suggesting the counter-argument rejects this premise. The problem is that people form their opinions via mental shortcuts that are error-prone and more specifically pseudoscience tends to present arguments that are superficially persuasive. You're taking it for granted that people just know the better argument when they see it, and that's simply not true.
This is one of the major reasons why professional scientists are often cautious about engaging pseudoscientific figures in debate for public consumption. It opens up a window for them to mislead people in a format conducive to their success.
So perhaps I’m stupid and worthy of ridicule, but I *still* buy (a version of) Hancock’s theory. Hancock himself is not to be trusted; he’s far, far too credulous, and much of his evidence is easily rebutted (such as the frozen mammoth corpses in Siberia being evidence of a rapid climactic shift). But he doesn’t seem to be *dishonest,* and I found the case he presents in *Underworld* compelling. There, he doesn’t talk about Atlantis; instead he presents a picture of a near-world-girdling coastal civilization (or set of civilizations) that was drowned out at the end of the last ice age. This makes *tremendous* sense to me, and explains a lot that nothing else does, such as evidence of truly ancient cultural ties between South America and Africa.
Two things occurred to me about why there could be shared stories across the world:
1. The same myths that the proto-Indo-Europeans or whatever had got carried with them all the way across the Bering Strait, and the "lost continent under the waves" story was one of them, and turned out to be one of the more durable ones in every culture it showed up in. People like intriguing stories!
2. Before the Bering Strait was washed under, there was communication of ideas across it - so even if the original North American settlers didn't bring it with them, it's possible that it became a big story and managed to spread on trade routes all the way across.
(And replace the Atlantis story with any other cultural commonality you have thought of, and it could've been brought or spread the same way.)
I don't know if this lines up with the evidence, or if this is what you were even thinking of, but I wanted to share my thoughts.
Fair. I am totally not going to get way into this, as it’s been years since I put any thought into it, but it’s more than shared stories. It’s shared architecture, and, recently, the discovery of some artifacts or materials from Africa in South America (sorry, I don’t remember specifics).
It’s not that I’m unwilling to consider alternative hypotheses, but it would have to be from someone who has read *Underworld* and is willing to respond to its claims and evidence specifically (this is not against you, but a general statement).
Null hypothesis: Lost lands and floods are really obvious stories for cultures with exposure to water to generate so they emerge spontaneously without needing outside help. The intellectual equivalent of ostriches and emus
Anywhere with coastal erosion literally has lost lands falling beneath the sea, plus the ocean is a vast and terrifying place at the best of times, it's really not that hard to see how similar myths could arise independently.
I guess one question is how we could distinguish between:
a. There are stories shared across the world and have been preserved over many thousands of years as humans spread out across the globe.
b. There are stories that are relatively easy to recreate that have arisen independently across humans all over the world, which look similar enough to seem related but are actually just independent things.
For (b), common human experience, human psychology, and the nature and limits of the worldview available to ancient people could all explain having many stories re-arise.
Details and specifics. Generic accounts are one thing. But at some point, the level of congruence between different stories becomes implausible to be merely chance and general shared experience. (No claims as to whether the flood stories in particular meet that threshold.)
Indeed, my takeaway from this article is that I should update my priors to believe in ~Atlantis~ pyramid building ancient coastal civilizations considerably. The criticism leveled at Hancock et al. is remarkable for being so damn incurious about things like this.
The pyramids are convergent evolution. If you have a large labor pool with preindustrial technology, and you want to build something tall, pyramids are the way to go. Being big on the bottom and gradually getting smaller as you go up means it won't fall over, and making it with a square base makes the math easier.
Also, the Egyptians stopped building pyramids thousands of years before the Maya started.
Graham's most recent works tie together some rather interesting facts and ideas. I agree and think he even says that he is reaching, speculating, and choosing to imagine and think beyond the available spotty evidence...and I think he also isn't always very clear when he is drawing from evidence and when is drawing his own conclusions.
That said, there is a thread for him to pull on and the evidence expands over time. Just recently we've seen evidence for over a dozen large temple complexes in Turkey like Gobekli Tepe which are in the 12,0000 year old range and are too large and too complex for small groups of hunter gatherers to have built. Even Gobekli is less than 10% excavated according to the ground penetrating radar. It is impressive all one its own with the 3D carvings out of monoliths and I think he's quite right than lots of archaeologists are in fact not experts on stone carving and have never attempted to create or move such large stones.
The arrogance and ignorance of those with PhDs who think they are experts on everything is a real phenomenon and Graham has most certainly received far more shrill screaming from such people than would be fair and his psychological arguments about him being more famous and making more money than them in the thing they are supposed to be experts in is likely real to some degree.
Some of the dumbest people I've ever met have had PhDs and they simply have very complex and convoluted ways to talk themselves stupid and ignore the idea of bias, conflicts of interest, and that they are human beings. The forced nostalgia and ignorance of recent history is astounding as we simply move on from things like Vietnam or the Iraq wars while every so called 'expert' was screaming about the necessity of bombing small villages.
Look at Lex Freidman who was talking about the UFO videos which are all confirmed now by the government and show physics far beyond any 10-20 year gap of secrets which the militaries of the world might have. And he talked to a dozen or so scientists with expertise in the area and they all just gave him blank groputhink answers from 20 years ago to giggle and say taht UFOs are silly and there is 'no evidence'...despite Lex literally showing them the evidence. They had no curiosity and were fully in the mode of trying to protect their own reputations and get back to the narrow things they wanted to talk about.
So despite being dead wrong, ignorant, etc. they responded with careerism and a lack of curiosity in most cases. The psychology and groupthink and sub cultural dynamics of a community of experts all trying to maintain their own credulity and reputation comes into direct conflict with doing actual science or being truly scholarly and curious about the world. After about 10 or 20 attempts, Lex has just given up on this topic in recent podcasts as none of these so called experts seem to know anything or have thought about this topic.
Sometimes I wonder...ok, so what, say there was an 'advanced' ancient civilisation we know nothing about. They had boats, spread all around the world from Egypt to New Zealand building pyramids and discovering an expansive icy coast of Antarctica along with building various underground shelters while they hid and eventually succumbed to the Younger-Dryas bombardments from the Torrid meteor stream. And maybe there are still untold wonders and remains of their civilisation under the Sahara Desert which was a lush jungle paradise.
Ok, great. that's really really cool. They could carve stone, move large stones in ways we struggle to understand, had advanced knowledge of the cosmos and complex astronomical knowledge including the procession of the equinox, etc.
That's really awesome, but like...so what? We have indeed found real human settlements underwater now all around the world in what used to be the above water coastal areas. This is simply a purely true statement, though underwater megaliths are still unclear in their evidence base. And....so what? It does show that the people who did thinking instead of being slaves to available evidence were right. Or at least some of them were right who happened to think that way.
But unlike discovering a new flying mechanism or solar tech or way to grow food in harmony with the soil microbiome or new knowledge about the importance of the human microbiome for health which to this day most doctors are ignorant about as that 'revolution of thinking' has yet to truly spread though the arthritic and slow medical system....knowledge of even several new and even globe spanning super ancient civilisations which collapsed 15,000 years ago would...not really change anything for us today. But would be really awesome to learn about and discover.
Our idea of history and the human species has been wrong multiple times. Our species was thought to be perhaps 100,000 years old and new fossil and DNA evidence points to humans being 300,000 years old in pretty much our modern form.
It probably is stupid and short-sighed of historians to think that literally nothing happened other than people banging sticks together in 290,000+ years of time and everything started 10,000 years ago in terms of civilisation. This is a pretty solid argument and it is clear why we wouldn't generally find evidence due to erosion and destruction of simpler building materials over that period of time.
By and large it all would fall into the 'so what' category for most people around the world. It is a very fun thing for some folks to think about and I have fun thinking about it, but it just doesn't' make much of a difference to our world. We already know many older civilisations collapsed and some of them due to environmental factors, probably most of them due to environmental changes or degradation of some kind which led to wars, famine, and diseases.
So I'm just not sure how much is there in terms of knowing about it mattering. It does shine a light on the obstinacy and idiocy of many so called experts who are very limited in their knowledge and very wrong in their ideas. The entire history of science has been one long slog of almost all the experts being continually wrong.
It is good to cast aspersions on the certainty and worship of 'the experts' like they are infallible when our history shows us they are almost nothing but fallible and limited humans whose ideas will be shown to be incredibly incomplete and wrong over time. What is surprisingly bad and annoying are the fake intellectual defenders of 'the experts' who don't have any understanding of the process of knowledge creation and loss over time.
If you had to the 'top experts' of Europe from the 1500s looking at the astronomical knowledge of the Incas they'd have said they were wrong and making errors and yet it was the Europeans who were wrong and we'd later learn about how advanced some of the knowledge was in several south american civilisations.
So anytime someone is screaming for everyone else to stop thinking or asserting that we have 100% pure expert approved knowledge and is all about censorship and ridicule of those alternative ideas for the purposes of aggrandising their own ego on what they imagine are the accomplishments of others are...I know I'm not going to engage with that person. The key to knowledge is trust, ignorance, and obedience to authority! You all recall how that's carved in stone above the door to every scientific society around the world....according to the fellatio of the experts who have never been wrong in the long rung, except for almost every time so far.
>It probably is stupid and short-sighed of historians to think that literally nothing happened other than people banging sticks together in 290,000+ years of time and everything started 10,000 years ago in terms of civilisation.
This is what's frustrating to me about the angry reaction to Hancock's work. We know modern humans have been wandering the face of the earth for three hundred thousand years, and we generally have no idea what our ancestors were up to except for a fuzzy picture of the most recent ~5% of human history. I think it's interesting to speculate about this huge period of prehistory and (admittedly only having read America Before after seeing Hancock on a podcast interview) I take his work as just that - interesting speculation. I'm bewildered that there's so much open hostility towards this kind of thing.
Unfortunately Hancock is a really poor emissary for his ideas. He’s so credulous. And he never really admits he was wrong; he just publishes a new book that makes new assertions that contradict his old ones.
"open hostility" is not how I want to call my feelings about this .. err .. interesting thoughts (honestly, I want to write: BS). So, yep, open hostility it is, I guess. How come? Well, see Scott worked hard on this deworming issue - great post. Now he sees his hard work laughed upon by this K.-guy. And feels angry and insulted. Rightly so.- Now legions of real archaeologists search the world for artifacts. Painstakingly hard work, and if you do not find some "oldest X found ever" you will never be known outside your circles. And then some people just go and claim sth. and their readers say: "Silly Archaeologists, you too dumb to find any of this Atlantis that must be so obviously there. A high culture 100 k years ago worldwide along all the beaches you simply overlooked, because ... ." - And you wonder why some feel kinda pissed off? As if there are no books, nay libraries about it. Pyramids? Children section, David Macaulay, see how they were build. No, sorry, no books disproving that there are green swans somewhere in the Amazon. Or that mammoths were singing or Neanderthals flew on gryphons. We can not disprove any of that, not even that an angel gave J. Smith those golden plates. WTF, there is so much wonder in real prehistoric past, dug out by real experts (yes, Heinrich Schliemann, well done) and then some guys just dream up sth. ... and we must read Erich von Däniken/ Hancock / creationists before we are allowed to shrug and roll our eyes? - And yes, science is work in progress, and yes, new findings do change the narrative, see Göbekli Tepe/Denisovans et al.. - But to be helpful: Check the timelines, and see where to put a 'global forgotten kinda advanced civilization leaving no trace': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_prehistory or another instructive overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_human_settlements .
That's all fair, I guess I'm not familiar enough with Hancock's history to be informed on the acrimony towards him. Like I said, I've only read his most recent book and thought he raised some interesting ideas. I certainly don't think there's any need for a thorough response to all of his ideas from "the establishment," but I'd expect more of a "He's a crank and we don't want to engage with him" kind of response. More understandable if he's been at it for ages and "the establishment" is over his schtick at this point.
Thanks for the links - somehow I missed Erik's essay, I'll give it a read.
Part of it is the hang-over from the Ancient Astronauts notions (and indeed Theosophy and its like before those) - that were super-duper advanced civilisations that were more advanced than current society millennia ago, but they got wiped out by floods/ice age/you name it. Lasers and spaceships (they like to quote the energy weapons and flying chariots of the gods in Indian mythology as 'really' being these kinds of thing) except oh no wiped out alongside the dinosaurs.
So, not unreasonably, when asked "where are the traces of these?", they come up with the underwater pyramids or rock carvings or just "well what do you think happened back when there were giraffes in the Sahara?" type extrapolations, which makes it hard to take seriously such theories. And then we get the reactions to *any* notion of "maybe humans weren't just banging sticks together for a hundred thousand years before we got the first recorded civilisation" all lumped in the "fake aliens" basket.
Be aware that the ocean level has increased by approx 120 meters since the last glacial maximum 19000 years ago. It only levelled out 6000 years ago. Plenty of material for our story-telling ancestors to weave myths and narratives around the campfire, to be passed on through the generations, about previous great civilisations that are now underneath the sea.
Presumably a semi-advanced coastal civilisation would have ships? And they'd travel longish distances from time to time?
They'd probably have crops and livestock too, which they'd have selectively bred.
I think the biggest problem would be: how the heck did this civilisation never travel inland? Not even a little bit? Or build something on a hill near the water? The people living inland never noticed "Hey, those people living on the coast have some neat ideas, let's copy them, or at least raid them and steal some of their stuff". And when the seas very slowly swallowed their cities over a period of centuries, these people just sat in place and freaking drowned instead of moving inland.
Is this so implausible? In the weak form, i.e. an ancient-Egypt level civilisation that wasn't conveniently in a desert near some people whose writings survived. Egypt's neighbours knew of its existence, and were broadly content to ignore it and keep living their own lives. Raiding was certainly common, but stuff broke and wore away, and those neighbouring cultures didn't have the tools or knowledge to recreate them. The Indus Valley civilisation had organised cities and *plumbing*, and very nearly disappeared without a trace (to the extent that we call them 'the Indus Valley civilisation') Cahokia and the Chaco Canyon cultures both became much more organised than their neighbours, and then collapsed, with their citizens going back to hunting and gathering, or small-scale subsistence farming.
For the record, I *don't* believe in Atlantis for reasons cited by Scott, but I do think the general idea that maybe there were more ancient civilisations that rose and fell and weren't necessarily conveniently in very dry areas isn't a crazy one.
So Scott is working off of an old hypothesis of Hancock’s; he has updated it to be “worldwide coastal civilization that got flooded at the end of the Ice Age,” instead of “Atlantis” as it’s usually thought of.
Unfortunately that pattern matches to a common failure mode of conspiracy / pseudoscience theorists, which is that when their initial idea gets challenged they come up with a more complex and harder to disprove version of the theory. Adding epicycles, if you will. There is a fine line between “updating based on new information” and “moving the goal posts”.
There must have been some places where a very rapid rise happened--some river changed course or some passage to the ocean was opened up, and very quickly the water level rose and everything was flooded. Whether that was the origin of the story of Noah's Ark or not, I don't know, but it seems like it's got to have happened a few times.
Or was there some climactic tipping point where the ice built up started melting rapidly, raising sea level by a significant amount in months, as opposed to centuries?
"truly ancient cultural ties between South America and Africa" would show up like a beacon in modern genetic data: you'd see big stretches of similarity between modern Africans and modern South Americans. Something like a single cross-breeding event a generation across the whole population would leave enough of a signal to detect.
You do, of course, see some stretches of African DNA in South Americans, but it's from recent post-Columbian admixture, and you don't see it in the isolated tribal areas.
No, I've got this one: If some of our distant coastal ancestors from BCE 19000 - 6000 built large stone structures, (too large to dismantle and move inland as sea levels gradually rose - easier just to gradually abandon them and build new ones further inland), much later generations would encounter these underwater structures as they dived for food etc. Baffled by these, they would probably think "in the distant past some cataclysmic event must have made the land here sink beneath the sea" , and construct their campfire-myths accordingly. Ok, given enough time, erosion will destroy even stone structures - but in theory at least, there might still be faint traces of "civilized human activity" as far down as up to 120 meters.
Most traces of costal civilisations will be washed away say 100 years after rising water levels have engulfed them. Exception: Large stone structures, which could last centuries or even millennia before they are indistinguishable from everything else at the bottom of the sea. Then remember that 19000 - 6000 BC is well before writing was invented. Coastal civilisations might come and go, and in a few hundred years no-one will remember they ever existed. Then, at some point (say 500-1000 years later) coastal people, diving for food or whatever, notice stone structures at 5-10 meters below the surface. The myth of ancient civilisations that sank beneath the sea is born.
...just a speculation of course. But one reason we in our time have not found many such stone structures (apart from the very real possibility that they never existed, of course!) is that we have not looked deep enough. I would be surprised if many have looked for traces of ancient coastal civilisations below 20 meters. Since ocean levels have risen approx. 120 meters since the last glacial maximum, perhaps we should extend our search...
There is a hell of a lot of ancient coastline to consider, and even in the best case scenario the number of premodern coastal cultures that built big stone stuff is likely to be very limited. So no puzzle, really, that you do not encounter pyramids every 2000 meter if you deep-dive off the coast of Morocco or other places that had a reasonable ok climate even back during the last glacial maximum.
Any thoughts on the difference between doing the Ivermectin analysis privately (and coming to whatever conclusion you decide but keeping it to yourself) versus posting the Ivermectin analysis as a public blog post? It seems like there should be some consideration of the fact that you cede the ability to be a neutral observer of the phenomena when you choose to discuss it in a public instead of a private medium.
"when you choose to discuss it in a public instead of a private medium"
Did you miss the badgering by Alexandros and his supporters about getting Scott to put up a response to the response to the response? There's not much choice in "you promised you'd do a write-up, Scott, when are you gonna publish it?"
That just moves the decision backwards in time. Replace "post the response response" with "agree to post a response response once the response exists"
I think Scott might frame it as "I think this discussion is worth having, and the other side won't be able to put time into it without a prior guarantee of public airing." That just makes the tradeoff between the value of private discussion and the possible downsides of publicizing harmful views more stark.
Everybody agrees Alexandros raised some valid points, so it's good that Scott addressed those, and I suspect he would have even without badgering. (Where "everybody" = Scott and Alexandros.)
And the whole discussion is good material for a blog and a philosophy that are interested in "what's the best way to reach useful conclusions about the world?"
Kavanagh goes with "Trust the regulators to represent expert consensus, and then trust expert consensus. And shout down anyone who publicly examines the question in more depth, because that examination will encourage more conspiracy theory entertaining nuts than sound reasoners, overall reducing the average amount of correctness in society."
That's not necessarily wrong - on average, how many times will the regulators be wrong, and is the value of catching those rare wrong opinions greater than the negative value of encouraging conspiracy theory entertaining nuts?
Now I suspect that Kavenagh would be more skeptical of a regulator's conclusion if it didn't agree with his worldview, but I don't know him, so who knows?
It's more of a Hawthorne Effect - regardless of now neutrally Scott wrote the Ivermectin series, his mere choice to create a public work discussing it has direct effects independent of the content of the post.
Maybe posting publicly that there’s a controversy about something is something you should only do if you’re enough of an expert to know there’s a controversy. In the counterfactual where Scott couldn’t resolve the controversy himself, maybe Scott should have held off on his post until he could ask someone who could explain it to him. If he didn’t know someone like that, he shouldn’t have posted it at all. In reality, Scott knew enough to say there was no controversy, so he was free to post.
Seems like having someone widely trusted to be honest (and with relevant expertise) go through their analysis in public is pretty valuable for demonstrating to people that yes, there's an actual reason why most experts no longer think ivermectin is a promising treatment for covid. It's not just that Dr Faucci and five Big Pharma CEOs have proclaimed it true and everyone else has fallen in line.
No, FIFAism is the belief in a worldwide body that gives away football championship hosting in return for money and favours. You're thinking of FIFOism.
Well, actually taking Kavanaghs line of argument seriously and offering counter-arguments to it (instead of ignoring it), was sort of a meta-version of Scott's general "rationalist" approach to contested issues. Rather clever, I would say.
Bret Devereaux linked a few weeks ago to this piece by Alexandra Sills making a related argument that academic historians need to engage with the general public more than they do. She even uses the same central example of having once believed in Atlantis, because that's what the sources who *did* want to engage the public plausibly argued.
I think Devereaux himself is a pretty good example of a historian doing public engagement well. (Including a three-part series on the Fall of Rome.) He lays out different perspectives (often touching on both current disputes and older paradigms) while generally making clear where he stands and how confident he is about it.
Of course, his activities are notably being done from outside a tenured or tenure-track academic position. And he's certainly been increasingly vocal about his concerns about how the fact that public outreach is of either zero or negative value careerwise will hurt both the public (which will often be operating without good access to the results of the research it's paying for) and the field (which will find it hard to attract public support and funding if it doesn't visibly produce results the public can benefit from).
I still don't get the power invested in these ideas. Going from a state of...I feel convinced by what I've seen that Atlantis was definitely real to...I'm not so sure about the evidence anymore and don't know if Atlantis was real.
This is far cry from the way that 'fans of reason' often term things and give a knee jerk reaction that Atlantis 100% was defiantly not real and we KNOW this now. This is untrue and it is not known with any degree of certainty if Atlantis or other similarly ancient societies existed.
What remains true is their incredible degree of plausibility. With 300,000 years of human existence, it would not be so unreasonable to imagine an Egypt level society or even more advanced than them at some point in the past. That's the more rational position than humans just banged rocks together for 290,000 years with zero progress. Our lack of evidence or unclear evidence we have collected so far is also well understood for how and why that would be the case.
So while a 100% stance of absolute certainty about Atlantis is silly, so is the opposite.
Reverting to a state of uncertainty is interesting and being less convinced of older ideas is an important shift in one's thinking. But in some ways I feel that can lead us to an opposite bias to be extra resistant to new knowledge in the area of ancient civilisations. That knee jerk, fire burns hands, level human response to assert 'ha! you wont fool me again'.
Absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence, but it's also not evidence of presence. Being open to new evidence is fine if and when it appears, but Plato writing a philosophical fable is orthogonal to the question, and pursuits like history and archaeology are about what we're able to uncover evidence for now.
If the evidence changes, then the theories can and should change. But I'm pretty sure that the odds that I as an interested layman can usefully distinguish between the next genuine paradigm-breaker and the next Velikovsky better than people in the field are pretty low. And the tendency for soi-disant would-be Galileos to pattern-match to previous cranks doesn't make me personally more inclined to try to sort through them.
I mean, hominid ancestors banged rocks together for a few million years before they got around to evolving into modern humans. Dinosaurs lived for 100 million years and they didn’t even get around to banging rocks. Single cell organisms floated around for a couple billion years before they even thought about growing an extra cell. And the earth was a lifeless rock for a couple billion years before that.
Turns out “evolutionary timescales” are a really damn long time.
Strongly agreed overall, but the origins of life have apparently been pushed far enough back that Earth was a lifeless rock for less than a billion years.
(Which is especially impressive since it presumably had to originate after Theia blasted a Moon's worth of mass off of it.)
"It is to escape from this conclusion that some philosophers, accepting as a principle the impotency of reason, have emphasized the need of belief on the part of human nature, either asserting the primacy of belief over reason or else affirming a radical separation between reason and belief, that is, between science and philosophy on the one hand and religion on the other. Such is the position taken by Kant, when he distinguishes between pure reason, confined to subjectivity, and practical reason, which alone is able to put us by an act of faith in relation with objective reality. It is also a fideistic attitude which is the occasion of agnosticism, of positivism, of pragmatism and other modern forms of anti-intellectualism. As against these views, it must be noted that authority, even the authority of God, cannot be the supreme criterion of certitude, and an act of faith cannot be the primary form of human knowledge. This authority, indeed, in order to be a motive of assent, must be previously acknowledged as being certainly valid; before we believe in a proposition as revealed by God, we must first know with certitude that God exists, that He reveals such and such a proposition, and that His teaching is worthy of assent, all of which questions can and must be ultimately decided only by an act of intellectual assent based on objective evidence. Thus, fideism not only denies intellectual knowledge, but logically ruins faith itself."
> before we believe in a proposition as revealed by God, we must first know with certitude that God exists, that He reveals such and such a proposition...
I believe that (some) Protestants would say that they have direct experience of God himself that does not require any kind of fiddly philosophical analysis or logical circumlocutions; they have a *personal* and immediate relationship with Jesus, and thus they know that He is the Lord, and His Bible shows them the way. I believe that many of them would also add, "yeah, and it's no surprise that an idolater like the Pope, bless his heart, wouldn't be able to hear Jesus like we do." :-/
I appreciate the inclusion of "bless his heart" - the harshest invective in the Protestant lexicon - in reference to the Pope. Adds a dose of realism.
But honestly, I don't think most Protestants would disagree with the Pope here (speaking as one of them) - I don't think the Pope is denying the possibility of direct experience; but it's part of belief not the whole of it.
If anything I'd argue the Protestant side puts more of an emphasis on reason, with more emphasis on direct individual study of the Bible. ("Sola fides" is a doctrine that stands in opposition to salvation by works, not in opposition to faith through reason)
Interesting. We are in 1590, right? And it hangs in the balance if Christendom shall choose the path of rationality and empiricism, as a foundation of faith, or instead follow the path of their colleagues, the learned Muslim theologists, who instead had chosen the path to hail immediate faith as opposed to rational inquiry (the reference is to the defeat of rationalist muslim theology, aka kalam, in the early/middle middle ages). Both sides had good arguments back then against their respective opponents, but we know how it went...Christian theology spawned the Enlightenment, Muslim theology did not. I'll have to read more about this guy, and his very short papacy.
Gregory was the 19th century. There was also Clement VI in the 14th century who had to smack down a French philosopher and theologian; fideism in various forms has been around for a long time. It's in the tradition of Thomism to defend reason as a power.
"As to the opinion of those who maintain that our supernatural assent is prepared for by motives of credibility merely probable, it is evident that it logically destroys the certitude of such an assent. This opinion was condemned by Innocent XI in the decree of 2 March, 1679 (cf. Denzinger, n. 1171), and by Pius X in the decree "Lamentabili sane" n. 25: "Assensus fidei ultimo innititur in congerie probabilitatum" (The assent of faith is ultimately based on a sum of probabilities). Revelation, indeed, is the supreme motive of faith in supernatural truths, yet, the existence of this motive and its validity has to be established by reason."
Ah, my mistake, I put "Gregory XIV" (pope 1590-1) in wiki instead of Gregory XVI. Those damned roman numerals...so easy to get wrong:-)
...in any case, Thomas Aquinas is certainly the main scholar responsible for allowing a "rationalist" tendency in Christianity. He was also more of a near-contemporary to the Muslim theologicans who defeated "rationalist" approaches to scripture in the Muslim world.
..although even further back in the Christian rationalist pantheon is John, the Evangelist who gave us the immortal story of "Thomas the Doubter". Thomas, who - despite insisting on evidence before he believed - was none the less allowed into Paradise. Not as its most prominent guest, according to Jesus - but Jesus did not contemn him to Hell for wanting proof before he believed, and that is the main thing.
I sometimes think about what it would be like to be just getting onto the internet now, or even to not be a Very Online person (an ultimate goal of mine at which I keep failing). I would definitely be a conspiracy theorist.
The reason is because Internet Discourse is about 12 layers deep and only the first few make any sense (See Zvi's Simulacra stuff). So you get online and someone says a pretty reasonable-sounding thing ("I like spaghetti"), and you retweet it, and suddenly you are a racist and a sexist, and an idiot. Because you didn't know that some celebrity Nazi streamer *also* liked spaghetti and that therefore all Right Thinking people hate spaghetti and anyway what Americans eat isn't actually spaghetti, and also did you know the guy who brought spaghetti to the Americas was a pedophile. If the Nazi streamer was even a little coy about being a Nazi he'd radicalize a more naive me in about 20 minutes in that environment.
I wish I had about ten hands so I could say "on the other hand" nine more times.
But on the other hand, one major issue I have with the whole rationalist project is that I think its proponents are overconfident in their ability to determine truth in areas where they don't have expertise. I do think that makes folks more likely to fall into weird failure modes where they believe actively harmful things.
On the other hand, I am 99% sure that some consensuses are false, and have no specific examples of a consensus I think is false, so I am almost certainly a sheep in most ways.
On the other hand, I'm still probably right more often than I'm wrong.
On the other hand, I'm never right nor wrong in interesting, thought provoking ways.
It doesn't really matter, in the end, that some self-proclaimed rationalist was overconfident and mistaken, or even that he managed to delude his whole (minuscule) community. What ends up mattering is which memes are powerful enough to reach mainstream consensus, or at least the status of its legitimate challengers, and rationalists, despite their now mostly discarded delusions of grandeur, aren't really threatening that.
The controversy over Ivermectin is mis-framed, the victim of recent-history amnesia.
Around 2020, when Trump began boosting it, Ivermectin became a token of one’s politics and therefore of one’s attitude to the pandemic. For the true believers, for the Trump camp, Ivermectin was a cure for Covid, a cure that made the pandemic nothing to worry about and a reason to open up, to get on with life and keep the economy humming along so Trump could be re-elected in 2020.
Within that framework, if authorities had conceded that Ivermectin might work, the Trump political machine would have translated that as the end of the pandemic and all the contrary voices demanding we do difficult and costly things would have been silenced. We’d have been swallowing Ivermectin, not vaccinating, and the death toll would have been in the millions.
Perhaps those in the Ivermectin-is-junk camp were too certain, perhaps they dismissed some evidence more forcefully than the science at the time justified, but I’m darn glad they did. This never was an Atlantis-type controversy and you mustn’t judge it by the same criteria.
One, I'm not sure I agree with your framing of the stakes - the idea that Trump being *slightly* more able to claim that Ivermectin was an effective treatment would have drastically affected outcomes and killed millions seems more than a little suspect to me.
To suggest that a slight change in the narrative around Ivermectin would have drastically changed course seems to imply that the US government handling of the pandemic is able to be completely divorced from the situation on the ground, which just isn't true.
Maybe we'd have opened up a little more, a little sooner, but in reality we opened up anyway and then the Delta and Omicron waves came and slowed things down again, and I think that would have happened regardless.
We'd still have developed vaccines and most people still would have taken them. It's much better to not be sick at all, than to be sick and have a treatment - (speaking as someone who took Paxlovid).
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And even if there was a risk of Dire Consequences, I find this sort of reasoning - that it's okay to exaggerate scientific results and downplay any uncertainty if it's for the Greater Good™ - to be troubling. To a large extent I still think the whole situation where the effectiveness of masks was intentionally downplayed to prevent a shortage burned a lot of trust in the establishment and "the Science" and did a ton more damage in the long run than it saved.
Like imagine if it *did* turn out that once the scientific consensus came in, it was pro-Ivermetcin.
(No matter how unlikely you thought that outcome was in 2020) The more loudly the "Follow the Science" crowd had yelled "it's junk, you're taking horse medicine you idiots", the more long-term damage there'd be for future public health efforts and science communication.
I think you're forgetting how desperate Trump became, as "his stock market" plunged in early 2020, to call an end to the pandemic and reopen schools and businesses. I think you're also ignoring the hot anger and opposition to mask and vaccine mandates among Republican legislators, especially Governors and state legislators, to school and business closures and to any kind of mandate that restricted personal freedoms. The rules and mandates that almost certainly saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives hung for months by a thread.
I do not doubt that Trump and many of the wild men and women in the Republican party would have jumped all over Ivermectin as the cure for the pandemic, proclaimed themselves the anti-expert saviors of America and abandoned everything that eventually brought the pandemic under control, especially mass, mandated vaccination. It was a very close-run thing, and we forget that now at our peril.
I'm not advocating the suppression of scientific truth, and no scientific truths were eventually suppressed in dismissing Ivermectin as the solution to Covid. But as things stood at the time, it was much better to vehemently dismiss poor quality research advocating Ivermectin, even if a little truth got temporarily put aside along the way.
I don't think I'm forgetting significant facts of what happened in 2020 - but you're talking about your counter-factual speculations as if they're "facts" to be "forgotten" rather than just that: counter-factual speculations made about what your political enemies would have done had things gone slightly differently.
(The part where they're your political enemies is really easy to pick out when you insist on referring to them as "cultists" and "wild men/women" rather than using a more neutral term like "supporters")
And again, I just don't think this really makes sense. In your view the only thing that stopped (Evil) President Trump from raising the Mission Accomplished banner and declaring Pandemic Over was the (Heroic) Expert Scientists loudly declaring that ivermetcin doesn't work? The same experts that Trump infamously doesn't listen to anyway?
It seems like if Trump wanted to use ivermetcin to declare the pandemic over (or hydroxychloroquine, which like tgof points out is actually way more chronologically reasonable here), he would have done it; and exaggerating The Science to convince Trump (who doesn't care about The Science) seems futile.
Indeed even as actual Trump was touting ivermectin, the actual Trump administration was executing “operation Warp Speed” that developed the most effective vaccines before Trump left office. And of course a vast world exists outside of the United States that tried all sorts of anti-COVID measures, including in some cases ivermectin.
So it’s weird to assume that the anti-misinformation keyboard warriors of English speaking Twitter were the deciding factor between our current world and one where millions of additional people are dead because the US medical establishment decided to give ivermectin a serious go and just give up on everything else.
Indeed it was stunning how quickly the rhetoric of Trump’s reflexive opponents shifted from “That’s Trump’s vaccine….he bypassed our essential safety protocols…it’ll be POISON…” to “This is a Miracle Cure that will do all manner of things vaccines have never done in the past.”
It’s a vaccine. It seems to work reasonably well, as vaccines go. There are contraindications. This is normal.
Cuomo literally declared that he wouldn't allow the vaccine in NY... until Trump said "ok then, we'll give your share to other states."
Of course, Tammany Hall Jr. to this day is insisting that mandating sending active COVID cases into nursing homes caused zero outbreaks, and all of the deaths were caused by asymptomatic nurses.
A lot of the concern was that Trump might act ahead of the trial results, which would hardly have been out of character. (And some of the reactions, on both sides, were certainly about Trump getting credit for it before the election.) Then the results came in (after the companies had made public assertions of resisting administration pressure) and it turned out that they were quite good, particularly for the mRNA vaccines.
(I remember when the adenovirus-based "Oxford vaccine" was seen as the clear front runner, before it turned out that not only was it probably somewhat less effective than mRNA, but that Oxford and AstraZeneca had somewhat messed up the trials. But even so, in a world where mRNA tech had developed more slowly, the adenovirus vaccines would reasonably have been seen as a triumph.)
It's stranger how Trump's supporters largely and uncharacteristically broke with Trump over the vaccine. Trump himself has continued to quietly support it, albeit without enthusiasm. But it's about the only thing that's gotten him booed at a rally, and DeSantis visibly flipped from bragging about getting his state vaccinated to trying to outflank Trump by demagoguing against the vaccine, appointing a vaccine-skeptical surgeon general, etc. And no Republican with national ambitions can be loudly pro-vaccination, let alone support treating it like a normal vaccine with respect to schools or the military.
"A lot of the concern was that Trump might act ahead of the trial results, which would hardly have been out of character. "
You're being way too charitable here. Most of the concern was straight up "orange man bad," as evidenced by the Emmy that Cuomo won.
"It's stranger how Trump's supporters largely and uncharacteristically broke with Trump over the vaccine."
That's only strange if you think of Trump supporters as being cultists, as opposed to them liking someone who seemed to be "on their side."
" let alone support treating it like a normal vaccine with respect to schools or the military."
First of all, "normal" is a dogwhistle for white supremacy. Second, mRNA vaccines are not a typical vaccine, neither in their method of operation nor in its effective duration.
I wish I understood the meme that says, “It’s not a vaccine.” People who I believe understand how it works say this, and I’ve never been able to figure out what they mean.
Ah. I guess that could be what they mean. But it’s pretty comparably to flu, as I understand it (module the high mutation rate that goes along with a pandemic), and I never heard that slur raised there. But nobody said you *must* get a flu shot, so perhaps it just never came up.
If I had to guess, it would be that a traditional vaccine consists of the virus itself (rendered incapable of reproducing by some chemical damage), or of pieces of the viruses outer protein coat. These foreign objects (along with an accompanaying adjuvant often) excite the immune system's awareness, which develops sensitivity to them, antbodies, et cetera.
The mRNA vaccines don't work quite the same way. Indeed, the lipid nanoparticle coat and mRNA are designed to *minimize* excitation of the immune system, so they survive long enough to do their job. Instead, the mRNA gets into cells and is translated by the cell's own pathways into a large number of copies of a certain key protein from the virus's outer coat. (It's the protein that's required for the "docking" action that gets the virus into the cell.) It's then these particles, which look foreign although they are made by the cell itself, which stimulate the immune system to develop an immunity. There are probably a lot of other signs that the affected cells give off of being "infected" which also help stimulate the immune response. (I say "infected" in quotes because the mRNA only codes for that one protein, it lacks instructions for making the rest of the virus, so no infected cell can construct an entire new virus, the way it could if it were infected with the real virus.)
From the biochemistry point of view, there's not much difference in these mechanisms, since viral infection is always a weird comingling of domestic and foreign molecular manufacturing, so to speak. But to some people it might seem a strange new world, because of the deliberate attempt to finagle the cell into building viral proteins.
You're confusing ivermectin with a different drug that Trump promoted -- hydroxychloroquine. There is some evidence that hydroxychloroquine was promoted by pro-business groups that wanted to end the lockdowns and ignore the pandemic.
The interest in ivermectin mostly didn't start until December 2020, after Trump had lost the election and vaccines were already being made available:
I'm not confusing the two, and what happened with hydroxychloroquine when there was even a hint of it being effective demonstrates my point about Ivermectin.
Trump announced he was taking hydroxychloroquine in May 2020, and there was a rush among his cultists to take it, with some deaths, most famously of the couple who took the product they were using to clean their fish tanks because it mentioned the ingredient.
Hydroxychloroquine was rapidly and nearly unanimously condemned, as was drinking bleach and using an UV lamp. But then Trump and his cult, desperate for any remedy they considered politically correct, began talking about Ivermectin in the summer of 2020, and by the spring of 2021, when Biden had become president, it had become the miracle cure among his people. Many cultists declined vaccination and opposed mandates because they believed a cure was available if they got the disease - many still do.
There are many active pro-IVM (as they call it) groups talking about using it to cure everything from rosacea to menopause. That's wacky, but less interesting than the following mental experiment.
Let's go back to Trump and hydroxychloroquine. Starting perhaps with Norman Vincent Peale, there are indications that Trump believes (or rather, consistently acts as if he believes; he's more interesting as a black box) that reality (like the economy -- a recursive engine which runs at least partially on what people think about the economy) is flexible. I'll leave wrangling about whether or not the 'power of positive thinking' billionaires are in the same camp as the 'simulation theory' billionaires to the philosophers, but from at least one perspective it's the case that if the expert-class hadn't opposed Trump's messaging about hydroxychloroquine and instead had boosted it, it really would have cured COVID and millions of deaths could have been prevented.
ivermectin for rosacea maybe has a plausible mechanism. There's a theory that rosacea is caused by demodex mites and an anti-parasitic could possibly kill those.
The fish tank cleaner is actually a pretty weird story: At first the wife claimed that they were drinking because Trump said so, then it came out that the husband wasn't a Trump supporter at all and the wife came under a murder investigation. Later the investigation was dropped and around the same time the wife came clean that they were drinking it as a joke.
And the wife had a previous domestic violence charge against her. And the only "evidence" that that the husband knew he was drinking it came from her. But sure, it was just one of those wacky hijinx where you jokingly drink poison then blame it on someone else.
You said "when Trump began boosting it, Ivermectin became a token of one’s politics and therefore of one’s attitude to the pandemic"
I'm not aware of Trump boosting ivermectin. It wasn't even included in his covid treatment when he got sick, I think that was October 2020.
The primary boost in the US came from Dr Kory's speech before congress in December. Check the Google search trends and how they align with the date of that.
I'm not sure if Trump joined in, after that. I'd imagine he was too busy contesting the election, at that time.
You do realize HCQ is commonly prescribed to treat autoimmune diseases, i.e. to handle runaway immune reactions, which are one of the most dangerous features of COVID? Many people are on it long-term, without much by way of side effects. It's a very well known and a fairly safe drug.
Let that sink in: it's safe enough that people with non-life-threatening diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, are routinely put on it.
HCQ was thus a perfectly reasonable guess as an intervention that might be helpful against the cytokine storm caused by COVID (see e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7161506/ ). It seems that a number of doctors in different countries made this guess independently.
But of course because Trump said something about it, all the right-thinking people jumped to unanimously condemn HCQ because Trump. Some governors even banned prescribing it.
I'm shocked that anyone wants anti-Trump hysterics to dictate what doctors can or cannot do, but unfortunately I'm not surprised.
HQC and azithromycin were standard treatments for covid in some US hospitals early in the pandemic. Later on, people did careful studies that found that they weren't helpful. But early on, doctors were throwing whatever they had at this nasty disease that was killing off a bunch of people.
Hydroxychloroquine was also given an Emergency Use Authorization for covid and used in hundreds of trials. That seems like the opposite of what the ivermectin conspiracy theorists claim, that all generic drugs are ignored and suppressed because of some big pharma profit conspiracy.
And if HCQ was effective against covid because it suppresses the immune system, then it shouldn't be critically important when you take it. As the late HCQ trials came in negative, the theory retreated to "you have to take it earlier". And when the early trials came in negative, it retreated to "you have to take it with azithromycin", "you have to take it with zinc", "the doses they used were too high/too low", etc.
I'm not denying there was also some anti-Trump sentiment that soured enthusiasm for the drug, but the primary problem is that it simply didn't work. If it had been successful in trials, it would have kept it's EUA and been used widely.
"most famously of the couple who took the product they were using to clean their fish tanks because it mentioned the ingredient."
Which, last I knew, had been reframed as the wife poisoning the husband and concocting the story of taking it as a cure in order to explain why he died:
"Arizona police are now conducting a homicide investigation into a woman who claimed she gave her husband fish tank cleaner after President Trump claimed the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for coronavirus.
Wanda Lenius told NBC News last month that she and her husband Gary consumed fish tank cleaner because it contained a chemical that Trump suggested might be an effective prophylactic and treatment for coronavirus. The cocktail, which contained four teaspoons of fish tank cleaner mixed with soda water, put Wanda in the ICU and killed Gary. “My advice,” Wanda explained, is “don’t believe anything that the President says and his people because they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
But then that allegation was walked back, so what happened and why is still unclear:
"“The death of Gary Lenius has not been ruled a homicide at this time," said Detective Jason Flam, a Mesa police spokesman. "It is normal protocol at the Mesa Police Department for all death cases (other than obvious natural causes) to be investigated. All death cases are assigned to a homicide detective for their review as a matter of protocol.
"Please do not confuse this fact with what is currently being reported that this case is now a homicide investigation,” he continued."
“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute,” he said. “And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.” Trump later claimed he was being “sarcastic,” but there was a rise in accidental poisonings following his comments. Lysol even released a statement begging customers to not drink their poisonous products."
Trump's own words. I assume the dishonesty to which you refer was Trump's.
I'm still not seeing you backing up your claim that Trump told people to drink bleach.
I mean, I even put your lie into quotes so you could respond to it. Instead, you actually quoted OMB as saying "*something* like that, by injection inside or *almost* a cleaning" in which he LITERALLY gives not one but TWO disclaimers that he's not saying "actually take disinfectant internally" and you're pretending he's saying the exact opposite.
+1. It's important to keep in mind that people aren't always putting forward things out of sincere reasoned belief, so engaging as if they are can be an error. A large part of the social role of medical and news organizations is providing signals of legitimacy that people act on.
In this way masks are the same thing as ivermectin. I definitely supported Scott's partially positive review because I hoped that people will latch on masks and forgot about other restrictions and the pandemic will basically be over. It didn't happen though.
I wasn't in Sweden but people who visited it, confirmed that the life in Sweden during pandemic was much less restricted indeed. I now understand that my mistake was to think that it will be possible to satisfy covid zealots by simple introduction of masks. Even if they had been more effective they would have made even stronger mask mandates without relaxing lockdowns.
I wore masks because I thought they would have some utility, and I didn’t care about “muh freedoms” but the utterly funny thing about masks is that I was shouted at for wearing one at the very beginning. It’s been written out of history but the authorities (governments and the WHO) opposed masks as useless.
I never experienced that someone would object to my mask wearing. It was the opposite – the police shouted at me for not wearing one on the street (it was in Spain). I did not believe that it was useful on the streets, only in closed spaces.
I used them for some time as it was required but didn't care if anybody else wear a mask or not. I was opposed to mask mandates. I remember that sometimes I had to go into some office with signs that mask wearing was mandatory but people inside actually were not wearing masks. I thought that they probably already got covid, so masks would be useless for them.
Two days ago I visited a GP in the UK and the signs instructed to wear masks and most visitors and doctors had masks. I decided to go without a mask and no one objected.
Maybe. I think the N95s were probably useful. The real interesting thing to me is that the person who was anti-mask and gave me an earful became passionately pro mask, and has forgotten she was ever anti mask.
I was working retail during the lockdowns and had the odd Anti-Vaxxer demand I remove my mask. I was barely wearing it unless a customer came over. It was her demanding it that made me dig my heels in.
One day she started talking to me about the vaccine and I shouted at her
"I hear enough of this shit at home! I am not listening to this at work!"
I feel a little bad for shouting at her now, but I wouldn't apologise if given the chance.
In a way, I can understand the fears that with enough people wearing a mask, it will be normalized and then mask mandate will be introduced. And it is exactly what happened in many places.
I was trying to buy a medicine in Spain today and almost couldn't do it because it turns out that you still need a mask in pharmacy in Spain. I didn't have a mask with me unfortunately.
I spent most of the UK lockdown believing it would go on forever, so I'm sympathetic to the fears of mandatory masking forever. But I felt sick when I had to wear one for long periods during my retail job. And it created the fun game of "Speak loudly enough for people to hear you [most of the customers were quite old] but not come across as shouting or being aggressive"
The only times, since lockdown ended in early 2022, I've worn a mask has been in anything run by the NHS. I've seen the odd mask sign around, but those are ignored. And I think I see maybe 2 people a day wearing masks when I'm out on public transport. I take an instant disliking to them.
I guess Covid measures have become politically unfeasible after it was a massive scandal that almost every major politician was going to parties.
If we go into theoretical area where masks would be very protective, then people would use them voluntary and again we would have no use for mask mandates.
There might be very small area where mask effectiveness is moderate and people's willingness to wear them not sufficient. Then it would make sense for mask mandates but that is so deep into theoretical area, equal to those areas where real communism works (some things in communism like free education for everyone, free healthcare etc. are really good).
" We’d have been swallowing Ivermectin, not vaccinating, and the death toll would have been in the millions."
Wait, what? Trump sponsored and encouraged the vaccine, to the point that concerned scientists had to take action and point out that human safety required that the vaccine not be announced safe and effective until just after the election. In an alternative universe where the vaccine were available in July 2020, I imagine Trump would have taken it and encouraged others to do so.
The real question was whether we could go to the beach or let our kids attend school. I guess it's true that if we thought Ivermectin were a miracle cure, more people might have done so.
Still, it seems to me that not much harm would have been done if authorities have said "the evidence for Ivermectin being effective is weak, and even in the most promising of the plausible studies, the effects are small. We're doing more research, but in no event should anyone take more than the safe dose of x, and we encourage people to continue social distancing."
The obsession with Trump in the US (on both sides) is so strange. It is clearly a culture that has gone wrong. The reality is that most governments did the same things in pandemic and politicians in democratic countries did what they always do – try to listen to the sentiments of the majority to remain voted it.
Even Sweden which has much less restrictions actually was not because of politicians but because their law did not allow for lockdowns. They have changed the law already and next time they will demand the same lockdowns as everywhere else.
It is really sad that people's fears can wreak so much chaos. While we need democracy, we need some kind of circuit breaker or protection from unreasonable overreaction.
It's unfortunate you gave up on Atlantis because sunken lost civilizations definitely exist; they're along the underwater coastlines all over the world from during the last glacial maximum. Naturally many now-submerged areas were considered important to their milieu and legends grew up around them. Most of human history can't be uncovered well by current archaeological processes because most humans lived along coasts that are now underwater, and are in many instances too dangerous to explore.
Came here to post this. Do a google image search for "sea levels for the last 20000 years" or similar, and you'll find NASA graphs that show just how much sea levels have risen after the last ice age, coinciding with the neolithic revolution.
If we know of an ancient civilization along the rivers of Mesopotamia that would have overlapped with this massive sea level rise, why wouldn't there have also been coastal civilizations that are now a hundred feet below sea level? To dismiss theories of ancient sunken civilizations, you'd have to explain why people used to not live near the coast, when that's where most people live now.
Can I point to one place that is Atlantis? No, but there were thousands of years where people all around the world had to retreat from the coastline as sea levels slowly rose. Surely some of those stories formed into legends.
Makes me wonder whether our descendants, should they be lucky enough to live on, will whisper legends of a glorious place called Miami that was swallowed up by the sea due to their ancestors’ hubris.
In Cordwainer Smith's "Instrumentality of Mankind" stories, it has survived in legend:
"Early works in the timeline include neologisms which are not explained to any great extent, but serve to produce an atmosphere of strangeness. These words are usually derived from non-English words. For instance, manshonyagger derives from the German words "menschen" meaning, in some senses, "men" or "mankind", and "jäger", meaning a hunter, and refers to war machines that roam the wild lands between the walled cities and prey on men, except for those they can identify as Germans. Another example is "Meeya Meefla", the only city to have preserved its name from the pre-atomic era: evidently Miami, Florida, from its abbreviated form (as on road signs) "MIAMI FLA"."
“If all I’ve heard is that the pro-skub people say that you should look at evidence [...] I’m already 90-something percent sure pro-skub are the good guys”
I’d always assumed this heuristic was universal, until the last 5 years falsified me in spectacular fashion. It seemed obvious that without getting a PhD in skub, this is the best you can do. Is this way of thinking just a peculiarity of rationalist-type people?
And, apparently, conspiracy theorists! Everyone else seemingly just wants everyone to Trust the Status-Quo Institutions (or rather, their preferred institutions).
The problem is that most people have had enough bad experiences to 'beware the man of one study'.
The person who says 'look at the evidence' often also has that evidence ready to hand to show to you, and it's two studies and a blog post, and they sound really convincing it that's all you see. The other side can say 'look at the evidence' too, but they'd have to vaguely gesture at a undifferentiated mountain of scientific journal articles that are mostly behind paywalls, or gesture vaguely at a scientific consensus going back decades or more that they don't actually know the history of, or gesture vaguely at abstract notions about Occam's Razor and isolated demands for rigor, or whatever.
That's why, in practice, the person telling you to 'look at the evidence' is most often *trying to sell you something*, something that you do not actually want. Rationalists and other science communicators are the exception to that, but they are a tiny minority of all cases.
So people learn the unfortunately correct hueristic of 'the person telling you to look at the evidence is probably trying to trick you'.
Rationalists and etc who do not learn this lesson and still feel like you should always trust the person telling you to look at the evidence may be unusually blessed in having life experiences where most people showing them evidence were honest allies showing them correct and helpful things, or they may be less blessed in having difficulty recognizing social patterns and forming instincts relating to social cues.
I’m going to say something dumb right now in the hopes of coming back and saying it smarter later:
This points to the real problem, and it’s so hard to define and articulate that it basically doesn’t get discussed (there’s a quote from somewhere in rationalism-land that goes something like, “we had no way to determine the magnitude of the variable, so we rounded it to zero”)
The fact that I can barely begin to explain why is just evidence of this. But I’ll try.
The “trust science” folks are very aware of what you’re talking about here; it drives everything they do on this topic. The line between “you’ve really got to learn a lot to even understand the topic well enough to have an informed opinion” and “just trust the guys with white coats and stop thinking about it” is really quite thin. Where do you draw that line? To what degree can we really expect a layman to be able to figure these things out and weigh the issues for himself? But if we *can’t,* then we have an unassailable priesthood. Which might be okay if they were unimpeachable, but the last three years have shown that to be categorically untrue. So what is Joe Schmoe to do? What should his heuristic be? Especially when the institutions he’s expected to have blind faith in seem bent on destroying his culture and way of life?
The problem is that there is no magic formula for getting to the truth. Following mainstream sources, following your tribe, using common sense, investigating and coming to your own conclusions--all those will sometimes lead you astray. And the more people lean on one of those strategies, the more con men and propagandists will exploit its weaknesses.
Pretty much. I mean, there *are* magic formulae for getting to the truth—it's just that they're all horrendously labor-intensive and/or time-consuming. So it all boils down to trust. And wherever there is trust, there is power to be exploited.
For the Yonaguni formation, apparently very regular sandstone bedding (which tends to split along bedding planes) coinciding at right angles with regular fracturing, something earthquakes are known to cause:
My problem with this is that this is exactly the sort of wording I would expect from someone who wanted to persuade others that a formation was natural whether or not the evidence for that was truly strong.
Without having been to the Yonaguni formation itself (and I'll likely never go), I only have others' word that the formation is even sandstone, as Wikipedia describes. So, sure, I'm trusting others' word on this. I know enough about sandstone to regard others' description of this coincidence as plausible, even if incorrect. But maybe that's the problem you're mentioning, that descriptions that would be plausible even if incorrect are for that reason less trustworthy? On the other hand, many actually-correct descriptions are plausible ones, and so ones which would sound plausible even if incorrect.
I’m not sure whether I can pin this down. First off, I am not saying that the wording *increases* my confidence that these structures are manmade. But for every unusual phenomenon, there is a plausible, but false, debunking that sounds persuasive on a surface reading. This reads like just such an account. In other words, it seems to me that it’s quite possible for the structures to exhibit characteristics that a surface account could easily ascribe to natural forces, and yet not be natural at all. For a more persuasive argument, I’d want something like, “we have definitely observed such structures being formed by natural processes, and these fail to exhibit characteristics which manmade structures would have” with actual evidence behind them.
I’m not saying that the account here is BS. Perhaps the links would lead me to fairly conclusive evidence. But I’m saying it’s easy to “debunk” anything, even if true, if “debunk” means (as it often seems to) “construct a plausible narrative that contradicts the account we’re debunking.”
If someone gave the brief explanation, "apparently very regular sandstone bedding (which tends to split along bedding planes) coinciding at right angles with regular fracturing, something earthquakes are known to cause," and then treated as impertinent questions like "How did this particular sandstone bedding get so regular?", "Can I see other examples of regular earthquake fracture?", and "Why would that fracture end up so perfectly perpendicular to the bedding planes *here*?" I would consider the explanation a dismissal. I don't know why the Yonaguni formation bedding would be that regular, myself, and am curious. Some cyclical natural phenomena can remain regular for quite some time, and I could imagine sand deposition occurring like that – but why, and why there?
I suspect many a geologist would happily help laymen answer these questions, either directly, or with advice on resources to consult. Geologists, after all, find rocks quite exciting! And whatever underwater formation Scott visited, he seemed convinced by the explanation he eventually found that it wasn't manmade.
Because none of us can know it all firsthand, we're forced to trust others' reports and judgment in order to learn. So I wouldn't be too hard on a non-geologist who simply trusts geologists' – or even open-source encyclopedias' – judgment about the Yonaguni formation. I have a soft spot for contrarians, but I tend to trust geological explanations more than contrarian archeology. The world needs contrarians to hedge its bets, but they're the hedge, not the main bet.
"The fact is, almost all the general information in your personal web of belief is stuff you read, stuff somebody told you, stuff you saw on TV. Building a relatively accurate mental model of the world doesn’t have all that much to do with your individual reasoning capacity. It’s mostly about trusting and distrusting the right people. The problem is that few of us have the capacity to independently assess whether someone, or some institution, or some process, is a reliable source of accurate information. You have to depend on other people to tell you whose testimony you ought to trust. There’s no way around it. The bootstrapping problem here is central [to] the human condition. We can’t get started building a model of the world that encompasses more than our own extremely narrow idiosyncratic experience unless, at some point, we simply take somebody’s word for it."
And "Membership in a community that confers status and trust on people worth trusting about the way things are supplies what you might call epistemic herd immunity. We mostly believe what people like us believe just because they believe it. And that’s fine, as long as the community’s beliefs are ultimately based on trust in genuinely trustworthy people."
I don't entirely trust the author of that advice, and he annoys me sometimes, but he can also make good points.
Yes, this all makes sense. I'm not saying that the wording of that WP article decreases my confidence that it's natural; I'm just saying that it doesn't increase it very much.
On a reread, I want to take issue with something here: "We can’t get started building a model of the world that encompasses more than our own extremely narrow idiosyncratic experience unless, at some point, we simply take somebody’s word for it."
I actually don't think that that's true at all. I don't think that, in world-modeling, you ever have to take anyone's word for anything.
That doesn't mean that you have to do all of your own empirical research (though with the state of science, I'm not sure I'd be surprised if this actually turned out to be necessary). What it means is that you never simply take anyone's word. You listen, and evaluate, and if it fits with everything else you know, including your own personal experience, you provisionally adopt it pending further confirmation from other sources or via other means. If not, you start asking questions. At no point have you believed something to be true simply because someone told you it was.
Another thing to keep in mind, is you can get pretty far by reasoning about pharmacological mechanisms. Basically, ivermectin isn't the kind of molecule that would be expected to do anything to SARS-CoV-2. And it isn't targeted at any host immunity factors, either. So the prior for it working against COVID is low.
I mean, if you're a pharmacologist you might be able to say that, but I don't think that's meaningfully distinct from "trust experts" for everyone else.
So someone explain to me why I shouldn’t take the conspiracy theorist position that people like Kavanagh are systematically (and to some meaningful extent, deliberately) perpetuating a faith-based, authoritarian structure to induce us to blindly believe whatever the institutional incentives of Science want us to believe.
Is it a conspiracy theory if it's manifestly true (at least for some limited number of people)? There are absolutely people doing that. Is it enough to matter? :shrug: YMMV on what counts there. Is this person an example of such? I won't make any claims in either direction.
Okay, I was too conservative. Let me try to be outlandish enough: The Scientific, Academic, Media, and (Democratic) Political systems are deliberately and systematically perpetuating a faith-based, authoritarian structure to induce us to blindly believe their preferred narratives, using the cover of Science as a catchall justification for blind belief.
Now I’ve probably gone slightly farther than what I actually believe, but not by too much.
Or maybe I can just say that by “people like Kavanagh” I mean “pretty much all of Science and Science-advocates” (acknowledging that there is some silent minority/majority who do not believe this way, but still count as they perpetuate the system by their silence).
You're probably missing an "institutional" before your "Science" and a qualifier or 2 to the effect of "Social Soft Science".
I don't think you believe that, e.g., Astronomers or High Energy Physicists want to effect large-scale changes to society to make us more authoritarian. (Not that those 2 don't contain a lot of bullshit and politics themselves, like everything humans do, they do, but its a different thing entirely)
The capital-S Science was meant to indicate institutional Science, yes.
> I don't think you believe that, e.g., Astronomers or High Energy Physicists want to effect large-scale changes to society to make us more authoritarian.
High energy physics does love those sweet government funded research grants though. Astronomers at least have to provide pretty pictures from time to time.
None of those groups are a monolith individually, and certainly not together. (Remember, Scott falls into *at least* two of those.) There are certainly incentives for pushing structural epistemic consolidation, but this is a 'trends and forces' argument that doesn't cleanly map to agentic organizations. "Authoritarians gonna authoritarian" is the tautological version, and "hey, powerful organizations have a tendency to consolidate power!" is only a little less so.
And yet there definitely does seem to be a consolidation of all of these systems (system ≠ everyone in the system) around a particular ideology, i.e. “Science is True, and Science says these things you must believe or you’re a bad person!”
But I said that that version was probably taking it too far. What about my revised version, above: “Pretty much all of Science and Science-advocates (acknowledging that there is some silent minority/majority who do not believe this way, but still count as they perpetuate the system by their silence) are systematically (and to some meaningful extent, deliberately) perpetuating a faith-based, authoritarian structure to induce us to blindly believe <certain things which are not necessarily justified to the degree that they assert>”?
"Pretty much all of Science and Science-advocates" is slippery, and depending on how you bound it I think this version falls into either tautology, vanilla Conservatism, or is empirically false.
I'd rather take Scott's "Christian position", and believe that they're well-meaning: that they believe conspiracy theories are incredibly damaging and we should do whatever we can to prevent them - but haven't realized (or don't believe) that the tactics they use for fighting conspiracies are actually making the situation worse.
Your framing makes them out to be "in the outer darkness, beyond redemption", whereas the view that they're well-intentioned but misguided allows for continued conversation and efforts at conversion.
Hmm…okay, let’s think about this, as this is a valid challenge against what I said.
Do I think these folks are irredeemable? No, I don’t think that I think that. But I think that no amount of “that’s not how science/investigation/rationality/thought is supposed to work” liberal (as in liberal science) pleading will move them in the slightest, because they believe that they’re doing God’s Work, and they *know* that they’re being dishonest, at least to some degree. They just think that the truth is dangerous, and that deception in the cause of Righteousness is valid and laudable—and, moreover, that people in general are stupid enough that giving *any* credence to Bad Ideas leads to awful consequences. Therefore, we must have a priesthood of Right-Thinking People to dictate what people should believe. This viewpoint is called “illiberalism.”
So the only way to talk someone out of illiberalism is to convince them of the virtues of liberalism; to show them that, while their views may gain ascendancy in the short term, there’s no way to achieve permanent ideological hegemony. The pendulum always swings back, and then it will be *your* views which will be in disfavor and therefore suppressed and vilified.
I have never had any luck in persuading anyone of this. Their objections seem to boil down to, “but our ideas are Right and theirs are Wrong!” and I’ve never discovered any way to counter that view.
Fundamentally, I don’t know what “well-meaning” means; or, rather, I don’t know what it would look like for someone *not* to be well-meaning. Certainly people can have malicious intent, and wish to harm certain people or groups, but even they do so because they believe that, ultimately, it is the right thing to do. Whether it is possible to persuade them otherwise is another question, one I do not have an answer to. “You cannot reason people out of something they were not reasoned into.”
> Fundamentally, I don’t know what “well-meaning” means; or, rather, I don’t know what it would look like for someone *not* to be well-meaning
That's the trick, though, it doesn't *look* different. A lot of your discussion here is about what's going on inside their head, e.g. statements like "they *know* that they're being dishonest to some degree". You can't know that, actually.
Maybe they are impossible to convince (in the same way that some people may actually be spiritually beyond salvation) but, again, you can't know that. "I've tried to persuade them in the past via reason but it never works" may very well say more about your powers of persuasion than the other person.
A very relevant SSC post is "Guided by the Beauty of our Weapons" - https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/ - which is a counter-argument to the idea that "reasoned argument doesn't work". (I'm surprised it wasn't linked in the original post with his other links to past articles, actuallly)
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Plus, do you not see the irony here? Kavanagh is basically saying "you can't argue with ivermeticin people, they never listen and it gives them too much credit", and you're saying "you can't argue with people who say 'you can't argue with ivermetcin people' because they never listen"!
>> Fundamentally, I don’t know what “well-meaning” means; or, rather, I don’t know what it would look like for someone *not* to be well-meaning
>That's the trick, though, it doesn't *look* different.
Er…that’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean “how it would look different from the outside,” I meant “what it would mean.” I don’t know, philosophically, what “not well-meaning” means. What would the criteria for such a person be?
>A lot of your discussion here is about what's going on inside their head, e.g. statements like "they *know* that they're being dishonest to some degree". You can't know that, actually.
Yes, I can. I can’t know it for certain about every single individual in this class, but there have been enough email dumps/hacks/Twitter files to know that they are saying things they know to be false in order to promulgate a narrative that they think is better for the public to believe than the strict truth. Plus, they are very often far too smart to *not* know, at least on some level, that they are advocating falsehoods. And in actually talking to people who are broadly of this kind of mindset, I have occasionally gotten them to admit that they say things they do not thoroughly believe, because they want *other* people to believe them.
>Maybe they are impossible to convince (in the same way that some people may actually be spiritually beyond salvation) but, again, you can't know that. "I've tried to persuade them in the past via reason but it never works" may very well say more about your powers of persuasion than the other person.
…yes? “I’ve never discovered any way to counter that view.” I think you’ve misread my response.
>Plus, do you not see the irony here? Kavanagh is basically saying "you can't argue with ivermeticin people, they never listen and it gives them too much credit", and you're saying "you can't argue with people who say 'you can't argue with ivermetcin people' because they never listen"!
I really think you should start over with my comment. Either you’re misinterpreting or I’m communicating much more poorly than I think.
Um…wow. Really? You've given me whole new insight, and shown me that I believe the **exact opposite** of what I thought I believed or tried to express.
Thank you so much for enlightening me with your astute mind-reading powers.
So let me see if I can parse this. Are you saying that you know more than I do about my beliefs? Or are you saying that I’ve misunderstood, and that Retsam, and you, and others, are arguing *for* illiberalism and *against* the idea that we should try to persuade others with reason?
The fact that nobody is engaging with what you're actually saying says it all I think. In general, whenever someone says anything like "you're obviously wrong" with no elaboration, or "this has already been addressed" with no link or summary, a good rule of thumb is to replace it with "I have no idea how to respond to your argument but I'd still really like to disagree with you anyway".
I find it just amazing how many people have a "philosophy" that amounts to "the correct positions are those that are Clearly Right", where those just happen to be all the positions they happen to hold and don't require any kind of consistent explantatory framework that makes them right. They're just Clearly Right.
How to argue with it?(And I'll note that the fact you asked this puts you on the opposite side of Kavanagh, despite what people above are saying.) I don't know if it'll work, but the best way might be to keep asking them variations of "who decides?" For a political example I've encountered multiple times: "Why should people be fired for opposing gay marriage but not for other opinions?"
"Because they're opposing someone's human rights"
"So who decides what's a human right?"
"Well the Supreme Court has said so"
"So people should also be fired if they oppose gun rights?
"No, because that's not REALLY a human right not matter what the Supreme Court says"
"So who does decide that?"
"Opposing gay marriage harms gay people!"
"And doesn't opposing gun rights harm gun owners?"
"There are good reasons for banning guns"
"And some people think there are good reasons for banning gay marriage, so why not let these reasons be freely debated?"
"Because some positions are so toxic they shouldn't be allowed!"
"So who decides WHICH positions are so toxic?"
Eventually, either (1) they stop responding, proving they have no defensible principle to appeal to, (2) you force them to acknowledge some consistent principle or external authority even when it gives results they don't like or (3) you force them to admit the truth, that the only principle they have for deciding which views are correct is "the ones I happen to agree with".
And this approach would also separate the good faith ones who do have a consistent principle (like "any scientific view with support from peer reviewed journals should be given a fair hearing, even if I disagree with it").
Does Kavanagh himself disagree with this position? He's probably entirely on board with thinking that dumb plebs would end up believing whatever Authority tells them, so the main issue is to ensure that it's the right authority.
I feel like this Chris individual exemplifies a particular subtype of a type of person — the people I've started, mentally, calling "aggressive conformists."
Curiosity is bad, trust in Authority, believe with all your heart in the Sanctioned Things. My place and time in history is the one that got it right.
The same sort of person that, many years ago, would have been sneering at anyone who didn't see the obvious danger of witches.
Shooting innocent people is bad, shooting criminals that are about to kill your child is good.
It doesn't work to just universally denounce methods without asking what end they are in service of.
Discouraging curiosity about fascism is not the same as discouraging curiosity in general. Promoting trust in scientific consensus is not the same as promoting trust in all Authority. Promoting sanctioned things because they are good is not the same as promoting sanctioned things because they are sanctioned.
I am tempted to agree with you, but the problem is that when we have a norm "discouraging curiosity about fascism is okay", some people will start applying the label "fascism" generously to everything they don't like. (And the curiosity whether the "fascism" label was applied correctly is itself classified as a sort of curiosity about fascism.)
On the other hand, it's not like I have a better solution. Any norm can (and will) be abused.
Atlantis is real tho (above water, the eye of Africa matches platos description and that area had a famous king atlas and humans were probably more seafaring then usually noted and using slave labor to cut the various stones monuments on and off for milliuna)
To impress an ancient Greek, you need clean water, the ability to move the big blocks, and able to cross the ocean.
Because Bret makes a living by titillating gullible, conspiracy-minded nitwits eager to believe anything so long as it isn't woke. He has led some of these deluded people to their deaths by encouraging them to forego a vaccine that would likely have saved their lives.
I live in Bret's old town of Olympia, Washington, and for a while, I considered him something of a hometown hero after his legitimately brave stand against the woke fools at Evergreen State College. Since then, however, he has degenerated into that most pitiful of internet personalities - the professional contrarian.
This seems to be a frequent fate of famous contrarians.
I feel similarly about Jordan Peterson. I liked his lectures on psychology. But the less I know about his opinions on covid and whatever else he talks about recently, the better.
Indeed. With the notable exception of Sam Harris, pretty much everyone associated with the so-called "Intellectual Dark Web" (which includes Peterson and Weinstein) has turned out to be something of a crank. I initially thought of Peterson, on balance, as a force for good: I've had a few young male students who genuinely seem to have profited by tuning into his message (circa 2018 or thereabouts). But what little I've seen of Peterson this decade has been pitiful - just a bitter man shaking his fist while collecting big paychecks from The Daily Wire. (Quite a step from the University of Toronto.)
Hell, Peterson was practically defending Russia's invasion of Ukraine on the grounds that Putin had no choice because the West was too woke (!) Talk about a useful idiot. Good Lord.
I think most thinkers are worth listening to within some range of topics, but often are just as dumb as anyone else when they get outside them.
And this is normal all the time. If you look at the great thinkers of the early 1900s, you'll see a shit-ton of smart, well-intentioned, serious guys who were serious supporters of either seize-the-means-of-production socialism or eugenics as the way forward to a happy future for all.
But also, I think there is a real danger in audience capture, and it can overlap with confirmation bias in scary ways. You start out correctly noticing that a lot of official pronouncements and policies about covid are kinda dumb, that selects for a specific audience and set of people who want to talk with you, and as you iterate this process, you get more and more rewards and feedback that encourage you to move further and further along some ideological gradient, till you're eventually explaining about how Big Pharma is suppressing all the good treatments for covid, or how the latest instance of a black cop beating up a black suspect is white supremacy, or whatever other goofy thing.
I like to imagine that although I am not as smart and interesting as the famous thinkers, at least I am less obviously stupid in the topics outside my competence. Seems like a low hanging fruit is simply not being so fucking overconfident at things I barely know anything about.
To put it bluntly, just replying "I don't know" to everything already makes you more correct on average than many of them. (I imagine getting positive points for saying something correct, negative points for saying something incorrect, and zero for admitting ignorance.) So if you just started from this baseline, then spent 10+ years learning something and getting good at it, and then you would express opinions on the one thing you learned, and keep saying "I don't know" to everything else... that would already put you into top 1%.
Alas, the "market for thinkers" does not work this way at all. High variance is better. If you are really smart and eloquent at A, but batshit crazy at B, C, D, E, you can start giving lectures on A and become popular. (And then you can leverage your popularity to also teach people the Truth about the B, C, D, E.)
It is interesting to observe various pressures on Scott. The many temptations that only if he fully embraced some X for a moment, he could instantly get thousands of new passionate followers. There are a few movements that Scott could transition to be one of the leaders, if only he threw away reason and caution, and started writing in their favor. All he would need is to stop looking also for evidence for the other side.
I think it is better in long term for Scott to resist. Not only because "For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?", but also because ACX is unique on the internet and can remain so for a long time, but joining one of the movements turns you into one of the many, and then you either start playing a different game, or you gradually stop being relevant. Five or ten years later, Peterson will be "just another antivaxer" or "just another Russian shill" and no one will care about him; even the "contrarian mob" will pay attention to some more recent convert instead.
> Hell, Peterson was practically defending Russia's invasion of Ukraine on the grounds that Putin had no choice because the West was too woke.
This is especially painful, coming from someone who couldn't stop talking about the human potential for evil and quoting Solzhenitsyn... and suddenly he is okay with an attempted genocide (not an exaggeration, if we consider the part about taking away the children of Ukrainians disloyal to the new regime and giving them to adoption to Russian families) just to make a cheap political point.
Considering those woke fools ended his career, and you're not paying him enough to live comfortably, I can't fault him for being a professional antiwokist.
I mean, I support a personn't choice to be a gay-for-pay sex workerso YMMV.
But it might be a bit more subtle than that, it might be "will say those opinions he already agrees with and lets himself get into cycles of one-upsmanship while signalling disapproval of the common outgroup." That latter behavior is common here on the local NPR station where the various journalists take turns seeing who can invent the most lurid insults for repubs.
That kind of lazy, snobbish attitude may do as much practical work to further ill-founded conspiracy theories as anything Alex Jones does. Treating adults like toddlers is often going to harden their beliefs. Why do they ignore the basics of human nature?
Maybe just in it for the clicks? Or a fulfilling sense of supremacy?
The pro-ivermectin camp (which would answer your question by saying "lol because obviously IVM works and they can't prove us wrong!") contains a sub-camp who offer a darker, more interesting, and more compelling answer: "because they don't regard us as human or worth convincing -- they are totalitarian at heart and would happily put us in camps not because we disagree but because they hate us."
What Scott calls fideism, I think I frequently see referred to on the greater net as "scientism": which is itself misrepresented, if I trust Wikipedia. WP calls scientism the belief that science is the best or only way to reach truth. I see people commonly use the term to refer to people who employ arguments from authority, where the authority is some scientist, as opposed to people who rely on the scientific method, and at most use scientists as a heuristic or possible time saver.
If I'm accurate, then scientism sounds like a special case of fideism. Scientism is faith in scientists.
I guess my point here is that Scott's far from alone in being frustrated by people who appear scientific but only because they profess faith in people who call themselves scientists. They just use a different term. (And TIL what fideism is!)
I think scientism is not so much about believing that scientists themselves are right about everything as it is about believing that the subject matter of science is all that can possibly exist.
So, for instance, if there is some subject like normative morality which appears to be outside the bounds of what science can even discuss, the scientismist concludes that normative morality is just nonsense unless we can rephrase it in scientific terms.
Fideism is about completely outsourcing your judgement to some "trustworthy" source (originally the Catholic Church if I remember right), and refusing to even try to think for yourself on the grounds that human reason is flawed or you're too stupid to figure things out for yourself (see https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/).
If it's not clear, fideism is specifically the (obscure) religious belief that salvation cannot come from reasoned belief but only from faith in the absence of reason. (It's not a mainstream Christian position, certainly)
Scott is using it here by analogy, not really directly accusing Kavanagh of "fideism" in a real sense, so I wouldn't cal Scientism a "special case of fideism", though it's maybe an analogous idea.
...and imagine what this is like for religious people. We experience stuff every day that Scientists and Experts think isn't real. To extend the scuba metaphor, we're going to visit the underwater pyramids with our whole family and all our friends, and they're telling us the ocean isn't real.
It takes a steely will to treat the Ivermectin debate seriously.
Yes, I've noticed the phenomenon that to many people the best arguments in favor of anything are "everyone we know believes it", "most high status people believe it", "people who don't support it are routinely mocked".
There are doubtless good evolutionary reasons for this - and also good reasons that a minority won't find this credible, at least not in all cases, and will insist on investigating for themselves, or at least privately regarding the "truths" in question as either "not proven" or even "probably false, given the effort to get people to (pretend to) believe them".
My personal eye opening experience was with climate change. Even a MOOC supposedly on the mechanisms of climate change started by informing me that some (large) percent of climate scientists believed climate change was real. And asking questions on their forums drew all kinds of flack. Apparently wanting predictions of the impact expressed in terms I could easily grasp ("how do the predicted effects compare with the medieval warm period?") was evidence that the person asking was a climate change denier come to the class to troll. It was damn clear that many prolific posters wouldn't have recognized the scientific method if it bit them, and didn't understand any details of climate change or its mechanisms.
It's your curse - and mine - to be abnormal, born with traits only useful to society in times of change. You can tell the difference between evidence and insult. You don't always automatically believe the highest status person in sight. You can distinguish between "what We believe" and "what's most likely to be true," at least some of the time.
That's a very uncomfortable position to be in. If one is lucky, these traits can be useful in becoming The Authority to be believed by a collection of Believers (a politer term than "sheeple," and more specific than "normals"). Mostly though it tends to put one on the outside looking in.
I'm not certain if this is precisely Kavanagh's position but I do think he leans this way - there seems to be a belief that the flow of potentially harmful information online requires (I'm probably over generalizing a bit) a kind of strong containment effort. It's a kind of public policy instinct - this is where Neil Young calling for Spotify to take off Joe Rogan or the broad misinformation expertise sphere comes from. And I can see how that mindset leads to "this empowered the Bret Weinsteins of the world to add marginal value to a conversation where the Experts had already reached the right conclusion."
But yeah, I think you're right in the effectiveness of the tone, I think it's pretty fair to be curious about the nuances of things, I don't really trust the instinct of someone to even be a misinformation expert, and I can't get past the idea that some people are gonna want to think about things and may even google it and the like and that's fine.
Anyone with a controversial opinion, which includes both conspiracy theorists and also things which are mainstream but also have a lot of opponents (like feminism) are surrounded by not just a bubble, but an anti-bubble.
In a previous job I had a colleague who was a Christadelphian. He was an amazing engineer, and in his job he got a lot of respect for reading up on the original literature of different problems and producing innovative solutions. Then in his evenings, he got a lot of respect for doing analyses of the bible and predicting the date of the second coming (or something like that). Mostly we did not talk to him about this, and if he mentioned it he would be a bit embarrassed - at some level he must have known we thought it daft.
The one person who did start a discussion about this was the least tactful person in the office. Which wasn't very untactful by the standards of twitter (this was before twitter); but nevertheless the conversation was a bit cringeworthy. My point in all this is that the anti-bubble is made up of the people least likely to be able to persuade them that they are wrong.
In another incident, someone I respect, who was usually very confident, diffidently admitted in a forum (that they ran) that they occasionally thought that God had spoken to them directly. They were worried that admitting this would make people lose respect for their intelligence. All the friends in the group who were christians rallied round and said that they thought this was wonderful and that they didn't lost any respect. I was silent. I've often looked back on this and thought - I should have had the confidence to say "it wouldn't be the act of a friend not to point out that there are other possible explanations - irrespective of you being religious, I still have enormous respect for you" (or something along those lines).
This “anti-bubble” concept is an interesting one that should be developed (by which I mean you should write a blog post on it and link it here so I can read it).
> They were worried that admitting this would make people lose respect for their intelligence. All the friends in the group who were christians rallied round and said that they thought this was wonderful and that they didn't lost any respect.
A funny thing is that (from what I've gathered from several ACX-adjacent spirituality discussions), many religious traditions are pretty wary of this kind of revelation and would probably not encourage people to assume it was genuine automatically. Depending on the tradition, they might suggest that people who feel they've received a revelation talk about it with their spiritual leaders, for example.
One interpretation of this is that the spiritual leaders want to maintain a kind of monopoly on power and authority (having just watched a classic movie about Joan of Arc yesterday, this feels like a real thing to me). But another is that believers (in one sense) can be skeptics (in another sense) and can understand very well that something that looks like a divine revelation, walks like a divine revelation, and quacks like a divine revelation is not necessarily a divine revelation.
Now maybe personally hearing from God is an accepted part of that person's forum members' Christian denominations, but it wouldn't be for everyone. (I did an SSC adversarial collaboration project on spiritual experience a couple of years ago, and one of the most surprising things for me was how aware many spiritual communities are that their members could be confused or misled by a spiritual experience!)
I hope you'll talk to Destiny (aka Stephen Bonnell) someday; as you guessed, his community has a massive presence on Manifold Markets, but he's also one of the most rhetorically competent people in the YT streaming sphere. He's read several SSC posts on stream in the past, and he accepts and reads emails from his community, so I'd think he'd be relatively easy to get in touch with.
That's not remotely true. It's just guys only like the smell of each others' fart. Foreign hot air doth offend your delicate sensibilities. Other Minds! Heavens. And so on.
What I find fascinating about rats is you let nazis shit all over the place but it's considered rude to point out that there's nazis shitting all over the place
"Either these people didn’t understand the arguments for and against Atlantis, or they did. If they didn’t, they were frauds, claiming expertise in a subject they knew nothing about. If they did, then at any moment they could have saved me from a five year wild-goose-chase - but chose not to, because it was more fun to insult me."
Fukin' Amen. this is the best sentence ever to describe Kavanagh's "Guru's" podcast. it's hours upon hours of the above.
I was very grateful for your Ivermectin post- I don't have a lot to add, other than those of us who are a bit closer to 1.01^infinity than average appreciate you sharing your thought processes and journey in such a compelling way!
I'm 100% certain he would talk identically about any number of sensitive topics, such as biological sex and race differences - I've seen his exact language used to describe a belief that cognitive ability differs by race. So nobody should be obliged to take what he says seriously.
Let me repeat - people like this shout down legitimate scientific statements all time using this language, so it would simply be a coincidence if there was no valid and worthy scientific debate to be had around ivermectin.
"pro-science" people have unquestionably, unequivocally allowed their ideology to influence what they think of as scientifically valid, so they have no leg to stand on when they want to declare that something doesn't even warrant investigation.
I think that, for most people, Kavanagh's type of argument is effective. A typical person believes following whatever their ingroup tells them to believe is the best path to the truth. And if it ever becomes clear that their ingroup is incorrect, then they'll still pretend to believe in order to avoid the social consequences of believing the "wrong" thing.
But presumably lots of arguments would work on your ingroup. That’s preaching to the choir. Less aggressively anti-inquiry arguments would probably be less likely to drive people on the margins into the arms of your out group.
I think the reasoning of people like Kavanagh is a bit more involved than you make it sound; in fact, it is somewhat closer to the EA mindset.
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Consider Ivermectin. I think it's pretty obvious by now that it doesn't work at preventing COVID. Every person who chooses to trust in Ivermectin instead of getting a vaccination runs an appreciable risk of dying (or being crippled for life); what's worse, this person runs the risk of transmitting COVID to others. Most people are not doctors nor biologists; they're just regular John Does trying to make it through the day. They have neither the time nor the skill to delve into every little study and re-run their own statistical calculations; they just need to know which choice is right: Ivermectin or vaccination.
Thus, by undermining the clear and accurate message -- "choose vaccination" -- you are influencing at least some number of people to make the wrong choice; thus, you are causing deaths both directly, and indirectly (through secondary infections). It doesn't matter that your intentions are good, and that your work is thorough; in essence, you are privileging the lives of a few science nerds over (potentially) millions of ordinary people. You are condemning millions to die over your intellectual vanity.
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Unfortunately, I think the argument above is true; it's just not the whole truth. It omits the massive negative knock-on effects (yes, including deaths) that result from normalizing ignorance and propaganda over critical thinking; however, such effects are long-term and difficult to measure. COVID deaths, on the other hand, are readily observable. Short-term thinking will always win out over long-term planning, and this situation is no different.
Who is supposed to have conspired to do what in this "textbook" theory? The lab leak hypothesis is that the whole mess was an *accident*. Possibly it was a textbook accident theory?
a. A claim about a conspiracy (a coverup of an accidental lab leak)?
b. An instance of broken thinking where people convince themselves of silly things without evidence?
ISTM that the lab leak stuff is definitely (a), but not at all (b). It may or may not have happened, and it seems hard to nail that down with much certainty at this point, but it's not the sort of thing you have to have a broken mode of thinking to conclude is likely.
Can we (at least those of us on this forum, but ideally everyone) default to using and assuming (a), always? It's fairly clear that (b) has come about as a deliberate attempt by people like Chris to enforce the "aggressive conformist" narrative, where anything that might suggest that two or more people worked together to do something behind the scenes must inherently be an example of broken thinking, regardless of the evidence. It's an attempt to smuggle in the connotations of (b), even when it's a veracious example of (a).
It would be like if a racist against green people created this term Green People™, and described anything bad that green people did as a "classic Green Person moment", and constantly complained about "Green People behavior" and about how "Green People" are terrible in every way. Then, when confronted about this, said "No, no, you don't understand, I'm not trying to denigrate green people or say that all green people are bad or anything, I'm only talking about Green People. It's a totally different thing. Why would you think when I say Green People that I'm talking about people that are green? Obviously Green People is just a specific term of art that describes bad and evil people and their behavior - it has nothing to do with people who have green skin."
Yes those are all conspiracy theories, echo chamber nonsense, and group think. You got those opinions from watching tv and reading flat earther type blogs. Grow up.
Amusing, because the available evidence says that it was indeed leaked, albeit accidentally. A recent meta-study of mask effectiveness says that the surgical masks commonly used are not a barrier to viruses. Go find it yourself, I don't care to provide evidence to people who have no use for evidence.
I don't watch TV or read flat earther type blogs. Your assumptions need re-examination.
I mostly agree with your criticism of Kavanaugh. But I think a better version of the kind of critique he is making is thet it can be a mistake to treat people as acting in good faith and making arguments based on rational assessment of evidence when they're not. In the former case a rational breakdown of the evidence helps, in the latter it just draws more attention to them which they use to convince more people.
This is complicated in practice because most fringe beliefs that have a large following will have a mixture of both. There's the people selling magic beans for money who know that's what they're doing. And people who've been convinced by them that the beans are magic and innocently try and tell their friends.
The theoretical ideal response is to help the latter without being exposure to the former, but these kind of people often try and stoke controversy because because if a thousand new people learn about them from the takedown, and 999 agree they're frauds, they've still gained one customer/follower.
I don't think it's almost ever a mistake to engage with _ideas_ in good faith. It's absolutely the case that MANY MANY people have already written their preferred conclusion on the 'bottom line' of their arguments, but, somewhat ironically, that seems to be almost exactly as frequent among those with the 'correct' beliefs as otherwise.
I don't think it's generally right to refuse to argue against some claims merely because they might be being made by someone "selling magic beans for money". It's easy enough to address the ideas themselves and (mostly) ignore the bean-mongers.
But some people, e.g. Daryl Davis, have had some _spectacular_ success engaging with 'bean-mongers' directly. I definitely don't think that's ALWAYS a mistake.
Years of dealing with similar controversies in Rootclaim taught me that truth is hard. We are constantly surprised by the results of our analyses, and each time find a different party to be correct. Sometimes it's US, sometimes Russia, sometimes China. Sometimes democrats, sometimes republicans. Sometimes the mainstream, sometimes the fringe. Sometimes experts, sometimes laypeople.
In the case of Kavanagh, it's easy to see how his simplistic approach leads him to wrong conclusions:
He takes the mainstream opinion on the chemical attacks in Syria (https://twitter.com/C_Kavanagh/status/1128388814525743104). Our analysis originally yielded 92% for the opposition carrying out the Ghouta attack, and that was recently shown to be the case after a video of opposition fighters launching chemical rockets was geolocated to the attack's launch location.
I disagree and think that the lab leak theory of covid's origin is unlikely to be true.
I say this having previously endorsed the lab leak theory, or at least having said that the question was a toss up. After taking the time to dive into the issue, I now think it's highly unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab.
I first heard of the Rootclaim challenge a few days ago, when Scott mentioned your debate with Kirsch.
Would I debate the lab leak theory for $100,000?
I don't know. That's a large quantity of money for me, so I'd need to know exactly how the debate would be judged.
Like, I think that Kirsch's claims about vaccine deaths are obviously false:
In a fair contest, I'd bet all the money I have that covid vaccines have saved more lives than they've cost.
But I wouldn't debate that with Kirsch, because I don't think the rules of his contest would be fair.
In the case of your debate, it looks like he wants to rig the judges to be in his favor (i.e. by nominating Weinstein and Martenson as judges), or at least neutral on the question (the 6-8 balanced judges idea) so that the debate will end up inconclusive.
I've been thinking about how to frame these debates in a way that can be objectively decided:
Like, I don't think it's fair for you to compare the Rootclaim challenge to James Randi's million dollar prize. For psychics to enter Randi's prize, they didn't have to put up a million dollars of their own. And the outcome of each contest could be objectively judged, anyone could watch and see whether or not the paranormal powers were working.
I think some controversial questions about covid could be objectively answered. Like, I think we can objectively test the question if masks work, with a simple challenge trial.
The lab leak theory is harder to decide without some form of judging.
Here's one bet I would propose: no one will ever prove the lab leak theory.
The bet needs some time frame to resolve, because never is a long time. I might frame it as:
"In 5 years time, the scientific consensus will not be that SARS-CoV-2 was created by gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
We could define consensus in a variety of ways.
I mean something comparable to, say, the level of scientific consensus that global warming is real and mostly caused by human CO2 emissions.
It could be something like surveying if 90% or more of virologists believe the lab leak theory.
It could be done by nominating current zoonotic origin proponents and saying they won't endorse the lab leak theory. I might suggest people like Michael Worobey, Bob Garry, and Kristian Anderson. Two of those scientists already changed their minds from lab leak to zoonotic origin, in early 2020, so that should show that they are capable of changing their minds. Worobey also signed a letter endorsing the discussion of the lab leak as a valid question, even though he strongly advocates for a zoonotic origin.
I would bet that the lab leak discussion will remain about the same as it is today. Most virologists will still lean towards a zoonotic origin. Scientists will continue to slowly find somewhat related bat viruses in China and SE Asia.
The lab leak theory may well live on in the public imagination. There will still be podcasts and substack articles and books written about the Wuhan lab. The theory might be endorsed by more government reports (like the House GOP minority report which already endorsed the lab leak theory). It may even become the theory advanced by the majority of the US government, if the GOP wins the next election.
But I would bet that the lab leak theory will still remain fringe among scientists. There will not be any clear proof of a gain of function research program at the WIV creating the virus. No one will find proof in the RNA sequence that covid is not natural.
1. In your lab leak assessment, what is the conditional probability you gave to a zoonotic coronavirus with an FCS appearing in the same city as the only lab in the world inserting FCS's into coronaviruses? Same question for a lab leak.
Are you confident you have enough evidence or priors to overcome whatever ratio you got?
I am yet to see someone who did this calculation and finds lab leak to be unlikely.
2. We're flexible on amounts. We can do less than $100k.
3. It remains to be seen whether Kirsch and us can agree on judges. I'm mildly optimistic.
4. We clearly state our challenge is not as good as Randi's. It's the best we could come up with given there is no experiment.
5. I give 50% that scientific consensus will not change on covid origins within 5 years, so not a good bet. There are strong incentives from China and virologists to keep the status quo.
6. If you don't like debates, a good criteria for lab leak would be that as we find closer and closer viruses, the FCS will stand out more, not less. i.e. We will not find a wild virus with part (or all) of the sars-cov-2 FCS. This has pretty good correlation with the truth, and doesn't give an advantage to either side (e.g. probability of winning while being wrong is roughly equal).
7. We looked into the 'masks don't work' claim, and were surprised to find it has merit. Note that it's not the claim you're making about stopping particles, but at the population level.
When you take into account how people behave in the real world, that people have many opportunities to get infected, the evidence that eyes are a primary infection path, and herd immunity considerations, it seems reasonable that masks don't help, even if they do help on the individual level.
What would your process look like for choosing judges or deciding a debate, if we did debate lab leak?
Regarding point #6, are you saying that you'd bet $100,000 that we won't find a SARS family virus with a partial furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction?
What level of similarity would you require, to win that bet? Like, if covid has 12 mysterious nucleotides added (forming the amino acids PRRA, give or take the frame shift), then how much of a match do you need in a wild virus? Is, say, 6 matching nucleotides at the S1/S2 junction good enough? Is 7?
Does the genetic sequence on both sides of the insert also have to be identical?
I think you're basically trying to reframe my bet "the lab leak will not be proven within X years" and instead cast it as, "the zoonotic origin will not be proven within X years".
But I'm not sure what your criteria are for that.
Like, in my case I could just go with "the scientific consensus will not support lab leak" as the resolution. But I'm not sure if you have an equivalent criterion because the scientific consensus already supports zoonosis.
If we find 10 more SARS like viruses that are a little bit closer to covid, but not exactly the same, scientists will still support zoonosis. But I don't know if you will be convinced, without knowing your resolution criteria.
I’m looking for a criteria that has an equal conditional probability to win given each hypothesis.
Need to formulate exactly but I’m thinking something like: if we find a virus that is close enough to be statistically likely to have part of the fcs, then it won’t.
You could just say there are 8.5 million people in Wuhan and 1.4 billion in China. If everyone in China has an equal probability of being patient zero, the odds that Covid starts in Wuhan are 0.6%.
You could say that most viral spillovers end without spreading, so covid has to start in a city, not on a farm. To get where we are today, maybe it also has to spread internationally before there's any containment. So those should increase your odds, maybe it rules out most of rural China, and gives the Wuhan odds a boost, maybe by a factor of 2-4? So, maybe we're talking in the 1-3% range?
You could also try to weight it somehow, like we have habitat maps of bats and also bat population density matched to human population density:
Yunnan and Laos and Southern China are favored on those maps, but Hubei is still a plausible location. Those maps do possibly rule out Northern China, so you might get another factor of 2 boost out of that? But maybe not, if you take the effects of animal trafficking into account.
Anyways, we're looking at something like 1-6% odds of a Wuhan origin.
I think what you're asking is: are there some other factors that make the lab leak unlikely, and are the numbers associated with those large?
Like, I need to give some other argument that says covid is less than 6% likely to be a lab leak, or preferably less than 1%?
At that point, I'd say yes, there are lots of arguments that reduce the odds that low.
First off, all the geographic evidence we have, within Wuhan, points to the market origin. The early case data. The pattern of case spread from one side of the market to the other. The pattern of positive environmental samples within the market. The pattern of case spread from near the market to the city around. The inability to find any earlier cases. The seroprevalence data even leaves the market's neighborhood as a hotspot.
So, to prove the lab leak theory, you already have to assume that someone got infected at the lab, went to the market and created a superspreading event without leaving a trace elsewhere. If you consider all possible superspreading locations in Wuhan, the Huanan market is pretty low on the list.
It's very high on the list of places for a zoonotic spillover, as one of the few wet markets in town. But it's low on the list of most crowded places.
Worobey's calculations gave the market 0.04% of visitors to about 430 possible superspreading locations.
So that's already a much lower probability than the 1-6% chance that the zoonotic spillover happened in Wuhan.
If you believe Pekar's analysis that two lineages originating separately at the market, you need to square the 0.04% and now we're talking odds of 1 in 6 million. You need 2 infected lab employees to both visit the market and cause a superspreading event without infecting anyone else in Wuhan. I'm not sure I trust Pekar's analysis well enough to rely on that. I think the case of a lab employee spreading the virus to the market and nowhere else is already unlikely enough, plus there's other evidence in the genome to knock down the odds of a lab origin further.
I guess you could maybe modify the odds based on how much you trust that China didn't lie about locations of cases or miss early cases or whatever.
Sorry, I don't speak Bayesian, this isn't how I usually argue or reason.
I get the idea behind multiplying a string of probabilities together, but the result is highly dependent on which odds you include in the calculation.
And I think the framing itself can miss other possibilities. Like, if covid started in a different city, don't you think there would still be a different conspiracy theory built around it's origin?
What do you find untrustworthy about the market data?
I've read Alina Chan's objections to the market data. She just says it's the result of ascertainment bias, but has no convincing argument for why it would be biased, or how a biased search found lots of non-market linked cases, or why the non-linked cases were still centered on the market and radiated away from it over time. She doesn't check against any other data, like seroprevalence or attempts to find earlier cases in hospital records. That sounds a lot more like a conspiracy theorist changing a few details of her theory to fit new facts than an honest attempt to understand.
I've also read the zenodo paper by Quay, Deigin, et al. responding to Worobey's work. That was a little better, but not convincing. IIRC, they leaned heavily on the idea that there weren't enough animals sold in Wuhan relative to markets in Southern China.
An important point is: you have to make many assumptions to rule out the market origin and pave the way for the lab leak to be true. Like, you have to assume that covid spread unnoticed in Wuhan in places besides the market. If you make those assumptions, then they also make an origin outside of Wuhan possible -- the virus could also have been unnoticed in other cities, could have entered the market via the adjacent train station, not from the lab across town. So you're now comparing the probability of a lab leak to the probability of an origin anywhere in China.
There's some discussion in there of 4 SARS family viruses with a partial FCS at the S1/S2 junction, you seemed curious about that.
I suppose if I wanted to win this, I should play dumb and not discuss anything before debating. But you didn't answer my questions about how a debate would be judged, so I'm pretty sure that we won't debate.
And my priors on "rich people make prizes that can actually be won" are incredibly low. I'm not saying you're a bad faith actor like Steve is, but in a world with people like Steve in it, you have to assume everyone is like him before putting money at risk.
You seem to worked on it quite a bit so this is not something we could cover here. But we can look into the challenge.
If you’re asking about the debate one then we’re flexible. Feel free to suggest people you think are strong and unbiased. If you’re asking about doing a challenge with the fcs, then it’s much easier. We define some criteria on the genome and we’re done.
Good article as usual: mostly hits points I've heard from you before, but it's good stuff to hear (and the underwater pyramid thing is a fun anecdote). Also, looking forward to your discussion of the "Five More Years" predictions from 2018 soon!
Assuming you still have some of that Atlantis passion, I would read a lengthy post summarizing the arguments that initially convinced you in favor of Atlantis existing, what the discrepancies in the coherent narrative exactly *were*, and then the arguments which ultimately convinced you against.
(Also — and I have no memory of my source here, talking out of my ass based on something I read about in middle school — isn’t the best candidate for Atlantis the ancient civilization of Tartessos in southern Spain/Biblical “Tarshish”? Which is enigmatic in the way pre-Bronze Age Collapse civilizations are but which isn’t any kind of geographic anomaly).
I'm pretty confident that the best explanation of "Atlantis" is that Plato made it up in order to make a point. That does not necessarily imply that there weren't lost civilizations that sort of match what Plato described, though.
I appreciated this a lot. I was taught six day creationism growing up and read YEC apologists voraciously. The book or two I was able to find at the library were pretty scarce and the Creationists seemed to have an exhaustive answer for everything. Every smart person I asked about evolution had some kind of dismissive comeback that made me think maybe the Creationists were right.
Then a single individual who was well acquainted with scientific literature decided to engage me in good faith, starting with an argument about HERVs that I had never heard before. I also found a book by the kind of para-scientific writer that sometimes gets made fun of, but he had taken time to write a book explaining the reasons why evolution made a lot of sense. I was stunned and it completely changed the course of my life.
I had to search to find out what HERVs are. The first page I read informed me that:
"HERVs have roles in regulating genes (a God-designed function) and causing disease (due to mutations in HERVs as a result of the Fall). It has been suggested that HERVs and other transposable elements played a role in rapid genetic changes that occurred post-Flood to allow humans and animals to adapt to different environments"
Was there a single moment when you really came to doubt creation? Did it happen over the course of a few days reading that book? Or was it a longer process?
Trusting the experts is not really an epistemic heuristic. The best option epistemically is to read so much that you become an expert. Trusting the experts is really about efficiency. People want to be able to dismiss conspiracy theories because it is too much work to have to refute literally every incorrect argument all the time. Most people who have the same argument (and win) three times get tired and dismissive and announce they are no longer going to argue with anyone about this subject. That's reasonable - they want to be able to move on to new subjects and new knowledge and not be weighed down by people behind them.
But the reality is: when a lot of people believe something, it is important to investigate it in depth and thoroughly explain why the thing is right or wrong. Maybe this isn't "cutting edge" intellectual work, but it's extremely necessary work that someone needs to do.
Most people lack both the time and ability to understand why bad, but superficially sophisticated arguments are wrong. On the subject of the myriad examples of COVID denialism, there is a lifetime's worth of material out there that requires somewhere between intelligent biology undergrad and Ph.D. level understanding to really break down. Thinking that anyone can just become a graduate level expert in immunology in their free reading time is not realistic.
It's nice to outsource this to experts, but experts who have the ability to explain where arguments go wrong in a way that is true, accessible, and doesn't require their audience to have a undergraduate educational background in the subject of discussion are rare. That's hard. The people famous for being good at it - the Carl Sagan and Ken Miller's of the world - are remarkable, precious resources. And even then, I can't think of a single example who hasn't screwed something up in their debunking efforts.
Sometimes you're left with being forced to trust that experts probably know what they're talking about.
I don't know if I fully agree with that. I reads a little like a convenient excuse for people who are willing to devote zero time to boning up on what we know about the natural world. I think anybody who got a B in a good high-school biology class can learn enough to understand how vaccines work in maybe a dozen hours of study, provided the right materials are available -- and these days, they often are, there are tons of concise Youtube videos on basic concepts in many scientific fields.
That doesn't really seem like such a high demand on your time that most people can't afford it. People routinely spend that much time, and much more, becoming familiar with how certain sports are played, the rules, et cetera, so they can enjoy their games.
So I think in no small part there is a certain degree of laziness among us. We think gee if it can't be explained to me in such terms that just using my mother wit and what I remember from 8th grade, it must be bogus, or something only an egghead can grok. But that's not really true. I would be in favor of recreating a certain standard among adults that said "you really ought to keep yourself at least mildly educated in the background for our very technological society so you can at least understand the arguments that are made, and participate meaningfully." In the Victorian era, nobody would listen to you if you couldn't quote Cicero in Latin, sort of a standard of dedication to self-education that was easily measured. Maybe we need something similar -- nobody will listen to you debate pandemic vaccine shit unless you can tell me what mRNA is and what it does at a 10th grade level.
Understanding what mRNA is or a simple model of how vaccines work is high school level material, but understanding some of the more sophisticated COVID pseudoscience floating out there is beyond that. There's a ton of material produced by people who have sufficient academic background to provide a veneer that just takes more knowledge to penetrate.
I routinely interact with various COVID denialism and something that I run into a lot is people sharing and misinterpreting papers that I'm able to read and see where they go wrong. I'm fully aware my ability to read them and understanding how their interpretations are misleading comes from having decent science reading comprehension skills, a undergrad background in cell biology, and having reasonably kept up in the practice of reading journals. It is more difficult than, say, answering science reading questions on an ACT correctly, and the vast majority of people can't do that consistently.
I don't mean this to be condescending towards people here. It's just that it's much easier to BS with pseudoscience than it is for people to tease apart how it is going wrong in any kind of detail. Some people are good at it. If you put in enough work and are reasonably intelligent, usually someone with a non-graduate background can see the flaws in most pseudoscience, but even that is hard. There's only so much time in the day.
As I said, I don't fully agree. I think you're allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Just developing a tradition that people should expect to keep up at least somewhat with the basic science and technology of the day is (1) not hard, and (2) would improve the discourse significantly. Yes, I agree, there are cases where it definitely isn't suffficient. But if we only had those left, and only the hardcore Piped Pipers and apostles, it would be a much better world.
I think we're mostly just talking about different things. I agree that it is a good idea for people to generally keep up with basic developments in science and technology and this would be beneficial. This should also have a protective effect in helping people recognize some signs of dubious scientific claims.
What I'm claiming is that pseudoscientific movements specifically are capable of churning out arguments that take more sophistication to understand the faults of than that. That's what makes them pseudoscientific - they're able to create the appearance of legitimate, serious science to a naive observer. I think the sweet spot of most pseudoscience is a few credentialed people combined with professionals from different fields* get together and use their knowledge to create arguments that superficially look compelling, but are filled with errors in fact and inference that take a level of knowledge and effort to unpack that is around the ability level of a smart undergrad in the relevant area. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less, but that the bullseye. Can people teach themselves into that range of knowledge? Sure, though I've seen enough examples of people getting in over their head that I'd caution some humility. Is that something we should generally expect of people? No.
*Often engineers, medical doctors, and lawyers oddly enough.
You're focused on the direct effects on the individual. But consider the social effects here, which are quite important. Let there still be clever pseudoscientific arguments, and a few weasel professionals -- but let there also be about 80% fewer rank-and-file supporters who retweet the folly, or say "yeah that!" on FB posts, simply because the general level of empirical skepticism -- which is a typical accompaniment of any kind of genuine education -- rises. An important distinction between science and pseudoscience is that the latter heavily relies on the size of the movement -- on the impression it creates that "lots of people agree with this." People want to belong, they want to be au courant, they want to be part of movements that look like they have power. Take away the numbers, and silly ideas become less persuasive. Think of it as memetic herd immunity.
It's hard to be an expert on very much, though. Many of us here are genuine experts in some things, but being an expert psychiatrist, rocket scientist, number theorist, structural engineer, etc., doesn't mean you're also going to do a great job resolving controversies in virology or sociology or whatever.
The "don't even engage with the question" tweet reminds me a bit of epistemic learned helplessness, where you can't trust yourself to reason correctly, so you should never try. I guess it's the correct advice for some people, but someone somewhere does need to evaluate the evidence and if Scott can't do it, who can?
Wiki on cargo cult science (categorised by Feynman).
„Cargo cult science is a pseudoscientific method of research that favors evidence that confirms an assumed hypothesis. In contrast with the scientific method, there is no vigorous effort to disprove or delimit the hypothesis.[1] The term cargo cult science was first used by physicist Richard Feynman during his 1974 commencement address at the California Institute of Technology.[1]“
The cargo cult is what Kavanaugh apparently wants.
Meanwhile Scott’s post assumed nothing and went through all the studies on Ivermectin, finding out that it’s useless against covid. Since Scott came to a conclusion that Kavanaugh agrees with, the problem Kavanaugh has is that Scott didn’t start with the „correct“ assumption and proceed from there. Feynman would have no problem taking sides here - he would side with Scott.
Scott is at least a psychiatrist with a strong medical background, and you can even see in his original post where he was flubbing some things. I think you need to think of Chris's argument as a criticism of "do your own research" debunking popular among rationalists, rather a criticism of, you know, doing research.
Except Scott did, in fact, do research, and is being vilified for it. But he’s not a credentialed public health expert, so he has no right to an opinion, because it might possibly differ from that of said experts.
I think "criticized" is a better term than "vilified" here, which reads as hyperbolic. And the complaint is that Scott's research sort of awkwardly ambled its way to the correct conclusion while creating a window for audiences to be misled about the nature of the debate. Chris is representing one side in a classic dilemma academics have for engaging pseudoscientific arguments that are easy to spot the signs of, but resource consuming to address at a granular level. He argues that doing so makes it seem like there's a serious dispute at all to engage and opens up a window for others to be misled. This is the same reason why many famous biologists refuse to debate creationists if a more sympathetic example helps understand the argument.
> There may be people so far gone into the outer darkness that they can’t be saved, but you are forbidden from ever believing with certainty that any specific individual is in this category.
Emphatically endorsed. It's a simple rule, but it feels like a cheat code for empathy.
I guess the steelman of this would be that an individual of a certain level of celebrity should not be addressing these concerns. I don't want the President of the United States weighing in on a schoolyard fight, or debating a homeless man's conspiracy theory that someone is a Cylon. To do so would create far more confusion than it would clear, no matter the strength of the argument.
But I don't think he's saying that. That would imply that Scott is an Internet behemoth pulling average folks along in his wake, but Kavanath is complaining about "the rationalists"; that suggests the Rationalist Community is itself a behemoth on the political landscape. And if a behemoth is interested in the topic, then it SHOULD be followed up on. You can't claim consensus while ignoring the questions of behemoths.
I suspect I'm just weird here, but hearing the president weigh in on a scientific controversy has approximately zero impact on my beliefs. Similarly, Joe Rogan expressing strong beliefs about the right course of treatment for covid, or a famous pro athlete or actor or singer's opinions about politics. Why on Earth would I care?
The default epistemology is "believe what you've heard" and when a conflict arises, resolve it with "believe who you trust more". Believing things for reasons is always going to be the hardest way to go, but the more of it we can get, the better. Think of humanity's collective beliefs like a bunch of caches pointing at other caches. The system only works is because real information is injected occasionally (by people reasoning and experimenting), otherwise you just get loops of beliefs pointing at each other.
As a child, I grew up in a house full of second-hand books, and with no internet. I learned about evolution from books that I knew were out of date, which mentioned that we didn’t know how wings could have evolved because half-a-wing can’t be used for flying. I had a few ideas of my own about partial wings, along the lines of flying squirrels gliding, and maybe you could run faster with some flapping, or maybe elaborate sexual displays, but I had nowhere to look up what the current ideas would be. So I waited years until we finally learned about it in school, and I asked my biology teacher.
I had, of course, learnt school survival techniques like never giving away that you already knew about this topic, and asking everything as a careful question without your own thoughts or prior knowledge, but these weren’t enough here! Because even asking this question had my biology teacher decide I was a religious fundamentalist who was opposed to evolutionary theory, and so everything she taught us from that moment on had weird patronising comments thrown in about “unless you don’t believe in that”. It had never even occurred to me that this was a possible danger (it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would oppose evolution for religious reasons past the Victorians).
My biology teacher didn’t have any good answers for me about wings. If a child asked me that, and I didn’t have up-to-date knowledge, I’d probably prompt them for their own thoughts, not assume I knew a position they were taking in some cultural dispute. Children sometimes do ask me about things that they have clearly come across as part of some cultural dispute, and are pretty much always looking for someone to talk it through with and suggest some broader context rather than actually embedded in a political position.
In short, people treating curiosity as a sign that someone is the wrong sort of person, and refusing to actually answer questions properly, also makes me very cross.
The fundamental problem is that getting the truth is much, much, much harder than anyone (establishmentarians and conspiracy theorists alike) wants to admit. It is *so* hard and time-consuming that it’s much much easier to just declare certain positions true and then presume, assert and believe that the effort to find the actual truth has been done.
Very likely this teacher didn't know how, or didn't want to expend the time, to learn the answer to her student's question. If the evolution of the wing had been included in the curriculum, meaning that someone else had done the heavy lifting of evaluating the primary literature and condensed it down to a simple narrative of how wings evolved, she would have learned and taught the narrative.
I don’t know anything about your teacher but I am inclined to be charitable to her; is it possible she was trying to be considerate of your (misperceived) sensibilities? Or do you think she was really trying to make you look stupid?
I think she probably thought she was being considerate of my views, but she hadn’t even asked me what my views were: she’d just jumped straight from essentially ‘dogwhistle for anti-evolution’ to assuming I held a strong religious view that must be worked around. It didn’t seem to occur to her that this was an obvious question that people could be genuinely puzzled and curious about.
She only saw my question through a lens of cultural arguments, rather than considering it as a question.
I'm just here to point out that the Richat Structure is DEFINITELY the former site of Atlantis. This isn't even a conspiracy theory, just a seriously under-investigated archeological thesis that someone with enough money could definitively prove or disprove.
I liked your posts on ivermectin, but I do think there is a genuine cost to posts like it, which Kavanagh seems to me to be at least hinting at.
When you take conspiracy theorists arguments seriously, it implies a higher prior on conspiracy theories than when you dismiss them out of hand. This can lead to your readers (consciously or not) increasing their priors on conspiracy theories and being more likely to believe future conspiracy theories they come across.
If their prior on conspiracies were not previously too low, this is a relevant cost.
Maybe I'm being too charitable when I mentally translate the statements 'pro-mainstream-anti-conspiracy people' make as pointing at this issue, but I do think the issue is real.
Not saying the benefit isn't worth the cost. Not saying the 'pro-mainstream-anti-conspiracy people' do a good job of pointing out that cost or doing any sort of cost-benefit analysis.
Just saying the cost exists, and is not entirely irrelevant. There probably exist some conspiracy theories it would be actively harmful for you to publicly take seriously because that cost would outweigh the benefit of practicing forming opinions.
I think you summarize well a charitable view of the point Kavanagh is making. I agree with you that I can imagine a somewhat-reasonable, hypothetical scenario where the cost you're pointing out exists. To me though, the burden of proof is on Kavanagh to demonstrate that either this particular ivermectin post has a much higher cost than benefit, or to demonstrate that a world in which these types of posts don't exist is a better world than the one in which they do. What's frustrating about Kavanagh's post, as well as most of these PR arguments along the lines of "even discussing x is dangerous" is that the person making the argument makes no attempt to show the hypothetical tradeoffs they're describing actually exist. It's easy to create a toy model of the world and tilt the table in your favour.
I don’t know, I look at it more like a vaccination. By treating a conspiracy theory (or at least a probably actually debunked theory) with a degree of seriousness, but then debunking it anyway, Scott shows how a very plausible seeming argument backed up with evidence that is facially trustworthy can nevertheless be shown to be incorrect. So on the one hand, yes, he’s exposing us to a “dangerous” idea and evidence supporting it. On the other hand he’s inoculating us against the next pseudoscientific theory that comes along with some seemingly plausible evidence.
If all you’ve ever heard is that “all conspiracy theories are obviously stupid and only convincing to stupid evil people” then you’re extremely vulnerable to your first exposure to a wrong theory with any plausible support. Which as Scott notes, is actually a lot of them.
Yes, inoculating us against pseudoscientific theories that sound plausible is a valuable benefit to taking them seriously. I am not denying that at all. Nor am I denying that that benefit is worth the cost in this instance. I just want to point out that the cost exists, and in some other similar cases may outweigh the benefit, and that it is important to keep that cost in mind when making similar decisions in the future.
If I were Kavanagh, this is where I’d start calling you a Weinstein obsessed antixvaxxer. Or perhaps dismiss your argument as “indulgent and potentially misleading”.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that while I’m not entirely unsympathetic to your steelmanned Kavanagh-in-theory, he is so far removed from Kavanagh-in-practice as to be functionally unrecognizable.
That's fine with me. I don't particularly care if my steelmanned Kavanagh-in-theory is recognizable as Kavanagh. I just care about whether there is anything we can learn from it, and I think there is.
I just spent the past two minutes scrolling through this Kavanagh guy's Twitter feed. 0/10, would not recommend. Smug, all the hallmarks of "too online," insults people rather than engage with anything they said, nothing original or insightful, lots of braindead left-right kayfabe jabbering, etc. Scott, you need to pick better online feuds! Jay-Z doesn't respond to a diss track from some Bronx drill rapper who's still trying to get exposure on Spotify by texting his friends and posting links on Facebook! The Undertaker doesn't beef with some meathead freshly hired from a Gold's Gym in San Jacinto!
Ugh. You did spill a lot of ink without actually doing it in the right way that could have actually been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
It's not really enough to "sort of" be a rationalist and "sort of" of be scientific. Do it the right way and get it accepted in a publication or leave it to the experts. All you had to do was wait about 6 months:
There are plenty of interesting non-peer reviewed but serious works.
Popularized science is important and usual. Essays and books by Gould, Hawkins, Penrose, Feynman to scratch the surface. And the field of scientific journalism when well done is useful and not peer reviewed.
But SA was not doing scientific journalism nor popularized science. He attempted original research. Not a horrible effort but research is not persuasive writing it is factual and technical writing.
This is an interesting distinction that is worth pointing out, but I think you may have just proved the opposite point. In general, yes, everything seems to be shoehorned into these two categories: Pop science that is dumbed down to airport bookstore level, and proper scientific journals that are increasingly specialized and self-justifying.
A regular dude like me isn't smart enough to discern which of Malcom Gladwell's points are legit and which are spurious sensationalism, and I'm also not smart enough to wade through all the original research and statistical data to draw out my own insights. As these two categories get further and further apart, the more I appreciate guys like Scott Alexender for staying in the middle, writers who are able to bridge these gaps; diving deeper and showing their work more than the celeb authors, and having a wider perspective and more practical application than the institutional experts.
I can understand being the sort of person who believes that the only academic work worth writing is the sort that gets published in a peer-reviewed journal, but I can't wrap my mind around why someone who believes that would choose to read this blog. But if that's not what you're saying, how can it be worse to write a blog post and wait 6 months than to just do the waiting?
And I can't wrap my mind around "I'm not sure admitting you had a dumb idea as a teenager is helpful." There are so many things wrong with this view that I'm sort of reeling: (a) Writer seems not to grasp that everybody has dumb ideas as a teenager. Anyone who says they did not is just lying. (b)This is a blog post by Scott about his reaction to Kavanagh, not a formal takedown of Kavanagh. It's a different kind of essay. Self-disclosure is part of essays of this kind. It's fine. It enriches the text. (c)It wasn't a dumb idea, it was a wrong idea. Given the info Scott had, and his lack of info about other matters, it wasn't dumb to wonder whether the ruins of Atlantis were really there to be seen. Seems pretty reasonable to me. And subsequent events show Scott as smart and determined to figure out the truth, which he in fact succeeded in doing. First he learns to scuba dive, which is no small thing. Then he goes and looks at the formations that are thought to be ruins. Then he reads around and figures out that geological formations actually can look that much like the foundations of ruined buildings. I like and admire Scott, but if I heard that story about some random teen I had never laid eyes on, I would *still* have thought, what a great kid.
Everybody does have stupid ideas as a teenager. Most (all) also from time to time have stupid ideas as adults and made mistakes and errors of judgments. But it does NOT enrich the text, at all.
A general admission of fallibility and self-awareness of the process of personal growth is one thing. But specific and detailed admission to strangers (we are not, in very large part, his friends nor should we be personal admirers) is quite another.
You say you like Scott. Have you actually every met him in person? Do you really know him? What you probably mean is you like what he has written, or the topics he has brought up, etc. I will also presume that the relationship is not mutual or symmetric. He in all likelihood doesn't really like you because he doesn't know you at all.
"What a great kid" should be default attitude for every kid. Unless you are a misanthrope at heart.
There is a potentially manipulative quality about admission of past to what really amounts to strangers. I'll not waste ink explaining.
That may form part of the objection. It can be seen as a subtle form of emotional blackmail: "If you argue my thinking is off here, you are spitting with contempt on this charming plucky teenage version of me that is sitting right here listening."
It's a little as if some archaeologist arguing that he had discovered Atlantis had begun his J. Underwater Arch. article by talking about how the dream of finally discovering Atlantis had sustained him during his horrible abusive childhood, and as he lifted himself by his bootstraps from dire poverty and ignorance, worked his way through Harvard shining shoes in Logan Airport, living in a squalid rat-infesed tenement purusing his bright and shiny goal....I mean, you'd feel like a churl pointing out his "Atlantean" artifacts looked suspiciously like discarded Coke bottles...
Mind you, I personally have no problem with the anecdote, but I can also see how someone might feel it's a little emotionally manipulative if the purpose is to coolly and rationally defend a certain line of reasoning.
You know, I see that one could make a case for Scott's story about his Atlantis mistake being emotional blackmail. As you point out, this kind of thing can make readers reluctant to criticize or argue, for fear of seeming churlish. I don't think that's JDK's grounds for objecting to the story. He says "A general admission of fallibility and self-awareness of the process of personal growth is one thing. But specific and detailed admission to strangers (we are not, in very large part, his friends nor should we be personal admirers) is quite another. " It seems like he's saying Scott's disclosure is TMI -- it's creepy to disclose personal details to strangers on the internet -- and also that it damages one's credibility to show the reader "home movies" of one's foolish younger self. A general admission to past mistakes and foolishness is allowed, but the writer should keep his clothes on.
Yes, certainly. That's why I said "may" before "form" and "part of" after that. I'm not pretending to speak for him. And also he did close his response to you with a specific hint at a feeling of being manipulated, which is what got me thinking along the lines I did.
Yeah, you're right, it's not even legitimate nitpicking on my part. I don't exactly warm up to the person we're responding to, and I think my disapproval of his take on things spilled over onto you.
People can't really be part of this substack primarily because of what the SA writes. I have to believe that they are here for the comments. [Unless I have misunderstood and this is really a cult?]
You have figured it out: Yup, we are a cult. We live for Scott’s weekly piece of drivel about dumb stuff he did as a kid, and groups of us gather on weekends to read favorites aloud. Once a year we meet at Burning Man re-enact one. This summer we’ll be staging the all time most popular ACX post, the one about how at age 4 Scott thought nuns were penguins and tried to feed one some kippered herring that had gone bad in the fridge. I will be playing the herring, but we have yet to find anyone to play the furious, retching nun. I’m thinking you’re parrhestic enough to pull it off though. Want to give it a go? As for subscribing: There’s no shame in not being a paid subscriber, although if you’re not Scott won’t have sex with you. He does demand a tenner for the ice cream cones. But he mails out pairs of his panties to random non-paying subscribers throughout the year, so you may luck out.
What SA wrote was NOT academic it was pseudo academic.
It was quasi serious.
Scientific journalism and popularization of science is very important but it also has many increasing flaws and deficiencies. But SA essays were not journalism about science it was an attempt at original research (a meta study is original research).
Because it was done publicly there is a higher standard to which we should hold it.
I guess what I'm looking for is a reason we should hold it to a higher standard. What is the benefit you get out of that restriction? Why do you think the world where Scott doesn't write up his thought process is preferable to ours? These normative statements don't answer my question, they only restate your position.
Speaking of science and research and holding people to a high standard: You never replied to my comment about your posting that link to a page about Evusheld's being de-authorized a coupla threads ago. I don't think someone holding himself to a high standard of accuracy and fairness in argument should have posted it. Got anything to say about that?
The other thing I find odd about the anti-conspiracy stuff is the particular hatred towards 9/11 truthers. Some beliefs are inherently bad, for instance Holocaust denial, but disbelieving the main narrative about 9/11 isn’t that.
I mean if the entire population were truthers in 2003 then we might have 1 million fewer dead Arabs. And no doubt back in 2003 the 20% of people who didn’t believe that the existence of WMD had been proven by the experts overlap significantly with the truthers.
Who are the dupes here? The odd thing about post 2003 is that after the abject failure of the establishment media to hold government and the military to account, what we learned was that the problem was the people who didn’t subsequently trust the government or the media.
As for myself I don’t see much merit in 9/11 theories, it’s all too complex.
Yes, and honestly for anyone with a decent knowledge of American history the idea that the US government would intentionally fail to stop or even facilitate an attack to justify a war *isn't crazy*. That doesn't make it *true* in this particular case, but still far from insane.
I’m sorry you’re going to have to remind me of the other times the US government has carried out an attack destroying a major landmark and killed thousands of Americans to start a war. I guess unless you’re saying that a “decent knowledge of history” leads one to believe in the conspiracy theories regarding Pearl Harbor and the Lusitania.
Some things are indeed worthy of being incredulous. The conspiracy theories about 9/11 are bonkers and contain layers of epicycles and rejection of contrary evidence because so many of them are obsessed with the false idea that a wide body jet can’t take down a skyscraper.
It was a pretty Rube Goldbergian false flag if it was one. Why not just set off a bomb somewhere and fabricate evidence tying it directly to Iraq, the supposed target of the false flag? Or hell, just do what we basically already did / have in our anti-Saddam playbook and go on a tour with evidence for Iraqi WMDs and provoke Iraq into a casus belli response. Instead we’ve got fake jets, cruise missiles, kidnappings, hidden demolition charges, and fake Saudi perpetrators supported by fake Afghan theocrats that the government never really did manage to tie directly to Saddam Hussein.
Evidence that the US military gave some thought to the possibility of performing smaller scale false flags against the United States to provoke a war with Cuba (in the same document where they also proposed provocation of Cuba) and then ultimately rejected it and eventually declassified the report about it is hardly strong evidence that they actually did execute a much more complex and larger scale false flag operation.
The US military thinks about a lot of things that it never actually does, many of them unthinkable.
What would you do if I told you the US has plans signed by the Joint Chiefs for first strike nuclear options against Russia and China? Because I’m almost certain they do. But “brainstorming a contingency” and “actually executing it successfully” are two very different things.
Neither I nor anybody else here asserted that 9/11 was a false flag. That's pure projection. Indeed, I don't personally believe any of what would usually be described as "9/11 conspiracy theories". Since we're talking about orders of magnitude, my point was only that the US government allowing something monstrous to happen for its own ends is several orders of magnitude more plausible than lizard people.
And honestly, the fact that you defaulted to the most insane possible version of this is a great example of why "conspiracy theory" is a borderline useless framing. Ironically, of course, some would assert that it's deliberately useless. The two statements "there may have been people within the CIA who suspected an attack might happen and deliberately ignored it" and "there were no planes, the towers were toppled by cruise missiles disguised with holograms" can both accurately be described as 9/11 conspiracy theories but aren't in the same universe in terms of plausibility.
(Yes I've actually heard the cruise missile thing)
You said “intentionally fail to stop or facilitate”. The latter is definitely a false flag, the former arguably still is. Either way you’re (edit: you meaning people that actually believe the theory, not necessarily you personally) asserting that the U.S. government (or part of it) was directly responsible for 9/11, with the intent of using it to justify a war.
Also the OP of this thread referred to “Truthers” not just 9/11 conspiracy theorists in general. I perhaps unfairly assumed that “truther”, which I’ve only ever seen used pejoratively, was meant to include the “strong” versions of the theory with stuff like intentional demolitions, not just “the CIA knew and didn’t act to stop it, but the actual attack proceeded more or less along the ‘official’ narrative”.
Potentially covering up exactly what happened in an incident half a world away in which an ally attacked a smallish Navy ship and killed 32 sailors is literally multiple orders of magnitude away from deliberately collapsing the twin towers and murdering 3000 civilians in the middle of the largest city on the Eastern Coast.
In deaths, yes. Which is a lot! In complexity it’s arguably more. And also we didn’t start a shooting war with Israel over it, and Israel didn’t try to pretend the Egyptians did it, so it’s not a false flag.
Plus “we accidentally attacked an ally because they thought they were an enemy” is absolutely a thing that happens all the time without actually requiring a more nefarious explanation. Hell, the Iraqis did the same thing 20 years later. And then the Americans shot down almost 300 people on flight 655 a year after that. People do dumb shit that kills the wrong people during shooting wars.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. The fact that the government used momentum from 9/11 to help push over the line an ultimately dubious casus belli to topple a longtime geopolitical foe in the Middle East does not make it rational or good to believe that the U.S. government organized a controlled demolition of the Twin Towers with remotely controlled military planes, that the Pentagon was hit with a cruise missile, or that “fire can’t melt steel”.
Yeh, maybe. But I wasn’t asking about stupidity or reversed intelligence. I was asking about why this particular belief generates so much heat. ( as opposed to the Kennedy assassination for instance which is ridiculed but not considered that dangerous).
You don’t see why people would be upset that people are making up wild conspiracy theories about a few thousand dead Americans that a few million personally experienced in New York and many millions more watched live on TV?
Yes the assassination of Kennedy was traumatic, but “a head of state gets assassinated” is a thing that happens sometimes. 9/11 was unprecedented, massively more traumatic, a personal tragedy for many many more people. And also 40 years more recent.
Yes. I don’t see why this conspiracy is a morally bad thing. Those people were killed anyway - this isn’t Holocaust denial which denies deaths. The thing to be enraged by is the million or so Iraqi deaths - which was a very real conspiracy to fake WMD.
“Only denying deaths makes a conspiracy theory worthy of condemnation” is a weird take, but if you take it consistently…
Personally I think the WMD intelligence was a lot more “confirmation bias” than “conspiracy” and the “million deaths” involves some questionable accounting / assignment of responsibility, but I don’t fault you for coming to a different conclusion.
“ Only denying deaths makes a conspiracy theory worthy of condemnation” is a weird take, but if you take it consistently…”
I was obviously replying to your appeal to emotion about the thousands of deaths, which are not denied by the 9/11 believers. And what is the last sentence?
L Given these massive deliberate twists in logic I think you are arguing in bad faith.
This is the most I’ve ever loved you. But if you prove to me the spotted owl really was being harmed by logging activities and the bard owl intruding into its habitat was just coincidence I’m going to need a minute to process that.
This guys the worst. All he does is shit all over anyone with a podcast/blog that discusses things, ironically I believe he has his own podcast too. You wanna critique Rogan fine, but this dude took the time to shit all over Andrew Huberman who literally cannot possibly be more credible and transparent when discussing health topics in his show. He bends over backwards to acknowledge the relative strength of the evidence when he discusses something, yet for some reason this guy still shits on him. Literally the worst type of person, just reeks of insecurity.
The bottom line is that “trust the experts uncritically and scientists are the experts” is a nonsensical statement, because the whole point of science is that you trust data, not people. An expert you trust uncritically isn’t a scientist, they’re a priest.
(And of course it’s worse than that because in practice “trust the science” really means “trust the Twitter user who retweeted the pundit who read the article that summarized the results of the study that a scientist did that may or may not be replicable”)
I know you have a burning anger against anti-conspiracy bloggers like me, so I will not bother you with some of the subtle misgivings in your rant above.
However, one thing that might be useful; conspiratorial ecosystems are NOT "reasoning like everybody else just with worse vigilance". This is incorrect, there are multiple behavioral and cognitive differences stemming from epistemic, social and existential motivations that are not 'like everybody else'
You're listing single papers from psychology, a field that is well-known to produce results that can't be reproduced, make studies with very small sample sizes, mostly with similar people (college students), etc. An average post by Scott will usually try to find meta studies, studies that have been reproduced, cite the number of people involved in the studies, delve deeper into them, try to find opposing studies. That doesn't give me a lot of confidence in your post, as I would suspect that you would (consciously or not) cherrypick studies that agree with you.
I do really like the "Important before you go" part though. I wish people would spend less time blaming and more time trying to find solutions. In tech there's this concept of "blameless review" that I like a lot, although it's assuming that people's interests are aligned, which can be quite a big assumptions at the level of a society. Not sure what the solution is here, but personally I find reading stuff about blame tiring and reading stuff about increasing the amount of knowledge interesting.
The best way to make sense of a topic is a mixture of learning about the tenets and vocabulary of the field, then familiarizing yourself with the primary literature, meta-reviews or meta-analyses, and interviewing domain experts about the topic so you cover all possible blind spots. This takes a lot of time and effort.
Just reading Meta-analyses is not always a shortcut, often, meta-analyses do not always exist on a specific topic or question; that does however not invalidate primary research on the topic. Psychological research is bound to be confounded, as are all studies into human nature, and usually do not give a clean works/doesn't work result like drug trials, but rather a probabilistic framework:
E.g People who believe in multiple conspiracy theories tend to have an increased illusionary pattern perception than people who do not believe in them.
Does that mean non-conspiracy theorists can not have increased illusionary pattern perception? What even is the definition of illusionary pattern perception? Are there multiple experiments done on the topic? Is there a consensus view? Is there a meta-analysis (No, in this case).
Point is, if you are not familiar with the field, even understanding the basic tenets of the field will be difficult for amateurs, as you have just illustrated with your insistence on a meta-analysis shortcut to "truth" - extrapolating from one field of science (e.g drug efficacy) to a different domain (behavioral/cognitive psychology) - where it is not necessarily applicable.
That is the point Kavanagh was making in the first place. It is naive (at best) and usually delusional to think that if you have your small rationalist toolbox, you can just epistemically trespass into various different domains of science and figure out what is what.
Sorry, there are usually no such shortcuts.
Even limited success in one domain doing so does not imply it will work in other domains.
And while Scott might scoff at sneering experts talking down on people (his perception from being too much online, too little actually trying to talk to them), my experience is that most scientists, most of the time, are happy to talk to even strangers about their work and explain where they are coming from, if so kindly asked.
>Point is, if you are not familiar with the field, even understanding the basic tenets of the field will be difficult for amateurs, as you have just illustrated with your insistence on a meta-analysis shortcut to "truth" - extrapolating from one field of science (e.g drug efficacy) to a different domain (behavioral/cognitive psychology) - where it is not necessarily applicable.
>That is the point Kavanagh was making in the first place. It is naive (at best) and usually delusional to think that if you have your small rationalist toolbox, you can just epistemically trespass into various different domains of science and figure out what is what.
Fwiw, I think this is an excellent post that gets at the basic issue that I think is escaping many of the replies. I'd add here that an issue Chris was getting at is that something like Scott's posts makes people think this is how it works and makes them think they can do the same. I don't think this is intentional, but it is a side-effect of this style of commentary. The other issue is that these kind of detailed engagements creates a sense of legitimacy for the the side being treated seriously when being debunked. You can try to undercut that with some contempt or snark, but people will read that as unfair or perhaps even ad hominem.
I'm of two-minds about this. I've always thought something like realclimate or sciencebasedmedicine - to name two popular debunking websites - was doing a real service to the public. At the same time, I also think most people just aren't equipped to do that and the risks are substantial. It draws on different skills not a lot of people possess. Attempts at doing something like that can hurt more than they help.
The rationalist crowd naturally has roots in the skeptics community, and it is not surprising to see them favor this style of commentary where people venture a little out of their field of expertise and offer detailed, personally investigated critical replies to popular crank views. I think that ends up sometimes being naive about how much capacity people actually have to look into an issue and figure out what's what, to use your phrasing. It's not a coincidence that skeptics communities are notorious for getting into their own dubious, rogue ideas from time to time.
I think the rational thing to do for rationalists is to first consider whether they are equipped to deal with the topic, whether their skillset matches the question they want to address, and whether they are willing to put in the work.
Right after that, they should also spend some time on various considerations about false balance, amplification, noise pollution, and the influence their work could or would have in the current media ecosystems.
There is a need for independent critical inquiry, and I do not think anybody should be excluded from discussions prima facie; but how is the saying:
"It does not take a domain expert to agree with the scientists, but it sure as hell takes a domain expert to disagree with them"
Most influencers are just cheap contrarians nowadays who lack the knowledge, skill, and experience to even reach a point where they can recapitulate accurately what is the mainstream position that domain experts hold and why.
But real scientific contrarians need to reach that level and THEN go beyond and show why they have an alternative that better explains the BODY OF EVIDENCE that they now completely understand.
I wrote something highly similar in a separate reply in the comments section to someone else. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have reason to believe you have your ducks in a row, deeply understanding a subject and why experts who disagree with you think what they do, before you can begin to feel confident that you are rejecting them for sound reasons or have something meaningful to contribute. That people typically don't is why we have no shortage of crackpots and a handful of Motoo Kimura's.
a. People stuck in the broken conspiracy-theory mindset, where they've built an evidence-proof shell around their beliefs and nothing will ever penetrate.
b. People who are wondering if maybe there's something to this conspiracy theory's claims, since they're facially plausible, and many of the people pushing back on them have often been visibly wrong or behaved dishonestly.
His writeup was for the people in (b), not the ones in (a).
I think Kavanagh/anti-both sidesism arguments presupposes there are a class of people who are really bad at doing research/using reason and so you want to model blind trust in experts for them so that they just do what is socially normal on important questions.
It does seem to me that there are issues that appear as settled questions to most people and if you raise the salience of them or present them as open questions some people, who would never have otherwise practiced epistemic learned helplessness on the issue will attempt to apply reason and arrive at wild conclusions. Flat earth has kind of peaked as a phenomenon, but I would expect that if major cable news shows had held formal debates on the subject prior to its peak that it would have increased the population of flat earthers just because more people who are conspiratorially minded/exceptionally bad at rationality would have engaged with the question.
Now in this model of the world there does need to be a class of experts who does science and reads studies and applies rationality but everyone outside of the relevant group of experts should defer to them and model deference.
If you think the sort of rationality ability + subject matter knowledge people need to avoid 0.99^infinity going to zero is quite high then I think this makes some sense as a model of the world. But it's very undemocratic, it leads to all sort of "Who Watches the Watchmen" issues if we all defer to small groups of subject matter experts.
I do think that's the real thing people find annoying about rationalists though. Is that there's sort of a pact within elite knowledge worker institutions to settle these sorts of disputes within institutional channels and rationalists break that pact. And I mean, it's not wrong to say non-subject matter experts critiquing subject matter experts through non institutional channels has dramatically lowered trust in institutions (revolt of the public), people just like it when it happens to institutions they don't like and dislike it when it happens to institutions they do like.
>you want to model blind trust in experts for them so that they just do what is socially normal on important questions.
The question Kavanagh et al are asking is not "how can we we increase our confidence that the things we believe are true, and communicate that belief and level of certainty to people as effectively and accurately as possible". It is "What can we say to get people to do what we want". Shaming anybody who engages with dissenters makes little sense under the first framework, but makes perfect sense under the second.
>I do think that's the real thing people find annoying about rationalists though. Is that there's sort of a pact within elite knowledge worker institutions to settle these sorts of disputes within institutional channels and rationalists break that pact.
There is a deleted spicy reddit comment by Scott about how the reason the Blue tribe hates and distrusts Tech so much is that it's a relatively democratic high-status and high-income work where people don't have to be born in the right places and go to the right schools in order to be good, therefore people in it are not subject to the brainwashing most other high-status work in the US require, and it births (or attracts) a lot of contrarians and heretics as a result.
Scott phrased it in less scathing terms, but that's what I think the summarization is to the best of my abilities.
“ Now in this model of the world there does need to be a class of experts who does science and reads studies and applies rationality but everyone outside of the relevant group of experts should defer to them and model deference.”
This model requires the designated class of experts to remain disciplined in “doing science” within their realm of expertise and avoid “doing politics and activism”, because once they start engaging in the latter they poison the former and cease to deserve deference.
In our actual reality “scientists” have repeatedly failed to maintain that discipline, with the support for mass protests during a pandemic and the sorry state of youth gender medicine science (see Jesse Singal’s Substack) being excellent recent examples.
To behave rationally is a pretty nice quality. To be a "rationalist" these days means you spend way too much time stretching every system, machine, and model to fit the particular Russian nesting doll you're invested in proving (i.e., big picture, it's the opposite of rational behavior).
And the favorite nesting doll amongst libertarian rationalists is "the cathedral," or the supposed ignorance/corruption/biases of professional educators, researchers, etc. It requires a naïve tone, a la FoxNews, "We're just asking questions, just wondering, just doing our due diligence," just expanding on the chaotic creativity of those hardwired to tear down structures rather than build or repair.
When you use so much bandwidth on something like ivermectin, it's like devoting your show to Hillary's emails for two years. Even if you don't tell a single lie, you're still just playing to your audience. So why not spend your time on things that might really make a difference because of rampant misinformation -- things that you really need to learn about, personally, like when you went scuba diving for original source material -- like reading and reviewing the full Mueller Report?
Why are you an authority on what people should spend more time or bandwidth on ? Maybe just like you view Ivermectin as a total non-issue and giving it attention only serves to amplify certain tacit messages to the audience, Scott views the Mueller Report in the exact same light ? (and this is a real Maybe, I actually don't know what Scott's views is)
>just expanding on the chaotic creativity of those hardwired to tear down structures rather than build or repair.
Both building up and tearing down has their uses, and people are far too often content to "build up" by staying silent and not rocking the boat while authoritarianism and herd behaviour is spreading like fire in those around them. Tearing down is under-appreciated and much-needed in those circumstances. You can make an argument that this is wrong and that we are actually in a time where building up is more important than building right, but you're not making that argument, you're making an argument that all tearing down is bad, which is wrong : everything you build up has to take the place of something you tear down. So tearing down is at least as good (or bad) in general as building up, since they are 2 sides of the same coin.
>the supposed ignorance/corruption/biases of professional educators, researchers, etc. It requires a naïve tone, a la FoxNews, "We're just asking questions, just wondering, just doing our due diligence,"
Are you saying that this is the wrong attitude, or only one that it's too inconvenient ? If it's wrong, then you should have nothing to fear, show the people doing it how they're wrong. If it's inconvenient, the key question is "for whom?", which people are served by playing down the "supposed" ignorance/corruption/biases of professional educators, researchers, etc and sweeping their failures under the rug ? and are those the kind of people who the rationalists (or really most people) would want to be served ?
"So tearing down is at least as good (or bad) in general as building up, since they are 2 sides of the same coin."
Your statement begs for a fitting aphorism: Cutting down a tree is a whole lot easier than putting it back together. Does this mean we can never cut down a tree? Of course not. Just that it's hubristically reckless to equate the two.
Humanity (on behalf of the vulnerable) has struggled way too diligently and collectively, bending the long, moral arc of the universe toward justice through imperfect, evolving institutions (such as democracy itself); we can't afford to be sanguine in the face of bros like Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Donald Trump, so flippantly eager to toss all this fragile progress into the trashbin, ostensibly for creative "disruption," but their willingness to dismiss/ignore history itself (such as the Mueller Report) is fueled mainly by their unchecked egos, and then bolstered blindly by cesspools of capitalism such as Fox News, today's version of Father Coughlin.
If someone wants to believe FDR steered us too deeply into socialism or whatever, fine. But this is a debate for the marketplace of ideas. It's not a legitimate excuse for casually toppling structures you declare unhelpful. Our social contract (not to mention our Constitution) cannot abide self-proclaimed saviors who find insurrections amusing and think fraud is a legitimate political tactic.
I don't want to be Yet Another Metaphor Pedant, but this gives contrarians way too much power. I would love if reality was this Based actually, I would love if merely contradicting authoritarianism really does demolish it as hard as cutting down a tree does to the tree, but it's simply not. Scott writing 25K words, or even 50K or 100K or 200K or 1000K words, doesn't even begin to make a dent into the mainstream herd.
The cold hard truth is that words simply don't matter, if you're complaining about words then 9 times out of 10 you're wrong, and you just want to silence people for reasons you don't like saying outloud.
>Humanity (on behalf of the vulnerable) has struggled way too diligently and collectively, bending the long, moral arc of the universe toward justice through imperfect, evolving institutions (such as democracy itself)
No, I disagree with nearly all of this. Humanity doesn't struggle on behalf of its vulenrable or even its deserving, Humanity blunders and flounders in the dark like a drunken 3 years old, often driven by its cruelest and stupidest members. There is no moral arc or great progressive curve, there is a cruel zigzagy line entirely guided by material reality and raw brute force, any resemblance this zigzag bears to a curve/arc/line bending towards justice is entirely in the beholder's imagination.
Democracy is a dumpster fire on most scales and turns out badly even when it works exactly as intended (which is rarely).
>we can't afford to be sanguine in the face of bros like Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Donald Trump, so flippantly eager to toss all this fragile progress into the trashbin, ostensibly for creative "disruption,"
None of those people came remotely close to threatening democracy or "progress", and I can't see the slightest connection between any of them and COVID contrarianism, trump experienced COVID first hand and took the vaccine (and it was his administration who rushed it that fast if I remember correctly, and it was a common anti-trump position at that time to question the vaccine's efficiency). Elon doesn't strike me as a vaccine skeptic even if he doesn't want to jail or persecute all vaccine skeptics (which, believe it or not, is a very common position). I don't care about Kanye and refuse to. He's only relevant if you make him so.
>Mueller Report
I don't understand why you think this thing is the greatest thing since the declaration of human rights, but it's not history anymore than trump's speeches are.
> It's not a legitimate excuse for casually toppling structures you declare unhelpful.
If your structures can be toppled by a single guy with a keyboard in his room writing his opinions (no matter how aweful or ill-informed), he is doing you a favor by toppling them. You can't bully people into staying silent or agreeing with you just because (you claim) their supposedly dangerous opinions will topple democracy, to hell with democracy then, I will say my opinion anyway.
"You can't bully people into staying silent or agreeing with you just because (you claim) their supposedly dangerous opinions will topple democracy, to hell with democracy then, I will say my opinion anyway."
You misunderstand. I do not want to silence you; in fact I can't imagine a more successful response to my bullying efforts, as I certainly would never fool myself into believing I could actually persuade you of anything.
The great danger to our country is that people like you usually only share your full anti-democracy sentiments in hushed tones, in polite circles with the likes of Steve Bannon and Mike Flynn -- so that ordinary cynics never actually realize how deadly serious you are about your chaos theories.
Other than enforcing the law and defending the Constitution and putting seditionists and fraudsters in prison, what our country most needs is for people like you to say exactly what you believe, loudly, clearly, bravely, boldly, unapologetically, because most Americans have no clue how nihilistic and cruel your vision for society actually is. If you are at all honorable as a participant in the public sphere, you will continue to speak out just as honestly as you have done here.
You have a very wrong mental model of me, I'm not American and I frankly don't give a shit about its politics (or politics in general) either way. I'm forced to care about politics every time some idiot in it does something with far ranging ramifications, but it's on a bare-minimum basis. This is the first time I have even heard of "Steve Bannon and Mike Flynn".
I'm not criticizing Democracy from a place of "Lets Make Monarchy Great Again", I'm a left-leaning Anarchist if somebody forced me to pick sides. I'm just saying that "Democratic" states are in practice just as corrupt and full of shit as the other ones, the only real advantage is that you can run your mouth about public figures and the government without being imprisoned, but that's basically it. You're just as disempowered and helpless on average as in other "non-democratic" states, because the state is the problem, not whatever made up Greek name it happened to justify its monopoly on violence with.
You are the gift that keeps giving. For the record, in case anyone else cares to notice, you have revealed yourself not only to despise democracy itself, but to be totally uninterested in the entire project of politics (your blasé attitude fueled by your dripping disdain for anyone who actually tries to participate in making our governments and institutions more honest, effective, transparent, and accessible).
Your two postures mirror my own interests here perfectly: challenging those who spout off about cultures and institutions they are profoundly uncurious about, and, as I've said, exposing the depth of the reckless nihilism that girds so many of these flippant positions, whether "libertarian," "rationalist," or "anarchic." So thanks for that. Though I really can't imagine abiding the cognitive dissonance of consciously educating yourself about politics as little as possible, while still brimming with confidence that you are adequately equipped to analytically and morally compare today's autocracies and kleptocracies with democracies.
Yes, a fitting analogy, with good considerations for any engagement in any civic square. One suggestion is especially apropos to the (self-proclaimed "famous") author of this very blog: attend to your own skill set.
"In deciding what you should spend your time on, it is important to think about what you are uniquely qualified and able to comment on."
Unfortunately, politics, writ large, is a discipline that everyone feels prepared to debate without even a superficial interest in its evolutionary history or its convoluted mechanisms. You may be a great engineer, shrink, piano tuner, whatever, but if you're not even interested enough to read the full Mueller Report, the appropriate place to spout about politics is at the end of your neighborhood bar, not from an ostensibly responsible seat. That's how we wound up with the former guy ("I alone can fix it"), casually willing to blow up democracy, NATO, race relations, etc. This isn't a call for staying in your lane, it's calling out a fact of nature: those who get drunk on their own power become clueless and cruel, while imagining they know everything significant. (See Elon Musk.)
So yes, our famous blogger may have just lazily phoned in this current piece, knowing it had the right key words to generate traffic, but he's too far out of his depth to even realize the damage he is doing by continuing to cater to a Fox News audience (who "cathedral" studies have proven are even less informed than people who never consume any news at all).
It threw me a bit; the reference appears to be to pirates, but pirates were famously described as communes hostes omnium, the shared enemies of everyone, not hostes humani generis.
I was taught that humanus wouldn't usually mean "human" in Latin, but looking into it the word appears to be an adjectival form of homo, so the meaning must have been available.
That said, according to my teachers, the word refers more to the qualities that humans _should_ have than to the fact of being human as opposed to bestial or divine.
Great essay. Precisely the sort of thing that made me subscribe in the first place. I particularly love the Atlantis analogy, since it takes it out of the realm of politically-charged topics.
The one area I'm not so sure about is the argument against the PR angle. It certainly seems to me that there is a level of credibility given to ludicrous points of view when presented side-by-side with the patently obvious truth, and so it's easy for people who are skimming stuff to get some subconscious impression of "there are good arguments on both sides". And there are a lot of people who apply far less care to evaluating a claim than an ACX reader does, from time pressure or lack of developed habits.
But a topic like "the world is obviously round, here are some people who think it's flat and look at how silly that belief is / they are" is something that most people can check against their daily experiences. They can see, for example, that ships sailing out of the harbor disappear from view hull-first and mast-last. So there's not a lot of risk to both-sidesing an article like that. However, "the Holocaust obviously happened and here are some people who have decided otherwise and how many bad things result from that", is riskier, because that's not a claim that is readily evaluated against daily experience. You learn from history textbooks, from lots of reading, seeing pictures of the camps and their liberation, etc... but an article that starts with "some people say the Holocaust happened. Others say that's a filthy lie. Let's treat both sies with dignity" does in fact have some PR risk attached. Someone who's normally thin-slicing new information can read that and come away with an impression that there is legitimate debate, where in fact there is only illegitimate debate.
I don't know where or precisely how to draw the line on "there is a valid PR concern here" vs "nonsense, there is plenty of space to treat the argument fairly, and deal a mortal blow to one side with very simple evidence and reasoning." It's clearly a hard problem. But I'm pretty sure that the line isn't as far to the side of "we should never worry about PR concerns relating to both-sidesing something" as the essay here appears to argue.
> But a topic like "the world is obviously round, here are some people who think it's flat and look at how silly that belief is / they are" is something that most people can check against their daily experiences. They can see, for example, that ships sailing out of the harbor disappear from view hull-first and mast-last.
You have a very different idea of what most people's daily experiences include than... most people do.
I would bet that the number of people whose daily experiences allow them to just observe in passing that ships disappear over the horizon from the bottom up and appear from the top down is closer to 0% of the population than it is to 1%.
It was an example. Most people aren't near a harbor but they've seen one, and can follow an argument that starts with "you know how, down at the harbor..."
Regardless, I'm positing that there are some factors which makes an argument safer to engage with directly, and some which are so far removed from our daily experience that most people are going to rely on ethos or pathos rather than logos (and thus there's some "PR risk" to entertaining the question seriously). And I think "proximity to daily life" might be one, but I'm sure Scott and others here can improve on that.
> It was an example. Most people aren't near a harbor but they've seen one, and can follow an argument that starts with "you know how, down at the harbor..."
All I can do is repeat what I said above: the share of people matching this new, "improved" description is still going to be closer to 0% than 1%. Nobody who's not familiar with harbors is able to follow an argument that starts with "you know how, down at the harbor...". They'd be taking you on faith, or not.
I got in trouble once in 5th grade when, in science class, we were supposed to submit trivia questions and then play the game of "answer a question drawn from a hat". I submitted "what color is the sea?", a much easier observation to make than "what happens to ships as they cross the horizon?". My choice was prompted by my observation that, every time I visited the sea, it was a deep green, but it was routinely referred to by fixed expressions as being blue. The teacher informed me that it wasn't fair to expect other students to be aware of what color the sea actually was when the culture suggested so strongly that it was blue.
The interaction between ships and the horizon, like the color of the ocean, is completely disconnected from the daily experience of virtually everyone. It's also not relevant - what matters is that you can go to the shore and watch for ships to cross the horizon. Nobody knows how that happens, except through secondhand reports - but they are able to assess what happens if it turns out to be important for some reason.
With every pseudoscientific movement, there is a corresponding dispute over whether scientists should address their arguments. Those arguments often are produced with a level of obsessive detail and sophistication where it takes a decent amount of education to understand where they go wrong, but are error-prone enough that having a decent understanding why is usually accessible to reasonably intelligent undergrad or even high schooler who has put in some work towards it. The bigger pseudoscientific movements usually have whole cottage industries dedicated to pumping out seemingly reasonable arguments that take some effort to pick apart.
The proponents of those movements set up a heads I win, tails you lose proposition when it comes to engaging scientific rebuttal. If people refuse to address them, they'll claim that this is because scholars are suppressing them, afraid to address their arguments, are dogmatic, etc. This can look compelling to outside observers who lack the capacity to understand why their superficially reasonable arguments are bad. It looks like scientists are ducking them, which fringe theorists are happy to parlay into their claims of improper suppression.
But, at the same time, if scholars do engage them, they use the fact that this is happening to create the impression that they are one legitimate side in a serious controversy where reasonable people can disagree. And this furthers their goals too. When their goals are obtaining institutional legitimacy, such as being taught in public schools or affecting public policy, this is significant.
This debate comes up again and again. From creationism, to climate denial, to more obscure stuff like facilitated communication you'll see this as a central conundrum for scientists and other scholars who have their actual academic responsibilities to worry about.
I see Chris Kavanagh as offering a variation of the latter argument here. Scott, by writing a lengthy address ends up creating a false impression that there's a serious dispute here where reasonable people reasonably disagree. Scott is a little out of his depth trying to rebut someone even more so, but making up for it with relentless gumption. So now you have naïve observers perhaps thinking this is a topic of academic controversy or that they're capable of engaging with the contours of the scientific claims on a level they are not, which is a trap to get rabbit holed into their own bad beliefs.
Scott offers the classic counter-argument to this, which is that detailed debunkings help people on the fence see how these ideas go wrong, and perhaps help them reason better next time they encounter a pseudoscientific claim with the appearance of sophistication. This is a service that more than outweighs the risk above.
Having seen this kind of dispute many times over, I'm never quite sure how I side on it. Both sides have pros and cons in a way that isn't easy to settle. I have long appreciated lay-attempts at long public debunkings and have offered them myself on subjects I know more about from time to time. But I have also witnessed how this dynamic has caused blow-back and led people way astray on their own understanding. It's not obvious to me which concern weighs more. So I offer my comment merely to note the tension.
Perfectly accurate, well-articulated, and, to me, so obvious that I’m confused why almost no commenters are mentioning this. I sincerely hope Scott sees this comment because I think it perfectly gets at the real substantative tension he needs to address/defend his stance on, and this community will gain immensely from his *considered* thoughts in response. Until then, for all the vital posts he’s made over the years on rational evaluation of evidence, he’s still missing the main point here. Which is a bit weird because, as you say, this is well-trodden ground.
So here's my speculation about why the discourse between defenders of the mainstream like Kavanagh and contrarians ends up being so political and disconnected from object-level reality:
As I've gotten older and wiser, I've learned that I'm susceptible to a certain kind of marketing for things that present themselves as the Alternative to the Mainstream Thing. The way this has often played out is that I get all excited about how the Alternative Thing is going to dethrone the Mainstream Thing and change everything, and I will raise my status in expectation by being an early adopter of the Alternative Thing, but instead I just end up learning in an unnecessarily roundabout way that there are actually good reasons the Mainstream Thing is mainstream and the Alternative Thing is marginal.
I think the reason I've been so susceptible to this is related to the dynamic described in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures: The subcultures that form around mainstream things tend to be older and larger, so the status competitions within them are fiercer, and I correctly feel ill-equipped to win status competitions in a crowded field. So I instinctively pursue higher variance strategies that at least give me a chance of achieving high status, conditional on some Alternative Thing actually winning and becoming the new Mainstream Thing, which does happen occasionally. Unfortunately, the way this feels from the inside is not "I'm taking calculated risks because high-variance strategies are rational for me," but rather "Why do I keep Believing in the Underdog really hard and then being disappointed 😭😭😭 I guess I'm just gullible."
Anyway, I think mainstream defenders recognize that positioning oneself as a promoter of the Alternative to the Mainstream Thing is a great grift, because there's an inexhaustible supply of insecure status-hungry people like me who are always scanning the horizon for high-variance Alternative Things to bet on. This means that contrarian beliefs can sometimes get more uptake than they deserve for status-competition reasons, and gives mainstream defenders an incentive to directly attack the social status of contrarians and their beliefs. Of course, gossiping about status also has the advantage that it's just easier than engaging on the object level, and is more fun, to most humans, most of the time.
ETA: To elaborate further on why contrarians attract the ire of the status-police, I think adopting contrarian stances tacitly signals both "I don't have what it takes to succeed according to the mainstream status hierarchy" and "I am ambitious, so I'm going to join this insurgent movement and try to overthrow the mainstream." This combination of weakness and ambition seems to paint a target on one's back.
I agree with Hitchens. "Picture all experts as if they were mammals." I don't know Chris Kavanagh's background, but I suspect he wasn't raised in a fundamentalist household or some place else where as a child the near experts/authorities were decidedly irrational and you painfully discovered this over the course of several years.
The way we make sure experts are experting correctly is by asking them to show their work. If they can't do that, they're not any different than fundamentalist parents who won't let their kids watch Thundercats because "it's Satanic." It's the same appeal to authority.
Having the "right answer" but not being able to show your work is not really having a right answer - it's just being lucky. The experts were lucky here.
There are people who get into bad beliefs because they trust the wrong sorts of authorities, such as someone raised in a fundamentalist Christian household who trusts bad Christian apologetics implicitly. But there are also people who get into bad beliefs because they have an overinflated sense of their ability to analyze arguments and end up getting fooled by bad reasoning because there's significant gaps in their understanding that aren't typically there for subject matter experts.
At the end of the day, we all have to mix in our trust of experts - no one is recapitulating the entire history of science in their basement - and our ability to critically analyze arguments. People have to develop a good sense of when to be humble about their own abilities, how to determine trustworthy sources, and when to be able to invoke their independent judgment. This takes skill. While in some places, I'd be more worried about people just trusting the wrong sorts of people and being too willing to defer to authorities, at Astral Codex Ten, by far and away the bigger risk is people thinking they're smart, independent thinkers who have figured out something through their own independent investigation professional scientists have not. And most of the time when someone thinks this, the problem is them.
As a general rule, if you think something that appears to go against a developed consensus of academic experts, you should have good reason to think you really have your ducks in a row in understanding the subject, and in particular, that you fully understand the position you're disagreeing with. This is not common. Otherwise, sometimes you need to bite the bullet, suspend judgment, and just wonder what other people see that you do not.
>getting fooled by bad reasoning because there's significant gaps in their understanding
Those gaps will be in different places for different people, so the more arguments you encourage the more of these will be closed up. And it's based on the idea that experts are unable to explain those gaps when asked.
I think the idea that increased exposure to more arguments helps people better understand subjects is naive and easily refuted by the existence of large pseudoscientific movements. Their problem isn't lack of exposure to arguments, but lack of ability to critically evaluate them. People sometimes think they can "investigate" a subject, and in doing so get persuaded to believe poor ideas. COVID has a good chance of being the most notorious example of this of our lifetimes. "I did my own research" is a pejorative quip for a reason.
Regarding experts explaining things, sometimes it's just hard to get across an idea that takes a lot of educational background to build up. We're bathed in a pop science environment that gives people lay explanations, often oversimplifications, sometimes to the point of being wrong, that might the impression that explaining a complicated scientific topic is easy, but it's often not.
I have a dual background in biology and psychology. I see popularly discussed ideas in those fields all that time where my reaction is, "Eh. Not quite right. Close enough, I guess." Whatever your field is, I bet you experience the same thing. I think you should take that experience and reflect that this happens all the time. People, when reasoning well, get things on a level that's close enough when combined with having a good sense of who the experts are and knowing when to trust that their views are probably the reasonable ones.
I'm not sure that the existence of large pseudoscientific movements refutes the idea that exposure to more arguments is a net positive. I agree that some people may not be helped by exposure to more arguments (i.e. the old 'you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themself into'), but on average the effect may still be beneficial. Kavanagh's argument seems to go even further and suggest that exposure to more arguments not only fails to help people but it may even be detrimental.
>Their problem isn't lack of exposure to arguments, but lack of ability to critically evaluate them.
Which is a lack of argument one level up. You can argue about techniques for evaluating arguments too.
An expert may not be able to fully explain a thing without background, but they should be able to point to something that explains the background well and say "that years-deep pile of information is what you're missing". Maybe they can even point to a particular thing and say "that piece covers the cliffnotes." I don't expect an interpreter to teach me the whole language to explain why I'm reading a translated idiom wrong, but I expect them to be able to say "that's wrong for this reason, this is right, the proof is in the pile."
I minored in chemistry. As a result, I have, or at least had, an understanding of quantum mechanics you'd expect a chemistry minor to have. That is to say, I understand it a lot better than most people and even know why certain equations are the way they are and can use them in practical problems, but I don't really get it like physicists working in QM do. I know enough to see how most of the pop science writing on it is operating on the level of metaphors that aren't *really* explaining it, but not enough to think I've got the full material down.
I, like basically everyone, just sort of trust that it's right and that it keeps making sense beyond the level at which I understand it to make sense. Unless you're a Ph.D. in a related field, I suspect you are probably in the same boat.
Crucially, I think we're right to have this attitude. If someone claims to be able to debunk QM, we're right to reject them unless we pick up signs that academic physicists view the critique as serious. It's helpful to know that if we really wanted to, we could engage with a body of evidence out there and, if we had sufficient time and ability, understand it, but I don't think we actually need to have the time or ability to hold this stance. Further, because the amount of knowledge out there vastly exceeds our time and ability, we necessarily hold this attitude towards most things. We test the fences of our knowledge as good critical thinkers, but most of the time, we just accept what we know about the world as received understanding from people who probably know what they're talking about.
The nice thing about sciences like chemistry or math is the results are pretty inequivocal. If you're using the equations in practical problems, you can observe whether or not they work. If you're not in a position to observe them, it doesn't much matter; Aether Theory explains the world I interact with nearly as well as quantum theory. The only loss is when you reach a point where the two disagree, at which point one theory will accurately predict the outcome and the other one won't. No need for trust, no loss for mistrust. That's supposed to be what forms consensus in the first place.
The trouble is, 'expertise' is a status boost, and thus subject to politics. There's an incentive for political parties to declare like-minded people 'experts', and if a layperson has no way to question that expertise, then 'the experts' can be packed to agree on whatever topic you want them to. The Decameron includes a tale about a 'Bologna judge', pumped out by the state from a 14th century diploma mill. (They steal his pants.) It's an old strategy.
> away the bigger risk is people thinking they're smart, independent thinkers who have figured out something through their own independent investigation professional scientists have not.
Your frame is all wrong. Curious people might be curious and might write about their curiosities and wonder how experts go to the conclusions that they got to. This is different than "people who think they've figured something out through their own independent investigation that professional scientists have not."
The constant vibe from the DtG crowd is that spoken curiosity is evidence of thought crime because it sounds too much like the people DtG believe are their opposition.
If you asked Scott, or any Bayesian, about a belief, they would give you a probability and they would adjust it as evidence presents itself.
You have this very naive idea that there's two categories of people: (1) DtG fans who appropriately pedestalize expertise and (2) the rest of the Internet that's 100% sure that their carnivore diet is the superior to every other diet.... or something like that.
In reality this is all more dimensional, and the disingenuous way you frame this elides obvious counter-examples readily observable if you would only look or ask.
Scott, I thought that your exploration of Ivermectin was fascinating and insightful.
Trashing you, because you did the work to understand why the studies revealed what they did, seems like just a few steps away from declaring that you're an apostate
Hm. I would have thought that Kavanagh's take was Bad on Purpose to Make You Click, and that there aren't actually people who think that way for real. I haven't seen any evidence otherwise.
A very reasonable response to a numbskull. Not a numbskull in the stupidity sense, but numbskull in that this K individual is clearly nothing more than a rabid attack dog on Twitter. The precise type of individual in the secondary role of mob leader's lieutenant for a witch burning.
This is a great post that contains a lot of truth. And yet … I also see a grain of truth in Kavanagh’s position. Like, I get emails every single day from P=NP crackpots and quantum mechanics crackpots and now AI crackpots too. Some of them probably *would* be better off never trying to think for themselves again, and just Trusting Science and Trusting the Experts. Sure, the experts are sometimes confidently wrong, but not as consistently so as they are! And for my part, I can’t possibly write 25,000 words to explain why each and every crackpot is wrong. As a matter of survival, I *have* to adopt a Kavanagh-like heuristic: “this person seems like an idiot.”
Where Kavanagh goes off the rails, and badly so, is here: if *someone else* spends 25,000 words to explain painstakingly why the experts’ knee-jerk instinct was right after all, then the only proper response is undying gratitude.
But P == NP and Quantum Computers are not culture war topics with plenty of value questions and policy decisions depending on them, and Computer Science is infinitely more certain and crystal-clear than whatever ungodly intersection that the question of Ivermectin sits on between Medicine, Microbiology and Epidemiology.
The consensus on P == NP and Quantum Computers is settled since the 70s/80s, while the "consensus" that Ivermectin is bad is barely 2 years old.
When I see how humankind has managed to make culture war issues out of whether it's a good idea to teach reading through phonics, or who should be Harry Potter's girlfriend [1], I despair of our ability not to make P vs NP beliefs into a test of who is racist/sexist/etc. too. Worse things have happened at universities.
That's exactly why I wish more experts blogged! (Or tweeted ... but Twitter's terseness and terrible conversational norms can make it too hard to tell who has actual expertise, and who merely the trappings of it.)
To your point, I find myself sympathetic to this sometimes because quantum mechanics/computational complexity/deep learning are sufficiently mathematical topics that realistically, if you don't have a significant amount of prerequisite numeracy, attempting to deploy reason will probably actually make you worse off a lot of the time.
In school I used to read the blog of, a certain math/physics truther blogger who proved that pi=4, as a guilty pleasure. Though he did have some uh, psychological comorbidities, that probably hindered his success in this area, what struck me at the time was that this was somebody who was at least making a spirited attempt at understanding and didn't have the right toolkit to not random walk himself into wronger than wrong territory.
In one of Feynman’s interviews he has this bit about if I try to teach you about magnets in terms of rubber bands, eventually you’re going to ask how the rubber bands pull together, and soon I’ll have to make my way back to electrical forces, and electromagnetism is the thing I’m trying to avoid having to explain in the first place, and so on.
I’m sure you know the crank ecosystem better than I, but I’ve always suspected that there are a lot of people with a “popular science” amount of background who try to figure out how the rubber bands pull together and shoot off in the wrong direction.
On the one hand, there just really isn’t a good way to make a lot of this stuff more reducible, so I think there’s an argument to "just leave this one to the scientists, bud."
On the other hand, telling people they can only start asking questions after they’ve taken several years of math courses isn’t very democratizing, and it’s the scientists (and journalists purporting to translate for them with fidelity) that are giving you all these half-true explanations in the first place! Just what are they hiding, anyway?
I want to believe good science communication is the way out of this trap, e.g., for physics maybe like “The Theoretical Minimum” series is about as good as you can do to give people enough scaffolding to bear the weight of reasoning without breaking their spirit entirely.
I think you've got it. No one - at least not Alexander (and I have to call him that when writing to you) - is saying that everyone should write 25,000 word post to spread Enlightenment, no matter what. Everyone has their own demands and hierarchies of value. Sometimes all you can say is "I disagree with you about that", or "I think you're wrong, and you may want to look into that more closely, and I'm sorry I don't have the time to answer in full".
What is wrong is to tell people they are wrong even to ask the question, much less to run down others for answering it.
This makes me think a contrarian marketplace or database would be useful; ask a bunch of smart people to give probabilities to various wild theories that experts dislike, so you can see which are the reasonable ones worth looking into and which ones are wild.
No!! The actually heavy lifting was done by The Cochrane Review, not by Scott!!
SA pretended to do heavy lifting (or maybe he actually thought he was doing it - I am not assigning intent). But he was unwilling to do it with the real expertise of an expert nor up to the quality standards of an expert.
Yeah, you're basically right. But maybe you've put too much energy into the question of ivermectin? Sure there are still people who argue, but I think that after six months of honest debate in 2020, the answer became pretty darn clear. There's really a LOT of evidence that it doesn't work as claimed.
ISTM that the only really convincing answers on this came from RCTs. It's so, *so* easy to fool yourself into seeing what you want to see in noisy data, and medicine is just chock full of noisy data.
To defend Chris very slightly - after reading the ivermectin article I almost commented something like "a quick trip over to Alexandros' website makes it pretty clear that he's employing motivated reasoning and is 100x less impartial than Scott is on this topic... did this really deserve >10,000 words?"
Looking back, I recognize that's a pretty unhelpful thing to say, and that Scott deserves a lot of credit for his thoroughness. But I get the impulse to think it kind of sucks that Alexandros's arguments get so much respect and airtime.
The fact that Scott wrote *this* article in addition to the original just goes to show how much he cares about the value of steelmanning. Respect.
I think it comes down to a value judgment where he operative questions are: “does every argument need to be treated seriously?” And “is treating obviously motivated reasoning seriously more likely to legitimize it or debunk it?” I think Chris and Scott could have a great conversation about this and would answer differently based on value judgments.
The Nazis (or at least some of them) believed that the Aryans were descended from the Atlanteans. Some of today's Russian supremacists believe that Russians are descended from the Atlanteans.
I personally don't believe that believing in Atlantis necessarily makes you a racist, but there's some overlap.
If that’s the reason, it’s pretty stupid. “Some racists believe that so if you believe it you are a racist.” This is the sort of thing that winds up with “racist” not meaning, y’know, actually racist...
I think the general reasoning goes like this: "You have no problem believing that the Parthenon or the Pantheon or the Chartres Cathedral were built by the people who live there, but when it's the Sphinx or Teotihuacan or Baalbek or Machu Picchu, all of a sudden the local peoples are savages who couldn't have put a stone above the other without external help, just like the 19th century ideas of Great Zimbabwe being built by a lost white civilization, because *of course* native Africans couldn't have built anything impressive on their own".
I don't know if this is a fair assessment. A prejudiced notion that non-European peoples are less capable might play a role for some Ancient Astronaut/Atlantis theorists, but greater familiarity with European monuments might be enough, not to mention there's more historical accounts surrounding them. Most people reading Hancock or Von Daniken would find it hard to believe that Stonehenge and Westminster Abbey were built by the same lost civilization, with all the millennia that passed in between, but might be willing to believe that the Egyptian and Aztec pyramids were, even though the gulf of time between them is about the same.
Re: trapped priors, this post o' mine might be of interest: <https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/02/04/just-in-time-bayesianism>. In particular, given Laplace's rule of succession, if you've been bitten by a dog before, your probability of a dog biting you is 2/(n+2), where n is your number of interactions. But then in expectation by the time you halve that, you've received another 2 dog bites. So the optimal thing is to not gather more evidence.
I’m trying to go up a level and think about why otherwise reasonable people, who would probably agree in the abstract that evaluating evidence is important, are motivated to take such a hard-line stance in favor of expert institutions. Not sure if I’m using this totally correctly, but what event traps your ‘trust experts’ prior?
Is it a result of some conspiracy arguments being too weak?
For example, maybe the protracted discourse over climate change trapped many educated liberals’ priors about scientific institutions because there is a high degree of consensus among climate scientists, the slow decline of many natural systems has been emotionally burdensome, and for a long time the most high-profile opposition arguments were not necessarily the most convincing ones (i.e., instead of nuanced discussions about the propriety of making certain forecasting assumptions, there was a lot of “Sure was cold this winter…”) Do people bias themselves toward absurd-sounding conspiracies and hindsight bias away the actual conspiracies and examples of institutional failure?
Or is it a result of some conspiracy arguments being too strong?
For example, I’ve been in plenty of arguments online, and occasionally the resistance you encounter on an issue you are confident about is unexpectedly strong. Your interlocutor just has this endless pile of argument trails and bunny paths to traverse, and while they individually are dubious enough upon inspection that you don’t update very much on them, they are too numerous to dispatch in any reasonable time frame as you go around and around and down the forking fractalline paths of disagreement. If you’re like me, you may begin to feel a psychologically damaging sense of epistemic uncertainty. I can imagine that instead of either getting overtaken by the force of logic or going back and developing some more general probabilistic heuristics that keep you from arguing into infinity, many people would like to just throw up their hands and say “Nobody seriously believes that birds are fake! I can’t exhaustively prove you wrong on every single thing but I know that it’s true! Even if I argue forever, your prior is trapped in bird fakehood and you’re still going to think the evidence supports you, so it’s pointless to even try! But I’m a humble and rational person so I’ll just defer to so-and-so who’s a Harvard professor and they say…”
Or something else? Or is that just not the right frame for this kind of thing entirely?
I think the unsaid, but implied, message to Scott is something like this:
Dude, we have the power now, we won the culture war. We now can just ban the other side on Facebook, on Twitter, anywhere in the media, get them fired from their jobs, get any venue to cancel their speeches or be burned down by somebody we certainly know nothing of but who will definitely show up to burn whatever we say needs to be burned. Soon there will be the law declaring their view illegal, and taking licenses and professional degrees from anyone who proclaims the heresy. Stop being a cuck and pretending like those are people and you have to argue with them. It's embarrassing and diminishes the Great Victory. People like you may cause them to occasionally be taken seriously and then we'd have to fight the culture war again, and we want to just enjoy the spoils of victory. We do not want to declare you the enemy but you are really walking on the thin ice here...
In other word, however I hate this, I must admit sometimes all these pomo critical theories are right - sometimes it's not about the facts but about the power.
I wonder, do the wokes really believe that they would implement their utopian theocracy without a fight? Or are they itching to graduate from imaginary nazi-punching on Twitter to IRL nazi-shooting?
Well, their constant moaning about gerrymandering and court-packing and how the police isn't abolished yet suggests otherwise. I suppose that some might think that enough propaganda and cancellations would overcome these minor obstacles, but this doesn't seem to be the primary attitude.
This is always like that. In a totalitarian state, the state controls everything, and yet it is obsessed with surveillance and constantly reminds every citizen that the spies, wreckers and saboteurs are behind every corner, the enemy could be your neighbor, relative or coworker, and every tiniest transgression should be immediately reported otherwise the whole system would collapse and descend into utter chaos. Obsession with control always comes with paranoia. And the more is the control, the stronger is the paranoia. This is actually one of Stalin's official theories as a political scientist, that the closer the society is to the Communism, the harder the class enemies fight against it.
Sure, but Stalin had actual total power, or as close to it as anybody ever did. The government, courts and police conformed to his every whim, and when somebody needed "cancellation", they usually ended up in the gulag, or with a bullet in the back of the head. The woke are only salivating at the prospect of such domination, and don't really have a straigthforward path from here to there.
> "I agree this might not have been the best use of my time, and I would accept this criticism from anyone except Kavanagh - who’s devoted his whole career to thinking about ivermectin and ideas closely aligned to it."
Probably a case of hyperbole not translating over internet; but what does this mean?
A quick search seems to have Kavanagh as a researcher in cognitive and evolutionary anthropology, writing articles about religion and ritual.
So I think that he has a day-job, but that he likes to put on his vigilante mask and go on twitter crusades after dark.
Might not be completely fair to say that his whole career is devoted thinking about ivermectin and so on.
Given that I (and probably most people) waste hours and hours on nonsense, all the "you spend too much time on X" critiques always seem completely empty.
Seconded. For some people, myself included, arguing on the Internet is a fun leisure activity that doesn't cost much money. (Unless you're Elon Musk, who spent $44 billion on his hobby of being a Twitter troll.)
Scott: As one scuba diver to another, where were those "pyramids"? I've heard of such things, but I've also heard reports by divers that didn't find the ones they saw all that impressive. From the photo, yours might be worth a trip sometime.
I learnt in my Indian philosophy class when reading about something new to you - first read without any analyzing on your part. Read the second time arguing along with the author. Then read a third time arguing against the author. Only after that form your opinion. Never blindly accept anything no matter the reputation of the author. Unfortunately a bit too time consuming in real world but does lead to a more nuanced view.
I agree that Chris Kavanagh's comments are not great, but I'm going to go against the grain and say that he actually is groping towards something real. There's a certain type of bad argument that the Rationalist community is susceptible to: it's hard to explain, but it's essentially an argument where the details are correct but the whole thing, when viewed from a distance, doesn't hold together.
The Atlantis thing mentioned in the post is one of them; Ivermectin, too. Some others are the aquatic ape hypothesis, the bicameral mind, and Slime Mold Time Mold's recent posts about obesity.
I think the reason the Rationalist community has such a hard time refuting these is that the problem isn't the individual sub-arguments, but the way the whole thing hangs together, and the Rationalist community mindset is all about examining and testing the smallest details.
I also think that people like Kavanagh aren't (in this instance) just arguing "weird arguments by weird people are weird and stupid", but trying to express a heuristic for dismissing these bad arguments. In this case, listening the experts or dismissing things because they sound dumb are actually viable strategies. The problem is that those strategies have their own failure modes.
It's interesting that you don't mention non-mainstream topics that are actually controversial in the ratsphere, like HBD or redpill or UFOs, and instead mostly go for ones that it didn't have a hard time dismissing whatsoever.
Thanks for the detailed response Scott, I think you've misinterpreted some of my arguments and have pegged me a bit wrong (I don't think I've ever written anything on Ivermectin outside of some tweets?). I'll try to reply properly in time but I think the anecdote you offer at the start is very telling of the divide between us.
To explain, I too read Graham Hancock when young and found some of his arguments compelling. From your description you could not locate any good criticism and ended up scuba diving to investigate ruins firsthand, learning geology from the ground up, and going on "a five year wild-goose-chase". It sounds like this was a valuable experience but perhaps one that left you a bit bitter at what you describe as sneering anti-conspiracists.
For me on the other hand, I did locate a bunch of good criticisms both in the skeptic community and from relevant experts, even though this was young internet time. Part of this (I think) was from following the disparaging comments on Hancock's blog back to the people he was disagreeing with. I did not scuba dive in ruins (though it looks fun) but I did learn about how superficially compelling it was to present alternative histories as forbidden knowledge and that the actual history was drier but more interesting& complex. I did not come away from this resenting Hancock or people that found him convincing. Indeed, I think he is both sincere and good at making his arguments appear compelling to a lay audience. I did gain an appreciation of the frustration of experts he disparages who have dedicated their careers to the topics he covers though.
I also don't think I would have the same intuition you have that personally exploring the ruins would be informative. I think that would actually be likely to skew my perspective as it feels like it would deliver potentially inaccurate intuitions and that it would require already having the expertise to properly assess what you are seeing. I still do think it sounds and looks fun though, so maybe you made the better choice ;).
In any case, I think it's interesting that we both took rather different lessons from our early encounters with Hancock but maybe a place we do both agree that there is value to detailed critics laid out for a curious lay audience by experts who have an alternative opinion.
So your response is basically that you‘re better at “looking into it” than Scott because you read the right experts on the Atlantis issue rather than risk being corrupted by a scuba trip? I find your attempt to stigmatize “personally exploring” a topic to be so, so lame. No one elected you arbiter of what others get to personally explore.
Also, you claim you didn’t come away from reading Hancock with resentment for exploring alternative ideas but on the Ivermectin breakdown your tweets contain plenty of resentment. I’m not sure how you reconcile this in your mind. How does a discerning arbiter of personal exploration like yourself determine which topics are worthy of sneer?
Nope. My point is that I didn't come away thinking skeptics and experts were sneering and dismissive but rather that they had detailed rebuttals and their positions had been largely straw manned by Hancock. As for how I decide my tweets and their tone... it depends on the topic, my mood, and what I am responding to. I was probably a little bit harsher to Scott than I needed to be ;).
Thanks for this. It’s a fitting coincidence that you “took rather different lessons” from your shared experience with Hancock, as it neatly symbolizes my criticism of this post which is that Scott extrapolates:
- his *own* (personality and intellect based) response to the “ridicule” strategy (to double down on “pro-skub”) + his own thirst for “reasonable explanations”
- to the rest of the “budding conspiracists” one step from the ledge.
It is imperative to treat people with empathy—as though they are “one good deed away from” seeing the light—but i still don’t see how Scott effectively addresses the claim that fanning silly flames of controversy ends up harming more not-like-Scott-conspiracists than it helps the like-Scott-ones.
This particular case might be a little different though as it seems you and scott both differ on how reasonable-at-face-value Ivermectin claims are in the first place. (Fwiw I agree w Scott, 30 “positive” studies ain’t a joke, and where better to painstakingly review them than in a space full of rationalists?)
I thought Scott's initial amateur meta-analysis was a good effort, especially given it isn't his field. And I didn't dismiss ivermectin out of hand either, I simply argue that it is not a special case but a very common one that you find when a treatment becomes favoured by partisans/contrarian or anti-vaxx communities. The way I put it on Twitter at the time was like this:
"So many ineffective treatments follow this pattern:
1) promising effect in in vitro studies
2) positive findings in small scale, low quality studies (often conducted by advocates)
3) mixed/weaker effects in medium quality studies
4) very weak to no effects in high quality studies
When you see this pattern over and over, you don’t get overly excited when you see results from 1 & 2 (& 3). This isn’t some new discovery from the COVID era. It’s an extremely well established pattern."
Scott's initial pass of the studies took 29 and reduced it to 11. That's already a huge red flag. 2/3rd are so low quality or questionable they would be better to discard? These are the kind of things that relevant experts were flagging early on about ivermectin and why they were very critical of the hype. Not to mention that so many of the advocates were previously advocating hydroxychloroquine in the exact same manner. The constant refrain from relevant experts was not we need to stop any trials into ivermectin! It was 'the current evidence doesn't justify promoting it & we need to wait until better evidence from large well controlled trials is in.' After those results came in the conclusion shifted to, even being generous, existing treatments and vaccines offer stronger evidence of efficacy. This wasn't experts just being dismissive and rude it was them responding to the overall quality of evidence vs. the strength of the claims being made AND the fact it was being presented as an alternative to vaccination.
Nor is Scott correct in presenting my position as being knee jerk adherence to institutional authority and prestige, if it was I should have been swayed by John Ioannidis over Gideon back when they disagreed. I was not. Indeed, I'm someone published advocating for Open Science reforms who largely agrees with Stuart Ritchie, Ben Goldacre, and Scott(!) when it comes to the possibility of distortions in scientific research.
> Scott's initial pass of the studies took 29 and reduced it to 11. That's
> already a huge red flag. 2/3rd are so low quality or questionable they
> would be better to discard?
If you randomly picked 29 small studies on some random uncontroversial medical topic, how many of them do you think Scott would discard as being, by his standards, so methodologically sloppy or statistically underpowered that they don't really tell us anything useful?
That’s not all that was occurring here. There was also the fraud. But even granting this is a likely outcome for any medical topic that would mean, in general, Scott should have even less reason to find an advocate website listing 30 positive studies at all impressive.
This is the critical point for me: one has to be able to recognize it as "amateur" hour.
But even if this was an undergraduate paper in a class in how to do meta-analysis, it would not have received an A. It might have been a C- with invitation to rewrite.
As someone who was reasonably impressed by Scott's effort but also who doesn't know any better, what would he have to change to get an A at undergraduate level
I mean the most obvious issue is it just isn't a meta-analysis. A meta-analysis is a fairly specific thing and the post in question, if I recall correctly, simply doesn't follow the standard methodology (multiple reviewiers, systematic review based on specific criteria, etc.) or provide the typical measures (e.g. heterogeneity, funnel plots, etc.)
Scott wrote a blog post that is meta-analytic. It looks at multiple studies, considers their methodologies and pools some effects. But if he were to try to edit what he did into a paper and publish in a journal, he would and should get rejected. As a right and proper meta-analysis, it's unsalvagable. But this is no material criticism, he doesn't present it as such.
Thanks for your response, which is much kinder than I deserve (sorry, I was pretty upset last night).
"I don't think I've ever written anything on Ivermectin outside of some tweets?"
My understanding is that you run a podcast which focuses on conspiracists and related people. I did check your Twitter and it seemed to have a lot about Weinstein. If this is just a coincidence and usually you don't focus on this kind of thing, then I guess I'm wrong and I apologize.
"For me on the other hand, I did locate a bunch of good criticisms both in the skeptic community and from relevant experts, even though this was young internet time. Part of this (I think) was from following the disparaging comments on Hancock's blog back to the people he was disagreeing with."
This was around 2000 for me, and I'm having trouble remembering it, but I don't remember a blog with comments, which I think I would have found pretty interesting. Are you thinking of this one https://grahamhancock.com/blog/page/13/ that started in 2014, or was there an earlier one I missed? I also think it's very possible I was just terrible at searching the Internet at the time and failed to find good criticisms which did exist.
"I also don't think I would have the same intuition you have that personally exploring the ruins would be informative."
Yeah, I don't want to justify this as the best use of my time / investigational resources, it was just something I dreamed of for a long time and eventually got to do. It actually did prove unexpectedly useful, because it helped me see that there were lots of similar rocks that looked very pyramid-like but were still recognizably natural all around it, such that it was more obvious that this was the most artificial-looking of a set of natural phenomena. Some people had said this before, but for whatever reason it sounded like cope when they said it and seemed true when I saw it.
I think I probably interpreted your Twitter thread as more hostile than it was, for which I apologize.
I am familiar with night posting and I am certainly not above taking shots so entirely understand. I enjoyed reading despite our disagreements and I do think my own tone can sound harsher than I intend so I'd be a hypocrite to complain about that.
As per my podcast, yes it does focus on guru-types, and conspiracy mongering is one of the core recurrent features we encounter, but on ivermectin specifically we haven't actually dwelt on the topic very much. Actually, it would have worked better as a subtweet, as we have a 3 hr odd episode with Gideon discussing the Together trial and Alexandros' treatment of it that we have yet to properly edit together. We've covered the Weinsteins a lot as they are archetypical exemplars of the kind of modern secular guru that we are interested in so I'd say the zing would have landed better if you had not tied it so tightly to ivermectin!
I read Hancock's book when I was a teenager in Northern Ireland so that would have been at the latest in the early 2000s. So I think it could have been Hancock's forum or some website he had up? Alternatively, I think the version of his book I read had a segment on a response to a critical BBC Horizon documentary and some criticisms from his son of radiocarbon dating and the dismissive attitude of some named experts. I can't remember exactly now but I remember reading some early internet websites on the topic and discussing it in forums.
The scuba image is awesome and I'm sure it was quite the experience so as above, I don't know that my intuitions served me better than yours in terms of quality of life experiences gained from engaging with Hancock. And I was disparaging on Twitter in that thread but I was responding in part to the frustration of encountering a lot of 'analysis' on ivermectin that to me read as bog standard partisanship and anti-vaxx conspiracism adopting scientific cosplay. As such I may have been a bit 'triggered' reading your conclusion as saying that stuff like Alexandros and the related ecosystem has produced is useful and would be good for scientists to imitate. I think we might differ on that point more substantially but it was probably unfair of me to present it as if that was your main takeaway.
I just want to say that it's incredibly refreshing to see people like you and Scott that attempt to *de* escalate from an exchange that started out a little heated and emotional, rather than escalate it further.
I'd like to agree that Chris's tone can be more harsh than he intends, that's part of his charm. His podcast persona is one of an angry mad genius, while Arthur plays the calmer straight man. The pod is delightful, and everyone should check it out.
Wait, you aren't some other Chris Kavanagh, who just happens the have the same name as that charming podcast guy I listen to sometimes? :-D Well, I must say that I have even more respect for you now for your having been such a charitable interlocutor in this thread.
"Just asking questions!". Just because a question is falsifiable doesn't make it scientific. Instead the implication goes the other way: scientific questions are falsifiable, but also ideally focus on relevant extensions to current knowledge without unnecessarily complicating the picture. The Ivermectin/Atlantis hypotheses are just daft, but yet, falsifiable. I'm with Chris on this one.
Ivermectin is hardly "daft" at the same level as, say, curing Covid by putting magic healing crystals under your pillow. As Scott points out, several early studies and meta-analyses found that it seemed to be effective, and several countries adopted it as a treatment on the strength of those studies.
The people who initially said that it seemed promising, were respectable mainstream scientists publishing in peer-reviewed journals, not random MAGA hatters without medical credentials. Based on later studies and more comprehensive analysis, the initial optimism unfortunately didn't pan out, but it at least *started out* as a legitimate, plausible hypothesis.
I wonder how close we got to an alternate timeline in which Donald Trump came out *against* Ivermectin during that early phase, then mainstream scientists felt duty-bound to defend the validity of those studies, and then when later studies cast doubt on its effectiveness, they couldn't back down anymore because that would be giving aid and succor to the enemy, and so hospitals kept giving Invermectin to Covid patients while MAGA hatters were standing outside the hospital waving "you're a human not a horse" signs, and conspiracy theorists came up with stories about Invermectin pills secretly containing 5G transmitters..
I remember a friend going on a massive rant about how Fauci is terrible, how lab-leak theories are suppressed, and how Ivermectin is great if only we looked into these studies in India. He also said he didn't trust the vaccines and they were a scam by Big Pharma. It was the full conspiratorial mindset on display (and we don't even live in North America!)
I don't think the Ivermectin treatment was ever plausible in the sense that a known biological mechanism would act to suppress Covid infection. Sure, there were studies showing this or that effect, but the rational and scientific approach is not to consider all hypotheses equally. It is not that we should never consider the Ivermectin hypothesis, but that it should be near the end of the list. The rational thing to do is focus time and resources on the most promising lines of enquiry first. For exactly why this is important, see Sabine Hossenfelder "Why I lost faith in science" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu4mH3Hmw2o
Mostly, I like Scott's posts - they are thoughtful, well researched and well written. But this one seems like an emotional exercise in tribal signalling. His ego was hurt: "This is an admirably concise encapsulation of everything I despise". The tribe he is othering is "anti-conspiracists", partly because they target bothsiderism traps that Scott sometimes falls in.
Chris has a tendency to rant and rail against anyone (left, right, libertarian, wherever) who fails to flag the context of issues within the wider discourse, especially the "Just asking questions" sort, and especially when engaging with status seeking cranks like Alexandros (via Brett Weinstein).
It's a well-written essay, and logically I think you 100% have the better argument. But...I'm also a little sympathetic to the other side. People are people, and they don't always, or even mostly, work remorselessly rationally, and it is even somewhat less than fully rational to operate as if they do.
Thing is, you should try just dealing with cranks over and over and over again. A person of good will and optimism will *start off* as you did here, being careful and measured, taking each hypothesis no matter how implausible it seems to you and treating it with respect, gathering the evidence, working out the math, writing it down line by line so any reasonable person can see the point.
And then one of two things happen: (1) they say well that's all well and good, but here's *another* line of argument that leads to the same conclusion, so ha! or (2) yeah well here's this one little place where you skipped a step, so your whole argument is suspect (sort of the grammar/analogy Nazi's approach that says if you misspelled a keyword, or your analogy isn't perfect in some miinor way, it shatters every logical link). And they are just indefatigable. It takes them 30 seconds to think up a new challenge, and it takes you 6 hours to patiently refute it, and after a while the economics just kills you, and you give up and say something nasty and ad hominem.
Not only that, but the point is unfortunately sound that when you treat a crank argument as worthy of close attention and discussion, people *do* take that you're agreeing there's a chance what they're saying is right, regardless of how strongly you put your final conclusion that they are not. So you're saying there *is* a chance? It's just a theory, what you're saying? There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio...! and you realize that your patient deconstruction of the central hypothesis of their obsession has not discouraged them *at all*, not prodded them to any introspection and doubt, but rather perversely *increased* their confidence that the central hypothesis is true -- look! Expert/Famed Reasonable Man/Authoirty took this seriously enough to debate! I must be *this* close to the actual truth! Let's roll out v2.0 or v5.0 or v948669.0 and try again...!
It's not logical, it's not reasonable, but it's human nature. I don't know that there are any great solutions. I fully agree with you that people with knowledge and ability should try to be more patient, take seriously hypotheses that seeem on the surface absurd, or unlikely, or which are presented offensively, offend the shibboleths, et cetera. This is why I feel it's deeply wrong to use phrases like "climate change denier," which short-circuits engaging rationally with an ad hominem label, and it's equally wrong to accuse everyone who proposes differences in outcomes between the races and sexes may in some cases arise from perfectly innocent causes of irredeemable racist or sexism. So logically we should treat people who think vaccines are useless or evil, and folk remedies sure-fire, with enough respect to engage the argument reasonably.
But it's difficult, and I can't too much blame people who lost their cool and fling about regrettable contemptuous dismissal. Boo humans.
"The first agenda tries to scare college kids away from abusing Adderall as a study drug by emphasizing that it’s terrifying and will definitely kill you. The second agenda tries to encourage parents to get their kids treated for ADHD by insisting Adderall is completely safe and anyone saying otherwise is an irresponsible fearmonger. The difference between these two situations is supposed to be whether you have a doctor’s prescription. But what if you are the doctor, trying to decide who to prescribe it to? Then what?"
Here is what is troublesome. People mistrust the medical system. An air of suspicion surrounds any decision taken by the public health authorities (PHA). This should not be the case. Whose fault is it? The burden is then on the PHA to regain the population’s trust. In the meantime, Scott comes to the rescue.
To Scott’s point, the PHA must do a better job of communicating their findings or lack thereof to the public. Dry journals are not cutting it. Condescending expert opinions are not slicing it. PHA need to do some serious communication-soul-searching. It is of essence in public health, and they are losing the battle in this new era.
I agree with Chris that contending the conspiracy-theories give them an air of legitimacy. I also value the role of Scott in dissecting them, opening them on the table for everyone to see, and putting them
back into the refrigerator once they are declared dead. But I would advocate to do it swiftly, as to avoid more confusion generated by crowds agglomerating around the table.
Another point. Of course you would want to do critical thinking. Of course you would want to study the trials by yourself. But at the end of the day there is a reason we all are specialized - to advance faster as a society. Specialization is key to our prosperity and survival. I know, trusting is hard, but it is necessary.
BTW,
Ivermectin is not effective in preventing deleterious outcomes from COVID-19 infection, such as hospitalization.
Roughly 5,000 patients were randomized in the TOGETHER and COVID-OUT randomized controlled phase III trials, to ivermectin, placebo or other intervention (metformin, fluvoxamine in the COVID-OUT). Ivermectin did not improve outcomes. These results were published in the NEJM.
Just these two large trials falsify the hypothesis that ivermectin is effective in treating COVID-19.
“But there other trials that show a positive effect”. Yes, but they were of poor methodological quality, low patient sample. “But look at this other trial, it had 1,000 patients in it!” Even if that trial was of rigor, other large well-conducted trials fail to reject the null hypothesis of no difference between treatment groups. Then you do a meta-analyses, ideally including trials with similar study characteristics and primary outcome.
Now, if you try that hard to prove the effectiveness of a treatment, it is because there is no treatment effect.
No need to apologize for being curious, or wanting to properly vet the scientific evidence in an area of public interest (both that it’s a “greater good” to try to discern whether ivermectin works or not; and because quite a large segment of society were happily subscribing to the “conspiracy theory”…this was not a couple of joes with foil hats and soap boxes on a street corner). When something is that prevalent, the concept of “I’m not gonna dignify that question with a proper answer” doesn’t suffice.
In general, I am in complete agreement with you, and against Kavanaugh. I’ve listened to Kavanaugh’s podcast and been extremely turned off by his tendency to psychopathologize his ideological opponents, in lieu of just debunking their arguments. ‘My opponent is an ignorant fool’ is a deeply satisfying argument to make, but it’s never as convincing to hear as it feels to say. There is one thing I will say, though, and that is that there is a particular type of personality (Alexandros) who insincerely baits sincere thinkers (you) into public disagreement, and then takes advantage of that public disagreement to elevate their public profile. It’s a type of parasitism on good faith, and should be discouraged. So while I agree that it is good to respond to crackpots, I feel one should only do so when those crackpots are demonstrating a real sincerity, and one should try hard not to be used as a prop in their personal PR campaign.
Ironically it seems to me that both Weinstein and Kavanagh share a model of the world that Scott disagrees with. Namely, that most people are “sheeple” that can, by shame or censorship, be forced by the Establishment into holding the “correct” beliefs. Fundamentally Kavanagh and Weinstein just disagree about whether or not this a good thing.
Really appreciate this post, find myself very much agreeing with you. (For what it’s worth, I‘ve actually worked in PR, and one of the most important things good PR campaigns do is treat their audience with respect. Any condensation can be smelled a mile away.)
I think Kavanagh's argument is that there are a near infinite number of controversies to discuss. By choosing among them to focus on ivermectin and award it tens of thousands of words of blog space, Scott presents the impression that the controversy has more to it than it really merits. That's why it's "indulgent".
Now, let's be honest: most "readers" will not read all or even any of the 30+k words of Scott's ivermectin posts. The arguments in them actually are irrelevant except to the union of the sets of sufficiently bored, curious, pedantic or engaged readers, because they actually won't be read. The very existence of two giant posts about ivermectin will already push many readers and onlookers of this blog toward the belief that ivermectin is effective, even if Scott's conclusions were mostly the opposite.
For a fairly influential writer like Scott, the choice of topics is as important as the content. The menu matters as much as the dishes. By giving airtime to ivermectin, Scott is supporting it, whether he likes it or not. This may not be what we like, but it's the reality of how writing works, on the Internet or off it.
"The very existence of two giant posts about ivermectin will already push many readers and onlookers of this blog toward the belief that ivermectin is effective, even if Scott's conclusions were mostly the opposite."
Hmm? No? There are an infinite number of words on the Internet for and against pretty much everything under the sun. Scott himself has written both for and against many drugs, therapies, and ideologies. The mere existence of an article on the Internet about something is not support for that thing.
I looked at the top 100 or so tweets that included a link to Scott's "Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know". With one exception, all the tweets that contained some kind of evaluation of the post interpreted it as showing that any apparent effect of ivermectin on covid was not real. The only exception was a tweet by Alexandros Marinos. Many of the ~100 tweets were from big accounts, meaning that probably millions of people read at least one of the tweets. It therefore seems likely that Scott's post nudged a large number of people towards the anti-ivermectin position even if they didn't read the post. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that Twitter discussions about the post pushed nearly as many (or any) people towards the pro-ivermectin view.
This small twitter experiment is not strong evidence, but, then again, you provided no evidence at all for your claim that Scott writing about this topic made the pro-ivermectin position more popular.
OK, that makes sense. Let's try another way to understand Kavanagh's argument:
Do you think something "not even worth seriously proving wrong", or something "worth debunking, and thoroughly debunked" is more likely to be false? I strongly believe the former is seen by most people as more likely to be false, especially if they haven't heard of ivermectin before. (Never underestimate how narrow common knowledge really is.) By discussing ivermectin at such length, Scott moved it from the "not worth discussion" to the "worth debunking and debunked" category, which actually increases most people's credence in the idea.
Right but the whole point is that ivermectin effectiveness *belongs* in the "worth debunking and debunked" category. We're not talking about flat earth or something here; The entire reason for the original blog post is that there was (at least at the time) legitimate, informed disagreement to be had among reasonable people. And even with flat earthers and similar, the problem with them isn't that their ideas aren't *worth* proving wrong. The problem is that their ideas *have* been proven wrong repeatedly, for centuries, often by their own experiments, and they persist anyway.
Kavanagh's position might carry more weight with E.G. a q-anon, where it's difficult to imagine what "debunking" would even look like. (Let the believer privately interrogate everyone who works for the justice department?) Trying to stuff reasonable empirical questions into the "not worth discussion" category, though, will only ever do more harm than good.
"The very existence of two giant posts about ivermectin will already push many readers and onlookers of this blog toward the belief that ivermectin is effective"
If this were true and merely mentioning something made people think it was more legitimate then all of the anti-vaccine posts/podcasts/etc. should be causing more people to believe vaccines are legitimate, but I doubt that is true.
Or is it a special case where mentioning heterodox things, even negatively makes people more willing to believe it, while mentioning consensus things negatively makes people less willing to believe it? In which case, source?
There's an economic efficiency / due process point buried here. Imagine a prediction market: "Ivermectin will be de-bunked within 12 months". Scott decides he will only invest in a deep dive into conspiracy theories that markets say are > [10] [or] [20]% likely to be true. Seems like a good way to optimise Scott's time. That said, the way Scott writes about the 1-2% cases like ivermectin is incredibly entertaining. And some of those 1-2% cases have huge option value--what if Scott had found that ivermectin was solid? Huge benefit to society. So I'm all for Scott delving into conspiracies. But if I were in charge of grant or tax dollars, I would pass.
This reminds me of an argument with my brother, a scientist, about that Nature paper that said Covid couldn’t have come out of a lab because the binding was only 88% optimal. I am probably not getting get science jargon quite right, but the point being that if someone engineered Covid in a lab, they would do 100%. I said, this is illogical. If you want to use it as a weapon, maybe you intentionally do sub 90% because 100% looks suspicious. Or maybe you developed it by running it through lots of animals and letting it mutate or something. Or maybe you had every percent created from 88% to 100% but only the 88% leaked out. My brother, a scientist, would just say “I’m a scientist and you should trust scientists.” And I was like, “but I’m the one doing science here! Isn’t logic science?” Reading this I probably should have added “I may be bad at science, but at least I’m giving it a shot!”
I’m a scientist. I agree with you that you are doing science. I can also sympathize with your brother’s perspective. It is the lazy way out to just say “trust the scientists.” That said, it is genuinely hard to explain things sometimes. Sometimes there is no really fast or easy principle to explain. There might be layers upon layers of things to explain. And something that is very convincing to a scientist just might not be without the experience. For example, it is really hard to explain some things without the relevant math! So, lazy scientists who don’t specialize in communicating with the public say dumb things like this.
>Or maybe you developed it by running it through lots of animals and letting it mutate or something
That was pretty much the research proposal of the people believed most likely to have caused a lab leak, if there were a lab leak. IIRC, the plan was to start by adding a furin cleavage site, then run the modified virus through hamster, green monkey, and humanized mice to see if it would evolve into something highly contagious in humans.
Pointing to a virus that looks a lot like a natural bat coronavirus except that it's got a furin cleavage site and has evolved into something 88% optimal for infecting humans, and saying "no, that can't have leaked out from an intermediate stage in that planned experiment because it is only 88% optimal", seem almost unbelievably daft. Maybe I'm missing something?
And none of this rules out a natural origin. The whole point of the planned experiment was to see what might plausibly evolve naturally - the scientists at WIV were trying to race nature to the goal of a human-contagious bat coronavirus, so they could study it in the (hopefully safe) lab before the rest of us encountered it in the wild. It is certainly plausible that nature won the race in 2019. But someone saying they're *sure* it was nature, because it was too much of a kludge to be Science!, I'm not buying that.
> I’ve looked into this pretty hard and my conclusion is that conspiracy ecosystems fall prey to the exact same biases that all of us have, including experts and correct people. But experts and correct people have slightly less of them, have better self-correction mechanisms, and manage to converge on truth, whereas conspiracy theorists have slightly more of them and shoot off into falsehood. I think of this as very subtle: 0.99^infinity goes to zero; 1.01^infinity goes to infinity. We all struggle with the same tendencies. The trick is in understanding and controlling them.
I'd have assumed it would often just be a case of what social environment you were shaped by, what cues you were exposed to more. In other words, getting lucky. Since you just said yourself, the supposed good guys are often not actually putting in the cognitive work, but rather just looking down on people who believe differently than them. 1.01^infinity would end up at a legitimate correct belief, but these people don't have a legitimate belief.
Admittadly, I've probably given this much less thought than you have.
I can confirm that in Bulgaria, where I live, some people STILL tout ivermectin as a wonderdrug against COVID. I have heard (from close people) about different wild schemes how to dose animal ivermectin. I have heard experts on TV (back when the pandemic was something people actually cared about) advertise ivermectin. Thankfully, policies didn't change like in Latin America, but it is worth noting that Kavanagh lives in a bubble, where real-world people believe only what he believes, and the worst thing is the most unscientific thinking: "Do not replicate science. Do not question science."
That bubble does real life harm because the failure to interact with misinformed people does not change misinformation.
Note: I do not know of his work outside of this thread.
a) Atzlan is the mythical homeland of the Aztecs, but the versions of the story mentioned on the wikipedia page say it was somewhere to the north of Tenochtitlan, not in the sea. If there's a version of the Atzlan story that has it sinking into the sea then it's a non-central version.
b) I can't find any reference to Atala as a specifically Indonesian myth at all. (It's a bit weird to talk about an "Indonesian myth" anyway, Indonesia is a huge archipelago with a bunch of very different cultural traditions and religions.) Anyway, there seems to be an Atala in Hinduism which is the first of seven netherworlds below Earth (or part thereof). Other references I've found seem to be from specifically pro-Atlantis resources.
So I'd guess that the reason they sound a bit like Atlantis is that Atlantis cranks made them up... or at least, tracked down any mythical place that starts with an "A" and declared them to be versions of Atlantis despite having only the most tenuous connection to Atlantis like "was a place in the past" or "is in the downwards direction somehow".
I noticed this too. My first instinct is that all of them probably have the word for "Sea" in them, and this word is similar across languages because a lot of human languages share common ancestors and influence each other.
I think this is plausible at least a little bit in the case of Greeks and Indonesians (Alexander The Great reached India, and from there on trade and warefare would do the rest), but Aztecs developed in complete isolation from the old world as far as I know, so I don't know how could that possibly happen.
I think it's funny that a decent proportion of the comments boil down to some version of "he sucks, ignore him" which is exactly the kind of ad hominem dismissal Scott is arguing against.
I agree 100 percent. I just wanted to add that in fact finding missions like these it's important to not be overwhelemd by bad faith arguments (fall victim to a gish gallopp). And especially if you are a public figure it's worth considering if you are contributing to what could be perceived as a false balance (This would be my very favourable interpretation of Kavanagh's argument).
I am personally very concerned about climate change and I'd say that science has already definitively answered the question of man made climate change multiple decades ago. I find it hard to not get angry when I'm confronted with arguments of climate change deniers and I think the rise of these arguments may be partially the fault of enganging with bad faith arguments and creating the illusion of broader scientific disagreement on this topic. But I'm not sure whre the line between honest discussion and troll-feeding can be drawn, if there even is one.
“Climate change denial” is actually a great example. Because there is a tendency among the Kavanaghs of the world to flatten “denial” into a homogeneous mass that fails to differentiate between the wildest “it’s all a fake Commie plot” conspiracy theory and the mildest, most good-faith skepticism of the conclusions in the latest IPCC report.
I actually think you would be really well served to signal boost and engage with the latter while denouncing / ignoring the former. Even if you strongly disagree with the skepticism, the point is to admit that you haven’t (and probably never will) convince everybody, so it’s better to push the skeptical into the “reasonable scientific examination” camp instead of the “bonkers conspiracy cranks” camp. Rather than shame everyone that asks questions, point to the responsible way to ask questions. The best part about this is THAT’S HOW SCIENCE IS SUPPOSED TO WORK and the tough examination by skeptics might actually make the science better.
FWIW I DON’T think the question was “definitively answered decades ago” except in the very broadest sense of “anthropogenic CO2 release at current scales will result in a measurably warmer climate”, and the interim has been filled with a lot of necessary science. I mean, I doubt you can point me to a “decades old” model that‘s remained perfectly aligned with observed climate. And if you could there would be a hundred more that seemed equally credible “decades ago” that nevertheless have drifted badly from the mark by today.
And of course the science is related to but not synonymous with the still very much open practical and political question of “what, if anything, should we do about it”?
Does that make me a “denier” that makes you angry? If it does, then am I more likely to engage with you, or the actually “denialist” conspiracy cranks who would happily talk to me for hours about their skepticism?
I think we're pretty much on the same page here. I was mostly referring to people that straight up deny that the earth is getting warmer or deny the anthropogenic aspect. Both are in my eyes very much scientifically proven and discussion around it distracts from the actually imprtant question of "what should we do about it".
It's things like the inevitable facebook photo of snow in december with a "wheres your climate change now"-caption that I'm often not sure how to react to.
“ It's things like the inevitable facebook photo of snow in december with a "wheres your climate change now"-caption that I'm often not sure how to react to.”
Of course there’s the reverse, which are the posts that blame climate change any time there is any natural disaster… I don’t know how to react to that without getting called a science denier.
>There’s a Hindu legend (maybe apocryphal?) about an atheist philosopher who spends literally every second of every day denouncing God. When he dies, God welcomes him into the highest heaven, praising him as a great yogi - for he never let his consciousness stray from awareness of God even for one moment.
Reminds me of Ravana, who is the villain of the Hindu Ramayana, who hates Ram/God so much that he sees him in everything, eventually even himself, thus reaching enlightenment (while literally getting speared by Ram).
In the same vein, I think this is also the deeper reason why Christians see a fear of God as a good thing and there is advice like "cast all of your fear (and other emotions) onto God".
The thing about big Youtube streamers is that basically half of them were banned from Twitch for various reasons, so it's a pre-selected most-controversial subset of the successful ones.
This is just as tedious as the other online celebrity beefs. Either talk it out directly, or let it drop, but don't do this nonsense where you talk past each other and (deliberately?) misunderstand each other. Like if you're at the point of writing "What is his complaint? At the risk of putting words in his mouth..." and then doing that very same thing, maybe you could ask him? I understand that isn't good for the blog post writing business (which is why YouTube streamers do this, too. It's """content"""), but if this is where the blog has fallen to since 2015 it's probably time to pack it up anyway.
On something like Ivermectin or vaccines, I agree wholeheartedly with Scott. But what does one do about the complex of things such as QAnon, anti-semitic conspiracy theories, theories about the Masons, etc.? Theories like these have historically shown the potential to acquire real power and to carry out violent action. And, notoriously, they have proven resistant to falsification (because the lack of evidence for such theories' truth just shows how powerful the conspirators are--or that the person who can't see the evidence still needs their red pill, or whatever). I'm not asking this in a "gotcha" spirit. I'm genuinely curious what rationalists would say about this issue.
I think debunking anti-semitic conspiracies is worthwhile and important, as you’d be surprised at the number of people who repeat them unknowingly or with only a minimum of malevolence.
I have some fairly person experience with this, as a Jew who has managed to befriend and educate some people who had misinformed or even borderline racist beliefs.
Some people are unreachable, it’s true, but many people are able to be converted, and I don’t think loud and well-reasoned arguments for conversion away from conspiratorial thinking are ever worse than the alternative of silence.
Like I implied, I think for most people, on the issue of antisemitism, it is one of genuine ignorance.
If you teach people that associations between Jews, banks, and “usury” are because banking was considered dirty and unChristian in Europe such that only Jews could do it, and that Jews were forbidden from nearly every other profession, many people will take that context with them and cease spouting incorrect and racist ideas about “Jews charging interest while Christians give alms.”
The history of the Rothschilds is similarly more interesting and comprehensive than conspiracy theories about them.
Your results may vary, depending on how close you are to the person in question, how effective you are at communicating, and how deep the other person believes their conspiracies, but I don’t see why countering the belief is harmful.
For the most part, conspiracy theories do not disappear on their own merely because nobody addresses them. That lack of attention is worked into the theory as proof of suppression.
That strategy works unless and until haters in this mold acquire real power, which, as I said, they have historically shown what one might call a non-trivial potential to do. In which case, there's a "you may not be interested in them, but they are interested in you" aspect that can arise. And if they fail to acquire real power, perhaps there is room for crediting those who do not adopt the "ignore them" strategy for the security that allows others to claim that ignoring them was the way to go.
Perhaps, until they gain important support, from large numbers of people and/or from powerful institutions. At which point it may be too late. How to decide which groups have the potential to transcend the "best ignored" stage is part of what interests me about this question.
Question: Do some people claim to be rationalists (we should probably operationalize what we mean by rationalists) to hide the fact that they are not really rationalists at all?
I wasn't put out by the ivermectin post but I was somewhat put out by the post about the pro-ivermectin guy who wrote the equivalent of a long book's worth "just asking questions" about whether ivermectin works.
I can really recommend Graham Hancock's Netflix series "Ancient Apocalypse". Not only is it well directed and edited, and so shows the quality of argument you're up against when you're trying to debunk a conspiracy theory, but it's also good rationality training to try and form a mental counterargument that's better than "U R DUMB" (ideally at least DH4 on Paul Graham's scale of argumentation).
I imagine a detailed counterargument would involve a mathematical model of the precession of the equinoxes to the point where you could show that the claimed alignment of some temple entrances with a particular prehistoric date range and no other, is actually well within the range of more modern dates plus a small amount of "noise". But everyone who doesn't have a PhD in astrophysics is likely to get stuck before they get to this point.
More generally, as each new generation enters school, to the extent that we still teach using your own intellect rather than trusting authority, we will come across students who have not yet been taught for example the historical consensus on World War II and just how strong the evidence for some things is, and we'll occasionally get someone genuinely asking "Couldn't there be a grain of truth in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as some blogger on the internet suggested?". And then the answer is not U R DUMB but "actually, this topic has been studied very, very extensively - and here's the findings". (Yes, for each one of these honest questions there will be 100 trolls. I don't know what to do about that either.)
I think this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=341Lv8JLLV4 makes a decent effort at pointing out which statements in "Ancient Apocalypse" are insufficiently supported by evidence, and what are the known unknowns of relevant archeology. Unfortunately it's also a bit dry -- 2 hours of a guy speaking into a microphone.
"So tearing down is at least as good (or bad) in general as building up, since they are 2 sides of the same coin."
Your statement begs for a fitting aphorism: Cutting down a tree is a whole lot easier than putting it back together. Does this mean we can never cut down a tree? Of course not. Just that it's hubristically reckless to equate the two.
Humanity (on behalf of the vulnerable) has struggled way too diligently and collectively, bending the long, moral arc of the universe toward justice through imperfect, evolving institutions (such as democracy itself); we can't afford to be sanguine in the face of bros like Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Donald Trump, so flippantly eager to toss all this fragile progress into the trashbin, ostensibly for creative "disruption," but their willingness to dismiss/ignore history itself (such as the Mueller Report) is fueled mainly by their unchecked egos, and then bolstered blindly by cesspools of capitalism such as Fox News, today's version of Father Coughlin.
If someone wants to believe FDR steered us too deeply into socialism or whatever, fine. But this is a debate for the marketplace of ideas. It's not a legitimate excuse for casually toppling structures you declare unhelpful. Our social contract (not to mention our Constitution) cannot abide self-proclaimed saviors who find insurrections amusing and think fraud is a legitimate political tactic.
Scott, you are deservedly pissed about this. Frankly, so am I. I was on the fence about Ivermectin. You were not, but you were also determined to give Ivermectin a fair shake. And in so doing, you further convinced yourself and also talked me down off the fence.
Kavanagh says that we are both idiots; you for entertaining the question and me for being on the fence in the first place.
So, to paraphrase Ken White of Popehat, in response to Kavanagh, I say:
Just to add to the pile of interesting case studies, I was thinking about the recent UAP controversy last night. I think there’s an interesting parallel to the situation you describe regarding underwater pyramids.
This is obviously classic skeptic territory, and I think a still generally valid account is something like: “Your prior that extraterrestrials have visited earth and have entirely escaped notice *except once by accident by bystanders with relatively primitive technology* should be low enough that even a combination of several improbable mutually reinforcing events is still more likely to be coincidence after updating.”
But even so, if the events are multiple and mutually reinforcing enough, it’s enough to at least be curious enough to look into what the heck is going on, right?
Enter the USS Nimitz incident. Like Bem’s Psi research, it seems made to clear your evidentiary bars:
--Readings from multiple independent instruments (radar and FLIR camera)
--Eyewitness Reports from four people across two naval aircraft, corroborating one another for an observation period of about 5 minutes (!)
--Confirmed authenticity by the Pentagon, which added, they are "part of a larger issue of an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years"
Most of these end up kind of falling apart under closer scrutiny, but you can’t know that from the outset.
How do we assess the expert consensus on this matter?
Astronomers if asked will probably give you something like the reasoning I started with, which we’ve priced in already, and typically don’t spend a lot of time on the particulars, being that they aren’t privy to all the relevant information and I suspect are tired about getting asked about this sort of stuff. You can say that Adam Frank’s NYT piece gives you basically the right interpretation of the evidence, but it’s pretty easy to suspect that this is cope.
As far as I know, there isn’t a climate-change-esque study on consensus opinion on alien visitation (the best I could find was the Wiki on the Fermi paradox, which says “The consensus scientific view is that although they may be unexplained, they do not rise to the level of convincing evidence” but then cites an article that doesn’t actually prove that this is a consensus view) There seems to be some consensus that extraterrestrial life existing is likely, and per SETI:
“From the Report of the Astronomy Survey Committee, National Academy of Sciences, 1972: ‘More and more scientists feel that contact with other civilizations is no longer something beyond our dreams but a natural event in the history of mankind that will perhaps occur in the lifetime of many of us ... In the long run, this may be one of science’s most important and most profound contributions to mankind and to our civilization.’”
As for the people who have the most direct knowledge of the incidents, US Defense agencies, they are overall famously tight-lipped about the whole affair, given national security concerns, and the statements they do make can be kremlinologized in a variety of ways. Meanwhile, the people substantially running these programs and conducting research specifically in this area, like Chris Mellon, Lue Elizondo and Avi Loeb (along with Tom DeLonge, for some reason) are sounding the alarm about this and calling for more thorough UAP research.
The media, the conduit to the experts for the hoi polloi, for their part expressed their share of hedging and credulity, perhaps most notably on the 60 Minutes episodes, which featured interviews with Nimitz eyewitnesses. Plenty of popular podcasters hop on the hype train too, of course, notably for Kavanagh’s beat JRE, Sam Harris, and the Weinsteins.
Hm. Maybe there’s something to this after all?
Meanwhile, who is really doing the hard work of documenting evidence, picking apart all the threads of the Nimitz incidents, critically interviewing participants, and even making physical models and simulations (!) to test whether a faraway plane’s IR signature might look like a tic tac? As you might expect, it turns out to be a community centered around…the guy who programmed Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater?
Mick West (and the associated community at Metabunk) is a really good example of how a technically inclined but basically dilettantish person with a lot of free time (AFAIK, West is not a credentialed expert on aeronautics, military technology, astronomy, photography, etc…) can make real research contributions to questions that really do need answers and provide a valuable public service in doing so. I don’t see a ton of daylight between a lot of the work at Metabunk and the spirit of Scott’s posts on Ivermectin.
…I guess what I’m saying is that in hindsight a lot of this uptake in UAP was probably Chinese spy balloons.
Late to this, but I was also quite persuaded by Fingerprints of the Gods as a teenager and it took me a while to find the holes all on my own, no one ever explained more than 'because it's stupid,' so I try to make more of a presumption of good faith on seemingly-ridiculous beliefs, or at least an assumption of social pressure or the like.
It did lead me to things like Hamlet's Mill, which while also having an overarching bullshit conclusion is full of interesting tales, which in turn led me to things like the Kalevala and the Hero with A Thousand Faces. So, mixed bag!
I mostly agree with this article, but there is one point which I can object to a little bit.
Even if we don't know why giant underwater pyramids are there. That doesn't mean that Atlantis existed. Nor does it mean that aliens built them, nor does it mean that god built them. Nor does it mean that a society of some other intelligent species built them.
Well, I read/listen to you both. I agree with your argument and Chris seemed to be trolling more than trying to get at some truth. But I agree with Chris mostly about B. W. I can't wade through what I perceive as his Trump-like narcissism enough to feel like I can learn anything from him.
He is making a social argument, not an intellectual one. The best people know this to be true, you fool, you fool. Maureen Dowd is even making jokes about it, dude, how much more evidence do you need?
> It sounds kind of like fideism, the belief (more common in atheists’ imaginations than real religion) that somebody who reasons their way to belief in God is a sinner, because a real saint would have believed through blind faith, without having to reason.
Scott, thank you for pointing out that the notion of fideism and "blind faith" is an atheist strawman not found in actual religious thought. I have some thoughts on the subject, of why faith is in fact an integral part of everybody's life, even non-religious individuals, but it's too big to put in a comment so I made it into a response post.
I'm going to stick my neck out on this one and say that Scott is even more right than he knows. I think we should definitely question the Holocaust.
Now put the pitchforks down and please notice I didn't say "deny". My point is this: I have been an astronomy buff since I was a kid, but I still remember the wrenching feeling when, at age 23, I first looked down a telescope and saw the rings of Saturn for myself. It's hard to put into words, but it was something like "Oh my god, it's all real."
I had a similar experience, though much less pleasant, when I read "Lying about Hitler", Evans account of the David Irving trial. Again, I'd grown up - like most of us - with the Holocaust as the great morality tale, about what happens if we let bad people be bad (insert the Cartman clip from South Park, which nails this approach). Anyway, when I read Evans carefully laying out the evidence page by page I had the same wrenching experience, except much more Lovecraftian - opening up a universe of horror.
I suspect that most people operate in a similar state of unreality about the Holocaust and so much else, which is why we are drowning in asinine Hitler analogies (or communist analogies, from the right). For most people, who haven't seen the evidence, the Holocaust has about as much 'reality' as the destruction of Alderaan. Since then I've concluded it is always, always worth going and checking the evidence for things pretty well established that you think you know - to make sure that you do, in fact, know them.
I doubt that you'll see this, but I think it's a problem when everyone doesn't take pains to be sure they're accurately characterizing their interlocutor's viewpoint.
Here I discuss your discipline in that regard with Andrew Gelman (and others) on his post about your Ivermectin piece:
"When experts have strong opinions on something, this is a good opportunity to practice your opinion-forming skills, see whether you get the same result as the experts, and, if not, figure out where you went wrong."
Or where they did. Consider the case of Barry Marshall.
> "The ONLY reason you could ever believe it is because you’re a racist who thinks brown people couldn’t have built civilizations on their own.”
This gets at an important aspect of conspiracism to which many "rationalists" are vulnerable. It's objectively true that there's a moderate cognitive tension between (a) the received Western "common sense" that Europeans came to dominate the globe because they were better at making advanced civilization (probably because of their higher genetic IQ, come on, it's not PC to say so but everyone knows it), and (b) the fact that a millennium or two ago, brown people were building mountains and temple complexes and breeding corn and potatoes while Europeans were languishing in dark ages (again, the eggheads get mad when you say this but, come on).
Obviously that doesn't mean this single factor is why every Atlantis theorist believes Atlantis theory, but it stands to reason that this tension makes it slightly more tempting to imagine that all these non-European ancient civilizations were just copying something else, and marginally increases the number of people weaving hypotheses and writing books about Atlantis theory. So, a good Bayesian should see this argument as evidence that many white Western people are motivated to overstate and lend excessive credence to evidence for Atlantis theory.
However, if you try to explain this to a white Atlantis theorist—ironically, especially one who prides himself on his rationality—he will often take so much offense at the suggestion that his culture's subconscious biases have anything to do with his individual reasoning in this case that he'll uncharitably caricature your explanation just as Scott does in the quoted line, and the explanation will backfire. Thus, an explanation with positive *explanatory* value has negative *persuasive* value—and identifying as a "rationalist" is a risk factor, because the "rationalist" community is for whatever reason happy to admit to and fight individual cognitive biases but considers it uncool to do so for culturally pervasive ones.
Scott, what is your expertise? Readers who don't have sufficient expertise in the domain of interest, really have no way of knowing whether you know what you're talking about.
For instance, I'm a self-esteem researcher. If I saw some substack article who has no PhD in psychology (i.e., years of systematic research training & experience) making contrarian claims about self-esteem, I would find it easy to dismiss whatever they claim. That's because I have a deep knowledge of the literature and issues! What about the regular reader who is simply a fan of the of the substack writer? Not a chance in hell they could know otherwise. They basically take the writer's claims and ostensible analysis on faith.
"Doing your own research" is arrogant and misguided. If you spent 4-6 years studying a research field in a systematic way, guided by mentors, having your research constructively criticized by peers, and having publications along the way, then you have a leg to stand on. Even then, if you want to make claims about the research, you need it to be evaluated ~within the community of expertise~. Substack bypasses all that. Readers who are not experts have practically zero basis to evaluate your claims or arguments. In truth, they need to accept much of what you say on faith.
It's like when I saw a 2-hour documentary skeptical that there was a very large holocaust. I went looking for counterarguments and mostly just found people saying "oh those horrible antisemitic people!"
Eventually I did find the counterarguments, but on a web site *dripping with hatred for the people arguing against the holocaust*. Geez, I thought, this is not how you convince someone.
I forgot to mention, and it seems editing is only allowed briefly now - there was no sign of antisemitism in the video, so the whole "antisemitism" argument fell flat. Anyway most ACXers already understand that it's more important to argue against the claims than the people making them.
I think that these emotional approaches are (often?) unconscious tactics. That is, that they have some underlying reason for their approach, even if they don’t know what it is.
For instance, derision can be an *extremely* successful approach to get people to believe what you want, at least in certain situations. It was not effective on you in that situation, but it may be effective on others.
The case of Dr. John Campbell[1] is probably illustrative. I saw one of his videos a couple of years ago, and noted that he said a lot of correct things, plus a few things that were questionable, or raised red flags for me but not for him. He seems to me like an average doctor with average intelligence, trying his best to understand what's going on, but getting a few things wrong.
And when he gets something wrong, how do people react? I'm not sure. I bet some were nice and tried to gently correct his misinformation, but this is the internet, so I bet others were mean and flippant, while still others might have responded with misinformation of their own coming from a different political orientation. And what will an *average person* do with this mixture of incoming messages? Probably he will listen more to the nice ones, at least at first, especially if they are backed up by charts and data he could use on his channel ... and the mean ones are likely to make him more skeptical of whatever counter-narrative they push.
So it's sad how mean and flippant people usually are when they "correct misinformation".
"Either these people didn’t understand the arguments for and against Atlantis, or they did. If they didn’t, they were frauds, claiming expertise in a subject they knew nothing about. If they did, then at any moment they could have saved me from a five year wild-goose-chase - but chose not to, because it was more fun to insult me."
Kavanagh's reasoning seems to me to be in line with the tendency in the media to circle the wagons in defense of experts and mainstream science, part of which strategy is to dismiss anything perceived as questioning that consensus out of hand. This approach strikes me as deeply misguided in the current info ecosystem. I am thinking of Gurri's "Revolt of the Public"- it used to be that elites could declare something to be correct or taboo, and there weren't any ways for non-elites to get any other messages out in the open. So the circling-the-wagons strategy worked reasonably well. Nowadays if you try to shut other views down, people go off and create their own bubbles.
This is why I take a pretty extreme stance on engaging with weird, and even horrible, views. I think smart, informed people should engage with the arguments of, for example, white supremacists. Ignoring them or denouncing them does not make these views go away, but feeds into the story that elites are seeking to suppress any dissenting views.
"When I tried reviewing ivermectin, I said - here’s a case where the experts have spoken with unusual unanimity about which side is right."
Uhm, what?
As far as im aware, US experts as embodied by its health institutions, still have not taken a stance and hide behind deflections such as 'you shouldnt take horse dewormer' and more garden variety generalisms such as 'you should not take drugs for purposes which we have not evaluated'. To what extent have they actually taken a positive stance against ivm?
Insofar as experts have taken a stance; it has been approved for the treatment of covid, in a majority of countries around the world.
Honestly a closely related element for me is the idea that say the NYT is selling you 60% fact, 30% contested opinion and 10% bullshit, and Tucker is selling maybe 50% bullshit, and 40% contested opinion and 10% fact.
And that the people whose general position is "everything Tucker Carlson says is wrong and everything the NYT is right" are just generally going to find themselves wrong about a lot more stuff than people who are more willing to withhold judgement and think for themselves.
And the common response is something like "yeah but the people who believe everything Tucker says are much worse than the people who believe everything the NYT says and I want to be on the side of the righteous".
To which my main response is "Fuck sides, you damn sheep. Not everything is about "them" and "us" .".
"I was totally raised one and the condescension from other people is insanely real. "
The first time I can recall this personally was after the OKC bombing, when Connie Chung was interviewing the local authorities with undisguised disbelief that Okies could possibly organize rescue/recovery/relief supplies/blood etc. She just would not accept that the locals weren't abject primitives in need of federal expert assistance.
What are my "preferred studies" exactly?
Omit the U in kavanagh
"hostes humani generi" -> should be "hostes humani generis" (genus is 3rd declension)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/genus#Latin
Thanks, fixed.
So he's not, in fact, related to the Supreme Court justice?
Or (if I'm playing a conspiracy theorist) did he change his name to get away from his relative's bad press?
All so he could generate his own bad press.
He’s from Ireland and the u is generally not used in Ireland. It’s pronounced differently too. Kav-an-a not Kav-an-Aw
> Kav-an-a not Kav-an-Aw
It is not at all obvious what the difference between those two is supposed to be. Is the vowel of the third syllable:
"a" as in "comma"?
"a" as in "father"? (This would make it identical to the third syllable of "Kav-an-Aw"...)
"a" as in "trap"? (This would violate the rules of English syllable formation.)
something else?
Alright.
[KAV] + [UH] + [NUH]
"a" as in "father"? (This would make it identical to the third syllable of "Kav-an-Aw"...)
In some parts of Ireland, including my own, "father" is pronounced more like "faader" so not really the same as standard English there. The American version is more heavy on the last syllable and more "awe" as here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t7FhMqopxA
Irish pronunciation is more emphatic on the first syllable: KAV-an-ah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxMfZG4ku1s
It rhymes with Canada. OK?
Just use IPA.
Incidentally, he has the same name as a premiership referee, so gets regular insults/ death threats based on that.
Might I inquire about the sudden interest in Youtube streamers? Is it because of Aella?
Sometimes there are Manifold markets about them.
An underappreciated feature of prediction markets surely is that they also tell us what other people are interested in enough to bet money on it...
I mean, yes, *but* this is sort of the reverse of the observation that prediction markets actually have extremely limited capacity to magically apply to all possible questions precisely because things that don't fall into this category are generally too thinly traded to yield helpful information.
Destiny is a Youtube streamer whose fanbase has started using Manifold markets quite a lot, and Aella has been on their stream several times.
It is pronounced Des-tiny, not De-stiny. FYI.
I thought your ivermectin post was great. It provided something more than just a dismissive, "the experts say ivermectin doesn't work so you shouldn't take it". There is an underprovision of writing for people who want more than a news article but don't want to spend a week ready peer reviewed publications.
It's precisely why I would link to Scott rather than a simple dismissal when arguing with a believer in ivermectin (as anti-viral).
Scott demonstrates here that “doing the legwork” has always been his thing. Which I now realize is why I got into ACX- I appreciate having science I can understand but not personally interpret from academic papers explained to me at a level more granular than journalism can and will support.
This.
Also, this comment is why you getting rid of the like button was a mistake.
👍
👍
I am afraid this may be a market with a supply shortage because explaining complicated issues thoroughly and without oversimplifying while also staying below the word count and domain knowledge requirements of a bundled dozen scientific papers is really hard, and most people who are not Scott can't do it.
And for people who couldn't understand the science even if they *did* spend a week reading peer reviewed publications. (I'm probably in that group; I'm no dummy and I have basic science literacy skills, but many of these things have conventions and shorthand that grow up in that specific branch of science. Anyone reading those studies in that branch understands how they are interpreted, but good luck if you're not.)
I'm sympathetic to this, but academic publications are, by and large, not that hard to read. Yes, you won't understand it as well as the reviewers, but you can become proficient at quickly assessing them for relevance and methodological quality. Look at what journal they're in, what the citations are, sample size, whether they're obsessed with p values, effect sizes, etc. Pay walls are a somewhat bigger problem, but there's always arxiv and SciHub.
If you can't read the papers, consider hedging your life against the thing in question rather than wasting time figuring it out from the internet.
You are overestimating how quantitative I am and how much time I have. I have read papers and know more or less what they’re saying, but I can’t do what Scott does in assessing the methodology and results. I have read several explanations of what p values or effect sizes are and what they really mean and still do not really understand what they are arrived at or how to tell if the authors are overly obsessed with them or just normally obsessed. Also, it takes *a lot* of time that I don’t have to discover, parse and weigh this information. But “hedging my life against the thing in question” sounds a lot like groping in the dark. If reasonably intelligent but non-quantitative people, or simply people with busy lives, have to resort to this, then *what is the point of science*? People need information to make better, more rational decisions. Why should anyone begrudge that? Shouldn’t there be some level of analysis available to help ordinary people make sense of science and do a better job than the cursory and distorted treatments that dominate the press? The popularity of this blog speaks to a demand for better public-facing scientific analysis. I’m here because what Scott does seems so rare. If we could have a bunch of ACXs analyzing and debating a range of scientific and social topics that would be great for the world.
Honestly, even if you are perfectly able to parse the reports, you should probably be hedging your life to the thing in question — and many scientists do behave this way about the products of their own inquiry.
I love ACX and similar resources, and agree with you that there should be more of them, but you are deeply underestimating them if you see them as merely summarizing what the actual scientists have done.
I don’t think the lofty purpose of “science” (if it exists) has much to do with the interpretation of any single scientific result or real-world problem. The purpose of a single scientific study is substantially narrower. As a rule, these are laser-focused on ontology (what is) and epistemology (how do we know) — which comes with drastic tradeoffs in their ability to answer ethical questions (what should be done). Generalizing the result of a carefully controlled scientific study to the real world is a perilous process, and _this_ is part of what blogs like ACX (or public health officials, think tanks, etc etc) attempt to do. The meta-analysis done here is knowledge in its own right. Further it is much more valuable, contextualized, actionable knowledge than the studies that went into it. However, it is not a scientific study, and bundling it under a big umbrella of “science” is confusing at best. There is substantial wisdom in risk management, economics, skeptical empiricism, life experience, etc that goes into these posts. Reading ACX and making decisions w it is much closer to “hedging your life” than it is to doing science.
So my main quibble is not that you should just read papers yourself. It is that the main value being provided here is not really reading and understanding papers at all.
So much this. I've gone on and on on this issue. The state of science reporting is truly abysmal. The only other person I've found doing what Scott does—honestly evaluate and report on the validity and quality of scientific studies—is Emily Oster.
Yes, I only wish Scott had studied Covid vaccine safety instead. I could've shown my father that. I don't know what good it did to argue against ivermectin.
I think the difference is that there weren't studies showing vaccines were unsafe. We've known about vaccines for a long time, so the antivax position is regarded as a perennially wrong & worthless one like creationism.
People still need to see reviews of whatever data exists. Also, it would be really helpful if someone would explain in detail How The System Works. I have seen neither kind of review; when it comes to depth of coverage, antivaxxers dominate the media landscape.
A great article, but my main takeaway is a great desire to go visit underwater pyramids.
Exactly. Where are these pyramids and why do they look like that if the answer isn’t “Atlanteans”?
Here's one example near Japan, linking to the part where they give a potential natural explanation for them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni_Monument#Natural_formation
Thanks. That does look very cool, although less “man made” looking in wide shots.
Slow cooling and the inherent symmetries present in crystals is the generic answer. If you cool molten salt very, very slowly, it will form one enormous perfect cube, because that's the underlying symmetry of the crystal. If you cool silica slowly enough, it will form enormous six-sided prisms, and so on.
This would be applicable in the case of hexagonal columns in igneous rock such as at Giant’s Causeway in Ireland , but the example in Japan posted above is in sedimentary rock, which was never hot enough for cooling fractures. Better explanation there would be a combination of vertical tectonic joint planes (presumably ~E-W-running and associated with stress from the convergent plate margin off the Japanese coast) and older horizontal depositional layers in the rock (“bedding planes”).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_(geology)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_(geology)
Ah yes good point, thank you. I guess the general answer is the underlying symmetries of the mineral crystal structure, plus sometimes symmetries generated by the method of formation. I kind of had Devil's Postpile in mind, which is rather mind-blowing that it's natural.
I think Illuminatus put them in the Bermuda Triangle. (But Wilson wasn't very specific about the location.)
He seems to resent people for being curious, in the same mold that the folks who criticize others for "just asking questions" seem to do: just because he's afraid they'll come to a conclusion he doesn't like. I think one consequence of this that he is missing that many of the questions people are asking have implications far beyond whatever narrow culture war issues he's caught up in.
Here he is complaining that people are trying to figure out how robust ChatGPT's guardrails are:
https://twitter.com/C_Kavanagh/status/1622772800598712320
He is a Twitter brained culture warrior. I used to follow him and his shtick is basically “grey tribe bad”. He’s made some good/valid points but that shtick will lead you to places like making fun of people for bothering to investigate both sides of a controversy.
I'm reminded of my biology teacher in secondary school who asked me if I believed in evolution. I answered that I wasn't sure because I felt like I hadn't, as you put it, investigated both sides of the controversy. She rolled her eyes.
I think I'm remembering this correctly.
Nobody "believes in" evolution, or they shouldn't anyway. You may believe evolution is true or at least the best-fitting theory right now, but it's not religious dogma.
Even if some people do treat it as such.
+1
Evolution is a model for how the living world came to be, which explains what we see *really well*. It's hard to imagine a discovery that would change that, though there can certainly be (and have been, and will continue to be) stuff that requires new explanations, or stuff whose currently-accepted explanation is wrong.
Well, the current explanation of evolution is certainly wrong. But it's wrong in details. And most of those details are small. It's really difficult to imagine a better theory.
OTOH, epicycles worked correctly, the only problems known were in small details, and it was really hard to imagine a better theory. (Epicycles were more accurate than Copernican theory, but Kepler fixed that. The real initial advantage of Copernican theory is that it was simpler to calculate.)
Isn't "believing in x" pretty common shorthand for "believing x occurs/exists/is true" depending on whether x is a process, object or statement?
"I believe in photosynthesis," "I believe in the Eiffel Tower," and "I believe in the Nicene Creed" all make sense as statements.
(I had to use the Nicene Creed, because basically no non-religious statements have their own name)
* "grey tribe and red tribe bad"
I think the essential component of his objections is that it's not about what people do, it's about what people do *in front of an audience*.
The charitable version is saying something like 'If there's a conspiracy theory that only .1% of people believe, and a careful and fair analysis of the evidence will cause 99% of the people who read it to conclude it's definitely fake for sure, and convince 1% of people who read it that hey that's a lot of evidence maybe there's actually something to it, then exposing everyone to that careful and fair analysis will increase the number of people who believe in the conspiracy tenfold. Bad on consequentialist grounds even if it does help some of the .1% escape their mistakes.'
The less charitable version is that he's like the people who think kids playing violent video games will turn them into murderers, and wants everyone to censor what they say in public spaces in the interest of not accidentally giving anyone 'bad ideas'.
Fair comment. I think the "charitable" version, let's call it the "don't give it oxygen" story, is basically fashionable amongst the twitter set when it comes to any number of alternative stories related to covid (vaccines, ivermectin, lockdowns, masks) and probably other alternative accounts to things as well (the Hunter Biden laptop comes to mind immediately).
I think folks glammed on to the "don't give it oxygen" argument probably in one or two cases where it might have been at least rational, from a group conflict point of view, if not a fully reasonable approach. Then guys like Kavanagh overextend it to just about any case they can pattern-match it to. It sort of makes sense it *might* apply to ivermectin too but I think Scott is right that actually, what the Ivermectin story needs is some people (preferably shady blogs online, no one as high profile as Fauci or whatever) willing to engage and speak honestly and clearly to people who genuinely want to know.
On a platform like Twitter "don't give it oxygen" might be the best course of action. Twitter doesn't seem like the best place to lay out nuanced, well researched analysis. OTOH I don't actually participate in the platform so maybe I'm missing something.
You are. Of course there's plenty of awfulness and stupidity, but there is also serious discussion and debate, and threads that explore ideas in some depth. And of course you can always link to long blog posts.
On the other hand, if nobody responds, the conspiracy side then use that as proof that they *can't* answer the questions put to them and that the conspiracy 'science' is correct. So damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I think this Chris Kavanagh bloke has picked the worst of both worlds: don't respond and treat it seriously because it is self-evidently rubbish and they're all conspiracy theorists, I know because I'm the expert on conspiracy theorist mindset.
But it wasn't crazy to think ivermectin would treat covid. There were prominent experts advocating for it, and national-level public health authorities using it, and randomized trials investigating it.
The tragic reality about medical treatments is that they're super hard to get right, so that you can genuinely have a lot of serious well-intentioned experts and health care systems doing pointless or counterproductive stuff for *years*, just because figuring out whether they really work is hard to do and subject to subtle errors. And you can have useful treatments lying around unused for years for the same reason.
So, people ran careful RCTs and it looks like ivermectin doesn't do much for covid (though it's great at treating parasitic infections). A lot of the early hopeful information turned out to be fraud or random noise+publication bias or confounded with other results of treatment. This sucks--it would have been really nice to have this cheap, widely-available thing treat covid. But it's also the normal way that things work out--all kinds of promising treatments turn out, when finally subjected to careful testing, not to work.
You left out placebos. Of course, that's a part of why it's difficult to determine what works, but it's also true that there are many drugs whose effectiveness isn't that much better than that of a placebo. Which should often raise the question of "Are they worth the cost and side effects?".
Besides, the charitable interpretation still omits the -admittedly very low- probability that the conspiracy theory may be in fact true. If that were the case, making that 1% of people engage with the argument may have a huge positive impact.
This.
So, given what Scott said about him, that he spends much of his time mockingly quoting every ivermectin "conspiracy theorist", does his own behavior pass the consequentialist test? Anybody who's inclined to trust "experts and Science" by default would dismiss ivermectin after the first CNN denouncement, so I don't see what Twitter mocking could possibly achieve beyond that, other than further radicalizing red-tribers.
I get the impression that he and Alexandros have their own beef going on - how else does Kavanagh know so much about him? - and while I'm happy for the pair of them to have a Twitter ding-dong, leave Scott alone!
Well, I wasn't aware of this Kavanagh character's existence until Scott mentioned him, so I think it's fair to say that he brought it on himself :)
> Bad on consequentialist grounds even if it does help some of the .1% escape their mistakes.'
Since this charitable version can be answered empirically, unless they provide evidence that that actually happens I'm not sure why I should prefer it as compared to long, proven history of "informing people causes them to become informed".
I don't know about evidence, but I think the primary factor which should cause you to expect that old rules like that no longer apply is engagement algorithms on social media, which is basically a hostile AI trying to expose as many people as possible to ideas that will cause the most disagreement and strife possible because their owners can monetize the resulting pageviews.
It's somewhat reasonable to think that the optimal rhetorical strategies under that regime are different from the optimal strategies where that is not happening.
This raises in my mind the question "Is this a good substitute for war?". I don't really take that seriously, but I'm not totally sure I shouldn't. Many people seem to feel like they need more aggression in their lives.
I'm still not sure why the hostile AI means writing a factual rebuttal to misinformation would hurt more than help. At best, it sounds like it would do nothing, but not that it would actually increase harm.
I can't count the number of times I've given people the benefit of the doubt that they were being curious in good faith – and reply back with long, reasoned arguments and zero rancor – only for them to ignore my entire argument and retreat to the worst rehashed conspiracist talking points, making it clear they were just shitposting the whole time. It does tend to jade one.
That's fair. I have listened to one or two of Chris's podcast episodes, and if there's one thing you can call him, it's jaded. But he doesn't seem to give others the benefit of the doubt, so I don't feel disposed to give _him_ the benefit of the doubt unless he himself explains he used to do that until it backfired on him too much. For all I know, he just thinks people who disagree with him on certain key issues are evil and dangerous and ought to be shut down.
The other problem is for every Scott Alexander, there are 99 other people out there *doing their own research* who are not remotely equipped actually evaluate the evidence, validate the sources, understand nuance, etc. For those people, just going with the experts will produce a far better outcome on average than trying to play amateur climatologist/statistician/epidemiologist/metallurgy expert/etc. There will of course, be spectacular failures of conventional wisdom along the way.
But if you aren't scientifically literate, "just going with the experts" isn't so simple in itself, because different people will be telling you different stories about what the scientific consensus is.
The pro-Ivermectin people aren't saying "trust Ivermectin because Jesus came to me in a dream and told me it works", they are saying "here are 30 peer-reviewed studies by respectable mainstream scientists in prestigious scientific journals showing that Ivermectin works". And their websites aren't written in Comic Sans with lots of grammar and spelling mistakes; they look pretty much the same as the websites telling you what the anti-Ivermectin consensus is. Maybe they even look more professional. Now what?
Then they should find an expert they trust, like their doctor. Not a youtube doctor who makes money off clicks, but an actual doctor. During an all hands on deck global pandemic, your doctor is likely to be up on the current research (unlike say some rare condition where a person doing their own research can supplement their doctor). Doctors can be wrong of course. But at least they understand how medical research and science work. On an issue like Ivermectin, a random doctor is going to get it right orders of magnitude more often than a random person going down internet rabbit holes.
Also in the course of doing your own research, it's not hard to see that the same people pushing Ivermectin were also pushing HCQ, and probably covid/mask deniers as well. Somehow the people who go down rabbit holes never seem to hold their sources accountable for being dead wrong in the recent past.
The fundamental problem imo is that for someone like Scott, doing his own research is going to yield much better information than a random doctor, or whatever the government is pushing in the moment. But how do you explain to a random person who doesn't have a science background that they're not only not equipped to do their own research, they're not even equipped to pick an expert they trust like Alexander? I follow Peter Attia and trust him unconditionally on this kind of stuff. But for the average person, their Scott Alexander or Peter Attia is Dr. Drew or Dr. Oz, who lead them to guys like Berenson. I don't know how to solve that.
Even Scott reads to me as way sharper on subjects that touch on psychiatry than he does on other topics where he's more of a smart amateur. I'm not surprised by this. This is only natural and is quite typical of public intellectuals as they move further away from their core expertise. We're all affected by this and try to balance personal humility with the our desire and sometimes need to have an opinion.
If you trust your doctor, fine. But according to what I've been reading many doctors have NOT been keeping up with health researchers. Perhaps they've been too busy. And many of them are required to say or deny certain things by their employers.
I don't think there's any simple answer as to how to find an expert you can trust. And this isn't only true in health care. Look into the replication crisis in many fields of science.
Perhaps they has always been the case, and we're just noticing it now because of improved communications.
Why would you trust your doctor on something like this? He graduated medical school long before COVID was a thing, and since then he's almost certainly been too busy doing by-the-book medicine for many, many patients to do a deep dive into every contrarian medical opinion just in case one of his patients picks that one to ask him about.
OK, maybe you're paying big bucks for a concierge physician who will take the time to do the research if you ask. But probably, your doctor is just going to tell you the same thing that Dr. Fauci told you, because that's where he learned it. Through different channels, but without doing any independent research.
MartinW is right. Finding independent experts you can trust to give you a straight answer about anything remotely controversial is not a trivial undertaking.
Chris's post speaks to people developing the skills necessary to tell the difference between something that superficially looks like it is representing reliable sources, but isn't and reliable sources. You can't escape the need to do this, but you can escape the need to do this without developing the level of knowledge that typically takes years and paying lots of money to achieve. His comments weren't "Pfft." They were, "these red flags were enough."
> Chris's post speaks to people developing the skills necessary to tell the difference between something that superficially looks like it is representing reliable sources, but isn't and reliable sources.
I believe you can do this. I believe I can do this. I have zero faith that most of the people out there fervently doing youtube research will ever be capable of this.
I think the real problem is that a lot of people can't tolerate being uncertain. Estimating probabilities is very different from belief.
We're not wired for it. I know someone who is 100% convinced her first kid has been sickly his whole life because of vaccines.
Her second kid got 1 shot, she prayed to God for a sign, the second kid got sick, she refused to let him get any more shots. Good luck ever convincing that person that vaccines are safe. It can't be done.
> only for them to ignore my entire argument and retreat to the worst rehashed conspiracist talking points, making it clear they were just shitposting the whole time. It does tend to jade one.
Sure, but maybe don't go in with the mindset of "I'm trying to convince this person", go in with the mindset, "I'm trying to convince anyone who might see this person's post and be convinced by their argument". Much harder to get jaded by the outcome.
If it helps, I've found it useful to ask someone to accurately paraphrase some aspect of the topic that they don't agree with. The people who are not willing to argue in good faith will almost universally refuse to do this or be unable to do it accurately. It's like a cognitive wall that exists, independent of their native intelligence.
If you're still interested in lost underwater civilizations of questionable historicity, you may be interested in the black sea deluge theory.
Didn't we all go through the "ancient astronaut" period in our youth? It was von Daniken for me, but I did dip my toe into Hancock's works.
Can you imagine how satisfying it would have been to be a Troy Was Real Truther?
Hi, but Troy was very likely real war. Of course not in the exact form in the Illiad but close enough and there might be a conflation of separate stories. But the more you find out about the history the more it is likely there was some kind of Greek expedition against the city. See Trevor Brice and Eric Cline books on the subject. Of course no one can definitely say for sure there was a war but they come close enough.
I think that's the point - pre-Schliemann, no-one even believed that the city existed.
Ironically, the idea that there was an orthodoxy that Troy wasn't real, pre-Schliemann, is itself a misconception: All he did was to prove that the site of the city called Ilium (which was inhabited into the 13th century) and associated for centuries with the city of the Iliad, was the place the city had been from antiquity, as opposed to it having moved from a nearby location. The press, however, failed to understand the nuances of this, and Schliemann was in no hurry to disabuse it of its misconception
http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2020/06/truth-in-myth.html
I know I did too! von Daniken indeed, but I was also very impressed by a theory explaining the different geological eras by different moons slowly approaching the earth, then collapsing on it and creating great catastrophes and extinctions. I thought this explained the appearance of the giant faunas very well: the very close moon had a tremendous upward force of gravity, and allowed the appearance of the huge dinosaurs at the end of the secondary ear, or the monstrous insects before that. Such a beautiful theory!
I believe this is a plot point in the original Frankenstein novel. A young Victor gets obsessed with fringe biology texts, which eventually sets him on the road to creating his monster.
Well you're not going to stumble onto lost, arcane secrets by reading mainstream journals.
Actually you probably are, for a literal definition of "arcane", there's so much interesting stuff published each month that some of it must be forgotten.
He is an autodidact so he's obsessed with alchemical texts, then he finally goes to university and finds out that is all rubbish, but luckily he also discovers Science! as the next best thing for necromancy. It is the early 19th century after all, now it's all galvanism not summoning demons at midnight. Still involves digging up graveyards, though.
I think Frankenstein found that the combination of his modern education and his past obsession with old alchemy texts let him find valuable insights hidden in the nonsense that other scientists had missed, which was why he was the one to discover how to make his creation and bring it to life.
I was so annoyed that he had been fine with necromancy and gravedigging, but when the "experiment" hadn't ended up with a pretty face, all commitment to scientific norms had fled and he'd reacted like a hysterical teenager. It's amusing that the popular adage "it's not Frankenstein, it's Frankenstein's monster" is actually wrong, Frankenstein was the real monster all along.
Victor *is* a hysterical teenager with a lot of parental issues and chips on both shoulders. He's like a version of the typical Byronic brooding (anti)hero, and I do wonder how much Bryon's presence and the tangle of sexual/romantic relationships going on in that tiny set influenced Mary Shelley,
He messes around, becomes a single dad, and isn't capable of taking care of the kid so he abandons and neglects the creation. Are we surprised the monster turned out the way he did? Textbook social work case! 😁
So the monster was depraved on account of he was deprived?
As someone or other once said: Knowledge is knowing that Frankenstein is the name of the creator, not the monster; wisdom is realising that Frankenstein was the true monster all along.
Yes, and the narrator makes Scott's exact point. If his father at the time explained why those texts were wrong in a respectful manner, he would have been convinced and dropped it. But his father dismissed them as unserious rubbish, and he was hooked. Its his fathers fault (might have been an uncle. Insert relevant authority figure). Brilliant.
Not me, I was all about psionics. :-)
The 70s were a wacky time, all sorts of stuff was semi-respectable, or at least good enough for a TV show.
https://jcom.sissa.it/archive/19/02/JCOM_1902_2020_L01
"The 1970s: a turning point
How can we reconcile the fact that our societies and cultures grow, on the one hand, every day more technoscientific and, on the other, more ambivalent towards science and scientists and, necessarily, their authority [Bauer, Pansegrau and Shukla, 2019]? To answer this question, one must go back to the 1970s and 1980s and the first postwar mass media pseudoscientific wave. Until then, although present here and there, pseudoscience was largely confined to the fringes of mass media or to fiction, the separation between the real and the fictional remaining clearly demarcated. Yet, on 5 January 1973, when there were only three main channels on U.S. television (ABC, CBS and NBC), NBC broadcast In Search of Ancient Astronauts, the first pseudoscientific documentary shown on U.S. television, which was a 1970 German documentary based on the bestselling Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (Memories from the Future) [1968] — translated as Chariots of the Gods — and dubbed, reformatted and adapted for U.S. audiences. In his pseudoscientific bestseller, the Swiss Erich von Däniken proposed, from a reinterpretation of founding myths and sacred texts in the light of the possibilities opened by the Space Age, that extraterrestrials had influenced the development of human societies in the remote past. The ratings of the broadcast were such that NBC produced two more documentaries on the same theme (In Search of Ancient Mysteries, broadcast on 31 January 1974, and The Outer Space Connection in February 1975) before giving the go-ahead to a TV documentary series, In Search of …, exclusively covering fringe topics from ghosts to the Bermuda Triangle.
Those three documentaries were narrated by Rod Serling, who was expected to reprise his role for In Search of …, if not for his premature death, which led to Leonard Nimoy being cast instead. Both were closely associated with the then minor genres of fantasy and science fiction — Serling as the narrator of The Twilight Zone (1959–1964) and Nimoy as Star Trek’s Spock (1966–1969) — and owed their fame to their 1970s reruns [Beeler, 2010; Geraghty, 2010]. And it must be stressed that the U.S. public had for decades already been exposed to those themes through comics, pulps and B movies [Stoczkowski, 1999]. The documentaries were all produced by Alan Landsburg, who had previously left his mark on award-winning science TV documentaries, a genre he helped create [Colker, 2014], lending them credibility (statements became plausible and assumptions believable), without providing the public with the necessary tools to evaluate their scientific validity. In short, a half-century ago, celebrity was already being disputed to expertise, while the demarcation between the real and the fictional was being deliberately blurred. The programs were widely broadcast and rebroadcast internationally, and many would-be imitators sought to capitalize on their success. They were helped by the transition to cable, which rapidly multiplied the number of channels, the content of which could be tailored to specific audiences. That format has since become dominant."
1969 had been the moon landing. All the SF stories looked to be coming true. No wonder the 70s went mad for 'scientific' versions of the old stories.
FYI: I had lessons on ESP and the Bermuda Triangle in the Gifted and Talented classes in school, alongside how to communicate with aliens that was popular back in the days of Voyager and Arecibo.
I grew up in the USSR, but I can't say you're wrong :-)
You're lucky, some people wind up in even less socially acceptable corners of idea space as their first "let's doubt the mainstream consensus" experience.
Pity those poor teenagers who wind up as Holocaust skeptics instead of Atlantis believers.
Holocaust denial is probably the easiest rabbit hole to fall into by the means that Scott outlined. Given that expressing doubt in the most minute detail of the Official Narrative instantly brands one as Exactly As Bad As Hitler, it's probably the least acceptable area for independent research, and thus very enticing for a certain variety of contrarian.
On the other hand, the holocaust is probably one of the best documented events in human history. The lengths people go to to catalogue and publicly display every piece of evidence is honestly astounding. I doubt there are very many holocaust survivors who were never asked to record an interview about their experience, and that's on top of all the meticulously archived records and physical evidence
We have holocaust museums in every major city, whereas I don't see a lot of "Atlantis is fake" museums.
Sea levels in various places rose during the last 10,000 years, or roughly the time period when at least some humans were building towns in places like the Middle East. If the Black Sea was one of those places where the water level used to be lower, it seems plausible that people would have built their town down near the water for the mildest climate, access to fishing, and other reasons that waterfront real estate is usually more expensive.
But perhaps people had time when the water started to rise to dismantle their towns and carry their carved stone building blocks to higher elevations? Or maybe they just hadn't gotten around to building anything impressive there by the time the water level rose?
Similarly, the English Channel used to be above the Ice Age ocean level and the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine. Human artifacts constantly turn up on beaches at places like Dunkirk. One Dutch nurse who walks everyday on her local beach has found hundreds of Stone Age artifacts from now inundated Dogger Land.
There are a couple of submerged ancient Egyptian cities that are being dug up, such as Heracleion. Pavlopetri is a submerged Greek city discovered in 1967. I vaguely recall a submerged Greek city that was a tourist attraction for boaters in Roman times.
Personally, I'm a great fan of Sunda, the submerged lowlands of Southeast Asia and western Indonesia.
Then of course one can go even further back to the Messinian age 6 million years ago, when the Mediterranean dried up, and the lost elephant civilization on its bottom...
That's not the only one. There's also the connection between Britain and the continent, that was drowned. I'm sure there are lots of others of various sizes. And they probably all spawned local tales of catastrophe, some of which were picked up and elaborated upon.
FWIW, some Athenian versions of Atlantis have the civilization placed in North Africa. And their symbol was the King Bee. Which was later(? no evidence it wasn't continuous!!) picked up by the Bavarian Illuminati. We've only got fragments of their literature, but perhaps it was Plato who moved their location to "beyond the Pillars of Hercules".
The stories are real. Believe them as history at your own peril.
They ARE hostes humani generis, but reversed stupidity etc.
I must admit, Alexandros is a better fake last name than Alexander. Even though the geographical difference (Greece vs Macedonia) is rather tiny.
I think he's talking about Alexandros Marinos, although I agree it's a great name.
Alexander? Great? Seems like a stretch.
There is a nominative determinism there somewhere.
https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/livestream-starting-soon-reading
FML
Reading those comments, I am *so ready* to get into a(n Internet) fist fight. I'm happy for Kavanagh to go after Marinos and his fanboys, just leave us out of it. I want to sit on the sidelines with my fruit salad watching, not be on the field participating!
> Even though the geographical difference (Greece vs Macedonia) is rather tiny.
Huh? Greece speaks Greek and the local version of the name would be Alexandros. Macedonia speaks South Slavic and the local version of the name appears to be Aleksandar.
(Macedonia is also a weird scammy name for that country. They are not related to Macedon, being located in a different geographic region and speaking an unrelated language, but they constantly claim that they should get credit for Alexander the Great. As far as I can tell, they aspire to be the Stamford University of countries.)
"Alexander" is the Latin form of the name.
> they aspire to be the Stamford University of countries
I don't think UConn Stamford is all that notable. Maybe you meant the Scamford University?
I meant Stamford University. The idea here is that the only significance of the name "Stamford" is that, if you're lucky, it might be confused for "Stanford". Lots of people care about Stanford University; nobody in the world cares about Stamford University.
This is also the relationship between Macedonia and Macedon.
Gotcha, makes sense.
When reading the post, I didn't read the tweets closely enough and thought "Alexandros" was just a way that Kavanagh was referring to Scott Alexander.
The most ridiculous line of Kavanagh's: “If studies had supported Ivermectin as an effective treatment it would have been adopted by medical and public health authorities.”
Evidently, Kavanagh's mental model is that authorities operate according to a neutral, objective rationality and are not subject to their own institutional biases. As if we did not see a very great deal during the pandemic that demonstrates the opposite.
Yes, this is the standard “trust the Science” line. Go on IFLScience or The Credible Hulk on Facebook and argue a contrary position (to ‘Trust Science’) sometime. It’s enlightening. They really, genuinely believe that Science works in the way it’s described in high school science classes, and that trying to publish valid results that contradict the Standard Narrative will result in laudits and massive career advancement, rather than isolation and ostracization.
I feel like there’s a reference I’m missing here.
Decent chance this is a "Trump did nothing wrong" claim on his part, but you will see people criticizing presidents for going against the consensus of American intelligence agencies.
Given that the CIA is an international joke and the others also struggle on a not-infrequent basis, I think you can see that there are at least some problems with such criticisms. Among other things, US intelligence consensus leaned heavily toward Saddam having WMDs.
Oooh, *intelligence* agency. That clears things up. Given that the subject was public health, I didn’t catch the reference.
"Among other things, US intelligence consensus leaned heavily toward Saddam having WMDs"
TBF, as far as I know, the *entire world* thought that.
Because, as I understand the gambit, Hussein was very interested in having *Iran* believe that, to deter a second war - that Iraq would lose - thus all the runarounds with the investigating agencies and such.
He was fine with the UN et. al believing he had them, because they weren't going to *do anything about it*.
And then 9/11 happened and he learned why brinksmanship is dangerous.
The "entire world" had no informed opinion on the subject that was independent of US intelligence, as propagated in the media. To the extent that, say, bureaucrats in France had an opinion, it was heavily influenced by what US officials were confidently asserting.
A huge part of the debate around the Iraq War (at least outside the US, anyway), was whether US intelligence was right or UN weapon inspections were right. It was very much NOT international consensus that he had them any more.
Also, Canadian intelligence got it right off the same exact information as the US. This rather suggests that it was possible to get the decision right.
The consensus of the intelligence community was certainly not supportive of the claims about wmd, aluminum tubes etc. The politicians hoovered up raw intelligence and interpreted it the way they wanted, which differed a lot from what the actual spies thought. Smart guys doing stupid shit. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/27/the-stovepipe
Sometimes it does work that way. Much depends on how politicized the questions are, and on the personalities of the most respected people in the field
Fair. I certainly don’t mean to imply it *never* works that way, but it seems strongly to me that attacking the “consensus” view in highly politicized fields is very unlikely to turn out well.
Which is annoying, because plate tectonics is taught, including the bit where people called him a liar for years. Or handwashing occasionally.
The idea that consensus can be hard to break and also wrong is not exactly short on examples. There are more counterexamples, of course. But still.
Those examples are used as evidence that the system works as intended.
It does, in the long run. But you know what Keynes said about that.
They're used as examples that the system EVENTUALLY works as intended.
As the good Sir Humphrey has pointed out, eventually is a long time.
Yes, but it works, so you have no justification for complaining about the system. It works as intended; there's nothing to see here.
And we have no way of knowing how many times the system hasn't worked yet.
I don't even know what "the system not working" would look like.
"For if it prosper, none dare call it pseudoscience."
Excuse me, I need to go make everyone in my organization take an IAT to gauge their racism. Though I need to make sure I don't imply to anyone that white people are more likely to be racist in these tests, since that would probably cause some stereotype threat.
If recently updated vaccines were better - we would have them. If European baby-formula were as good as US-formula, it would be freely available in the US. If non-US airlines had the know-how to do flights inside the USofA, they would be welcome ( I heard, they are not - but that can not be true, or?). If nuclear power was safe, we would no longer burn coal. - Or as Zvi put it last week:
"We have a new drug that cuts Covid risk of hospitalizations and deaths by about half with no major side effects. You can’t have it. Maybe ever. Because FDA."
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/covid-2922-interferon
Thing is, the public health authorities *did* update their models based on contemporaneous studies. They found that ventilators work better if you rotate the patient to face down. They found that certain generic steroids made a big difference. They found that SSRIs and particularly fluoxetine had a measurable effect.
What they didn’t do is start a podcast and accuse everyone who didn’t recommend ivermectin or vitamin D or hydroxochloroquine of being in the pocket of Big Pharma.
What they did do was affix their signatures to a public letter that said it was fine to gather in crowds as long as you were protesting the death of George Floyd, because racism is deadlier than COVID.
That single act should permanently discredit the entire public health establishment until fundamental changes are made.
I mean I wouldn’t go that far. But I think it’s an excellent example of the difference between trusting science and trusting scientists. You should trust scientists only insofar as they are disciplined practitioners of science, and trust experts only insofar as they remain in their lane of expertise. Once they deviate from that and start acting like pundits and political activists, their credentials don’t make them any more trustworthy than any other pundit or political activist.
Which would be fine, *if they weren't speaking with the authority of their discipline when they made political pronouncements.* It calls into question everything they have done, on suspicion of it *all* being political.
This is a fantastic comment, and a thought I wish more people would come to: *Experts are only experts in their own field.*
Your science/scientist distinction is a good example that I can use to illustrate this to others in the future!
Thanks. It’s something that always grinds my gears - the IFL Science crowd seems to buy way too deeply into the Hollywood idea that a “scientist” is a general purpose expert in a lab coat that can deploy “science” at any problem and quickly arrive at a clear solution.
Why would that discredit anyone but the signers?
Was there an outcry of the rest of the field against such acts? Or is the general sense that this is the consensus view?
Were there effective treatments for Covid that no medical establishment ever adopted?
I feel like you're making a mistake about what types of errors groups like this do and don't make. Wildly flailing to try to show you're doing stuff in ways that create unnecessary procedures and costs, is not at all the same as looking at a trillion doll bill on the ground and leaving it there.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism/comment/12795387
I think the generic argument is more that they have a lot at stake if they fuck it up. For example, if ivermectin had turned out to be a miracle cure, and *you* were the fool at the FDA who blocked it, you will certainly put a disagraceful end to your career, if not end up hanged from a lamppost, once the truth becomes apparent -- and it always does, sooner or later. That is, it's not any hypothetical altruistic nature but the Sword of Damocles that we tend to think keeps authority honest.
That's why the best guarantee of honesty in authority is not searching for the magic algorithm to select only saints for the positions, but a vigorous culture of free speech, skepticism, and access to data so that the time between official decision and the manifestation of the truth or falsity of the decision is worryingly (for the official in question) short -- not enough time to get out of Dodge when the brown stuff hits the flying vanes.
That is really, really, really not the incentive structure at the FDA. Blocking good things comes with zero cost. Approving bad things is career-ending.
Actually, you've just presented evidence that it *is*. And I agree. The greater the authority, and the heavier the sword hanging over them, the more CYA conservative they become. Failing to approve modest advancements is low-risk, beause nobody expects them and even whey they are later proved out, they're not sufficiently wonderful to get people furious. Approving Thalidomide is a nightmare. That's the way they operate when things are going kind of well on average. It's only when things become dire that they reverse, and the risk of not approving something that might heal the crisis becomes higher than the risk that you might approve something that makes it a little worse. As Admiral King said, in a time of war you send for the sons of bitches, and their allies, the crazy idea guys. But in time of peace you sink back into caution.
So who lost their jobs for blowing the one chance we had to keep the pandemic in check before it was too late, i.e. the testing fiasco? That’s much much worse than invermectin working.
The problem is that this is a minority opinion. For better or worse, most people don't see it that way, so yeah there are no serious political consequences. So it goes. A sine qua non for the Sword to fall is that it has to be the will of The People, like most or all of them.
Who lost their jobs for not approving beta blockers in the US earlier?
Exactly. There are no consequences for not approving things, and there would be no consequences for those who did not approve Invermectin had it turned out to be a miracle drug, as there will be no consequences for those who do not approve Interferon λ, which seems to actually *be* a miracle drug. https://thezvi.substack.com/p/covid-2922-interferon
I think we have evidence, because of the pandemic, that the conservative cautious take-it-slow approach will CYA in the long run. See the vaccines that were zoomed through without the usual long trial periods, because we needed to cut through the red tape for this emergency.
Now there are people claiming this was a terrible idea because the vaccines are killing young people via heart attacks.
Were I an official of the FDA, the lesson I'd take away here is "CYA, nobody ever got in trouble for buying IBM, the old ways are the best".
The vaccine acceleration was a calculated risk, definitely, but I think it worked. Unless someone discovers something truly hideous buried in the 1 in 1 million weeds --- produces babies with no faces when given to teen black mothers between the ages of 17 and 19 -- it looks to me like they won that bet. Vaccines were developed and deployed in a time and at a scale that is without precedent, just amazing. The definitely called for an unusual level of commitment and government money (e.g. Trump's Operation Warp Speed), and it called for a certain level of bureaucratic boldness, to just send it out to 300 million people after testing on 20,000 or so.
But as I said, it seems to have worked. It definitely seemed[1] to have put a stop to the big repeated waves of re-infection and death among the older crowd[2] that freaked at least some people out. We can look at China, which lacked, and still lacks, vaccines that are as effective to see the social cost of not having them[3]. Not good.
By historical standards, of human response to pandemic, it's pretty good, solid B territory. Nobody drowned all the cats, did a pogrom on tne Jews, bled or cupped people, shoved everyone into lepers colonies, gave them grams of aspirin until their livers quit (supposedly a thing that happened in 1918). There was certainly a fair amount of official overreaction, but it's hard to blame officials for overreacting to what The People themselves, bless their hearts, were overreacting. I do blame them for not collecting data early and often, and for every time the temptation to pretend to more knowledge than they had got the better of conservative common sense -- but that's what people are like. They don't develope much sturdier characters once thier job description goes from J. Random Internet Commenter to Senior Poobah In Charge Of Big Decisions. My expectations were low, because my expectations of people are always low, and they kind of met them, so....passing grade.
It *is* an interesting question what lessons for the future will be taken away. Big fast bets on novel biotechnology seems like one of them, which is not necessarily a good thing in all respects. Probably a greater caution in emergency orders to refashion social activity -- but maybe not as much as people hope (or fear), because work from home kind of mostly worked. Definitely a greater investment by all factions in the importance of My Tribe Being In Control, lest the Untermenschen from the other side make all the critical decisions -- which is bad by any measure.
I would give the species as a whole a D on its performance, but mostly because of that last factor, because of our inability, when the chips were down, to behave with restraint, compassion, and consideration for each other.
-------------
[1] I am cautiously saying "seemed" because the role of natural acquired immunity is still unknown. Maybe it was so important the vaccines only changed things on the margin, or maybe the vaccines bought valuable time, or maybe the vaccines were essential.
[2] I realize the younger crowd, who were never in any danger, can afford to be contemptuous about that. Geez, you're already 78, why fuss because you die today instead of 2-3 years hence? What's a few years of life?
[3] And this in a place with a ruthless powerful regime, a population that is used to following orders, and where news that shows the state in a bad light is highly repressed.
I also think it worked—objectively. But on a PR level, it was a disaster. The vaccines were nowhere near as effective as advertised, the testing in many cases was not as thorough as they made it seem, they refuse to release their actual data in anything like a timely manner, etc., etc. And yes, people seem to be dying suddenly at an unusual rate.
On an objective level, it was probably all worth it. But the FDA doesn't operate objectively. They operate on public opinion. And so they will be even more cautious next time, when the actual empirical lesson is probably that they should be far *less* so.
And I would say that the lack of "restraint, compassion, and consideration" is almost entirely due to official overreach. If the lockdowns and mandates hadn't made this a hugely political issue, most people would not have treated it as one.
I doubt that anyone will end the career in the FDA for approving Aduhelm (aducanumab). At worst, they will now work for big pharma in some important position.
While it was atrocious that they pushed through approval, on this one I do give the FDA some benefit of the doubt. People have been complaining for years that they hold up life-saving treatments out of over-regulated caution (who had the last post on here about DALYs lost due to the FDA not regulating faster?), the pharma company engaged in a canny PR blitz, and they were faced with the very real likelihood of media coverage along the lines of "heartless bureaucrats block miracle treatment, read this heart-wrenching account by a family member of how this has ensured their loved one suffers". Political pressure was applied and they folded.
It is to the credit of those involved who protested about this, and the Aduhelm fiasco is going to overshadow all future attempts to get rushed-through approval for 'life-saving' treatments. The only fault of the FDA is that they did yield to having their arms twisted here, and maybe this result (the drug was an expensive boondoggle) will mean they can resist future such attempts.
https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/medicines/human/withdrawn-applications/aduhelm
The problem remains that everyone will be convinced *their* pet treatment should be given speedy approval and leapfrog all the regulations, while the rival treatment is rubbish and should not be approved.
EMA clearly said that they are not going to approve Aduhelm because the data is not convincing therefore the company withdraw the application.
It may indeed play the role that it will now silence the critics who complain that the FDA hesitate to approve every snake oil they consider a life-saving treatment. We will see.
In the modern scientific era, It's very uncommon for a major consensus of relevant experts to be wrong about a major area of scientific dispute, and when they are, it's almost always for interesting reasons where their position was reasonably defensible given what was known at the time. The sexy examples of this happening are sexy because it is so uncommon, and even then, those are often over-exaggerated or not quite right because one template pop science writing loves is a maverick taking on the establishment and proving to be correct. Facts get twisted and oversimplified to fit that framework. H. Pylori stories where something like this really happened are unusual.
The pandemic provides a great example of people not understanding this leading them to adopt all sorts of poor beliefs because they think they can easily dismiss popular views of experts who know vastly more than they do as just captured by their biases. We are now drowning in examples of people holding dubious opinions about COVID, its risks, and how to mitigate them driven by people's forays into amateur epidemiology grounded in flippant dismissal of actual epidemiologists.
So one easy counterexample seems to be the usefulness of masks worn by the public to slow the spread of a respiratory pathogen. The consensus among most US experts and authorities was that making the public mask wasn't useful, and then switched pretty quickly to it being useful. At least one of those positions has to be wrong. (My impression is that in a lot of Asia the consensus was different, but I don't know enough to be sure.)
Or how about the huge replication crisis in the social sciences. Stuff that social psychology professors taught their students was very solid (most priming effects, for example) turned out not to really exist. That was a consensus in a social science field that was wrong. I think you can find about a dozen solid counterexamples to your claim there.
We can also look at radical mastectomy for breast cancer treatment. As I understand it, there was a really bitter dispute there, with the mainstream supporting radical mastectomy and a minority persisting in demonstrating that it did more harm than good.
Or we can consider the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder or not. That was something that changed in the last 50 years or so. Which instance of the consensus scientific position there was the really solid one that we should have confidence in?
Now, none of this means that you're better off finding a rando on the internet to listen to about some field of science than listening to someone with actual expertise. But i do not think it is rare for scientific consensus, even on practically relevant questions, to be quite wrong.
Radical mastectomy is an interesting example, because it illustrates one of the limitations on empirical science when it comes to medicine. The problem is, you generally *can't* get approval to do a study where your experimental arm gets anything *less* than the "standard of care." So let's say you have an idea that you don't have to remove the *whole* breast, just a chunk (which is what they do now). How do you prove you're right? You can't just sign a bunch of women up and say "OK some of you will be randomly assigned to just get a lumpectomy, which we kind of hope is just as good as taking the whole breast, but maybe not, you might die earlier than those in the control arm." That's totally unethical, and nobody would approve or fund it. So you're left with stuff like studying the relatively rare case that happens accidentally, for other reasons, until you've accumulated enough evidence.
Actually it is quite easily. Read Vinay Prasad how it is routinely done by pharma companies in cancer drug research. The ethics committee work is a boring, honorary post that is usually taken by old geezers and half-senile profesors who have lost acuity for better jobs. It is quite easy to get an obsolete standart-of-care past them because it is probably the one they used to have while they were doctors themselves. While at the same time it is quite hard to propose more progressive trial designs because those old people are too conservative and afraid from anything new.
Not even going to bother. Any argument that begins "everybody's corrupt! Check out this one guru on the Interwebz!" strikes me as so a priori implausible that it's not worth my time to even glance over it.
Impossible of what? Vinay Prasad is not so much known on internet, he has written several books and some of them like "Reversal" are included in the reading list for university studies of therapeutics. You probably didn't know that judging from your response.
I even don't see why you couldn't make a controlled trial as you described it if we have serious evidence that it might be better.
People in this group used to say that human challenge studies infecting people with covid are unethical. The reality is that we do such studies all the time. The UK did but it took quite long time to get the approval.
The previous expert consensus on masks I'm fairly familiar with as I used to sit on a committee regarding influenza harm reduction in a particular vulnerable community and this topic came up several times, prompting me to read publications on it. It's hard to summarize in a post, but a "for/against" position is an oversimplification. The idea was that for influenza-like respiratory illnesses specifically, poor compliance with proper mask use washed out its benefits and encouraged risk taking behavior such that it wasn't worth the effort. At the same time, epidemiological models were pretty clear that there were different circumstances where there would be a benefit and compliance levels themselves are fluid. Masks would be advisable in theory in the right circumstances. There was no consensus that they were generally useless, which should be obvious given that they're standard PPE in certain settings.
Then COVID comes around and the initial reaction is that previously received wisdom, but we learn very quickly that COVID contagious properties are different such that there's a likely benefit. At the same time, the overall efforts to mitigate COVID spread, of which widespread mask use was one, absolutely crushed the not-as-contagious influenza rates. So does that mean it turns out that masks actually would be helpful to stop influenza spread? Summarizing what I've read, the answer is now, "Yeah, probably" with a side of "should keep looking into it."
Regarding various examples of received expert consensuses being wrong, I will unfortunately again insist that it doesn't happen all that often. It's more often than a prior understanding is incomplete and requires elaboration and embellishment. When something is truly upturned, it's usually the case that a prior consensus was held for reasons that made it the reasonable position to hold. The "scholars just got this completely wrong; what were they thinking?!" stories are rare, but heavily played up in popular media because they are catnip to people. Most of what people learn in the course of getting a science degree will stick around, though some of it will prove to have severe limitations or be only partially correct in a way that calls into question its value. At the same time, they'll learn things that are appropriately qualified in their field that, when translated for a popular audience, are taught with a level of simplicity and confidence that just gets it wrong.
>Then COVID comes around and the initial reaction is that previously received wisdom, but we learn very quickly that COVID contagious properties are different such that there's a likely benefit.
Perhaps, but we "learned" that at the same time anyone paying any attention at all would have noticed that the American public no longer had any access to the sort of masks that had been previously determined to be mostly-useless-but-sometimes-useful-under-unusual-circumstances. Only cheap imitations built to no specification or standard and sold on Etsy or wherever. If the real thing is understood to be mostly useless but marginally useful under unusual circumstances, it is not even remotely scientific or rational to insist that the untested cheap imitation that *looks* like the real thing, *must* be used.
Really, given that risk compensation is one of the down sides of masking, it was grossly irresponsible to recommend improvised masks under any circumstances unless clearly hedged with "don't even think about trusting these things to keep you safe". And that wasn't the messaging.
Wouldn't THAT "messaging" been (seen as) counter-productive? When communicating to all, i.e. millions of IQ below 100 and low willingness of compliance), you do not want to kill your aim (ppl. using masks) by emphasizing how limited their effect really is. - btw, during the low-supply-time, DIY-masks were recommended by many experts (In Germany e.g. by Prof. Drosten ): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8006937/How-make-coronavirus-mask-Hong-Kong-officials-release-DIY-video.html
This is all downstream of: Kavanagh thinks learning and understanding things is relatively easy, while Scott thinks learning and understanding things is very, very hard. Kavanagh sees the light blinking *Science*, and stops, while Scott never stops.
Kavanagh is wrong. Scott is right.
Going by his Twitter potted bio, he's some kind of sociologist. So he's going for the soft science angle of "but think of the mindsets involved" that sociology likes to invoke; you don't go by the numbers solely, you have to interpret the context of the lived experience and so forth.
That's why he's able to be so sure about "LOL dumb" on the ivermectin question; you see, *he* understands the conspiracy theorist mindset and so can dismiss them out of hand, and addressing their questions is merely giving them the dignity of being worth taking seriously.
Sociologists also have a much stronger incentive than anyone else to insist on no-one doubting their results - their whole field is simultaneously laughable and easy for laymen to poke holes in.
Does he *think* it’s easy, or does he *want others to believe* it’s easy?
The older I get, the more I find myself reversing Hanlon’s Razor.
I think both? It appears that in his mind it's easy to know which scientists and studies to believe (if in doubt, just ask him and he will tell you which ones are legitimate, I'm sure). Since it's clear in his mind, he wants others to believe that it should be clear in their minds too. Anyone who thinks it's difficult is probably just listening to the wrong sources.
I happen to disagree with him on all of that, and that's the crux of Scott's post.
No, Kavanagh probably doesn't think learning and understanding things is so easy. Bring up one inconvenient but well-supported research result or fact and you will see this in action, suddenly he will bring up how "you have to take everything with a grain of salt" and "something something p-values" and "muh X is a complicated field and you have to be careful with generalization". I haven't even heard of him half an hour ago, but I will literally bet my house on this.
What Kavanagh wants is to (performatively) be amazed at how utterly easy and no-brainer his ***conclusions*** are, so he can better wage war on those who disagree and insult their intelligence. This is a standard culture war practice, here's the 1400 year example that first came to my mind :
>Every human is born a Muslim, it's their Jew parents who make them Jew and their Christian parents who make them Christian.
--A hadith. (Sayings by the prophet of Islam, treated as holy and second only to Quran by most Muslims)
Which is funny, because if you actually take a look at 2 year olds you will find they make terrible Muslims, not a single word of the Quran do they know, they don't even understand how God is One (or God, or how bathrooms work).
But the actual message here is something along the lines of "All those other religions are fake and has to be indoctrinated to kids in order to survive, but ours ? ours is superior, it didn't have to be invented, people are just born knowing it."
Kavanagh is doing something slightly more sophisticated than this, but only slightly. Truth is really out there in the observable world and is indeed figured out by experimentation and you can in fact see it for yourself, but the catch is that you can't disagree with our published conculsions. Any disagreement where you're actually *conflicted* about the final say (i.e. any serious disagreement) just proves how utterly peanut-brained you are, our conclusions are so blindingly obvious that, once we have additionally written them in published papers, disagreeing anymore is just stupidity and ignorance and bad faith zealotry on your part.
I believe everyone has their own version of this, sometimes without realizing.
I truly hope not everyone. I would put Scott up as a candidate.
How in the world are people Liking comments?
I like Chris, but I do think Scott is not a good target for him. Scott has spent many years writing hundreds of thousands of words on all manner of topics, most of them non-political, so there’s more basis for good faith.
Brett Weinstein and most of these other cranks are basically political actors who profit from controversy, not accuracy.
It's the opposite. Kavanagh thinks that learning and understanding things is hard, so 25,000 word debunkings for a popular audience from personal investigation have a lot of potential to mislead people. Kavanagh argues that understanding the meta-signs that someone is a crackpot should be sufficient and risks less misunderstanding. Scott, by contrast, is optimistic about the ability of ordinary people to weigh critiques and counter-critiques and come to the right decision.
Scott is the person who thinks he can debate a creationist and the audience - or at least enough of the audience to matter - will figure it out where as Kavanagh is worried that the audience will be bamboozled by the debate itself. If anyone thinks understanding is "easy" in this scenario, it's Scott.
I don't know what the right answer is here. It's an old dilemma. But I do think a lot of the comments are misunderstanding what the issue is.
I agree that it is important to discuss the signs of crackpottery (and that Scott could've done more in that department) but if you want to convince fence-sitters, there is no substitute for putting in work and showing your work, as Scott did. Because Scott is right, the errors made by crackpots are (1) errors that non-crackpots also make and (2) there are also crackpots who promote a message that is more or less true, e.g. Steve Kirsch was very worried about anthropogenic global warming. Therefore, pointing out that several ivermectin supporters appear to be crackpots is arguably a Chinese Robber Fallacy (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/) though it is, of course, still evidence.
Plus, you can't just say "the signs of a crackpot are X, Y and Z, and see how my opponent shows the signs!" because the people who are fans of your opponent have now stopped listening to you. And if you're not really careful about your X, Y and Z, people might think that better sources of truth also exhibit those signs. And most likely, better sources of truth sometimes do... nobody's perfect.
Fence sitters are not necessarily convinced by the superior argument. You're insisting that, and I'm suggesting the counter-argument rejects this premise. The problem is that people form their opinions via mental shortcuts that are error-prone and more specifically pseudoscience tends to present arguments that are superficially persuasive. You're taking it for granted that people just know the better argument when they see it, and that's simply not true.
This is one of the major reasons why professional scientists are often cautious about engaging pseudoscientific figures in debate for public consumption. It opens up a window for them to mislead people in a format conducive to their success.
So perhaps I’m stupid and worthy of ridicule, but I *still* buy (a version of) Hancock’s theory. Hancock himself is not to be trusted; he’s far, far too credulous, and much of his evidence is easily rebutted (such as the frozen mammoth corpses in Siberia being evidence of a rapid climactic shift). But he doesn’t seem to be *dishonest,* and I found the case he presents in *Underworld* compelling. There, he doesn’t talk about Atlantis; instead he presents a picture of a near-world-girdling coastal civilization (or set of civilizations) that was drowned out at the end of the last ice age. This makes *tremendous* sense to me, and explains a lot that nothing else does, such as evidence of truly ancient cultural ties between South America and Africa.
Two things occurred to me about why there could be shared stories across the world:
1. The same myths that the proto-Indo-Europeans or whatever had got carried with them all the way across the Bering Strait, and the "lost continent under the waves" story was one of them, and turned out to be one of the more durable ones in every culture it showed up in. People like intriguing stories!
2. Before the Bering Strait was washed under, there was communication of ideas across it - so even if the original North American settlers didn't bring it with them, it's possible that it became a big story and managed to spread on trade routes all the way across.
(And replace the Atlantis story with any other cultural commonality you have thought of, and it could've been brought or spread the same way.)
I don't know if this lines up with the evidence, or if this is what you were even thinking of, but I wanted to share my thoughts.
Fair. I am totally not going to get way into this, as it’s been years since I put any thought into it, but it’s more than shared stories. It’s shared architecture, and, recently, the discovery of some artifacts or materials from Africa in South America (sorry, I don’t remember specifics).
It’s not that I’m unwilling to consider alternative hypotheses, but it would have to be from someone who has read *Underworld* and is willing to respond to its claims and evidence specifically (this is not against you, but a general statement).
Null hypothesis: Lost lands and floods are really obvious stories for cultures with exposure to water to generate so they emerge spontaneously without needing outside help. The intellectual equivalent of ostriches and emus
This has always seemed so obvious to me I've always wondered why everyone doesn't think this by default.
Anywhere with coastal erosion literally has lost lands falling beneath the sea, plus the ocean is a vast and terrifying place at the best of times, it's really not that hard to see how similar myths could arise independently.
If it was just the stories, sure. It’s more than that: Technology, and even artifacts.
But the stories aren’t just “there was a flood”; there are a lot of specifics you wouldn’t expect to be similar.
I guess one question is how we could distinguish between:
a. There are stories shared across the world and have been preserved over many thousands of years as humans spread out across the globe.
b. There are stories that are relatively easy to recreate that have arisen independently across humans all over the world, which look similar enough to seem related but are actually just independent things.
For (b), common human experience, human psychology, and the nature and limits of the worldview available to ancient people could all explain having many stories re-arise.
Details and specifics. Generic accounts are one thing. But at some point, the level of congruence between different stories becomes implausible to be merely chance and general shared experience. (No claims as to whether the flood stories in particular meet that threshold.)
Indeed, my takeaway from this article is that I should update my priors to believe in ~Atlantis~ pyramid building ancient coastal civilizations considerably. The criticism leveled at Hancock et al. is remarkable for being so damn incurious about things like this.
Read Hancock’s *Underworld.*
The pyramids are convergent evolution. If you have a large labor pool with preindustrial technology, and you want to build something tall, pyramids are the way to go. Being big on the bottom and gradually getting smaller as you go up means it won't fall over, and making it with a square base makes the math easier.
Also, the Egyptians stopped building pyramids thousands of years before the Maya started.
It’s a lot more specific than that. Yes, “pyramid” is obvious. Specific details of architecture and construction are not.
Graham's most recent works tie together some rather interesting facts and ideas. I agree and think he even says that he is reaching, speculating, and choosing to imagine and think beyond the available spotty evidence...and I think he also isn't always very clear when he is drawing from evidence and when is drawing his own conclusions.
That said, there is a thread for him to pull on and the evidence expands over time. Just recently we've seen evidence for over a dozen large temple complexes in Turkey like Gobekli Tepe which are in the 12,0000 year old range and are too large and too complex for small groups of hunter gatherers to have built. Even Gobekli is less than 10% excavated according to the ground penetrating radar. It is impressive all one its own with the 3D carvings out of monoliths and I think he's quite right than lots of archaeologists are in fact not experts on stone carving and have never attempted to create or move such large stones.
The arrogance and ignorance of those with PhDs who think they are experts on everything is a real phenomenon and Graham has most certainly received far more shrill screaming from such people than would be fair and his psychological arguments about him being more famous and making more money than them in the thing they are supposed to be experts in is likely real to some degree.
Some of the dumbest people I've ever met have had PhDs and they simply have very complex and convoluted ways to talk themselves stupid and ignore the idea of bias, conflicts of interest, and that they are human beings. The forced nostalgia and ignorance of recent history is astounding as we simply move on from things like Vietnam or the Iraq wars while every so called 'expert' was screaming about the necessity of bombing small villages.
Look at Lex Freidman who was talking about the UFO videos which are all confirmed now by the government and show physics far beyond any 10-20 year gap of secrets which the militaries of the world might have. And he talked to a dozen or so scientists with expertise in the area and they all just gave him blank groputhink answers from 20 years ago to giggle and say taht UFOs are silly and there is 'no evidence'...despite Lex literally showing them the evidence. They had no curiosity and were fully in the mode of trying to protect their own reputations and get back to the narrow things they wanted to talk about.
So despite being dead wrong, ignorant, etc. they responded with careerism and a lack of curiosity in most cases. The psychology and groupthink and sub cultural dynamics of a community of experts all trying to maintain their own credulity and reputation comes into direct conflict with doing actual science or being truly scholarly and curious about the world. After about 10 or 20 attempts, Lex has just given up on this topic in recent podcasts as none of these so called experts seem to know anything or have thought about this topic.
Sometimes I wonder...ok, so what, say there was an 'advanced' ancient civilisation we know nothing about. They had boats, spread all around the world from Egypt to New Zealand building pyramids and discovering an expansive icy coast of Antarctica along with building various underground shelters while they hid and eventually succumbed to the Younger-Dryas bombardments from the Torrid meteor stream. And maybe there are still untold wonders and remains of their civilisation under the Sahara Desert which was a lush jungle paradise.
Ok, great. that's really really cool. They could carve stone, move large stones in ways we struggle to understand, had advanced knowledge of the cosmos and complex astronomical knowledge including the procession of the equinox, etc.
That's really awesome, but like...so what? We have indeed found real human settlements underwater now all around the world in what used to be the above water coastal areas. This is simply a purely true statement, though underwater megaliths are still unclear in their evidence base. And....so what? It does show that the people who did thinking instead of being slaves to available evidence were right. Or at least some of them were right who happened to think that way.
But unlike discovering a new flying mechanism or solar tech or way to grow food in harmony with the soil microbiome or new knowledge about the importance of the human microbiome for health which to this day most doctors are ignorant about as that 'revolution of thinking' has yet to truly spread though the arthritic and slow medical system....knowledge of even several new and even globe spanning super ancient civilisations which collapsed 15,000 years ago would...not really change anything for us today. But would be really awesome to learn about and discover.
Our idea of history and the human species has been wrong multiple times. Our species was thought to be perhaps 100,000 years old and new fossil and DNA evidence points to humans being 300,000 years old in pretty much our modern form.
It probably is stupid and short-sighed of historians to think that literally nothing happened other than people banging sticks together in 290,000+ years of time and everything started 10,000 years ago in terms of civilisation. This is a pretty solid argument and it is clear why we wouldn't generally find evidence due to erosion and destruction of simpler building materials over that period of time.
By and large it all would fall into the 'so what' category for most people around the world. It is a very fun thing for some folks to think about and I have fun thinking about it, but it just doesn't' make much of a difference to our world. We already know many older civilisations collapsed and some of them due to environmental factors, probably most of them due to environmental changes or degradation of some kind which led to wars, famine, and diseases.
So I'm just not sure how much is there in terms of knowing about it mattering. It does shine a light on the obstinacy and idiocy of many so called experts who are very limited in their knowledge and very wrong in their ideas. The entire history of science has been one long slog of almost all the experts being continually wrong.
It is good to cast aspersions on the certainty and worship of 'the experts' like they are infallible when our history shows us they are almost nothing but fallible and limited humans whose ideas will be shown to be incredibly incomplete and wrong over time. What is surprisingly bad and annoying are the fake intellectual defenders of 'the experts' who don't have any understanding of the process of knowledge creation and loss over time.
If you had to the 'top experts' of Europe from the 1500s looking at the astronomical knowledge of the Incas they'd have said they were wrong and making errors and yet it was the Europeans who were wrong and we'd later learn about how advanced some of the knowledge was in several south american civilisations.
So anytime someone is screaming for everyone else to stop thinking or asserting that we have 100% pure expert approved knowledge and is all about censorship and ridicule of those alternative ideas for the purposes of aggrandising their own ego on what they imagine are the accomplishments of others are...I know I'm not going to engage with that person. The key to knowledge is trust, ignorance, and obedience to authority! You all recall how that's carved in stone above the door to every scientific society around the world....according to the fellatio of the experts who have never been wrong in the long rung, except for almost every time so far.
Ok but bottom line it for me is the earth flat or nah. Or hollow, I will accept hollow as a point of prevarication.
>It probably is stupid and short-sighed of historians to think that literally nothing happened other than people banging sticks together in 290,000+ years of time and everything started 10,000 years ago in terms of civilisation.
This is what's frustrating to me about the angry reaction to Hancock's work. We know modern humans have been wandering the face of the earth for three hundred thousand years, and we generally have no idea what our ancestors were up to except for a fuzzy picture of the most recent ~5% of human history. I think it's interesting to speculate about this huge period of prehistory and (admittedly only having read America Before after seeing Hancock on a podcast interview) I take his work as just that - interesting speculation. I'm bewildered that there's so much open hostility towards this kind of thing.
Unfortunately Hancock is a really poor emissary for his ideas. He’s so credulous. And he never really admits he was wrong; he just publishes a new book that makes new assertions that contradict his old ones.
"open hostility" is not how I want to call my feelings about this .. err .. interesting thoughts (honestly, I want to write: BS). So, yep, open hostility it is, I guess. How come? Well, see Scott worked hard on this deworming issue - great post. Now he sees his hard work laughed upon by this K.-guy. And feels angry and insulted. Rightly so.- Now legions of real archaeologists search the world for artifacts. Painstakingly hard work, and if you do not find some "oldest X found ever" you will never be known outside your circles. And then some people just go and claim sth. and their readers say: "Silly Archaeologists, you too dumb to find any of this Atlantis that must be so obviously there. A high culture 100 k years ago worldwide along all the beaches you simply overlooked, because ... ." - And you wonder why some feel kinda pissed off? As if there are no books, nay libraries about it. Pyramids? Children section, David Macaulay, see how they were build. No, sorry, no books disproving that there are green swans somewhere in the Amazon. Or that mammoths were singing or Neanderthals flew on gryphons. We can not disprove any of that, not even that an angel gave J. Smith those golden plates. WTF, there is so much wonder in real prehistoric past, dug out by real experts (yes, Heinrich Schliemann, well done) and then some guys just dream up sth. ... and we must read Erich von Däniken/ Hancock / creationists before we are allowed to shrug and roll our eyes? - And yes, science is work in progress, and yes, new findings do change the narrative, see Göbekli Tepe/Denisovans et al.. - But to be helpful: Check the timelines, and see where to put a 'global forgotten kinda advanced civilization leaving no trace': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_prehistory or another instructive overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_human_settlements .
Our long "stagnation" is a riddle, I agree. Erik Hoel won the ACX contest by a.o. proposing a fine and fun theory. https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/the-gossip-trap
That's all fair, I guess I'm not familiar enough with Hancock's history to be informed on the acrimony towards him. Like I said, I've only read his most recent book and thought he raised some interesting ideas. I certainly don't think there's any need for a thorough response to all of his ideas from "the establishment," but I'd expect more of a "He's a crank and we don't want to engage with him" kind of response. More understandable if he's been at it for ages and "the establishment" is over his schtick at this point.
Thanks for the links - somehow I missed Erik's essay, I'll give it a read.
Part of it is the hang-over from the Ancient Astronauts notions (and indeed Theosophy and its like before those) - that were super-duper advanced civilisations that were more advanced than current society millennia ago, but they got wiped out by floods/ice age/you name it. Lasers and spaceships (they like to quote the energy weapons and flying chariots of the gods in Indian mythology as 'really' being these kinds of thing) except oh no wiped out alongside the dinosaurs.
So, not unreasonably, when asked "where are the traces of these?", they come up with the underwater pyramids or rock carvings or just "well what do you think happened back when there were giraffes in the Sahara?" type extrapolations, which makes it hard to take seriously such theories. And then we get the reactions to *any* notion of "maybe humans weren't just banging sticks together for a hundred thousand years before we got the first recorded civilisation" all lumped in the "fake aliens" basket.
Be aware that the ocean level has increased by approx 120 meters since the last glacial maximum 19000 years ago. It only levelled out 6000 years ago. Plenty of material for our story-telling ancestors to weave myths and narratives around the campfire, to be passed on through the generations, about previous great civilisations that are now underneath the sea.
It still rose quite a bit from 4000-1000BC - about 3m over that period. After that it was fairly steady until around 1900AD.
Anything remotely like this would show up in modern population genetics, and it doesn't.
What would show up? That people lived near coasts? What would you expect to find?
Presumably a semi-advanced coastal civilisation would have ships? And they'd travel longish distances from time to time?
They'd probably have crops and livestock too, which they'd have selectively bred.
I think the biggest problem would be: how the heck did this civilisation never travel inland? Not even a little bit? Or build something on a hill near the water? The people living inland never noticed "Hey, those people living on the coast have some neat ideas, let's copy them, or at least raid them and steal some of their stuff". And when the seas very slowly swallowed their cities over a period of centuries, these people just sat in place and freaking drowned instead of moving inland.
Is this so implausible? In the weak form, i.e. an ancient-Egypt level civilisation that wasn't conveniently in a desert near some people whose writings survived. Egypt's neighbours knew of its existence, and were broadly content to ignore it and keep living their own lives. Raiding was certainly common, but stuff broke and wore away, and those neighbouring cultures didn't have the tools or knowledge to recreate them. The Indus Valley civilisation had organised cities and *plumbing*, and very nearly disappeared without a trace (to the extent that we call them 'the Indus Valley civilisation') Cahokia and the Chaco Canyon cultures both became much more organised than their neighbours, and then collapsed, with their citizens going back to hunting and gathering, or small-scale subsistence farming.
For the record, I *don't* believe in Atlantis for reasons cited by Scott, but I do think the general idea that maybe there were more ancient civilisations that rose and fell and weren't necessarily conveniently in very dry areas isn't a crazy one.
So Scott is working off of an old hypothesis of Hancock’s; he has updated it to be “worldwide coastal civilization that got flooded at the end of the Ice Age,” instead of “Atlantis” as it’s usually thought of.
Unfortunately that pattern matches to a common failure mode of conspiracy / pseudoscience theorists, which is that when their initial idea gets challenged they come up with a more complex and harder to disprove version of the theory. Adding epicycles, if you will. There is a fine line between “updating based on new information” and “moving the goal posts”.
They didn’t drown, but their civilizations did collapse. That’s the argument at least.
And I’m not sure we’re talking about centuries here. That’s the real question; was there a tipping point that caused rapid sea level rise?
There must have been some places where a very rapid rise happened--some river changed course or some passage to the ocean was opened up, and very quickly the water level rose and everything was flooded. Whether that was the origin of the story of Noah's Ark or not, I don't know, but it seems like it's got to have happened a few times.
Or was there some climactic tipping point where the ice built up started melting rapidly, raising sea level by a significant amount in months, as opposed to centuries?
"truly ancient cultural ties between South America and Africa" would show up like a beacon in modern genetic data: you'd see big stretches of similarity between modern Africans and modern South Americans. Something like a single cross-breeding event a generation across the whole population would leave enough of a signal to detect.
You do, of course, see some stretches of African DNA in South Americans, but it's from recent post-Columbian admixture, and you don't see it in the isolated tribal areas.
Okay, now that's an interesting point, that I'd like to see explored further.
Sadly it makes no sense because these civilizations would move as sea levels rose.
That depends on how fast the sea levels rose.
No, I've got this one: If some of our distant coastal ancestors from BCE 19000 - 6000 built large stone structures, (too large to dismantle and move inland as sea levels gradually rose - easier just to gradually abandon them and build new ones further inland), much later generations would encounter these underwater structures as they dived for food etc. Baffled by these, they would probably think "in the distant past some cataclysmic event must have made the land here sink beneath the sea" , and construct their campfire-myths accordingly. Ok, given enough time, erosion will destroy even stone structures - but in theory at least, there might still be faint traces of "civilized human activity" as far down as up to 120 meters.
Yeah, but where did these civilizations *go*? It’s not like there are continuous traces of human settlements up the waterline.
Most traces of costal civilisations will be washed away say 100 years after rising water levels have engulfed them. Exception: Large stone structures, which could last centuries or even millennia before they are indistinguishable from everything else at the bottom of the sea. Then remember that 19000 - 6000 BC is well before writing was invented. Coastal civilisations might come and go, and in a few hundred years no-one will remember they ever existed. Then, at some point (say 500-1000 years later) coastal people, diving for food or whatever, notice stone structures at 5-10 meters below the surface. The myth of ancient civilisations that sank beneath the sea is born.
...just a speculation of course. But one reason we in our time have not found many such stone structures (apart from the very real possibility that they never existed, of course!) is that we have not looked deep enough. I would be surprised if many have looked for traces of ancient coastal civilisations below 20 meters. Since ocean levels have risen approx. 120 meters since the last glacial maximum, perhaps we should extend our search...
But is that what we see? A continuous line of large stone structures climbing up the coastlines as the water rose?
My point is that if your thesis was right, we should see coastal civilizations stretching into modern times somewhere near the submerged structures.
There is a hell of a lot of ancient coastline to consider, and even in the best case scenario the number of premodern coastal cultures that built big stone stuff is likely to be very limited. So no puzzle, really, that you do not encounter pyramids every 2000 meter if you deep-dive off the coast of Morocco or other places that had a reasonable ok climate even back during the last glacial maximum.
Any thoughts on the difference between doing the Ivermectin analysis privately (and coming to whatever conclusion you decide but keeping it to yourself) versus posting the Ivermectin analysis as a public blog post? It seems like there should be some consideration of the fact that you cede the ability to be a neutral observer of the phenomena when you choose to discuss it in a public instead of a private medium.
"when you choose to discuss it in a public instead of a private medium"
Did you miss the badgering by Alexandros and his supporters about getting Scott to put up a response to the response to the response? There's not much choice in "you promised you'd do a write-up, Scott, when are you gonna publish it?"
Disagree, there's a very clear choice being presented - ignore or engage. Ignoring has no consequences, engaging does.
I'm not sure "no consequences" is correct. There's reputational consequences and living up to your own ideals.
"Ignoring" or at minimum appearing to ignore had the fanboys popping up all the time about "when you gonna do what you promised?"
> Ignoring has no consequences
Scott's whole post is a discussion of why ignoring could indeed have consequences that *support* conspiracies.
That just moves the decision backwards in time. Replace "post the response response" with "agree to post a response response once the response exists"
I think Scott might frame it as "I think this discussion is worth having, and the other side won't be able to put time into it without a prior guarantee of public airing." That just makes the tradeoff between the value of private discussion and the possible downsides of publicizing harmful views more stark.
Everybody agrees Alexandros raised some valid points, so it's good that Scott addressed those, and I suspect he would have even without badgering. (Where "everybody" = Scott and Alexandros.)
And the whole discussion is good material for a blog and a philosophy that are interested in "what's the best way to reach useful conclusions about the world?"
Kavanagh goes with "Trust the regulators to represent expert consensus, and then trust expert consensus. And shout down anyone who publicly examines the question in more depth, because that examination will encourage more conspiracy theory entertaining nuts than sound reasoners, overall reducing the average amount of correctness in society."
That's not necessarily wrong - on average, how many times will the regulators be wrong, and is the value of catching those rare wrong opinions greater than the negative value of encouraging conspiracy theory entertaining nuts?
Now I suspect that Kavenagh would be more skeptical of a regulator's conclusion if it didn't agree with his worldview, but I don't know him, so who knows?
This is needlessly factually wrong
I dunno, still seems possible to be pretty neutral publically.
It's more of a Hawthorne Effect - regardless of now neutrally Scott wrote the Ivermectin series, his mere choice to create a public work discussing it has direct effects independent of the content of the post.
Maybe posting publicly that there’s a controversy about something is something you should only do if you’re enough of an expert to know there’s a controversy. In the counterfactual where Scott couldn’t resolve the controversy himself, maybe Scott should have held off on his post until he could ask someone who could explain it to him. If he didn’t know someone like that, he shouldn’t have posted it at all. In reality, Scott knew enough to say there was no controversy, so he was free to post.
Seems like having someone widely trusted to be honest (and with relevant expertise) go through their analysis in public is pretty valuable for demonstrating to people that yes, there's an actual reason why most experts no longer think ivermectin is a promising treatment for covid. It's not just that Dr Faucci and five Big Pharma CEOs have proclaimed it true and everyone else has fallen in line.
So you're saying I shouldn't believe in a worldwide body that oversees the game of chess?
No, that's Fidoism. You're thinking of FIFAism 😁
No, FIFAism is the belief in a worldwide body that gives away football championship hosting in return for money and favours. You're thinking of FIFOism.
No, FIFOism is the belief that Big Queue is out to take control all your data structures. You're thinking of FEMAism.
No, FEMAism is the belief that the federal government creates emergencies as a jobs program. You're thinking of FOMOism
No, FOMOism is the belief that you are missing out on the fun others are having. You're thinking of Finalism
No, finalism is the belief that school or college finals affect reality. You’re thinking of Fidelism
I have a conspiracy theory that FIFA and the IOC are both deeply corrupt organizations....
And I have a conspiracy theory that the nations in OPEC are colluding to control the global price of oil!
Relatedly, I think the Pope might actually be a Catholic!
I thought Fidoism was the notion that dogs are trained by the government to spy on their owners?
Perhaps CK desperately wants you to engage with him as an ego boost. Just ignore him and let him flail around in a vacuum.
. . . . in which case, misspelling his name was a nice touch.
Well, actually taking Kavanaghs line of argument seriously and offering counter-arguments to it (instead of ignoring it), was sort of a meta-version of Scott's general "rationalist" approach to contested issues. Rather clever, I would say.
. . . . ignore engaging on his platform.
Bret Devereaux linked a few weeks ago to this piece by Alexandra Sills making a related argument that academic historians need to engage with the general public more than they do. She even uses the same central example of having once believed in Atlantis, because that's what the sources who *did* want to engage the public plausibly argued.
https://ancientalexandra.wixsite.com/domus/post/knights-on-white-horses
I think Devereaux himself is a pretty good example of a historian doing public engagement well. (Including a three-part series on the Fall of Rome.) He lays out different perspectives (often touching on both current disputes and older paradigms) while generally making clear where he stands and how confident he is about it.
Of course, his activities are notably being done from outside a tenured or tenure-track academic position. And he's certainly been increasingly vocal about his concerns about how the fact that public outreach is of either zero or negative value careerwise will hurt both the public (which will often be operating without good access to the results of the research it's paying for) and the field (which will find it hard to attract public support and funding if it doesn't visibly produce results the public can benefit from).
I still don't get the power invested in these ideas. Going from a state of...I feel convinced by what I've seen that Atlantis was definitely real to...I'm not so sure about the evidence anymore and don't know if Atlantis was real.
This is far cry from the way that 'fans of reason' often term things and give a knee jerk reaction that Atlantis 100% was defiantly not real and we KNOW this now. This is untrue and it is not known with any degree of certainty if Atlantis or other similarly ancient societies existed.
What remains true is their incredible degree of plausibility. With 300,000 years of human existence, it would not be so unreasonable to imagine an Egypt level society or even more advanced than them at some point in the past. That's the more rational position than humans just banged rocks together for 290,000 years with zero progress. Our lack of evidence or unclear evidence we have collected so far is also well understood for how and why that would be the case.
So while a 100% stance of absolute certainty about Atlantis is silly, so is the opposite.
Reverting to a state of uncertainty is interesting and being less convinced of older ideas is an important shift in one's thinking. But in some ways I feel that can lead us to an opposite bias to be extra resistant to new knowledge in the area of ancient civilisations. That knee jerk, fire burns hands, level human response to assert 'ha! you wont fool me again'.
Absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence, but it's also not evidence of presence. Being open to new evidence is fine if and when it appears, but Plato writing a philosophical fable is orthogonal to the question, and pursuits like history and archaeology are about what we're able to uncover evidence for now.
If the evidence changes, then the theories can and should change. But I'm pretty sure that the odds that I as an interested layman can usefully distinguish between the next genuine paradigm-breaker and the next Velikovsky better than people in the field are pretty low. And the tendency for soi-disant would-be Galileos to pattern-match to previous cranks doesn't make me personally more inclined to try to sort through them.
"Absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence"
Wow it's been awhile since I've had a good chance to tell someone to read the sequences :) But
in all seriousness this is wrong and Eliezer did a good write up of why it is wrong.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mnS2WYLCGJP2kQkRn/absence-of-evidence-is-evidence-of-absence
I mean, hominid ancestors banged rocks together for a few million years before they got around to evolving into modern humans. Dinosaurs lived for 100 million years and they didn’t even get around to banging rocks. Single cell organisms floated around for a couple billion years before they even thought about growing an extra cell. And the earth was a lifeless rock for a couple billion years before that.
Turns out “evolutionary timescales” are a really damn long time.
Strongly agreed overall, but the origins of life have apparently been pushed far enough back that Earth was a lifeless rock for less than a billion years.
(Which is especially impressive since it presumably had to originate after Theia blasted a Moon's worth of mass off of it.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms
Yeah, I actually looked that up after my post and was surprised by how far back the origin of life has been pushed. TIL.
I am Gregory XVI, and I approve of this message 😁
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06068b.htm
"It is to escape from this conclusion that some philosophers, accepting as a principle the impotency of reason, have emphasized the need of belief on the part of human nature, either asserting the primacy of belief over reason or else affirming a radical separation between reason and belief, that is, between science and philosophy on the one hand and religion on the other. Such is the position taken by Kant, when he distinguishes between pure reason, confined to subjectivity, and practical reason, which alone is able to put us by an act of faith in relation with objective reality. It is also a fideistic attitude which is the occasion of agnosticism, of positivism, of pragmatism and other modern forms of anti-intellectualism. As against these views, it must be noted that authority, even the authority of God, cannot be the supreme criterion of certitude, and an act of faith cannot be the primary form of human knowledge. This authority, indeed, in order to be a motive of assent, must be previously acknowledged as being certainly valid; before we believe in a proposition as revealed by God, we must first know with certitude that God exists, that He reveals such and such a proposition, and that His teaching is worthy of assent, all of which questions can and must be ultimately decided only by an act of intellectual assent based on objective evidence. Thus, fideism not only denies intellectual knowledge, but logically ruins faith itself."
> before we believe in a proposition as revealed by God, we must first know with certitude that God exists, that He reveals such and such a proposition...
I believe that (some) Protestants would say that they have direct experience of God himself that does not require any kind of fiddly philosophical analysis or logical circumlocutions; they have a *personal* and immediate relationship with Jesus, and thus they know that He is the Lord, and His Bible shows them the way. I believe that many of them would also add, "yeah, and it's no surprise that an idolater like the Pope, bless his heart, wouldn't be able to hear Jesus like we do." :-/
I appreciate the inclusion of "bless his heart" - the harshest invective in the Protestant lexicon - in reference to the Pope. Adds a dose of realism.
But honestly, I don't think most Protestants would disagree with the Pope here (speaking as one of them) - I don't think the Pope is denying the possibility of direct experience; but it's part of belief not the whole of it.
If anything I'd argue the Protestant side puts more of an emphasis on reason, with more emphasis on direct individual study of the Bible. ("Sola fides" is a doctrine that stands in opposition to salvation by works, not in opposition to faith through reason)
I don't think that's actually irrational. It doesn't seem fundamentally different to me to believing your senses in everyday life.
Interesting. We are in 1590, right? And it hangs in the balance if Christendom shall choose the path of rationality and empiricism, as a foundation of faith, or instead follow the path of their colleagues, the learned Muslim theologists, who instead had chosen the path to hail immediate faith as opposed to rational inquiry (the reference is to the defeat of rationalist muslim theology, aka kalam, in the early/middle middle ages). Both sides had good arguments back then against their respective opponents, but we know how it went...Christian theology spawned the Enlightenment, Muslim theology did not. I'll have to read more about this guy, and his very short papacy.
Gregory was the 19th century. There was also Clement VI in the 14th century who had to smack down a French philosopher and theologian; fideism in various forms has been around for a long time. It's in the tradition of Thomism to defend reason as a power.
"As to the opinion of those who maintain that our supernatural assent is prepared for by motives of credibility merely probable, it is evident that it logically destroys the certitude of such an assent. This opinion was condemned by Innocent XI in the decree of 2 March, 1679 (cf. Denzinger, n. 1171), and by Pius X in the decree "Lamentabili sane" n. 25: "Assensus fidei ultimo innititur in congerie probabilitatum" (The assent of faith is ultimately based on a sum of probabilities). Revelation, indeed, is the supreme motive of faith in supernatural truths, yet, the existence of this motive and its validity has to be established by reason."
Ah, my mistake, I put "Gregory XIV" (pope 1590-1) in wiki instead of Gregory XVI. Those damned roman numerals...so easy to get wrong:-)
...in any case, Thomas Aquinas is certainly the main scholar responsible for allowing a "rationalist" tendency in Christianity. He was also more of a near-contemporary to the Muslim theologicans who defeated "rationalist" approaches to scripture in the Muslim world.
..although even further back in the Christian rationalist pantheon is John, the Evangelist who gave us the immortal story of "Thomas the Doubter". Thomas, who - despite insisting on evidence before he believed - was none the less allowed into Paradise. Not as its most prominent guest, according to Jesus - but Jesus did not contemn him to Hell for wanting proof before he believed, and that is the main thing.
I sometimes think about what it would be like to be just getting onto the internet now, or even to not be a Very Online person (an ultimate goal of mine at which I keep failing). I would definitely be a conspiracy theorist.
The reason is because Internet Discourse is about 12 layers deep and only the first few make any sense (See Zvi's Simulacra stuff). So you get online and someone says a pretty reasonable-sounding thing ("I like spaghetti"), and you retweet it, and suddenly you are a racist and a sexist, and an idiot. Because you didn't know that some celebrity Nazi streamer *also* liked spaghetti and that therefore all Right Thinking people hate spaghetti and anyway what Americans eat isn't actually spaghetti, and also did you know the guy who brought spaghetti to the Americas was a pedophile. If the Nazi streamer was even a little coy about being a Nazi he'd radicalize a more naive me in about 20 minutes in that environment.
I wish I had about ten hands so I could say "on the other hand" nine more times.
But on the other hand, one major issue I have with the whole rationalist project is that I think its proponents are overconfident in their ability to determine truth in areas where they don't have expertise. I do think that makes folks more likely to fall into weird failure modes where they believe actively harmful things.
On the other hand, I am 99% sure that some consensuses are false, and have no specific examples of a consensus I think is false, so I am almost certainly a sheep in most ways.
On the other hand, I'm still probably right more often than I'm wrong.
On the other hand, I'm never right nor wrong in interesting, thought provoking ways.
"On the gripping hand" will get you one more iteration. You're out of luck after three, though.
"On the slapping hand"
"On the shadow-puppet hand"
"On the wiping hand"
...I think that's the extent of what hands can do.
How about the second hand, minute hand, hour hand, invisible hand, hand of God (right and left), deckhand, upper hand, or helping hand?
On the hand that feeds me, though, this may be getting out of hand.
The hand of Providence, the hand of glory, and the hand of fate (though perhaps that's more a fickle finger):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfEDxbylTOE
And every once in a while you just need Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof: "NO! There is no other hand!"
I'm a fan of "On the mutant third hand," perhaps escalating the level of mutation if you need even more hands.
"On the invisible hand", if you want to sound like Adam Smith started a religious cult.
(... inb4 "he did, it's called Capitalism")
It doesn't really matter, in the end, that some self-proclaimed rationalist was overconfident and mistaken, or even that he managed to delude his whole (minuscule) community. What ends up mattering is which memes are powerful enough to reach mainstream consensus, or at least the status of its legitimate challengers, and rationalists, despite their now mostly discarded delusions of grandeur, aren't really threatening that.
The controversy over Ivermectin is mis-framed, the victim of recent-history amnesia.
Around 2020, when Trump began boosting it, Ivermectin became a token of one’s politics and therefore of one’s attitude to the pandemic. For the true believers, for the Trump camp, Ivermectin was a cure for Covid, a cure that made the pandemic nothing to worry about and a reason to open up, to get on with life and keep the economy humming along so Trump could be re-elected in 2020.
Within that framework, if authorities had conceded that Ivermectin might work, the Trump political machine would have translated that as the end of the pandemic and all the contrary voices demanding we do difficult and costly things would have been silenced. We’d have been swallowing Ivermectin, not vaccinating, and the death toll would have been in the millions.
Perhaps those in the Ivermectin-is-junk camp were too certain, perhaps they dismissed some evidence more forcefully than the science at the time justified, but I’m darn glad they did. This never was an Atlantis-type controversy and you mustn’t judge it by the same criteria.
That's different.
One, I'm not sure I agree with your framing of the stakes - the idea that Trump being *slightly* more able to claim that Ivermectin was an effective treatment would have drastically affected outcomes and killed millions seems more than a little suspect to me.
To suggest that a slight change in the narrative around Ivermectin would have drastically changed course seems to imply that the US government handling of the pandemic is able to be completely divorced from the situation on the ground, which just isn't true.
Maybe we'd have opened up a little more, a little sooner, but in reality we opened up anyway and then the Delta and Omicron waves came and slowed things down again, and I think that would have happened regardless.
We'd still have developed vaccines and most people still would have taken them. It's much better to not be sick at all, than to be sick and have a treatment - (speaking as someone who took Paxlovid).
---
And even if there was a risk of Dire Consequences, I find this sort of reasoning - that it's okay to exaggerate scientific results and downplay any uncertainty if it's for the Greater Good™ - to be troubling. To a large extent I still think the whole situation where the effectiveness of masks was intentionally downplayed to prevent a shortage burned a lot of trust in the establishment and "the Science" and did a ton more damage in the long run than it saved.
Like imagine if it *did* turn out that once the scientific consensus came in, it was pro-Ivermetcin.
(No matter how unlikely you thought that outcome was in 2020) The more loudly the "Follow the Science" crowd had yelled "it's junk, you're taking horse medicine you idiots", the more long-term damage there'd be for future public health efforts and science communication.
That kinda happened with masks, and to a certain extent with antigen tests.
I think you're forgetting how desperate Trump became, as "his stock market" plunged in early 2020, to call an end to the pandemic and reopen schools and businesses. I think you're also ignoring the hot anger and opposition to mask and vaccine mandates among Republican legislators, especially Governors and state legislators, to school and business closures and to any kind of mandate that restricted personal freedoms. The rules and mandates that almost certainly saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives hung for months by a thread.
I do not doubt that Trump and many of the wild men and women in the Republican party would have jumped all over Ivermectin as the cure for the pandemic, proclaimed themselves the anti-expert saviors of America and abandoned everything that eventually brought the pandemic under control, especially mass, mandated vaccination. It was a very close-run thing, and we forget that now at our peril.
I'm not advocating the suppression of scientific truth, and no scientific truths were eventually suppressed in dismissing Ivermectin as the solution to Covid. But as things stood at the time, it was much better to vehemently dismiss poor quality research advocating Ivermectin, even if a little truth got temporarily put aside along the way.
I don't think I'm forgetting significant facts of what happened in 2020 - but you're talking about your counter-factual speculations as if they're "facts" to be "forgotten" rather than just that: counter-factual speculations made about what your political enemies would have done had things gone slightly differently.
(The part where they're your political enemies is really easy to pick out when you insist on referring to them as "cultists" and "wild men/women" rather than using a more neutral term like "supporters")
And again, I just don't think this really makes sense. In your view the only thing that stopped (Evil) President Trump from raising the Mission Accomplished banner and declaring Pandemic Over was the (Heroic) Expert Scientists loudly declaring that ivermetcin doesn't work? The same experts that Trump infamously doesn't listen to anyway?
It seems like if Trump wanted to use ivermetcin to declare the pandemic over (or hydroxychloroquine, which like tgof points out is actually way more chronologically reasonable here), he would have done it; and exaggerating The Science to convince Trump (who doesn't care about The Science) seems futile.
Indeed even as actual Trump was touting ivermectin, the actual Trump administration was executing “operation Warp Speed” that developed the most effective vaccines before Trump left office. And of course a vast world exists outside of the United States that tried all sorts of anti-COVID measures, including in some cases ivermectin.
So it’s weird to assume that the anti-misinformation keyboard warriors of English speaking Twitter were the deciding factor between our current world and one where millions of additional people are dead because the US medical establishment decided to give ivermectin a serious go and just give up on everything else.
Indeed it was stunning how quickly the rhetoric of Trump’s reflexive opponents shifted from “That’s Trump’s vaccine….he bypassed our essential safety protocols…it’ll be POISON…” to “This is a Miracle Cure that will do all manner of things vaccines have never done in the past.”
It’s a vaccine. It seems to work reasonably well, as vaccines go. There are contraindications. This is normal.
Cuomo literally declared that he wouldn't allow the vaccine in NY... until Trump said "ok then, we'll give your share to other states."
Of course, Tammany Hall Jr. to this day is insisting that mandating sending active COVID cases into nursing homes caused zero outbreaks, and all of the deaths were caused by asymptomatic nurses.
A lot of the concern was that Trump might act ahead of the trial results, which would hardly have been out of character. (And some of the reactions, on both sides, were certainly about Trump getting credit for it before the election.) Then the results came in (after the companies had made public assertions of resisting administration pressure) and it turned out that they were quite good, particularly for the mRNA vaccines.
(I remember when the adenovirus-based "Oxford vaccine" was seen as the clear front runner, before it turned out that not only was it probably somewhat less effective than mRNA, but that Oxford and AstraZeneca had somewhat messed up the trials. But even so, in a world where mRNA tech had developed more slowly, the adenovirus vaccines would reasonably have been seen as a triumph.)
It's stranger how Trump's supporters largely and uncharacteristically broke with Trump over the vaccine. Trump himself has continued to quietly support it, albeit without enthusiasm. But it's about the only thing that's gotten him booed at a rally, and DeSantis visibly flipped from bragging about getting his state vaccinated to trying to outflank Trump by demagoguing against the vaccine, appointing a vaccine-skeptical surgeon general, etc. And no Republican with national ambitions can be loudly pro-vaccination, let alone support treating it like a normal vaccine with respect to schools or the military.
"A lot of the concern was that Trump might act ahead of the trial results, which would hardly have been out of character. "
You're being way too charitable here. Most of the concern was straight up "orange man bad," as evidenced by the Emmy that Cuomo won.
"It's stranger how Trump's supporters largely and uncharacteristically broke with Trump over the vaccine."
That's only strange if you think of Trump supporters as being cultists, as opposed to them liking someone who seemed to be "on their side."
" let alone support treating it like a normal vaccine with respect to schools or the military."
First of all, "normal" is a dogwhistle for white supremacy. Second, mRNA vaccines are not a typical vaccine, neither in their method of operation nor in its effective duration.
I wish I understood the meme that says, “It’s not a vaccine.” People who I believe understand how it works say this, and I’ve never been able to figure out what they mean.
Its effective duration is being compared unfavorably to MMR, polio, tetanus, etc.
Ah. I guess that could be what they mean. But it’s pretty comparably to flu, as I understand it (module the high mutation rate that goes along with a pandemic), and I never heard that slur raised there. But nobody said you *must* get a flu shot, so perhaps it just never came up.
If I had to guess, it would be that a traditional vaccine consists of the virus itself (rendered incapable of reproducing by some chemical damage), or of pieces of the viruses outer protein coat. These foreign objects (along with an accompanaying adjuvant often) excite the immune system's awareness, which develops sensitivity to them, antbodies, et cetera.
The mRNA vaccines don't work quite the same way. Indeed, the lipid nanoparticle coat and mRNA are designed to *minimize* excitation of the immune system, so they survive long enough to do their job. Instead, the mRNA gets into cells and is translated by the cell's own pathways into a large number of copies of a certain key protein from the virus's outer coat. (It's the protein that's required for the "docking" action that gets the virus into the cell.) It's then these particles, which look foreign although they are made by the cell itself, which stimulate the immune system to develop an immunity. There are probably a lot of other signs that the affected cells give off of being "infected" which also help stimulate the immune response. (I say "infected" in quotes because the mRNA only codes for that one protein, it lacks instructions for making the rest of the virus, so no infected cell can construct an entire new virus, the way it could if it were infected with the real virus.)
From the biochemistry point of view, there's not much difference in these mechanisms, since viral infection is always a weird comingling of domestic and foreign molecular manufacturing, so to speak. But to some people it might seem a strange new world, because of the deliberate attempt to finagle the cell into building viral proteins.
You're confusing ivermectin with a different drug that Trump promoted -- hydroxychloroquine. There is some evidence that hydroxychloroquine was promoted by pro-business groups that wanted to end the lockdowns and ignore the pandemic.
The interest in ivermectin mostly didn't start until December 2020, after Trump had lost the election and vaccines were already being made available:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=ivermectin,hydroxychloroquine
At least, that was the case in the United States. I believe there was more prior interest in ivermectin in Latin America.
I'm not confusing the two, and what happened with hydroxychloroquine when there was even a hint of it being effective demonstrates my point about Ivermectin.
Trump announced he was taking hydroxychloroquine in May 2020, and there was a rush among his cultists to take it, with some deaths, most famously of the couple who took the product they were using to clean their fish tanks because it mentioned the ingredient.
Hydroxychloroquine was rapidly and nearly unanimously condemned, as was drinking bleach and using an UV lamp. But then Trump and his cult, desperate for any remedy they considered politically correct, began talking about Ivermectin in the summer of 2020, and by the spring of 2021, when Biden had become president, it had become the miracle cure among his people. Many cultists declined vaccination and opposed mandates because they believed a cure was available if they got the disease - many still do.
There are many active pro-IVM (as they call it) groups talking about using it to cure everything from rosacea to menopause. That's wacky, but less interesting than the following mental experiment.
Let's go back to Trump and hydroxychloroquine. Starting perhaps with Norman Vincent Peale, there are indications that Trump believes (or rather, consistently acts as if he believes; he's more interesting as a black box) that reality (like the economy -- a recursive engine which runs at least partially on what people think about the economy) is flexible. I'll leave wrangling about whether or not the 'power of positive thinking' billionaires are in the same camp as the 'simulation theory' billionaires to the philosophers, but from at least one perspective it's the case that if the expert-class hadn't opposed Trump's messaging about hydroxychloroquine and instead had boosted it, it really would have cured COVID and millions of deaths could have been prevented.
ivermectin for rosacea maybe has a plausible mechanism. There's a theory that rosacea is caused by demodex mites and an anti-parasitic could possibly kill those.
The fish tank cleaner is actually a pretty weird story: At first the wife claimed that they were drinking because Trump said so, then it came out that the husband wasn't a Trump supporter at all and the wife came under a murder investigation. Later the investigation was dropped and around the same time the wife came clean that they were drinking it as a joke.
And the wife had a previous domestic violence charge against her. And the only "evidence" that that the husband knew he was drinking it came from her. But sure, it was just one of those wacky hijinx where you jokingly drink poison then blame it on someone else.
You said "when Trump began boosting it, Ivermectin became a token of one’s politics and therefore of one’s attitude to the pandemic"
I'm not aware of Trump boosting ivermectin. It wasn't even included in his covid treatment when he got sick, I think that was October 2020.
The primary boost in the US came from Dr Kory's speech before congress in December. Check the Google search trends and how they align with the date of that.
I'm not sure if Trump joined in, after that. I'd imagine he was too busy contesting the election, at that time.
You do realize HCQ is commonly prescribed to treat autoimmune diseases, i.e. to handle runaway immune reactions, which are one of the most dangerous features of COVID? Many people are on it long-term, without much by way of side effects. It's a very well known and a fairly safe drug.
Let that sink in: it's safe enough that people with non-life-threatening diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, are routinely put on it.
HCQ was thus a perfectly reasonable guess as an intervention that might be helpful against the cytokine storm caused by COVID (see e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7161506/ ). It seems that a number of doctors in different countries made this guess independently.
But of course because Trump said something about it, all the right-thinking people jumped to unanimously condemn HCQ because Trump. Some governors even banned prescribing it.
I'm shocked that anyone wants anti-Trump hysterics to dictate what doctors can or cannot do, but unfortunately I'm not surprised.
HQC and azithromycin were standard treatments for covid in some US hospitals early in the pandemic. Later on, people did careful studies that found that they weren't helpful. But early on, doctors were throwing whatever they had at this nasty disease that was killing off a bunch of people.
Hydroxychloroquine was also given an Emergency Use Authorization for covid and used in hundreds of trials. That seems like the opposite of what the ivermectin conspiracy theorists claim, that all generic drugs are ignored and suppressed because of some big pharma profit conspiracy.
And if HCQ was effective against covid because it suppresses the immune system, then it shouldn't be critically important when you take it. As the late HCQ trials came in negative, the theory retreated to "you have to take it earlier". And when the early trials came in negative, it retreated to "you have to take it with azithromycin", "you have to take it with zinc", "the doses they used were too high/too low", etc.
I'm not denying there was also some anti-Trump sentiment that soured enthusiasm for the drug, but the primary problem is that it simply didn't work. If it had been successful in trials, it would have kept it's EUA and been used widely.
"most famously of the couple who took the product they were using to clean their fish tanks because it mentioned the ingredient."
Which, last I knew, had been reframed as the wife poisoning the husband and concocting the story of taking it as a cure in order to explain why he died:
https://news.yahoo.com/woman-blamed-trump-giving-her-133613382.html
"Arizona police are now conducting a homicide investigation into a woman who claimed she gave her husband fish tank cleaner after President Trump claimed the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for coronavirus.
Wanda Lenius told NBC News last month that she and her husband Gary consumed fish tank cleaner because it contained a chemical that Trump suggested might be an effective prophylactic and treatment for coronavirus. The cocktail, which contained four teaspoons of fish tank cleaner mixed with soda water, put Wanda in the ICU and killed Gary. “My advice,” Wanda explained, is “don’t believe anything that the President says and his people because they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
But then that allegation was walked back, so what happened and why is still unclear:
https://eu.azcentral.com/story/news/local/mesa/2020/04/29/gary-lenius-death-after-ingesting-chloroquine-phosphate-not-homicide/3052133001/
"“The death of Gary Lenius has not been ruled a homicide at this time," said Detective Jason Flam, a Mesa police spokesman. "It is normal protocol at the Mesa Police Department for all death cases (other than obvious natural causes) to be investigated. All death cases are assigned to a homicide detective for their review as a matter of protocol.
"Please do not confuse this fact with what is currently being reported that this case is now a homicide investigation,” he continued."
"drinking bleach"
This is dishonest.
“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute,” he said. “And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.” Trump later claimed he was being “sarcastic,” but there was a rise in accidental poisonings following his comments. Lysol even released a statement begging customers to not drink their poisonous products."
Trump's own words. I assume the dishonesty to which you refer was Trump's.
I'm still not seeing you backing up your claim that Trump told people to drink bleach.
I mean, I even put your lie into quotes so you could respond to it. Instead, you actually quoted OMB as saying "*something* like that, by injection inside or *almost* a cleaning" in which he LITERALLY gives not one but TWO disclaimers that he's not saying "actually take disinfectant internally" and you're pretending he's saying the exact opposite.
So nah dawg, you're the dishonest one.
+1. It's important to keep in mind that people aren't always putting forward things out of sincere reasoned belief, so engaging as if they are can be an error. A large part of the social role of medical and news organizations is providing signals of legitimacy that people act on.
That has nothing to do with Scott‘s actual post on Ivermectin. He didn’t have to take either side to do the science.
Pious fraud
In this way masks are the same thing as ivermectin. I definitely supported Scott's partially positive review because I hoped that people will latch on masks and forgot about other restrictions and the pandemic will basically be over. It didn't happen though.
I wasn't in Sweden but people who visited it, confirmed that the life in Sweden during pandemic was much less restricted indeed. I now understand that my mistake was to think that it will be possible to satisfy covid zealots by simple introduction of masks. Even if they had been more effective they would have made even stronger mask mandates without relaxing lockdowns.
I wore masks because I thought they would have some utility, and I didn’t care about “muh freedoms” but the utterly funny thing about masks is that I was shouted at for wearing one at the very beginning. It’s been written out of history but the authorities (governments and the WHO) opposed masks as useless.
I never experienced that someone would object to my mask wearing. It was the opposite – the police shouted at me for not wearing one on the street (it was in Spain). I did not believe that it was useful on the streets, only in closed spaces.
I used them for some time as it was required but didn't care if anybody else wear a mask or not. I was opposed to mask mandates. I remember that sometimes I had to go into some office with signs that mask wearing was mandatory but people inside actually were not wearing masks. I thought that they probably already got covid, so masks would be useless for them.
Two days ago I visited a GP in the UK and the signs instructed to wear masks and most visitors and doctors had masks. I decided to go without a mask and no one objected.
There was a period when the WHO opposed mask wearing.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-recommendation-trnd/index.html
And they were right. What happened afterwards was that covid zealots got overhand and made any such opposition look bad.
Maybe. I think the N95s were probably useful. The real interesting thing to me is that the person who was anti-mask and gave me an earful became passionately pro mask, and has forgotten she was ever anti mask.
I was working retail during the lockdowns and had the odd Anti-Vaxxer demand I remove my mask. I was barely wearing it unless a customer came over. It was her demanding it that made me dig my heels in.
One day she started talking to me about the vaccine and I shouted at her
"I hear enough of this shit at home! I am not listening to this at work!"
I feel a little bad for shouting at her now, but I wouldn't apologise if given the chance.
In a way, I can understand the fears that with enough people wearing a mask, it will be normalized and then mask mandate will be introduced. And it is exactly what happened in many places.
I was trying to buy a medicine in Spain today and almost couldn't do it because it turns out that you still need a mask in pharmacy in Spain. I didn't have a mask with me unfortunately.
I spent most of the UK lockdown believing it would go on forever, so I'm sympathetic to the fears of mandatory masking forever. But I felt sick when I had to wear one for long periods during my retail job. And it created the fun game of "Speak loudly enough for people to hear you [most of the customers were quite old] but not come across as shouting or being aggressive"
The only times, since lockdown ended in early 2022, I've worn a mask has been in anything run by the NHS. I've seen the odd mask sign around, but those are ignored. And I think I see maybe 2 people a day wearing masks when I'm out on public transport. I take an instant disliking to them.
I guess Covid measures have become politically unfeasible after it was a massive scandal that almost every major politician was going to parties.
There are times when mask mandates might be justified but I hope you care more about freedom than you're letting on.
Not with the current evidence.
If we go into theoretical area where masks would be very protective, then people would use them voluntary and again we would have no use for mask mandates.
There might be very small area where mask effectiveness is moderate and people's willingness to wear them not sufficient. Then it would make sense for mask mandates but that is so deep into theoretical area, equal to those areas where real communism works (some things in communism like free education for everyone, free healthcare etc. are really good).
" We’d have been swallowing Ivermectin, not vaccinating, and the death toll would have been in the millions."
Wait, what? Trump sponsored and encouraged the vaccine, to the point that concerned scientists had to take action and point out that human safety required that the vaccine not be announced safe and effective until just after the election. In an alternative universe where the vaccine were available in July 2020, I imagine Trump would have taken it and encouraged others to do so.
The real question was whether we could go to the beach or let our kids attend school. I guess it's true that if we thought Ivermectin were a miracle cure, more people might have done so.
Still, it seems to me that not much harm would have been done if authorities have said "the evidence for Ivermectin being effective is weak, and even in the most promising of the plausible studies, the effects are small. We're doing more research, but in no event should anyone take more than the safe dose of x, and we encourage people to continue social distancing."
The obsession with Trump in the US (on both sides) is so strange. It is clearly a culture that has gone wrong. The reality is that most governments did the same things in pandemic and politicians in democratic countries did what they always do – try to listen to the sentiments of the majority to remain voted it.
Even Sweden which has much less restrictions actually was not because of politicians but because their law did not allow for lockdowns. They have changed the law already and next time they will demand the same lockdowns as everywhere else.
It is really sad that people's fears can wreak so much chaos. While we need democracy, we need some kind of circuit breaker or protection from unreasonable overreaction.
It's unfortunate you gave up on Atlantis because sunken lost civilizations definitely exist; they're along the underwater coastlines all over the world from during the last glacial maximum. Naturally many now-submerged areas were considered important to their milieu and legends grew up around them. Most of human history can't be uncovered well by current archaeological processes because most humans lived along coasts that are now underwater, and are in many instances too dangerous to explore.
He needs to read Underworld.
Atlantis may have been remembered as a sunken civilization, but that was thousands of years ago. It wouldn't necessarily still be underwater.
Came here to post this. Do a google image search for "sea levels for the last 20000 years" or similar, and you'll find NASA graphs that show just how much sea levels have risen after the last ice age, coinciding with the neolithic revolution.
If we know of an ancient civilization along the rivers of Mesopotamia that would have overlapped with this massive sea level rise, why wouldn't there have also been coastal civilizations that are now a hundred feet below sea level? To dismiss theories of ancient sunken civilizations, you'd have to explain why people used to not live near the coast, when that's where most people live now.
Can I point to one place that is Atlantis? No, but there were thousands of years where people all around the world had to retreat from the coastline as sea levels slowly rose. Surely some of those stories formed into legends.
Makes me wonder whether our descendants, should they be lucky enough to live on, will whisper legends of a glorious place called Miami that was swallowed up by the sea due to their ancestors’ hubris.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/miami-is-the-most-vulnerable-coastal-city-worldwide/
In Cordwainer Smith's "Instrumentality of Mankind" stories, it has survived in legend:
"Early works in the timeline include neologisms which are not explained to any great extent, but serve to produce an atmosphere of strangeness. These words are usually derived from non-English words. For instance, manshonyagger derives from the German words "menschen" meaning, in some senses, "men" or "mankind", and "jäger", meaning a hunter, and refers to war machines that roam the wild lands between the walled cities and prey on men, except for those they can identify as Germans. Another example is "Meeya Meefla", the only city to have preserved its name from the pre-atomic era: evidently Miami, Florida, from its abbreviated form (as on road signs) "MIAMI FLA"."
And they were bouncing in the clubs where the heat was on
And it was all night on the beach until the break of dawn
And they were going to Miami, the glorious place that the sea swallowed up
And welcome to Miami, the glorious place that the sea swallowed up
“If all I’ve heard is that the pro-skub people say that you should look at evidence [...] I’m already 90-something percent sure pro-skub are the good guys”
I’d always assumed this heuristic was universal, until the last 5 years falsified me in spectacular fashion. It seemed obvious that without getting a PhD in skub, this is the best you can do. Is this way of thinking just a peculiarity of rationalist-type people?
And, apparently, conspiracy theorists! Everyone else seemingly just wants everyone to Trust the Status-Quo Institutions (or rather, their preferred institutions).
The skub is a lie.
Always was.
90 percent is way too high. Sometimes people make dumb arguments but are still right.
“Good guys” ≠ “right.”
The problem is that most people have had enough bad experiences to 'beware the man of one study'.
The person who says 'look at the evidence' often also has that evidence ready to hand to show to you, and it's two studies and a blog post, and they sound really convincing it that's all you see. The other side can say 'look at the evidence' too, but they'd have to vaguely gesture at a undifferentiated mountain of scientific journal articles that are mostly behind paywalls, or gesture vaguely at a scientific consensus going back decades or more that they don't actually know the history of, or gesture vaguely at abstract notions about Occam's Razor and isolated demands for rigor, or whatever.
That's why, in practice, the person telling you to 'look at the evidence' is most often *trying to sell you something*, something that you do not actually want. Rationalists and other science communicators are the exception to that, but they are a tiny minority of all cases.
So people learn the unfortunately correct hueristic of 'the person telling you to look at the evidence is probably trying to trick you'.
Rationalists and etc who do not learn this lesson and still feel like you should always trust the person telling you to look at the evidence may be unusually blessed in having life experiences where most people showing them evidence were honest allies showing them correct and helpful things, or they may be less blessed in having difficulty recognizing social patterns and forming instincts relating to social cues.
I’m going to say something dumb right now in the hopes of coming back and saying it smarter later:
This points to the real problem, and it’s so hard to define and articulate that it basically doesn’t get discussed (there’s a quote from somewhere in rationalism-land that goes something like, “we had no way to determine the magnitude of the variable, so we rounded it to zero”)
The fact that I can barely begin to explain why is just evidence of this. But I’ll try.
The “trust science” folks are very aware of what you’re talking about here; it drives everything they do on this topic. The line between “you’ve really got to learn a lot to even understand the topic well enough to have an informed opinion” and “just trust the guys with white coats and stop thinking about it” is really quite thin. Where do you draw that line? To what degree can we really expect a layman to be able to figure these things out and weigh the issues for himself? But if we *can’t,* then we have an unassailable priesthood. Which might be okay if they were unimpeachable, but the last three years have shown that to be categorically untrue. So what is Joe Schmoe to do? What should his heuristic be? Especially when the institutions he’s expected to have blind faith in seem bent on destroying his culture and way of life?
It seems there might be a paradox here insofar as the less we "trust the science," the more trustworthy the science becomes.
Or at least vice versa, yes.
The problem is that there is no magic formula for getting to the truth. Following mainstream sources, following your tribe, using common sense, investigating and coming to your own conclusions--all those will sometimes lead you astray. And the more people lean on one of those strategies, the more con men and propagandists will exploit its weaknesses.
Pretty much. I mean, there *are* magic formulae for getting to the truth—it's just that they're all horrendously labor-intensive and/or time-consuming. So it all boils down to trust. And wherever there is trust, there is power to be exploited.
So, um. How do these geological forces work? The ones that build the underwater stairstep patterns?
For the Yonaguni formation, apparently very regular sandstone bedding (which tends to split along bedding planes) coinciding at right angles with regular fracturing, something earthquakes are known to cause:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni_Monument#Natural_formation
Basalt columns, on the other hand, tend to have sixfold symmetry.
My problem with this is that this is exactly the sort of wording I would expect from someone who wanted to persuade others that a formation was natural whether or not the evidence for that was truly strong.
Without having been to the Yonaguni formation itself (and I'll likely never go), I only have others' word that the formation is even sandstone, as Wikipedia describes. So, sure, I'm trusting others' word on this. I know enough about sandstone to regard others' description of this coincidence as plausible, even if incorrect. But maybe that's the problem you're mentioning, that descriptions that would be plausible even if incorrect are for that reason less trustworthy? On the other hand, many actually-correct descriptions are plausible ones, and so ones which would sound plausible even if incorrect.
I’m not sure whether I can pin this down. First off, I am not saying that the wording *increases* my confidence that these structures are manmade. But for every unusual phenomenon, there is a plausible, but false, debunking that sounds persuasive on a surface reading. This reads like just such an account. In other words, it seems to me that it’s quite possible for the structures to exhibit characteristics that a surface account could easily ascribe to natural forces, and yet not be natural at all. For a more persuasive argument, I’d want something like, “we have definitely observed such structures being formed by natural processes, and these fail to exhibit characteristics which manmade structures would have” with actual evidence behind them.
I’m not saying that the account here is BS. Perhaps the links would lead me to fairly conclusive evidence. But I’m saying it’s easy to “debunk” anything, even if true, if “debunk” means (as it often seems to) “construct a plausible narrative that contradicts the account we’re debunking.”
If someone gave the brief explanation, "apparently very regular sandstone bedding (which tends to split along bedding planes) coinciding at right angles with regular fracturing, something earthquakes are known to cause," and then treated as impertinent questions like "How did this particular sandstone bedding get so regular?", "Can I see other examples of regular earthquake fracture?", and "Why would that fracture end up so perfectly perpendicular to the bedding planes *here*?" I would consider the explanation a dismissal. I don't know why the Yonaguni formation bedding would be that regular, myself, and am curious. Some cyclical natural phenomena can remain regular for quite some time, and I could imagine sand deposition occurring like that – but why, and why there?
I suspect many a geologist would happily help laymen answer these questions, either directly, or with advice on resources to consult. Geologists, after all, find rocks quite exciting! And whatever underwater formation Scott visited, he seemed convinced by the explanation he eventually found that it wasn't manmade.
Because none of us can know it all firsthand, we're forced to trust others' reports and judgment in order to learn. So I wouldn't be too hard on a non-geologist who simply trusts geologists' – or even open-source encyclopedias' – judgment about the Yonaguni formation. I have a soft spot for contrarians, but I tend to trust geological explanations more than contrarian archeology. The world needs contrarians to hedge its bets, but they're the hedge, not the main bet.
"The fact is, almost all the general information in your personal web of belief is stuff you read, stuff somebody told you, stuff you saw on TV. Building a relatively accurate mental model of the world doesn’t have all that much to do with your individual reasoning capacity. It’s mostly about trusting and distrusting the right people. The problem is that few of us have the capacity to independently assess whether someone, or some institution, or some process, is a reliable source of accurate information. You have to depend on other people to tell you whose testimony you ought to trust. There’s no way around it. The bootstrapping problem here is central [to] the human condition. We can’t get started building a model of the world that encompasses more than our own extremely narrow idiosyncratic experience unless, at some point, we simply take somebody’s word for it."
And "Membership in a community that confers status and trust on people worth trusting about the way things are supplies what you might call epistemic herd immunity. We mostly believe what people like us believe just because they believe it. And that’s fine, as long as the community’s beliefs are ultimately based on trust in genuinely trustworthy people."
I don't entirely trust the author of that advice, and he annoys me sometimes, but he can also make good points.
https://modelcitizen.substack.com/p/q-trust-and-you
Yes, this all makes sense. I'm not saying that the wording of that WP article decreases my confidence that it's natural; I'm just saying that it doesn't increase it very much.
On a reread, I want to take issue with something here: "We can’t get started building a model of the world that encompasses more than our own extremely narrow idiosyncratic experience unless, at some point, we simply take somebody’s word for it."
I actually don't think that that's true at all. I don't think that, in world-modeling, you ever have to take anyone's word for anything.
That doesn't mean that you have to do all of your own empirical research (though with the state of science, I'm not sure I'd be surprised if this actually turned out to be necessary). What it means is that you never simply take anyone's word. You listen, and evaluate, and if it fits with everything else you know, including your own personal experience, you provisionally adopt it pending further confirmation from other sources or via other means. If not, you start asking questions. At no point have you believed something to be true simply because someone told you it was.
Hi, Midge! Fancy seeing you outside of the walls of the Dispatch. ;)
Hi!
Good question. I mean there’s [this](https://exploringtheearth.com/2019/10/29/the-giants-causeway-northern-ireland-and-how-it-formed/), but that doesn’t seem at all like the same thing.
Another thing to keep in mind, is you can get pretty far by reasoning about pharmacological mechanisms. Basically, ivermectin isn't the kind of molecule that would be expected to do anything to SARS-CoV-2. And it isn't targeted at any host immunity factors, either. So the prior for it working against COVID is low.
I mean, if you're a pharmacologist you might be able to say that, but I don't think that's meaningfully distinct from "trust experts" for everyone else.
I thought ivermectin had some effect on the covid virus in cell culture, just at much higher concentrations than were available when dosing humans.
The second part of your sentence is the key.
So someone explain to me why I shouldn’t take the conspiracy theorist position that people like Kavanagh are systematically (and to some meaningful extent, deliberately) perpetuating a faith-based, authoritarian structure to induce us to blindly believe whatever the institutional incentives of Science want us to believe.
Is it a conspiracy theory if it's manifestly true (at least for some limited number of people)? There are absolutely people doing that. Is it enough to matter? :shrug: YMMV on what counts there. Is this person an example of such? I won't make any claims in either direction.
Okay, I was too conservative. Let me try to be outlandish enough: The Scientific, Academic, Media, and (Democratic) Political systems are deliberately and systematically perpetuating a faith-based, authoritarian structure to induce us to blindly believe their preferred narratives, using the cover of Science as a catchall justification for blind belief.
Now I’ve probably gone slightly farther than what I actually believe, but not by too much.
Or maybe I can just say that by “people like Kavanagh” I mean “pretty much all of Science and Science-advocates” (acknowledging that there is some silent minority/majority who do not believe this way, but still count as they perpetuate the system by their silence).
You're probably missing an "institutional" before your "Science" and a qualifier or 2 to the effect of "Social Soft Science".
I don't think you believe that, e.g., Astronomers or High Energy Physicists want to effect large-scale changes to society to make us more authoritarian. (Not that those 2 don't contain a lot of bullshit and politics themselves, like everything humans do, they do, but its a different thing entirely)
The capital-S Science was meant to indicate institutional Science, yes.
> I don't think you believe that, e.g., Astronomers or High Energy Physicists want to effect large-scale changes to society to make us more authoritarian.
https://www.city-journal.org/cornell-black-hole-class-racializes-astronomy
That’s something foisted on the departments rather than being produced by them.
High energy physics does love those sweet government funded research grants though. Astronomers at least have to provide pretty pictures from time to time.
None of those groups are a monolith individually, and certainly not together. (Remember, Scott falls into *at least* two of those.) There are certainly incentives for pushing structural epistemic consolidation, but this is a 'trends and forces' argument that doesn't cleanly map to agentic organizations. "Authoritarians gonna authoritarian" is the tautological version, and "hey, powerful organizations have a tendency to consolidate power!" is only a little less so.
And yet there definitely does seem to be a consolidation of all of these systems (system ≠ everyone in the system) around a particular ideology, i.e. “Science is True, and Science says these things you must believe or you’re a bad person!”
But I said that that version was probably taking it too far. What about my revised version, above: “Pretty much all of Science and Science-advocates (acknowledging that there is some silent minority/majority who do not believe this way, but still count as they perpetuate the system by their silence) are systematically (and to some meaningful extent, deliberately) perpetuating a faith-based, authoritarian structure to induce us to blindly believe <certain things which are not necessarily justified to the degree that they assert>”?
"Pretty much all of Science and Science-advocates" is slippery, and depending on how you bound it I think this version falls into either tautology, vanilla Conservatism, or is empirically false.
Did you…skip over the following caveat?
I'd rather take Scott's "Christian position", and believe that they're well-meaning: that they believe conspiracy theories are incredibly damaging and we should do whatever we can to prevent them - but haven't realized (or don't believe) that the tactics they use for fighting conspiracies are actually making the situation worse.
Your framing makes them out to be "in the outer darkness, beyond redemption", whereas the view that they're well-intentioned but misguided allows for continued conversation and efforts at conversion.
Hmm…okay, let’s think about this, as this is a valid challenge against what I said.
Do I think these folks are irredeemable? No, I don’t think that I think that. But I think that no amount of “that’s not how science/investigation/rationality/thought is supposed to work” liberal (as in liberal science) pleading will move them in the slightest, because they believe that they’re doing God’s Work, and they *know* that they’re being dishonest, at least to some degree. They just think that the truth is dangerous, and that deception in the cause of Righteousness is valid and laudable—and, moreover, that people in general are stupid enough that giving *any* credence to Bad Ideas leads to awful consequences. Therefore, we must have a priesthood of Right-Thinking People to dictate what people should believe. This viewpoint is called “illiberalism.”
So the only way to talk someone out of illiberalism is to convince them of the virtues of liberalism; to show them that, while their views may gain ascendancy in the short term, there’s no way to achieve permanent ideological hegemony. The pendulum always swings back, and then it will be *your* views which will be in disfavor and therefore suppressed and vilified.
I have never had any luck in persuading anyone of this. Their objections seem to boil down to, “but our ideas are Right and theirs are Wrong!” and I’ve never discovered any way to counter that view.
Fundamentally, I don’t know what “well-meaning” means; or, rather, I don’t know what it would look like for someone *not* to be well-meaning. Certainly people can have malicious intent, and wish to harm certain people or groups, but even they do so because they believe that, ultimately, it is the right thing to do. Whether it is possible to persuade them otherwise is another question, one I do not have an answer to. “You cannot reason people out of something they were not reasoned into.”
> Fundamentally, I don’t know what “well-meaning” means; or, rather, I don’t know what it would look like for someone *not* to be well-meaning
That's the trick, though, it doesn't *look* different. A lot of your discussion here is about what's going on inside their head, e.g. statements like "they *know* that they're being dishonest to some degree". You can't know that, actually.
Maybe they are impossible to convince (in the same way that some people may actually be spiritually beyond salvation) but, again, you can't know that. "I've tried to persuade them in the past via reason but it never works" may very well say more about your powers of persuasion than the other person.
A very relevant SSC post is "Guided by the Beauty of our Weapons" - https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/ - which is a counter-argument to the idea that "reasoned argument doesn't work". (I'm surprised it wasn't linked in the original post with his other links to past articles, actuallly)
---
Plus, do you not see the irony here? Kavanagh is basically saying "you can't argue with ivermeticin people, they never listen and it gives them too much credit", and you're saying "you can't argue with people who say 'you can't argue with ivermetcin people' because they never listen"!
>> Fundamentally, I don’t know what “well-meaning” means; or, rather, I don’t know what it would look like for someone *not* to be well-meaning
>That's the trick, though, it doesn't *look* different.
Er…that’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean “how it would look different from the outside,” I meant “what it would mean.” I don’t know, philosophically, what “not well-meaning” means. What would the criteria for such a person be?
>A lot of your discussion here is about what's going on inside their head, e.g. statements like "they *know* that they're being dishonest to some degree". You can't know that, actually.
Yes, I can. I can’t know it for certain about every single individual in this class, but there have been enough email dumps/hacks/Twitter files to know that they are saying things they know to be false in order to promulgate a narrative that they think is better for the public to believe than the strict truth. Plus, they are very often far too smart to *not* know, at least on some level, that they are advocating falsehoods. And in actually talking to people who are broadly of this kind of mindset, I have occasionally gotten them to admit that they say things they do not thoroughly believe, because they want *other* people to believe them.
>Maybe they are impossible to convince (in the same way that some people may actually be spiritually beyond salvation) but, again, you can't know that. "I've tried to persuade them in the past via reason but it never works" may very well say more about your powers of persuasion than the other person.
…yes? “I’ve never discovered any way to counter that view.” I think you’ve misread my response.
>Plus, do you not see the irony here? Kavanagh is basically saying "you can't argue with ivermeticin people, they never listen and it gives them too much credit", and you're saying "you can't argue with people who say 'you can't argue with ivermetcin people' because they never listen"!
I really think you should start over with my comment. Either you’re misinterpreting or I’m communicating much more poorly than I think.
No, people understand what you're saying just fine. You just don't seem to understand their critiques of what you're saying.
To be perfectly clear: You're making the exact same sort of argument as Kavanagh, just from the other side and one meta-level up.
Um…wow. Really? You've given me whole new insight, and shown me that I believe the **exact opposite** of what I thought I believed or tried to express.
Thank you so much for enlightening me with your astute mind-reading powers.
So let me see if I can parse this. Are you saying that you know more than I do about my beliefs? Or are you saying that I’ve misunderstood, and that Retsam, and you, and others, are arguing *for* illiberalism and *against* the idea that we should try to persuade others with reason?
So would anyone like to try to *actually* engage with what I said?
If it’s unclear, I’ll be happy to clarify. Obviously something here is causing confusion.
The fact that nobody is engaging with what you're actually saying says it all I think. In general, whenever someone says anything like "you're obviously wrong" with no elaboration, or "this has already been addressed" with no link or summary, a good rule of thumb is to replace it with "I have no idea how to respond to your argument but I'd still really like to disagree with you anyway".
I find it just amazing how many people have a "philosophy" that amounts to "the correct positions are those that are Clearly Right", where those just happen to be all the positions they happen to hold and don't require any kind of consistent explantatory framework that makes them right. They're just Clearly Right.
How to argue with it?(And I'll note that the fact you asked this puts you on the opposite side of Kavanagh, despite what people above are saying.) I don't know if it'll work, but the best way might be to keep asking them variations of "who decides?" For a political example I've encountered multiple times: "Why should people be fired for opposing gay marriage but not for other opinions?"
"Because they're opposing someone's human rights"
"So who decides what's a human right?"
"Well the Supreme Court has said so"
"So people should also be fired if they oppose gun rights?
"No, because that's not REALLY a human right not matter what the Supreme Court says"
"So who does decide that?"
"Opposing gay marriage harms gay people!"
"And doesn't opposing gun rights harm gun owners?"
"There are good reasons for banning guns"
"And some people think there are good reasons for banning gay marriage, so why not let these reasons be freely debated?"
"Because some positions are so toxic they shouldn't be allowed!"
"So who decides WHICH positions are so toxic?"
Eventually, either (1) they stop responding, proving they have no defensible principle to appeal to, (2) you force them to acknowledge some consistent principle or external authority even when it gives results they don't like or (3) you force them to admit the truth, that the only principle they have for deciding which views are correct is "the ones I happen to agree with".
And this approach would also separate the good faith ones who do have a consistent principle (like "any scientific view with support from peer reviewed journals should be given a fair hearing, even if I disagree with it").
Because scientists never get rich from it.
So? They get to advance their political agendas; isn’t that sufficient motivation?
Does Kavanagh himself disagree with this position? He's probably entirely on board with thinking that dumb plebs would end up believing whatever Authority tells them, so the main issue is to ensure that it's the right authority.
Well, since I accused him of doing this deliberately, I wouldn't think so, no.
I feel like this Chris individual exemplifies a particular subtype of a type of person — the people I've started, mentally, calling "aggressive conformists."
Curiosity is bad, trust in Authority, believe with all your heart in the Sanctioned Things. My place and time in history is the one that got it right.
The same sort of person that, many years ago, would have been sneering at anyone who didn't see the obvious danger of witches.
You might like this PG essay then, which discusses exactly what you just said: http://www.paulgraham.com/conformism.html
Shooting innocent people is bad, shooting criminals that are about to kill your child is good.
It doesn't work to just universally denounce methods without asking what end they are in service of.
Discouraging curiosity about fascism is not the same as discouraging curiosity in general. Promoting trust in scientific consensus is not the same as promoting trust in all Authority. Promoting sanctioned things because they are good is not the same as promoting sanctioned things because they are sanctioned.
I would abolutely advise to be curious about fascism, especially its reocurring popularity among pretty much averagely agreeable and smart people.
I am tempted to agree with you, but the problem is that when we have a norm "discouraging curiosity about fascism is okay", some people will start applying the label "fascism" generously to everything they don't like. (And the curiosity whether the "fascism" label was applied correctly is itself classified as a sort of curiosity about fascism.)
On the other hand, it's not like I have a better solution. Any norm can (and will) be abused.
Atlantis is real tho (above water, the eye of Africa matches platos description and that area had a famous king atlas and humans were probably more seafaring then usually noted and using slave labor to cut the various stones monuments on and off for milliuna)
To impress an ancient Greek, you need clean water, the ability to move the big blocks, and able to cross the ocean.
A fellow Richat Structure enthusiast!
While I largely agree with Scott, I also think Bret Weinstein *deserves* Chris Kavanagh.
Bret definitely went off the deep edge after seeming more respectable early on.
Why?
Because Bret makes a living by titillating gullible, conspiracy-minded nitwits eager to believe anything so long as it isn't woke. He has led some of these deluded people to their deaths by encouraging them to forego a vaccine that would likely have saved their lives.
I live in Bret's old town of Olympia, Washington, and for a while, I considered him something of a hometown hero after his legitimately brave stand against the woke fools at Evergreen State College. Since then, however, he has degenerated into that most pitiful of internet personalities - the professional contrarian.
This seems to be a frequent fate of famous contrarians.
I feel similarly about Jordan Peterson. I liked his lectures on psychology. But the less I know about his opinions on covid and whatever else he talks about recently, the better.
Indeed. With the notable exception of Sam Harris, pretty much everyone associated with the so-called "Intellectual Dark Web" (which includes Peterson and Weinstein) has turned out to be something of a crank. I initially thought of Peterson, on balance, as a force for good: I've had a few young male students who genuinely seem to have profited by tuning into his message (circa 2018 or thereabouts). But what little I've seen of Peterson this decade has been pitiful - just a bitter man shaking his fist while collecting big paychecks from The Daily Wire. (Quite a step from the University of Toronto.)
Hell, Peterson was practically defending Russia's invasion of Ukraine on the grounds that Putin had no choice because the West was too woke (!) Talk about a useful idiot. Good Lord.
https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/the-third-rail/62d08716c5c05500224b78d3/jordan-peterson-youtube-video-russia-ukraine/
I think most thinkers are worth listening to within some range of topics, but often are just as dumb as anyone else when they get outside them.
And this is normal all the time. If you look at the great thinkers of the early 1900s, you'll see a shit-ton of smart, well-intentioned, serious guys who were serious supporters of either seize-the-means-of-production socialism or eugenics as the way forward to a happy future for all.
But also, I think there is a real danger in audience capture, and it can overlap with confirmation bias in scary ways. You start out correctly noticing that a lot of official pronouncements and policies about covid are kinda dumb, that selects for a specific audience and set of people who want to talk with you, and as you iterate this process, you get more and more rewards and feedback that encourage you to move further and further along some ideological gradient, till you're eventually explaining about how Big Pharma is suppressing all the good treatments for covid, or how the latest instance of a black cop beating up a black suspect is white supremacy, or whatever other goofy thing.
I like to imagine that although I am not as smart and interesting as the famous thinkers, at least I am less obviously stupid in the topics outside my competence. Seems like a low hanging fruit is simply not being so fucking overconfident at things I barely know anything about.
To put it bluntly, just replying "I don't know" to everything already makes you more correct on average than many of them. (I imagine getting positive points for saying something correct, negative points for saying something incorrect, and zero for admitting ignorance.) So if you just started from this baseline, then spent 10+ years learning something and getting good at it, and then you would express opinions on the one thing you learned, and keep saying "I don't know" to everything else... that would already put you into top 1%.
Alas, the "market for thinkers" does not work this way at all. High variance is better. If you are really smart and eloquent at A, but batshit crazy at B, C, D, E, you can start giving lectures on A and become popular. (And then you can leverage your popularity to also teach people the Truth about the B, C, D, E.)
It is interesting to observe various pressures on Scott. The many temptations that only if he fully embraced some X for a moment, he could instantly get thousands of new passionate followers. There are a few movements that Scott could transition to be one of the leaders, if only he threw away reason and caution, and started writing in their favor. All he would need is to stop looking also for evidence for the other side.
I think it is better in long term for Scott to resist. Not only because "For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?", but also because ACX is unique on the internet and can remain so for a long time, but joining one of the movements turns you into one of the many, and then you either start playing a different game, or you gradually stop being relevant. Five or ten years later, Peterson will be "just another antivaxer" or "just another Russian shill" and no one will care about him; even the "contrarian mob" will pay attention to some more recent convert instead.
> Hell, Peterson was practically defending Russia's invasion of Ukraine on the grounds that Putin had no choice because the West was too woke.
This is especially painful, coming from someone who couldn't stop talking about the human potential for evil and quoting Solzhenitsyn... and suddenly he is okay with an attempted genocide (not an exaggeration, if we consider the part about taking away the children of Ukrainians disloyal to the new regime and giving them to adoption to Russian families) just to make a cheap political point.
Considering those woke fools ended his career, and you're not paying him enough to live comfortably, I can't fault him for being a professional antiwokist.
That sounds like "he will adopt the opinions of anyone who pays him decently", which I think is a description he would be *horrified* to hear.
(Still may be true, though, especially if he is paid with both money and respect.)
I mean, I support a personn't choice to be a gay-for-pay sex workerso YMMV.
But it might be a bit more subtle than that, it might be "will say those opinions he already agrees with and lets himself get into cycles of one-upsmanship while signalling disapproval of the common outgroup." That latter behavior is common here on the local NPR station where the various journalists take turns seeing who can invent the most lurid insults for repubs.
Thanks for this post.
That kind of lazy, snobbish attitude may do as much practical work to further ill-founded conspiracy theories as anything Alex Jones does. Treating adults like toddlers is often going to harden their beliefs. Why do they ignore the basics of human nature?
Maybe just in it for the clicks? Or a fulfilling sense of supremacy?
The pro-ivermectin camp (which would answer your question by saying "lol because obviously IVM works and they can't prove us wrong!") contains a sub-camp who offer a darker, more interesting, and more compelling answer: "because they don't regard us as human or worth convincing -- they are totalitarian at heart and would happily put us in camps not because we disagree but because they hate us."
They are not necessarily wrong about Chris Kavanagh, but of course the problem is if they generalize too much.
What Scott calls fideism, I think I frequently see referred to on the greater net as "scientism": which is itself misrepresented, if I trust Wikipedia. WP calls scientism the belief that science is the best or only way to reach truth. I see people commonly use the term to refer to people who employ arguments from authority, where the authority is some scientist, as opposed to people who rely on the scientific method, and at most use scientists as a heuristic or possible time saver.
If I'm accurate, then scientism sounds like a special case of fideism. Scientism is faith in scientists.
I guess my point here is that Scott's far from alone in being frustrated by people who appear scientific but only because they profess faith in people who call themselves scientists. They just use a different term. (And TIL what fideism is!)
This is, to be frank, not an area where I'd trust Wikipedia. A lot of its editors are the target of the Scientism pejorative.
I think scientism is not so much about believing that scientists themselves are right about everything as it is about believing that the subject matter of science is all that can possibly exist.
So, for instance, if there is some subject like normative morality which appears to be outside the bounds of what science can even discuss, the scientismist concludes that normative morality is just nonsense unless we can rephrase it in scientific terms.
Fideism is about completely outsourcing your judgement to some "trustworthy" source (originally the Catholic Church if I remember right), and refusing to even try to think for yourself on the grounds that human reason is flawed or you're too stupid to figure things out for yourself (see https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/).
If it's not clear, fideism is specifically the (obscure) religious belief that salvation cannot come from reasoned belief but only from faith in the absence of reason. (It's not a mainstream Christian position, certainly)
Scott is using it here by analogy, not really directly accusing Kavanagh of "fideism" in a real sense, so I wouldn't cal Scientism a "special case of fideism", though it's maybe an analogous idea.
...and imagine what this is like for religious people. We experience stuff every day that Scientists and Experts think isn't real. To extend the scuba metaphor, we're going to visit the underwater pyramids with our whole family and all our friends, and they're telling us the ocean isn't real.
It takes a steely will to treat the Ivermectin debate seriously.
Yes, I've noticed the phenomenon that to many people the best arguments in favor of anything are "everyone we know believes it", "most high status people believe it", "people who don't support it are routinely mocked".
There are doubtless good evolutionary reasons for this - and also good reasons that a minority won't find this credible, at least not in all cases, and will insist on investigating for themselves, or at least privately regarding the "truths" in question as either "not proven" or even "probably false, given the effort to get people to (pretend to) believe them".
My personal eye opening experience was with climate change. Even a MOOC supposedly on the mechanisms of climate change started by informing me that some (large) percent of climate scientists believed climate change was real. And asking questions on their forums drew all kinds of flack. Apparently wanting predictions of the impact expressed in terms I could easily grasp ("how do the predicted effects compare with the medieval warm period?") was evidence that the person asking was a climate change denier come to the class to troll. It was damn clear that many prolific posters wouldn't have recognized the scientific method if it bit them, and didn't understand any details of climate change or its mechanisms.
It's your curse - and mine - to be abnormal, born with traits only useful to society in times of change. You can tell the difference between evidence and insult. You don't always automatically believe the highest status person in sight. You can distinguish between "what We believe" and "what's most likely to be true," at least some of the time.
That's a very uncomfortable position to be in. If one is lucky, these traits can be useful in becoming The Authority to be believed by a collection of Believers (a politer term than "sheeple," and more specific than "normals"). Mostly though it tends to put one on the outside looking in.
Spot on. Thanks.
This is my take on internet fame:
https://www.mattball.org/2023/02/the-path-to-internet-fame-2-of-2.html
Are you familiar with the words "apex fallacy"?
I'm not certain if this is precisely Kavanagh's position but I do think he leans this way - there seems to be a belief that the flow of potentially harmful information online requires (I'm probably over generalizing a bit) a kind of strong containment effort. It's a kind of public policy instinct - this is where Neil Young calling for Spotify to take off Joe Rogan or the broad misinformation expertise sphere comes from. And I can see how that mindset leads to "this empowered the Bret Weinsteins of the world to add marginal value to a conversation where the Experts had already reached the right conclusion."
But yeah, I think you're right in the effectiveness of the tone, I think it's pretty fair to be curious about the nuances of things, I don't really trust the instinct of someone to even be a misinformation expert, and I can't get past the idea that some people are gonna want to think about things and may even google it and the like and that's fine.
Anyone with a controversial opinion, which includes both conspiracy theorists and also things which are mainstream but also have a lot of opponents (like feminism) are surrounded by not just a bubble, but an anti-bubble.
In a previous job I had a colleague who was a Christadelphian. He was an amazing engineer, and in his job he got a lot of respect for reading up on the original literature of different problems and producing innovative solutions. Then in his evenings, he got a lot of respect for doing analyses of the bible and predicting the date of the second coming (or something like that). Mostly we did not talk to him about this, and if he mentioned it he would be a bit embarrassed - at some level he must have known we thought it daft.
The one person who did start a discussion about this was the least tactful person in the office. Which wasn't very untactful by the standards of twitter (this was before twitter); but nevertheless the conversation was a bit cringeworthy. My point in all this is that the anti-bubble is made up of the people least likely to be able to persuade them that they are wrong.
In another incident, someone I respect, who was usually very confident, diffidently admitted in a forum (that they ran) that they occasionally thought that God had spoken to them directly. They were worried that admitting this would make people lose respect for their intelligence. All the friends in the group who were christians rallied round and said that they thought this was wonderful and that they didn't lost any respect. I was silent. I've often looked back on this and thought - I should have had the confidence to say "it wouldn't be the act of a friend not to point out that there are other possible explanations - irrespective of you being religious, I still have enormous respect for you" (or something along those lines).
This “anti-bubble” concept is an interesting one that should be developed (by which I mean you should write a blog post on it and link it here so I can read it).
> They were worried that admitting this would make people lose respect for their intelligence. All the friends in the group who were christians rallied round and said that they thought this was wonderful and that they didn't lost any respect.
A funny thing is that (from what I've gathered from several ACX-adjacent spirituality discussions), many religious traditions are pretty wary of this kind of revelation and would probably not encourage people to assume it was genuine automatically. Depending on the tradition, they might suggest that people who feel they've received a revelation talk about it with their spiritual leaders, for example.
One interpretation of this is that the spiritual leaders want to maintain a kind of monopoly on power and authority (having just watched a classic movie about Joan of Arc yesterday, this feels like a real thing to me). But another is that believers (in one sense) can be skeptics (in another sense) and can understand very well that something that looks like a divine revelation, walks like a divine revelation, and quacks like a divine revelation is not necessarily a divine revelation.
Now maybe personally hearing from God is an accepted part of that person's forum members' Christian denominations, but it wouldn't be for everyone. (I did an SSC adversarial collaboration project on spiritual experience a couple of years ago, and one of the most surprising things for me was how aware many spiritual communities are that their members could be confused or misled by a spiritual experience!)
Still waiting on that blog post. I'm not kidding.
I hope you'll talk to Destiny (aka Stephen Bonnell) someday; as you guessed, his community has a massive presence on Manifold Markets, but he's also one of the most rhetorically competent people in the YT streaming sphere. He's read several SSC posts on stream in the past, and he accepts and reads emails from his community, so I'd think he'd be relatively easy to get in touch with.
Un-substantive posts are generally frowned on around here.
That's not remotely true. It's just guys only like the smell of each others' fart. Foreign hot air doth offend your delicate sensibilities. Other Minds! Heavens. And so on.
Yeah, good luck not getting a ban, or at least a ban warning, if you keep on with this sort of comment.
Just FYI.
And I say this because I got such a warning, even though I consider myself a native, not a foreigner.
What I find fascinating about rats is you let nazis shit all over the place but it's considered rude to point out that there's nazis shitting all over the place
It's mildly amusing that you're so sure that your shit smells sweeter than theirs.
It's mildly amusing you can't read
User banned for this comment.
While I largely disagree with Scott, I also think Bret Weinstein *deserves* Chris Kavanagh.
"Either these people didn’t understand the arguments for and against Atlantis, or they did. If they didn’t, they were frauds, claiming expertise in a subject they knew nothing about. If they did, then at any moment they could have saved me from a five year wild-goose-chase - but chose not to, because it was more fun to insult me."
Fukin' Amen. this is the best sentence ever to describe Kavanagh's "Guru's" podcast. it's hours upon hours of the above.
Nice.
I was very grateful for your Ivermectin post- I don't have a lot to add, other than those of us who are a bit closer to 1.01^infinity than average appreciate you sharing your thought processes and journey in such a compelling way!
I'm 100% certain he would talk identically about any number of sensitive topics, such as biological sex and race differences - I've seen his exact language used to describe a belief that cognitive ability differs by race. So nobody should be obliged to take what he says seriously.
Let me repeat - people like this shout down legitimate scientific statements all time using this language, so it would simply be a coincidence if there was no valid and worthy scientific debate to be had around ivermectin.
"pro-science" people have unquestionably, unequivocally allowed their ideology to influence what they think of as scientifically valid, so they have no leg to stand on when they want to declare that something doesn't even warrant investigation.
Yup
I think that, for most people, Kavanagh's type of argument is effective. A typical person believes following whatever their ingroup tells them to believe is the best path to the truth. And if it ever becomes clear that their ingroup is incorrect, then they'll still pretend to believe in order to avoid the social consequences of believing the "wrong" thing.
But presumably lots of arguments would work on your ingroup. That’s preaching to the choir. Less aggressively anti-inquiry arguments would probably be less likely to drive people on the margins into the arms of your out group.
I think the reasoning of people like Kavanagh is a bit more involved than you make it sound; in fact, it is somewhat closer to the EA mindset.
---
Consider Ivermectin. I think it's pretty obvious by now that it doesn't work at preventing COVID. Every person who chooses to trust in Ivermectin instead of getting a vaccination runs an appreciable risk of dying (or being crippled for life); what's worse, this person runs the risk of transmitting COVID to others. Most people are not doctors nor biologists; they're just regular John Does trying to make it through the day. They have neither the time nor the skill to delve into every little study and re-run their own statistical calculations; they just need to know which choice is right: Ivermectin or vaccination.
Thus, by undermining the clear and accurate message -- "choose vaccination" -- you are influencing at least some number of people to make the wrong choice; thus, you are causing deaths both directly, and indirectly (through secondary infections). It doesn't matter that your intentions are good, and that your work is thorough; in essence, you are privileging the lives of a few science nerds over (potentially) millions of ordinary people. You are condemning millions to die over your intellectual vanity.
---
Unfortunately, I think the argument above is true; it's just not the whole truth. It omits the massive negative knock-on effects (yes, including deaths) that result from normalizing ignorance and propaganda over critical thinking; however, such effects are long-term and difficult to measure. COVID deaths, on the other hand, are readily observable. Short-term thinking will always win out over long-term planning, and this situation is no different.
Well it is quite fun to insult people. (extremist conformist authoritarians like this Kavanagh character, moreso)
The chance of maybe causing the insulted person to add for themselves some injury to the insult, makes it even more thrilling.
Was it a conspiracy theory that COVID-19 leaked from a lab?
Was it a conspiracy theory that masks were worthless for stopping COVID-19?
Was it a conspiracy theory that Fauci didn't know what the hell he was talking about?
There are two kinds of faith: faith in that which has been disproven, and faith in that which has not been proven.
A reasonable person has principles, which guide him when information is insufficient. They can fail you but are beneficial when they usually don't.
On your first, yes it is absolutely a conspiracy theory.
Wait, you think *lab leak* is a conspiracy theory, in the pejorative sense? I'm taken aback - lab leaks happen all the time!
Spare me the faux shock. Lab leak is a textbook conspiracy theory.
Who is supposed to have conspired to do what in this "textbook" theory? The lab leak hypothesis is that the whole mess was an *accident*. Possibly it was a textbook accident theory?
When you say "conspiracy theory," do you mean:
a. A claim about a conspiracy (a coverup of an accidental lab leak)?
b. An instance of broken thinking where people convince themselves of silly things without evidence?
ISTM that the lab leak stuff is definitely (a), but not at all (b). It may or may not have happened, and it seems hard to nail that down with much certainty at this point, but it's not the sort of thing you have to have a broken mode of thinking to conclude is likely.
Can we (at least those of us on this forum, but ideally everyone) default to using and assuming (a), always? It's fairly clear that (b) has come about as a deliberate attempt by people like Chris to enforce the "aggressive conformist" narrative, where anything that might suggest that two or more people worked together to do something behind the scenes must inherently be an example of broken thinking, regardless of the evidence. It's an attempt to smuggle in the connotations of (b), even when it's a veracious example of (a).
It would be like if a racist against green people created this term Green People™, and described anything bad that green people did as a "classic Green Person moment", and constantly complained about "Green People behavior" and about how "Green People" are terrible in every way. Then, when confronted about this, said "No, no, you don't understand, I'm not trying to denigrate green people or say that all green people are bad or anything, I'm only talking about Green People. It's a totally different thing. Why would you think when I say Green People that I'm talking about people that are green? Obviously Green People is just a specific term of art that describes bad and evil people and their behavior - it has nothing to do with people who have green skin."
Yes those are all conspiracy theories, echo chamber nonsense, and group think. You got those opinions from watching tv and reading flat earther type blogs. Grow up.
Amusing, because the available evidence says that it was indeed leaked, albeit accidentally. A recent meta-study of mask effectiveness says that the surgical masks commonly used are not a barrier to viruses. Go find it yourself, I don't care to provide evidence to people who have no use for evidence.
I don't watch TV or read flat earther type blogs. Your assumptions need re-examination.
You guys are crank magnets lol
That was an excellent refutation of my claims. So much evidence, so much logic, I am completely overwhelmed by your intellect. </s>
If you can't tell who the mark is, well...
Exactly.
Some people got "masks were worthless for stopping COVID-19" from RationalWiki.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YSP9prWnjKxzwuAKp/rationalwiki-on-face-masks
I often present an expert on one side with a well-supported argument on the other and ask them to reconcile. Sometimes they do...
Minor correction: 0.99^infinity = 0. What you meant is that 0.99^n goes to 0 (with n).
I mostly agree with your criticism of Kavanaugh. But I think a better version of the kind of critique he is making is thet it can be a mistake to treat people as acting in good faith and making arguments based on rational assessment of evidence when they're not. In the former case a rational breakdown of the evidence helps, in the latter it just draws more attention to them which they use to convince more people.
This is complicated in practice because most fringe beliefs that have a large following will have a mixture of both. There's the people selling magic beans for money who know that's what they're doing. And people who've been convinced by them that the beans are magic and innocently try and tell their friends.
The theoretical ideal response is to help the latter without being exposure to the former, but these kind of people often try and stoke controversy because because if a thousand new people learn about them from the takedown, and 999 agree they're frauds, they've still gained one customer/follower.
I don't think it's almost ever a mistake to engage with _ideas_ in good faith. It's absolutely the case that MANY MANY people have already written their preferred conclusion on the 'bottom line' of their arguments, but, somewhat ironically, that seems to be almost exactly as frequent among those with the 'correct' beliefs as otherwise.
I don't think it's generally right to refuse to argue against some claims merely because they might be being made by someone "selling magic beans for money". It's easy enough to address the ideas themselves and (mostly) ignore the bean-mongers.
But some people, e.g. Daryl Davis, have had some _spectacular_ success engaging with 'bean-mongers' directly. I definitely don't think that's ALWAYS a mistake.
Can you do a post talking about the meta-analysis of mask effectiveness studies?
I would also like to see this
You are completely right on this issue.
Years of dealing with similar controversies in Rootclaim taught me that truth is hard. We are constantly surprised by the results of our analyses, and each time find a different party to be correct. Sometimes it's US, sometimes Russia, sometimes China. Sometimes democrats, sometimes republicans. Sometimes the mainstream, sometimes the fringe. Sometimes experts, sometimes laypeople.
In the case of Kavanagh, it's easy to see how his simplistic approach leads him to wrong conclusions:
He takes the mainstream opinion on the chemical attacks in Syria (https://twitter.com/C_Kavanagh/status/1128388814525743104). Our analysis originally yielded 92% for the opposition carrying out the Ghouta attack, and that was recently shown to be the case after a video of opposition fighters launching chemical rockets was geolocated to the attack's launch location.
https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/Who-carried-out-the-chemical-attack-in-Ghouta-on-August-21-2013
He does the same for the origins of sars-cov-2 (https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40C_Kavanagh%20lab%20leak%20evidence&src=typed_query&f=top), where the evidence strongly favors a lab leak.
https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COVID-19-SARS-CoV-2
There are no shortcuts to truth.
I disagree and think that the lab leak theory of covid's origin is unlikely to be true.
I say this having previously endorsed the lab leak theory, or at least having said that the question was a toss up. After taking the time to dive into the issue, I now think it's highly unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab.
I first heard of the Rootclaim challenge a few days ago, when Scott mentioned your debate with Kirsch.
Would I debate the lab leak theory for $100,000?
I don't know. That's a large quantity of money for me, so I'd need to know exactly how the debate would be judged.
Like, I think that Kirsch's claims about vaccine deaths are obviously false:
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/debunking-steve-kirschs-latest-claims-97e1c40f5d74
In a fair contest, I'd bet all the money I have that covid vaccines have saved more lives than they've cost.
But I wouldn't debate that with Kirsch, because I don't think the rules of his contest would be fair.
In the case of your debate, it looks like he wants to rig the judges to be in his favor (i.e. by nominating Weinstein and Martenson as judges), or at least neutral on the question (the 6-8 balanced judges idea) so that the debate will end up inconclusive.
I've been thinking about how to frame these debates in a way that can be objectively decided:
https://medium.com/@tgof137/prove-the-earth-is-round-win-a-million-dollars-4a220092ab0c
Like, I don't think it's fair for you to compare the Rootclaim challenge to James Randi's million dollar prize. For psychics to enter Randi's prize, they didn't have to put up a million dollars of their own. And the outcome of each contest could be objectively judged, anyone could watch and see whether or not the paranormal powers were working.
I think some controversial questions about covid could be objectively answered. Like, I think we can objectively test the question if masks work, with a simple challenge trial.
The lab leak theory is harder to decide without some form of judging.
Here's one bet I would propose: no one will ever prove the lab leak theory.
The bet needs some time frame to resolve, because never is a long time. I might frame it as:
"In 5 years time, the scientific consensus will not be that SARS-CoV-2 was created by gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
We could define consensus in a variety of ways.
I mean something comparable to, say, the level of scientific consensus that global warming is real and mostly caused by human CO2 emissions.
It could be something like surveying if 90% or more of virologists believe the lab leak theory.
It could be done by nominating current zoonotic origin proponents and saying they won't endorse the lab leak theory. I might suggest people like Michael Worobey, Bob Garry, and Kristian Anderson. Two of those scientists already changed their minds from lab leak to zoonotic origin, in early 2020, so that should show that they are capable of changing their minds. Worobey also signed a letter endorsing the discussion of the lab leak as a valid question, even though he strongly advocates for a zoonotic origin.
I would bet that the lab leak discussion will remain about the same as it is today. Most virologists will still lean towards a zoonotic origin. Scientists will continue to slowly find somewhat related bat viruses in China and SE Asia.
The lab leak theory may well live on in the public imagination. There will still be podcasts and substack articles and books written about the Wuhan lab. The theory might be endorsed by more government reports (like the House GOP minority report which already endorsed the lab leak theory). It may even become the theory advanced by the majority of the US government, if the GOP wins the next election.
But I would bet that the lab leak theory will still remain fringe among scientists. There will not be any clear proof of a gain of function research program at the WIV creating the virus. No one will find proof in the RNA sequence that covid is not natural.
A few quick responses:
1. In your lab leak assessment, what is the conditional probability you gave to a zoonotic coronavirus with an FCS appearing in the same city as the only lab in the world inserting FCS's into coronaviruses? Same question for a lab leak.
Are you confident you have enough evidence or priors to overcome whatever ratio you got?
I am yet to see someone who did this calculation and finds lab leak to be unlikely.
2. We're flexible on amounts. We can do less than $100k.
3. It remains to be seen whether Kirsch and us can agree on judges. I'm mildly optimistic.
4. We clearly state our challenge is not as good as Randi's. It's the best we could come up with given there is no experiment.
5. I give 50% that scientific consensus will not change on covid origins within 5 years, so not a good bet. There are strong incentives from China and virologists to keep the status quo.
6. If you don't like debates, a good criteria for lab leak would be that as we find closer and closer viruses, the FCS will stand out more, not less. i.e. We will not find a wild virus with part (or all) of the sars-cov-2 FCS. This has pretty good correlation with the truth, and doesn't give an advantage to either side (e.g. probability of winning while being wrong is roughly equal).
7. We looked into the 'masks don't work' claim, and were surprised to find it has merit. Note that it's not the claim you're making about stopping particles, but at the population level.
When you take into account how people behave in the real world, that people have many opportunities to get infected, the evidence that eyes are a primary infection path, and herd immunity considerations, it seems reasonable that masks don't help, even if they do help on the individual level.
What would your process look like for choosing judges or deciding a debate, if we did debate lab leak?
Regarding point #6, are you saying that you'd bet $100,000 that we won't find a SARS family virus with a partial furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction?
What level of similarity would you require, to win that bet? Like, if covid has 12 mysterious nucleotides added (forming the amino acids PRRA, give or take the frame shift), then how much of a match do you need in a wild virus? Is, say, 6 matching nucleotides at the S1/S2 junction good enough? Is 7?
Does the genetic sequence on both sides of the insert also have to be identical?
I think you're basically trying to reframe my bet "the lab leak will not be proven within X years" and instead cast it as, "the zoonotic origin will not be proven within X years".
But I'm not sure what your criteria are for that.
Like, in my case I could just go with "the scientific consensus will not support lab leak" as the resolution. But I'm not sure if you have an equivalent criterion because the scientific consensus already supports zoonosis.
If we find 10 more SARS like viruses that are a little bit closer to covid, but not exactly the same, scientists will still support zoonosis. But I don't know if you will be convinced, without knowing your resolution criteria.
I’m looking for a criteria that has an equal conditional probability to win given each hypothesis.
Need to formulate exactly but I’m thinking something like: if we find a virus that is close enough to be statistically likely to have part of the fcs, then it won’t.
Regarding question #1:
There are a lot of different ways you could calculate the probability of covid spilling over in Wuhan.
Wuhan is the 9th largest city in China, you could say there are 8 cities more likely for it to start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_population
You could just say there are 8.5 million people in Wuhan and 1.4 billion in China. If everyone in China has an equal probability of being patient zero, the odds that Covid starts in Wuhan are 0.6%.
You could say that most viral spillovers end without spreading, so covid has to start in a city, not on a farm. To get where we are today, maybe it also has to spread internationally before there's any containment. So those should increase your odds, maybe it rules out most of rural China, and gives the Wuhan odds a boost, maybe by a factor of 2-4? So, maybe we're talking in the 1-3% range?
You could also try to weight it somehow, like we have habitat maps of bats and also bat population density matched to human population density:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31860-w/figures/2
Yunnan and Laos and Southern China are favored on those maps, but Hubei is still a plausible location. Those maps do possibly rule out Northern China, so you might get another factor of 2 boost out of that? But maybe not, if you take the effects of animal trafficking into account.
Anyways, we're looking at something like 1-6% odds of a Wuhan origin.
I think what you're asking is: are there some other factors that make the lab leak unlikely, and are the numbers associated with those large?
Like, I need to give some other argument that says covid is less than 6% likely to be a lab leak, or preferably less than 1%?
At that point, I'd say yes, there are lots of arguments that reduce the odds that low.
First off, all the geographic evidence we have, within Wuhan, points to the market origin. The early case data. The pattern of case spread from one side of the market to the other. The pattern of positive environmental samples within the market. The pattern of case spread from near the market to the city around. The inability to find any earlier cases. The seroprevalence data even leaves the market's neighborhood as a hotspot.
So, to prove the lab leak theory, you already have to assume that someone got infected at the lab, went to the market and created a superspreading event without leaving a trace elsewhere. If you consider all possible superspreading locations in Wuhan, the Huanan market is pretty low on the list.
It's very high on the list of places for a zoonotic spillover, as one of the few wet markets in town. But it's low on the list of most crowded places.
Worobey's calculations gave the market 0.04% of visitors to about 430 possible superspreading locations.
So that's already a much lower probability than the 1-6% chance that the zoonotic spillover happened in Wuhan.
If you believe Pekar's analysis that two lineages originating separately at the market, you need to square the 0.04% and now we're talking odds of 1 in 6 million. You need 2 infected lab employees to both visit the market and cause a superspreading event without infecting anyone else in Wuhan. I'm not sure I trust Pekar's analysis well enough to rely on that. I think the case of a lab employee spreading the virus to the market and nowhere else is already unlikely enough, plus there's other evidence in the genome to knock down the odds of a lab origin further.
I guess you could maybe modify the odds based on how much you trust that China didn't lie about locations of cases or miss early cases or whatever.
Sorry, I don't speak Bayesian, this isn't how I usually argue or reason.
I get the idea behind multiplying a string of probabilities together, but the result is highly dependent on which odds you include in the calculation.
And I think the framing itself can miss other possibilities. Like, if covid started in a different city, don't you think there would still be a different conspiracy theory built around it's origin?
This is very helpful. I think you’re underestimating the coincidence and ignoring some lab leak evidence but that is minor.
The most important issue is that you’re putting too much trust in the market data. I suggest looking at some rebuttals to that and then re-evaluate.
What do you find untrustworthy about the market data?
I've read Alina Chan's objections to the market data. She just says it's the result of ascertainment bias, but has no convincing argument for why it would be biased, or how a biased search found lots of non-market linked cases, or why the non-linked cases were still centered on the market and radiated away from it over time. She doesn't check against any other data, like seroprevalence or attempts to find earlier cases in hospital records. That sounds a lot more like a conspiracy theorist changing a few details of her theory to fit new facts than an honest attempt to understand.
I've also read the zenodo paper by Quay, Deigin, et al. responding to Worobey's work. That was a little better, but not convincing. IIRC, they leaned heavily on the idea that there weren't enough animals sold in Wuhan relative to markets in Southern China.
An important point is: you have to make many assumptions to rule out the market origin and pave the way for the lab leak to be true. Like, you have to assume that covid spread unnoticed in Wuhan in places besides the market. If you make those assumptions, then they also make an origin outside of Wuhan possible -- the virus could also have been unnoticed in other cities, could have entered the market via the adjacent train station, not from the lab across town. So you're now comparing the probability of a lab leak to the probability of an origin anywhere in China.
I've written about all of this stuff before:
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-lab-leak-theory-f640ae1c3704
There's some discussion in there of 4 SARS family viruses with a partial FCS at the S1/S2 junction, you seemed curious about that.
I suppose if I wanted to win this, I should play dumb and not discuss anything before debating. But you didn't answer my questions about how a debate would be judged, so I'm pretty sure that we won't debate.
And my priors on "rich people make prizes that can actually be won" are incredibly low. I'm not saying you're a bad faith actor like Steve is, but in a world with people like Steve in it, you have to assume everyone is like him before putting money at risk.
You seem to worked on it quite a bit so this is not something we could cover here. But we can look into the challenge.
If you’re asking about the debate one then we’re flexible. Feel free to suggest people you think are strong and unbiased. If you’re asking about doing a challenge with the fcs, then it’s much easier. We define some criteria on the genome and we’re done.
Good article as usual: mostly hits points I've heard from you before, but it's good stuff to hear (and the underwater pyramid thing is a fun anecdote). Also, looking forward to your discussion of the "Five More Years" predictions from 2018 soon!
Assuming you still have some of that Atlantis passion, I would read a lengthy post summarizing the arguments that initially convinced you in favor of Atlantis existing, what the discrepancies in the coherent narrative exactly *were*, and then the arguments which ultimately convinced you against.
(Also — and I have no memory of my source here, talking out of my ass based on something I read about in middle school — isn’t the best candidate for Atlantis the ancient civilization of Tartessos in southern Spain/Biblical “Tarshish”? Which is enigmatic in the way pre-Bronze Age Collapse civilizations are but which isn’t any kind of geographic anomaly).
I'm pretty confident that the best explanation of "Atlantis" is that Plato made it up in order to make a point. That does not necessarily imply that there weren't lost civilizations that sort of match what Plato described, though.
I appreciated this a lot. I was taught six day creationism growing up and read YEC apologists voraciously. The book or two I was able to find at the library were pretty scarce and the Creationists seemed to have an exhaustive answer for everything. Every smart person I asked about evolution had some kind of dismissive comeback that made me think maybe the Creationists were right.
Then a single individual who was well acquainted with scientific literature decided to engage me in good faith, starting with an argument about HERVs that I had never heard before. I also found a book by the kind of para-scientific writer that sometimes gets made fun of, but he had taken time to write a book explaining the reasons why evolution made a lot of sense. I was stunned and it completely changed the course of my life.
I had to search to find out what HERVs are. The first page I read informed me that:
"HERVs have roles in regulating genes (a God-designed function) and causing disease (due to mutations in HERVs as a result of the Fall). It has been suggested that HERVs and other transposable elements played a role in rapid genetic changes that occurred post-Flood to allow humans and animals to adapt to different environments"
Was there a single moment when you really came to doubt creation? Did it happen over the course of a few days reading that book? Or was it a longer process?
Trusting the experts is not really an epistemic heuristic. The best option epistemically is to read so much that you become an expert. Trusting the experts is really about efficiency. People want to be able to dismiss conspiracy theories because it is too much work to have to refute literally every incorrect argument all the time. Most people who have the same argument (and win) three times get tired and dismissive and announce they are no longer going to argue with anyone about this subject. That's reasonable - they want to be able to move on to new subjects and new knowledge and not be weighed down by people behind them.
But the reality is: when a lot of people believe something, it is important to investigate it in depth and thoroughly explain why the thing is right or wrong. Maybe this isn't "cutting edge" intellectual work, but it's extremely necessary work that someone needs to do.
Most people lack both the time and ability to understand why bad, but superficially sophisticated arguments are wrong. On the subject of the myriad examples of COVID denialism, there is a lifetime's worth of material out there that requires somewhere between intelligent biology undergrad and Ph.D. level understanding to really break down. Thinking that anyone can just become a graduate level expert in immunology in their free reading time is not realistic.
It's nice to outsource this to experts, but experts who have the ability to explain where arguments go wrong in a way that is true, accessible, and doesn't require their audience to have a undergraduate educational background in the subject of discussion are rare. That's hard. The people famous for being good at it - the Carl Sagan and Ken Miller's of the world - are remarkable, precious resources. And even then, I can't think of a single example who hasn't screwed something up in their debunking efforts.
Sometimes you're left with being forced to trust that experts probably know what they're talking about.
I don't know if I fully agree with that. I reads a little like a convenient excuse for people who are willing to devote zero time to boning up on what we know about the natural world. I think anybody who got a B in a good high-school biology class can learn enough to understand how vaccines work in maybe a dozen hours of study, provided the right materials are available -- and these days, they often are, there are tons of concise Youtube videos on basic concepts in many scientific fields.
That doesn't really seem like such a high demand on your time that most people can't afford it. People routinely spend that much time, and much more, becoming familiar with how certain sports are played, the rules, et cetera, so they can enjoy their games.
So I think in no small part there is a certain degree of laziness among us. We think gee if it can't be explained to me in such terms that just using my mother wit and what I remember from 8th grade, it must be bogus, or something only an egghead can grok. But that's not really true. I would be in favor of recreating a certain standard among adults that said "you really ought to keep yourself at least mildly educated in the background for our very technological society so you can at least understand the arguments that are made, and participate meaningfully." In the Victorian era, nobody would listen to you if you couldn't quote Cicero in Latin, sort of a standard of dedication to self-education that was easily measured. Maybe we need something similar -- nobody will listen to you debate pandemic vaccine shit unless you can tell me what mRNA is and what it does at a 10th grade level.
Understanding what mRNA is or a simple model of how vaccines work is high school level material, but understanding some of the more sophisticated COVID pseudoscience floating out there is beyond that. There's a ton of material produced by people who have sufficient academic background to provide a veneer that just takes more knowledge to penetrate.
I routinely interact with various COVID denialism and something that I run into a lot is people sharing and misinterpreting papers that I'm able to read and see where they go wrong. I'm fully aware my ability to read them and understanding how their interpretations are misleading comes from having decent science reading comprehension skills, a undergrad background in cell biology, and having reasonably kept up in the practice of reading journals. It is more difficult than, say, answering science reading questions on an ACT correctly, and the vast majority of people can't do that consistently.
I don't mean this to be condescending towards people here. It's just that it's much easier to BS with pseudoscience than it is for people to tease apart how it is going wrong in any kind of detail. Some people are good at it. If you put in enough work and are reasonably intelligent, usually someone with a non-graduate background can see the flaws in most pseudoscience, but even that is hard. There's only so much time in the day.
As I said, I don't fully agree. I think you're allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Just developing a tradition that people should expect to keep up at least somewhat with the basic science and technology of the day is (1) not hard, and (2) would improve the discourse significantly. Yes, I agree, there are cases where it definitely isn't suffficient. But if we only had those left, and only the hardcore Piped Pipers and apostles, it would be a much better world.
I think we're mostly just talking about different things. I agree that it is a good idea for people to generally keep up with basic developments in science and technology and this would be beneficial. This should also have a protective effect in helping people recognize some signs of dubious scientific claims.
What I'm claiming is that pseudoscientific movements specifically are capable of churning out arguments that take more sophistication to understand the faults of than that. That's what makes them pseudoscientific - they're able to create the appearance of legitimate, serious science to a naive observer. I think the sweet spot of most pseudoscience is a few credentialed people combined with professionals from different fields* get together and use their knowledge to create arguments that superficially look compelling, but are filled with errors in fact and inference that take a level of knowledge and effort to unpack that is around the ability level of a smart undergrad in the relevant area. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less, but that the bullseye. Can people teach themselves into that range of knowledge? Sure, though I've seen enough examples of people getting in over their head that I'd caution some humility. Is that something we should generally expect of people? No.
*Often engineers, medical doctors, and lawyers oddly enough.
You're focused on the direct effects on the individual. But consider the social effects here, which are quite important. Let there still be clever pseudoscientific arguments, and a few weasel professionals -- but let there also be about 80% fewer rank-and-file supporters who retweet the folly, or say "yeah that!" on FB posts, simply because the general level of empirical skepticism -- which is a typical accompaniment of any kind of genuine education -- rises. An important distinction between science and pseudoscience is that the latter heavily relies on the size of the movement -- on the impression it creates that "lots of people agree with this." People want to belong, they want to be au courant, they want to be part of movements that look like they have power. Take away the numbers, and silly ideas become less persuasive. Think of it as memetic herd immunity.
Someone we would trust..
Ah.. hmm
It's hard to be an expert on very much, though. Many of us here are genuine experts in some things, but being an expert psychiatrist, rocket scientist, number theorist, structural engineer, etc., doesn't mean you're also going to do a great job resolving controversies in virology or sociology or whatever.
" The best option epistemically is to read so much that you become an expert. "
No one can do that for more than a few topics. And what happened to the option of just not caring? What does Atlantis mean to you?
The "don't even engage with the question" tweet reminds me a bit of epistemic learned helplessness, where you can't trust yourself to reason correctly, so you should never try. I guess it's the correct advice for some people, but someone somewhere does need to evaluate the evidence and if Scott can't do it, who can?
Someone with appropriate credentials, is what this sort of pundit has in mind I'd imagine.
Wiki on cargo cult science (categorised by Feynman).
„Cargo cult science is a pseudoscientific method of research that favors evidence that confirms an assumed hypothesis. In contrast with the scientific method, there is no vigorous effort to disprove or delimit the hypothesis.[1] The term cargo cult science was first used by physicist Richard Feynman during his 1974 commencement address at the California Institute of Technology.[1]“
The cargo cult is what Kavanaugh apparently wants.
Meanwhile Scott’s post assumed nothing and went through all the studies on Ivermectin, finding out that it’s useless against covid. Since Scott came to a conclusion that Kavanaugh agrees with, the problem Kavanaugh has is that Scott didn’t start with the „correct“ assumption and proceed from there. Feynman would have no problem taking sides here - he would side with Scott.
This.
Scott is at least a psychiatrist with a strong medical background, and you can even see in his original post where he was flubbing some things. I think you need to think of Chris's argument as a criticism of "do your own research" debunking popular among rationalists, rather a criticism of, you know, doing research.
Except Scott did, in fact, do research, and is being vilified for it. But he’s not a credentialed public health expert, so he has no right to an opinion, because it might possibly differ from that of said experts.
I think "criticized" is a better term than "vilified" here, which reads as hyperbolic. And the complaint is that Scott's research sort of awkwardly ambled its way to the correct conclusion while creating a window for audiences to be misled about the nature of the debate. Chris is representing one side in a classic dilemma academics have for engaging pseudoscientific arguments that are easy to spot the signs of, but resource consuming to address at a granular level. He argues that doing so makes it seem like there's a serious dispute at all to engage and opens up a window for others to be misled. This is the same reason why many famous biologists refuse to debate creationists if a more sympathetic example helps understand the argument.
Both of your ivermectin articles were long, but I finished reading both of them and learned some things from both of them.
I have never been able to finish an episode of "Decoding the Gurus".
> There may be people so far gone into the outer darkness that they can’t be saved, but you are forbidden from ever believing with certainty that any specific individual is in this category.
Emphatically endorsed. It's a simple rule, but it feels like a cheat code for empathy.
Nice.
I guess the steelman of this would be that an individual of a certain level of celebrity should not be addressing these concerns. I don't want the President of the United States weighing in on a schoolyard fight, or debating a homeless man's conspiracy theory that someone is a Cylon. To do so would create far more confusion than it would clear, no matter the strength of the argument.
But I don't think he's saying that. That would imply that Scott is an Internet behemoth pulling average folks along in his wake, but Kavanath is complaining about "the rationalists"; that suggests the Rationalist Community is itself a behemoth on the political landscape. And if a behemoth is interested in the topic, then it SHOULD be followed up on. You can't claim consensus while ignoring the questions of behemoths.
I suspect I'm just weird here, but hearing the president weigh in on a scientific controversy has approximately zero impact on my beliefs. Similarly, Joe Rogan expressing strong beliefs about the right course of treatment for covid, or a famous pro athlete or actor or singer's opinions about politics. Why on Earth would I care?
The default epistemology is "believe what you've heard" and when a conflict arises, resolve it with "believe who you trust more". Believing things for reasons is always going to be the hardest way to go, but the more of it we can get, the better. Think of humanity's collective beliefs like a bunch of caches pointing at other caches. The system only works is because real information is injected occasionally (by people reasoning and experimenting), otherwise you just get loops of beliefs pointing at each other.
As a child, I grew up in a house full of second-hand books, and with no internet. I learned about evolution from books that I knew were out of date, which mentioned that we didn’t know how wings could have evolved because half-a-wing can’t be used for flying. I had a few ideas of my own about partial wings, along the lines of flying squirrels gliding, and maybe you could run faster with some flapping, or maybe elaborate sexual displays, but I had nowhere to look up what the current ideas would be. So I waited years until we finally learned about it in school, and I asked my biology teacher.
I had, of course, learnt school survival techniques like never giving away that you already knew about this topic, and asking everything as a careful question without your own thoughts or prior knowledge, but these weren’t enough here! Because even asking this question had my biology teacher decide I was a religious fundamentalist who was opposed to evolutionary theory, and so everything she taught us from that moment on had weird patronising comments thrown in about “unless you don’t believe in that”. It had never even occurred to me that this was a possible danger (it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would oppose evolution for religious reasons past the Victorians).
My biology teacher didn’t have any good answers for me about wings. If a child asked me that, and I didn’t have up-to-date knowledge, I’d probably prompt them for their own thoughts, not assume I knew a position they were taking in some cultural dispute. Children sometimes do ask me about things that they have clearly come across as part of some cultural dispute, and are pretty much always looking for someone to talk it through with and suggest some broader context rather than actually embedded in a political position.
In short, people treating curiosity as a sign that someone is the wrong sort of person, and refusing to actually answer questions properly, also makes me very cross.
The fundamental problem is that getting the truth is much, much, much harder than anyone (establishmentarians and conspiracy theorists alike) wants to admit. It is *so* hard and time-consuming that it’s much much easier to just declare certain positions true and then presume, assert and believe that the effort to find the actual truth has been done.
Very likely this teacher didn't know how, or didn't want to expend the time, to learn the answer to her student's question. If the evolution of the wing had been included in the curriculum, meaning that someone else had done the heavy lifting of evaluating the primary literature and condensed it down to a simple narrative of how wings evolved, she would have learned and taught the narrative.
Exactly.
I know what you mean.
I don’t know anything about your teacher but I am inclined to be charitable to her; is it possible she was trying to be considerate of your (misperceived) sensibilities? Or do you think she was really trying to make you look stupid?
I think she probably thought she was being considerate of my views, but she hadn’t even asked me what my views were: she’d just jumped straight from essentially ‘dogwhistle for anti-evolution’ to assuming I held a strong religious view that must be worked around. It didn’t seem to occur to her that this was an obvious question that people could be genuinely puzzled and curious about.
She only saw my question through a lens of cultural arguments, rather than considering it as a question.
I'm just here to point out that the Richat Structure is DEFINITELY the former site of Atlantis. This isn't even a conspiracy theory, just a seriously under-investigated archeological thesis that someone with enough money could definitively prove or disprove.
I liked your posts on ivermectin, but I do think there is a genuine cost to posts like it, which Kavanagh seems to me to be at least hinting at.
When you take conspiracy theorists arguments seriously, it implies a higher prior on conspiracy theories than when you dismiss them out of hand. This can lead to your readers (consciously or not) increasing their priors on conspiracy theories and being more likely to believe future conspiracy theories they come across.
If their prior on conspiracies were not previously too low, this is a relevant cost.
Maybe I'm being too charitable when I mentally translate the statements 'pro-mainstream-anti-conspiracy people' make as pointing at this issue, but I do think the issue is real.
Not saying the benefit isn't worth the cost. Not saying the 'pro-mainstream-anti-conspiracy people' do a good job of pointing out that cost or doing any sort of cost-benefit analysis.
Just saying the cost exists, and is not entirely irrelevant. There probably exist some conspiracy theories it would be actively harmful for you to publicly take seriously because that cost would outweigh the benefit of practicing forming opinions.
I think you summarize well a charitable view of the point Kavanagh is making. I agree with you that I can imagine a somewhat-reasonable, hypothetical scenario where the cost you're pointing out exists. To me though, the burden of proof is on Kavanagh to demonstrate that either this particular ivermectin post has a much higher cost than benefit, or to demonstrate that a world in which these types of posts don't exist is a better world than the one in which they do. What's frustrating about Kavanagh's post, as well as most of these PR arguments along the lines of "even discussing x is dangerous" is that the person making the argument makes no attempt to show the hypothetical tradeoffs they're describing actually exist. It's easy to create a toy model of the world and tilt the table in your favour.
I absolutely agree with everything you just said.
I don’t know, I look at it more like a vaccination. By treating a conspiracy theory (or at least a probably actually debunked theory) with a degree of seriousness, but then debunking it anyway, Scott shows how a very plausible seeming argument backed up with evidence that is facially trustworthy can nevertheless be shown to be incorrect. So on the one hand, yes, he’s exposing us to a “dangerous” idea and evidence supporting it. On the other hand he’s inoculating us against the next pseudoscientific theory that comes along with some seemingly plausible evidence.
If all you’ve ever heard is that “all conspiracy theories are obviously stupid and only convincing to stupid evil people” then you’re extremely vulnerable to your first exposure to a wrong theory with any plausible support. Which as Scott notes, is actually a lot of them.
Yes, inoculating us against pseudoscientific theories that sound plausible is a valuable benefit to taking them seriously. I am not denying that at all. Nor am I denying that that benefit is worth the cost in this instance. I just want to point out that the cost exists, and in some other similar cases may outweigh the benefit, and that it is important to keep that cost in mind when making similar decisions in the future.
If I were Kavanagh, this is where I’d start calling you a Weinstein obsessed antixvaxxer. Or perhaps dismiss your argument as “indulgent and potentially misleading”.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that while I’m not entirely unsympathetic to your steelmanned Kavanagh-in-theory, he is so far removed from Kavanagh-in-practice as to be functionally unrecognizable.
That's fine with me. I don't particularly care if my steelmanned Kavanagh-in-theory is recognizable as Kavanagh. I just care about whether there is anything we can learn from it, and I think there is.
This strikes me as very close to how a government might reason its decision to “stay on message.” It’s a good argument.
I just spent the past two minutes scrolling through this Kavanagh guy's Twitter feed. 0/10, would not recommend. Smug, all the hallmarks of "too online," insults people rather than engage with anything they said, nothing original or insightful, lots of braindead left-right kayfabe jabbering, etc. Scott, you need to pick better online feuds! Jay-Z doesn't respond to a diss track from some Bronx drill rapper who's still trying to get exposure on Spotify by texting his friends and posting links on Facebook! The Undertaker doesn't beef with some meathead freshly hired from a Gold's Gym in San Jacinto!
And yet the attitude this guy presents is very common and worth combating.
Ugh. You did spill a lot of ink without actually doing it in the right way that could have actually been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
It's not really enough to "sort of" be a rationalist and "sort of" of be scientific. Do it the right way and get it accepted in a publication or leave it to the experts. All you had to do was wait about 6 months:
https://www.cochrane.org/CD015017/INFECTN_ivermectin-preventing-and-treating-covid-19.
Cochrane did not have any of the ad hominems, speculations, or things that you backtracked on.
Also longer doesn't mean better. Surely, you could have written less.
Finally, I am not sure that admitting that you had a dumb idea as a teenager is helpful.
I legit can't tell if this sarcastic or not...
Not sarcastic at all!
You mean to tell me you don't know that everything worth reading on a technical topic has been peer reviewed?!?!?!
There are plenty of interesting non-peer reviewed but serious works.
Popularized science is important and usual. Essays and books by Gould, Hawkins, Penrose, Feynman to scratch the surface. And the field of scientific journalism when well done is useful and not peer reviewed.
But SA was not doing scientific journalism nor popularized science. He attempted original research. Not a horrible effort but research is not persuasive writing it is factual and technical writing.
This is an interesting distinction that is worth pointing out, but I think you may have just proved the opposite point. In general, yes, everything seems to be shoehorned into these two categories: Pop science that is dumbed down to airport bookstore level, and proper scientific journals that are increasingly specialized and self-justifying.
A regular dude like me isn't smart enough to discern which of Malcom Gladwell's points are legit and which are spurious sensationalism, and I'm also not smart enough to wade through all the original research and statistical data to draw out my own insights. As these two categories get further and further apart, the more I appreciate guys like Scott Alexender for staying in the middle, writers who are able to bridge these gaps; diving deeper and showing their work more than the celeb authors, and having a wider perspective and more practical application than the institutional experts.
No, just straightforwardly patronizing and unpleasant.
Parrhesia
I can understand being the sort of person who believes that the only academic work worth writing is the sort that gets published in a peer-reviewed journal, but I can't wrap my mind around why someone who believes that would choose to read this blog. But if that's not what you're saying, how can it be worse to write a blog post and wait 6 months than to just do the waiting?
And I can't wrap my mind around "I'm not sure admitting you had a dumb idea as a teenager is helpful." There are so many things wrong with this view that I'm sort of reeling: (a) Writer seems not to grasp that everybody has dumb ideas as a teenager. Anyone who says they did not is just lying. (b)This is a blog post by Scott about his reaction to Kavanagh, not a formal takedown of Kavanagh. It's a different kind of essay. Self-disclosure is part of essays of this kind. It's fine. It enriches the text. (c)It wasn't a dumb idea, it was a wrong idea. Given the info Scott had, and his lack of info about other matters, it wasn't dumb to wonder whether the ruins of Atlantis were really there to be seen. Seems pretty reasonable to me. And subsequent events show Scott as smart and determined to figure out the truth, which he in fact succeeded in doing. First he learns to scuba dive, which is no small thing. Then he goes and looks at the formations that are thought to be ruins. Then he reads around and figures out that geological formations actually can look that much like the foundations of ruined buildings. I like and admire Scott, but if I heard that story about some random teen I had never laid eyes on, I would *still* have thought, what a great kid.
Everybody does have stupid ideas as a teenager. Most (all) also from time to time have stupid ideas as adults and made mistakes and errors of judgments. But it does NOT enrich the text, at all.
A general admission of fallibility and self-awareness of the process of personal growth is one thing. But specific and detailed admission to strangers (we are not, in very large part, his friends nor should we be personal admirers) is quite another.
You say you like Scott. Have you actually every met him in person? Do you really know him? What you probably mean is you like what he has written, or the topics he has brought up, etc. I will also presume that the relationship is not mutual or symmetric. He in all likelihood doesn't really like you because he doesn't know you at all.
"What a great kid" should be default attitude for every kid. Unless you are a misanthrope at heart.
There is a potentially manipulative quality about admission of past to what really amounts to strangers. I'll not waste ink explaining.
That may form part of the objection. It can be seen as a subtle form of emotional blackmail: "If you argue my thinking is off here, you are spitting with contempt on this charming plucky teenage version of me that is sitting right here listening."
It's a little as if some archaeologist arguing that he had discovered Atlantis had begun his J. Underwater Arch. article by talking about how the dream of finally discovering Atlantis had sustained him during his horrible abusive childhood, and as he lifted himself by his bootstraps from dire poverty and ignorance, worked his way through Harvard shining shoes in Logan Airport, living in a squalid rat-infesed tenement purusing his bright and shiny goal....I mean, you'd feel like a churl pointing out his "Atlantean" artifacts looked suspiciously like discarded Coke bottles...
Mind you, I personally have no problem with the anecdote, but I can also see how someone might feel it's a little emotionally manipulative if the purpose is to coolly and rationally defend a certain line of reasoning.
You know, I see that one could make a case for Scott's story about his Atlantis mistake being emotional blackmail. As you point out, this kind of thing can make readers reluctant to criticize or argue, for fear of seeming churlish. I don't think that's JDK's grounds for objecting to the story. He says "A general admission of fallibility and self-awareness of the process of personal growth is one thing. But specific and detailed admission to strangers (we are not, in very large part, his friends nor should we be personal admirers) is quite another. " It seems like he's saying Scott's disclosure is TMI -- it's creepy to disclose personal details to strangers on the internet -- and also that it damages one's credibility to show the reader "home movies" of one's foolish younger self. A general admission to past mistakes and foolishness is allowed, but the writer should keep his clothes on.
Yes, certainly. That's why I said "may" before "form" and "part of" after that. I'm not pretending to speak for him. And also he did close his response to you with a specific hint at a feeling of being manipulated, which is what got me thinking along the lines I did.
Yeah, you're right, it's not even legitimate nitpicking on my part. I don't exactly warm up to the person we're responding to, and I think my disapproval of his take on things spilled over onto you.
People can't really be part of this substack primarily because of what the SA writes. I have to believe that they are here for the comments. [Unless I have misunderstood and this is really a cult?]
I don't see in the slightest how reading a blog for the posts makes someone a cultist. That said, I won't dodge the accusation; I absolutely am ;).
You have figured it out: Yup, we are a cult. We live for Scott’s weekly piece of drivel about dumb stuff he did as a kid, and groups of us gather on weekends to read favorites aloud. Once a year we meet at Burning Man re-enact one. This summer we’ll be staging the all time most popular ACX post, the one about how at age 4 Scott thought nuns were penguins and tried to feed one some kippered herring that had gone bad in the fridge. I will be playing the herring, but we have yet to find anyone to play the furious, retching nun. I’m thinking you’re parrhestic enough to pull it off though. Want to give it a go? As for subscribing: There’s no shame in not being a paid subscriber, although if you’re not Scott won’t have sex with you. He does demand a tenner for the ice cream cones. But he mails out pairs of his panties to random non-paying subscribers throughout the year, so you may luck out.
What SA wrote was NOT academic it was pseudo academic.
It was quasi serious.
Scientific journalism and popularization of science is very important but it also has many increasing flaws and deficiencies. But SA essays were not journalism about science it was an attempt at original research (a meta study is original research).
Because it was done publicly there is a higher standard to which we should hold it.
I guess what I'm looking for is a reason we should hold it to a higher standard. What is the benefit you get out of that restriction? Why do you think the world where Scott doesn't write up his thought process is preferable to ours? These normative statements don't answer my question, they only restate your position.
Speaking of science and research and holding people to a high standard: You never replied to my comment about your posting that link to a page about Evusheld's being de-authorized a coupla threads ago. I don't think someone holding himself to a high standard of accuracy and fairness in argument should have posted it. Got anything to say about that?
I can't understand why any one would be a paid subscriber.
But I balk at the $10 ice cream cone.
The other thing I find odd about the anti-conspiracy stuff is the particular hatred towards 9/11 truthers. Some beliefs are inherently bad, for instance Holocaust denial, but disbelieving the main narrative about 9/11 isn’t that.
I mean if the entire population were truthers in 2003 then we might have 1 million fewer dead Arabs. And no doubt back in 2003 the 20% of people who didn’t believe that the existence of WMD had been proven by the experts overlap significantly with the truthers.
Who are the dupes here? The odd thing about post 2003 is that after the abject failure of the establishment media to hold government and the military to account, what we learned was that the problem was the people who didn’t subsequently trust the government or the media.
As for myself I don’t see much merit in 9/11 theories, it’s all too complex.
Yes, and honestly for anyone with a decent knowledge of American history the idea that the US government would intentionally fail to stop or even facilitate an attack to justify a war *isn't crazy*. That doesn't make it *true* in this particular case, but still far from insane.
I’m sorry you’re going to have to remind me of the other times the US government has carried out an attack destroying a major landmark and killed thousands of Americans to start a war. I guess unless you’re saying that a “decent knowledge of history” leads one to believe in the conspiracy theories regarding Pearl Harbor and the Lusitania.
That’s an argument to incredulity.
Anyway:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
Some things are indeed worthy of being incredulous. The conspiracy theories about 9/11 are bonkers and contain layers of epicycles and rejection of contrary evidence because so many of them are obsessed with the false idea that a wide body jet can’t take down a skyscraper.
It was a pretty Rube Goldbergian false flag if it was one. Why not just set off a bomb somewhere and fabricate evidence tying it directly to Iraq, the supposed target of the false flag? Or hell, just do what we basically already did / have in our anti-Saddam playbook and go on a tour with evidence for Iraqi WMDs and provoke Iraq into a casus belli response. Instead we’ve got fake jets, cruise missiles, kidnappings, hidden demolition charges, and fake Saudi perpetrators supported by fake Afghan theocrats that the government never really did manage to tie directly to Saddam Hussein.
Evidence that the US military gave some thought to the possibility of performing smaller scale false flags against the United States to provoke a war with Cuba (in the same document where they also proposed provocation of Cuba) and then ultimately rejected it and eventually declassified the report about it is hardly strong evidence that they actually did execute a much more complex and larger scale false flag operation.
The US military thinks about a lot of things that it never actually does, many of them unthinkable.
What would you do if I told you the US has plans signed by the Joint Chiefs for first strike nuclear options against Russia and China? Because I’m almost certain they do. But “brainstorming a contingency” and “actually executing it successfully” are two very different things.
Neither I nor anybody else here asserted that 9/11 was a false flag. That's pure projection. Indeed, I don't personally believe any of what would usually be described as "9/11 conspiracy theories". Since we're talking about orders of magnitude, my point was only that the US government allowing something monstrous to happen for its own ends is several orders of magnitude more plausible than lizard people.
And honestly, the fact that you defaulted to the most insane possible version of this is a great example of why "conspiracy theory" is a borderline useless framing. Ironically, of course, some would assert that it's deliberately useless. The two statements "there may have been people within the CIA who suspected an attack might happen and deliberately ignored it" and "there were no planes, the towers were toppled by cruise missiles disguised with holograms" can both accurately be described as 9/11 conspiracy theories but aren't in the same universe in terms of plausibility.
(Yes I've actually heard the cruise missile thing)
You said “intentionally fail to stop or facilitate”. The latter is definitely a false flag, the former arguably still is. Either way you’re (edit: you meaning people that actually believe the theory, not necessarily you personally) asserting that the U.S. government (or part of it) was directly responsible for 9/11, with the intent of using it to justify a war.
Also the OP of this thread referred to “Truthers” not just 9/11 conspiracy theorists in general. I perhaps unfairly assumed that “truther”, which I’ve only ever seen used pejoratively, was meant to include the “strong” versions of the theory with stuff like intentional demolitions, not just “the CIA knew and didn’t act to stop it, but the actual attack proceeded more or less along the ‘official’ narrative”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
Potentially covering up exactly what happened in an incident half a world away in which an ally attacked a smallish Navy ship and killed 32 sailors is literally multiple orders of magnitude away from deliberately collapsing the twin towers and murdering 3000 civilians in the middle of the largest city on the Eastern Coast.
It’s literally two orders of magnitude.
In deaths, yes. Which is a lot! In complexity it’s arguably more. And also we didn’t start a shooting war with Israel over it, and Israel didn’t try to pretend the Egyptians did it, so it’s not a false flag.
Plus “we accidentally attacked an ally because they thought they were an enemy” is absolutely a thing that happens all the time without actually requiring a more nefarious explanation. Hell, the Iraqis did the same thing 20 years later. And then the Americans shot down almost 300 people on flight 655 a year after that. People do dumb shit that kills the wrong people during shooting wars.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. The fact that the government used momentum from 9/11 to help push over the line an ultimately dubious casus belli to topple a longtime geopolitical foe in the Middle East does not make it rational or good to believe that the U.S. government organized a controlled demolition of the Twin Towers with remotely controlled military planes, that the Pentagon was hit with a cruise missile, or that “fire can’t melt steel”.
Yeh, maybe. But I wasn’t asking about stupidity or reversed intelligence. I was asking about why this particular belief generates so much heat. ( as opposed to the Kennedy assassination for instance which is ridiculed but not considered that dangerous).
You don’t see why people would be upset that people are making up wild conspiracy theories about a few thousand dead Americans that a few million personally experienced in New York and many millions more watched live on TV?
Yes the assassination of Kennedy was traumatic, but “a head of state gets assassinated” is a thing that happens sometimes. 9/11 was unprecedented, massively more traumatic, a personal tragedy for many many more people. And also 40 years more recent.
Yes. I don’t see why this conspiracy is a morally bad thing. Those people were killed anyway - this isn’t Holocaust denial which denies deaths. The thing to be enraged by is the million or so Iraqi deaths - which was a very real conspiracy to fake WMD.
“Only denying deaths makes a conspiracy theory worthy of condemnation” is a weird take, but if you take it consistently…
Personally I think the WMD intelligence was a lot more “confirmation bias” than “conspiracy” and the “million deaths” involves some questionable accounting / assignment of responsibility, but I don’t fault you for coming to a different conclusion.
“ Only denying deaths makes a conspiracy theory worthy of condemnation” is a weird take, but if you take it consistently…”
I was obviously replying to your appeal to emotion about the thousands of deaths, which are not denied by the 9/11 believers. And what is the last sentence?
L Given these massive deliberate twists in logic I think you are arguing in bad faith.
Hatred? You can be a 9/11 truther and get a job at CNN.
Yeh. Who is that?
Van Jones.
It doesn’t read as sarcastic at all, to me. Humorless, actually.
This is the most I’ve ever loved you. But if you prove to me the spotted owl really was being harmed by logging activities and the bard owl intruding into its habitat was just coincidence I’m going to need a minute to process that.
This guys the worst. All he does is shit all over anyone with a podcast/blog that discusses things, ironically I believe he has his own podcast too. You wanna critique Rogan fine, but this dude took the time to shit all over Andrew Huberman who literally cannot possibly be more credible and transparent when discussing health topics in his show. He bends over backwards to acknowledge the relative strength of the evidence when he discusses something, yet for some reason this guy still shits on him. Literally the worst type of person, just reeks of insecurity.
The bottom line is that “trust the experts uncritically and scientists are the experts” is a nonsensical statement, because the whole point of science is that you trust data, not people. An expert you trust uncritically isn’t a scientist, they’re a priest.
(And of course it’s worse than that because in practice “trust the science” really means “trust the Twitter user who retweeted the pundit who read the article that summarized the results of the study that a scientist did that may or may not be replicable”)
Right. "in god we trust all others bring data." George Box
I know you have a burning anger against anti-conspiracy bloggers like me, so I will not bother you with some of the subtle misgivings in your rant above.
However, one thing that might be useful; conspiratorial ecosystems are NOT "reasoning like everybody else just with worse vigilance". This is incorrect, there are multiple behavioral and cognitive differences stemming from epistemic, social and existential motivations that are not 'like everybody else'
Here is a 5 min summary:
https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/the-conspiracy-mindset
You're listing single papers from psychology, a field that is well-known to produce results that can't be reproduced, make studies with very small sample sizes, mostly with similar people (college students), etc. An average post by Scott will usually try to find meta studies, studies that have been reproduced, cite the number of people involved in the studies, delve deeper into them, try to find opposing studies. That doesn't give me a lot of confidence in your post, as I would suspect that you would (consciously or not) cherrypick studies that agree with you.
I do really like the "Important before you go" part though. I wish people would spend less time blaming and more time trying to find solutions. In tech there's this concept of "blameless review" that I like a lot, although it's assuming that people's interests are aligned, which can be quite a big assumptions at the level of a society. Not sure what the solution is here, but personally I find reading stuff about blame tiring and reading stuff about increasing the amount of knowledge interesting.
Thanks for the reply.
The best way to make sense of a topic is a mixture of learning about the tenets and vocabulary of the field, then familiarizing yourself with the primary literature, meta-reviews or meta-analyses, and interviewing domain experts about the topic so you cover all possible blind spots. This takes a lot of time and effort.
Just reading Meta-analyses is not always a shortcut, often, meta-analyses do not always exist on a specific topic or question; that does however not invalidate primary research on the topic. Psychological research is bound to be confounded, as are all studies into human nature, and usually do not give a clean works/doesn't work result like drug trials, but rather a probabilistic framework:
E.g People who believe in multiple conspiracy theories tend to have an increased illusionary pattern perception than people who do not believe in them.
Does that mean non-conspiracy theorists can not have increased illusionary pattern perception? What even is the definition of illusionary pattern perception? Are there multiple experiments done on the topic? Is there a consensus view? Is there a meta-analysis (No, in this case).
Point is, if you are not familiar with the field, even understanding the basic tenets of the field will be difficult for amateurs, as you have just illustrated with your insistence on a meta-analysis shortcut to "truth" - extrapolating from one field of science (e.g drug efficacy) to a different domain (behavioral/cognitive psychology) - where it is not necessarily applicable.
That is the point Kavanagh was making in the first place. It is naive (at best) and usually delusional to think that if you have your small rationalist toolbox, you can just epistemically trespass into various different domains of science and figure out what is what.
Sorry, there are usually no such shortcuts.
Even limited success in one domain doing so does not imply it will work in other domains.
And while Scott might scoff at sneering experts talking down on people (his perception from being too much online, too little actually trying to talk to them), my experience is that most scientists, most of the time, are happy to talk to even strangers about their work and explain where they are coming from, if so kindly asked.
>Point is, if you are not familiar with the field, even understanding the basic tenets of the field will be difficult for amateurs, as you have just illustrated with your insistence on a meta-analysis shortcut to "truth" - extrapolating from one field of science (e.g drug efficacy) to a different domain (behavioral/cognitive psychology) - where it is not necessarily applicable.
>That is the point Kavanagh was making in the first place. It is naive (at best) and usually delusional to think that if you have your small rationalist toolbox, you can just epistemically trespass into various different domains of science and figure out what is what.
Fwiw, I think this is an excellent post that gets at the basic issue that I think is escaping many of the replies. I'd add here that an issue Chris was getting at is that something like Scott's posts makes people think this is how it works and makes them think they can do the same. I don't think this is intentional, but it is a side-effect of this style of commentary. The other issue is that these kind of detailed engagements creates a sense of legitimacy for the the side being treated seriously when being debunked. You can try to undercut that with some contempt or snark, but people will read that as unfair or perhaps even ad hominem.
I'm of two-minds about this. I've always thought something like realclimate or sciencebasedmedicine - to name two popular debunking websites - was doing a real service to the public. At the same time, I also think most people just aren't equipped to do that and the risks are substantial. It draws on different skills not a lot of people possess. Attempts at doing something like that can hurt more than they help.
The rationalist crowd naturally has roots in the skeptics community, and it is not surprising to see them favor this style of commentary where people venture a little out of their field of expertise and offer detailed, personally investigated critical replies to popular crank views. I think that ends up sometimes being naive about how much capacity people actually have to look into an issue and figure out what's what, to use your phrasing. It's not a coincidence that skeptics communities are notorious for getting into their own dubious, rogue ideas from time to time.
I think the rational thing to do for rationalists is to first consider whether they are equipped to deal with the topic, whether their skillset matches the question they want to address, and whether they are willing to put in the work.
Right after that, they should also spend some time on various considerations about false balance, amplification, noise pollution, and the influence their work could or would have in the current media ecosystems.
There is a need for independent critical inquiry, and I do not think anybody should be excluded from discussions prima facie; but how is the saying:
"It does not take a domain expert to agree with the scientists, but it sure as hell takes a domain expert to disagree with them"
Most influencers are just cheap contrarians nowadays who lack the knowledge, skill, and experience to even reach a point where they can recapitulate accurately what is the mainstream position that domain experts hold and why.
But real scientific contrarians need to reach that level and THEN go beyond and show why they have an alternative that better explains the BODY OF EVIDENCE that they now completely understand.
I wrote something highly similar in a separate reply in the comments section to someone else. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have reason to believe you have your ducks in a row, deeply understanding a subject and why experts who disagree with you think what they do, before you can begin to feel confident that you are rejecting them for sound reasons or have something meaningful to contribute. That people typically don't is why we have no shortage of crackpots and a handful of Motoo Kimura's.
:)
My sense is that Scott is distinguishing between:
a. People stuck in the broken conspiracy-theory mindset, where they've built an evidence-proof shell around their beliefs and nothing will ever penetrate.
b. People who are wondering if maybe there's something to this conspiracy theory's claims, since they're facially plausible, and many of the people pushing back on them have often been visibly wrong or behaved dishonestly.
His writeup was for the people in (b), not the ones in (a).
Alexander is better at scientific inquiry. Kavanagh is much, much better at recognizing the fox in the henhouse.
But Alexander is much much much better at noticing that the foundation of the henhouse is crumbling
I think Kavanagh/anti-both sidesism arguments presupposes there are a class of people who are really bad at doing research/using reason and so you want to model blind trust in experts for them so that they just do what is socially normal on important questions.
It does seem to me that there are issues that appear as settled questions to most people and if you raise the salience of them or present them as open questions some people, who would never have otherwise practiced epistemic learned helplessness on the issue will attempt to apply reason and arrive at wild conclusions. Flat earth has kind of peaked as a phenomenon, but I would expect that if major cable news shows had held formal debates on the subject prior to its peak that it would have increased the population of flat earthers just because more people who are conspiratorially minded/exceptionally bad at rationality would have engaged with the question.
Now in this model of the world there does need to be a class of experts who does science and reads studies and applies rationality but everyone outside of the relevant group of experts should defer to them and model deference.
If you think the sort of rationality ability + subject matter knowledge people need to avoid 0.99^infinity going to zero is quite high then I think this makes some sense as a model of the world. But it's very undemocratic, it leads to all sort of "Who Watches the Watchmen" issues if we all defer to small groups of subject matter experts.
I do think that's the real thing people find annoying about rationalists though. Is that there's sort of a pact within elite knowledge worker institutions to settle these sorts of disputes within institutional channels and rationalists break that pact. And I mean, it's not wrong to say non-subject matter experts critiquing subject matter experts through non institutional channels has dramatically lowered trust in institutions (revolt of the public), people just like it when it happens to institutions they don't like and dislike it when it happens to institutions they do like.
>you want to model blind trust in experts for them so that they just do what is socially normal on important questions.
The question Kavanagh et al are asking is not "how can we we increase our confidence that the things we believe are true, and communicate that belief and level of certainty to people as effectively and accurately as possible". It is "What can we say to get people to do what we want". Shaming anybody who engages with dissenters makes little sense under the first framework, but makes perfect sense under the second.
>I do think that's the real thing people find annoying about rationalists though. Is that there's sort of a pact within elite knowledge worker institutions to settle these sorts of disputes within institutional channels and rationalists break that pact.
There is a deleted spicy reddit comment by Scott about how the reason the Blue tribe hates and distrusts Tech so much is that it's a relatively democratic high-status and high-income work where people don't have to be born in the right places and go to the right schools in order to be good, therefore people in it are not subject to the brainwashing most other high-status work in the US require, and it births (or attracts) a lot of contrarians and heretics as a result.
Scott phrased it in less scathing terms, but that's what I think the summarization is to the best of my abilities.
“ Now in this model of the world there does need to be a class of experts who does science and reads studies and applies rationality but everyone outside of the relevant group of experts should defer to them and model deference.”
This model requires the designated class of experts to remain disciplined in “doing science” within their realm of expertise and avoid “doing politics and activism”, because once they start engaging in the latter they poison the former and cease to deserve deference.
In our actual reality “scientists” have repeatedly failed to maintain that discipline, with the support for mass protests during a pandemic and the sorry state of youth gender medicine science (see Jesse Singal’s Substack) being excellent recent examples.
To behave rationally is a pretty nice quality. To be a "rationalist" these days means you spend way too much time stretching every system, machine, and model to fit the particular Russian nesting doll you're invested in proving (i.e., big picture, it's the opposite of rational behavior).
And the favorite nesting doll amongst libertarian rationalists is "the cathedral," or the supposed ignorance/corruption/biases of professional educators, researchers, etc. It requires a naïve tone, a la FoxNews, "We're just asking questions, just wondering, just doing our due diligence," just expanding on the chaotic creativity of those hardwired to tear down structures rather than build or repair.
When you use so much bandwidth on something like ivermectin, it's like devoting your show to Hillary's emails for two years. Even if you don't tell a single lie, you're still just playing to your audience. So why not spend your time on things that might really make a difference because of rampant misinformation -- things that you really need to learn about, personally, like when you went scuba diving for original source material -- like reading and reviewing the full Mueller Report?
Why are you an authority on what people should spend more time or bandwidth on ? Maybe just like you view Ivermectin as a total non-issue and giving it attention only serves to amplify certain tacit messages to the audience, Scott views the Mueller Report in the exact same light ? (and this is a real Maybe, I actually don't know what Scott's views is)
>just expanding on the chaotic creativity of those hardwired to tear down structures rather than build or repair.
Both building up and tearing down has their uses, and people are far too often content to "build up" by staying silent and not rocking the boat while authoritarianism and herd behaviour is spreading like fire in those around them. Tearing down is under-appreciated and much-needed in those circumstances. You can make an argument that this is wrong and that we are actually in a time where building up is more important than building right, but you're not making that argument, you're making an argument that all tearing down is bad, which is wrong : everything you build up has to take the place of something you tear down. So tearing down is at least as good (or bad) in general as building up, since they are 2 sides of the same coin.
>the supposed ignorance/corruption/biases of professional educators, researchers, etc. It requires a naïve tone, a la FoxNews, "We're just asking questions, just wondering, just doing our due diligence,"
Are you saying that this is the wrong attitude, or only one that it's too inconvenient ? If it's wrong, then you should have nothing to fear, show the people doing it how they're wrong. If it's inconvenient, the key question is "for whom?", which people are served by playing down the "supposed" ignorance/corruption/biases of professional educators, researchers, etc and sweeping their failures under the rug ? and are those the kind of people who the rationalists (or really most people) would want to be served ?
"So tearing down is at least as good (or bad) in general as building up, since they are 2 sides of the same coin."
Your statement begs for a fitting aphorism: Cutting down a tree is a whole lot easier than putting it back together. Does this mean we can never cut down a tree? Of course not. Just that it's hubristically reckless to equate the two.
Humanity (on behalf of the vulnerable) has struggled way too diligently and collectively, bending the long, moral arc of the universe toward justice through imperfect, evolving institutions (such as democracy itself); we can't afford to be sanguine in the face of bros like Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Donald Trump, so flippantly eager to toss all this fragile progress into the trashbin, ostensibly for creative "disruption," but their willingness to dismiss/ignore history itself (such as the Mueller Report) is fueled mainly by their unchecked egos, and then bolstered blindly by cesspools of capitalism such as Fox News, today's version of Father Coughlin.
If someone wants to believe FDR steered us too deeply into socialism or whatever, fine. But this is a debate for the marketplace of ideas. It's not a legitimate excuse for casually toppling structures you declare unhelpful. Our social contract (not to mention our Constitution) cannot abide self-proclaimed saviors who find insurrections amusing and think fraud is a legitimate political tactic.
> Cutting down a tree
I don't want to be Yet Another Metaphor Pedant, but this gives contrarians way too much power. I would love if reality was this Based actually, I would love if merely contradicting authoritarianism really does demolish it as hard as cutting down a tree does to the tree, but it's simply not. Scott writing 25K words, or even 50K or 100K or 200K or 1000K words, doesn't even begin to make a dent into the mainstream herd.
The cold hard truth is that words simply don't matter, if you're complaining about words then 9 times out of 10 you're wrong, and you just want to silence people for reasons you don't like saying outloud.
>Humanity (on behalf of the vulnerable) has struggled way too diligently and collectively, bending the long, moral arc of the universe toward justice through imperfect, evolving institutions (such as democracy itself)
No, I disagree with nearly all of this. Humanity doesn't struggle on behalf of its vulenrable or even its deserving, Humanity blunders and flounders in the dark like a drunken 3 years old, often driven by its cruelest and stupidest members. There is no moral arc or great progressive curve, there is a cruel zigzagy line entirely guided by material reality and raw brute force, any resemblance this zigzag bears to a curve/arc/line bending towards justice is entirely in the beholder's imagination.
Democracy is a dumpster fire on most scales and turns out badly even when it works exactly as intended (which is rarely).
>we can't afford to be sanguine in the face of bros like Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Donald Trump, so flippantly eager to toss all this fragile progress into the trashbin, ostensibly for creative "disruption,"
None of those people came remotely close to threatening democracy or "progress", and I can't see the slightest connection between any of them and COVID contrarianism, trump experienced COVID first hand and took the vaccine (and it was his administration who rushed it that fast if I remember correctly, and it was a common anti-trump position at that time to question the vaccine's efficiency). Elon doesn't strike me as a vaccine skeptic even if he doesn't want to jail or persecute all vaccine skeptics (which, believe it or not, is a very common position). I don't care about Kanye and refuse to. He's only relevant if you make him so.
>Mueller Report
I don't understand why you think this thing is the greatest thing since the declaration of human rights, but it's not history anymore than trump's speeches are.
> It's not a legitimate excuse for casually toppling structures you declare unhelpful.
If your structures can be toppled by a single guy with a keyboard in his room writing his opinions (no matter how aweful or ill-informed), he is doing you a favor by toppling them. You can't bully people into staying silent or agreeing with you just because (you claim) their supposedly dangerous opinions will topple democracy, to hell with democracy then, I will say my opinion anyway.
"You can't bully people into staying silent or agreeing with you just because (you claim) their supposedly dangerous opinions will topple democracy, to hell with democracy then, I will say my opinion anyway."
You misunderstand. I do not want to silence you; in fact I can't imagine a more successful response to my bullying efforts, as I certainly would never fool myself into believing I could actually persuade you of anything.
The great danger to our country is that people like you usually only share your full anti-democracy sentiments in hushed tones, in polite circles with the likes of Steve Bannon and Mike Flynn -- so that ordinary cynics never actually realize how deadly serious you are about your chaos theories.
Other than enforcing the law and defending the Constitution and putting seditionists and fraudsters in prison, what our country most needs is for people like you to say exactly what you believe, loudly, clearly, bravely, boldly, unapologetically, because most Americans have no clue how nihilistic and cruel your vision for society actually is. If you are at all honorable as a participant in the public sphere, you will continue to speak out just as honestly as you have done here.
You have a very wrong mental model of me, I'm not American and I frankly don't give a shit about its politics (or politics in general) either way. I'm forced to care about politics every time some idiot in it does something with far ranging ramifications, but it's on a bare-minimum basis. This is the first time I have even heard of "Steve Bannon and Mike Flynn".
I'm not criticizing Democracy from a place of "Lets Make Monarchy Great Again", I'm a left-leaning Anarchist if somebody forced me to pick sides. I'm just saying that "Democratic" states are in practice just as corrupt and full of shit as the other ones, the only real advantage is that you can run your mouth about public figures and the government without being imprisoned, but that's basically it. You're just as disempowered and helpless on average as in other "non-democratic" states, because the state is the problem, not whatever made up Greek name it happened to justify its monopoly on violence with.
You are the gift that keeps giving. For the record, in case anyone else cares to notice, you have revealed yourself not only to despise democracy itself, but to be totally uninterested in the entire project of politics (your blasé attitude fueled by your dripping disdain for anyone who actually tries to participate in making our governments and institutions more honest, effective, transparent, and accessible).
Your two postures mirror my own interests here perfectly: challenging those who spout off about cultures and institutions they are profoundly uncurious about, and, as I've said, exposing the depth of the reckless nihilism that girds so many of these flippant positions, whether "libertarian," "rationalist," or "anarchic." So thanks for that. Though I really can't imagine abiding the cognitive dissonance of consciously educating yourself about politics as little as possible, while still brimming with confidence that you are adequately equipped to analytically and morally compare today's autocracies and kleptocracies with democracies.
Dr. V. Prasad wrote about the problem of slam dunking on a 7ft hoop. It might be appropriate analogy.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/90109
Yes, a fitting analogy, with good considerations for any engagement in any civic square. One suggestion is especially apropos to the (self-proclaimed "famous") author of this very blog: attend to your own skill set.
"In deciding what you should spend your time on, it is important to think about what you are uniquely qualified and able to comment on."
Unfortunately, politics, writ large, is a discipline that everyone feels prepared to debate without even a superficial interest in its evolutionary history or its convoluted mechanisms. You may be a great engineer, shrink, piano tuner, whatever, but if you're not even interested enough to read the full Mueller Report, the appropriate place to spout about politics is at the end of your neighborhood bar, not from an ostensibly responsible seat. That's how we wound up with the former guy ("I alone can fix it"), casually willing to blow up democracy, NATO, race relations, etc. This isn't a call for staying in your lane, it's calling out a fact of nature: those who get drunk on their own power become clueless and cruel, while imagining they know everything significant. (See Elon Musk.)
So yes, our famous blogger may have just lazily phoned in this current piece, knowing it had the right key words to generate traffic, but he's too far out of his depth to even realize the damage he is doing by continuing to cater to a Fox News audience (who "cathedral" studies have proven are even less informed than people who never consume any news at all).
" or the supposed ignorance/corruption/biases of professional educators"
Hoo boy. I can only assume you've never been to a school.
Wonderful! Also, I'm happy to see a reference to hostes humani generis.
yeah I had to look that one up, as well as "near occasion of sin".
It threw me a bit; the reference appears to be to pirates, but pirates were famously described as communes hostes omnium, the shared enemies of everyone, not hostes humani generis.
I was taught that humanus wouldn't usually mean "human" in Latin, but looking into it the word appears to be an adjectival form of homo, so the meaning must have been available.
That said, according to my teachers, the word refers more to the qualities that humans _should_ have than to the fact of being human as opposed to bestial or divine.
Great essay. Precisely the sort of thing that made me subscribe in the first place. I particularly love the Atlantis analogy, since it takes it out of the realm of politically-charged topics.
The one area I'm not so sure about is the argument against the PR angle. It certainly seems to me that there is a level of credibility given to ludicrous points of view when presented side-by-side with the patently obvious truth, and so it's easy for people who are skimming stuff to get some subconscious impression of "there are good arguments on both sides". And there are a lot of people who apply far less care to evaluating a claim than an ACX reader does, from time pressure or lack of developed habits.
But a topic like "the world is obviously round, here are some people who think it's flat and look at how silly that belief is / they are" is something that most people can check against their daily experiences. They can see, for example, that ships sailing out of the harbor disappear from view hull-first and mast-last. So there's not a lot of risk to both-sidesing an article like that. However, "the Holocaust obviously happened and here are some people who have decided otherwise and how many bad things result from that", is riskier, because that's not a claim that is readily evaluated against daily experience. You learn from history textbooks, from lots of reading, seeing pictures of the camps and their liberation, etc... but an article that starts with "some people say the Holocaust happened. Others say that's a filthy lie. Let's treat both sies with dignity" does in fact have some PR risk attached. Someone who's normally thin-slicing new information can read that and come away with an impression that there is legitimate debate, where in fact there is only illegitimate debate.
I don't know where or precisely how to draw the line on "there is a valid PR concern here" vs "nonsense, there is plenty of space to treat the argument fairly, and deal a mortal blow to one side with very simple evidence and reasoning." It's clearly a hard problem. But I'm pretty sure that the line isn't as far to the side of "we should never worry about PR concerns relating to both-sidesing something" as the essay here appears to argue.
> But a topic like "the world is obviously round, here are some people who think it's flat and look at how silly that belief is / they are" is something that most people can check against their daily experiences. They can see, for example, that ships sailing out of the harbor disappear from view hull-first and mast-last.
You have a very different idea of what most people's daily experiences include than... most people do.
I would bet that the number of people whose daily experiences allow them to just observe in passing that ships disappear over the horizon from the bottom up and appear from the top down is closer to 0% of the population than it is to 1%.
It was an example. Most people aren't near a harbor but they've seen one, and can follow an argument that starts with "you know how, down at the harbor..."
Regardless, I'm positing that there are some factors which makes an argument safer to engage with directly, and some which are so far removed from our daily experience that most people are going to rely on ethos or pathos rather than logos (and thus there's some "PR risk" to entertaining the question seriously). And I think "proximity to daily life" might be one, but I'm sure Scott and others here can improve on that.
> It was an example. Most people aren't near a harbor but they've seen one, and can follow an argument that starts with "you know how, down at the harbor..."
All I can do is repeat what I said above: the share of people matching this new, "improved" description is still going to be closer to 0% than 1%. Nobody who's not familiar with harbors is able to follow an argument that starts with "you know how, down at the harbor...". They'd be taking you on faith, or not.
I got in trouble once in 5th grade when, in science class, we were supposed to submit trivia questions and then play the game of "answer a question drawn from a hat". I submitted "what color is the sea?", a much easier observation to make than "what happens to ships as they cross the horizon?". My choice was prompted by my observation that, every time I visited the sea, it was a deep green, but it was routinely referred to by fixed expressions as being blue. The teacher informed me that it wasn't fair to expect other students to be aware of what color the sea actually was when the culture suggested so strongly that it was blue.
The interaction between ships and the horizon, like the color of the ocean, is completely disconnected from the daily experience of virtually everyone. It's also not relevant - what matters is that you can go to the shore and watch for ships to cross the horizon. Nobody knows how that happens, except through secondhand reports - but they are able to assess what happens if it turns out to be important for some reason.
With every pseudoscientific movement, there is a corresponding dispute over whether scientists should address their arguments. Those arguments often are produced with a level of obsessive detail and sophistication where it takes a decent amount of education to understand where they go wrong, but are error-prone enough that having a decent understanding why is usually accessible to reasonably intelligent undergrad or even high schooler who has put in some work towards it. The bigger pseudoscientific movements usually have whole cottage industries dedicated to pumping out seemingly reasonable arguments that take some effort to pick apart.
The proponents of those movements set up a heads I win, tails you lose proposition when it comes to engaging scientific rebuttal. If people refuse to address them, they'll claim that this is because scholars are suppressing them, afraid to address their arguments, are dogmatic, etc. This can look compelling to outside observers who lack the capacity to understand why their superficially reasonable arguments are bad. It looks like scientists are ducking them, which fringe theorists are happy to parlay into their claims of improper suppression.
But, at the same time, if scholars do engage them, they use the fact that this is happening to create the impression that they are one legitimate side in a serious controversy where reasonable people can disagree. And this furthers their goals too. When their goals are obtaining institutional legitimacy, such as being taught in public schools or affecting public policy, this is significant.
This debate comes up again and again. From creationism, to climate denial, to more obscure stuff like facilitated communication you'll see this as a central conundrum for scientists and other scholars who have their actual academic responsibilities to worry about.
I see Chris Kavanagh as offering a variation of the latter argument here. Scott, by writing a lengthy address ends up creating a false impression that there's a serious dispute here where reasonable people reasonably disagree. Scott is a little out of his depth trying to rebut someone even more so, but making up for it with relentless gumption. So now you have naïve observers perhaps thinking this is a topic of academic controversy or that they're capable of engaging with the contours of the scientific claims on a level they are not, which is a trap to get rabbit holed into their own bad beliefs.
Scott offers the classic counter-argument to this, which is that detailed debunkings help people on the fence see how these ideas go wrong, and perhaps help them reason better next time they encounter a pseudoscientific claim with the appearance of sophistication. This is a service that more than outweighs the risk above.
Having seen this kind of dispute many times over, I'm never quite sure how I side on it. Both sides have pros and cons in a way that isn't easy to settle. I have long appreciated lay-attempts at long public debunkings and have offered them myself on subjects I know more about from time to time. But I have also witnessed how this dynamic has caused blow-back and led people way astray on their own understanding. It's not obvious to me which concern weighs more. So I offer my comment merely to note the tension.
Perfectly accurate, well-articulated, and, to me, so obvious that I’m confused why almost no commenters are mentioning this. I sincerely hope Scott sees this comment because I think it perfectly gets at the real substantative tension he needs to address/defend his stance on, and this community will gain immensely from his *considered* thoughts in response. Until then, for all the vital posts he’s made over the years on rational evaluation of evidence, he’s still missing the main point here. Which is a bit weird because, as you say, this is well-trodden ground.
So here's my speculation about why the discourse between defenders of the mainstream like Kavanagh and contrarians ends up being so political and disconnected from object-level reality:
As I've gotten older and wiser, I've learned that I'm susceptible to a certain kind of marketing for things that present themselves as the Alternative to the Mainstream Thing. The way this has often played out is that I get all excited about how the Alternative Thing is going to dethrone the Mainstream Thing and change everything, and I will raise my status in expectation by being an early adopter of the Alternative Thing, but instead I just end up learning in an unnecessarily roundabout way that there are actually good reasons the Mainstream Thing is mainstream and the Alternative Thing is marginal.
I think the reason I've been so susceptible to this is related to the dynamic described in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures: The subcultures that form around mainstream things tend to be older and larger, so the status competitions within them are fiercer, and I correctly feel ill-equipped to win status competitions in a crowded field. So I instinctively pursue higher variance strategies that at least give me a chance of achieving high status, conditional on some Alternative Thing actually winning and becoming the new Mainstream Thing, which does happen occasionally. Unfortunately, the way this feels from the inside is not "I'm taking calculated risks because high-variance strategies are rational for me," but rather "Why do I keep Believing in the Underdog really hard and then being disappointed 😭😭😭 I guess I'm just gullible."
Anyway, I think mainstream defenders recognize that positioning oneself as a promoter of the Alternative to the Mainstream Thing is a great grift, because there's an inexhaustible supply of insecure status-hungry people like me who are always scanning the horizon for high-variance Alternative Things to bet on. This means that contrarian beliefs can sometimes get more uptake than they deserve for status-competition reasons, and gives mainstream defenders an incentive to directly attack the social status of contrarians and their beliefs. Of course, gossiping about status also has the advantage that it's just easier than engaging on the object level, and is more fun, to most humans, most of the time.
ETA: To elaborate further on why contrarians attract the ire of the status-police, I think adopting contrarian stances tacitly signals both "I don't have what it takes to succeed according to the mainstream status hierarchy" and "I am ambitious, so I'm going to join this insurgent movement and try to overthrow the mainstream." This combination of weakness and ambition seems to paint a target on one's back.
I agree with Hitchens. "Picture all experts as if they were mammals." I don't know Chris Kavanagh's background, but I suspect he wasn't raised in a fundamentalist household or some place else where as a child the near experts/authorities were decidedly irrational and you painfully discovered this over the course of several years.
The way we make sure experts are experting correctly is by asking them to show their work. If they can't do that, they're not any different than fundamentalist parents who won't let their kids watch Thundercats because "it's Satanic." It's the same appeal to authority.
Having the "right answer" but not being able to show your work is not really having a right answer - it's just being lucky. The experts were lucky here.
There are people who get into bad beliefs because they trust the wrong sorts of authorities, such as someone raised in a fundamentalist Christian household who trusts bad Christian apologetics implicitly. But there are also people who get into bad beliefs because they have an overinflated sense of their ability to analyze arguments and end up getting fooled by bad reasoning because there's significant gaps in their understanding that aren't typically there for subject matter experts.
At the end of the day, we all have to mix in our trust of experts - no one is recapitulating the entire history of science in their basement - and our ability to critically analyze arguments. People have to develop a good sense of when to be humble about their own abilities, how to determine trustworthy sources, and when to be able to invoke their independent judgment. This takes skill. While in some places, I'd be more worried about people just trusting the wrong sorts of people and being too willing to defer to authorities, at Astral Codex Ten, by far and away the bigger risk is people thinking they're smart, independent thinkers who have figured out something through their own independent investigation professional scientists have not. And most of the time when someone thinks this, the problem is them.
As a general rule, if you think something that appears to go against a developed consensus of academic experts, you should have good reason to think you really have your ducks in a row in understanding the subject, and in particular, that you fully understand the position you're disagreeing with. This is not common. Otherwise, sometimes you need to bite the bullet, suspend judgment, and just wonder what other people see that you do not.
>getting fooled by bad reasoning because there's significant gaps in their understanding
Those gaps will be in different places for different people, so the more arguments you encourage the more of these will be closed up. And it's based on the idea that experts are unable to explain those gaps when asked.
I think the idea that increased exposure to more arguments helps people better understand subjects is naive and easily refuted by the existence of large pseudoscientific movements. Their problem isn't lack of exposure to arguments, but lack of ability to critically evaluate them. People sometimes think they can "investigate" a subject, and in doing so get persuaded to believe poor ideas. COVID has a good chance of being the most notorious example of this of our lifetimes. "I did my own research" is a pejorative quip for a reason.
Regarding experts explaining things, sometimes it's just hard to get across an idea that takes a lot of educational background to build up. We're bathed in a pop science environment that gives people lay explanations, often oversimplifications, sometimes to the point of being wrong, that might the impression that explaining a complicated scientific topic is easy, but it's often not.
I have a dual background in biology and psychology. I see popularly discussed ideas in those fields all that time where my reaction is, "Eh. Not quite right. Close enough, I guess." Whatever your field is, I bet you experience the same thing. I think you should take that experience and reflect that this happens all the time. People, when reasoning well, get things on a level that's close enough when combined with having a good sense of who the experts are and knowing when to trust that their views are probably the reasonable ones.
I'm not sure that the existence of large pseudoscientific movements refutes the idea that exposure to more arguments is a net positive. I agree that some people may not be helped by exposure to more arguments (i.e. the old 'you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themself into'), but on average the effect may still be beneficial. Kavanagh's argument seems to go even further and suggest that exposure to more arguments not only fails to help people but it may even be detrimental.
>Their problem isn't lack of exposure to arguments, but lack of ability to critically evaluate them.
Which is a lack of argument one level up. You can argue about techniques for evaluating arguments too.
An expert may not be able to fully explain a thing without background, but they should be able to point to something that explains the background well and say "that years-deep pile of information is what you're missing". Maybe they can even point to a particular thing and say "that piece covers the cliffnotes." I don't expect an interpreter to teach me the whole language to explain why I'm reading a translated idiom wrong, but I expect them to be able to say "that's wrong for this reason, this is right, the proof is in the pile."
I minored in chemistry. As a result, I have, or at least had, an understanding of quantum mechanics you'd expect a chemistry minor to have. That is to say, I understand it a lot better than most people and even know why certain equations are the way they are and can use them in practical problems, but I don't really get it like physicists working in QM do. I know enough to see how most of the pop science writing on it is operating on the level of metaphors that aren't *really* explaining it, but not enough to think I've got the full material down.
I, like basically everyone, just sort of trust that it's right and that it keeps making sense beyond the level at which I understand it to make sense. Unless you're a Ph.D. in a related field, I suspect you are probably in the same boat.
Crucially, I think we're right to have this attitude. If someone claims to be able to debunk QM, we're right to reject them unless we pick up signs that academic physicists view the critique as serious. It's helpful to know that if we really wanted to, we could engage with a body of evidence out there and, if we had sufficient time and ability, understand it, but I don't think we actually need to have the time or ability to hold this stance. Further, because the amount of knowledge out there vastly exceeds our time and ability, we necessarily hold this attitude towards most things. We test the fences of our knowledge as good critical thinkers, but most of the time, we just accept what we know about the world as received understanding from people who probably know what they're talking about.
The nice thing about sciences like chemistry or math is the results are pretty inequivocal. If you're using the equations in practical problems, you can observe whether or not they work. If you're not in a position to observe them, it doesn't much matter; Aether Theory explains the world I interact with nearly as well as quantum theory. The only loss is when you reach a point where the two disagree, at which point one theory will accurately predict the outcome and the other one won't. No need for trust, no loss for mistrust. That's supposed to be what forms consensus in the first place.
The trouble is, 'expertise' is a status boost, and thus subject to politics. There's an incentive for political parties to declare like-minded people 'experts', and if a layperson has no way to question that expertise, then 'the experts' can be packed to agree on whatever topic you want them to. The Decameron includes a tale about a 'Bologna judge', pumped out by the state from a 14th century diploma mill. (They steal his pants.) It's an old strategy.
> away the bigger risk is people thinking they're smart, independent thinkers who have figured out something through their own independent investigation professional scientists have not.
Your frame is all wrong. Curious people might be curious and might write about their curiosities and wonder how experts go to the conclusions that they got to. This is different than "people who think they've figured something out through their own independent investigation that professional scientists have not."
The constant vibe from the DtG crowd is that spoken curiosity is evidence of thought crime because it sounds too much like the people DtG believe are their opposition.
If you asked Scott, or any Bayesian, about a belief, they would give you a probability and they would adjust it as evidence presents itself.
You have this very naive idea that there's two categories of people: (1) DtG fans who appropriately pedestalize expertise and (2) the rest of the Internet that's 100% sure that their carnivore diet is the superior to every other diet.... or something like that.
In reality this is all more dimensional, and the disingenuous way you frame this elides obvious counter-examples readily observable if you would only look or ask.
Scott, I thought that your exploration of Ivermectin was fascinating and insightful.
Trashing you, because you did the work to understand why the studies revealed what they did, seems like just a few steps away from declaring that you're an apostate
Hm. I would have thought that Kavanagh's take was Bad on Purpose to Make You Click, and that there aren't actually people who think that way for real. I haven't seen any evidence otherwise.
I found his first tweet really irritating.
"You typed 25,000 words, and arrived at the right answer!" What kind of criticism is that?
From the perspective of a Twitter user, 25000 words is like thousand tweets. Imagine someone writing a thousand tweets long thread!
A very reasonable response to a numbskull. Not a numbskull in the stupidity sense, but numbskull in that this K individual is clearly nothing more than a rabid attack dog on Twitter. The precise type of individual in the secondary role of mob leader's lieutenant for a witch burning.
Social media is poison.
This is a great post that contains a lot of truth. And yet … I also see a grain of truth in Kavanagh’s position. Like, I get emails every single day from P=NP crackpots and quantum mechanics crackpots and now AI crackpots too. Some of them probably *would* be better off never trying to think for themselves again, and just Trusting Science and Trusting the Experts. Sure, the experts are sometimes confidently wrong, but not as consistently so as they are! And for my part, I can’t possibly write 25,000 words to explain why each and every crackpot is wrong. As a matter of survival, I *have* to adopt a Kavanagh-like heuristic: “this person seems like an idiot.”
Where Kavanagh goes off the rails, and badly so, is here: if *someone else* spends 25,000 words to explain painstakingly why the experts’ knee-jerk instinct was right after all, then the only proper response is undying gratitude.
But P == NP and Quantum Computers are not culture war topics with plenty of value questions and policy decisions depending on them, and Computer Science is infinitely more certain and crystal-clear than whatever ungodly intersection that the question of Ivermectin sits on between Medicine, Microbiology and Epidemiology.
The consensus on P == NP and Quantum Computers is settled since the 70s/80s, while the "consensus" that Ivermectin is bad is barely 2 years old.
When I see how humankind has managed to make culture war issues out of whether it's a good idea to teach reading through phonics, or who should be Harry Potter's girlfriend [1], I despair of our ability not to make P vs NP beliefs into a test of who is racist/sexist/etc. too. Worse things have happened at universities.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/23/we-are-all-msscribe/
This is the best response in the thread: reasonable, empathetic, and highlights where both sides are right.
A comment by EAII above says something similar but imo even more well-articulated.
Sometimes "what do the experts think about X" is itself a difficult question for a layman to answer. :/
That's exactly why I wish more experts blogged! (Or tweeted ... but Twitter's terseness and terrible conversational norms can make it too hard to tell who has actual expertise, and who merely the trappings of it.)
Nicely put.
To your point, I find myself sympathetic to this sometimes because quantum mechanics/computational complexity/deep learning are sufficiently mathematical topics that realistically, if you don't have a significant amount of prerequisite numeracy, attempting to deploy reason will probably actually make you worse off a lot of the time.
In school I used to read the blog of, a certain math/physics truther blogger who proved that pi=4, as a guilty pleasure. Though he did have some uh, psychological comorbidities, that probably hindered his success in this area, what struck me at the time was that this was somebody who was at least making a spirited attempt at understanding and didn't have the right toolkit to not random walk himself into wronger than wrong territory.
In one of Feynman’s interviews he has this bit about if I try to teach you about magnets in terms of rubber bands, eventually you’re going to ask how the rubber bands pull together, and soon I’ll have to make my way back to electrical forces, and electromagnetism is the thing I’m trying to avoid having to explain in the first place, and so on.
I’m sure you know the crank ecosystem better than I, but I’ve always suspected that there are a lot of people with a “popular science” amount of background who try to figure out how the rubber bands pull together and shoot off in the wrong direction.
On the one hand, there just really isn’t a good way to make a lot of this stuff more reducible, so I think there’s an argument to "just leave this one to the scientists, bud."
On the other hand, telling people they can only start asking questions after they’ve taken several years of math courses isn’t very democratizing, and it’s the scientists (and journalists purporting to translate for them with fidelity) that are giving you all these half-true explanations in the first place! Just what are they hiding, anyway?
I want to believe good science communication is the way out of this trap, e.g., for physics maybe like “The Theoretical Minimum” series is about as good as you can do to give people enough scaffolding to bear the weight of reasoning without breaking their spirit entirely.
I think you've got it. No one - at least not Alexander (and I have to call him that when writing to you) - is saying that everyone should write 25,000 word post to spread Enlightenment, no matter what. Everyone has their own demands and hierarchies of value. Sometimes all you can say is "I disagree with you about that", or "I think you're wrong, and you may want to look into that more closely, and I'm sorry I don't have the time to answer in full".
What is wrong is to tell people they are wrong even to ask the question, much less to run down others for answering it.
So - which microscopic error in cognitive bias management leads someone to accuse people who say things they don't like of being racist?
(or maybe you covered that in one of the articles you linked, I haven't read many of them)
This makes me think a contrarian marketplace or database would be useful; ask a bunch of smart people to give probabilities to various wild theories that experts dislike, so you can see which are the reasonable ones worth looking into and which ones are wild.
Thanks for explaining the rationale behind the ivermectin post. I appreciate that we have people like Scott to do the heavy lifting on these topics.
No!! The actually heavy lifting was done by The Cochrane Review, not by Scott!!
SA pretended to do heavy lifting (or maybe he actually thought he was doing it - I am not assigning intent). But he was unwilling to do it with the real expertise of an expert nor up to the quality standards of an expert.
Yeah, you're basically right. But maybe you've put too much energy into the question of ivermectin? Sure there are still people who argue, but I think that after six months of honest debate in 2020, the answer became pretty darn clear. There's really a LOT of evidence that it doesn't work as claimed.
ISTM that the only really convincing answers on this came from RCTs. It's so, *so* easy to fool yourself into seeing what you want to see in noisy data, and medicine is just chock full of noisy data.
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To defend Chris very slightly - after reading the ivermectin article I almost commented something like "a quick trip over to Alexandros' website makes it pretty clear that he's employing motivated reasoning and is 100x less impartial than Scott is on this topic... did this really deserve >10,000 words?"
Looking back, I recognize that's a pretty unhelpful thing to say, and that Scott deserves a lot of credit for his thoroughness. But I get the impulse to think it kind of sucks that Alexandros's arguments get so much respect and airtime.
The fact that Scott wrote *this* article in addition to the original just goes to show how much he cares about the value of steelmanning. Respect.
I think it comes down to a value judgment where he operative questions are: “does every argument need to be treated seriously?” And “is treating obviously motivated reasoning seriously more likely to legitimize it or debunk it?” I think Chris and Scott could have a great conversation about this and would answer differently based on value judgments.
I understand the reaction, but isn't that also literally what Kavanagh's podcast is?
Wait, can someone explain why believing in Atlantis makes you racist?
The Nazis (or at least some of them) believed that the Aryans were descended from the Atlanteans. Some of today's Russian supremacists believe that Russians are descended from the Atlanteans.
I personally don't believe that believing in Atlantis necessarily makes you a racist, but there's some overlap.
If that’s the reason, it’s pretty stupid. “Some racists believe that so if you believe it you are a racist.” This is the sort of thing that winds up with “racist” not meaning, y’know, actually racist...
I think the general reasoning goes like this: "You have no problem believing that the Parthenon or the Pantheon or the Chartres Cathedral were built by the people who live there, but when it's the Sphinx or Teotihuacan or Baalbek or Machu Picchu, all of a sudden the local peoples are savages who couldn't have put a stone above the other without external help, just like the 19th century ideas of Great Zimbabwe being built by a lost white civilization, because *of course* native Africans couldn't have built anything impressive on their own".
I don't know if this is a fair assessment. A prejudiced notion that non-European peoples are less capable might play a role for some Ancient Astronaut/Atlantis theorists, but greater familiarity with European monuments might be enough, not to mention there's more historical accounts surrounding them. Most people reading Hancock or Von Daniken would find it hard to believe that Stonehenge and Westminster Abbey were built by the same lost civilization, with all the millennia that passed in between, but might be willing to believe that the Egyptian and Aztec pyramids were, even though the gulf of time between them is about the same.
Re: trapped priors, this post o' mine might be of interest: <https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/02/04/just-in-time-bayesianism>. In particular, given Laplace's rule of succession, if you've been bitten by a dog before, your probability of a dog biting you is 2/(n+2), where n is your number of interactions. But then in expectation by the time you halve that, you've received another 2 dog bites. So the optimal thing is to not gather more evidence.
Best post in the rat->normie outreach series so far.
I’m trying to go up a level and think about why otherwise reasonable people, who would probably agree in the abstract that evaluating evidence is important, are motivated to take such a hard-line stance in favor of expert institutions. Not sure if I’m using this totally correctly, but what event traps your ‘trust experts’ prior?
Is it a result of some conspiracy arguments being too weak?
For example, maybe the protracted discourse over climate change trapped many educated liberals’ priors about scientific institutions because there is a high degree of consensus among climate scientists, the slow decline of many natural systems has been emotionally burdensome, and for a long time the most high-profile opposition arguments were not necessarily the most convincing ones (i.e., instead of nuanced discussions about the propriety of making certain forecasting assumptions, there was a lot of “Sure was cold this winter…”) Do people bias themselves toward absurd-sounding conspiracies and hindsight bias away the actual conspiracies and examples of institutional failure?
Or is it a result of some conspiracy arguments being too strong?
For example, I’ve been in plenty of arguments online, and occasionally the resistance you encounter on an issue you are confident about is unexpectedly strong. Your interlocutor just has this endless pile of argument trails and bunny paths to traverse, and while they individually are dubious enough upon inspection that you don’t update very much on them, they are too numerous to dispatch in any reasonable time frame as you go around and around and down the forking fractalline paths of disagreement. If you’re like me, you may begin to feel a psychologically damaging sense of epistemic uncertainty. I can imagine that instead of either getting overtaken by the force of logic or going back and developing some more general probabilistic heuristics that keep you from arguing into infinity, many people would like to just throw up their hands and say “Nobody seriously believes that birds are fake! I can’t exhaustively prove you wrong on every single thing but I know that it’s true! Even if I argue forever, your prior is trapped in bird fakehood and you’re still going to think the evidence supports you, so it’s pointless to even try! But I’m a humble and rational person so I’ll just defer to so-and-so who’s a Harvard professor and they say…”
Or something else? Or is that just not the right frame for this kind of thing entirely?
I think the unsaid, but implied, message to Scott is something like this:
Dude, we have the power now, we won the culture war. We now can just ban the other side on Facebook, on Twitter, anywhere in the media, get them fired from their jobs, get any venue to cancel their speeches or be burned down by somebody we certainly know nothing of but who will definitely show up to burn whatever we say needs to be burned. Soon there will be the law declaring their view illegal, and taking licenses and professional degrees from anyone who proclaims the heresy. Stop being a cuck and pretending like those are people and you have to argue with them. It's embarrassing and diminishes the Great Victory. People like you may cause them to occasionally be taken seriously and then we'd have to fight the culture war again, and we want to just enjoy the spoils of victory. We do not want to declare you the enemy but you are really walking on the thin ice here...
In other word, however I hate this, I must admit sometimes all these pomo critical theories are right - sometimes it's not about the facts but about the power.
I wonder, do the wokes really believe that they would implement their utopian theocracy without a fight? Or are they itching to graduate from imaginary nazi-punching on Twitter to IRL nazi-shooting?
They think they have captured enough institutions so that they would win before any fight would even start.
Well, their constant moaning about gerrymandering and court-packing and how the police isn't abolished yet suggests otherwise. I suppose that some might think that enough propaganda and cancellations would overcome these minor obstacles, but this doesn't seem to be the primary attitude.
This is always like that. In a totalitarian state, the state controls everything, and yet it is obsessed with surveillance and constantly reminds every citizen that the spies, wreckers and saboteurs are behind every corner, the enemy could be your neighbor, relative or coworker, and every tiniest transgression should be immediately reported otherwise the whole system would collapse and descend into utter chaos. Obsession with control always comes with paranoia. And the more is the control, the stronger is the paranoia. This is actually one of Stalin's official theories as a political scientist, that the closer the society is to the Communism, the harder the class enemies fight against it.
Sure, but Stalin had actual total power, or as close to it as anybody ever did. The government, courts and police conformed to his every whim, and when somebody needed "cancellation", they usually ended up in the gulag, or with a bullet in the back of the head. The woke are only salivating at the prospect of such domination, and don't really have a straigthforward path from here to there.
> "I agree this might not have been the best use of my time, and I would accept this criticism from anyone except Kavanagh - who’s devoted his whole career to thinking about ivermectin and ideas closely aligned to it."
Probably a case of hyperbole not translating over internet; but what does this mean?
A quick search seems to have Kavanagh as a researcher in cognitive and evolutionary anthropology, writing articles about religion and ritual.
So I think that he has a day-job, but that he likes to put on his vigilante mask and go on twitter crusades after dark.
Might not be completely fair to say that his whole career is devoted thinking about ivermectin and so on.
Given that I (and probably most people) waste hours and hours on nonsense, all the "you spend too much time on X" critiques always seem completely empty.
Seconded. For some people, myself included, arguing on the Internet is a fun leisure activity that doesn't cost much money. (Unless you're Elon Musk, who spent $44 billion on his hobby of being a Twitter troll.)
Scott: As one scuba diver to another, where were those "pyramids"? I've heard of such things, but I've also heard reports by divers that didn't find the ones they saw all that impressive. From the photo, yours might be worth a trip sometime.
Does it look a bit like the stairlike formations at the Yonaguni monument off the coast of Japan?
Think I saw some divers filming there on youtube - looked like there were some dangerous currents.
Yeah, this is the Yonaguni monument.
I am officially jealous. I've visited Japan twice, but never with dive gear, and that's an expensive place to go diving.
I learnt in my Indian philosophy class when reading about something new to you - first read without any analyzing on your part. Read the second time arguing along with the author. Then read a third time arguing against the author. Only after that form your opinion. Never blindly accept anything no matter the reputation of the author. Unfortunately a bit too time consuming in real world but does lead to a more nuanced view.
I agree that Chris Kavanagh's comments are not great, but I'm going to go against the grain and say that he actually is groping towards something real. There's a certain type of bad argument that the Rationalist community is susceptible to: it's hard to explain, but it's essentially an argument where the details are correct but the whole thing, when viewed from a distance, doesn't hold together.
The Atlantis thing mentioned in the post is one of them; Ivermectin, too. Some others are the aquatic ape hypothesis, the bicameral mind, and Slime Mold Time Mold's recent posts about obesity.
I think the reason the Rationalist community has such a hard time refuting these is that the problem isn't the individual sub-arguments, but the way the whole thing hangs together, and the Rationalist community mindset is all about examining and testing the smallest details.
I also think that people like Kavanagh aren't (in this instance) just arguing "weird arguments by weird people are weird and stupid", but trying to express a heuristic for dismissing these bad arguments. In this case, listening the experts or dismissing things because they sound dumb are actually viable strategies. The problem is that those strategies have their own failure modes.
It's interesting that you don't mention non-mainstream topics that are actually controversial in the ratsphere, like HBD or redpill or UFOs, and instead mostly go for ones that it didn't have a hard time dismissing whatsoever.
Thanks for the detailed response Scott, I think you've misinterpreted some of my arguments and have pegged me a bit wrong (I don't think I've ever written anything on Ivermectin outside of some tweets?). I'll try to reply properly in time but I think the anecdote you offer at the start is very telling of the divide between us.
To explain, I too read Graham Hancock when young and found some of his arguments compelling. From your description you could not locate any good criticism and ended up scuba diving to investigate ruins firsthand, learning geology from the ground up, and going on "a five year wild-goose-chase". It sounds like this was a valuable experience but perhaps one that left you a bit bitter at what you describe as sneering anti-conspiracists.
For me on the other hand, I did locate a bunch of good criticisms both in the skeptic community and from relevant experts, even though this was young internet time. Part of this (I think) was from following the disparaging comments on Hancock's blog back to the people he was disagreeing with. I did not scuba dive in ruins (though it looks fun) but I did learn about how superficially compelling it was to present alternative histories as forbidden knowledge and that the actual history was drier but more interesting& complex. I did not come away from this resenting Hancock or people that found him convincing. Indeed, I think he is both sincere and good at making his arguments appear compelling to a lay audience. I did gain an appreciation of the frustration of experts he disparages who have dedicated their careers to the topics he covers though.
I also don't think I would have the same intuition you have that personally exploring the ruins would be informative. I think that would actually be likely to skew my perspective as it feels like it would deliver potentially inaccurate intuitions and that it would require already having the expertise to properly assess what you are seeing. I still do think it sounds and looks fun though, so maybe you made the better choice ;).
In any case, I think it's interesting that we both took rather different lessons from our early encounters with Hancock but maybe a place we do both agree that there is value to detailed critics laid out for a curious lay audience by experts who have an alternative opinion.
So your response is basically that you‘re better at “looking into it” than Scott because you read the right experts on the Atlantis issue rather than risk being corrupted by a scuba trip? I find your attempt to stigmatize “personally exploring” a topic to be so, so lame. No one elected you arbiter of what others get to personally explore.
Also, you claim you didn’t come away from reading Hancock with resentment for exploring alternative ideas but on the Ivermectin breakdown your tweets contain plenty of resentment. I’m not sure how you reconcile this in your mind. How does a discerning arbiter of personal exploration like yourself determine which topics are worthy of sneer?
Nope. My point is that I didn't come away thinking skeptics and experts were sneering and dismissive but rather that they had detailed rebuttals and their positions had been largely straw manned by Hancock. As for how I decide my tweets and their tone... it depends on the topic, my mood, and what I am responding to. I was probably a little bit harsher to Scott than I needed to be ;).
Thanks for this. It’s a fitting coincidence that you “took rather different lessons” from your shared experience with Hancock, as it neatly symbolizes my criticism of this post which is that Scott extrapolates:
- his *own* (personality and intellect based) response to the “ridicule” strategy (to double down on “pro-skub”) + his own thirst for “reasonable explanations”
- to the rest of the “budding conspiracists” one step from the ledge.
It is imperative to treat people with empathy—as though they are “one good deed away from” seeing the light—but i still don’t see how Scott effectively addresses the claim that fanning silly flames of controversy ends up harming more not-like-Scott-conspiracists than it helps the like-Scott-ones.
This particular case might be a little different though as it seems you and scott both differ on how reasonable-at-face-value Ivermectin claims are in the first place. (Fwiw I agree w Scott, 30 “positive” studies ain’t a joke, and where better to painstakingly review them than in a space full of rationalists?)
I thought Scott's initial amateur meta-analysis was a good effort, especially given it isn't his field. And I didn't dismiss ivermectin out of hand either, I simply argue that it is not a special case but a very common one that you find when a treatment becomes favoured by partisans/contrarian or anti-vaxx communities. The way I put it on Twitter at the time was like this:
"So many ineffective treatments follow this pattern:
1) promising effect in in vitro studies
2) positive findings in small scale, low quality studies (often conducted by advocates)
3) mixed/weaker effects in medium quality studies
4) very weak to no effects in high quality studies
When you see this pattern over and over, you don’t get overly excited when you see results from 1 & 2 (& 3). This isn’t some new discovery from the COVID era. It’s an extremely well established pattern."
Scott's initial pass of the studies took 29 and reduced it to 11. That's already a huge red flag. 2/3rd are so low quality or questionable they would be better to discard? These are the kind of things that relevant experts were flagging early on about ivermectin and why they were very critical of the hype. Not to mention that so many of the advocates were previously advocating hydroxychloroquine in the exact same manner. The constant refrain from relevant experts was not we need to stop any trials into ivermectin! It was 'the current evidence doesn't justify promoting it & we need to wait until better evidence from large well controlled trials is in.' After those results came in the conclusion shifted to, even being generous, existing treatments and vaccines offer stronger evidence of efficacy. This wasn't experts just being dismissive and rude it was them responding to the overall quality of evidence vs. the strength of the claims being made AND the fact it was being presented as an alternative to vaccination.
Nor is Scott correct in presenting my position as being knee jerk adherence to institutional authority and prestige, if it was I should have been swayed by John Ioannidis over Gideon back when they disagreed. I was not. Indeed, I'm someone published advocating for Open Science reforms who largely agrees with Stuart Ritchie, Ben Goldacre, and Scott(!) when it comes to the possibility of distortions in scientific research.
> Scott's initial pass of the studies took 29 and reduced it to 11. That's
> already a huge red flag. 2/3rd are so low quality or questionable they
> would be better to discard?
If you randomly picked 29 small studies on some random uncontroversial medical topic, how many of them do you think Scott would discard as being, by his standards, so methodologically sloppy or statistically underpowered that they don't really tell us anything useful?
That’s not all that was occurring here. There was also the fraud. But even granting this is a likely outcome for any medical topic that would mean, in general, Scott should have even less reason to find an advocate website listing 30 positive studies at all impressive.
"amateur meta-analysis"
This is the critical point for me: one has to be able to recognize it as "amateur" hour.
But even if this was an undergraduate paper in a class in how to do meta-analysis, it would not have received an A. It might have been a C- with invitation to rewrite.
As someone who was reasonably impressed by Scott's effort but also who doesn't know any better, what would he have to change to get an A at undergraduate level
I mean the most obvious issue is it just isn't a meta-analysis. A meta-analysis is a fairly specific thing and the post in question, if I recall correctly, simply doesn't follow the standard methodology (multiple reviewiers, systematic review based on specific criteria, etc.) or provide the typical measures (e.g. heterogeneity, funnel plots, etc.)
Scott wrote a blog post that is meta-analytic. It looks at multiple studies, considers their methodologies and pools some effects. But if he were to try to edit what he did into a paper and publish in a journal, he would and should get rejected. As a right and proper meta-analysis, it's unsalvagable. But this is no material criticism, he doesn't present it as such.
Thanks for your response, which is much kinder than I deserve (sorry, I was pretty upset last night).
"I don't think I've ever written anything on Ivermectin outside of some tweets?"
My understanding is that you run a podcast which focuses on conspiracists and related people. I did check your Twitter and it seemed to have a lot about Weinstein. If this is just a coincidence and usually you don't focus on this kind of thing, then I guess I'm wrong and I apologize.
"For me on the other hand, I did locate a bunch of good criticisms both in the skeptic community and from relevant experts, even though this was young internet time. Part of this (I think) was from following the disparaging comments on Hancock's blog back to the people he was disagreeing with."
This was around 2000 for me, and I'm having trouble remembering it, but I don't remember a blog with comments, which I think I would have found pretty interesting. Are you thinking of this one https://grahamhancock.com/blog/page/13/ that started in 2014, or was there an earlier one I missed? I also think it's very possible I was just terrible at searching the Internet at the time and failed to find good criticisms which did exist.
"I also don't think I would have the same intuition you have that personally exploring the ruins would be informative."
Yeah, I don't want to justify this as the best use of my time / investigational resources, it was just something I dreamed of for a long time and eventually got to do. It actually did prove unexpectedly useful, because it helped me see that there were lots of similar rocks that looked very pyramid-like but were still recognizably natural all around it, such that it was more obvious that this was the most artificial-looking of a set of natural phenomena. Some people had said this before, but for whatever reason it sounded like cope when they said it and seemed true when I saw it.
I think I probably interpreted your Twitter thread as more hostile than it was, for which I apologize.
Hi Scott,
I am familiar with night posting and I am certainly not above taking shots so entirely understand. I enjoyed reading despite our disagreements and I do think my own tone can sound harsher than I intend so I'd be a hypocrite to complain about that.
As per my podcast, yes it does focus on guru-types, and conspiracy mongering is one of the core recurrent features we encounter, but on ivermectin specifically we haven't actually dwelt on the topic very much. Actually, it would have worked better as a subtweet, as we have a 3 hr odd episode with Gideon discussing the Together trial and Alexandros' treatment of it that we have yet to properly edit together. We've covered the Weinsteins a lot as they are archetypical exemplars of the kind of modern secular guru that we are interested in so I'd say the zing would have landed better if you had not tied it so tightly to ivermectin!
I read Hancock's book when I was a teenager in Northern Ireland so that would have been at the latest in the early 2000s. So I think it could have been Hancock's forum or some website he had up? Alternatively, I think the version of his book I read had a segment on a response to a critical BBC Horizon documentary and some criticisms from his son of radiocarbon dating and the dismissive attitude of some named experts. I can't remember exactly now but I remember reading some early internet websites on the topic and discussing it in forums.
The scuba image is awesome and I'm sure it was quite the experience so as above, I don't know that my intuitions served me better than yours in terms of quality of life experiences gained from engaging with Hancock. And I was disparaging on Twitter in that thread but I was responding in part to the frustration of encountering a lot of 'analysis' on ivermectin that to me read as bog standard partisanship and anti-vaxx conspiracism adopting scientific cosplay. As such I may have been a bit 'triggered' reading your conclusion as saying that stuff like Alexandros and the related ecosystem has produced is useful and would be good for scientists to imitate. I think we might differ on that point more substantially but it was probably unfair of me to present it as if that was your main takeaway.
If you want to see me not being mean on Twitter about a similar analysis you did on another contentious subject, here's a relevant example: https://twitter.com/C_Kavanagh/status/1409226528152461313?s=20&t=3DKj-VOmiJtDz84n6oE2QA
Anyway, I will try to respond properly as I think you raise interesting arguments and where we do disagree is actually interesting!
I just want to say that it's incredibly refreshing to see people like you and Scott that attempt to *de* escalate from an exchange that started out a little heated and emotional, rather than escalate it further.
Amen to that!
Cheers!
I'd like to agree that Chris's tone can be more harsh than he intends, that's part of his charm. His podcast persona is one of an angry mad genius, while Arthur plays the calmer straight man. The pod is delightful, and everyone should check it out.
You mean Matt, right? I do enjoy their podcast as well.
Yes...Arthur Dent is his twitter name. I get confused sometimes.
> ... yes it does focus on guru-types ...
Wait, you aren't some other Chris Kavanagh, who just happens the have the same name as that charming podcast guy I listen to sometimes? :-D Well, I must say that I have even more respect for you now for your having been such a charitable interlocutor in this thread.
Merci!
I have been really impressed with your thoughtful and kind responses throughout this thread. Thanks for participating.
(Update: I see what I wanted to say was what Isaac King already said. But thanks again.)
"Some tweets"
Make that several hundred tweets: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40C_Kavanagh%20ivermectin&src=typed_query&f=live
I always enjoy reading what you write but I honestly can't believe that this even had to be written.
"Just asking questions!". Just because a question is falsifiable doesn't make it scientific. Instead the implication goes the other way: scientific questions are falsifiable, but also ideally focus on relevant extensions to current knowledge without unnecessarily complicating the picture. The Ivermectin/Atlantis hypotheses are just daft, but yet, falsifiable. I'm with Chris on this one.
Ivermectin is hardly "daft" at the same level as, say, curing Covid by putting magic healing crystals under your pillow. As Scott points out, several early studies and meta-analyses found that it seemed to be effective, and several countries adopted it as a treatment on the strength of those studies.
The people who initially said that it seemed promising, were respectable mainstream scientists publishing in peer-reviewed journals, not random MAGA hatters without medical credentials. Based on later studies and more comprehensive analysis, the initial optimism unfortunately didn't pan out, but it at least *started out* as a legitimate, plausible hypothesis.
I wonder how close we got to an alternate timeline in which Donald Trump came out *against* Ivermectin during that early phase, then mainstream scientists felt duty-bound to defend the validity of those studies, and then when later studies cast doubt on its effectiveness, they couldn't back down anymore because that would be giving aid and succor to the enemy, and so hospitals kept giving Invermectin to Covid patients while MAGA hatters were standing outside the hospital waving "you're a human not a horse" signs, and conspiracy theorists came up with stories about Invermectin pills secretly containing 5G transmitters..
I remember a friend going on a massive rant about how Fauci is terrible, how lab-leak theories are suppressed, and how Ivermectin is great if only we looked into these studies in India. He also said he didn't trust the vaccines and they were a scam by Big Pharma. It was the full conspiratorial mindset on display (and we don't even live in North America!)
I don't think the Ivermectin treatment was ever plausible in the sense that a known biological mechanism would act to suppress Covid infection. Sure, there were studies showing this or that effect, but the rational and scientific approach is not to consider all hypotheses equally. It is not that we should never consider the Ivermectin hypothesis, but that it should be near the end of the list. The rational thing to do is focus time and resources on the most promising lines of enquiry first. For exactly why this is important, see Sabine Hossenfelder "Why I lost faith in science" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu4mH3Hmw2o
Mostly, I like Scott's posts - they are thoughtful, well researched and well written. But this one seems like an emotional exercise in tribal signalling. His ego was hurt: "This is an admirably concise encapsulation of everything I despise". The tribe he is othering is "anti-conspiracists", partly because they target bothsiderism traps that Scott sometimes falls in.
Chris has a tendency to rant and rail against anyone (left, right, libertarian, wherever) who fails to flag the context of issues within the wider discourse, especially the "Just asking questions" sort, and especially when engaging with status seeking cranks like Alexandros (via Brett Weinstein).
It's a well-written essay, and logically I think you 100% have the better argument. But...I'm also a little sympathetic to the other side. People are people, and they don't always, or even mostly, work remorselessly rationally, and it is even somewhat less than fully rational to operate as if they do.
Thing is, you should try just dealing with cranks over and over and over again. A person of good will and optimism will *start off* as you did here, being careful and measured, taking each hypothesis no matter how implausible it seems to you and treating it with respect, gathering the evidence, working out the math, writing it down line by line so any reasonable person can see the point.
And then one of two things happen: (1) they say well that's all well and good, but here's *another* line of argument that leads to the same conclusion, so ha! or (2) yeah well here's this one little place where you skipped a step, so your whole argument is suspect (sort of the grammar/analogy Nazi's approach that says if you misspelled a keyword, or your analogy isn't perfect in some miinor way, it shatters every logical link). And they are just indefatigable. It takes them 30 seconds to think up a new challenge, and it takes you 6 hours to patiently refute it, and after a while the economics just kills you, and you give up and say something nasty and ad hominem.
Not only that, but the point is unfortunately sound that when you treat a crank argument as worthy of close attention and discussion, people *do* take that you're agreeing there's a chance what they're saying is right, regardless of how strongly you put your final conclusion that they are not. So you're saying there *is* a chance? It's just a theory, what you're saying? There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio...! and you realize that your patient deconstruction of the central hypothesis of their obsession has not discouraged them *at all*, not prodded them to any introspection and doubt, but rather perversely *increased* their confidence that the central hypothesis is true -- look! Expert/Famed Reasonable Man/Authoirty took this seriously enough to debate! I must be *this* close to the actual truth! Let's roll out v2.0 or v5.0 or v948669.0 and try again...!
It's not logical, it's not reasonable, but it's human nature. I don't know that there are any great solutions. I fully agree with you that people with knowledge and ability should try to be more patient, take seriously hypotheses that seeem on the surface absurd, or unlikely, or which are presented offensively, offend the shibboleths, et cetera. This is why I feel it's deeply wrong to use phrases like "climate change denier," which short-circuits engaging rationally with an ad hominem label, and it's equally wrong to accuse everyone who proposes differences in outcomes between the races and sexes may in some cases arise from perfectly innocent causes of irredeemable racist or sexism. So logically we should treat people who think vaccines are useless or evil, and folk remedies sure-fire, with enough respect to engage the argument reasonably.
But it's difficult, and I can't too much blame people who lost their cool and fling about regrettable contemptuous dismissal. Boo humans.
As an example of the times when the correct answer isn't as clear as ivermectin, I'm reminded of a quote from the old SSC post about Adderall risks https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
"The first agenda tries to scare college kids away from abusing Adderall as a study drug by emphasizing that it’s terrifying and will definitely kill you. The second agenda tries to encourage parents to get their kids treated for ADHD by insisting Adderall is completely safe and anyone saying otherwise is an irresponsible fearmonger. The difference between these two situations is supposed to be whether you have a doctor’s prescription. But what if you are the doctor, trying to decide who to prescribe it to? Then what?"
He sounds like an arsehole.
Here is what is troublesome. People mistrust the medical system. An air of suspicion surrounds any decision taken by the public health authorities (PHA). This should not be the case. Whose fault is it? The burden is then on the PHA to regain the population’s trust. In the meantime, Scott comes to the rescue.
To Scott’s point, the PHA must do a better job of communicating their findings or lack thereof to the public. Dry journals are not cutting it. Condescending expert opinions are not slicing it. PHA need to do some serious communication-soul-searching. It is of essence in public health, and they are losing the battle in this new era.
I agree with Chris that contending the conspiracy-theories give them an air of legitimacy. I also value the role of Scott in dissecting them, opening them on the table for everyone to see, and putting them
back into the refrigerator once they are declared dead. But I would advocate to do it swiftly, as to avoid more confusion generated by crowds agglomerating around the table.
Another point. Of course you would want to do critical thinking. Of course you would want to study the trials by yourself. But at the end of the day there is a reason we all are specialized - to advance faster as a society. Specialization is key to our prosperity and survival. I know, trusting is hard, but it is necessary.
BTW,
Ivermectin is not effective in preventing deleterious outcomes from COVID-19 infection, such as hospitalization.
Roughly 5,000 patients were randomized in the TOGETHER and COVID-OUT randomized controlled phase III trials, to ivermectin, placebo or other intervention (metformin, fluvoxamine in the COVID-OUT). Ivermectin did not improve outcomes. These results were published in the NEJM.
Just these two large trials falsify the hypothesis that ivermectin is effective in treating COVID-19.
“But there other trials that show a positive effect”. Yes, but they were of poor methodological quality, low patient sample. “But look at this other trial, it had 1,000 patients in it!” Even if that trial was of rigor, other large well-conducted trials fail to reject the null hypothesis of no difference between treatment groups. Then you do a meta-analyses, ideally including trials with similar study characteristics and primary outcome.
Now, if you try that hard to prove the effectiveness of a treatment, it is because there is no treatment effect.
No need to apologize for being curious, or wanting to properly vet the scientific evidence in an area of public interest (both that it’s a “greater good” to try to discern whether ivermectin works or not; and because quite a large segment of society were happily subscribing to the “conspiracy theory”…this was not a couple of joes with foil hats and soap boxes on a street corner). When something is that prevalent, the concept of “I’m not gonna dignify that question with a proper answer” doesn’t suffice.
In general, I am in complete agreement with you, and against Kavanaugh. I’ve listened to Kavanaugh’s podcast and been extremely turned off by his tendency to psychopathologize his ideological opponents, in lieu of just debunking their arguments. ‘My opponent is an ignorant fool’ is a deeply satisfying argument to make, but it’s never as convincing to hear as it feels to say. There is one thing I will say, though, and that is that there is a particular type of personality (Alexandros) who insincerely baits sincere thinkers (you) into public disagreement, and then takes advantage of that public disagreement to elevate their public profile. It’s a type of parasitism on good faith, and should be discouraged. So while I agree that it is good to respond to crackpots, I feel one should only do so when those crackpots are demonstrating a real sincerity, and one should try hard not to be used as a prop in their personal PR campaign.
I'm wondering whether Kavanagh is famous enough for disagreeing with him to generate a lot of interest.
Ironically it seems to me that both Weinstein and Kavanagh share a model of the world that Scott disagrees with. Namely, that most people are “sheeple” that can, by shame or censorship, be forced by the Establishment into holding the “correct” beliefs. Fundamentally Kavanagh and Weinstein just disagree about whether or not this a good thing.
Really appreciate this post, find myself very much agreeing with you. (For what it’s worth, I‘ve actually worked in PR, and one of the most important things good PR campaigns do is treat their audience with respect. Any condensation can be smelled a mile away.)
I think Kavanagh's argument is that there are a near infinite number of controversies to discuss. By choosing among them to focus on ivermectin and award it tens of thousands of words of blog space, Scott presents the impression that the controversy has more to it than it really merits. That's why it's "indulgent".
Now, let's be honest: most "readers" will not read all or even any of the 30+k words of Scott's ivermectin posts. The arguments in them actually are irrelevant except to the union of the sets of sufficiently bored, curious, pedantic or engaged readers, because they actually won't be read. The very existence of two giant posts about ivermectin will already push many readers and onlookers of this blog toward the belief that ivermectin is effective, even if Scott's conclusions were mostly the opposite.
For a fairly influential writer like Scott, the choice of topics is as important as the content. The menu matters as much as the dishes. By giving airtime to ivermectin, Scott is supporting it, whether he likes it or not. This may not be what we like, but it's the reality of how writing works, on the Internet or off it.
"The very existence of two giant posts about ivermectin will already push many readers and onlookers of this blog toward the belief that ivermectin is effective, even if Scott's conclusions were mostly the opposite."
Hmm? No? There are an infinite number of words on the Internet for and against pretty much everything under the sun. Scott himself has written both for and against many drugs, therapies, and ideologies. The mere existence of an article on the Internet about something is not support for that thing.
I looked at the top 100 or so tweets that included a link to Scott's "Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know". With one exception, all the tweets that contained some kind of evaluation of the post interpreted it as showing that any apparent effect of ivermectin on covid was not real. The only exception was a tweet by Alexandros Marinos. Many of the ~100 tweets were from big accounts, meaning that probably millions of people read at least one of the tweets. It therefore seems likely that Scott's post nudged a large number of people towards the anti-ivermectin position even if they didn't read the post. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that Twitter discussions about the post pushed nearly as many (or any) people towards the pro-ivermectin view.
This small twitter experiment is not strong evidence, but, then again, you provided no evidence at all for your claim that Scott writing about this topic made the pro-ivermectin position more popular.
OK, that makes sense. Let's try another way to understand Kavanagh's argument:
Do you think something "not even worth seriously proving wrong", or something "worth debunking, and thoroughly debunked" is more likely to be false? I strongly believe the former is seen by most people as more likely to be false, especially if they haven't heard of ivermectin before. (Never underestimate how narrow common knowledge really is.) By discussing ivermectin at such length, Scott moved it from the "not worth discussion" to the "worth debunking and debunked" category, which actually increases most people's credence in the idea.
Right but the whole point is that ivermectin effectiveness *belongs* in the "worth debunking and debunked" category. We're not talking about flat earth or something here; The entire reason for the original blog post is that there was (at least at the time) legitimate, informed disagreement to be had among reasonable people. And even with flat earthers and similar, the problem with them isn't that their ideas aren't *worth* proving wrong. The problem is that their ideas *have* been proven wrong repeatedly, for centuries, often by their own experiments, and they persist anyway.
Kavanagh's position might carry more weight with E.G. a q-anon, where it's difficult to imagine what "debunking" would even look like. (Let the believer privately interrogate everyone who works for the justice department?) Trying to stuff reasonable empirical questions into the "not worth discussion" category, though, will only ever do more harm than good.
"The very existence of two giant posts about ivermectin will already push many readers and onlookers of this blog toward the belief that ivermectin is effective"
If this were true and merely mentioning something made people think it was more legitimate then all of the anti-vaccine posts/podcasts/etc. should be causing more people to believe vaccines are legitimate, but I doubt that is true.
Or is it a special case where mentioning heterodox things, even negatively makes people more willing to believe it, while mentioning consensus things negatively makes people less willing to believe it? In which case, source?
There's an economic efficiency / due process point buried here. Imagine a prediction market: "Ivermectin will be de-bunked within 12 months". Scott decides he will only invest in a deep dive into conspiracy theories that markets say are > [10] [or] [20]% likely to be true. Seems like a good way to optimise Scott's time. That said, the way Scott writes about the 1-2% cases like ivermectin is incredibly entertaining. And some of those 1-2% cases have huge option value--what if Scott had found that ivermectin was solid? Huge benefit to society. So I'm all for Scott delving into conspiracies. But if I were in charge of grant or tax dollars, I would pass.
Why am I not showing up as "Paid"? I'm sure I paid. Conspiracy!
This reminds me of an argument with my brother, a scientist, about that Nature paper that said Covid couldn’t have come out of a lab because the binding was only 88% optimal. I am probably not getting get science jargon quite right, but the point being that if someone engineered Covid in a lab, they would do 100%. I said, this is illogical. If you want to use it as a weapon, maybe you intentionally do sub 90% because 100% looks suspicious. Or maybe you developed it by running it through lots of animals and letting it mutate or something. Or maybe you had every percent created from 88% to 100% but only the 88% leaked out. My brother, a scientist, would just say “I’m a scientist and you should trust scientists.” And I was like, “but I’m the one doing science here! Isn’t logic science?” Reading this I probably should have added “I may be bad at science, but at least I’m giving it a shot!”
I’m a scientist. I agree with you that you are doing science. I can also sympathize with your brother’s perspective. It is the lazy way out to just say “trust the scientists.” That said, it is genuinely hard to explain things sometimes. Sometimes there is no really fast or easy principle to explain. There might be layers upon layers of things to explain. And something that is very convincing to a scientist just might not be without the experience. For example, it is really hard to explain some things without the relevant math! So, lazy scientists who don’t specialize in communicating with the public say dumb things like this.
>Or maybe you developed it by running it through lots of animals and letting it mutate or something
That was pretty much the research proposal of the people believed most likely to have caused a lab leak, if there were a lab leak. IIRC, the plan was to start by adding a furin cleavage site, then run the modified virus through hamster, green monkey, and humanized mice to see if it would evolve into something highly contagious in humans.
Pointing to a virus that looks a lot like a natural bat coronavirus except that it's got a furin cleavage site and has evolved into something 88% optimal for infecting humans, and saying "no, that can't have leaked out from an intermediate stage in that planned experiment because it is only 88% optimal", seem almost unbelievably daft. Maybe I'm missing something?
And none of this rules out a natural origin. The whole point of the planned experiment was to see what might plausibly evolve naturally - the scientists at WIV were trying to race nature to the goal of a human-contagious bat coronavirus, so they could study it in the (hopefully safe) lab before the rest of us encountered it in the wild. It is certainly plausible that nature won the race in 2019. But someone saying they're *sure* it was nature, because it was too much of a kludge to be Science!, I'm not buying that.
> I’ve looked into this pretty hard and my conclusion is that conspiracy ecosystems fall prey to the exact same biases that all of us have, including experts and correct people. But experts and correct people have slightly less of them, have better self-correction mechanisms, and manage to converge on truth, whereas conspiracy theorists have slightly more of them and shoot off into falsehood. I think of this as very subtle: 0.99^infinity goes to zero; 1.01^infinity goes to infinity. We all struggle with the same tendencies. The trick is in understanding and controlling them.
I'd have assumed it would often just be a case of what social environment you were shaped by, what cues you were exposed to more. In other words, getting lucky. Since you just said yourself, the supposed good guys are often not actually putting in the cognitive work, but rather just looking down on people who believe differently than them. 1.01^infinity would end up at a legitimate correct belief, but these people don't have a legitimate belief.
Admittadly, I've probably given this much less thought than you have.
I can confirm that in Bulgaria, where I live, some people STILL tout ivermectin as a wonderdrug against COVID. I have heard (from close people) about different wild schemes how to dose animal ivermectin. I have heard experts on TV (back when the pandemic was something people actually cared about) advertise ivermectin. Thankfully, policies didn't change like in Latin America, but it is worth noting that Kavanagh lives in a bubble, where real-world people believe only what he believes, and the worst thing is the most unscientific thinking: "Do not replicate science. Do not question science."
That bubble does real life harm because the failure to interact with misinformed people does not change misinformation.
Note: I do not know of his work outside of this thread.
Do we have an idea why all the atlantis variants are sounding somewhat similar name wise?
In my limited research....
a) Atzlan is the mythical homeland of the Aztecs, but the versions of the story mentioned on the wikipedia page say it was somewhere to the north of Tenochtitlan, not in the sea. If there's a version of the Atzlan story that has it sinking into the sea then it's a non-central version.
b) I can't find any reference to Atala as a specifically Indonesian myth at all. (It's a bit weird to talk about an "Indonesian myth" anyway, Indonesia is a huge archipelago with a bunch of very different cultural traditions and religions.) Anyway, there seems to be an Atala in Hinduism which is the first of seven netherworlds below Earth (or part thereof). Other references I've found seem to be from specifically pro-Atlantis resources.
So I'd guess that the reason they sound a bit like Atlantis is that Atlantis cranks made them up... or at least, tracked down any mythical place that starts with an "A" and declared them to be versions of Atlantis despite having only the most tenuous connection to Atlantis like "was a place in the past" or "is in the downwards direction somehow".
There are thousands or tens of thousands of distinct languages/cultures on earth and random chance?
Yeah, might be random chance that I just never heard of all the different "Atlantis" variants with completely different names
I noticed this too. My first instinct is that all of them probably have the word for "Sea" in them, and this word is similar across languages because a lot of human languages share common ancestors and influence each other.
I think this is plausible at least a little bit in the case of Greeks and Indonesians (Alexander The Great reached India, and from there on trade and warefare would do the rest), but Aztecs developed in complete isolation from the old world as far as I know, so I don't know how could that possibly happen.
Is there a ACX styled analysis of 9/11 truther stuff like WTC7?
lol
One of your best essays ever.
I think it's funny that a decent proportion of the comments boil down to some version of "he sucks, ignore him" which is exactly the kind of ad hominem dismissal Scott is arguing against.
I agree 100 percent. I just wanted to add that in fact finding missions like these it's important to not be overwhelemd by bad faith arguments (fall victim to a gish gallopp). And especially if you are a public figure it's worth considering if you are contributing to what could be perceived as a false balance (This would be my very favourable interpretation of Kavanagh's argument).
I am personally very concerned about climate change and I'd say that science has already definitively answered the question of man made climate change multiple decades ago. I find it hard to not get angry when I'm confronted with arguments of climate change deniers and I think the rise of these arguments may be partially the fault of enganging with bad faith arguments and creating the illusion of broader scientific disagreement on this topic. But I'm not sure whre the line between honest discussion and troll-feeding can be drawn, if there even is one.
“Climate change denial” is actually a great example. Because there is a tendency among the Kavanaghs of the world to flatten “denial” into a homogeneous mass that fails to differentiate between the wildest “it’s all a fake Commie plot” conspiracy theory and the mildest, most good-faith skepticism of the conclusions in the latest IPCC report.
I actually think you would be really well served to signal boost and engage with the latter while denouncing / ignoring the former. Even if you strongly disagree with the skepticism, the point is to admit that you haven’t (and probably never will) convince everybody, so it’s better to push the skeptical into the “reasonable scientific examination” camp instead of the “bonkers conspiracy cranks” camp. Rather than shame everyone that asks questions, point to the responsible way to ask questions. The best part about this is THAT’S HOW SCIENCE IS SUPPOSED TO WORK and the tough examination by skeptics might actually make the science better.
FWIW I DON’T think the question was “definitively answered decades ago” except in the very broadest sense of “anthropogenic CO2 release at current scales will result in a measurably warmer climate”, and the interim has been filled with a lot of necessary science. I mean, I doubt you can point me to a “decades old” model that‘s remained perfectly aligned with observed climate. And if you could there would be a hundred more that seemed equally credible “decades ago” that nevertheless have drifted badly from the mark by today.
And of course the science is related to but not synonymous with the still very much open practical and political question of “what, if anything, should we do about it”?
Does that make me a “denier” that makes you angry? If it does, then am I more likely to engage with you, or the actually “denialist” conspiracy cranks who would happily talk to me for hours about their skepticism?
I think we're pretty much on the same page here. I was mostly referring to people that straight up deny that the earth is getting warmer or deny the anthropogenic aspect. Both are in my eyes very much scientifically proven and discussion around it distracts from the actually imprtant question of "what should we do about it".
It's things like the inevitable facebook photo of snow in december with a "wheres your climate change now"-caption that I'm often not sure how to react to.
“ It's things like the inevitable facebook photo of snow in december with a "wheres your climate change now"-caption that I'm often not sure how to react to.”
Of course there’s the reverse, which are the posts that blame climate change any time there is any natural disaster… I don’t know how to react to that without getting called a science denier.
>There’s a Hindu legend (maybe apocryphal?) about an atheist philosopher who spends literally every second of every day denouncing God. When he dies, God welcomes him into the highest heaven, praising him as a great yogi - for he never let his consciousness stray from awareness of God even for one moment.
Reminds me of Ravana, who is the villain of the Hindu Ramayana, who hates Ram/God so much that he sees him in everything, eventually even himself, thus reaching enlightenment (while literally getting speared by Ram).
In the same vein, I think this is also the deeper reason why Christians see a fear of God as a good thing and there is advice like "cast all of your fear (and other emotions) onto God".
The thing about big Youtube streamers is that basically half of them were banned from Twitch for various reasons, so it's a pre-selected most-controversial subset of the successful ones.
This is just as tedious as the other online celebrity beefs. Either talk it out directly, or let it drop, but don't do this nonsense where you talk past each other and (deliberately?) misunderstand each other. Like if you're at the point of writing "What is his complaint? At the risk of putting words in his mouth..." and then doing that very same thing, maybe you could ask him? I understand that isn't good for the blog post writing business (which is why YouTube streamers do this, too. It's """content"""), but if this is where the blog has fallen to since 2015 it's probably time to pack it up anyway.
On something like Ivermectin or vaccines, I agree wholeheartedly with Scott. But what does one do about the complex of things such as QAnon, anti-semitic conspiracy theories, theories about the Masons, etc.? Theories like these have historically shown the potential to acquire real power and to carry out violent action. And, notoriously, they have proven resistant to falsification (because the lack of evidence for such theories' truth just shows how powerful the conspirators are--or that the person who can't see the evidence still needs their red pill, or whatever). I'm not asking this in a "gotcha" spirit. I'm genuinely curious what rationalists would say about this issue.
I think debunking anti-semitic conspiracies is worthwhile and important, as you’d be surprised at the number of people who repeat them unknowingly or with only a minimum of malevolence.
I have some fairly person experience with this, as a Jew who has managed to befriend and educate some people who had misinformed or even borderline racist beliefs.
Some people are unreachable, it’s true, but many people are able to be converted, and I don’t think loud and well-reasoned arguments for conversion away from conspiratorial thinking are ever worse than the alternative of silence.
So how have you, so to speak, reached the reachable? Again, I am genuinely curious.
Like I implied, I think for most people, on the issue of antisemitism, it is one of genuine ignorance.
If you teach people that associations between Jews, banks, and “usury” are because banking was considered dirty and unChristian in Europe such that only Jews could do it, and that Jews were forbidden from nearly every other profession, many people will take that context with them and cease spouting incorrect and racist ideas about “Jews charging interest while Christians give alms.”
The history of the Rothschilds is similarly more interesting and comprehensive than conspiracy theories about them.
Your results may vary, depending on how close you are to the person in question, how effective you are at communicating, and how deep the other person believes their conspiracies, but I don’t see why countering the belief is harmful.
For the most part, conspiracy theories do not disappear on their own merely because nobody addresses them. That lack of attention is worked into the theory as proof of suppression.
I think “ignore them” is an underrated strategy
That strategy works unless and until haters in this mold acquire real power, which, as I said, they have historically shown what one might call a non-trivial potential to do. In which case, there's a "you may not be interested in them, but they are interested in you" aspect that can arise. And if they fail to acquire real power, perhaps there is room for crediting those who do not adopt the "ignore them" strategy for the security that allows others to claim that ignoring them was the way to go.
Perhaps, though I would argue that the attention they receive from the panicked public is in fact their greatest power.
Perhaps, until they gain important support, from large numbers of people and/or from powerful institutions. At which point it may be too late. How to decide which groups have the potential to transcend the "best ignored" stage is part of what interests me about this question.
Maybe this is useful additional context:
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/90109
Question: Do some people claim to be rationalists (we should probably operationalize what we mean by rationalists) to hide the fact that they are not really rationalists at all?
I wasn't put out by the ivermectin post but I was somewhat put out by the post about the pro-ivermectin guy who wrote the equivalent of a long book's worth "just asking questions" about whether ivermectin works.
I can really recommend Graham Hancock's Netflix series "Ancient Apocalypse". Not only is it well directed and edited, and so shows the quality of argument you're up against when you're trying to debunk a conspiracy theory, but it's also good rationality training to try and form a mental counterargument that's better than "U R DUMB" (ideally at least DH4 on Paul Graham's scale of argumentation).
I imagine a detailed counterargument would involve a mathematical model of the precession of the equinoxes to the point where you could show that the claimed alignment of some temple entrances with a particular prehistoric date range and no other, is actually well within the range of more modern dates plus a small amount of "noise". But everyone who doesn't have a PhD in astrophysics is likely to get stuck before they get to this point.
More generally, as each new generation enters school, to the extent that we still teach using your own intellect rather than trusting authority, we will come across students who have not yet been taught for example the historical consensus on World War II and just how strong the evidence for some things is, and we'll occasionally get someone genuinely asking "Couldn't there be a grain of truth in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as some blogger on the internet suggested?". And then the answer is not U R DUMB but "actually, this topic has been studied very, very extensively - and here's the findings". (Yes, for each one of these honest questions there will be 100 trolls. I don't know what to do about that either.)
I think this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=341Lv8JLLV4 makes a decent effort at pointing out which statements in "Ancient Apocalypse" are insufficiently supported by evidence, and what are the known unknowns of relevant archeology. Unfortunately it's also a bit dry -- 2 hours of a guy speaking into a microphone.
"So tearing down is at least as good (or bad) in general as building up, since they are 2 sides of the same coin."
Your statement begs for a fitting aphorism: Cutting down a tree is a whole lot easier than putting it back together. Does this mean we can never cut down a tree? Of course not. Just that it's hubristically reckless to equate the two.
Humanity (on behalf of the vulnerable) has struggled way too diligently and collectively, bending the long, moral arc of the universe toward justice through imperfect, evolving institutions (such as democracy itself); we can't afford to be sanguine in the face of bros like Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Donald Trump, so flippantly eager to toss all this fragile progress into the trashbin, ostensibly for creative "disruption," but their willingness to dismiss/ignore history itself (such as the Mueller Report) is fueled mainly by their unchecked egos, and then bolstered blindly by cesspools of capitalism such as Fox News, today's version of Father Coughlin.
If someone wants to believe FDR steered us too deeply into socialism or whatever, fine. But this is a debate for the marketplace of ideas. It's not a legitimate excuse for casually toppling structures you declare unhelpful. Our social contract (not to mention our Constitution) cannot abide self-proclaimed saviors who find insurrections amusing and think fraud is a legitimate political tactic.
Scott, you are deservedly pissed about this. Frankly, so am I. I was on the fence about Ivermectin. You were not, but you were also determined to give Ivermectin a fair shake. And in so doing, you further convinced yourself and also talked me down off the fence.
Kavanagh says that we are both idiots; you for entertaining the question and me for being on the fence in the first place.
So, to paraphrase Ken White of Popehat, in response to Kavanagh, I say:
"First, fuck you."
As always, Scott, a pleasure to read you.
Just to add to the pile of interesting case studies, I was thinking about the recent UAP controversy last night. I think there’s an interesting parallel to the situation you describe regarding underwater pyramids.
This is obviously classic skeptic territory, and I think a still generally valid account is something like: “Your prior that extraterrestrials have visited earth and have entirely escaped notice *except once by accident by bystanders with relatively primitive technology* should be low enough that even a combination of several improbable mutually reinforcing events is still more likely to be coincidence after updating.”
But even so, if the events are multiple and mutually reinforcing enough, it’s enough to at least be curious enough to look into what the heck is going on, right?
Enter the USS Nimitz incident. Like Bem’s Psi research, it seems made to clear your evidentiary bars:
--Readings from multiple independent instruments (radar and FLIR camera)
--sudden, natural/human-technology implausible movements
--Eyewitness Reports from four people across two naval aircraft, corroborating one another for an observation period of about 5 minutes (!)
--Confirmed authenticity by the Pentagon, which added, they are "part of a larger issue of an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years"
Most of these end up kind of falling apart under closer scrutiny, but you can’t know that from the outset.
How do we assess the expert consensus on this matter?
Astronomers if asked will probably give you something like the reasoning I started with, which we’ve priced in already, and typically don’t spend a lot of time on the particulars, being that they aren’t privy to all the relevant information and I suspect are tired about getting asked about this sort of stuff. You can say that Adam Frank’s NYT piece gives you basically the right interpretation of the evidence, but it’s pretty easy to suspect that this is cope.
As far as I know, there isn’t a climate-change-esque study on consensus opinion on alien visitation (the best I could find was the Wiki on the Fermi paradox, which says “The consensus scientific view is that although they may be unexplained, they do not rise to the level of convincing evidence” but then cites an article that doesn’t actually prove that this is a consensus view) There seems to be some consensus that extraterrestrial life existing is likely, and per SETI:
“From the Report of the Astronomy Survey Committee, National Academy of Sciences, 1972: ‘More and more scientists feel that contact with other civilizations is no longer something beyond our dreams but a natural event in the history of mankind that will perhaps occur in the lifetime of many of us ... In the long run, this may be one of science’s most important and most profound contributions to mankind and to our civilization.’”
As for the people who have the most direct knowledge of the incidents, US Defense agencies, they are overall famously tight-lipped about the whole affair, given national security concerns, and the statements they do make can be kremlinologized in a variety of ways. Meanwhile, the people substantially running these programs and conducting research specifically in this area, like Chris Mellon, Lue Elizondo and Avi Loeb (along with Tom DeLonge, for some reason) are sounding the alarm about this and calling for more thorough UAP research.
The media, the conduit to the experts for the hoi polloi, for their part expressed their share of hedging and credulity, perhaps most notably on the 60 Minutes episodes, which featured interviews with Nimitz eyewitnesses. Plenty of popular podcasters hop on the hype train too, of course, notably for Kavanagh’s beat JRE, Sam Harris, and the Weinsteins.
Hm. Maybe there’s something to this after all?
Meanwhile, who is really doing the hard work of documenting evidence, picking apart all the threads of the Nimitz incidents, critically interviewing participants, and even making physical models and simulations (!) to test whether a faraway plane’s IR signature might look like a tic tac? As you might expect, it turns out to be a community centered around…the guy who programmed Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater?
Mick West (and the associated community at Metabunk) is a really good example of how a technically inclined but basically dilettantish person with a lot of free time (AFAIK, West is not a credentialed expert on aeronautics, military technology, astronomy, photography, etc…) can make real research contributions to questions that really do need answers and provide a valuable public service in doing so. I don’t see a ton of daylight between a lot of the work at Metabunk and the spirit of Scott’s posts on Ivermectin.
…I guess what I’m saying is that in hindsight a lot of this uptake in UAP was probably Chinese spy balloons.
Late to this, but I was also quite persuaded by Fingerprints of the Gods as a teenager and it took me a while to find the holes all on my own, no one ever explained more than 'because it's stupid,' so I try to make more of a presumption of good faith on seemingly-ridiculous beliefs, or at least an assumption of social pressure or the like.
It did lead me to things like Hamlet's Mill, which while also having an overarching bullshit conclusion is full of interesting tales, which in turn led me to things like the Kalevala and the Hero with A Thousand Faces. So, mixed bag!
I mostly agree with this article, but there is one point which I can object to a little bit.
Even if we don't know why giant underwater pyramids are there. That doesn't mean that Atlantis existed. Nor does it mean that aliens built them, nor does it mean that god built them. Nor does it mean that a society of some other intelligent species built them.
Well, I read/listen to you both. I agree with your argument and Chris seemed to be trolling more than trying to get at some truth. But I agree with Chris mostly about B. W. I can't wade through what I perceive as his Trump-like narcissism enough to feel like I can learn anything from him.
Maybe Erik Hoel got it right in his review of The Dawn of Everything.
Twitter is high school and Kavanagh is a Mean Girl.
He is making a social argument, not an intellectual one. The best people know this to be true, you fool, you fool. Maureen Dowd is even making jokes about it, dude, how much more evidence do you need?
Ho ho, Scott, weren't you were a silly young fellow to believe in Atlantis!
Just kidding - as a teen I read Chariots Of The Gods and even went to hear Erik Von Daniken speak.
Perhaps there's something in young men that needs a cause like this.
> It sounds kind of like fideism, the belief (more common in atheists’ imaginations than real religion) that somebody who reasons their way to belief in God is a sinner, because a real saint would have believed through blind faith, without having to reason.
Scott, thank you for pointing out that the notion of fideism and "blind faith" is an atheist strawman not found in actual religious thought. I have some thoughts on the subject, of why faith is in fact an integral part of everybody's life, even non-religious individuals, but it's too big to put in a comment so I made it into a response post.
https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/on-faith-and-action?sd=pf
Curious to hear your take on PMDD.
I'm going to stick my neck out on this one and say that Scott is even more right than he knows. I think we should definitely question the Holocaust.
Now put the pitchforks down and please notice I didn't say "deny". My point is this: I have been an astronomy buff since I was a kid, but I still remember the wrenching feeling when, at age 23, I first looked down a telescope and saw the rings of Saturn for myself. It's hard to put into words, but it was something like "Oh my god, it's all real."
I had a similar experience, though much less pleasant, when I read "Lying about Hitler", Evans account of the David Irving trial. Again, I'd grown up - like most of us - with the Holocaust as the great morality tale, about what happens if we let bad people be bad (insert the Cartman clip from South Park, which nails this approach). Anyway, when I read Evans carefully laying out the evidence page by page I had the same wrenching experience, except much more Lovecraftian - opening up a universe of horror.
I suspect that most people operate in a similar state of unreality about the Holocaust and so much else, which is why we are drowning in asinine Hitler analogies (or communist analogies, from the right). For most people, who haven't seen the evidence, the Holocaust has about as much 'reality' as the destruction of Alderaan. Since then I've concluded it is always, always worth going and checking the evidence for things pretty well established that you think you know - to make sure that you do, in fact, know them.
Scott -
I doubt that you'll see this, but I think it's a problem when everyone doesn't take pains to be sure they're accurately characterizing their interlocutor's viewpoint.
Here I discuss your discipline in that regard with Andrew Gelman (and others) on his post about your Ivermectin piece:
https://t.co/hjeqmmlALN
.
"When experts have strong opinions on something, this is a good opportunity to practice your opinion-forming skills, see whether you get the same result as the experts, and, if not, figure out where you went wrong."
Or where they did. Consider the case of Barry Marshall.
> "The ONLY reason you could ever believe it is because you’re a racist who thinks brown people couldn’t have built civilizations on their own.”
This gets at an important aspect of conspiracism to which many "rationalists" are vulnerable. It's objectively true that there's a moderate cognitive tension between (a) the received Western "common sense" that Europeans came to dominate the globe because they were better at making advanced civilization (probably because of their higher genetic IQ, come on, it's not PC to say so but everyone knows it), and (b) the fact that a millennium or two ago, brown people were building mountains and temple complexes and breeding corn and potatoes while Europeans were languishing in dark ages (again, the eggheads get mad when you say this but, come on).
Obviously that doesn't mean this single factor is why every Atlantis theorist believes Atlantis theory, but it stands to reason that this tension makes it slightly more tempting to imagine that all these non-European ancient civilizations were just copying something else, and marginally increases the number of people weaving hypotheses and writing books about Atlantis theory. So, a good Bayesian should see this argument as evidence that many white Western people are motivated to overstate and lend excessive credence to evidence for Atlantis theory.
However, if you try to explain this to a white Atlantis theorist—ironically, especially one who prides himself on his rationality—he will often take so much offense at the suggestion that his culture's subconscious biases have anything to do with his individual reasoning in this case that he'll uncharitably caricature your explanation just as Scott does in the quoted line, and the explanation will backfire. Thus, an explanation with positive *explanatory* value has negative *persuasive* value—and identifying as a "rationalist" is a risk factor, because the "rationalist" community is for whatever reason happy to admit to and fight individual cognitive biases but considers it uncool to do so for culturally pervasive ones.
Scott, what is your expertise? Readers who don't have sufficient expertise in the domain of interest, really have no way of knowing whether you know what you're talking about.
For instance, I'm a self-esteem researcher. If I saw some substack article who has no PhD in psychology (i.e., years of systematic research training & experience) making contrarian claims about self-esteem, I would find it easy to dismiss whatever they claim. That's because I have a deep knowledge of the literature and issues! What about the regular reader who is simply a fan of the of the substack writer? Not a chance in hell they could know otherwise. They basically take the writer's claims and ostensible analysis on faith.
"Doing your own research" is arrogant and misguided. If you spent 4-6 years studying a research field in a systematic way, guided by mentors, having your research constructively criticized by peers, and having publications along the way, then you have a leg to stand on. Even then, if you want to make claims about the research, you need it to be evaluated ~within the community of expertise~. Substack bypasses all that. Readers who are not experts have practically zero basis to evaluate your claims or arguments. In truth, they need to accept much of what you say on faith.
So much this.
It's like when I saw a 2-hour documentary skeptical that there was a very large holocaust. I went looking for counterarguments and mostly just found people saying "oh those horrible antisemitic people!"
Eventually I did find the counterarguments, but on a web site *dripping with hatred for the people arguing against the holocaust*. Geez, I thought, this is not how you convince someone.
I forgot to mention, and it seems editing is only allowed briefly now - there was no sign of antisemitism in the video, so the whole "antisemitism" argument fell flat. Anyway most ACXers already understand that it's more important to argue against the claims than the people making them.
Very, very few people reason like you (and many others here) do. These tactics are common for a reason (several reasons, really).
If the tactics worked, wouldn't everyone accept SJW-style views, and AGW, and the severity of the Holocaust?
I don't think he wasn't hating on them as a tactic. He just hated them.
I think that these emotional approaches are (often?) unconscious tactics. That is, that they have some underlying reason for their approach, even if they don’t know what it is.
For instance, derision can be an *extremely* successful approach to get people to believe what you want, at least in certain situations. It was not effective on you in that situation, but it may be effective on others.
The case of Dr. John Campbell[1] is probably illustrative. I saw one of his videos a couple of years ago, and noted that he said a lot of correct things, plus a few things that were questionable, or raised red flags for me but not for him. He seems to me like an average doctor with average intelligence, trying his best to understand what's going on, but getting a few things wrong.
And when he gets something wrong, how do people react? I'm not sure. I bet some were nice and tried to gently correct his misinformation, but this is the internet, so I bet others were mean and flippant, while still others might have responded with misinformation of their own coming from a different political orientation. And what will an *average person* do with this mixture of incoming messages? Probably he will listen more to the nice ones, at least at first, especially if they are backed up by charts and data he could use on his channel ... and the mean ones are likely to make him more skeptical of whatever counter-narrative they push.
So it's sad how mean and flippant people usually are when they "correct misinformation".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGmRwQ4TZc4
"Either these people didn’t understand the arguments for and against Atlantis, or they did. If they didn’t, they were frauds, claiming expertise in a subject they knew nothing about. If they did, then at any moment they could have saved me from a five year wild-goose-chase - but chose not to, because it was more fun to insult me."
Well said.
Kavanagh's reasoning seems to me to be in line with the tendency in the media to circle the wagons in defense of experts and mainstream science, part of which strategy is to dismiss anything perceived as questioning that consensus out of hand. This approach strikes me as deeply misguided in the current info ecosystem. I am thinking of Gurri's "Revolt of the Public"- it used to be that elites could declare something to be correct or taboo, and there weren't any ways for non-elites to get any other messages out in the open. So the circling-the-wagons strategy worked reasonably well. Nowadays if you try to shut other views down, people go off and create their own bubbles.
This is why I take a pretty extreme stance on engaging with weird, and even horrible, views. I think smart, informed people should engage with the arguments of, for example, white supremacists. Ignoring them or denouncing them does not make these views go away, but feeds into the story that elites are seeking to suppress any dissenting views.
"When I tried reviewing ivermectin, I said - here’s a case where the experts have spoken with unusual unanimity about which side is right."
Uhm, what?
As far as im aware, US experts as embodied by its health institutions, still have not taken a stance and hide behind deflections such as 'you shouldnt take horse dewormer' and more garden variety generalisms such as 'you should not take drugs for purposes which we have not evaluated'. To what extent have they actually taken a positive stance against ivm?
Insofar as experts have taken a stance; it has been approved for the treatment of covid, in a majority of countries around the world.