Say that when people have covid plus some other disease at the same time, even if the other disease is not deadly, merely treating the other disease can reduce mortality, because the organism has less of an overall burden.
Wait until everyone nods.
Then add: Of course that might seem statistically like the other cure is "curing covid", right? So just to be sure, before you make a public announcement, please also test the cure on people who have only covid and nothing else.
> Somebody was proposing a hypothesis. And then somebody was like, "I think clearly Baumol disease is because of Y." Somebody was responding with, "That clearly is not true because of all of this evidence." The other person was like, "No, that doesn't really check out. I still think my original hypothesis [is correct]." Then the [second] person was like, "I don't know, man, here's some additional evidence." And then... the first commenter responded and was just like, "Shit, you're right. I was wrong."
> And I remember reading this. I wasn't that old, like 15 or 16 or something. But I remember reading this and just writing to one of my friends on Skype at the time in ALL CAPS, being like, "What the fuck man, I just saw someone change their mind on the internet!" And just being like, the thing that I had observed in that comment thread was drastically different than the thing that I had observed in all other online forums [up to that] time. It's just a playbook that I had expected and I'd seen play out already by the time, like hundreds of times, maybe even thousands of times: [if] you have two commenters on the internet, getting more heated and angry at each other, both trying to defend, [some position] that they have some reason to hold, it is never the case that it ends up with one person being like, "Oh, I was wrong. You're right."
> And that was huge. It's not the case that there aren't other places [like that] on the internet, the internet is huge these days. And there's lots of subreddits that also are capable of people saying that they changed their mind. But it continues to be a very, very small fraction of the internet. And I think it, like, does demonstrate today something substantially different going on.
Your observation makes the situation look a little worse than it really is. One of the things my father told me was that the purpose of an argument was not to convince someone but to give him the arguments with which he might later convince himself.
I think the argument is that the quoted populations are the people who are especially susceptible to Fox News' message, not the entirety of their viewer body.
In other words, they are what they are in large part because they watched Fox News, rather than choosing to watch Fox News because of what they are.
You're very persistent in linking your own blog in comments on this substack, often with little discernible connection to the topic at hand. I have some critical feedback, assuming that it is welcomed:
> It seems it started in 2016 with their capture by the Bernie Bros contingent. It wasn't Senator Sanders' ideas (Denmark is happier than the United States; if it was politically possible, we would gladly support those ideas). Rather, it was the anti-Clinton and then anti-establishment posts. Then it morphed into acceptance of more and more "everyone is out to get me and my small group who know the truth" conspiracies. (I wrote this last year in an obviously unsuccessful attempt to influence them.)
This paragraph seems to go out of its way to confuse with pronouns. "It seems it started ..." What does "it" refer to? The opening paragraph has as subjects "a friend", "their feed", and "they". I'm guessing "it" is a change in "their" posting behavior.
When you mention "their capture by the Bernie Bros contingent" it is hard to discern what "their" refers to. The posts themselves? Your singular friend?
In the parenthetical about Denmark, which reads somewhat as non sequitur, who is "we", kemo sabe? Bernie Bros? You and your friend? All of America?
Before the parenthetical, you say "It wasn't ... ideas." Then "It was ... the posts". It seems to me that these two "its" cannot possibly refer to the same thing. Who is making the anti-xyz posts you're referring to? It's a struggle to follow along.
Ivor Cummins just did a 43 minute video on determining Conspiracy Theories vs Actual Conspiracies. He has a 6 point list of requirements for something to be an actual conspiracy.
I think both of you should be citing evidence, although I think primarily it's on you to explain why we should take this person seriously enough to watch a 43 minute video.
He takes his six criteria for "Is this a conspiracy or a conspiracy theory" and applies them to various things, e.g. 9/11 Truther. He explains how smart people can get tricked into falling for a conspiracy theory.
That's not really "citing evidence." That's just a summary of the video.
I watched part of it, and while the 6 criteria aren't obviously unreasonable, it's never demonstrated what makes them better than some other set of criteria.
Props to you for giving material to support you PoV . But upon investigating it looks unconvincing. That blogger seemed biased against Cummins and mostly parroting official narrative.
P.s. i have no big stake either way. Except maybe my inherent bias against sources proven to be consistently and purposefully lying.
Cummins from his deleted tweets feels like he is consistent in his position he holds now( e.g. that COVID is a variant of respiratory infection very similar to flu)
"Parroting official narrative" -- did you read the Scottpost?
Sure, it seems likely that COVID will eventually become similar to the flu; killing your host is often a bad strategy for a parasite, but that's not the point of contention here.
The consistency of his positions, which is questionable given his deletions, also isn't the point of contention. The point was about his predictions. From the linked blogpost: "By the end of December, the UK had 8 people per million dying of COVID-19 each day, four times what Cummins predicted. This rose in January to a peak of 18 per million, nine times higher."
There's a mistaken belief that COVID seemed to super-charge that pathogens (or in some cases respiratory pathogens) evolve towards lower virulence, but that's not necessarily true. The normal view is that the evolution of virulence involves trade-offs between mechanisms of reproduction and transmission and host survival. Pathogens can become even more virulent over time if the fitness conditions favor that, which it easily can.
People looking for reassurance that COVID is on its way to becoming harmless spread this myth about viral evolution that has really stuck among people. I unfortunately often see it expressed with a sort of professorial condescension even though it's totally misinformed and wrong.
I said Cummins had a terrible predictive track record. Either he made multiple predictions falsified by reality or he didn't. The blogger in question could have hated Cummins since they fought each other on a playground as children and that would not change anything. Pointing out that Cummins was repeatedly wrong does not make one dismissable as "biased".
> Except maybe my inherent bias against sources proven to be consistently and purposefully lying.
Was the specific source I linked to one that you know of having lied? What makes you think Christopher Snowdon is less honest than Cummins?
If you're looking for cheap heuristics, discounting anybody who in this day and age uses "sheeple" unironically probably works pretty well. (Even if he used it on the side that I'd otherwise support.)
That's a weird distinction to draw. In the context of, say, medicine, "Medicinal Theory vs Actual Medicine" would not really make sense - they're not opposing or contradictory concepts. Medicinal Theory doesn't mean "False Medicine," so the difference in those two concepts is not in their veracity but the fact that one refers to a theory (which may or may not be true) while another refers to a theory that has been confirmed.
The more I read Scott's writing about this, the more I become convinced that there simply is no natural category of "conspiracy theories." There are simply theories, with better or worse epistemic support.
Yes, some of those theories have extremely bad epistemic support, and we should certainly learn to identify and reject them. But that's not primarily by categorization, i.e., dropping them into a category labeled "conspiracy theories." Rather, it's by applying epistemic criteria to the content of the theories.
I half agree. I think a key feature of a "conspiracy theory" is the element of a conspiracy. Some people are acting badly in secret, or hiding a truth for malign purposes.
To the extent a person can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories, key features are
1. A strong belief in Conflict Theory rather than Mistake Theory as a major driver of bad outcomes in the world.
2. A high estimation (often extreme overestimation) of large numbers of peoples' abilities to keep secrets.
3. A tendency to think of elites as their own distinct class, rather than people like themselves who happen to hold positions of authority.
I do think that if you don't hold these beliefs (especially 2), you will correctly reject lots of conspiracy theories and very few correct theories. Hence, it's useful to call some things "conspiracy theories" and give them short shrift.
Is Ivermectin a conspiracy theory though? Not necessarily, even if some Ivermectin proponents have fallen pray to conspiratorial secondary theories about the medical establishment. I think, some of what Scott is calling "conspiracy theories" are more like offbeat theories. Theories that hold the experts are wrong but not evil.
1) As you note, many advocates of Ivermectin are not claiming a "conspiracy" in the stronger sense that you outline.
2) In matters concerning politically charged government actions, especially those involving intelligence agencies, it's not clear that the elements you outline could not be part of a rationally held mental model.
Want to hear my 9/11 conspiracy theory? A group of nineteen Arab hijackers trained and supported by Al Qaeda conspired to hijack and fly planes into buildings. This is clearly a conspiracy theory, it says so right there.
Meanwhile, "Atlantis existed but archeologists are too stupid to notice" isn't a conspiracy theory at all.
It's true that many dumb theories do involve conspiracies (since you can easily explain away any counterevidence you like if you posit the existence of a massive conspiracy to fabricate counterevidence) but not all do, and not all theories involving conspiracies are wrong.
Let's just stop using "conspiracy theory" as shorthand for "dumb weird fringe theory poorly supported by evidence and believed only by kooks".
You both raise very good arguments that made me think. Let me clarify what I'm thinking by example. When it comes to 9/11, I believe the 19 Al Qaedas conspiracy theory but I reject out of hand the theory (rare in the US but popular in parts of the world) that 4,000 Jews received phone calls warning them not to go to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11. If 4,000 anybodies had received warning phone calls the night before, these people would warn their coworkers, word would spread through the city, and the next morning the building would be empty and the story of the mystery phone calls would be in the NY Times.
A while back I looked up the original Marjorie Taylor Greene post about "Jewish space lasers". The press focussed on the ambiguously anti-semitic part (it's some Rothschild linked company that supposedly has the lasers), but basically the whole thing is a long babbling series of associations that ultimately presumes that corporations have secret satellites that can collect solar energy and shoot energy beams and that it would be normal for such companies to create deadly wildfires in order to clear a path for a high-speed rail. The fires aren't even in the path of the planned rail but that's not the point. MTG thinks we live in a would where companies have secret sci-fi satellites and directly murder lots of Americans to reduce the price they'll pay for land or whatever.
My point here isn't that no conspiracies ever exist. Small numbers of criminals and terrorists and perhaps larger numbers of intelligence agency employees can certainly launch conspiracies. There's grey areas of plausibility (did the FSB blow up apartment buildings to justify the Chechen war, could the CIA have murdered Epstein in his jail cell)? But the Alex Joneses and MTGs of the world keep getting enormous amounts of stuff wrong, and it is always in the direction of far too many people keeping secrets and elites being far more psychotically evil than they actually are. They just have a stilted view of the world that means they get things wrong over and over. That's what I mean by conspiracy theories.
Regardless of all else, I agree with Scott that even if you are arguing with someone who believes in 4,000 Jews with space lasers or whatever, you'll get farthest by making calm factual arguments instead of declaring your opponent to be beneath you.
You've done the work that I would ask in debunking a conspiracy theory in a great way. When I, and I assume people like me (and Scott's point in writing these articles) ask for reasons to not consider a theory valid, it doesn't have to be hard. I never looked into the Jewish Space Lasers conspiracy, but had I heard about it and lacked any context to determine falsehood. A simple explanation like yours can go a long way. Not that I trust MTG, but I trust the typical media response to her very little as well. So them saying "she's an anti-Semite who believes in Jewish Space Lasers" I typically feel like I'm just missing information. If I heard that information from MTG, the chances that I (in a hypothetical sense, I know enough about her specifically to avoid it) believe it goes up. If I hear some stupid reply meant to call believers stupid, with no detail, then that doesn't have the intended effect of balancing MTG, it just tells me that they consider MTG a cultural enemy.
Now we get to the issue with using that terminology. By using "conspiracy theory" as shorthand for "stupid, crazy, insane theory that only lunatics believe," you are implanting a mind virus into roughly half the population - because when they hear about the "Small numbers of criminals and terrorists and perhaps larger numbers of intelligence agency employees"-type occurrences, they think "Hey, I've seen that type of claim before - CONSPIRACY THEORY!!! RED ALERT!!!"
It shouldn't be surprising that using a generic term to refer only to a subset of things covered by that term could lead to those connotations spilling over outside of that subset.
Of course, the reason why some people continue to do this is precisely because they want those connotations to spill over - they want a term they can use to cover up any allegations of bad behavior between two or more people. But those who actually care about having true beliefs should stop doing this.
I'm not sure how I feel about the usage of the term conspiracy theory in general; it does seem to best apply to theories that presume impossibly large/powerful/successful conspiracies and we tend to also use it to describe other theories that are just dumb in general.
However, the last paragraph in that comment there also seems to be positing a conspiracy that also seems implausible. While there is possibly an /extremely small/ number of people who intentionally overuse the term conspiracy theory so that one day they might have an easier time convincing the public that they or someone else is innocent of a real conspiracy, there is almost no way they could have any significant effect on the general usage of English around the world.
**But maybe there is a conspiracy among, say, journalists who secretly meet and discuss intentionally overusing this term so they can rescue their favorite politicians later, and they might have the power to actually influence the language if there were enough of them... and here we've gone full circle.
“ Let's just stop using "conspiracy theory" as shorthand for "dumb weird fringe theory poorly supported by evidence and believed only by kooks".”
I agree. We’ve lumped at least 3 things together:
1) theories about actual conspiracies where groups conspire to secretly commit nefarious acts
2) “pseudoscientific” or contrarian scientific theories (flat earth, cold fusion)
3) alternative history (Atlantis, Holocaust denial)
Of course there’s some bleed over. “Ivermectin is an effective drug against COVID” is type 2, but “the government is suppressing knowledge of Ivermectin effectiveness to enrich Big Pharma” is type 1.
All 3 can sometimes be true, and all 3 can have cases that are really hard to distinguish from correct theories even if they are false.
But flat earth is impossible without a conspiracy? There are people who claim to have personally seen Earth from afar, to have moved at great speed around it and that it has the shape of a sphere. For flat earth to be true they must form part of a conspiracy. Likewise, if Holocaust is a fabrication, someone must have fabricated it.
But that's not the central aspect of the theory. Perhaps a logical consequence of the theory is that a conspiracy would be required for it to be true, but it's odd to frame that as the defining characteristic of a theory like flat earth, as opposed to something that's directly defined by being a conspiracy, like JFK. I presume they do this to smuggle the negative connotations from one to another.
I think it's also important to call out the category of "theories involving a bunch of people independently (but not universally) deciding that it's in their best interests to behave a certain way, to the detriment of the public". There's no reason to label that a "conspiracy theory" except to discredit it for ideological reasons.
E. g. being antivax not because you believe something about the biological properties of the vaccine in question, but only because The Other Tribe strongly supports it and we can’t have anything in common with them? And if asked why, respond with some half-baked argument about the biological properties?
Doesn't that cut both ways? If one or more vaccines turn out to have caused significant side effects, are the pro-vaxxers not going to be accused of doing the same thing?
As a specific example "the vaccine stops transmission" was a widely expressed view by the pro-vaccine side, even after that was shown to be untrue (it lowered transmission for a few months, but not by enough to prevent society-wide spread similar to without the vaccine).
One obvious example was mentioned by Scott in this post. Lots of people treat the idea that average IQ varies by race as a nutty idea, even though a majority of the relevant experts think it is probably true. The reason is not that those people are in a conspiracy, it is that they think belief in that idea, even if true, has bad consequences.
Many of them likely are in a conspiracy. If a bunch of academic journal editors meet up and discuss how they should all reject any papers associated with race and intelligence, that is a conspiracy.
> 2. A high estimation (often extreme overestimation) of large numbers of peoples' abilities to keep secrets.
If the payoff is large enough and/or the cost sufficiently small, you will always have someone 'spilling beans'. Just take a look at how many Satoshis we have and how many people 'worked with Aliens' in their time in the US military. Hell, in the worst case, just quote an anonymous source, it's not like reputable journalists don't do this.
Lastly, people are not that bad at keeping secrets, either. If you manage things on a need-to-know-basis and stamp the occasional whistle-blower as a nut job you can get pretty far. Just look how long it took for the NSA surveillance to actually get leaked, even though we know now that thousands of people knew for years.
Also people into Pizzagate/Epstein theory point out to Instagram posts and leaked emails and children's testimonies and mentions dating back to 2008, so conspiracy theories don't rely on *nobody spilling the beans*, but on *no one would notice if they did*.
I thought about the NSA example but my impression is that while Snowden leaked the details, it was pretty widely known that the NSA was engaged in mass electronic surveillance of some sort. I remember my friends in high school (pre-9/11 this was funny) joking about sending e-mails with lots of terrorism-related keywords to waste the NSA's time.
The cover-up that genuinely impressed me was how many people knew valuable details about the D-Day landing that would have been valuable to the Germans, but that was a time when control of communication was much greater.
One of my favorite conspiracy theories is that Pfizer shut down its vaccine trial from late October 2020 until the day after the Election, putting all new samples into cold storage.
In fact, that's not a secret: the Pfizer executive in charge of vaccine development, William Gruber, told Stat News that's what Pfizer did on November 9, 2020, the day the success of the clinical trial was announced, much to reporter Matthew Herper's astonishment.
But, even though that's part of the public record, nobody cares.
So, while Pfizer delaying the announcement of its vaccine's efficacy until after the election might be a small-c conspiracy theory, it's not a Conspiracy Theory. Capital-C Conspiracy Theories have to appeal to a substantial number of people. There are lots of Conspiracy Theories about Pfizer and its vaccine, but the most plausible one doesn't qualify because practically nobody has even heard of it.
"Gruber said that Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October that they wanted to drop the 32-case interim analysis. At that time, the companies decided to stop having their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study, instead leaving samples in storage. The FDA was aware of this decision. Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday."
That they stopped the analysis is a true fact. Leaping from there to the inference that this was done to screw Trump is idiotic. The people who run Pfizer cared very little about who won the election, because it doesn't much affect their bottom line. On the other hand, they care very much indeed about that bottom line, and had they stuck to their original protocol, they would have been obliged by their agreement with the FDA to cut the trial short, because it had demonstrated its (unmabitious) primary endpoint, of more or less being better than nothing at slowing COVID.
What Pfizer *suspected* (correctly as it turned out), was that the vaccine would be much better than the primary endpoint goal -- which would of course translate into much more $$$ for Pfizer, Inc. -- but they could only prove that if they ran the trial all the way to the end. Had they continued their intermediate analysis, the protocol would call for cutting the trial short (so the control arm could get the vaccine), and then they would never have proof (except possibly after some laborious real-world study years later) that the vaccine was much better than they thought.
That's why they did it. As always, with business, and for that matter most smart people, it's not complicated psychology and hall of mirrors mechanism one needs to untangle, it's just about the benjamins. Adducing some ideological fetish that would have a Vice President of Pfizer throwing away potential $billions in future profit in order to see this schmo or that schmuck become President for a tiny part of the time over which he can expect to get handsome bonuses for a bountiful bottom line is massively overthinking things without using common sense, which is indeed the hallmark of the conspiracy theorist.
Pfizer thought through all the technical issues of their vaccine clinical trial during the summer of 2020 when they publicly published their protocol of when they would unblind results.
What they didn't count on was the political backlash from Democrats who were terrified of a successful vaccine turning out to be what the New York Times called Trump's "October surprise." Both Biden and Harris used their debates with Trump and Pence to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about a rushed Trump vaccine.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla consistently told Wall Street that he expected to have at least vaccine efficacy results to announce in late October 2020. So, analysts were shocked when he didn't mention the vaccine trial on the Pfizer earnings call of October 27, 2020. What we learned on 11/9/20 was that Pfizer had put their world-historical clinical trial in cold storage from late October until the day after the Election.
Here's my 2022 review of Bourla's memoir "Moonshot."
I was hoping he was going to offer an explanation for putting the "world's most important clinical trial" on hiatus, but instead he left the entire topic out of his autobiography. That suggests to me that he doesn't have an entirely innocent explanation that I'm overlooking.
Look, I sympathize with Bourla: he wanted to beat Moderna, which Pfizer did by a week, and he didn't want the Establishment (e.g., the likely next President, Joe Biden, the media, academia, the federal bureaucracy, etc.) to be outraged at Pfizer and its vaccine by providing Trump with his "October Surprise." He successfully threaded the needle. The Harvard B School should write up a case study of how he did it, with barely anybody even noticing his corner-cutting.
A good example of how long a secret can be kept is Bletchley Park.
The British decoding of German Enigma codes employed about 10,000 people at Bletchley Park during WWII, but it was unknown to the newspaper reading public until 1974 (with distorted tales of Ultra appearing in the press from about 1971 onward).
I've seen hints of the existence of Ultra in earlier books by insiders: e.g., Professor Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison's official history of the US Navy in WWII has one line about how U-Boat hunting in the Atlantic became so successful that it was almost as if somebody was reading the German codes. But I don't know that anybody who wasn't an insider got his joke until Stevenson's book a decade later.
Similarly, I would guess my father, a Lockheed engineer, visited Area 51 a number of times. (He often was off to work at Edwards AFB, and Area 51 was a more remote clone of Edwards.) But I never heard about it from him. My wife's uncle lived at Edwards for a couple of years and no doubt went to Area 51 as well. But he never talked about it.
Something I often tell people who believe conspiracy theories about covid vax (it kills millions but that's covered up, etc.) seems like a version of your (2) and (3), as I understand them: Scientists are not a club or a religious sect. They don't all know each other, and the don't all like and respect each other, and they're not particularly invested in presenting a united front. If a research team publishes a paper that looks suspicious, other scientists will request their raw data and go over what the team did with great, angry care. In fact they sometimes do that even when someone's results are not suspicious, driven by professional rivalry. And if they find something wrong with the research they will blow the whistle on the team and write letters to journal editors and the press about the matter. They also are not, as a group, all that bribable with money. They're not saints, but the currency that matters to them isn't Ben Franklins, it's being right, being smart, being in the forefront. If you keep in mind that this is what "the scientists" are like, it should be obvious that there is no way someone could get that whole bunch to agree to keep secret a body of data that shows the covid vax in fact kills many. many people.
"If you keep in mind that this is what "the scientists" are like, it should be obvious that there is no way someone could get that whole bunch to agree to keep secret a body of data that shows the covid vax in fact kills many. many people."
I don't believe there's a conspiracy to keep the COVID vax death toll secret. But is it possible to get a whole bunch of scientists to agree that men can be women any time they say so, or that socioeconomic discrepancies are entirely due to discrimination, or that Muslims do not commit disproportionate terrorist attacks? Make the punishment for unorthodox opinions heavy enough and almost all scientists will fold. You don't even need an authority to enforce the orthodoxy from the top down, because mutual denunciation and ostracism is enough. We're seeing this happen as we speak with woke ideology. As the woke say themselves, free speech does not mean speech without consequences. There's no a priori reason to believe that a similar pro-vax orthodoxy cannot be enforced, especially as anti-vax becomes synonymous with unwoke.
" But is it possible to get a whole bunch of scientists to agree that men can be women any time they say so."
Well what do you mean by agreeing that men can be women?(1) Do you mean scientists will literally say that male-to-female trans people are in every respect women -- XX chormosomes, able to have babies, etc.? I'm sure you do not mean that. (2) Do you mean that most scientists will say that if males want to do the hormones and surgery route and call themselves women, they do not object -- they consider it to a personal choice they have no say in? (3) Do you mean that scientists will say that the data indicate that M-to-F hormone and surgery transition is the best option for anyone with gender dysphoria -- that on average it leads to less suffering and a higher level of functioning?
Note that (1) and (3) are things regarding which scientists can analyze data and make statements about what's true and what's not . (2) is not -- it's an attitude. So let's look at (3), what doctors and mental health clinicians have to say about sexual transitioning. I'm a psychologist, and I can tell you that when my collegues and I talk about sexual transitioning as a solution to gender dysphoria we are skeptical regarding how great a solution it is. Regarding initiating sexual transitioning when someone's a teenager we are quite uneasy about it. The idea of beginning the transition with pre-pubescent kids horrifies most of us. It is also not difficult to find research regarding outcomes for people post-transition that indicate that post-transition people are not doing that great. The scientists who study gender dysphoria and gender change are not afraid to tell the truth about what they find. I have never been even mildly "punished" by my peers for my skepticism about sexual transitiioning as a successful treatment for these complexly unhappy folks, and virtually all my friends are liberal democrats.
I do not like wokesters any more than you do, but I'd like to see some evidence that they have kept scientists from doing research that might yield politically incorrect results regarding trans people, Muslim terrorism and inborn differences as a cause of poverty. You got any?
> I have never been even mildly "punished" by my peers for my skepticism
Have you ever *published* your opinions, or do you know someone who published something similar? Like, maybe the norm is that certain opinions are okay to have in private, but putting them on paper is what gets you in trouble.
If you imagine a world where 90% of psychologists are privately horrified of transitioning pre-pubescent kids, but 99% of psychological articles published in peer-review journals approve of it... that's more or less what some of the "conspiracy theorists" are saying.
I have never published anything about this -- I don't write articles. Have said it to patients, colleagues and acquaintances and not gotten bad reactions. I have said it online, but not in a setting where people have already committed to positions and are squatting in opposite ditches hurling pieces of fire and shit at each other. I mean, I am not angry about this issue in those conversations -- I'm not saying, "you fucking wokesters think you're more humane than anyone else, and actually you are coercive and cruel." I'm saying things like, "when I hear about a situation like this [say somebody's 11 year old going on puberty blockers] here is what I worry about." As regards the *science* of this, it is not difficult at all to find articles about the physical downsides and risks of puberty blockers. But of course that's not the main issue for most of us. The most disturbing thing is the idea of allowing a 10 year old's ideas about this matter to weigh so heavily in decisions that will have lifelong consequences. As a matter of fact, I have similar feelings when I see 16 year old gymnasts at the Olympics. Many years ago, probably at around the age of 6, the kid was gymnastics-crazy, as many little kids are, especially girls. And this one was very gifted. She dreamed of getting a gold medal at the Olympics, and the parents permitted her to live the life of an olympian in training for many years. She missed so much! Not to mention that for every girl who goes to the olympics there are thousands who devote their lives to trying and do not succeed. Many of them get seriously injured at some point, and occasionally one dies from a bad landing. I often mention this when people try to get me to watch the Olympics with them, and I actually get much more pushback for this idea than I do for my concerns about prepubescent transitioning. Nobody gets furious, but they say things like, "yeah, but the kid got to live out her dream," and look at me uneasily. I think they're thinking I have an unpleasant gift for finding the one weird downside of something wonderful.
Anyhow, endocrinologists are not shy about their data about the downside. As for the other downside -- letting a kid decide to take such a huge, life-altering course -- it is hard to research. You can interview and test kids along the way to get an idea of how things are going for them, and there are people doing that and publishing results, but you can't do anything remotely like an RCT. How would I back up my ideas if I were to write a book or an article about this topic? It would have to be pretty wide-ranging, right? I'd need to get data about how frequently 9 year olds express a wish to be the opposite gender -- how things work out for those who do not transition -- the fad side of gender diversity thinking -- similar fads -- measures of changing attitudes about parental authority, and the effect on kids of parents being permissive in certain ways. And then I'd have to pull it all together in one big long argument about how pre-puberty transition if rarely the best approach, and how people have come to think it is.
"Well what do you mean by agreeing that men can be women?"
I mean exactly that: they will say that trans-women are real women. If your objection is that this isn't a precise statement of fact but more of an attitude, you'd be right. However, pro-vax and anti-vax are both attitudes too. A medical professional would say "the vaccine is safe and you should take it", not "the risk of X type of adverse reaction within 2 months in population Y is Z%". It doesn't matter if every journal is filled with articles quantifying the risks of the COVID vaccine; if scientists are not allowed to adopt the attitude "the vaccine is dangerous and you should not take it", then the public would be led astray by following scientific consensus. I'll reiterate again that I don't think this has happened yet and I am pro-vax, but the more censorious the pro-vaccine side gets, the less credible they become.
"I'd like to see some evidence that they have kept scientists from doing research that might yield politically incorrect results regarding trans people, Muslim terrorism and inborn differences as a cause of poverty. You got any?"
"PLOS One explained that in response to “readers’ concerns,” they were seeking “further expert assessment on the study’s methodology and analyses.” If so, that’s fair enough. But in an unusual display of transparency, Brown added their own statement that their “community members” had been “expressing concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.”"
"It’s been an open secret for years that prestigious journals will often reject submissions that offend prevailing political orthodoxies—especially if they involve controversial aspects of human biology and behavior—no matter how scientifically sound the work might be. The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups."
"American geneticists now face an even more drastic form of censorship: exclusion from access to the data necessary to conduct analyses, let alone publish results. Case in point: the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbidden territory."
"However, the ethical authority appears to be gearing up to issue some form of punishment related to the case.
“I don’t see anywhere that ethical permission is sought to test the hypothesis if immigrants are over-represented in statistics on convicted rapists,” the body said. The scientists were also criticized for insufficient evaluation as they failed to indicate how their research should “reduce exclusion and improve integration.”"
"So let's look at (3), what doctors and mental health clinicians have to say about sexual transitioning. I'm a psychologist, and I can tell you that when my collegues and I talk about sexual transitioning as a solution to gender dysphoria we are skeptical regarding how great a solution it is. Regarding initiating sexual transitioning when someone's a teenager we are quite uneasy about it. The idea of beginning the transition with pre-pubescent kids horrifies most of us. It is also not difficult to find research regarding outcomes for people post-transition that indicate that post-transition people are not doing that great. The scientists who study gender dysphoria and gender change are not afraid to tell the truth about what they find. I have never been even mildly "punished" by my peers for my skepticism about sexual transitiioning as a successful treatment for these complexly unhappy folks, and virtually all my friends are liberal democrats."
Thank you for describing your experience. I'm surprised that your peers are so open-minded, but I guess practicing psychologists are not as rigidly constrained by orthodoxy as I thought, which gives me some hope for the future. I'm in academia, which is the wokest of the woke of the elite institutions. So are almost all scientists. As a scientist myself, I find it hard to imagine the courage it would take for a social scientist to even admit to taking an unwoke hypothesis seriously, let alone taking it seriously enough to do a study on it and publish the unwoke results. It reminds me of my childhood in an authoritarian country, where people who opposed the government definitely existed, but no official public statement from any high-profile individual or organization was ever anti-government. The atmosphere is exactly the same: hushed voices, doctrinal training sessions, obvious things that everyone knew but nobody admitted, an invitation to come "drink tea" with your friendly local authority if you ever questioned the orthodoxy.
A funny example of how it usually takes more than one whistleblower to get the truth out is that millions of people with three digit IQs remain utterly convinced that "Science has proven that race does not exist." Yet, in 2018 the superstar of population genetics, Harvard's David Reich, published a book saying that's not true and the New York Times published his essay saying that's not true.
But I almost never run into anybody online who says, "I used to believe that science had proved race doesn't exist, but then I read this top Harvard scientist in the New York Times saying that wasn't true, so I changed my mind." As far as I can tell, almost everybody who paid attention to Reich already agreed with what he had to say, and huge numbers of people who think of themselves as intellectuals who know that science proves races does not exist paid no heed whatsoever.
The funniest example was when journalist Angela Saini went to interview Reich for her book about how science had proven race does not exist and he flat out told her the thesis of her book was wrong. As far as I can tell, that just proved to her how pervasive the menace of racist pseudoscience was even at Harvard.
Was curious how hard it was to find someone saying online that Muslims commit a disproportionate number of terrorist attacks. It is definitely not difficult. Found 2 in 30 secs. Here's the ACLU: "While terrorism — even in the form of suicide attacks -- is not an Islamic phenomenon by defini tion, it cannot be ignored that the lion's share of terrorist acts and the most devastating of them in recent years have been perpetrated in the name of Islam." https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/ACLURM001331.pdf
Here's another: " According to Nesser (2018), Islamist terrorism (the focus of the present study) is the most prominent type of international terrorism. Islamism can generally be described as a set of ideologies and its proponents usually perceive specific political, legal and social aspects of other cultures and religions as incompatible with Islam (Eikmeier, 2007;)." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1464884921990223#bibr29-1464884921990223
Only glanced at both articles, but gist of what they were saying seemed to be that radical Islam is sort of like the form of Christianity that leads people to blow up abortion clinics, etc. -- i.e., that there's a subgroup of Muslims who are nutso killer fanatics, but that the religion itself is no more compatible with terrorism than the religions people are used to in America. That sounds fair to me.
Of course I agree that wokeism exists but it doesn't seem to me that it is hard to find researchers who are willing to state the facts you think of as unsayable.
>But is it possible to get a whole bunch of scientists to agree that [...] that socioeconomic discrepancies are entirely due to discrimination
Empirically, no (or at least it's extraordinarily difficult). I know this because the woke left has been trying for decades to engineer a scientific consensus on this issue, and yet it's next-to-impossible to find a scientist in the relevant fields who will actually say, in words, that this is true. I've spent a lot of time searching, and the most I've been able to find is scientists who will that the evidence is inconclusive and purely discrimination-based explanations can't be ruled out yet.
To my understanding and memory, ivermectin was being widely considered (worldwide) as a potential treatment for COVID at the same time the public media was denouncing it as horse paste and calling anyone trying it idiots. You don't need the scientists actually studying something to agree with each other, if the press is willing to pick a unified direction. There were real scientists trying to get the message out about alternate treatments and the dangers of lockdowns, but they were often stifled in very authoritarian ways. That's why so many people are interested in the Twitter Files - looking for evidence about when and why these actual scientists were denied the ability to share their thoughts. Not every dissenting opinion turned out to be correct, but a lot of stifled dissenting opinions have been verified now.
It was a literal conspiracy involving government forces, social media, and the press that shut down certain speakers if they wanted to talk about theories. That this happened to real scientists who have since been proven correct on at least some of the things they were trying to say is known to be true.
Yes, the Great Barrington Declaration was signed by many healthcare professionals and yet the media managed to completely discredit them. It was clear that it wasn't just that the public sentiment went this way, there were some strong forces working to discredit it.
The part about covid response is mostly negative. If you open the sources, you can see how he is being criticized for things that have turned out correct (for example, Cochrane report about masks).
Somehow, I have started to see a pattern. Take any distinguished scientist, physician or public health reporter with good credentials before pandemic, and suddenly they all are bad during covid response? Some of them made mistakes but wouldn't you think that they made mistakes in the past too? It is as if there is whole campaign to discredit any critics of lockdown policy.
The Great Barrington declaration hinged on two things: herd immunity and focused protection of the vulnerable. One turned out not to be possible, and the other was pretty obviously impossible at the time: There was and is no way to keep Covid out of nursing homes when it's circulating at high levels in the general population, let alone protecting the elderly not in nursing homes, immunocompromised, etc.
GBD authors and signatories also became pretty famous for declaring that cases were in their final decline just ahead of the next surge. E.g., Jay Bhattacharya saying "The emergency phase of the disease is over" and "we protected the vulnerable" right before the delta wave killed another quarter million Americans. (A GBD supporter asserting the end of the pandemic right before a wave became such a familiar occurrence that one researcher called it the Gupta Predictor, after author Sunetra Gupta.)
In general, the contrarian case on Covid represented by the GBD was rarely "it's going to kill a million-plus people one way or another, so there's no point in trying to control it", but repeatedly pointing to imagined inflection points as the beginning of the end while grossly underestimating the total, starting in about April 2020.
The first turned out not possible but in a way we all strengthened our immunity against covid either through vaccination or catching disease. It happens with all cold viruses and it was predictable that it will be the same for covid.
The second is not true. We can and could have provided focused protection to the elderly. In the UK many elderly living alone sheltered and avoided getting covid until vaccines came along. We could have provided the same thing for much less financial cost and impact on the society than lockdowns.
I personally had no pandemic at all. At no point of all these years I felt that I was in danger so great that I need to observe lockdowns, avoid travel, meeting people or even wear a mask. I understand that some people were in danger, mostly elderly and immunosuppressed. I definitely was careful in contacts with them. Pandemic damage was completely self-inflicted caused by mass panic and it becomes more and more clear with every day.
We had Sweden as a contrariant case and it did well, not much different from most other countries who had hard lockdowns.
I would also suggest that nursing homes were largely irrelevant. They are places where people are going to die. The median age of death from covid is 82+ years. The pandemic restrictions was a war of the elderly against the young.
I agree that the GBD was not very well developed, it lacked concrete details and their suggestions lacked practicality. Nevertheless, they were shut down immediately, blocked and demonised, never given a chance to explain and improve their position. That was really sad.
> They don't all know each other, and the don't all like and respect each other, and they're not particularly invested in presenting a united front.
The straightforward response to this that I've seen: sure they are, they want more research grants so they all want to keep the climate change gravy train running.
> They also are not, as a group, all that bribable with money.
Even if that were true, money is what lets them do what they actually want to do, so it's important.
> To the extent a person can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories, key features are
This suggests that the problem is not the conspiracy theory per se, but rather the "conspiracy theory mindset".
Wrong theories appear all the time. Without this mindset, they would be evaluated, and after collecting enough evidence rejected. People with this mindset break this mechanism, simply because they never give up, no matter what. Even worse, they try to convince other people to adopt the same mindset.
Besides the general anti-epistemology, an important component is how strongly emotionally invested those people are. It's as if they were traumatized by something.
Like, imagine someone who was a victim of police abuse, or knows someone who was. If such person spends the rest of their life writing angry anti-establishment rants -- I get it. It may not be the optimal reaction, but it is a natural reaction. The surprising thing is what someone has a similar emotional reaction about... pyramids, or ivermectin, or miracle mineral supplement, or whatever.
My best guess is that they basically use the topic as a metaphor for... something else. (Something like: "My abusive father believes that he is right about everything. Just like those scientists do. But I will prove all of them wrong!" And now you cannot give up, because if ivermectin actually does not work... then your abusive father metaphorically wins.) And I suppose many people have unsolved emotional problems, so when you show them a way to channel their feelings, they are hooked.
And when someone's reaction to people with fringe beliefs is... verbal abuse... that just strengthens the emotional connection ("yes, more evidence that I am actually fighting against abusive people").
Yeah, it's crazy how some people just could not stop trying to spread disinformation about the value of lockdowns and masks. We clearly know that lockdowns were not effective and should have stopped far earlier, but they just kept going!
I'm being snarky, but I draw exception to what theories polite society is willing to dismiss as part of a "conspiracy theory mindset" and which theories are not.
Pseudoscientific movements and other fringe scholarly movements very often end up incorporating an element of conspiracy theory. This is because when you arguments you believe to be persuasive are looked low upon by experts, there's only so many ways you can explain that, especially if your movement is large enough to have not escaped people's notice. One of the easiest routes to explaining this is proposing some form of conspiracy theory among the academic establishment to deny you. This conspiracy may be formal, but more often it's more of an informal alignment of interests - a conspiracy of incentive if you will. Global warming is the result of scientists under pressure to toe the line for that sweet, sweet grant money, for instance.
Once people start seeing conspiracy in one, it becomes easy to see that same kind of conspiracy elsewhere, which is one reason why crank movements seem to have a magnetism. The reasoning that protects them is promiscuous.
So while the theories themselves aren't conspiracy theories proper, people often end up using terms like that interchangeably because they're so commonly found together. This is technically wrong, but mostly forgivable.
There seems to be a similar effect in the opposite direction, where anti-conspiracy "aggressive conformist" types start denying the possibility of conspiracy anywhere they hear about it - it's rare to see someone who denies conspiracy in one place and accepts it in another. In my experience, those who use the term "conspiracy theory" in the way you describe tend to categorically dismiss all theories involving people working together behind the scenes, often even denying that people follow incentives, as well.
People skeptical of JFK assassination conspiracy theories or moon landing conspiracy theories generally seem to just accept that Watergate happened or that organized crime exists. To be frank, the idea that people who reject conspiracy theories generally don't believe that people even engage in conspiracies or behave according to incentives sounds ridiculous.
I guess I should add a caveat - they disbelieve all conspiracy theories that would harm them politically. It is true that the most fervent anti-conspiracy-theory hyperconformists heavily pushed the baseless Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, even years after it had been debunked. But they didn't even think of that as a conspiracy theory, because those in power control these labels, and so they reframed it as a "collusion" theory (literally just a synonym for conspiracy).
However, there definitely is a failure mode of rationality wherein one becomes a "debunker" and defines their identity around "debunking conspiracy theories," as if it is a foregone conclusion that all such theories are false and it's just a matter of finding a way to debunk them. But of course sometimes people really do conspire with one another.
A logical consequence of disbelieving all conspiracy theories is that you disbelieve all (new) conspiracies, because all revealed conspiracies started as theories at some point.
The correct category is "theories contrary to the current scientific consensus." A conspiracy theory could be both part of the consensus and true — consider the history of the communist movement. A false consensus could be the result of something other than a conspiracy.
The only feature of a "conspiracy theory" is that it is a theory about a conspiracy. Because... that's what the words say.
The attempt to associate all sorts of other things with the term "conspiracy theory" is driven by a desire to get rid of any term for "two or more people working together to do something behind the scenes." If that is happening, they literally just don't want us to have a word that we can use to describe it. If "conspiracy theory" is reserved for a hundred different stigmatized and pathologized things, we just don't even have the language to describe that that is happening.
Like, imagine if we did the same for any other type of theory. Imagine if any "Biological Theory" was just declared categorically false, simply by nature of being related to biology. That would seem to imply a judgement about the existence of biology, no?
Their goal is to suggest that any act of two or more people working together behind the scenes is axiomatically impossible. Because if someone points out some evidence for this bad behavior behind the scenes, they can pattern-match you onto imaginary "flat earthers" or whatever the astroturfed "conspiracy theory" of the week is.
> The only feature of a "conspiracy theory" is that it is a theory about a conspiracy. Because... that's what the words say.
You know language often doesn't work like this, right? Do you struggle with understanding idioms?
If you're worried that the evolution of the term "conspiracy theory" to mean this leaves no room to describe legitimate conspiracies, the word we ordinarily use for that is just "conspiracy."
It is perfectly valid to use a sequence of words to mean simply what those words mean, as written, even if some consider it to be an idiom or term of art. Words can have multiple meanings. This is laughably basic stuff.
"Conspiracy" obviously doesn't work. "It's a conspiracy, man!" and things of that form have already been memed quite extensively. Further, the problem with the term "conspiracy theory" is not that it is used by people who believe in such theories, but that it is applied as a label to their theories by those with power. So they don't have the ability to just avoid being labelled with that term. The only thing we can do is change the connotations of the term in common usage to better represent the frequent truthfulness of such theories.
Some sequences of words have a well-understood meaning that is very different than just the sum of what the individual words normally mean. See e.g. "rootless cosmopolitan" or "fellow traveller". If you use those words without understanding that, there will be miscommunication. So you should probably try not to do that.
This is a fully-general counterargument against ever using a word in any sense other than its first listed dictionary definition. That eliminates the vast majority of word usage.
You're proposing an alternative meaning of the term "conspiracy theory" to common parlance based on your literal reading of what the component parts of the term mean. Not only that, but you seem to think this is fundamentally the "correct" meaning, then accuse others of being prescriptivist. This is all silly, but you imagine disagreement with you is rooted in a misunderstanding of linguistics that is "laughably basic." I don't know what to tell you. Sometimes phrases mean something other than what the most literal reading of them would suggest.
If you allow me a little speculation, what appears to be going on is there are conspiracy theories as people normally understand them that you are personally sympathetic to and you are bristling at the dismissiveness the label brings.
I'm not "proposing an alternative meaning," I'm stating the obvious fact that that is one of the meanings of the word. It's easily the second most common usage.
> you seem to think this is fundamentally the "correct" meaning, then accuse others of being prescriptivist.
You're the one who's trying to disallow me from using it that way.
> you imagine disagreement with you is rooted in a misunderstanding of linguistics that is "laughably basic."
You've misused the concept of linguistic prescriptivism twice now already.
> Sometimes phrases mean something other than what the most literal reading of them would suggest.
Another basic linguistics error. The meaning of words depends on how they are used and the context in which they are used. Using a sequence of words to mean what the words mean as written, rather than as a term of art, is never "incorrect" - again, extremely basic. Do better.
> there are conspiracy theories as people normally understand them that you are personally sympathetic to and you are bristling at the dismissiveness the label brings
Do you have a memory issue or something? I don't mean any offense if you do, I know remembering things from one comment ago can be tricky.
Anyway, yes, obviously that is my objection. Do you really think a bootlicking aggressive conformist would ever disagree with the way those in power abuse language? To repeat:
> The attempt to associate all sorts of other things with the term "conspiracy theory" is driven by a desire to get rid of any term for "two or more people working together to do something behind the scenes." If that is happening, they literally just don't want us to have a word that we can use to describe it. If "conspiracy theory" is reserved for a hundred different stigmatized and pathologized things, we just don't even have the language to describe that that is happening.
Hard agree. Labeling something a "conspiracy theory" is just a political move to drive an uncertain claim out of the public discourse, while other equally uncertain claims are validated by "experts say this so shut up". There is uncertainty around a very wide range of claims, and no substitute for the ability to think for yourself.
There's a conspiracy theory community that holds conventions and stuff. There's clearly a great deal of overlap in believers and ideas between most conspiracy theories. It is a very visible cluster in belief-space.
With that said, I don't think arguing over whether specific ideas are conspiracy theories is fruitful, especially not when it devolves into technicalities. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Scott used to wonder how to distinguish between "there's no evidence" qua "experts haven't investigated", vs "there's no evidence" qua "experts have investigated and determined it's wrong". "Conspiracy theory" seems to be an argument-from-authority which strongly suggests the latter.
I'd argue there is a somewhat natural category of conspiracy theories. They're theories that there's a large conspiracy of people who are doing something bad that at first glance you wouldn't realize is their doing. Usually the blame is put on certain groups like the masons, the Illuminati, the CIA, the US as a whole, or sometimes even a large and diverse demographic like Jews or Arabs. Some examples are "Bush did 9/11" or "HAARP causes earthquakes (on purpose)". Theories like these can sometimes be true, but often are only founded in paranoid fantasies.
Then there's the broader category of beliefs that go something like "X is true but academics, politicians and the media are deliberately covering it up". They do involve a conspiracy of sorts, because the clear truth of X is deliberately being kept from people by a conspiracy of experts. But the subject of the theory can be pretty much anything. Atlantis is one example. Sometimes these theories are straightforwardly wrong ("vaccines cause autism"). Sometimes there's a lot of conflicting evidence and it's hard to claim a deliberate cover-up ("glyphosate is dangerous"). And sometimes it's a sort of philosophical question that involves a lot of factors so there can't really be a "correct" answer even in principle ("everyone should go vegan"). And sometimes it's a factual question and the doubters are correct ("wmds in Iraq").
But it's true that "conspiracy theory" has become a bit of a swear word that you can apply to any science- or politics-related belief that you don't like. In any case, the P.C. word for it is "conspiracy myth" these days, because "theory" was seen as giving them too much credit.
That use of myth is funny, since that's another word they Orwelled - etymologically, "myth" simply refers to beliefs and stories that have been passed down over a long period of time, and in fact typically refers to things that "have a significant truth or meaning" according to Wiktionary.
Of course, contemporarily, myth is used as a synonym of "false belief," in an example of the same bit of linguistic trickery that happened to "conspiracy theory". If they can take a word describing a particular, distinct concept, and shift the meaning to "false, crazy thing," then they can propagate the belief that all examples of that particular original thing are false, without evidence ever coming in to the equation.
I think essential part of conspiracy theory is a specific epistemology, where you assume that minority of evidence is more reliable than the majority of evidence.
The whole "conspiracy" part isn't about some people having an organisation or agreement to futher their goals in secret. It's about a group of people counterfeiting the majority of evidence. Big Pharma counterfeighted their trials of ivermectin, Zionist government hid the fact of its existence, Scientists deny the truth of flat earth to diminish Christianity, Archeologist frauded the evidence so that no-one new about Atlantis. The pattern is the same. You can't trust the established institutions because they are all in the evidence falsifying conspiracy, no matter how many good arguments they have. You can only trust the tiny minority of contarians, even if their evidence isn't very good.
I strongly agree. Maybe the label of "conspiracy theory" had some kind of independent value at one point, but it's used and abused as a means to shut down conversation or discredit theories too quickly to maintain a status as good heuristics in all cases.
Consider two examples - NASA faking the moon landing, and the CIA spending 20 years developing torture techniques for interrogation on unwilling US citizens. One of those is true, and it's not immediately obvious (if you don't already know any details) which one is harder to believe.
We know and have proof that conspiracies exist, and also that the government has repeatedly conspired against its own people in ways both illegal and nefarious. Given real history, I have a hard time taking "that's just a conspiracy theory" seriously at face value. Give me some detail, give me some reasons why we should consider it wrong.
"Conspiracy theory" is almost universally used as a term of art to refer to the false ones. To say something is a conspiracy theory is to say it is a claim to conspiracy that is unreasonable. That's why we don't ordinarily call Watergate a conspiracy theory even though it plainly involved a conspiracy.
I think almost by definition, we cannot know for sure that a conspiracy theory is false. We can only know for sure that it is true (because it is proven), but conspiracy theories cannot usually be disproved.
As far as whether a particular conspiracy is "unreasonable", the problem here is that history is chalk full of conspiracies that any reasonable person would consider unreasonable when they were happening, yet they later were proven to have happened.
I can't think of any great heuristic for asserting that a particular conspiracy is obviously wrong that, when back-tested against actual conspiracies, would correctly identify legitimate conspiracies and filter out only the bad ones.
MK Ultra (my example from above) would absolutely have been considered "unreasonable" at the time it was actually happening. It would have been labelled a "conspiracy theory" as a direct attempt to discredit it, probably by the CIA itself and likely by multiple other government organizations.
Jokes about "the CIA is listening to my conversations through my teeth" (there's a joke on a joke about it in a Futurama episode, but it used to be a pretty common trope) were a way to deflect criticism by mocking the idea that the CIA would be torturing US citizens - despite the fact that they actively were!
The point is that to claim something is a conspiracy theory is to claim that it is unreasonable to believe. A person can be wrong about this, but that's what the charge means. A literal reading of the term would lead you to think it is any assertion that a conspiracy has happened, but that's not what people mean by the term. Again, Watergate is not normally described as a conspiracy theory even though it involved a conspiracy in its most literal sense. A conspiracy theory is an explanation for event or situation that supposes it is the result of an implied or explicit agreement of people in positions of influence, usually for sinister motives, that is unreasonable to think. The term has evolved to have this meaning, and it rarely is used outside of this context.
Another person replied to this point by saying you can't ever really know if a conspiracy claim is false or unreasonable, but I just don't think that's an accurate understanding of how to be justified in a belief that a claim is wrong. If you instead argue, "People thought something was a conspiracy theory, but it turned out to be true" then I just read that as, "It turns out people are wrong sometimes!" And, well, yeah. That's true.
But then I'm not sure how much we've gained by labeling something a "conspiracy theory" (and presumably that it should be discredited) if we agree that people saying that can be wrong, including in some of the most egregious cases - like MK Ultra.
If we agree that a "conspiracy theory" can certainly still be correct, and that the proper course of action is to consider the evidence for and against, then why use a term often identified with an active attempt to discredit the theory?
We've gained a way to have a shorthand description of a particular kind of false theory that people can become attracted to. This is how it is generally used.
The term is associated with attempting to discredit a theory because the term is an expression that the theory is discredited. You should look at it, depending on context, as a warning, a dismissal, or a claim about a theory being dubious inviting further engagement. Your objection reduces into, "How can you call something wrong if it could be right?" and I'm not sure what to say to that beyond, "People sometimes make mistakes."
People don't really use "conspiracy theory" to describe conspiracies they believe are real unless they are being ironic or are acknowledging that most people think of their beliefs that way. Once you stop trying to read the term so literally, the normal intended meaning should be reasonably clear.
MK Ultra would have been *correctly* labeled a conspiracy theory at the time it was happening, *if* there had been a small group of people publicly theorizing about how the CIA was nefariously testing mind-control chemicals on unsuspecting victims. That would have been pretty much a central example of a conspiracy theory.
Instead, MK Ultra went directly from "nobody outside the CIA has a clue about this", hence not even a theory, to "yeah, the CIA just admitted all of this to the Senate", at which point it was just a boring old conspiracy fact.
The general argument against conspiracy theories is not that conspiracies never happen, it's that conspiracy theories almost never persist at the knife-edge balance where conspiracy theorists know about them with high confidence but the relevant policemen, journalists, Senators, etc, are all clueless.
... which is precisely the problem with using it. Then we don't have a term for "actual, plausible, true scenario where a bunch of people are conspiring with one another to do bad things."
Imagine if we did this for another type of theory, like biology. We defined a "biological theory" as a crazy, ridiculous, unbelievable theory about biology like Lamarckism. And then any time you tried to bring up a plausible theory relating to biology, and you had plenty of evidence to support it, someone would say "Hey, that sounds like a biological theory to me! Are you crazy?! Let me guess, you also believe giraffes can modify their DNA by stretching their necks, you wacko."
Is there a socially acceptable way to "like" or "thumbs up" a comment in Substack or in Astral Codex comment threads? I would like to signal boost this comment as I was going to say something along the same lines, but I don't see an obvious way to achieve that without coming across as spammy.
This isn't the first time I have wished for a mechanism to signal boost a particular comment in comment threads.
Good response. Aaronson’s example is nothing all like conspiracy theories. When people email him proofs of hard unsolved problems, he’s not ignoring them because they’re conspiracy theories or because he’s worried he’ll attract attention to the writer. It’s simply because he knows the probability of someone solving it whose name he doesn’t know is vanishingly small, and since the topic is hard, responding to them all would basically consume his whole existence.
Not to mention the fact that nowhere does Scott say that it is required for any individual person to respond to _any_ conspiracy theories at all. Just that if you _are_ going to, do so by actually arguing, and not sneering dismissal. I think Aaronson is doing the right thing by ignoring these people. If he wanted to, he could choose to dedicate some small amount of time to responding to a random selection of these people, but it's almost definitely not worth doing. What he should absolutely _not_ do is spend time responding to these people by insulting them.
I think it was Sabine Hossenfelder who one time actually started engaging with the people who send those emails by essentially charging them to teach them advanced physics over Skype. Which to me seems like good evidence that actually at least those people emailing their ideas to experts are pretty open to being convinced by experts and are genuinely interested in finding truth.
What's your reasoning for agreeing with Aaronson when he throws out the shit people send him? I.e. you presumably don't think he's thrown a proof for the Riemann hypothesis in the trash, even though (I'm assuming) you haven't read the proofs, don't have the expertise to evaluate one if you did, and don't know him personally.
I used to get lots of emails like this. Most of the time it's very easy to tell. Rarely, it would require reading through 200+ pages of proof that pi is sometimes equal to 4 (literally; I'm not even making that up!)
I may have come across exactly that individual, looking for information on an obscure branch of mathematics.
That's another issue, there. There are branches of mathematics in which there are, I would presume, actual experts, but which you can only find crackpots writing about online; the "real" stuff goes into journals no regular person even knows exist.
That's nice to hear. Mathematics does seem like an idyllic field in what concerns Open Access stuff these days. Hopefully everyone else will eventually learn from it!
To be clear I'm not saying he's wrong to do so, but I want to establish a general principle by which you'd judge this sort of thing (that is, when you can dismiss someone's theory as crankery).
In the math-proof case it sounds like your answer is basically personal experience with these sorts of theories, as a result of which you can easily tell which ones are crankish. Do you think that's fair?
It is fair, yes. Typically in physics there were straightforward arguments independent from the ones used by these people that could be used to determine they were wrong even if you didn't know exactly where - think Second Law of Thermodynamics and perpetual motion machines. Other times there were lots of claims but no arguments at all besides "this guy solved physics in the 1970s but the establishment covered it up". It helps that you basically never get this sort of thing in fields you're not an expert of some sort in.
The basic reasoning is, nobody gets to order you to spend your free time on them. You're not obligated to spend your time analyzing someone's math any more than you're obligated to go on a date with every person who requests one. You pick the ones that interest you and ignore the rest guilt-free. And maybe you would have really hit it off on that date if you'd gone, and you'll never know because you said no, but that's your call to make.
I'm not talking about whether Aaronson has a moral obligation to review people's proofs, but whether you trust that he's actually weeding out bad ones, as a factual matter.
The odds of weeding out bad takes by ignoring all takes is 100%. The only way he wouldn't be weeding out bad proofs is if he's lying to us about throwing things out.
I loosely disagree. This is one of the main things I worry may be getting subtly overincentivized over time.
The way to keep the good ones seems more like “write it, but then re-evaluate it later and to the extent that the emotional charge makes it more interesting/relevant/etc. rather than making it false/needlessly-unkind/etc. (this is a pretty bad approximation of what I'm actually thinking, there's another “how does it fit into the surrounding structure” part I'm not expressing properly) you move forward with it with eyes open.
Question: is masking a conspiracy theory? One is routinely denounced by The Science (tm) and the other routinely enforced by The Science (tm), but they have roughly the same amount of evidence (see Vinay Prasad's writings on this).
As far as I can tell, scientists are responding to masking data pretty normally with standard back and forth. E.g., this thread looking at what the Cochrane analysis did and didn't say.
The conclusion, that masking is probably individually effective but that it's hard to get good enough compliance for a large population effect, especially after Omicron increased infectivity, seems plausible enough. It may be wrong, but it doesn't have the earmarks of a conspiracy to me.
Of course by Scott's heuristic, maybe that just means it's the conspiracy keyed to my psychology. 🙂
For my own part, it helps that I don't find masking that onerous. I don't expect it to have been a complete waste of time, but if it turns out to be I won't be filled with regret for continuing to do it. I'm pretty sure I've wasted more effort on worse things. (But presumably that's equally true for some fraction of Reptoid enthusiasts too.)
I really dislike the ubiquitous posts I see like this. The implication seems often to be that other people also shouldn't be upset at being made to mask as well. Well, not everyone is exactly like you. Some people really dislike masking. Some people (like myself) really really disliked being socially shamed into positions we obviously knew were completely ridiculous. Like being in a really crowded restaurant or bar where no one is wearing masks, but you get treated like an evil person if you dare to not put a mask on when walking to the bathroom. Some of us value our own capacity for rational reasoning and hate societal shame being weaponized too much. I don't think that's an unreasonable stance to take.
I mean, y'all won the political war. We pretty clearly won't be able to get mask mandates again for the foreseeable future, whether they're useful or not.
Yes, a rapidly spreading novel virus that killed over a million Americans led to emergency measures. And there will never be an emergency where all of those are right. On the scale of Japanese internment, jailing war protesters, or even wage and price controls (all imposed in the face of far fewer US deaths), mask mandates are frankly de minimis and far better justified in the moment, even if they turn out to have been wrong.
If the potential plus side is "saves lives" and the potential downside is "some people are made to feel bad and it turns out to have been unnecessary", I think the first is a reasonable default till you know more.
I'd be all for after action examinations of what we did for future reference for the next pandemic, including actually doing some RCTs. (I think what we'll actually get is a strong bias for doing nothing that will likely lead to a worse outcome if we hit another pandemic before the cycle turns again, whether or not masks themselves are a factor.)
But I don't think it's possible to get away from the basic idea of doing plausibly useful things on necessarily limited evidence during that sort of emergency.
> If the potential plus side is "saves lives" and the potential downside is "some people are made to feel bad and it turns out to have been unnecessary", I think the first is a reasonable default till you know more.
That's a really dangerous position, and it's led to far too many people in my life (and I'm guessing elsewhere as well) being hypochondriacs. I've seen multiple situations in the past year where person A travels a really long distance to see persons B and C, and then persons B and C say that they don't want to see person A because person A has a cold. Well, we don't have unlimited time in life, and at some point we may regret that we've squandered away lots of time to prevent getting sick from minor illnesses. There are lots of ways to save lives, who are you to say that one is more valuable than another? Why are we still driving cars? You can save a lot of lives by abolishing cars. Should we do that?
Covid currently kills around five times as many Americans a day as cars.
With cars, we have a whole panoply of mandated safety equipment, pages and pages of regulations, mandated licensing, and a pervasive enforcement infrastructure to try to keep the numbers as low as they are. We don't ban them, and we also don't shrug our shoulders and say "life is risk" as people drive a hundred past schools.
Where to draw the line is a judgment call, and a million deaths is a statistic. But yeah, I think 500 deaths a day plus an undetermined but substantial risk of long Covid remains worth at least as much effort and inconvenience as we put into cars. I'd even say it's worth five times as much.
But most people disagree. So be it. I'd rather live in a functioning democracy than have my preferences override one. "The people have spoken, the bastards" and all that.
But in the absence of pretty much any mitigations (which is where we are now), I'll certainly take individual action to minimize my own risk. Same as I'd probably try to avoid highways if they operated under American Autoduel Association rules.
And obviously I don't blame the people you describe for doing what seems wise to them likewise.
The Science (tm) should have made a better effort to prove they work. 3 years and trillions of dollars later and somehow science still can't figure out if they work. The response "just keep wearing them until we experts say different" is unacceptable, I would redirect that frustration towards the science establishment sitting on top of mountains of money and few answers. One suspects authorities are going to be reluctant to ever state masks are ineffective considering the public stance they took and the shaming campaign that followed.
My pet peeve is that science considers this a vitally important topic but refuses to perform challenge testing in the middle of a pandemic killing millions of people. I find these priorities hard to sort out.
This was the position defended by Anthony Fauci in January 2020, saying that masks would not help protect against Covid.
The Washington Post had a story in 2020 (I can't find a link at the moment) crediting a corporate communications expert as writing to the CDC telling the CDC that they were at risk of losing the narrative - that even less-effective masks, even if used improperly, should have _some_ protective effect. In February 2020, the CDC and Anthony Fauci changed their recommendation, advising the use of masks. It seems to me that there are 3 possible explanations for the change in recommendation:
1. Fauci was lying in January 2020, to keep people from panic-buying all the medical masks that doctors, nurses, and first responders needed. Masks really are effective, but the lie was in a good cause.
2. There was new research done between January and February, establishing that masks actually are effective. I've never seen any claim of new research, and it doesn't seem plausible that there was any.
3. The CDC changed its guidance to something that sounded better, in order to preserve its image of infallible expertise.
The third possibility seems most likely to me. Unfortunately, people and institutions have incentives that may lead them to act differently than we'd like.
There was a lot of revaluation of airborne transmission during Covid. (And a lot of arguing back and forth between that and droplet transmission, which pointed to different conclusions on masking.)
In addition, the previous consensus was in part based on no one needing to evaluate intermediate measures: why would anyone bother looking into makeshift cloth masks when n95s were available for less than a buck a piece at Home Depot?
Until they suddenly weren't, and the question was whether something was better than nothing. There was a lot of back and forth among experts about that, and the conclusion (when we were having a 9/11 worth of deaths every couple days) was "worth a shot!"
What I don't think anyone anticipated was the way most people would anchor on those early makeshift measures. Everyone agreed that whether cloth masks had a measurable effect or not, respirators were likely better. But in practice, even when the shortage eased, most people stuck with whatever emergency jury rig they'd started with, as if people who dug trenches for shelter decided to just keep living in them after houses became available.
In that environment, especially with the propensity to wear masks uselessly (the below-the-nose, the chin mask, etc.) it's not that surprising that masking would have an ambiguous effect. Whether that's because True Masking Has Never Been Tried, because masks' effects were overwhelmed by the magnitude of the risks (body armor won't help if you're tied up in front of a machine gun, but isn't useless), or because they do nothing remains ambiguous, and probably will remain an open question.
(And since mask mandates are gone for good, probably not one anyone will spend a lot of research effort on.)
Maybe. Except the guidance changed in February 2020, when Covid deaths were under 10 per week. Maybe the panic was due to anticipated deaths from modeling. But it certainly wasn't based on expertise.
My recollection is that masks were officially discouraged until the spring of 2020, in part because there was a shortage of high quality masks for medical workers. And, it was widely said that nobody could effectively wear a mask without the careful training given medical personnel.
Also, the conventional wisdom in March 2020 was that covid was spread by touch or by sneezing and coughing. It was not until the Heinsberg Study was released on April 9, 2020 in Germany that we began to have a clue that it was spread largely by face to face socializing, and it took months for that revelation to sink in.
There was a sudden shift by the Establishment to being pro-mask in the spring of 2020, but the dominant model at the time remained, even after Heinsberg, that coronavirus was spread by coughing and sneezing large droplets. So low quality masks were seen as fine.
And to be frank, masks came to be viewed as talismans against the evil eye. Also, they served as tribal markers that you were a good citizen.
My guess is that even low quality masks did slow the spread, less because they worked, but because they made socializing less fun and socializing is what spreads covid. So people who didn't like masks stayed home more.
By the way, the Heinsberg Study was a major breakthrough in understanding how covid is spread. The scientists undermined the early consensus on a number of points, for which they were intensely denounced by colleagues.
>My recollection is that masks were officially discouraged until the spring of 2020, in part because there was a shortage of high quality masks for medical workers.
I don't think this is right. Did you check my link above, to the CDC guidelines from January 2020?
Nevertheless, this is part of the current narrative. Perhaps it's even true. At the time (January 2020), Dr. Fauci publicly stated that masks would be ineffective. The "narrative" is that this was a noble lie, told to protect the mask supply for medical personnel. It doesn't seem likely to me that this is correct, because the official guidance changed from "don't bother with masks" to "you must wear masks in public" in March, long before the medical mask supply was secured. But, if this narrative is correct, then the implication is that our experts will lie to us if they think it's justified.
Alternatively, mask mandates can be seen as politicians' imperative to be seen to be "doing something", and public health officials' need to be seen to provide useful guidance. These needs converged in guidance that appeared useful, leading to action that appeared helpful, while accomplishing little.
>> to keep people from panic-buying all the medical masks that doctors, nurses, and first responders needed.
It doesn't make sense because pre-pandemic knowledge was that masks are not effective even in hospital settings. Now with Cochrane review this is re-affirmed, we don't have evidence that masks help in hospital settings.
At some point we decided to use masks in case they could be useful. But even with this logic the need to supply healthcare workers with masks were based on panic and not on logic. We should not have made mask mandates based on precautionary principles. The proper action would be to try to use masks, make more efforts to produce and distribute them but not consider them as definitely proven as helpful. In fact, we should have regarded masks as ivermectin.
"there's a good chance masks don't work but WTH let's ask for them anyway because the cost of trying it is low" is a very different claim than what we were sold. I mean I disagree with it also because of reasons Harold and others have said but it's more logically defensible -- but it's also just not the claim that was made.
"Rationing and recycling bacon grease will beat Hitler" was also presented with more confidence than it necessarily merited. Emergency responses generally don't filter out with a lot of ambiguity and qualifications, especially if their working (if they do) depends on pretty much everyone doing it.
The consequences for that, when wrong (which some inevitably are) is frequently much more costly than some people having to endure the discomfort of masks for longer than they'd have liked. And that's certainly a reason to limit emergency responses to genuine emergencies, ensure that the government that enacts them knows that it will have to answer to the voters, and where possible to subject them to after action evaluation so that you don't do the same wrong things twice. And the threshold should be higher the greater the cost of getting things wrong.
But trying things that *might* work is going to be a feature of any major crisis. And asserting more confidence than is fully justified is I suspect unavoidable during one, and may at times be necessary. I don't think anyone wants the fire chief or the captain of the sinking ship to say "This is my best guess what to do, but I don't have a lot of confidence", even if that's actually the case.
(If the captain is Queeg, maybe it's better that someone stop him. But the typical emergency response isn't going to go well if everyone operates on the basis that every captain probably is.)
As it was, we continued to argue about masks, loudly and pretty much continuously as I recall, and scientists likewise did a back and forth of what data and studies they could find. (Which are imperfect enough to be a Rorschach test three years later, never mind when daily deaths were regularly in the thousands and no one knew how bad it would ultimately get.) Eventually, for better or worse, the anti-maskers won a more or less complete political victory. Not as fast as they'd have liked, rather faster than I'd have.
But while that's probably somewhat neutered future pandemic responses for a generation or so, I'd expect that next time there's a different out of scale emergency, whether it's a Pacific tsunami, a city being nuked, or aliens stealing the Great Lakes, the response will include measures whose efficacy will be best-guess, backed with confident imperatives.
And some will be right, some wrong, and some we'll spend the next decade arguing about.
You're just about the first person I've ever seen say "anti-masking won". Everyone else seems to think "masking won, and we beat covid with it, and now we can go back to normal".
Maybe I'd have more faith in your starry eyed notions of how emergency response and public health should be handled if anyone ever admitted that an attempt failed. If it was publicly acknowledged, "we pushed this on the nation, and it didn't work out, it just fueled tensions, and we don't even really know if it had any positive effect, so that's why we repealed it," then I'd be far more likely to want to participate in an emergency response next time. If a politician who was initial pro masking said that, I'd easily vote for him next time.
Humility goes a long way, and personally I wouldn't even mind that fire chief you mentioned. Someone can exude confidence while also being transparent, and they certainly do not have to demonize the people who disagree with them. I listen to leaders, at least in my immediate sphere, who acknowledge their fallibility, are transparent with it. And if those leaders ridicule people or don't recognize opposing but potentially valid viewpoints, they immediately lose my resect and my willingness to follow them.
So what's the potential plus side of making people mask for the 1 minute they're using the restroom in a restaurant, and not for the 2 hours they're sitting down and chatting? And what's the potential plus side of making people mask a year after it became obvious that COVID is here to stay, that vaccines can't stop it, and that everyone is going to get it multiple times in their lives?
Saving lives is of course important. So is defending freedom, which makes life worth living. So is defending common sense.
Vaccines as they are probably cut Covid transmission 20-40%, which is worth doing even if it's not going to stop it from circulating, same as with flu shots. I think it's likely that some combination of testing and air filtration (masks hopefully giving way to air cleaning) could do a bit better than that. Getting Covid fewer times is fewer die rolls on the assorted death, hospitalization, and long Covid table, and I think that's still worth pursuing. I'd also be putting Warp Speed resources into second generation vaccines that may be able to do better. (E.g., nasal vaccines that may do better against transmission than the current ones.)
Most people don't agree, and so here we are. (I'm personally still practicing avoidance, and so far so good, but obviously eventually some obligatory gathering will trip me up, doubtless sooner rather than later. Covid once in three years is still probably better for my overall odds than Covid twice a year, and as long as it holds off there's always the hope that the horse will learn to sing.)
And of course I may be wrong about how much can be done. I'm not an expert, and even the experts are divided. But it doesn't matter much, since I expect we're not going to find out.
As for specific masking policies, I don't have to defend them all. The best I could do for the restaurant policy is that it reinforces "mask except when you really can't" if that were still in the range of possible norms. But that detail is pretty trivial an unlikely to have much measurable effect in a restaurant full of unmasked customers, and the norm ship has sailed over the horizon.
If I were a policymaker, I'd have had to seriously consider just when to give mask policies up as hopeless. As things are, I don't know for sure when that line was crossed, and it doesn't really matter.
I am generally pretty pro-freedom, whether it's speech codes or plastic straw bans. (I don't even like seat belt laws, even though I started wearing seat belts and pushing my family to do so as a teenager before laws existed.) But I've always carved out exceptions for responding to big public dangers, like the having a draft for WWII, or requiring mandatory childhood vaccination. So I was never a proper libertarian even back when I occasionally voted for LP candidates. (I was usually careful to add "ish".)
Obviously the salience of the whole "more US deaths than WWII" event kind of reinforced that for me on this particular issue. Obviously mileage varies, and I can live with being out of the tribe. (I could still theoretically be convinced by "it doesn't work well enough" if the evidence satisfied me, but that's an empirical question, not one of principle.)
> Obviously the salience of the whole "more US deaths than WWII" event kind of reinforced that for me on this particular issue.
You seem to bring up the death toll a lot. It's important to note that deaths for Covid are not distributed evenly. Perhaps there's a QALY analysis somewhere, but I seriously doubt that Covid has lost anywhere near as many QALYs as WWII, mostly because WWII's death toll was concentrated on the very young, and Covid's death toll was concentrated on the very old.
Personally, though it may sound cold, I think there's a big difference between wiping out a generation of people in their prime vs killing many elderly people a couple of years before they'd die anyway. In fact, I think there's something kind of insidious about saying that we need to push draconian measures which will reduce everyone's freedom and quality of life for several years, to protect a very small number of people truly at risk, most of whom have already lived full lives.
LHN, the potential downside to masks are unknown. It isn't known what happens when you expose 50 million children to high levels of carbon dioxide for 8 hours per day for a year or two, or what happens to their long term social development not being able to see each other's faces, or unknown unknowns.
Saved QALY, didn’t save any lives. Everyone will still die. Also it didn’t save that many QALY in general (compared to many other social issues involving deaths) as the average age of death was in the mid 80s.
That's the thing. The median death from covid depending on country is 82-85 years. Taking about number of people who died makes this rather pointless because everybody dies and not many people at this age are active and enjoying life.
> If the potential plus side is "saves lives" and the potential downside is "some people are made to feel bad and it turns out to have been unnecessary", I think the first is a reasonable default till you know more.
The problem is not scientists, it's "The Science (tm)". There was certainly a lot of moralizing by the latter, concerning unproven or wildly exaggerated claims, which were being presented as facts beyond dispute.
Additionally, masking requirements often didn't follow any coherent physical model, but rather molded themselves around what was politically tenable. That's what I object to. Masks were weaponized as a sort of magical talisman that turned you into a good person, and by contrast turned everyone else into bad people.
No, that twitter thread doesn't say that masking is probably individually effective. It says that the effect will likely be different. Would that effect be different enough to be individually effective? We don't even know how likely that could be.
The "Should I even give them attention, or would that just be signaling that they're worthy of attention?" question has a pretty straight forward solution: do they actually have your attention, or are you too busy thinking about more important things?
If you have to talk about not giving them attention you are already giving them attention, and doing it in a way that shows unwillingness (or inability) to get into the object level arguments, so it's not a good thing for your credibility. If that's what's tempting, then it calls for some honest reflection.
I just don’t get any of this. I have no interest in defending the efficacy of Ivermectin. I don’t think it works. But of COURSE there’s nothing wrong with analyzing deeply whether it works and looking hard at the evidence on both sides. It’s a pharmaceutical product that a bunch of studies suggested might work. This isn’t the flat Earth. I get the argument that there are some really extreme views that some might consider so crazy that it doesn’t make sense to engage them but this doesn’t seem anywhere in that galaxy.
While I'm not as smart as all y'all, I'm a little smart, but also lazy and easily distracted. These posts of Scott's are endlessly helpful to me as I steer my way through my own tendency to accept science at face value and not question conclusions. If I'm a member of the target audience, and I think I am, Scott helps me to be a better thinker and a more honest human without asking me to work very hard. I appreciate that a great deal.
ETA: Apparently I'm on my husband's membership for this site. I'm not TenaciousK, but am often DawnCoyote
My personal tactic is to defer to what people around me believe and accept whatever they say, but let myself break from it if I have accumulated enough evidence and done enough due diligence.
How much evidence and how much diligence? That depends on how far away my belief is going to be from the consensus belief. If it's a slight twist on a consensus belief, not much. Something moderately different means there should be a pretty good body of evidence and I should have spent a good chunk of time thinking things through.
But if it's the total opposite of what everyone around me believes? That requires a lot of evidence and a lot of thinking, significant understanding of arguments for the mainstream position, and really being able to answer every possible counter-argument. Given how much I like to talk about my beliefs, it's the only way to avoid looking like a crank or a fool.
Like Scott's recommendation, this definitely biases me towards believing the mainstream consensus version of things for most things. But life's too short and I'm going to be wrong about a lot of things either way, and I figure this is about the best I can do.
I thought there was a lot of truth in your original post on fideism as well (and for it's worth, I enjoyed the ivermectic posts quite a bit). Where it erred, I thought, was mostly in how unfair it was to the anti-conspiracy side. For example:
> If there’s some argument I know nothing about - pro- vs. anti- skub, perhaps - and all I’ve heard is that the pro-skub people say that you should look at evidence and decide rationally based on your best judgment, and the anti-skub people say you should never look at evidence and have to trust them - I’m already 90-something percent sure pro-skub are the good guys.
The thing is, anti-conspiracy folks don't say this. They say, "You should trust the expert consensus, because resolving technical disputes is hard, and the expert consensus is definitely sometimes wrong, but much less often than it is right." And you know this, which is why I don't think you would actually be 90-something percent pro-skub. There was a fair amount of this strawman-ish stuff in the post.
But, again, I liked the ivermectin posts, which were interesting as just a sort of epistemological whodunit, and in general I tend to agree with you on the value of engaging with weird arguments.
> The thing is, anti-conspiracy folks don't say this. They say, "You should trust the expert consensus, because resolving technical disputes is hard, and the expert consensus is definitely sometimes wrong, but much less often than it is right." And you know this, which is why I don't think you would actually be 90-something percent pro-skub. There was a fair amount of this strawman-ish stuff in the post.
Maybe *you* say this. You sound like a well-tempered person, so I believe you.
You are vastly overestimating the politeness and humility of "anti-conspiracy" folks.
The "anti-conspiracy" people *very often* sneer and mock people who don't think what they think on whatever the subject is.
For example, you can find approximately 9 million posts across Reddit and Twitter saying "lmao these fucking idiots are eating horse paste, I hope they die from covid."
That's what anti-conspiracy folks sounded like when they were a ragtag bunch of nerds calling themselves the "skeptical movement". Nowadays the modal anti-conspiracist is some idiot on Twitter ranting against ivermectin with one breath and, with the next, saying Russiagate is "big if true."
I think that was a response specifically against making arguments like Kavanagh (who is seemingly saying "don't do your own research"), and not meant to characterize the anti-conspiracy crowd in general.
A good conspiracy theory has both pattern and content. By the time people are adults most of us have seen or read about an authority figure which was incompetent, self-dealing or corrupt. So for a theory of the pattern “x authority is actually incompetent,” many people are already open to believing that at least a little because they’ve seen it before.
Also, for something like the East Palestine disaster, it’s already yielding a fresh trove of arguments against believing experts. “They told me we were safe but then the pets died” feeds directly into “x authority is incompetent.” In fact it’s possible someone has never carefully looked at a scene of competent authority, so trusting the pattern feels normal to them. Making the populace not panic is (imho) usually a more important criterion than the welfare of any one person, for the experts, who are, I think, burdened with various panic scenarios. If only we could learn disaster response as a culture. So the experts could stop overweighting the consequences of panic. Hmmm.
Anyway, then whatever content is superimposed on the pattern becomes more believable to them. An observer can have very little knowledge of y, but if the x incompetent experts say y is good, they must be wrong. For example. A part can metaphorically represent the whole, so if a person has some examples of locally incompetent authority, therefore all authority is incompetent and ivermectin has a strong chance of being a miracle cure.
Some of the election fraud theories work this way. “Look, the election authority is incompetent (example), there must have been voting fraud!”
So a key reflex for resisting a conspiracy theory is the ability to believe an authority might be a little bit competent & non corrupt. If one can’t consider even 1% possibility that the authority is just doing their best under difficult conditions, resistance to the theory is unlikely.
From what I read , a lot of sophisticated people in the US, who despise conspiracy theorists and conspiracy theories (which is generally coded right these days) believed wholeheartedly in Russisgate.
"Russiagate" refers to a lot of things from a lot of people, but a less maximal version is, AFAICT, true and not really disputed by people anymore.
Do you disagree with any of the following?
- Russia hacked the DNC's and Podesta's emails
- They released them to Assange who leaked them publicly
- Roger Stone was in communication with Assange on the timing of said leaks
- Someone emailed high up people in the trump campaign offering dirt on Hillary and saying it's part of Russia's efforts to get him elected, to which they responded positively and arranged a meeting
- Trump publicly encouraged Russia to continue the hacking while also taking pro-Russia positions in his campaign.
- He also publicly denied that Russia was involved, even though - by his own later statements - he accepted that they did it.
There's other stuff, too, but to me, all the above is enough to be a huge scandal.
I think that if you asked a lot of the people who "believe in Russiagate" what they think is scandalous about trump and Russia, they'd point to the stuff I mentioned before mentioning the Steele Dossier. Maybe not the Roger Stone detail but more some general suspicion that someone in trumpland had some hand in the leaks.
Maybe - Maybe! - now they would, but I remember a whole lot of people talking about Trump's pee tape, secret meetings in Eastern Europe, and Russian blackmail. Those things were all exclusively from Steele and wrong.
A good indicator of a conspiracy theory believer is that no matter how many times you showe evidence of a theory's falsity, the adherent will redefine things to make it true again.
Just like Jack is doing here with trying to claim that Russiagate is still true, NPR goes further to claim that the Steel Dossier is not debunked! I am not making this up.
It may have changed, but the last report I heard about it on the air went as follows (paraphrased from memory):
So it turns out that Michael Cohen did not meet Russian Dude X in Prague at a certain time. In fact, it turns out that M.C. and R.D.X have never met in any place at any time ever, and M.C. has never been to Prague.
BUT...
Other people associated with Trump have met with other Russian dudes in other European cities! So the Steele Dossier is in fact generally true, even if it occasionally gets some details wrong.
I haven't done a survey or anything. I would say that a lot of the people I know worried about the blackmail to some degree or another, 99% of the time I saw a reference to the pee tape thing it was a joke, and as for secret meetings ... my sense is that this is too deep in the weeds for most people, but while I'm not aware of any secret meetings actually in Eastern Europe - there was an allegation of one with Michael Cohen that IIRC was never substantiated - there were in fact secret meetings. At least the trump tower one and one with Manafort and a shady Russian guy, per the bipartisan Senate committee's report on this.
It's a little weird to say that "there were secret meetings" is true, but if you get the location wrong and think "there were secret meetings in Eastern Europe" then suddenly it's an insane conspiracy theory ... the location isn't the issue.
The blackmail thing is also a real worry - just taking that meeting in trump tower opens you up to blackmail!
Also the person I responded to started by saying that people *today* believe "Russiagate".
"t's a little weird to say that "there were secret meetings" is true, "
You're going to need to cite a source for that.
If you're going to redefine "secret meeting" as "any meeting that wasn't preannounced with its agenda printed in the NYT" *and* you're only going to apply this definition to politicians with a particular party affiliation, it's going to be super easy (barely an inconvenience) to make those bad guys over there much worse than your team. It'll be especially easy when the guy you want to paint as corrupt/compromised/vulnerable has literally hundreds of thousands of people 'assosciated' with him from his decades of business interactions. And of course since there are only 143 million Russians, any Trump assosciate meeting with a Russian is far too much of a coincidence to not investigate.
I mean, it's not *really* true that the FISA warrant was based on false information, was it? All the guy did was (accidentally, I'm sure) exclude the word "not" here and there. An oversight anyone could make. After all, if he 'really' was falsifying such an affidavit, he'd have been punished severely and since he wasn't, obviously he didn't.
My favorite was when our AG ran on a platform of prosecuting Trump without ever mentioning what the charge was going to be. But hey, it worked, and she kept her promise!
So Trump Russia Collusion wasn't a thing in this retrospective analysis? The recent CJR analysis says the media wrote 533,000 articles on the subject. The maximalist view was expressed quite often.
Somebody hacked the DNC and released real information, that information is still curiously called "disinformation" by people. The most glaring part of this as I recall was the DNC undermining Sanders. Real information is somehow a Trump scandal and not a DNC scandal n this professed view. Instead of blaming the hackers maybe the real fault lies with the people who wrote misguided emails. Maybe the Russians did it but there is no definitive proof other than vague IC assertions.
Trump's statement was about recovering emails from Clinton's private server (not a scandal according to people) that somehow got erased and the statement was pretty clearly a joke unless one thinks Trump can only command secret Russian hackers by making overt statements during public press conferences.
Meanwhile we now know that the Clinton campaign financed the opposition research that resulted in the Steele dossier. Once again, this actual misinformation is not a Clinton scandal according to people, but a Trump scandal.
AFAIK, every single one of your bullet points is false, except maybe the last one.
They all (except the last) hinge on the first claim that Russia was behind the DNC hacks: if this claim fails, then all the points fail. I have never encountered any evidence whatsoever that would suggest to me that the first point is true though. I'm not even aware that anyone claims to have credible evidence of this claim; merely people repeating that they know it to be true (which is not the same thing). I'd be interested in hearing evidence.
People have really gone to great lengths to convince themselves that anything anyone says negative about trump relating to Russia must be some crazy conspiracy.
I'll just point to number 4 as the most obvious ... not only has everyone admitted it, trump jr himself tweeted out screenshots of the emails. The tweets are still up.
This was a top news story for IIRC like a week, numerous people in the trump white house (including trump himself I think) have acknowledged it, but somehow I expect that if trump jr deleted those tweets tomorrow, a week from now people would claim it never happened and it's a deranged conspiracy.
"The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father." - a literal email shared by Donald Trump's son (in the link Jack provided)
This is a weird double-standard that strongly affects my feeling on the entire conversation.
Russians offer Trump incriminating evidence against Hillary Clinton - scandal for Trump. Hillary contracts with Steele to get incriminating evidence from Russians - scandal for Trump. Huh?
There's a world in which maybe Trump was the bad guy in one or both cases, but considering we know that Steele actively worked with Russian intelligence sources *and* the material he collected was *false* it doesn't seem like there's any way to look at the second part of that and say Trump was bad twice and Hillary wasn't bad either time. As someone mentioned above there were over 500,000 articles about Russiagate, the vast majority of which had to do with the Steele dossier, which was literally funded by Clinton as opposition research. She paid the Russians to dig up dirt on Trump. How is that not exactly what he is being accused of here? Is it because she hired a lawyer to hire a firm to hire Steele to do it? It's silly to claim she wasn't aware of the activities, especially considering all the legwork her campaign, and she herself, did to promote the evidence and sell it to the media before it was known that Steele was the only source for any of the allegations.
Doubly weird is that many known accusations against Hillary, that she kept a secret server in contravention to government classification and record retention laws, that she conspired with the DNC to shut down Sanders, were true.
I'm in the camp that both were trying to do shady things. I absolutely refuse to accept a world in which we say that half a million articles going after Trump and practically nothing outside of deep red media against Clinton is perfectly normal and acceptable. It was a witch hunt against Trump, and until we recognize that we will have a really hard time moving on as a nation.
> Roger Stone was in communication with Assange on the timing of said leaks
This seems like weasly, misleading language. Does "in communication with" mean he sent Assange an email that Assange ignored, or does it mean that Assange agreed to leak them on Stone's requested schedule?
> Trump publicly encouraged Russia to continue the hacking while also taking pro-Russia positions in his campaign.
What pro-Russia positions? How exactly did Trump encourage this exactly? You know that incitement to commit a crime is often a crime right, so if Trump did that, why wasn't he charged?
I don't think there's anything saying that Assange agreed to leak them on Stone's requested schedule, but the trial revealed communications from Stone on October 7 saying to release the Podesta leaks that day (to distract from the Access Hollywood story) and that was indeed the day they were released. So it's either him going with what Stone said, or it's a big coincidence.
Also IIRC the idea that Stone was in communication with Assange was widely known among the highers-up in the trump campaign. Also ... even if it was a coincidence my main point is about culpability of the trump campaign people. What's the "good" version of the story for them? Something like that they wanted to coordinate with Assange but didn't succeed in actually doing so - to me that doesn't really exonerate them.
"What pro-Russia positions?"
Big ones that I remember are saying he'd recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea and wanting to lift sanctions. Also more generally defending Putin in interviews and shit.
"How exactly did Trump encourage this exactly?"
When he said "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."
> So it's either him going with what Stone said, or it's a big coincidence.
On Oct. 2nd Stone said something big would be released on the 5th. They weren't. Then he said the 6th. They weren't. They were actually released on the 7th. There is evidence that Stone didn't even get this information from Assange and that he was just conveying hearsay:
As that article explains, Assange himself publicly announced on Oct. 4 that he would be releasing something soon. Since Assange's release was known ahead of time, wouldn't the more plausible conspiracy be that the Access Hollywood release was timed to distract from the Wikileaks release rather than the other way around?
Newly unredacted sections of the Mueller report detail how there was insufficient evidence to link these Stone and Wikileaks:
> but the trial revealed communications from Stone on October 7 saying to release the Podesta leaks that day (to distract from the Access Hollywood story)
Please cite a source and let's see what was actually said.
> Big ones that I remember are saying he'd recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea and wanting to lift sanctions. Also more generally defending Putin in interviews and shit.
So? Pretty words for another world leader are meaningless. He also said no one's ever been as tough on Russia as him, but that seemingly went in one ear and out the other because Russiagate had taken root in your brain. Let's look at the actual evidence:
So of your 6 point list, points 1 and 2 are the same but aren't relevant as there's no connection to Trump, point 3 isn't supported by evidence, point 4 was proven and the person indicted, point 5 was half right and half wrong per above, and point 6 contradicts your claim from point 5 that Trump asked Russia to find the emails (which happened during the campaign). So from a 5 point list we're down to 1.5 points that are actually relevant, and this is already omitting the hundreds of other purported links to Russia that the media peddled.
This exaggerated, conspiratorial overreach has happened time and time again with Trump-Russia claims which is why it's now called Russiagate.
The Trump-Russia **conspiracy** theory is that Trump and Russia **conspired** to rig the 2016 election. We now know that this was categorically false. There is no evidence that Trump conspired with Russia (in the strongest possible sense of "no evidence", i.e. we looked extensively for years and found nothing). Without Trump, there is no Trump-Russia conspiracy. It's just Russia trying to meddle in the election, which is not a conspiracy, and is a weird thing to focus exclusively on when China is also proven to have interfered in our elections in favor of Biden and other Democrats.
In 2019, Slate published a transcript of a speech given by the New York Times top editor Dean Baquet to the NYT newsroom in which he admitted that the NYT had been focused on overthrowing Trump via hyping RussiaGate, but now that the Mueller Report had proved a fizzle, the NYT was switching to its Plan B for overthrowing Trump by hyping racism, such as via its 1619 Project:
Most of this discussion doesn't resonate with me on a personal level. It seems like it comes from the premise of "Believing false stuff is really really bad," when it seems like "ignorance or misunderstanding" is really the "default position".
If we interpret "conspiracy theories" broadly enough, then many "conspiracy theories" have been true. There were periods where many scientific theories, including cooky-sounding ones, were suppressed. There doesn't seem to be any "common sense" way to resolve these kinds of general issues. Many political, economic, philosophical, and scientific positions that are ubiquitous today began as fringe positions and I don't think this trend will end particularly soon. The lab leak hypothesis is an example of something that I'm uncertain about but which could be called a "conspiracy theory." In time, it's possible it will be classified as such or, if it's confirmed, people will change the story so that it was always the leading possibility. This is an issue I don't see as easy to resolve just by using good epistemic norms (if I did, I would try to do so).
So it seems like if we want to tackle "conspiracy theories" we might set out sights a little lower and treat it as a special case. It seems like 90%+ of conspiracy theories can be resolved using a few basic habits. Just ask, "If this were true, who would gain by suppressing it? Who would gain by supporting it? What tools do the relevant actors have to push their agenda?"
This seems to dispel most of what I would consider "absurd conspiracies", which includes vax microchips, pizzagate, the moon landing, Paul Mccartney's death, but not "difficult to decide" ones like the Lab-leak hypothesis, the drug war's racist origins, US support of Israel because of biblical prophecies, etc.
> Just ask, "If this were true, who would gain by suppressing it? Who would gain by supporting it? What tools do the relevant actors have to push their agenda?"
Also, crucially, "How many people would have had to keep this secret, and for how long?"
Sometimes it's not a secret though, sometimes it's just a distasteful thing people don't particularly like to think about and try to ignore after it goes out of vogue; see "forced sterilization of upwards of 60k people in the US in the early 1900s, all the way into the 60s" -- not a conspiracy theory, but also not something I was taught in school and sounds rather like a conspiracy if it takes you unawares. Or the US forgiving war criminals from WWII who had brutalized their way through puppet states because they felt like they would be 'pro-American' after the fact (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi)
Plenty of things sound like conspiracy theories but aren't, so I can see how it might be difficult for people to tell the difference at a glance.
The suppression of the lab leak theory was a conspiracy. The article by a bunch of virologists saying it wasn't true was organized by someone who had helped fund the institute in question and he did not reveal that fact in response to the requirement that authors reveal any conflicts of interest. Fauci et. al. switched from "we really don't know" in private email exchanges to "it wasn't a lab leak" in public statements.
That doesn't show that it was a lab leak — we still don't know. But it is an example of a real conspiracy that happened, worked for a while, and is now known.
One problem with this post, and its predecessor, is that they are kind of missing the point on what the real disagreement is here.
There is an interesting question about the real discernment of truth, and tools like rationality for helping improve on this. But nothing about the ivermectin debate (in the popular consciousness) bears on this. The ivermectin issue is not part of the rationality, discernment-of-truth debate; it's part of the what-is-permissible-to-believe-in-public debate.
For issues like this, subtle questions of rationality and study design are irrelevant. The only relevant questions are what powerful factions are in control of the respectable opinion on the matter, and what that respectable opinion is. Speaking a non-respectable opinion, or denying the respectable opinion, are forbidden, regardless of the truth either way. The "we must deny oxygen to the dangerous conspiracy theories!" response is diagnostic of this class of debate: treating the debate as if it's an ordinary matter of truth-discernment, and addressing the evidence on either side, amounts to denying the authority of The Experts to determine the respectable opinion -- a species of lèse-majesté -- and thus is equally condemnable as actually propounding the "conspiracy theory". And in this context, "trust the experts!" does not mean "identify people with expertise on the subject and trust them"; it means "agree with the respectable opinion". ("Expert" here comes to be defined in reverse as "anyone who propounds the respectable opinion"; people who differ with the respectable opinion are by definition not experts.)
(The race-and-IQ question is a good example here; it is an issue where the best available scientific evidence, and the actual experts, mostly point one way, but the respectable opinion you're allowed to believe in public is precisely the opposite. One can see how impotent mere expertise and evidence are in the face of a power faction determined to suppress them.)
There are issues where your heuristic of "almost always trust the experts" is a good one. Most plain scientific or technical questions that don't have a major presence in the public debate fall into this category. However, if you're dealing with an issue where a power faction has dictated a respectable opinion, then the heuristic becomes worthless. Whether the officially-defined Respectable Opinion is actually correct is more or less up to chance; going along with your heuristic here just makes you into an obedient subject of the power factions.
For various mostly-stupid reasons, the question of ivermectin efficacy (and hydroxychloroquine, and vitamin D/sun exposure, and all the other theories of covid treatment) has always been one with a set respectable opinion. Thus, trusting the experts is not a viable heuristic here. And if you try to use this as "practice in forming your own opinion" -- under the presumption that if you come to a conclusion contrary to the respectable opinion then you're in error -- then you'll just warp your epistemology to become a more obedient subject of the controlling power factions.
This really is a great point. I think an exploration of "how to determine who the experts are", or "how to tell expert consensus apart from respectable opinion, especially if you're a layperson" really would be valuable. It seems far too easy or arbitrary for one side of any issue to just coopt the respectable consensus, and claim its expert consensus.
The feedback loop of acceptable opinions into scientific publishing is likewise inherently biased on controversial topics.
Suppose a hypothetical researcher on transgender people completes a study with a conclusion that is unpalatable to transgender people and their allies. Well, if that researcher published such a study, she would be committing academic career suicide and probably have her name smeared publicly by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Human Rights Campaign by trying to publish that.
Ray Blanchard of the U. of Toronto has been a leading researcher on what motivates men to declare themselves women since the 1980s. One of his most important discoveries is that many of the most prominent male to female transgenders are motivated by a sex fetish that he named "autogynephilia." (Another is that younger brothers tend to be more homosexual than older brothers.)
Blanchard is quite sympathetic toward autogynephilics and supports, in many cases, them having sex change surgery.
But he's persona non grata with the SPLC and transgender movement because they want to keep this fetish a secret because its embarrassing to the Narrative. Thus, the New York Times, despite its blanket coverage of transgenderism, has only twice ever mentioned the word "autogynephilia."
You're obviously not up-to-date on things. The NYT is leading the "onslaught" against LGBT+ folx by laundering extreme right-wing hate groups talking points.
To say that Blanchard and his clique, not to mention modern blanchardians, claim(ed) that not-exclusively-androphilic transsexuals are motivated by a "sex fetish he named "autogynephilia"" is a stretch of truth.
First of all, the word "fetish" in sexologist terminology is a term that does not apply to "ETLE paraphilias", and that latter word - "paraphilia" - is what autogynephilia hould be called. (Do I need to say that "sex fetish" is reduntant?)
Secondly and more importantly, in Blanchard's two-type system, "autogynephiles" are not motivated directly by a fetish. That framing, for one, would be unable to explain why the desire to present as a woman persists after any sort of arousal subsides and even after gender confirmation surgery, and barring that the idea that thousands of people base their daily lives on the sexual component of a sexuality is as absurd as it is hurtful. Instead, original blanchardians aknowledge AGP as a cause of wider non-sexual "gender issues" - classical blanchardian framing would perhaps invoke the term "romance hypothesis", the idea that autogynephilic desire to be female is analogous to straight desire to enter long-term relationships.
Perhaps they would be more amenable to it if the majority of AGP "popularizers", themselves more or less impervious to real facts, stopped spreading misleading claims and overrelying on pattern-matching within an unfamiliar region of the thingspace to produce incorrect generalizations, the above charitably being a description of approximately 90% of AGP truthers you'd find on Twitter.
> However, if you're dealing with an issue where a power faction has dictated a respectable opinion, then the heuristic becomes worthless
I think the big problem here is that from the inside view, every kook theory looks like an issue where Power has dictated a respectable opinion. If you're a Noah's Ark truther then it probably feels like powerful forces have lined up to suppress your opinion, whereas from the outside view it just looks like everyone mocks you because you're silly.
It's certainly tempting to imagine you're being suppressed even if you're not. But the fact that it's possible to make this mistake doesn't make the distinction meaningless.
(If anything, Noah's Ark is one of the worse possible examples here -- it's not nearly as bad as the big highly political cases, but "don't discover anything that might give aid and comfort to Christians" is definitely one of the operative biases in various adjacent sciences.)
> The race-and-IQ question is a good example here; ... the actual experts, mostly point one way, but the respectable opinion you're allowed to believe in public is precisely the opposite.
I'm not sure whether this is, in fact, the case (at least as concerns the issue of genetic causes; that differences in distributions of IQ results exist is pretty well established). I've seen surveys of psychologists that showed a substantial majority of respondents favored at least a partially genetic explanation, but these have also been criticized as unrepresentative & probably biased toward the genetic explanation. This seems plausible: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4804158/ (the more recent study cited in Scott's "Scientific Consensus" post) sent their survey to 1345 people (everyone who'd recently published papers in journals on intelligence/cognitive ability plus the members of an intelligence research society) but got only 71 answers to the questions about race; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2019.101406 (a similar survey done by the same authors in 2020) got only 72 answers. If pro-genetic-explanation people were much more likely to answer than pro-environmental explanation people (as seems likely), then the actual proportion of experts who support a genetic explanation would be much lower than the proportion reported in the studies, though still nonnegligible.
> The only relevant questions are what powerful factions are in control of the respectable opinion on the matter, and what that respectable opinion is.
There may be different 'respectable opinions' in different contexts: in particular, it is probably much more common for one side to dominate the public discourse in the mainstream media than the scientific discourse among actual scientists. Respectable opinion on the causes of racial disparities in IQ is clearly dominated by the politically powerful faction both in mainstream media & among scientists. On the other hand, on the issue of COVID treatments & precautions, something like this may occur in the general media, but from the fact that articles like https://www.cochrane.org/CD006207/ARI_do-physical-measures-such-hand-washing-or-wearing-masks-stop-or-slow-down-spread-respiratory-viruses are still published & seriously responded to, I infer that scientists can still discuss these subjects freely. (Cf. the COVID-lab-leak theory, which journalists were much more unanimously opposed to than microbiologists.)
Tenured professor Bryan Pesta was recently fired by Cleveland State U. after co-authoring a landmark paper on the correlation of IQ and racial admixture.
> If pro-genetic-explanation people were much more likely to answer than pro-environmental explanation people (as seems likely)
Why would that be likely? Wouldn't the pro-environmental people be outraged by the blatant racism of the pro-genetic position and so want to strongly affirm their dissent?
> If pro-genetic-explanation people were much more likely to answer than pro-environmental explanation people (as seems likely)
Why does this seem likely?
There is no downside to an academic expressing a pro-environmental position. There is a potentially career-destroying downside to expressing a pro-genetic position.
The way the incentives are aligned, I would basically expect *fewer* academics to answer a survey supporting a genetic explanation of IQ.
The genetics-and-IQ (-and-everything-else) debate reminds me of the old adage about how a die-hard atheist thinks of God. It can be summarized in three statements:
First, God does not exist.
Second, the belief that God exists is harmful to humankind.
Third, even if He should turn out to exist, humankind is best served by ignoring Him.
Replace "God" with "genetic influence", and you have the gene-denier's position in today's debate in a nutshell.
By the way, I was voted the world's most trustworthy journalist on the subject of IQ by professional psychometricians in 2013.
On the other hand, I was ten years younger then. The topic of IQ demands a lot of IQ to write about, and I'm definitely not smarter today than I was when I was younger. Perhaps I'm "wiser," but that's harder to reliably quantify.
My view is that my last major contribution to the science of psychometrics was my 2015 post "The Flynn Effect: IQ Testing Across Space and Time:"
This is exactly what I was trying to get at with my glib "is masking a conspiracy?" question. The powers-that-be declared masks effective and derided ivermectin based on... what, exactly? Certainly not rationality and good-faith discernment-of-truth.
Which is the conspiracy theory: "white supremacy" is the source of all humanity's ills, or "the Jews" are the source of all humanity's ills? Choose wisely: one gets you cancelled toot sweet, the other a MacArthur genius grant.
For the peanut gallery, they are both wrong, much like ivermectin and masks are both likely ineffective. Unlike IVM/Masks, though, they are both extremely dangerous that should have the oxygen sucked out of them.
I agree, this is a classic example of what Moldbug/Yarvin would call "leaking power," essentially that when "apolitical" experts are given power, their expertise becomes inherently political, and their incentives shift from promoting true ideas to promoting ideas that justify their own power and prestige. Therefore, "trust the experts" becomes synonymous with "trust power."
"The answer is: absolutely, yes, but also this is how conspiracy theories get you." This isn't just how conspiracy theories get you, this is the ideal human experience, to pose the hypothetical in our mind like a grand fiction so that we can demand of ourselves to create an understanding of these people, this world, ourselves. The conspiracy theory is the undemarcated indulgence in being human, to constantly seek to know, and to have that beautiful, torturous need throw us into passionate order and fixation at a cornucopia of childish and wildly wise levels of knowing...the conspiracy theory is as fundamental as theory of mind, as learning mating rituals. To belive is our mother tongue, to strive towards meaning with our will to illusion is the gifts of endless puzzlement that disappear the chains of our determinism. We are fated to believe, and we cannot nor ought we dissuade perseverance in the face of ruin--unless we believe that signal blazes before the stormy rocks out to the quiet ghostship filled sea of our hopeful need for conversation.
Evidence for a given theory is the observation of an event that is more likely to occur if the theory is true than if it is false. (The event would be evidence against the theory if it is less likely if the theory is true.)
I've seen it argued that a lot of the appeal of "conspiracy theories" (or just heterodox views in general if we wish to avoid the categorization issue of what counts as a "conspiracy") is that it makes the holder feel special.
It seems like maybe the best defense against conspiracy theories might just being confident in ones own value/personality with needing to ground it in, say, having non-standard views on the Kennedy assassination.
Maybe less Grassy Knolls and more Touching Grass, in short.
Which is funny, because the people who use that specific term are exclusively part of the Very Online crowd. No one who actually regularly touches grass is even aware of the phrase "Touch Grass."
Arguably, believing even the most transparently false conspiracy theories isn't measurably bad for individuals or society and it doesn't matter what people think. If someone wants to think that COVID isn't real or that Donald Trump wants you to drink bleach, it's not going to meaningfully change anything.
From this perspective, just doing what we can do silence or ignore annoying people is basic hygiene. Only the unusually altruistic (like Scott Alexander) actually care enough to want to help people think better.
You mention the flaw with the heuristic of 'trust experts' (namely, that you might be wrong about what experts think, or someone else might be deliberately misleading you about what experts think), but not the equal and opposite problem of the heuristic 'ignore conspiracy theories'.
To state directly what you hinted at in the post: People who don't want you to believe something will describe it as a conspiracy theory, regardless of what qualities it has or does not have.
The lessons you've attempted to impart with these last two posts (be humble; be vigilant) are important, but if I could add one more, it would be to follow the arguments as much as you realistically can, not because every theory deserves the time of day, but as practice for when you have a real question that you can't just throw your hands up and say 'no opinion' to.
Sometimes an argument will make sense, and a counter-argument will be above your head. (E.g. this pyramid looks artificial; it ends in right angles at regular intervals. And the counterargument being a bunch of complicated geology that I won't even pretend to understand). That doesn't mean the argument has to convince you.
But there's a difference between being persuaded by a counterargument that you know exists that you don't fully understand, and being persuaded by a counterargument that you *assume* to exist, because you didn't take the initial argument seriously in the first place.
There are loads of 'conspiracy theories' that I don't give the time of day to, that I'm sure have at least one or two convincing arguments I haven't looked into, but I don't go around saying 'no one should look into this', because someone has to, there is literally no other possible way to know which is correct.
I didn't read any of your ivermectin posts (I didn't care about the question one way or the other, and a lot of it was over my head), but I appreciated that you took the claims seriously and addressed the arguments rather than taking the completely absurd stance of 'no one has to look into this to know it's false'. And I would have appreciated an exhaustive post debunking the moon landing deniers' strongest arguments just as much (and probably read the whole thing with a bucket of popcorn), because those posts are how truth is discovered and transmitted to others.
Kavanagh's sneering is wrong on two counts. First, he's far more certain that ivermectin doesn't work than the evidence justifies (I don't think it does, but the evidence in favor of it is a hell of a lot stronger than the evidence in favor of moon landing denial). Second, he's doing the very same thing the worst conspiracy theory believers do. He's saying 'I believe [x] because a seemingly trustworthy person said [x], and you should also believe [x] and if you don't, or if you take arguments for [not x] seriously than shame on you.'
You, Kavanagh, and conspiracy theorists all have one thing in common. You're claiming to have found truth, or at least made an honest and intelligent effort at it.
The difference between you, and them, is that Kavanagh and conspiracy theorists are saying 'I've found truth, it's high status to believe what I believe, and low status to believe otherwise', and you're saying 'I think I've found truth, here's a detailed map of how I got here'.
You might be right. You might be wrong. You might have made some substantial errors, or been biased. But no one, at all, even theoretically, can know that without someone having looked at your map.
And no one can know that the pro-ivermectin people are wrong, or biased, or making substantial errors, until someone has looked at *their* maps and said something to the effect of, 'oh, I see what you did here, you took a left at Albuquerque, but you should have taken a right'.
The notion that by taking bad arguments seriously enough to debunk them you're making the problem worse only makes sense if the bad argument is so obscure that most people won't have even heard of it until you debunked it; and it's very convincing; and your counterargument is either unconvincing, hard to follow, or both; such that people will come away convinced of the very thing you were trying to refute.
You definitely haven't done that with ivermectin (although you may have convinced some people that Atlantis is real).
Would this mindset have protected you against error in 1923? In 1823? In 1023? 2123?
Does it seem likely or not that experts in 2123 will look at 2023 experts the way 2023 experts look at 1923 experts? Does it seem like the amount of progress and change there was from 1923 to 2023 is going to be greater or less than what will happen from 2023 to 2123?
Would an alternative approach have made one more likely to be right in those years? We of course remember the people who diverged from their contemporaries in ways that match what we know (or "know") as "ahead of their time", but there's obviously a big selection bias there.
("They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.")
Knowing that there's a lot of societal knowledge that will turn out to be incomplete or flat out wrong is a good exercise in intellectual humility. Having strong confidence that I can reliably do better across the board would be the opposite.
I mean, yeah, actually, it seems to me like, if you knew you were going to be born in a randomly chosen year and location in history, and you had to choose a heuristic for judging the effectiveness of a medicine beforehand, “The experts have no idea what they’re talking about and shouldn’t be trusted” is the winner, hands down. You will, on average, be far closer to the truth than somebody who takes them seriously. (That’s speaking as though our current ideas are true.)
I’m not judging Scott’s mindset against some hypothetical procedure I might have that I think would outperform it. I’m judging it against pure dumb idiot teenager skepticism. If you think our age is unique in world history, then his mindset wins. If not, not.
I’m being a bit too harsh, to make the point. Our track record versus infectious disease is way better than any other historical period’s. It may be that our age really is unique.
But I think it’s a useful corrective to imagine Scott giving this advice to somebody in 1945 who’s about to undergo psychiatric treatment by an expert. They were right about some stuff, but they were disastrously wrong often enough that pure stubborn ignorant skepticism would be a far safer choice.
> “The experts have no idea what they’re talking about and shouldn’t be trusted” is the winner, hands down.
This feels like cheating. There are a thousand ways to be wrong, and only one way to be right. If someone handed you a list of all hypotheses ever hypothesized and asked you which were correct, you'd be right more than 99% of the time if you thought every one was false. But you'd also be an idiot, since you'd know zero true facts about the world.
It's easy to guess that whatever the latest superfood is, it's overhyped and probably ineffective. It's hard to find an actual superfood.
In this case it was the pro-ivermectin group that had the difficult job (of being right on a precise claim), while the experts (eventually) took the view that the pro-ivermectin group "have no idea what they're talking about and shouldn't be trusted".
Yeah, that seems like an important insight. It's much harder to be right about something insanely difficult like medicine, which makes the skeptical position seem unfairly easy.
But being right isn't just about abstract truth. When it comes to medicine, everybody is dealing with very high stakes -- your health. If you happen to be right because you're an idiot who knows zero true facts about the world, and it also keeps you safe from trepanation or lobotomy or getting fed mercury or thalidomide or vioxx, for most of history it seems like that's a good deal.
But even when it comes to abstract questions like, "why do plants grow?", "why do heavy things fall?", "what are the stars?", our era's experts give very different answers than the experts in ancient Egypt or medieval China or Enlightenment Europe. An idiot who knows zero true facts about the world is closer to the truth than those experts, at least according to our experts. This is why the oracle called Socrates the wisest man in Athens: he, at least, knew that he didn't know anything.
So I'd say that the basic starting position of any well-read, intelligent person is extreme skepticism. I'm not recommending anti-vaxxers; I'm recommending Socrates and Descartes. We should judge Scott's and Kavanagh's mindsets against that. A couple thousand years later, Socrates looks pretty smart for saying that he knew nothing and bothering the experts to no end; in a couple thousand more years, will Scott's advice look smart?
(Descartes didn't end up looking smart when it comes to medicine or physics, but that's because he lost his initial skepticism when he jumped on his Method as the one true and infallible way to knowledge.)
On the other hand, whilst the precise answers to abstract questions may have been wrong, they generally tracked close enough to reality to enable people to make correct predictions.
A medieval astronomer who believed in Ptolemaic-style geocentrism may have been wrong on that particular issue, but he could still correctly predict when the next solar eclipse would be, or whatever. A doctor who believed in the miasma theory of disease could still give useful advice like "Don't live near an open sewer, don't live in the middle of a swamp," even if his explanation for why these things were unhealthy wouldn't be right. An idiot who knows zero true facts about the world might avoid being wrong about geocentrism or miasmas, but the cost is being unable to meaningfully act in the real world. (Unless he applies his scepticism selectively, of course, which is what most sceptics have tended to do.)
Depends on what they're expert in. We still think Newton was bang-on about inertia and so forth, at least for v << c, and the Principia was published in 1687.
Well nothing is going to protect you against error, in any era. The best you can hope for is to have an appropriate level of skepticism about everything so you're not _too_ far wrong.
In 1923, for instance, if you'd followed the expert consensus blindly, you'd have been wrong about continental drift. If, on the other hand, you'd put a lot of work into doing your own research into all the available geological evidence... you'd still be wrong about continental drift, with a slightly lower level of certainty. Continental drift theory in 1923 was based on some sketchy evidence (these fossils look like these other fossils, and hey look South America fits into Africa) and lacked any kind of plausible mechanism to explain why the continents would drift. Compelling evidence for continental drift would show up decades later, at which point expert consensus quickly shifted to support it.
But of course, that's just the one-in-ten-thousand example of a weird kooky theory which actually turns out to be right. The other 9,999 get forgotten (unless they wind up doing serious harm like Lysenkoism).
The experts of the past weren't idiots, even though they didn't know and couldn't measure as much as we do now. For example, "Miasma theory" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory ) was a lot closer to correct than blaming illness on witchcraft or divine wrath.
To quote Isaac Asimov:
"[W]hen people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
I think the point here is that as science progresses we pose new questions, and sometimes initially get them wrong. Also, remember the difference between "trust confident expert consensus where it exists" and "assume confidently that whatever experts think is most likely to be true definitely is, even if the experts themselves aren't certain".
So in 1923 and 1823 trusting expert consensus would have have offered a lot of protection against error (although far from perfectly, especially in 1823), but been a much less powerful tool than in 2023, because there were far fewer questions where there /was/ an expert consensus to trust.
In 1023 it would have been a disaster. I think what this is telling us is that we need to be careful about what we mean by "expert" (this something like this is probably also the point about why it's less powerful in 1823 than it was by 1923, but why there isn't necessarily that much gap between 1923 and 2023).
I suspect that in 2123 "trust the expert consensus" will result in being /wrong/ about as often as in 1923 or 2023, but in being /right/ much more broadly - there will still be the same number of questions at the edges of scientific expertise where there's a mistaken consensus, but the amount of stuff in the centre of it where consensus is obviously correct will have grown.
> I’ve tried to be pretty clear that I think experts are right remarkably often, by some standards basically 100% of the time
Maybe “right” means a proper evidence based opinion from Bayesian analysis with some confidence interval? What are you supposed to do if you have differing priors, values, or goals? How do you even reconcile “experts are right…” with the existence of this blog?
I really relate to these last two posts, having been raised Mormon. Part of the reason it's so hard to escape fundamentalist religion is the vast majority of arguments you hear against it are really poor, just an insult, or a combination of the two. For example, at least half of the arguments Mormons will hear claiming Mormonism is false are from fundamentalists of different denominations roughly following the pattern "Of course you're right the Earth is only 6,000 years ago and god spoke to man then. And you're right about what God said 4,000 years ago when he again spoke. And you're right about everything he did 2,000 years ago when he came down and spoke to mankind in the flesh. But it's completely impossible that he spoke to man again 200 years ago and you're secretly a Satan worshiper for even considering it"
>Get a sense of what the arguments for the conspiracy theory look like
This was part of what really got me thinking on the right path. Going out and seeing what believers in other religions were saying--how they'd find all kinds of evidence obviously proving their religion true. And realizing that, yah, objectively, I'm willing to dismiss all those things about other religions and to be intellectually consistent I can't use similar things as proof of Mormonism (e.g., eye witness accounts of the supernatural, random miracles, spiritual feelings, etc.).
Then I was able to go through and start investigating things like Evolution and then the actual historicity of Mormonism. And yah, by that point it was all pretty easy to discard via standard Bayesian reasoning.
But initially, from the inside view, it did seem like overwhelming evidence and the fact that smart people just dismissed it with an insult made it so I could dismiss the "experts" because they obviously hadn't examined it closely and were just ignorant of all the truths I'd discovered that they were too prideful to listen to. (I've probably mangled the memory but I recall an old lesswrong post where someone tried to defend Mormonism and commenters patiently went through each point and showed how that wasn't dissimilar to evidences other religions use for their mutually exclusive religion... and seeing smart people who did consider the evidence carefully and charitably and still reject it was an major initial source of cognitive dissonance)
As someone who is a still-practicing Mormon, I get where you're coming from. I've probably encountered every religious and non-religious argument against Mormonism there is, but I still believe it is God's true church. I no longer seek to PROVE the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is true (where at one time I might have), but I do want to explain why I believe, and perhaps demonstrate why and how I think a person can be religious while also be rational.
First, I and others close to me have had our share of spiritual experiences, random miracles, etc. in the context of our faith. And you are absolutely right, I can't use those experiences as proof that my religion is right, when other have had spiritual experiences connected to their religion. Even if there WERE no other religions with their own spiritual experiences, one could simply choose not to believe my testimony. But, that doesn't negate the reality of MY spiritual experiences for ME. Like Scott said about the Kennedy assassination, I don't NEED to have an opinion on others' spiritual experiences. I'm not going to say they are of God, or the devil, or delusions. I choose not to have an opinion. I can't disprove others' spiritual experiences, but no-one's going to disprove mine either.
Next, I will grant I've learned things about the church that have changed my overall view from what it was when I was an innocent Primary kid, but I think it's like the race and IQ thing mentioned here. If there is solid data that indicates that different races have different IQs, then why then does it feel so icky? Even aside from questioning the data itself, there's also the question of what you DO with the data. Does it mean that we should indeed segregate by race? Does it mean you can tell whether or not a candidate would be a good fit for a particular job just by looking at their name or their profile picture? I would say no. Indeed I'd say the majority of people, even the IQ scientists would say no, even if avowed racists threw all manner of data at them. Because no matter what the data says, going back to the Jim Crow days would FEEL wrong. It goes against everything the majority culture believes to be right. Would you say that this is incorrect, because this is just a feeling? Or because it's just groupthink? Now, I believe there are solid reasons behind this feeling. At best, racial IQ averages explain WHY you might see certain intellectual trends in certain races, but they don't tell you anything about individuals. And again, this is assuming all the data perfectly checks out. However, there are people who take this kind of data and say we SHOULD go back to Jim Crow or something like it, and say that the aforementioned reasons I gave behind the feeling of wrongness are just rationalizations to justify the false beliefs that are implanted by the anti-racist culture.
When I come across something like "Did you know Joseph Smith did THIS?" I admit it affects me on the emotional level of someone insulting my mother. But on an intellectual level, when I compare it to other matters of debated history, and on a spiritual level, remembering my own spiritual experiences and the blessings living gospel values has brought me, I'm able to "walk around with the annoying knot in my beliefs" confident that any unanswered questions will be resolved in the hereafter. There's the data, and how I choose to respond to the data.
Lastly, I don't believe that quitting the church would resolve that aforementioned knot, just put new ones in it's place. There's the classic "what-if-you're-wrong-at-the-end" argument. If it turns that atheists are right and there is nothing after death, then I lose nothing by believing whatever makes me happy. But if I reach an afterlife only to find that I've wasted my mortal one turning against my spiritual experiences.... Of course you also have the question of "what if you picked the wrong religion". One of the nice things about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is we don't believe you'll be damned for merely dying in ignorance. I don't think a god that would do that is a god I would want to live with anyway.
My experience was that the "knot" was completely gone after accepting that Mormonism was not true. For me, the dissonance wasn't from not knowing exactly how the universe formed, or other questions that have no answers. I'm fine saying "I don't know" on those things, and in many cases, might not ever know.
The problem is the things I do know. If I had to give one answer on Sunday and another answer on a school test... those things caused "knots" in the brain. The conflicts between trying to reconcile mutually exclusive world views (i.e., the earth is 4+ Billion years old, humans evolved from other animals, early humans were dark skinned, American Indians came from Asia 10,000+ years ago and have no Israelite DNA, etc.).
>There's the classic "what-if-you're-wrong-at-the-end" argument. If it turns that atheists are right and there is nothing after death, then I lose nothing by believing whatever makes me happy. But if I reach an afterlife only to find that I've wasted my mortal one turning against my spiritual experiences....
For me very much the opposite. I'm quite confident I won't find god even in a foxhole, but as hypothetical, if I die and end up in an afterlife, I'd be quite comfortable going as an atheist who did his best with what he had. I think my first thought would be "Yippee, I'm so glad I was wrong about this, let's go talk to god! How cool is that!" But I'd be absolutely terrified in the same situation if I'd stayed in the church. The thought of being asked, "You knew (or should have known) the church was a lie but you raised your children in it anyways because it was easier for you that way? You were put in a position to get your family closer to the truth and you failed" would haunt me.
Harvard economist Raj Chetty has built history's best social statistics database, and he keeps finding that Salt Lake City is the best place to raise kids.
I haven't done anything formal but at least with some exploratory analysis I did years ago, heavily Mormon counties do extremely well on any measure that is influenced by smoking (e.g., lung cancer), but other than that, doesn't stand out relative to their demographics. If you think from an "Albion's Seed" perspective, Utah is basically a New England state out of place geographically because of it's unique migration history... which was basically a bunch of New Englanders, English, and Scandinavian people. But I'd be curious if you have link's to Chetty's (or others) work that shows them doing consistently better than New England on measures that aren't smoking or drinking related.
Could some of that be a result of rules such as "if another Mormon hurts you, you are not supposed to report it to the police"? (Just guessing, I don't know if such rules exist.)
I was thinking a lot about the inside view from Mormonism also. In particular: everyone who mocked me for believing it, told me it was obvious, so forth—they were worse than useless in terms of convincing me away from it. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to those who were willing to consider it carefully and charitably, and respond to my points with seriousness. It sounds like we had similar experiences with the whole thing.
What's important is that you should treat everything every sharp customer tells you as equally plausible. Especially things you read on blogs about topics like machine learning, statistics, human biological diversity, social justice, and gender. Remember: always do your own research!
Nah, that advice doesn't scale very well. I have zero technical training in vaccine development for example (like 99.99%) of the rest of humanity, so 'doing my own research' would necessarily involve several years of dedicated study just to be incompetent.
One thing that people tend to assume, which I’m not at all sure is generally true, is that believers in conspiracy theories believe in conspiracy theories.
I’ve mentioned this on here before, so sorry to repeat myself, but some years ago I attended an actual conspiracy theory convention in San Francisco, called (amazingly) ConspiracyCon.
I’m not saying there were no true believers there. And of course it’s guesswork to ask what they really believe. But many of the attendees did seem notably relaxed about their commitment to particular theories. The same people would be won over by Saturday’s lecture on how JFK was not assassinated, and Sunday’s about how he was assassinated by then-seventeen-year old George W Bush. The guy who seemed very intense about Israel causing the Haitian hurricane for some reason, was able to retreat to much less specific weather-control mutterings when informed by his friend that anti-Israel theories were leftist. It was all just very social: holding beliefs was secondary to seeming cynical and in-the-know, signalling solidarity and basically having fun with like-minded friends.
I think for most of us probably the majority of our beliefs are like this (self-conscious political / religious / philosophical beliefs, not beliefs like “If I walk out the window it will end badly). How many people who claim to believe that abortion is literally the same thing as child murder show any sign of behaving the way you’d expect someone who believed that to behave? Same with the anarchist and communist friends of mine who insist that they want to smash the system. When I was a kid I believed… I believed I believed, or stated to myself that I believed… in God, but I didn’t behave at all like someone who thought an omnipotent, highly judgmental and irascible being was watching my every move.
I’m not sure there’s much that’s particular about believers in conspiracy theories (though there may be something particular about the style of argument of their most successful proponents). Many of them have just been born into or wandered into a social milieu in which those are the kind of things it’s cool to “believe”.
"But many of the attendees did seem notably relaxed about their commitment to particular theories. The same people would be won over by Saturday’s lecture on how JFK was not assassinated, and Sunday’s about how he was assassinated by then-seventeen-year old George W Bush."
This gets at something I don't like about the conspiratorial mindset. It's usually presented as "don't trust anyone, non-believers are naive, be an independent thinker, etc". But you can't actually go through life not trusting in any authority for any belief. It would be impossible to function. (how do you know England *really* is there, have *you* ever been there? Oh you trust Big Map?)
I think it's often more that people have some other, non-evidence-based motivation for their beliefs, and the conspiratorial reasoning is just a way of opportunistically dismissing any evidence to the contrary and dumping the requirement that your own beliefs be internally consistent.
IMO everyone has a right to try and untie knots in their belief structure b/c no one else CAN just like no one can truly understand 1+1=2 or infinity without going through the process themselves.
This is important b/c otherwise the feeling of living in a Matrix becomes THE primary problem to resolve vs accumulating stockpiles of calories or wealth. “ur not smart & sophisticated” enough is equivalent to “just accept the matrix”. (Root cause of “wanted to escape matrix” likely explains a lot of issues and is similar to “inability to sit quietly in a room alone”)
On a spectrum of conspiracy theory -> widely accepted truth -> Truth of God, these tools resolve knots based on desire for understanding.
Conspiracy theorists just want all the info to be integrated, the arrogant believe they have achieved the god truth, others dare not approach that infinity and aim to just be less wrong.
The choice of tool depends on how strong the load bearing structures are for dissonance. (the greatest structures require reading a 25k word article every day or similar)
Conspiracy theories act similar to a True Belief in God or a touchstone to True Love, an infinite ocean that can dissolve any knot b/c contrast w such Vastness reduces any knot to an infinitesimal.
However conspiracy theories have to constantly integrate all the new information all the time. Like every codebase, it cannot outrun entropy and eventually collapses into a hyper dense black hole of stubbornness, sphagettifying anything that crosses its event horizon.
My personal conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theories are a shitty replacement for God that prevent an excess of desperate Matrix escaping acts like mass shootings or other “can’t sit quietly in a room” problems. The purpose isn’t to be “right” but to be useful for things like refusing-to-dehumanize-others-even-enemies and empathy-towards-the-personal-task-of-knot-resolving
As a minor footnote, I do wish you'd added two more defensive mental positions that have served me well over time:
Measurement is king. Do as much measurement as you can yourself. Be more inclined to believe people who display a devotion to measurement. Measurement trumps any amount of beautiful theory, and it's about the only lasting bulwark we have about the universal human tendency to believe plausible pleasing bullshit. Give the world 10 years in which no one actually died and we would persuade ourselves that death did not exist.
If measurement is king, consistency is queen. Always ask yourself whether such-and-such hypothesis is logically consistent with all else that you know to be true, or have better reason to believe is true. If the FDA is corrupt in approving/not approving this drug, what *else* would have to be true about what the FDA does? Is this what you see? If ancient astronauts landed on Earth and taught Incans how to smelt aluminum and build helicopters, what *else* would be true about history? Is it? If it was fairly easy to discover effective antivirals -- half a dozen can be found just by rummaging around in the existing pharmacopeia -- then would AIDS have been so frightening for so long? Or hep C? Would people still be dying of influenza the way they do? Et cetera.
There are conspiracy theories that are logically consistent with everything you know -- but they're rare, beautifully constructed works of art. Often a quotidian conspiracy theory starts off small, but as soon you start wondering about its consistency, it has to grow bigger and bigger. Oswald didn't act alone -- requires one shadowy accomplice. But the cops and FBI didn't figure that out -- now we also require the police and FBI to be incompetent. Multiple blue-ribbon commissions didn't find any reason to credit the theory -- well, they're in on it to, the conspiracy is bigger than we ever thought! And so on. When your conspiracy has to get bigger and deeper every time you poke at even minor inconsistencies, that's a warning sign.
There is something creepy about rationality. It makes me feel like that scene in Akira Kurosawa's Dreams where the ice demon is telling the guy fainting from hypothermia to "go to sleep", that "the snow is hot".
I don't think we need more rationality, collectively speaking. We need better ways of unleashing our passions. It's probably good that experts strive to be rational clear thinkers, but this stuff isn't for everyone. Brahmins, experts, can't actually rule either: it is the Kshatriyas who do that, and they are supposed to listen to the experts.
If there is one great sin of the rationalists, it's one from the Bhagavad Gita:
> So let the enlightened toil, sense-freed, but set
To bring the world deliverance, and its bliss;
Not sowing in those simple, busy hearts
Seed of despair.
The story of rationality is a seed of despair. "Submit to the experts, who are more reasonable than you". "Don't have faith, that's delusion." "Hope the Singularity sorts everything out". This stuff is poison in its present form. It would be much healthier to approach rationality as a tool you deploy in certain contexts (such as the one in this article, to be fair), not as a final answer to every last thing.
So if this is a proper context for rationality, why the triggering? Probably the picture of Dawkins did it. I just don't buy Dawkins or Yudkowsky understand reality more than Jesus did. And I suppose they have arguments for why they are, in fact, better than Jesus, even if they have never actually phrased it that way.
Rationalists do have a god, and it is a god of ice. I would rather follow fire, but I also believe the two can coexist. The ice would need to be subordinate though.
I don't know, that's what I have picked up from SSC/ACX and LW over the years. If rationality is actually ok with something like ontology agnosticism, well, that's not what I've seen, but it certainly makes me feel better about it.
this strikes me as egregiously weird, since if there was one thing Yud wanted everyone to take away from LW, it was that the singularity would most definitely NOT sort itself out. It's the equivalent of "Jesus taught us to hate our neighbor".
>I come back to this example less often, because it could get me in trouble, but when people do formal anonymous surveys of IQ scientists, they find that most of them believe different races have different IQs and that a substantial portion of the difference is genetic.
IQ scientists (mostly psychologists) are not exactly a reliable source for developing intuition on this question. But some people are pretty well wedded to their uh, priors here.
Most academic experts on Marxism are Marxists themselves and most philosophers of religion are personally religious. Does this mean you should be a religious theist and a Marxist? The main reason for this is those subjects attract people likely to be sympathetic to the object of study. But if you zoom out just a little bit and look the broader fields that have something to say about arguments that exist within more niche disciplines, that consensus quickly melts away. The arguments for theistic justification discussed in phil of religion tend to be viewed very poorly by other kinds of scholars who have equivalent or superior claims to expertise to evaluate them, for example.
When trusting the experts, you end up having to develop mature skillset in understanding who exactly the experts are, and one of the intermediate lessons is spotting these kind of dynamics.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Most experts on the book of Mormon believe the document is of divine providence and is an ancient record of pre-Columbian meso/America. The reason you don't defer to the BoM experts on this and accept that they probably know best is because you should quickly recognize that this is a quirk of the fact that the people most interested in becoming Book of Mormon experts have prior ideological commitments that create the attraction. The arguments they accept for their views also overlap with the expertise in surrounding fields that they inhabit a niche area of. And if you look there, you'll notice they are roundly dismissed.
It means, pawing aside all the red herrings, that IQ is sort of a junk specialty in psychology, which is sort of junk discipline. The data is crappy, the baseline understanding of genetics is poor, and for some reason the field is chockablock with discredited race science cranks who for some reason keep getting cited in the literature. It's very odd, really.
Do you think my comparison here is based in treating Book of Mormon experts who believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon seriously? I'm making a circumspect point about IQ researchers being in a quirky niche subfield that isn't on an island.
Bearing in mind I majored in psychology (and biology if it makes you feel better), I don't agree that psychology is a "junk discipline."
I did get a degree in psychology (focus on neurology/brain imaging) and ended the degree leaning towards the junk science view.
On the IQ point, I'm inclined to agree with the initial poster here. What's more, as another commenter points out above, the actual response rate is very low - if anything, the example Scott uses for IQ is comparable to the NYT example he highlights as being particularly egregious!
Oh somebody said "Nazi" on here and Steve Sailor appears to defend their honor! Steve: you don't know any genetics. You're also literally a white supremacist. The fact that you are coddled on this site is a mystery to me.
IQ scores seem to pretty robustly predict outcomes both in school and at work. When something helps you make good predictions about stuff you care about, it's not junk.
It seems to me that you're using "conspiracy theory" to mean the same as "questionable or crackpot science." Unless the "conspiracy theory" is just about the efforts of "the establishment" to "suppress the truth."
It seems obvious to me that there should be a fair amount of tolerance for discussing "questionable or crackpot science." My go-to example is plate tectonics: until sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, plate tectonics was generally regarded as a crackpot theory. The incidental supporting evidence (the way the shape of South America seemed to "fit" into Africa, corresponding geological strata that seemed to appear on opposite sides of the ocean) was considered weak, coincidental, and unconvincing. The idea seemed to be crazy - the Earth essentially changing shape constantly. But, scientists kept debating, and eventually most of them bought into the crazy theory. One lesson: the establishment and experts can be wrong, and can unfairly trash people who are right. Another lesson: without continued open discussion, the right answer would never have become accepted.
This example is also notable in that the result had relatively little importance outside of earth science fields. The scientists had their arguments, and the rest of us didn't need to pay much attention. If we did pay attention, and we backed the "wrong" side, it didn't hurt us much.
However, if the issue had become attached to an issue with political salience, the political issues would have consumed the scientific question. If the "pro" side had been championed by people who urged the end of ocean shipping because ship turbulence could cause plates to fracture, or if the "anti" side had been championed by people who wanted to end oil drilling because it could cause volcanos, the scientific merits would have been ignored by the activists.
I think we saw some of this effect with respect to Covid and Ivermectin. There were people who were tired of the "experts" telling them what to do, and wanted something that would show the experts were no better than the ignorant rubes they tried to push around. These people probably picked the wrong issue in focusing on Ivermectin. There were plenty of other illustrations of the fecklessness of experts, and of the over-reliance on experts by politicians to mandate questionable policies in the name of threat reduction. In the case of Ivermectin and other Covid topics, I think the prudent medical approach would be to let doctors carefully explore many different clinical approaches, sharing their results and trying to spread the learning. Meanwhile, conduct good scientific tests to get "hard" information and share that too. Eventually, we'll get better information. Unfortunately, more people will die than if everyone used the "right" treatment from the start, but we don't know the "right" treatment, so the unfortunate result is unavoidable.
The policy implications on Covid topics turned out to be pretty large: How much economic lockdown should we implement? What protective measures should be mandated? Which risks matter more: teachers who face potential mortal risks if infected vs. students who face lost education if schools are disrupted? These are not scientific questions, but value questions involving risk tradeoffs under uncertainty. In many areas, politicians took the authority of "expert" opinion to impose measures of questionable value. In the process, personal and institutional incentives got distorted:
- Experts didn't want to confess ignorance and cede the spotlight to others who would express no doubts
- Politicians didn't want to appear helpless, so had a strong incentive to "do something"
- Government bodies had an institutional incentive to show themselves boldly taking charge in a moment of crisis, thus justifying their past funding and giving them arguments for much larger future funding.
I think we see more of this effect with respect to climate change. There is pretty basic science, well established for many years, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and increased atmospheric carbon dioxide will lead to higher temperatures, all other things being equal. The activists have seized on this point, and some follow-on speculation by some scientists, to conclude that everyone will die unless we stop using fossil fuels very very soon. Too many of the other side started by questioning the science of greenhouse gases, or the temperature record, when they should have focused their efforts on the weaker parts of the activists' program: how much warming can we expect, and how much harm (balanced against how much benefit) comes from it?
There certainly are conspiracy theories around the climate change issue: Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by scientists who are trolling for funding, vs. Climate change dissenters are anti-science hacks funded by fossil fuel interests. Most of the scientific papers I've read on climate change are rather modest in their claims, but the authors are maligned by those who reject all claims, and over-interpreted by those whose agenda is anti-capitalism and anti-technology.
On this issue, the policy implications are potentially all-encompassing. There are experts all along the spectrum from "there is no significant issue" to "we must transition away from fossil fuels within the next few years or face catastrophe." The policy issue, though, isn't scientific at all, and no amount of expert judgment can solve it. It will ultimately depend on citizens informing themselves as much as possible, confronting the hard choices and tradeoffs, and being willing to live with the consequences.
All of which is to say I agree with what [I think] Scott is saying: we really need to try to understand these issues. We should respect the expertise of the experts, and try to understand their judgments. The experts owe it to us to take resistance to their conclusions seriously and engage them on the merits.
Another problem with the "idiocy" heuristic is that you'll eventually encounter conspiracy theories that are true, and them your whole framework will be thrown into doubt and you'll be primed to think They Were Lying About Everything. I mean, Nixon really did interfere with the Vietnam peace talks for his own political gain. There were no WMDs in Iraq. Either Russia was secretly backing Trump's campaign, or the whole thing was a rumor from Hillary's campaign (a conspiracy either way!). If you treat conspiracy theories as some special realm of debate too stupid to entertain, and then you find out one of them is valid, you'll suddenly be wondering whether anything you know is true at all.
Your advice to the young internet newbie doesn't have a single axiological ideal written into it. They're as neutral as laws of physics, leading people to believe whatever is the exact consequence of the advice, no matter their relation to ideals. I believe this is a mistake and I point to the example of our universe as evidence.
To build intuition of the character of amoral systems:
Things like archeologists being wrong, mistakes being made about drug effectiveness, some government or corporation doing a cover-up don't really feel like conspiracy theories.
This essay reads like it was written by someone who has never even heard of the replication crisis in expert publications. The advice that closes the post with is really terrible. As is the claim that "experts" are overwhelmingly correct on things. There are very few fields of expertise that genuinely have the certainty of the limited number of hard physical/engineering sciences. Huge ranges of academic fields -- social sciences, psychology, much of psychiatry and public health -- should not be taken at face value when they conflict with common sense. Even "hard science" research in medicine, such as pharma and biological research, is substantially corrupted by various misaligned incentives, to the point that our priors need to be skeptical on a broad range of medical claims. (I've been saying for years that Scott needs to read the great book "Medical Nihilism" by the distinguished philosopher Jacob Stegenga). Simply put, there is no substitute for learning to think for yourself and think critically.
Most "conspiracy theory" claims are attempts to manipulate social/emotional coalition dynamics and deference to authority to discredit stuff that might be true but for practical or political reasons people don't want to test. That of course doesn't mean that most conspiracy theories are true. It's at least as difficult to evaluate the truth of "conspiracy theories" as anything else. But naked efforts to use raw authority claims to exile perfectly sensible claims from the public sphere are absolutely everywhere these days, and a post like this which claims this is a simple issue is quite misguided.
google "replication crisis", check out the book I cited and learn something -- inform yourself, sounds like you have a ways to go in understanding the world you live in.
Scott has written extensively on the replication crisis. Anything he writes should be taken in the context where the replication crisis (among other things) is assumed shared background knowledge.
That seems a little over the top. A "broad range"? Surely you mean something more like "a broader range than I think is acceptable."
I mean...do you doubt that bacteria and viruses cause disease, not humoral imbalance or evil spirits? Do you doubt that penicillin cures many bacterial infections, and shaking beads and rattles cures none at all? Are you doubting that TPA helps with certain strokes, or that drug-counted stents prolong life, or that insulin staves off death for diabetics, or that vincristine can cure childhood leukemia, or that kidney transplants work, or that birth control pills work, or that you will get a broken bone competently splinted, a laceration competently sewn up, or a concussion expertly treated in almost any ER in the country?
The fact that you have issues with 0.5% of medical science should not blind you to the enormous benefits you derive from the 99.5% which it would appear you take as some kind of natural birthright, although it was wrested from ignorance and folly by centuries of patient thought and effort by the same ilk of person you casually disparage here.
I am not an expert about stents and you should definitely not take me as one about them. But I remember some discussion about them some time ago. It is not that we are against them or that they don't save lives. It is just that they may be overkill and cause other issues. Maybe the evidence has changed since then. I would be happy if you could provide it.
And I feel slightly offended that you call my position a fringe. I think that my position is strongly mainstream, most of things I write here comes from my professional training. My problem is that I am autistic and don't always know how to express ideas in a way that don't upset people, I am too direct, too harsh sometimes and I need to learn to tone down my enthusiasm.
In addition to stents as Kaspars mentioned, TPA is also a controversial therapy for strokes. It's telling you can't get through your triumphant list of certainties without including some uncertainties.
Most of what I wrote was not about medicine but people seem to be scandalized that I included medicine in the areas where you have to exercise critical thinking and can't just defer to experts. Of course I believe basic science and I believe stuff when there's good reason to believe it. But I'm also highly aware of the fact that there are absolutely massive institutional and commercial incentives for false positives in medicine, that biological systems are enormously complex, and many areas are simply not that well understood.
If you want a crude quantitative take on the difference between our views, it's that I think your .5% factor is probably underestimated by 30 to 40 times. Probably more in psychiatric / brain areas. If you talk to experienced doctors I think many would also believe that just one-half of one percent of popular therapies across medical fields having a questionable cost-benefit balance is a pretty massive underestimate. In Stegenga's great "Medical Nihilism" book, which again I recommend people check out, he comments at the end that something like his "medical nihilism" view, a conservative prior toward medical treatments and a sense that risks outweigh benefits significantly more often than claimed, is fairly common among highly experienced and thoughtful medical professionals.
Yes, the evidence about TPA is also quite negative but it was mentioned ”some cases” so I didn't object to that.
Lay persons think that doctors are like scientists who read all latest studies and controversies and can be consulted about them. Maybe some do but most simply follow the guidelines issued by regional or national health bodies, also local hospital guidelines.
The medical ecosphere is very wide – first are scientists doing research in academia or big pharma. They won't know much anything about practical treatment of patients. Next step is regulators who review studies and approve medicines and therapies. The next step in the UK is NICE committee who evaluates the approved drugs and write national treatment guidelines. And then come NHS trusts who get funding to actually pay for them. Doctors maintain certain autonomy in their decisions but have to practice in all these constraints. It is pointless to ask any individual doctor if masks are effective and should be used in the hospital because it is not him or her who decides on this policy. It doesn't even make sense to spend time reading Cochrane review.
Specialist doctors have more autonomy, have less guidelines and they might be more connected to latest research. The narrower the field, the less evidence is available though.
Sure, you lack a sense of proportion. I got that from the original post already. Were you forced to go live in the back country of Bangladesh and experience *that* level of medicine, I expect you would gain a sense of proportion very quickly. But you're coddled by Western medicine, and take almost all of its miracles for granted, which is what privileged people tend to do. Not surprising.
I think that medicine in Bangladesh only proves his point. I studied public health and a wrote a course work about Afghanistan (before Taliban took over again) and it was surprising how much improvement in health indicators they achieved with merely $10/person/year of health expenditure.
It is only expected that as more money comes, the amount of gained benefit will be less and we have reached the stage where any additional spending gives only marginal benefits.
The US is very special though. This simple graph https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health-expenditure shows that the US expenditure have increased considerably with only modest gains in life expectancy. For most of other countries the increase of spending is less and life expectancy has increased more than in the US.
Common contra-argument is that the US subsidise research and “pays” for gains in other countries. But then why the US haven't utilized the benefits of this research and fallen behind? Maybe it is due to lifestyle but the US has actually less smokers and less alcohol use than many European countries. Although it has opioid crisis and high obesity rates. It is hard to know what to believe but maybe the answer is corruption – the US has a strange insurance system that incentivises wrong things that despite having the best doctors and everything, it doesn't provide optimal care?
Actually it's more like 20% of "Medical Practice" is valuable and substantive--very much so--and 80% is bullshit. The Pareto 20/80 principle has near universal application.
Also, I think that if you actually interviewed most people in the affected areas they wouldn't have said those results were clearly correct.
The issue that gets the most attention in the replication crisis is that the incentives disfavored replicating the experiment to show it probably didn't hold up. But a secondary issue was that there were systemic pressures not to publicly opine that the evidence for many of these claims was week. There was a sort of culture there that if it wasn't really hurting anyone (eg Himmicanes) then it's wrong to attack the researcher who did the work.
Most people working in the fields probably were pretty skeptical of Himmicanes but the incentives favored staying quite not expressing the skepticism (what's the proof) or doing the studies to debunk it.
But that's a very different thing from getting up and positively saying yes it's true and we're really sure of it especially in a situation where it really matters. If the government had started allocating resources based on the Himmicane theory you wouldn't have had the field lining up to defend it and you probably would have gotten a bunch of pushback then.
I think Dan Olsens documentary does a good job describing how the motives for believing in conspiracy theories are not simply a misfire of rationality (at least ones as outlandish as Q-anon or flat-earth). However I don’t think revealing that actually gives any guidance when it comes to protecting yourself from falling for the theories that appeal to your own psychological vulnerabilities.
I skipped to the comments after reading your 3 definitions of conspiracy theories, because I had a rare moment of synthesis.
I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone put it this way yet, but it seems like a formulation Scott might make:
Part of the problem is that there are two forces working against each other. One is that the most adaptive ideas are not always the most true, and in the internet age they can spread fast. The other is that there’s no place to stand to know what’s “true” ex ante.
That’s where we get experts labeling something misinformation one day and guideline the next. That’s one failure mode. Another is qanon being a really sticky, sexy worldview. Or Bret Weinstein’s anti-vax stances. Or the 1619 project.
Where this cashes out (maybe?) is that we shouldn’t blindly trust the experts, which is not the same as saying we don’t need trustworthy institutions. There’s simply too much information to keep track of to do our own research on everything.
Chris Kavanagh (an anthropologist) co-hosts a podcast looking into the Guru-sphere "Decoding the Gurus", it is all done with good humour and gentle roasting. I wouldn't say he is an "anti-conspiracist", but he does show how the so-called Gurus tend to sow the conspiracy mindset as a way to promote their brand, boost their egos, and sell mountains of supplements. The alleged conspiracy itself is beside the point, rather it is a nexus of interaction between the Guru, the followers, and the wider discourse. The "rationalists" (of which Scott is a prominent exemplar) entered the nexus when attempting unravel the ivermectin thread, which has been an ongoing Guru talking point.
The existence of the conspiratard-industrial-complex isn’t the issue, the issue is the veracity of the conspiracy theories and rhetoric it promotes. Just pointing out the corruption that motivates the CIC doesn’t get at why it is emotionally appealing and bypasses rational, systemic thinking.
You write too fast Scott! I'm still composing the response to your first post. From the three categories you offer in regards conspiracy theories I'd fall into the 'Intellect' understanding. I agree that ordinary heuristics can lead to conspiratorial thinking, that actual conspiracies exist, and that it is likely everyone, including very smart people, fall into conspiratorial thinking on certain issues. However, I would disagree that conspiracy theorists and conspiracy communities are just applying standard reasoning methods with some different priors/weightings. They are not. There is good work on this topic and I think it is pretty well documented that conspiracy communities promote rather special forms of logic/thinking that are unusually bad for reaching accurate answers. See the work of Stephan Lewandosky on what discerns "conspiracist cognition" for example.
"However, I would disagree that conspiracy theorists and conspiracy communities are just applying standard reasoning methods with some different priors/weightings. They are not"
For me this is key ... I can't evaluate every theory out there but there are certain styles of argument that I view as conspiratorial and generally dismiss. This is the way I interpreted your original tweet thread. It's basically Scott Aaronson's point about rejecting crank proofs.
Re ivermectin, what I got out of it is that I got to the truth faster than Scott with way less effort. Because I used this sort of filter rather than earnestly taking on the pro-ivermectin arguments.
Also - reason this isn't just "trust the experts" is that I think the experts will get shit wrong sometimes, but I also have ideas about *how* and *when* they'll be wrong, that conspiratorial thinking usually doesn't match. I.e. when I think Aaronson will correctly filter out crank proofs, it's not because I trust (or even know) him on a personal level. Perhaps he is untrustworthy in some ways ... but "throw out a proof of Riemann's Hypothesis as part of some Math Conspiracy" isn't it.
Jumped to the end of that linked piece, saw this, knew I didn't need to bother reading the rest of it - on the same grounds as Kavanagh etc. say that you don't need to bother with the whole theory when you can just smell the conspiracy mindset off it:
"We have shown that some of President Trump’s discourse fulfils various criteria for conspiracist cognition. Why would this matter? ...Moreover, the implications of President Trump’s discourse cannot be evaluated without also considering his long record of stating overt falsehoods. .... Experts on authoritarianism postulate that the purpose of public lies is not (just) to mislead the public, but to erode the epistemic status of facts and evidence altogether in the interest of an authoritarian regime (cf. Schedler & Hoffmann 2016). As Roger Cohen put it, “Trump’s outrageous claims have a purpose: to destroy rational thought”.
Orange Man Bad, Fascist jack-booted regime just round the corner, as a consequence the public won't believe the experts, meaning us, telling them what they should think, believe and do.
Twitter is the Devil's Toilet Roll when it comes to any kind of coherent argument, but your tweets gave me the impression that you were dismissing it all on the grounds that "Marinos is a kook, and we know this because he's a fan of Bret Weinstein who's a kook".
Now, I only know Alexandros via what Scott has been writing here, and then following back to his Substack. I have no idea who Bret Weinstein is. If you expect me to go "Aha!" at his name and thus know he's a kook and therefore Alexandros is a kook, it doesn't work. I have no idea. Maybe he's not a kook, how do I know?
That's why something like what Scott did is beneficial (even if it did go past my level of patience): because if he dismissed Alexandros as "blatant kook" and didn't back that up, that leaves people like me to go "Well, how do I know?" If he only goes with one study, then the fans of ivermectin keep popping back up with "but you didn't look at this study, and this study, and this study, and this one" and again, someone with no axe to grind can think "Whoa, that is a lot of what look like good scientific studies, maybe Alexandros is right?"
My own view from the start was "ivermectin? the cattle drench? don't see how that works against covid" but that does *not* mean I would have been correct to dismiss it all as conspiracy theory mindset. The average person, seeing A Real Doctor online telling them "A study conducted in a hospital found that ivermectin works" won't know who to believe. They may or may not be convinced by "he's a kook" "but how do you know?" "look I just know", but I think they're more likely to be convinced by "okay, I read the study, it's terrible, this is why it's terrible, and in conclusion - worms".
The fans of whatever failed intervention will "always keep popping back up with "but you didn't look at this study, and this study, and this study, and this one"".
How do you know scientists who did a study is the best or the kookiest? That is never a question that matters. "In God, we trust all others bring data" (George Box).
Rationality will not convince someone who gets to an opinion irrationally to reject the irrational opinion. Relying upon the "real doctor I saw on TV talking about a study" as a basis for action is not rationality.
Did SA's meta-study get submitted for publication in a journal? No. Did it employ the tone of a publishable meta-study? No. If it had been submitted for publication would it have been accepted? Very unlikely.
SA tried to put on the cloak of science but really wasn't a being a scientist. This is the problem. Half-assed science which cannot be easily distinguished by non-scientists from real science is very problematic. Making it long and using "persuasive" writing is a way to hide it's true nature. (Intentionally or unintentionally - "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." Feynman.) You don't really get points for getting the "right" answer.
What could SA have written at the time?
There is a mixed bag of studies on Ivermectin. The medical community is in equipoise. (SA recent statement in this post that most doctors had supported it at the time of his essay is false.) In a state of equipoise, sensible and ethical doctors should reject recommending an intervention until there are good RCTs and meta-studies that are sufficiently powered to answer the question. If you are not a doctor, you should be talking to your doctor about treatments not your neighbor or co-worker or local veterinarians or a favorite blogger. (Even if you are a doctor, you should be talking to your doctor - because doctors should not treat themselves.)
You trust your doctor(s). If they are wrong, you or your estate sues them. If they are right, you try to avoid survivors bias in the future. If you don't trust them you seek a second or maybe third opinion from other doctors.
I think we really need to distinguish the broken mode of thinking from the specific theory.
Suppose that in 2006, you knew two guys who were both totally convinced that the government was massively spying on everyone. One was just a paranoid who had found a hook for his delusions, the other was some dude named Snowden who couldn't say where he worked but wanted advice on countries with no extradition treaties with the US. These two might have believed the same things, but one of them had good reasons and his mind was working properly, while the other guy's brain was malfunctioning in a way that just happened to lead him to the right answer by accident.
It's not the theory that's the problem, it's the broken way of thinking. Now, often the broken mode of thinking leads you to some beliefs that are hard to sustain without that broken mode of thinking, but plenty of widespread conspiracy theories aren't obviously crazy, they're just false. I mean, think of all the JFK assassination conspiracy theories. They're probably all bullshit, but it's not like some powerful group (the CIA, the Russians, the Mafia, etc.) conspiring to assassinate the president is implausible. Or think about the claims that Obama was not really a US citizen. These sure look like they were all wrong, but it's not like you need to imagine some kind of crazy impossible giant conspiracy to imagine that someone managed to get their young child's documents falsified in a way that guaranteed he would be a US citizen.
It's easier when you see someone pushing an obviously nuts claim, like that the Earth is flat or the holocaust never happened or something. But then, a whole lot of day-to-day rational people believe in young Earth creationism, which is not a whole lot less obviously counterfactual than those things.
The Official Narrative on the Iraq War wasn't true? Sounds like "conspiracist cognition" to me! Maybe he also has an Authoritarian Personality or scores high on Disgust Sensitivity!
But, seriously though, it's interesting how all these diagnoses amount to "if you're not a leftist, you have a psychological disorder." Funny how that works out. A far-left field of study pathologizing people who disagree with them politically? Must just be a coincidence. I'm sure Stephan is just a neutral observer...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211368117300700, in which Stephan rails against those who don't believe in a socialist response to solving climate change, says Twitter users need to stop talking and just "trust the science", suggests PolitiFact is a neutral arbiter of the truth of Trump's claims, ires that Trump supporters don't change their opinion after learning that he made a false statement (despite his own study showing that anti-Trump Democrats disbelieve true statements made by Trump, with an even larger effect size), says that taxation being framed as a "burden" is misinformation, says that science *must* be political, and ultimately suggests a solution he calls "technocognition," a system that would combine mass censorship of misinformation as defined by NGOs and "Disinformation Charters" with technological manipulation through the behavioral science techniques of "nudging," "inoculation," and "digital containment".
Article published in 2017, just a year after Trump became president, and suddenly we are living in the "post-truth era". Are we still in the post-truth era, or has the balance of nature been restored with the rightful Democratic victory?
Our boy may talk up a storm about restoring autonomy to individuals online and giving them the tools to protect democratic discourse, but that doesn't mean you let those filthy right-wingers talk, as per this retweet of someone else havering over "too many right-wingers and they let them talk too long":
"After last night's appalling episode of #bbcqt, today I've emailed @BBCR4Feedback
to express my concerns about Fiona Bruce's inability to properly or fairly chair @bbcquestiontime panels, & about the disproportionate number of right-wing panellists.
As an example of this, I want to bring to your attention the hugely disproportionate amount of time Conservative MP Robert Jenrick was given to answer the audience question on the controversial issue of immigration on the 16/02/2023 episode."
"I've just timed how long she allowed each panellist to speak on #immigration:
Ruth Wishart - 30 seconds
Ian Hislop - 2 mins
Lionel Shriver - 2 mins
Stephen Kinnock - 3mins, 30 seconds
Robert Jenrick - 10 minutes.
This is totally unacceptable."
Me, I think when you're sitting there with a stopwatch timing how long to the second everyone gets to speak, then it's just the teensiest-weensiest bit, how shall I put it, "conspiratorial cognition"?
EDIT: Just to make it clear, Stephan wasn't the guy with the stopwatch. That was someone he retweeted, which I take to mean he approves of and supports what they are saying. So Stephan is all for "make sure there is just the correct proportion of right-wingers who get to speak" which appears to be "none".
Here’s my rule of thumb: physicists like the simple and beautiful answer, but I’m not a physicist. Activists like the empowering righteous answer, but I’m not an activist. What I am is a limited human being in a very large world, so to me truth usually tastes like a meal not prepared for humans. Actually. I don’t find the truth for myself. I pick the experts who prepare the meal with the most apologies and caveats.
I feel like the general idea of "don't bother looking that up, it's a conspiracy theory" maps to like, 20% or more of the arguments I see online in a way I can't figure out how to directly articulate. It sort of looks like "that's bad because it's word that means bad" and the response is predictably:
"only idiots believe in conspiracy theories, here's 500 well researched sources from lesser known experts about lizard men"
"it's not a scapegoat, the goat is guilty"
"I'm not racist, *I* didn't pick who decided to run the evil secret government trying to kill god."
"extremists are dangerous and that's why we need to immediately purge anyone who seems like they aren't 100% with us"
"I'm not entitled I just think I have a right to that thing you have"
I made those extreme, but the general structure is pretty much always going to be true for the person stating it. And sometimes the goat really *was* behind everything. But the internal experience of the person making the argument is going to be identical either way, and you knew the person believed in __ when they started arguing for it, so making the argument is usually somewhere posting a warning sign for observers and trying to bring the social shame of the bad word unto them through a ritual chant. The person it's being used on is more likely to go "huh I wonder what other conspiracies are true" than be convinced of anything.
And it's everywhere. You might be thinking of some culture war issue, but the exact same structure happens basically everywhere. i.e. In gaming discussions look at when people use negative phrases like entitled. It makes some sense when the word is a big culturally loaded negative word that you can't be seen associating with and get points for dunking on, but people do the nearly exactly the same thing for mildly negative words like "grindy".
Anyway, this was meant to be a question before I wrote all that. I feel like there's a name for this and I can't think of it. Does anyone know? Something around argument by labeling. thought terminating cliche. argument by word association. semantic argument. argument by I don't want to read all that so I'm just going to guess., argument by you kind of remind me of my college roommate so I'm pretty sure I know *exactly* what you mean. argument by valence.
It's really important I have a word for this so I can quickly identify when people are doing it and stop listening to them.
A great elaboration of the idea that it's mistaken to trust the experts : https://fakenous.substack.com/p/is-critical-thinking-epistemically . I admit there is a real epistemic hazard in the area but I think the critics fail to appreciate the ability of non-experts (w/ appropriate epistemic humility) to usefully evaluate the strength of expert argument as well as the importance of these marginal changes in our credences. As well as being practically important it's ultimately how we identify experts deserving deference (physicist about the reactor) and those who don't (priests, theologians, some philosophers/ish [1] about moral/meaning issues)
I think a good metaphor for our ability to evaluate the strength of an expert argument is an interactive proof system. A verifier (amatuer) with highly limited computational resources and a random string can verify with high probability the claims of an untrustworthy computationally unbounded system (expert) with very high probability even though the verifier (assuming P!= NP) couldn't hope to determine the answer on their own.
Non-metaphorically, we can examine the claims made about the strength of arguments and then double check that the details seem to agree. Is the evidence as strong as claimed, do the arguments seem sound and grapple with the best counters? Or does it disappear into a mist of fog and certainty? Yes, you'll sometimes miss things and think the evidence says something it doesn't. Just don't over-interpret any one data point and be open to correction. Can they keep answering why/justify that questions in a way that suggests a coherent shared view or do they obfusciate and insist that you can't evaluate any of it until you've invested so much you won't doubt it's value. Does it seem like the actual factual content of claims seems to be a key issue or do the 'experts' seem happy to approve of claims that seem imprecise/different as long as they share the same social/value valence? It might be surprising but, over time, it's surprisingly easy to get a sense of whether a subject has the kind of experts who deserve or deference in credence.
Secondly, we rarely are asked just to bet on what's the most likely theory. We have to make calls in the real world with costs and benefits and even if evaluating the data yourself only should let you adjust your credences by 10% (relative) that might still be pretty important if it's the difference between a surgery and no-surgery.
Some claims are so improbable we can treat them as if they were really impossible but for most claims (including ivermectin) even the experts would, if their honest opinion was solicited, would give an answer that's far enough from 0/1 to make it plausible for cases to come up in the real world where that difference from 0/1 matters. I mean, should you treat the patient with COVID and parasites with ivermectin or another drug?
[1] I'm a big fan of philosophy (trained in it in grad schools and married to a philosopher). But the kind of philosopher who studies ethics or life meaning type philosophy isn't an expert in the object level (what's ethical how to live) the way a physicist is. They are an expert in the range of arguments and the scholarship..
I have listened pretty regularly to TWIV (a wonderful academic virology podcast) for many years, since long before covid. During the pandemic, they started doing a weekly clinical update on covid, and you could listen to genuine experts change their views in realtime as new information came along. The two hosts of the clinical update are a virology professor and an infectious disease doctor in NYC, and the ID doctor went through several iterations of what he thought was the right treatment over time. Early on, he and his hospital were using HQC and azithromycin, and he helped run trials on convalescent plasma that didn't work (in retrospect, probably largely because they were given too late), and he's spent three years continuously updating. Listening to this was a great view of genuine well-intentioned experts dealing with uncertainty and doing their best to converge on good answers. Notably, the ID doctor was clear that ivermectin was a possible treatment but that the studies supporting it were not very good and that he wanted to see better evidence, even when it became yet another iteration of the culture war applied to covid. And after some better studies concluded it wasn't helpful, he was clear on that, but note that he was also willing to update away from stuff he had believed worked and had used on patients.
I think most people don't have much of a sense of science or medicine uodating like this. And honestly, an academic virology podcast isn't ever going to have a huge audience (but if that sounds interesting to you, definitely check it out!). But I wish more people had a better sense of what it looks like when scientists are struggling to understand some new thing, and maybe putting out guidance that changes over time.
"If people are trying to confuse you about who the experts are, then to a second approximation trust prestigious people and big institutions, including professors at top colleges, journalists at major newspapers, professional groups with names like the American ______ Association, and the government."
"Instead of saying, “Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease,” it urges health professionals to substitute this doctrinaire sentence: “People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease.”"
"The top and bottom chess sets are the same color, and only look black vs. white because of contrast effects."
This is such a dumb, pedantic point, but I'm a professional vision scientist so I feel obligated to make it. The top and bottom chess sets are the same *luminance*, not the same color. Luminance is a physical quantity, color is a perceptual experience.
Our brain assumes that nearby objects are receiving similar levels of illumination, and under that assumption it's likely correct that the top chess set is absorbing less light than the bottom chess set. Color is our brain's attempt to reconstruct object reflectance, and that reconstruction tends to be more accurate using the contrast along object edges, rather than absolute luminance levels. Either way, our perceptual attempt at that reconstruction is what defines color. The physical reality that giving rise to that percept is something else.
We (most of us) love pedantry and don't think it's dumb. One problem with your point tho is that 'color' isn't (to nearly any degree) purely or exclusively a vision science term. In particular, 'color' has a pretty clear meaning in the context of image editing software, e.g. Photoshop.
Women detected that men that gathered more resources through any means survived.
Men developed the methods to control populations, organizations and nature itself.
Men practiced them. Some lineages kept those practices and passed them on more successfully.
Men's interests in affairs, status, politics, ideas, science are known.
Control over one's destiny is one life-strategy. Letting others' (wage-slave, submission) is also another life-strategy.
There is natural variation everywhere.
Cooperation and competition are natural forces.
Successful cooperators can manipulate any group of entities or forces, just as we do with animals, we do to other humans.
Thus, from first principles, we already deduced there are competing cooperating groups that seek to control the world.
We see empires coalesce, we see states coalesce, we see corporations coalesce, we see cells coalesce, we see organisms coalesce; the main feature is they develop a greater 'consciousness' or emergence of ability to manage and control
their environment to their desired parameters.
Making plans against other humans is natural.
Anyone bibby-babblying about the possibility of thought of thought or emotion of thought is just circlejerking idiocy.
Network theory works just as well on human networks. Centrality, nodes, connections, information streams.
Humans at the highest elevation of power already enjoy all the world's excesses. Fame, wealth, women, land, properties, businesses. After all is said and done. Things not in control.
1. Human evolution, human societies, human capabilities (are limited)
2. Life, death is presently inevitable
Thus (1) and (2) are both logical pursuits to all those who keep the principle directive (continuation of their own informational-genetic legacy).
No need for affirmation of facts.
No need for affirmation of data points.
First principles dictates everything.
QED.
Resources are rate-limited (in regeneration) and finite locally. Scarcity is real.
Killing off, or preventing other competitors from rising to the top is seen everywhere through the animal kingdom. More resources for me and my kin, my tribe, my group = less for everyone else. Dynamics rule. Useful subjects = generate more resources, generate more hedonistically desirable things. Cognition, aptitude, willpower and opportunities intersect to product civilizational-products. Thus, a logical policy, subjugate all those who do not fit with my value functions) and exterminate the rest.
Once again, no need for hard-theories or anything. This is a fact. This is observed in all primates. Stop running from evolutionary theory. There is no reason to not believe we whom have the same substrate as other entities to behave any differently, just because something is more complex or we have more intelligence does not mean our primitive inclinations differ any aspect whatsoever. It is irrelevant how many groups there are, because in the long run, genetic fixation of conserved sequences occur once a certain threshold of dynamic equilibra has been established between the lower-levels of energy and higher-levels of energy. This is a natural anti-entropic process of all living species, all living communities and I dare say, all algorithmically-induced structures composite of the universe.
>Nobody needs to be sure whether Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman or not.
Are you sure? Because, while I'm not especially familiar with conspiracy theories, most of the ones I've heard about this one involve the CIA being the ones who assassinated him and/or covered up the truth, which seems massively important to me. If it was just the case that Oswald had a hidden partner who was equally deranged but got away with it, then it doesn't matter anymore. But if there was actually a conspiracy, and a powerful U.S. government agency committed treason, got away with it, and still exists, then it would be incredibly likely that it is still just as corrupt, just as powerful, and therefore willing and able to commit similar levels of treason today. You can't just believe that the CIA assassinated our own president and not care whether anyone knows about it. This would be incredibly important if true.
A lot of conspiracy theories are this way, and I think you're just underestimating them because the weak version of the Atlantis one (where they're an ancient society but don't have crazy sci-fi technology) probably wouldn't matter. But for many, even if the object level fact that the conspiracy theory claims didn't matter, the conspiracy by elites to cover it up via deception and malice (not just ignorance) is of great importance because it casts doubt on their honesty and legitimacy as authorities. If they're lying to you about this, what else are they lying to you about?
You don't have to believe that they're true to acknowledge that if true they would change a lot about how appropriate trusting the experts was.
What if the actual conspiracy is that Oswald was a KGB asset, and it was covered up to avoid escalating the situation?
There is something that has been bugging me for a long time, and seeing it a couple times in close proximity in this thread has pushed me to comment on it, and that is when analysis makes a jump in logic that misses several steps.
Two weeks ago, New Jersey Councilwoman Eunice Dwumfour was shot to death in her car. Because there's no obvious motive, it's rational thinking to consider this as an assassination (a targeted killing). Considering she may have been targeted for political reasons is likewise rational. Jumping straight to ruling out any other reasons she may have been targeted and assuming she must have been targeted for politics is not rational. At the same time, being assassinated for political reasons makes news, whereas the other possible motives are much less newsworthy.
The CIA gets a lot of flack for misbehavior. Some of that is well deserved. The problem is that we've been tricked into the irrational binary between "the CIA is evil" and "the CIA is good". The reality is most likely that the CIA is a national security / intelligence organization, and inherent in that is a certain level of secrecy and behavior outside the normal rules of government, and that any similar organization will be very similar in terms of behavior. With the Kennedy assassination, it's rational to consider whether Oswald acted alone, and if he wasn't alone, it's rational to consider a national security / intelligence organization as his backer. It's irrational thinking to jump immediately to assuming that, absent specific evidence, the CIA is possibly suspect while the KGB (another powerful national security / intelligence organization, at least at the time) is not.
There are other hidden jumps here; one is hidden in "assassinated him and/or covered up the truth", as there is a big difference between the two. Another is frequently hidden in "malice (not just ignorance)", as 'motive' is probably the hardest part to objectively prove (and ruling out 'incompetence' / 'bad luck' is as hard). I formed my original question around those jumps.
The jumps in a conspiracy theory say a lot about the assumptions of the people making the jump. I'm a naturally contrary person, so I tend to distrust the experts / authorities to start with. But part of that is recognizing that conspiracy theorists are just the next tier of experts / authorities.
Because I actually saw the beginnings of conspiracy theories about Dwumfour's murder. Fortunately, that seems to have subsided for a 'wait and see' approach.
One of the root problems is that there's no longer any trust, at least when politics is involved, and the current trend is to push politics into everything. There seems to be a race to the bottom to destroy social trust in every rival institution, so what ends up happening is that people latch on to anyone that says anything that matches up with your personal experience, as unreliable as that may be. I'm trying to avoid that by finding people like our host that show traits that make them more likely to be acting honestly, but I don't know how long I can trust my own judgement on that.
Regarding the "naive positions" on conspiracy theories...
I think of a conspiracy theory as one that uses certain (bad) steps in its reasoning - usually the "evidence to the contrary is being covered up/generated by powerful people" thing.
The obvious problem is that the opposite of this, "always trust the experts", also has its problems. So conspiratorial thinking is bad, but you can argue it's exact opposite is also bad.
My answer is that it's not just a question of distrusting experts, having an idea of when to trust them and when not to. I don't blanket trust experts but I have certain expectations about the *way* they'll fail, that conspiratorial thinking tends to violate. Could fill a much longer comment about when to trust vs distrust experts and I don't know if I could describe it well ... but it has a healthy dose of "I know it when I see it".
Regarding whether you should have addressed the question at all...
I have some sympathy for the "don't elevate it by treating it seriously" idea. But I also think it's useful for someone to earnestly debunk something like this. Reminds me of how I read somewhere that most people aren't very price sensitive when shopping, but stores have to compete on price because of the small portion of people who are hyper-price-sensitive.
Ultimately the thing I'm against is certain conspiratorial paths of reasoning, not the conspiracy theories themselves; and relatedly in the case of ivermectin, the way it played into anti-vaxx bullshit. That's what bothers me about the ivermectin thing, not anger at the idea that deworming meds might be useful against COVID.
I don't think an apology was owed. The reason Scott got angry was because the posts which triggered this had a dismissive and slightly mocking tone that was seemingly meant to lower the status of people like Scott. It doesn't sound like this anger clouded any judgement, though I appreciate the extra post. So yeah, no need to apologise for getting angry at a status attack.
"Many actual conspiracy theories share common aspects that make them effective memeplexes. Familiarize yourself with the most common cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and rhethorical strategies, and cultivate an internal alarm that goes off when you see more than one or two of them in one place."
I actually took a university class on Pseudoscience, taught by a physics professor and dyed-in-the-wool skeptic. He handed out a useful list of criteria to distinguish pseudoscience from actual science. Three of the most salient were "mistaking noise for the signal", "arguing from ignorance", and the "false dilemma". I'll check tonight if I can find the list.
That class, and later internet exposure, also informed my view of the skeptic community - namely, that skeptics were often the only ones to do very thorough takedowns of controversial and outlandish ideas. Some of the best skeptics became so experienced that they could smell bullshit from a mile away, and grew tired of doing a deep-dive every time; some not-so-diligent skeptics never put in the hard work to aquire that skill, and jumped straight to the jaded, dismissive cynicism that Scott deplored in his first post.
Generally the difference between a conspiracy theory and a theory is a conspiracy.
In any given case it may be true that millions of people are mistaken, or that a small, powerful group of people has interests that are different from ours.
But hardly ever does an entire class of people deliberately work together to tell us something obviously false. The likelihood that they did gets lower as the group gets bigger or the lie becomes more blatant.
Likely: "The New York Times/Breitbart has a powerful incentive to believe and print things that are not true, and it's important to remember that when reading their articles, and take into account their track record and their incentives."
Possible but be careful: "A small subset of folks in intelligence agencies worked with the president to sell arms to both sides of a middle east conflict in order to pay drug lords to fight socialists."
Almost certainly wrong: "Every healthcare worker on Earth is working in concert to convince us that people are dying of a pandemic, a fact most of them have personally observed to be false."
Never underestimate how narrow common knowledge really is. Should we try denying oxygen to ivermectin? Look, there are plenty of people who don't know what *oxygen* is, and they aren't idiots or children either. Plenty of people have not heard of ivermectin even now.
For that matter, the idea that Dawkins might want to not debate Christianity so as not to spread their ideas at all actually makes sense, in my experience. I'm from a country where Christianity isn't the dominant religion historically. I know many people whose prior on Creationism and Christianity in general went up because of atheists' arguments including Dawkins'.
Whether the effect of a debunking is to increase or decrease overall public credence in an idea is an empirical question that can only be answered case by case. Sometimes it may really be better to let it lie than to dignify it with a response, but I don't think there are any simple principles we can apply to know when.
Really good post, thanks. A comment about "trusting experts": I'm a biologist. When a mathematician tells me that a theorem whose meaning I sort of understand is true, it leads me to assign a truth value of >99%, whereas when an economist tells me that a macroeconomic intervention whose meaning I sort of understand will lead to a particular result, I assign a truth value of maybe 60%. I don't consider the mathematician a better expert; instead I think mathematics is a topic where "true" and "false" are exceptionally clearly defined and understandable. (In my own micro-sub discipline I tend to be very skeptical of results contrary to my own opinion, but that's another story).
It's great but I think it should be expanded to mean something other than just conspiracy theories, such that it becomes a point about general false beliefs. I think belief in sinister conspiracies are actually right-coded in some way and as such much of what gets classified as conspiracy stuff is actually just false ideas/propaganda oriented towards right-wing people. An idea need not involve a conspiracy in order to be damaging in some way, and a lot of false ideas held by leftists appear to be damaging to themselves and society at large despite the ideas themselves sound harmless and obviously good to the people who hold them. I would cite examples, but it won't do any good because that would just start looking like mean-spirited left-bashing and the leftist reading this may feel defensive for no good reason - I like leftists in general!
I can supply an example from my own experience: as a youngster I came into contact with the ideas of marxism and communism and read up on it a lot. I have speculated a lot about just what about my own psychological profile made me fall for it, but in the end I just had to admit that the marxist literature is very impressive and describes and diagnoses some real problems really well. It's also true that most of the counter-arguments I encountered were pretty dumb and seemed to lack good faith or even seriousness. I had not yet learned the lessons of the cowpox of doubt, or encountered rationalist forums.
Speaking of, it used to be that I sometimes linked my friends to one certain SSC post to bring them out of their overconfidence in some pet theory or issue; I think it was this one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/20/on-overconfidence/
I have tried to replace that one with the trapped priors post but it was a bit too heavy unfortunately!
In the middle you point out that: it still sounds too rambling [rambly?]. Well it was and still is! An essay is not a conversation at a party where you can't really go back and unsay things, such that there is unavoidable accretion. In an essay, you can (and should out of respect for your readers and yourself) edit out stuff and rearrange and simplify and distill before you release it. And the essay/blog is not like a comment to blog which is more of a quip.
Paraphrasing the poet John Ciardi that which is written without hard work is usually read without pleasure.
Just a datapoint here. Some of my in-laws, who are more conservative than I am, shared something about ivermectin. I replied "I was curious about some of the results people were seeing with ivermectin, and looked into it. It turns out that most of the successful studies of ivermectin were done in places where parasitic worms are common. So ivermectin did help Covid patients survive, but mainly by reducing the burden of parasitic worms the body had to deal with at the same time." It satisfied them-- they weren't committed to the idea, they'd just heard some interesting data and once they had a good explanation for it, they didn't need to press the point.
I guess my point is this sort of thing can help people who aren't so committed to the theory yet.
Expect this alleged bioplausibility argument is not correct. Ivermectin doesn't work and shouldn't be used for Covid because the proper assumption is things don't work unless proper* RCTs can show an intervention's mean AND upper bound (the top part of confidence interval) of HR (harm reduction) is less than 1. The Cochrane Review meta analysis rejects the hypothesis that Ivermectin is useful intervention for Covid.
One of Galileo's arguments was the movement of the earth caused the tides in the Mediterranean. Like when you move a bathtub and the water sloshes around. Sounds legit I'm going with the Pole and Italian Copernicus and Galileo, not greco-Egyptian Aristotle and Ptolemy guys. Except bathtub idea wrong.
So no it really is not useful to your relatives in the long run. What you should be teaching them is that most observational studies are wrong.
Consider George Box:
"All models are approximations. Assumptions, whether implied or clearly stated, are never exactly true. All models are wrong, but some models are useful. So the question you need to ask is not "Is the model true?" (it never is) but "Is the model good enough for this particular application?"
Deming explores similar ideas in short essay On Probability as Basis for Action 1975.
**RTCs not properly powered nor properly randomized, nor biased in other ways (see recent paxlovid RCT which shows it works before you take it!!! Immortality Bias) aren't the gold standard either.
Since Scott thinks theology is a helpful lens through which to consider what we often call conspiracy theories, I'd like to jump in with another example--which backs up both his position and many of the comments. In his commentary on the story of Ahab, St. Gregory has to account for the fact that God seems to a) live in physical space, since he has angels on the right and left of his throne and b) seems to deceive Ahab. One argument takes care of both problems: the angels described as being on the right are those loyal to God, while those on the left are the rebel angels--both do his will. That is, even in their efforts to manipulate Ahab, the fallen angels can't help delivering God's truth. (Ahab's problem isn't rational; he just needs to figure out which prophet to listen to. Of course, that's never easy. Sometimes the consensus is right, but the ancient Hebrew consensus was often wrong, which is why prophets were so necessary, even if they were so often ignored. As many of the comments have pointed out, identifying authority worth trusting is at least as hard as thinking correctly. Pierre Kory sure _seems_ like someone you can trust on the question of acute respiratory illness.) But I'm not introducing St. Gregory just because the consensus here seems to agree with him. I am struck also by the way the dialectic of good and bad angels seems to be only stable approach to truth. Toby Ord and Nick Bostrom make a pair of points that argue that reliance on either angelic cadre would be suicidally dangerous. Bostrom argues that in a world where a "black ball" technology is possible, human civilization requires global surveillance and strict information control to protect ourselves from extinction. Ord points out a subtler danger: that any attempt to rigorously encode what we call we now call the consensus can only lead to a dystopia of crippling opportunity costs. We would be fools not to fight the zombie armies of misleading narratives and polluted data, but we'd also be naive to think that somehow banning them would leave us any better off.
I feel like this entire post is undermined by you reminding me that you think the question on who should have succeeded the prophet Muhammad is a pointless question. The only question I could see as more important in Islam is the question on if the Quran was created or not.
Yeah, that one was a bit like "In 2020 there was a completely pointless argument over which animal symbol should be the official icon of the state, the elephant or the donkey, even going so far as to have the supporters of one totem animal stage a protest within the pomerium".
"including professors at top colleges, journalists at major newspapers, professional groups with names like the American ______ Association, and the government."
How about the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons? Oh, but they are pro-Ivermectin.
Turns out there's nothing stopping people with non-mainstream ideas to give themselves a fancy official-sounding name! Oh, and they've existed since 1943 so it's also not like the organisation was created specifically to give some fake legitimacy to the covid-quack-cures cause.
My view on ivermectin, like my view on most COVID treatments in 2020-2021 was something like "Sounds neat, I have no idea if this works, I'll wait and hear more information when it's available." I don't think I was ever "pro" ivermectin, but I was definitely more sympathetic with people prescribing it and taking it when the response went from "we're trying a variety of treatments for COVID" to "HAHA, those idiots are eating horse paste!" Even with no knowledge of the pros or cons of using it, the response was ridiculous. I don't remember a response like that to any other drug or treatment in my life. It was the kind of response that you might expect when someone is talking about huffing paint. Even with that the news is more sympathetic to the people doing that than they were with ivermectin.
Have you researched leavo-trile which is short for leavo rotary mandelonitriloside? Were nyt experts in 1977 really more informed than scientists in 2023?
Remember that it was the same scientist who said laevo-trile is safe and not effective that said tobacco is good for people especially when they’re anxious or pregnant. Dr McDonald is the original tobacco scientist.
Consider doing more recent look into the Lea-trile as an accessory nutrient.
I am not sure what you talking about. Laetrile was a cancer quack cure made from apricot pits. A form of cyanide. It was nonsense. Same kind of ferver that surrounded HCQ and Ivermectin. You can also look at the history under Amygdalin wiki .
I was responding to Mr. Doolittle: "I don't remember a response like that to any other drug or treatment in my life."
I remember it because a father of friend was a "Laetrile" doctor - lost license, maybe some patients killed and trying to smuggle in from Mexico. Details are sketchy in my memory 45-50 years later. The was a Cochrane review relatively recently, Milazzo S, Horneber M ( 2015). Basically Laetrile treatment is not only useless but the added harm risk is so high that it would be unethical to ever do future studies of it.
It's often hard to remember that inverse weathervanes don't exist, and reversed stupidity isn't wisdom. Some empty-headed journalists sneered at their outgroup for "taking horse paste," aka getting a doctor to prescribe them ivermectin for covid. Those journalists were idiots. But that doesn't help you determine whether the people taking the ivermectin were behaving sensibly or not.
There has to be some connection to power to make any of this make sense. If people with no power believe some conspiracy theory, it does not matter at all (and it might even be good).
For example, lots of people believe that the earth is flat. Given who these people are, it has literally zero effect on society or scientific research.
On the other hand, lots of people believed Russia successfully penetrated US elections enough to change the course of our politics. Those people were sufficiently powerful enough that it's arguable that hundreds of thousands of people are now dying in a war that wouldn't have happened if no one had believed that conspiracy theory.
I'm aiming for extreme examples here, but take something more mundane. If people start to believe Graham Hancock's theories, it's hard to see anything too bad coming of that. Maybe there will be more funding for archeological work in the Amazon or underwater. I don't really see a significant downside. Hell, it might even be good for archeology if more people started to care - even if that caring was a bit misplaced.
The chess pieces are the same *pixel value*, not color, since color is synthesized by our brains in relation to everything else. While this seems silly to say, there are contexts where this matters a bunch more.
'Pixel value' isn't entirely unambiguous and 'color' doesn't purely or exclusively refer to human visual perception (especially given that that's not a narrow static phenomena anyways). 'Color' is a – mostly – fine word to describe what you're referring to as 'pixel value'. It's a relatively clear category in context, e.g. image editing software.
But I also don't think your comment is silly. I'm pretty sure Scott was 'gesturing at' what you described too, if only in 'looser' language.
On Scott Aaronson's point, obviously some people are very dumb and would be better off deferring to The Proper Authorities on everything. But most people should think for themselves because they know their personal circumstances better than The Proper Authorities do (consider Covid, when The Proper Authorities were shouting "YOU MIGHT DIE!" because septuagenarians might die, a teenager would have done well to consider the fact he was young and healthy).
Ideally, really stupid people would trust the authorities and everyone else would think for themselves. Unfortunately we can't just say "Trust the authorities if you're stupid, otherwise think for yourself", that will obviously not work. We can say "Think for yourself" and let the stupid people form their own stupid ideas, or we can say "Trust the experts" and have everyone's knowledge of their personal situation get bulldozed by experts who have never met them, but Scott's advice on conspiracies is ten paragraphs long, and when it comes to public messaging you get about five words.
Interestingly, because "trust the experts" is stupid advice, some people are going to figure out that it's stupid and disregard it. Stupid people are bad at figuring things out and therefore less likely to do this. You can't make all the stupid people trust experts while all the people with common sense use it, but you can achieve a differential!
Reading Zvi during covid has made me feel like a conspiracy theorist. I've gotten that you-might-be-crazy look my uncle who believes Hillary is a reptilian gets for claiming things like:
- "being outdoors massively reduces the risk of transmission" in the summer of 2020
- telling my mother that maskless indoor dining (pre vaccination) is dangerous regardless of whether it's allowed by the law at that time
- asking my family to try fluvoxamine for my unvaccinated 80+ year old grandmother who got covid in early 2021
In a large new field your priors should be lower. Looking into ivermectine was not an epistemic mistake. It came down to a) ivermectine works or b) peer reviewed papers are wrong or even fraudulent (as they turned out to be). Saying that peer review isn't enough evidence to look into something because the wrong people believe it is special pleading.
I think the basic issue here is that most people, regardless of their actual beliefs, are in fact conspiracy theorists. "Conspiracy theory" is, in a sense, the most natural form for a human being for a theory to take.
Indeed, the very idea of a conspiracy theory is, I think, something like a conspiracy theory; you are supposing that people are conspiring to mislead and delude you, that nobody can be trusted, except these shining individuals on the hill who will lead you out of the darkness and into the light. "Trust the experts", as you note, just leads to people demanding you listen to -their- experts.
(Also, I'm a crackpot; I'll readily admit to being a crackpot. My opinion on how physics works shouldn't harm scientific progress at all, at worst, if I pester physicists a few times, I make them tired of crackpots before some other crackpot does - and shit, maybe something will come of it; I didn't bother anybody for a decade, until I thought one of my crackpot ideas might be, while not exactly correct, might be a precursor towards building something correct; Julian Barbour's scalar relativity will, I expect, get there eventually, but I think I've found a shortcut. But granted, I'm more open about being a crackpot than most crackpots, and when I do bother physicists, I open with that fact, and if I am entirely off-base, I'm probably a useful training exercise.)
Hey Scott -- the Ivermectin meta-analyses you did were actually really helpful to me. I wasn't an Ivermectin believer per se, but I honestly didn't know what to think. I heard from one side "there were these studies that look really promising - this and this study said that there was a statistically significant effect", and from the other side I heard "These heretics are taking HORSE DEWORMER! Burn them at the stake!" So I was leaning lightly towards the side that wasn't screeching like lunatics, but also still unsure because this is outside of my area of expertise, and resolved to do whatever my doctor told me if I were to get COVID.
You convinced me that, most likely, Ivermectin was a bit of a red herring, outside of cases where I was likely infected by a parasite. And I honestly thank you for it. It put me in the 99.9% sure category. I've pointed your essays to other people who are like-minded, and most of them also found it convincing.
And I do actually like listening to Bret Weinstein's podcast; he's the right kind of contrarian that makes me think harder about a lot of things. But I'm also a devout Catholic, so I disagree with him on a large number of things. I am one of those weirdos that likes listening to contrary opinions to my own, as long as they're cogent, non-screeching, and internally reasonable.
There is one other point to consider, which is that over the last thirty years or so, the notion of conspiracy theories as problematic has lost a lot of its value as the term has been politicized.
Remember Hillary Clinton proclaiming that there was a "vast right-wing conspiracy" trying to smear her honorable husband with rumors that he was having an affair with a White House intern? Turned out to be absolutely true.
Remember all the rumors flying about the NSA abusing Patriot Act powers to spy on Americans, which was dismissed again and again as tinfoil-hattery by people in the know? And then Ed Snowden blew the lid off the whole thing and turned "conspiracy theory" into some very disturbing, very real conspiracy fact.
Remember how experts exhorted us over and over that the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan couldn't possibly have been one of those viral research labs where they're studying bat coronaviruses, and that only a conspiracy nut could possibly believe such a racist idea? And now it's generally acknowledged that, though we'll probably never know for certain, this is the hypothesis that best fits the facts, by far.
Remember the massive, unprecedented effort to suppress the story of Hunter Biden's laptop, with experts everywhere calling it a conspiracy theory and a disinformation campaign that probably originated in Russia, fact-checkers "proving" that it was false, and organization that broke the story being kicked off of social media entirely? And now that it's no longer politically convenient to hide the truth, it's openly acknowledged that yes, the laptop is real and really did belong to Hunter Biden.
One important reason why so many people are drawn to things that are termed conspiracy theories nowadays is that they've seen so many things that got dismissed as conspiracy theories turn out to be openly acknowledged as true once the passage of time changes the incentives for people to talk or not talk about the subject. It's getting harder and harder as time goes by to tell the real garbage from the stuff that actual conspiracies truly are trying to suppress or discredit!
Dr Mobeen Syed Of Beanheads fame has several YouTube videos that can help understand pharmacology of Ivermectin. I began using Stromectal which is brand named ivermectin way back in the late 80s. It’s amazingly safe for children. Adults too.
I think Kavanagh's position, and others like it, is rooted in a crisis of confidence in Truth. I don't mean some divinely revealed Truth, but rather the idea that 1) there is an objective underlying reality, 2) human beings have the capacity to discover and describe that underlying reality fairly accurately, and 3) the most accurate description will eventually be widely accepted.
I suspect Kavanagh would agree with 1) and 2) but have doubts about 3). This is understandable -- we live in a time that *seems* to make it hard to believe in 3) (though I'm not sure the current era is really an outlier in this regard).
But if you don't believe in 3) I think there is a strong temptation to form an Oligarchy of Truth Tellers that will go through step 2) and dispense their "knowledge" to the masses. This doesn't have to be an intentional effort and it doesn't have to rely on formal institutions or hierarchies -- it can emerge organically.
But I simply do not believe that an Oligarchy of Truth Tellers would be any less likely to fall victim to untruths. In fact, I think they would be *more* likely, as the natural tendency is for such an oligarchy to become isolated, entrenched, subject to group-think, and protective of its special status at the expense of Truth.
I don't think there is a problem with having little cliques of truth tellers, as long as there are lots of them across domains, and there are strong norms against any one clique become too entrenched within a given domain. The best norm that I know of to ensure that remains the case is to never suppress any idea, and to answer all critiques -- even the ones leveled in bad faith. Or as Jonathan Rauch has put it, no one gets the final say, and no one has personal authority.
This means that sometimes you'll provide a "platform" for bad ideas, which is why you have to trust People. I don't mean you have to trust every individual, but you do have to trust that on average, and over the long run, most people want to, are capable of, and will believe the ideas that come closest to Truth.
Trust in People seems to be relatively low right now among those in traditional institutions of authority (The Revolt of the Public has some interesting arguments for why that might be, though I don't find all of them convincing). But I don't see any other alternative that doesn't ultimately lead to the Oligarchy of Truth Tellers and, from there, to stagnation (or even regression) in the pursuit of Truth.
I think the crisis of confidence in Truth leads people in those cliques/oligarchies (some do exist, sadly) to reactionarily lash out at those going against the clique/oligarchy consensus. "Conspiracy Theorist" happens to be the slur of the day. In a different place/time it might be heretic, anti-revolutionary, etc.
I simply am not that worried about conspiracy theorists. I'm actually more worried about the over-reaction. In that sense it's a lot like terrorism (note: I am *not* making a moral equivalence!). Terrorism is undeniably dangerous, but it doesn't, in-and-of-itself, present an existential risk to society at large. The existential risk comes from fear, and the reactionary bad policies that emerge from fear. "Don't publicly debate people with 'bad' ideas" sounds a heck of a lot to me like the kind of reactionary bad policy that, if carried far enough and for long enough, could start to pose a threat to liberalism and the pursuit of Truth.
It can be absolutely exhausting to answer all critiques, which is all the more reason to applaud Scott's efforts.
Scott sort of gets to this about halfway through his response, but do we agree that the idea that (a) the idea that ivermectin might be effective against Covid is a crackpot theory along the lines of Atlantis and perpetual motion, such that even debating it gives it oxygen, or (b) is the effectiveness of ivermectin against Covid still an open scientific question, even if the weight of evidence appears to be that any benefit from Ivermectin is likely to be somewhat small?
I was under the impression that Scott and Alexandros, at least, agreed that it was the latter, but the discourse appears to keep assuming that this is some crazy crackpot theory that Scott resoundingly and convincingly refuted. Did I miss something?
I remember a brief time, around early winter 2019, when the idea that there was some new virus called Covid and that it had the potential to become a pandemic was dismissed as a conspiracy theory, and an anti-Asian racist one to boot. Well, that escalated quickly.
Trusting experts is probably the right thing 99% of the time, but the other 1% of the time you end up stocking up on masks and food and sanitising gel before everyone else.
There is also an *opposite* of conspiracy theory. Don't know if it has a name. Let me describe it:
I have a friend who seems to believe that everything any official institution does is optimal. Like, if you show him an article about how some bureaucrats made a mistake, or some institution abused the people it was supposed to care about, or how some law creates perverse incentives, etc., he would automatically dismiss it as a conspiracy theory.
In his world (it seems to me) every institution works perfectly. There is no such thing as principal-agent problem. (Or maybe there is, in private companies, but definitely never in state-organized institutions.) There is no such thing as government employees optimizing for their personal benefit, rather than for the supposed goals of the organization. There is no such thing as government making a stupid rule.
In his world, only bad people, who all work outside government institutions, do bad things. Which is why we should have more government and regulation, obviously. Bad people also share lies about the government making mistakes, but only gullible people (such as me) listen to them, instead of believing the experts (in this context this refers to employees of the relevant institution).
I am probably strawmanning his position a little, but this is how it seems to me. It is extremely frustrating. I am unable to discuss things happening in real world with him, because he dismisses all news of something being wrong, without even hearing the evidence. Just the claim that something is wrong, is obviously a conspiracy theory, no need to waste time debating the details.
Do you also know people like this? Does this officially have a name?
Depending on how much you want to change their mind, I'd suggest Supreme Court cases involving Federal enforcements. (There's better ones than Bond v United States but that's the one I can remember: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/12-158) Pit the systems against each other.
Haha, Bond v United States is amusing. We are not Americans though, so the next time I see my friend I need to ask him whether all governments are infallible, or only the Slovak one.
From a quick skim of comments I don't seen anyone taking this position, so let me do it. To make it clear, Mr. Kavanagh is criticizing you for a good faith deep dive into the facts of a controversial theory. For me, that's a red flag right there.
To put it in rationalist terms: there is this classic fallacy (forgot the formal name) where one applies higher standards to others than to oneself. This seems at play here. You are being criticized for engaging too subtly and closely with the facts of a theory, and thereby possibly causing negative second-order effects. But the criticism itself fails the same rule! It's also making an exceedingly subtle ethical argument about your article, without giving any consideration to the possibly negative second-order effects of making such a judgment. Thus the argument disqualifies itself.
But let me take the occasion to make a bigger point. There is a major intellectual trend these days to over-ethicize everything, which is another way of saying that culture is growing judgmental. I understand there are multiple moral reckonings going on, from the environment to inequality to respect for different cultural and ethnic groups, and I can see how that brings a heightened awareness to ethical issues into everyday life. But a culture of ethical maximizers is just as narrow minded and spiritless as a culture of anything-else-maximizers, so at some point one has to put a limit to that.
There is such a thing as a basic personal sphere of freedom, where one gets to follow their interests and whims, and express oneself as gracefully as one can muster. It's a basic thing of any kind of functioning society - I believe at some point you called it "slack". My take is that a good-faith open-ended deep dive into *any kind of facts* falls well within it, and anyone saying the contrary is making an extreme claim of the kind that requires extreme evidence.
I've been reading your blog for many years already, and what has kept me here so long is a kind of love for truth wherever it may take you. And that sometimes means truth over convenience, truth over niceness, truth over established "facts", truth over committed contrarianism, and yes, truth over (often pessimistically imagined) ethical consequences.
If the EA movement has taught us one lesson (besides doing plenty of good work in the world, yes), it's that it only takes a brainy human being with some time in their hands and the argumentative abilities of a modern chatbot to conjure up moral hazards with possible millions of victims, as long as they are far enough in the future, and they can put the right number of "ifs" in front. It's like obsessing about sin is back in fashion, except that it's not controlled by the Christians anymore. But you know what? Fuck that. We'd be better off killed by a cartoon paperclip maximizer than having our spirit sapped by an army of maximizers of someone else's presumed utility.
I think the fallacy you're thinking of is an "isolated demand for rigor."
IMHO, it's possible to make an argument that by wading into this issue, then conceding to Alexandros that he got a number of points wrong, Scott is contributing to pro-Ivermectin belief even though he argues the weight of the evidence suggests Ivermectin is not very effective against Covid if at all.
But it probably requires you to grant (or at least assume) either that the case against Ivermectin is basically iron-clad, or that disagreeing with officials is so dangerous on health matters that it must be stamped out even when there's still a live scientific dispute.
This really just further proves what he said, though, in that it requires doing a bunch of "well maybe if this and possibly given that..." type hedging, and inserts morality into what was originally a purely epistemic debate, when the point of the post you're replying to is that people should stop doing that, and just chill out and let people research and debate about whatever, without this hypermoralist worry that doing so might maybe possibly theoretically have some negative moral outcome. (I understand that your post is itself engaging in this desired spirit of abstract debate, I don't have an issue with you attempting to argue for this argumentative moralism, just pointing out that your post doesn't contradict the assumptions of the one you're replying to)
I think your advice to the internet-connecting kid needs to include also the fact that sometimes, high-prestige people and institutions are spouting nonsense. Sometimes, the high-prestige institutions are telling you that there is a rash of ritual satanic sexual abuses in daycares, or that the low rate of black kids in magnet schools is the result of racial discrimination in schools.
Your goal is to avoid walking off a cliff. One way you can walk off a cliff is to wander into some bubble and convince yourself to build an evidence-proof shell around some false belief. Sometimes, the bubble is found in a weird cul-de-sac of internet weirdos. Sometimes, it's found in the newsroom of the NYT or the psychology department at Harvard. But I think the critical thing is to try to avoid building that evidence-proof shell. Conspiracies are sometimes true (though usually they're more sordid and sad than the stuff of movie plots), but the conspiracy-theory mode of thinking is broken.
"At what point in this process - which second of which day - did it switch from plausible-but-false scientific theory to conspiracy theory? "
When Bad People started believing it. Although there is a countertheory that it happened when Good People stopped believing in it.
"figure out whether you really need to have an opinion."
^^^^^THIS^^^^^
Life became vastly better when I realized that on the overwhelming number of questions in the universe I had neither the ability, knowledge, or moral authority to take action and since opinions without actions exist only in my skull, there wasn't actually a point in having most opinions.
Related, the problem with "trusting the experts" is that one almost never interacts with an expert, nor gets their opinion. Fauci (PBUH) is not actually a scientist, nor is he a doctor (his license to practice expired, when? A half century ago?) He's a bureaucrat. You do not get to be the head of a government agency be being good at Science(tm) you get there by being good at office politics. To the extent that there are actual experts involved, by the time their decision gets to the lips of a newsreader, it's gone through multiple levels of edits and adjustments by people who are much more concerned by the policy implications of public health than the factual accuracy.
Never mind about believing or not believing conspiracy theories, what I have a problem with believing is Scott's premise in the previous post, which is that anti-conspiracy writers mostly just say "conspiracy theories are stupid" and "trust the experts" and don't provide any evidence for their beliefs.
I haven't read much on ivermectin - in fact I've never heard of it outside of this blog - or on Scott's initial conspiracy theory example, Atlantis. But the conspiracy theories I have read about - Shakespeare authorship, JFK assassination, moon landing, 9/11 - have loads of counter-argument material showing why the conspiracy theory is nonsense. (For Shakespeare, the best source is a superbly written and argued book called "Contested Will" by James Shapiro, which also offers a theory as to why proposals for alternative authors arose in the first place.)
True enough that any given outbreak of the conspiracy may be met the way that Scott Aaronson describes, by sighing or ignoring it. But that's because the counter-arguments are already out there. Just refer to those.
One useful lesson for everyone is how to evaluate experts and areas of expertise. It's easy to look at experts as a big group and see them as all the same (and then when you see some experts make predictions that turn out entirely wrong, maybe you assume that all experts are full of shit).
a. Not all areas of expertise are equal
Some areas of expertise have a lot of contact with reality in ways that give them opportunities to find out when they're wrong, and institutions and incentives that support learning when they're wrong. Chemists know quite a bit about how to synthesize certain compounds, both becuase they know a lot about how chemical reactions work and because they do it and make sure it works. Structural engineers know quite a bit about how to build bridges that don't fall down, both from having an underlying model of strength of materials and how to calculate forces in a structure, and also from having built a lot of bridges and carefully examined the cases where one fell down.
By contrast, other areas of expertise have little contact with reality and few opportunities to find out they're wrong, and/or institutions and incentives that do not support learning when they're wrong. For example, macroeconomists are very smart people who mostly don't have great ways to test their theories most of the time. Philosophers are even smarter people who have approximately no ways to test their theories.
I think of this as a kind of a spectrum, where on one side you have areas of science where the consensus is mostly driven by the outcomes of experiments or observations, and on the other side, you have areas of science where the consensus is mostly driven by who makes the most convincing arguments.
Along with that, some areas of science and practice are just messier than others. Medicine is notoriously messy, which is why determining whether ivermectin or paxlovid is a better choice for treating covid requires careful experimental design and statistics, rather than just asking a group of doctors what seems to work best. Social psychology and economics are even messier, and it's genuinely hard to untangle what's going on a lot of the time even with the best efforts of the scientists involved.
This distinction matters a lot when you're trying to understand how much weight to give to expert consensus. How much weight should we give to the expert consensus of physicists on the feasibility of a new power generation technology? How much weight should we give to the expert consensus among sociologists on the feasibility of a new proposed welfare reform scheme? How about the expert consensus among black studies professors on the cause of the black/white difference in SAT scores?
I'm pretty sure that the average academic philosopher is smarter than the average structural engineer. But I have *way* more confidence in the consensus position among structural engineers than the consensus position among moral philosophers.
b. Expertise is generally pretty narrow.
Experts are expert in their area. You don't have to go too far outside their area for their knowledge to become not all that helpful. Virologists are experts on virology, and tend to know a lot about adjacent fields like molecular biology, genetics and immunology, but probably won't know so much about (say) the practicalities of closing borders to stop viral spread.
Expert speculation outside of what's known is useful--often it is the best guidance we can get--but it's important to recognize that it's still just speculation. All kinds of stuff sounds plausible at first, but turns out wrong when you investigate it in depth.
Drug development offers constant examples of this--really smart people working for companies that are betting tens of millions of dollars on being right will pretty routinely find some compound that seems like it should help some disease, find an animal model of the disease and show that it treats the animals successfully, find some markers for the disease in humans and show that it improves the markers in humans, and then eventually run a full trial and discover that the treatment does no good at all on the actual disease.
c. Science is good at determining factual questions (what virus causes covid, how does it spread, etc.), but doesn't give any particular help in determining questions of values or morality.
Asking an epidemiologist how to slow the spread of a new respiratory virus is sensible, but this doesn't tell you what policies you should enact, since that question rests on moral or political questions as much as practical ones. The infamous public letter about how the BLM protests during covid were okay because racism is a public health crisis too is a good example of subject matter experts crossing from speaking about their expertise to expressing their values in an area in which they are probably not really more expert than anyone else. "What measures might decrease the spread of a respiratory virus" is a good question to ask an epidemiologist. "What public protests ought to be allowed, and what protests ought to be suppressed" is not a question which an epidemiologist is an especial expert.
d. Some fields are heavily politicized, and activists will often try to capture the mechanisms of determining consensus.
There are in-public examples of academics in some fields having their careers wrecked by working on politically-unacceptable questions, or coming to unacceptable conclusions. That's a pretty strong signal that those fields' mechanisms for determining truth by consensus is likely to be broken.
There are also public pronouncements by some scientific bodies and journals on political or philosophical matters, sometimes including policies that certain findings or research areas should not be published or funded. These make it very hard to have confidence that what comes out from research in those areas is the best available picture of reality, rather than the best available picture of what won't get you fired for saying.
e. What experts are heard in public is largely a function of which experts will be interviewed by media outlets, or given a platform by particular organizations.
For example, in the runup to the Iraq war in 2002-2003, it was pretty hard to find any kind of expert on the Middle East or WMDs or anything else who was opposing the war. Such experts existed, but they didn't get a lot of airtime in prestigious media outlets. This is an old problem that journalists have talked about for a long time--when a friend of mine was getting a journalism degree many years ago, I remember him talking about the "golden rolodex" that determined which experts got called, and how this could distort coverage. Ideological commitments by a lot of prestige media outlets makes this worse.
All these make it a bad general strategy to just follow the experts and trust them. And this is a problem, because expertise is real, and your occasional Googling and reading stuff online and listening to podcasts is actually not a substitute for doing a PhD in virology or spending years working as an environmental regulator or whatever.
There's an art to engaging with experts and reasoning sensibly about what they tell you while keeping in mind both their limitations and your own. It's a very rare talent, but one worth cultivating. Less because you might need it to determine some internet controversy than because if you work in technology or industry or science, you'll need to spend a lot of time doing exactly this. The usability expert on your team knows a lot more than you do about human factors and how to set up usability testing and what the results mean, the software developers know more than you do about they can reasonably build in a given amount of time, the security guy knows way more than you about what attacks are known that might apply to your product, and yet you, as the manager of the team, have to integrate all that expertise into making a decision, without either ceding the floor to whichever expert is the loudest or ignoring an expert in their area of expertise.
e. is important. In my experience "I trust the experts", in practice, often boils down to "I trust the government official they interviewed on the news". Or, more likely, "I trust a twitter thread where a science journalist for a major publication was half-assedly summarizing a study".
"when people do formal anonymous surveys of IQ scientists, they find that most of them believe different races have different IQs and that a substantial portion of the difference is genetic."
I followed the link, and it doesn't say that. It says:
"97% of expert psychologists and 85% of applied psychologists agree that IQ tests measure cognitive ability “reasonably well”. And 77% of expert psychologists and 63% of applied psychologists agree IQ tests are culture-fair"
Unless I'm missing something, Scott's link is to his own article, which says:
"Even things about genetic psychological differences between population groups are less bold and maverick-y than their proponents like to think. The relevant surveys I know trying to elicit scientific consensus (1, 2, 3) all find that, when asked anonymously, most scientists think these differences explain about 25% – 50% of variance"
My personal opinion is when people started saying (screaming?) Trust The Science in an emotionally entangled way then I need to check it out more closely.
Additionally I think that the question is not whether the Trust The Science crowd is "wrong", but whether they actually have sufficient data to know their answer is correct. The more typical response is not a conspiracy theory but a conclusion that the answer is still unknown at this time.
Further I would say there has been a large increase lately in people placing themselves on the mantle of science and making dubious proclamations with little pushback from whatever one would call science authority. Sorting this out personally takes time and effort.
There is a third way. Believing a conspiracy theory vs not falling for it -- that's a false dichotomy.
It is safer and often more useful to not know nor care about a theory:
- Did Covid originate in a lab or an animal? Don't know, but knowing wouldn't affect my life at all.
- Does Atlantis exist? Maybe, maybe not, anyway I won't ever move to live there :-)
- Does Ivermectin work? Hopefully I'll never need it.
Granted, I had fun reading this post, and I am thankful for people like Scott who stay awake at night because "someone is wrong on the Internet". But I can't shake off the feeling that my life would be better if I had instead spent the time with someone or something that really matters for my life.
Mostly this is right, but "should I get the covid vaccine" is an example of a CW / conspiracy theory involved question where your answer might matter a fair bit for your health. (Not so much if you are a healthy 30 year old, but quite a bit if you're a 70 year old with emphysema.)
I can't empathize with the Kavanagh position. People like him base their arguments on a belief that conspiracy theories are regularly causing massive harm and the theories of experts and institutions rarely do. Sure, in general, the prestige media and respected institutions are more accurate than conspiracy theorists, but I am hard pressed to think of any major conspiracy theory that has caused any significant amount of harm, while there are significant expert consensus-lead programs that *have* caused massive harm and the conspiracy theorists were right on from day 1 (like the War on Terror).
Yes, conspiracy theorists are natural contrarians and so they create a counter narrative for nearly every expert-held position. But you need both a mistaken belief AND power to cause harm in the world. Conspiracy theories sometimes cause small scale harm. A man in California recently killed his family over the belief that they had been replaced by reptilians. But expert theories cause massive, world-wide harm. The War on Terror caused millions of pointless, preventable, human-caused deaths (killings, murders, whatever the best term might be) including torture, immolations, live crucifixions, etc.
On top of all this, keep in mind:
A. Snide dismissal of reptilian shapeshifter theories by Slate, Vox, etc will covert zero people away from a belief in reptilians.
B. Refutations of reptilian theories that take them seriously (maybe critical analysis of videos that supposedly show the Clintons blinking in a weird way) will convert some small number of people away from belief in these theories.
If you ruthlessly criticize every mainstream, expert-led proclamation, and the prestige media takes these things seriously, and even arrives at the "correct" position, like Scott did with Ivermectin, you might prevent another War on Terror. I can't even suggest a downside here, because if ACX actually ran an article "Contra Alex Jones on Huma Abedin blinking sideways" it wouldn't make more psychopaths snap and go on a killing spree, instead it would probably do a small part towards preventing them.
The danger posed by someone accidentally giving credence to a false expert-led theory is much greater than the danger of doing the same to a false conspiracy theory, this has been borne out repeatedly.
Issues with ivermectin, and with Scott, and a substantial issue with- I won't say conspiracy theories but alternate disfavored theories- in general are
1. You only find evidence for those things that you look for evidence for. Only theories that you initially determine to be worth your time and energy will EVER have evidence in your mind. Any hypothesis that you dismiss out of hand is not dismissed because of lack of evidence. The dismissal is the cause of the lack of evidence.
2 The ability to detect fraud/bias and the ability to synthesize evidence and weigh it are not connected skills at all. Lots of people can tell when they are being lied to. Example: An MD friend who has been practicing for 35 years and hears Tony Fauci describing chloroquine as dangerous and untested knows that this is not a medical opinion. It is an opinion offered for some other reason, Dr Fauci's qualifications notwithstanding. He will not forget that he was lied to and that politics was passed off as medicine no matter what studies say about chloroquine and covid. In this category is refusing plausible, medically safe treatments in summer '20 because of a lack of RCT. There were no randomly controlled trials of anything in covid patients in May 2020, but patients needed treatment. The protocol was not based on RCT so lack of RCT was a false reason to reject treatments. Knowing medicine and knowing when you are being lied to and being able to prove it are not the same thing. Confounding them is a mistake. Epistemology is downstream of BS detection.
3 Pretending that studies are conducted in a vacuum without consideration of what benefits the career of those conducting the study or the sponsor is ridiculously nieve. Studies with fraudulent results or reports that don't match the data are found repeatedly, often years or decades later, and the error was very frequently in a direction suggesting nefarious intent.
While not being a fan of any fringe theories, I think historically, "trust the experts" does not lead to all that great outcomes.
All expertise is some mixture of of domain knowledge and a high status echo chamber. It is very difficult for an outsider (or even an insider) to judge the mixture for any particular field of expertise. Take modern physics, which gives us semiconductors and thus ultimately smartphones and the like. Seems like excellent evidence that the field is not a pure echo chamber (and indeed I am of the opinion that STEM is mostly domain knowledge and not echo chamber).
Now consider a peasant in ancient Egypt. While the miracle of life-sustaining iPhones caused by quantum mechanics might seem impressive to us, the miracle of the flooding of the Nile will be much more central to sustaining life in Egypt. I assume that amongst ancient Egyptians, the consensus that the Pharaoh (with the help of some other God, perhaps) causes the flooding of the Nile is much stronger than our consensus that QM causes iPhones.
Yet the Pharaoh an his priesthood, were -- not to put to fine a point on it -- full of shit, basically 100% echo chamber. Forget causation, I would trust the observations and gut feelings (wrong as they may be) of a Nile farmer over the priesthoods predictions regarding Nile flooding any day of the week.
So we would advise the peasant to perhaps pay lip service to the priesthood but ignore them as a source of cosmology.
Same thing for the medieval serf. "Your priest has no more knowledge about the existence of God than any fool, and if he tells you that it is thus just that you are a serf and not a free man, he is wrong. Think for yourself, you can hardly to worse than the experts."
Same thing for a peasant during the Great Leap Forward. "Mao knows less about agriculture than any farmer, disbelieve anything he says."
Suppose that you know you will teleport to some random time period. What epistemological rules could you follow to decide if a group of experts is right?
* "Anyone providing exponential growth is probably for real". (Excepting hyperinflation.) A good heuristic, but too narrow. You might conclude that the design of the light bulb (supposedly brought forth by a mythological figure called Edison) is mostly ceremonial as it was not substantially improved in many a decade.
* "Anything you are not allowed to question is probably bullshit" is another heuristic. But you might conclude that as comparative theology is much more welcoming to heterodox opinions than particle physics, the former is much more sound than the latter.
* "A field of endeavor where anyone may practice the craft is probably more solid than one where the law restricts who may practice it" is another worthwhile heuristic. Exceptions include modern medicine (restricted) versus faith healers and the like (mostly unrestricted).
From what I remember, when Kant wrote "Was ist Aufklaerung" at the beginning of the enlightenment period, telling people to think for themselves, he was not thinking very much about possible failure modes.
By contrast, EY -- whose sequences I am (re-)reading at the moment -- seems very concerned with possible failure modes of people thinking for themselves.
Personally, I would rather live in a society where people try to think for themselves even it a substantial faction of them ends up believing in QAnon, blood libel, flat earth, young earth creationism, cold fusion, covid denial, climate change denial and so on than in one where almost everyone just trusts the experts. Still sucks for them and any people they kill.
"Yet the Pharaoh an his priesthood, were -- not to put to fine a point on it -- full of shit, basically 100% echo chamber. Forget causation, I would trust the observations and gut feelings (wrong as they may be) of a Nile farmer over the priesthoods predictions regarding Nile flooding any day of the week."
You would be incorrect, because the annual flooding was so important. They had 'Nilometers' to measure and predict the coming inundation, and record-keeping and accuracy was vital:
So the literate, educated, and technology using priesthood *would* be the experts, never mind the peasants' gut feelings. And if you staked your livelihood on "the priests are full of shit, Pharaoh's not a god", you would soon have gone out of business and probably life, as well.
No, listen, you're no worse than the rest of people who have learned a potted version of history from popular culture sources such as media and movies, and a political gloss on top of that - "hierarchy bad, priesthood always bad power-hungry, royalty bad, yay for the people!"
And you're not entirely wrong - the establishment *can* be caught up in political nonsense and manipulation and power-seeking, practical on-the-ground experience *is* necessary and is often better than theory. You simply picked a poor example in this one, since the Nile inundation was *so* vital to the life of Egypt that they *had* to find ways to be able to predict when it would happen, if the levels would be high enough, or if there would be a potential bad harvest and subsequent famine (think of the Biblical story of Joseph in Egypt, telling the Pharaoh to build granaries to store enough food to last in the upcoming seven years of famine).
A better example might be the duelling auguries in Roman politics; first between Marcus Bibulus and Julius Caesar - Bibulus was one of the two consuls along with Caesar, he tried to block Caesar's populist legislation by declaring on his authority as an augur that the omens were unfavourable and the Senate could not be summoned to take place, but Caesar ignored him by using his own position as Pontifex Maximus (and more importantly, his military forces) to over-ride such objections:
"Immediately before the vote Bibulus ordered it suspended for religious reasons. Caesar, who was also pontifex maximus, the most significant religious official in Rome, ignored this and continued with the vote. Bibulus and two of his tribunes mounted the steps of the Temple of Castor and Pollux and attempted to denounce the bill. The crowd turned on him and his entourage, breaking his fasces (the symbols of his consulship), pushing him to the ground and pouring feces on him. Getting up, Bibulus uncovered his neck and shouted to the crowd to kill him to end his embarrassment. His fellow senators persuaded him to leave and regroup at a nearby temple, as the assembly proceeded to pass the bill.
The following day, Bibulus entered the Senate where he made a formal complaint about the treatment which he had suffered, and appealed to the Senate to annul the law, but this was not acted upon. He then resisted swearing an oath to uphold the new law, but was eventually convinced to take the oath. After this humiliation, in March 59 BC, Bibulus stopped attending meetings of the Senate, leaving Caesar with complete control over the consulship. He occasionally issued complaints against Caesar and Pompey, which led to attacks on his house from Caesar and Pompey's supporters. For the rest of the year supporters of the First Triumvirate mocked Bibulus by declaring that the two consuls were really "Julius and Caesar". Bibulus returned the insult by referring to his co-consul as the "Queen of Bithynia," an allusion to Caesar's alleged love affair with the King of Bithynia. He also alleged that Caesar had been involved in the first conspiracy of Catiline. Bibulus spent the remainder of his term sequestered in his house where he claimed he was watching for omens, an act that purported to invalidate all legislation passed that year."
Or as described in Robert Harris' book "Lustrum" (second volume of "The Cicero Trilogy"):
"DESPITE HIS RESENTMENT, Cicero kept out of public life for the whole of the next month – an easy matter, as it turned out, as the senate did not meet. Bibulus locked himself away in his house and refused to move, whereupon Caesar declared that he would govern through assemblies of the people, which Vatinius, as tribune, would summon on his behalf. Bibulus retaliated by letting it be known that he was perpetually on his roof, studying the auguries, and that they were consistently unfavourable – thus no official business could legally be transacted. Caesar responded by organising noisy demonstrations in the street outside Bibulus’s home, and by continuing to pass his laws via the public assemblies regardless of what his colleague said. (Cicero wittily remarked that Rome seemed to be living under the joint consulship of Julius and Caesar.) It sounded legitimate when one put it that way – governing through the people: what could be fairer? – but really ‘the people’ were the mob, controlled by Vatinius, and any who opposed what Caesar wanted were quickly silenced. Rome had become a dictatorship in all but name, and most respectable senators were appalled. But with Pompey and Crassus supporting Caesar, few dared speak out against him."
Second instance of political manipulation was when Mark Antony was augur:
"One of the tribunes for 47 BC, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, a former general under Pompey, proposed a law which would have canceled all outstanding debts. Antony opposed the law for political and personal reasons: he believed Caesar would not support such massive relief and suspected Dolabella had seduced his wife Antonia Hybrida Minor. When Dolabella sought to enact the law by force and seized the Roman Forum, Antony responded by unleashing his soldiers upon the assembled masses, killing hundreds. The resulting instability, especially among Caesar's veterans who would have benefited from the law, forced Caesar to return to Italy by October 47 BC.
Antony's handling of the affair with Dolabella caused a cooling of his relationship with Caesar. Antony's violent reaction had caused Rome to fall into a state of anarchy. Caesar sought to mend relations with the populist leader; he was elected to a third term as consul for 46 BC, but proposed the senate should transfer the consulship to Dolabella. When Antony protested, Caesar was forced to withdraw the motion out of shame. Later, Caesar sought to exercise his prerogatives as Dictator and directly proclaim Dolabella as consul instead. Antony again protested and, in his capacity as an Augur, declared the omens were unfavorable and Caesar again backed down."
As described in "Dictator", the third volume of "The Cicero Trilogy":
"He was scheduled to leave Rome at the start of his campaign of world conquest on the eighteenth day of March. Before he left, it was necessary for him to decree the results of all the elections for the next three years. A list was published. Mark Antony was to be consul for the remainder of the year alongside Dolabella; they would be succeeded by Hirtius and Pansa; Decimus Brutus (whom I shall henceforth call Decimus, to distinguish him from his kinsman) and L. Munatius Plancus would take over the year after that. Brutus himself was to be urban praetor and thereafter governor of Macedonia; Cassius was to be praetor and then governor of Syria; and so on. There were hundreds of names; it was drawn up like an order of battle. The moment he saw it, Cicero shook his head in amazement at the sheer hubris of it: ‘Julius the god seems to have forgotten what Julius the politician never would: that every time you fill an appointment, you make one man grateful and ten resentful.’ On the eve of Caesar’s departure, Rome was full of angry, disappointed senators. For example, Cassius, already insulted not to be chosen for the Parthian campaign, was offended that the less-experienced Brutus should be given a praetorship superior to his. But the greatest resentment was Mark Antony’s at the prospect of sharing the consulship with Dolabella, a man whom he had never forgiven for committing adultery with his wife, and to whom he felt greatly superior; in fact such was his jealousy, he was actually using his powers as an augur to block the nomination on the grounds that it was ill-omened."
Dolabella and Antony later reconciled, but those are two instances of religious authority being used for nothing more than political advantage in the struggle for power, and if the common man was sceptical about pronouncements on omens, he would have been correct.
This is all pretty amazing to a dummy like me, who'd never studied Roman history except for the highlights. It makes me wish to cry out to the heavens: what happened ?!! Why did our politics become so boring and formal ? Granted, Trump&Co are trying to bring back some excitement, but is it really enough ? Yes, granted, I'd take effective governance over spectacle any day, but seeing as that's impossible...
Examples like these, and many more, are precisely why democracy was seen by conservative political thinkers as "rule by the mob" and was opposed.
I would recommend Harris' novels as they do give a good overview of how Rome turned from a Republic to an Empire and how by using (and abusing) the very laws and institutions in place this was done. He has Cicero as his hero as The Greatest Guy Ever, which will depend on your own view of Cicero. But the period was turbulent and exciting and the events are real and the personalities more or less as they are presented.
Boring and formal is better than exciting but can be murdered in the street for politics 😁
Though granted, the formal inauguration of the president might be enlivened if the Secret Service or other official guard sang the likes of the below to accompany "Hail to the Chief":
> Probably something like “make a principled precommitment never to disagree with prestigious institutions until you are at least 30 and have a graduate degree in at least one subject” would be good advice
Buahahaha, no way .this would have been good advice for my past self. Here are some disagreements I've historically had with institutions around me
- Frequentist statistics is worse than Bayesian probability theory.
- Various disagreements with religious institutions
- Prestigious institutions in small countries (Spain, Austria) being kind of mediocre
- University modes of teaching are a really terrible fit for me personally. For me reading textbooks is more efficient than attending talks
- The aims of some academic institutions make little sense, and pursuing an academic career is not a good move.
- Keynesian Beauty Contests have predictable flaws, and are less preferable than methods which are ultimately scored against reality, even if they have intermediary steps
Idk, some of these are a matter of taste, but overall I think that preccommitment would have been a terrible idea for me.
> Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge is a 1975 book by Austrian-born philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend. The central thesis of the book is that science should become an anarchic enterprise. In the context of the work, the term "anarchy" refers to epistemological anarchy, which does not remain within one single prescriptive scientific method on the grounds that any such method would restrict scientific progress. The work is notable in the history and philosophy of science partially due to its detailed case study of Galileo’s hypothesis that the earth rotates on its axis and has since become a staple reading in introduction to philosophy of science courses at undergraduate and graduate levels.
Eh, this feels wrong for the exact reasons the earlier post didn't.
I mean, I assume we don't really disagree about what the correct heuristics are, I just think the formulation in section IV is actually pretty bad advice, for a few reasons, mostly boiling down to omission of important concepts, and filling the resulting holes with exactly the kinds of superficial appeals to authority that the previous post correctly railed against.
To name two of those concepts (while not claiming the list is exhaustive):
1. Agnosticism. That's one thing the advice does right, though it's probably not going far enough. You don't need to have an opinion, period. I realize that it may be unintuitive for most, maybe even goes contrary to basic human instinct, but once you grasp the concept, it really solves most of your epistemic problems. We know nothing, all we do is just heuristics, something something bayesian reasoning. This doesn't mean treating all claims equally, like the common caricature would paint it (a caricature traditionally pushed by people insisting you really, really need to have an opinion about god in particular). It means separating knowledge from common sense judgement, and defaulting to the latter in lieu of the former. (And of course the knowledge that's actually available to us is not fundamental truths about reality, but a careful experimental measure and examination of it. I guess understanding how limited and difficult acquiring even this sort of knowledge is is what the "30 and graduate degree" ballpark is gesturing towards, but agnosticism lets you get there without using meaningless, alienating, exclusionary markers like age and credentials.) Defaulting, instead of committing. Assume the scientific consensus is built on the hard work of people who did said hard work while you didn't, but be ready to ditch it without regret whenever reality starts contradicting it. (Also, within the wide concept of science itself, put more trust in things with practical applications you can witness everyday over purely academic theorizing.)
2. Motivated reasoning. The naive "intellect" position may treat conspiracy theories the same way as scientific theories. Fine. Let me propose a slightly more sophisticated version that separates the reasoning about factual claims from reasoning about the process of establishing their validity. Whether ivermectin treats COVID is a valid factual question. (As is the existence of Atlantis, etc.) We're only getting in a conspiracy theory territory once we start arguing whether scientific institutions are unfairly rejecting it. But of course whether scientific institutions are unfairly rejecting things is also a valid factual question, right? Yes, in isolation. Hence, motivated reasoning is what one should be on the lookout for. "Scientific institutions are unfairly rejecting things, scientific institutions reject ivermectin, hence, you should update in favor of ivermectin" is the moment to NOPE out of the conversation, and this alone should guard you from conspiracy theorizing without having to throw out the correct intellectual position towards the purely factual questions out with the bathwater. {Edit: I realized belatedly that the preceding example is less convincing that it could be, so this needs an addendum that the reasoning applies equally well to "Scientific institutions use flawed heuristics, here's my argument for why small studies are more trustworthy than big studies, therefore you should update in favor of ivermectin". Still NOPE, and still can be rejected without committing on factual claims - both whether ivermectin works against COVID and whether scientific heuristics are flawed.} "Doctors don't want you to know about [miracle treatment]" IS a separate theory from "[treatment] has [benefits]", and nothing should prevent you from being open-minded (though skeptical, because agnosticism) about the latter while forcibly rejecting the former. (As a bonus, you can, and, empirically, probably should, reject all arguments from authority of science. This is not the same as rejecting science, if you don't know what science says, you still don't know after hearing someone make overly confident claims about it. If it matters, learn what it actually says. If it doesn't, well, it really is safe to just ignore what you've heard altogether.)
Talking about "conspiracy theories" makes it sound like this is just relevant to Pizzagate and Illuminati, but your arguments sound quite relevant for normal questions like "should I look into fasting/sauna/weightlifting/Peter Attia even though it's not strongly recommended by my country's health agency?"
>At what point in this process - which second of which day - did it switch from plausible-but-false scientific theory to conspiracy theory?
Part of the issue is that it was probably both at the same time, in a sense.
Ie, at the same time, there were both doctors who had read the relevant studies and thought it was mildly likely to have a moderate beneficial impact in reducing time to cleared infection and overall mortality (or w/e), and political partisans online convinced it's a complete cure that means no one should ever need to take a vaccine and the government is covering it up so they can implant microchips in mandatory vaccines and stretch out the lockdown measures they're using to control the world.
Or whatever.
That's part of the issue here - 'Are these rock formations natural or man-made' is a pretty binary question, but many conspiracy theories are clusters of beliefs and paradigms with many different possible versions.
'Belief that ivermectin works for Covid' is an underdetermined description; there are versions of that belief that were reasonable at the time, and versions that were stupid or insane. And part of the fear (across all aspects of the culture war, really) is that anything supportive you say towards the reasonable version, will be taken as support and confirmation of the insane version.
(Similar for the 'human biodiversity' point - 'At a population average level, Ashkenazi jews have a small heritable advantage on IQ test versus the global average' is a very different belief from 'all black people are genetically inferior in terms of intelligence and civility to all white people worldwide, and this fact entirely explains all wealth disparities and crime statistics and is why you social welfare and diversity programs are pointless and destructive and why you should just not let them into your country to begin with' are, again, very different beliefs, but there is an entire cottage industry devoted to taking support for one of those ideas and applying it to the political project of the other one)
Re: the chess piece illusion: this is always a funny example to me because the chess pieces actually are different, whenever people use it online. Not out of malice, but out of the way image compression algorithms and contrast calibration on monitors and so forth make subtle changes to images.
There *is* a real version of the illusion that you can see on paper, and it does still work, but the effect is much weaker than what you see here.
By the time the real paper version has been scanned into a file, resized and changed image formats a few times, compressed, optimized for web, and displayed on your backlit monitor, the original symmetry between the pieces has been lost and they're actually just different.
actually, the chess pieces in the file are still almost equal, as can be seen in the following video that superposes the "white" pieces on the "black" (and vice-versa)
"Conspiracy theory" is the wrong label. The correct category is "belief contrary to the current scientific orthodoxy." It doesn't have to depend on a conspiracy — the orthodoxy might be wrong for a non-conspiratorial reason, as I think was true of both Ptolemaic astronomy and the orthodox view of ulcers that Barry Marshal refuted. And some conspiracy theories are part of the orthodoxy — there was an international communist conspiracy, arguably at least two of them, Stalinist and Trotsyite — and the French resistance against the Nazis was a conspiracy.
> As a matter of survival, I *have* to adopt a Kavanagh-like heuristic: “this person seems like an idiot.”
That's perfectly reasonable to do *sometimes*, because you don't have to debunk every conspiracy theorist *yourself*, we should instead cultivate a community whose collective goal is to perform factual analyses on these questions. This seems like the obvious takeaway from Scott's last post on this.
He lamented that he could not find *anyone* discussing what looks like relevant evidence *except* conspiracy theorists. It seems clear that Scott's last post was railing against the collective dismissal of even having to discuss what looks like relevant evidence, not against so-and-so specifically not addressing that evidence.
> 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.
I once read about a proposal to change how high school science classes are taught in the US. The most common way of teaching high school science is to lead with experimental results (i.e. accepted facts) and have students do a few experiments along the way.
The proposal was to reverse this, by leading with students doing experiments, and only consolidating students' knowledge about the results afterward. I think it was meant to encourage students to understand 'science' as methodology, not accumulated experimental results.
Would this alternative way of teaching lead to students decreasing their priors on experimental results being true?
Hopefully not, and it’s a good point. The most outlandish conspiracy theories are completely unreasonable, but I don’t think believing them is a failure of reason . It’s a form of emotional disregulation.
"how an extremely pointless question - whether Abu Bakr or Ali should have been political leader of the Arabian empire in 632 AD - produced the Sunni/Shia split . . ." I've loved Scott's work and his online persona for a good while now. But this is . . . it's not good. Why not apply some of the humility and humanity that are among the glories of his work to this question--or just leave it alone? The fact that such huge consequences grew from such an apparently small thing--and surely there is room for the possibility that this perception is an illusion of ours, not that of the people there at the time--should inspire genuine and patient curiosity, not scorn. Granted, no one has time for everything, but then perhaps a respectful avoidance is best--unless you want to proclaim the equivalent for this issue of "only fools and racists believe in Atlantis"--"only fools and tedious academics think that the Sunni/Shia split is anything other than a pure waste of time." The rationalist project can impart real enlightenment, but belittling huge ranges of the human experience isn't part of that.
To put it another way, perhaps one should ask why the particular scissors statement--should Abu Bakr or Ali be the Prophet's successor--mattered so much at that particular place and time and why it has continued to matter--without just using rationalist categories to impoverish and then jeer at the whole issue. I'm sure this objection is familiar to rationalists; but that doesn't mean that's not precisely what is being done here.
Well, just because some people are against any criticism being applied to brown people like Muslims, but not against such criticisms being applied to white people like Christians. I wasn't sure if your issue with him calling the Sunni/Shia debate and split "pointless" was an idpol thing.
I understand your concern. But no, there's no idpol agenda, nor a religious allegiance at stake (as I wrote in my reply to Deiseach below), nor some other personal indentification (like, "The reason it mattered was because Ali was AWESOME!") of that sort. And, like I said, no one can pay due attention to every subject matter (which is why, in the case of Ivermectin, we can be glad that Scott did it for us, and keeps us informed with a fair analysis of the positions against his, etc.).
Seeing as how I have very strong beliefs around that (1) yes, there is room for debate (2) yes, the Scholastic categories are only human constructs to grapple with the mystery (3) well the Protestants, who were all standing on "the plain, clear, evident word of the Gospels" found very quickly that the word wasn't so plain, clear and evident when they came to debate the Lord's Supper (4) given all that, I believe what the Church teaches and am only glad that at least Scott isn't doing a P.Z. Myers to show how much he thinks it's dumb and pointless:
"Myers practices what he preaches. In perhaps his most notorious stunt, he pierced a Catholic Eucharist wafer with a rusty nail and threw it in the trash, along with some coffee grounds, a banana peel, a few pages each of the Koran and Richard Dawkins’s atheist manifesto, The God Delusion, just to show he had no reverence for his own doctrine, either. Myers commenced “The Great Desecration”, as he called it, in support of a college student at the University of Central Florida who “stole” a consecrated communion wafer, which devout Catholics believe is the actual body of Christ, from a mass. For this, the student was met with threats and his actions were compared by some to kidnapping."
The Reformation was a complex tangle of both political, secular power struggles and religious, theological struggles and religious, authority, struggles. It didn't happen all at once, pow! and had a long history of various movements in preceding centuries which contributed to it.
I've seen lackwits online defending the Albigensians, when I am fairly sure they know damn-all about the Albigensians and only heard of it as 'bac Catholic church versus independent thinking'. Indeed, in the most recent instance I've seen, I'm pretty sure the person doesn't think the Albigensians *were* Christians, given the terms they put it in (Christianity invented human rights abuses) and I think the Albigensians would claim to be Christian, and indeed the only correct form of Christianity.
Okay, getting back to the point: how would I feel? That he was adopting the modern secular understanding of how religion is all about feelings and is a private matter for each individual who can make it up as they go along, and that he did not understand the history or underlying principles and why it all mattered. In other words, he was misinformed.
Um. Just so my point doesn't get lost, I was not making an argument in defense of religion as such, nor as an attack on rationalism as such, nor do I have any religious beliefs or allegiances at stake in the matter. My concern was that of a historian. I'm interested in human experience and humans' social/political/psychological life together. Referring back to the original problem I was discussing, it seems to me that understanding humans is not furthered in any major or satisfying way by dismissing a huge portion of human historical experience as simply a cognitive goof or category error, and we're done. Some sort of curiosity is necessary about why they found the issues important. That's my principle.
It’s almost futile to try to clip a quote from this because practically every sentence is quotable gold. Or possibly (outside view) it feels so good to read because it confirms my existing beliefs. Anyway I’m gonna leave that knot unresolved, with a strong prior most of it is probably true.
> Is it possible that most of the standard arguments against the idea are dumb and flawed, but the idea really is false?
I liked this one a lot. It's so easy (for me) to fall for something when you can refute the standard arguments and feel a smart and superior contrarian.
One thing I’ve learned from years of following the skeptic movement (rationalism’s grumpy uncle) is that people make stuff up ALL THE TIME then double down when challenged, then double down again ad infinitum. After a couple decades of reading and witnessing this outrageous claim cycle, the skeptic develops a sort of reflexive, well… skepticism that serves well. It’s not fun to be the party-pooper whenever a new story comes up. Ivermectin doesn’t work because most everything like that doesn’t work. A huge % of new cancer drugs don’t pan out, but it’s painful to rain on hopeful people’s parades. I think rationalists can be a bit wishful (I didn’t say naive) in thinking they can reason with confidence men who just make stuff up. But if Randi taught us anything , it’s that charlatans are real and there’s no depth to which they will not stoop. Uh-oh, that brings me full circle since Randi, like Scott, took the time to carefully and publicly debunk the woo peddlers - I didn’t know that’s where this comment was headed. Amazing.
Another thing. You said, “ when people do formal anonymous surveys of IQ scientists, they find that most of them believe different races have different IQs and that a substantial portion of the difference is genetic.”. This may have already been addressed in the comments, but when I followed the link to your 2017 post, you talked about the expert consensus around the utility of IQ testing, NOT the heritability of IQ. Did you choose the wrong link?
> Even things about genetic psychological differences between population groups are less bold and maverick-y than their proponents like to think. The relevant surveys I know trying to elicit scientific consensus (1, 2, 3) all find that, when asked anonymously, most scientists think these differences explain about 25% – 50% of variance.
There are three links - two scientific papers and a blog post[1][2][3]. The first scientific paper says "Around 90% of experts believed that genes had at least some influence on cross-national differences in cognitive ability." The second says "There is overwhelming support for a significant within-group heritability for IQ, and a majority of respondents feel that black-white and socio-economic status IQ differences are also partially hereditary." I don't see where 25-50% comes from (but I spent little time looking for it).
Note: "heritability" is a tricky concept to use correctly; consider that in the 1950s, "wearing earrings" was entirely heritable because it was predicted by genetic gender.[4] Also, Wikipedia states that "the scientific consensus is that there is no evidence for a genetic component behind IQ differences between racial groups"[5].
I am not sure what to make of the difference between Wikipedia and these papers, but there was recently a tempest in EA circles around Nick Bostrom's apology for a super cringe thing he said decades ago. Many people treated him as if he were some kind of white supremacist just for *not having an opinion* about whether there was any genetic race-IQ link, in his apology. So for Scott to just come out and disagree with Wikipedia on this (almost as a throwaway line, in an article that isn't about this topic) strikes me as unwise. Making this blunder even bigger, he links to his own blog rather than to scientific papers directly. As for me, I have not studied this topic enough to have an opinion.
The Fideist position argues that Scott is doing more harm than good by giving Ivermectin the time of day. Putting the truth of that assertion aside, the point of this blog is evidently NOT to do the greatest possible good with each post -- and it never has been. If that were the case, based on Scott's own values, every single post should be about existential risk from AI. He even wrote an enormous blogpost giving reactionary philosophy a fair shake. I suspect the people who oppose Ivermectin usage would mostly agree that reactionary philosophy is a much greater danger than the drug (which merely doesn't seem to help in first-world cases).
Of course, you could argue that this blog would probably have less reach if it were a never-ending AI ex-risk tirade. That would put us in the realm of multi-period optimization, where greedy algorithms like "do the most good with each post" are insufficient. You could then pursue a multi-pronged strategy, where you write some posts about controversial topics to drive readership and sprinkle in things you really care about in between -- like AI ex-risk. Of course, your treatment of the controversial topics would need to be very even-handed. You need to build up good will so that people will trust you about the things that matter. You can't simply delegate to the experts, because on the thing you care about most, you may disagree with them -- so you need a nice track record of disagreeing productively with the academy.
Once you see the blog topic as a global optimization, the decision to write about Ivermectin is pretty easy. It's a controversial topic, so it will drive a ton of readership. There's a lot of content on both sides of the issue, so you can flex your analytical muscles in a way you can't with other controversial topics like "the social safety net". It's also timely, making the article extremely urgent to write. The analysis of other controversial issues can wait, because they're not going anywhere. You can use the increased readership and reputation in a number of even more positive ways down the line. The positive effects from using the readership to tackle AI ex-risk will overcome whatever small credence you have lent to Ivermectin.
Also consider the type of reader that you are alienating with this strategy -- the fideists. They are basically a worthless readership. Almost all of legacy media is fideist, so this is going to be a high-churn audience that you have to compete aggressively for. In addition, they're not very useful for whatever other goals you might have, because you can't get them to do anything unless the experts agree.
This might sound a bit cynical, but it need not be. The instrumental usefulness of writing about Ivermectin need not diminish any of the other good reasons to write about it, enumerated by Scott. The overlap of people who read ACX and at least _consider_ Ivermectin is significant and VERY poorly served by existing ways of making decisions. These are people who, for whatever reason, will not simply trust the expert consensus -- and I think Scott's analysis helps them. I wonder if the detractors actually think that Scott's series caused any Ivermectin-related injury. It sounds like they are simply annoyed by the spam, which is always going to be a conflict of interest between media and people.
For a first approximation: Check Scott. Check Zvi. Check their blogrolls - though some link to risky stuff - if all falis: Check Matthew Yglesias and Wikipedia. Nyt: for entertainment. Substackers have skin in the game: their Reputation is on the line.
For a first approximation: Check Scott. Check Zvi. Check their blogrolls - though some link to risky stuff - if all falis: Check Matthew Yglesias and Wikipedia. Nyt: for entertainment. Substackers have skin in the game: their Reputation is on the line.
"Which second of the day"? Not sure what point (humorous or otherwise) you intend to make here. Lakatos view of demarcation would be that with previous positive studies being discredited, there was a point (defined by a particular new and better study in a series of studies) when the theory became degenerating. The protective belt of study methodological issues can no longer protect the core theory that the drug works. I doubt that "second" is all that murky.
How would this even work for the Ivermectin debate?
Say that when people have covid plus some other disease at the same time, even if the other disease is not deadly, merely treating the other disease can reduce mortality, because the organism has less of an overall burden.
Wait until everyone nods.
Then add: Of course that might seem statistically like the other cure is "curing covid", right? So just to be sure, before you make a public announcement, please also test the cure on people who have only covid and nothing else.
Love the humility and intelligence in this post. There should be more on the internet like it.
Ugh. I get another feeling: erase the internet and start over.
Depending on your definition of social media, that would also delete substack and all of Scotts recent writings.
> There should be more on the internet like it.
This reminded me of a recent podcast with Oliver Habryka:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4NFDwQRhHBB2Ad4ZY/the-filan-cabinet-podcast-with-oliver-habryka-transcript
> Somebody was proposing a hypothesis. And then somebody was like, "I think clearly Baumol disease is because of Y." Somebody was responding with, "That clearly is not true because of all of this evidence." The other person was like, "No, that doesn't really check out. I still think my original hypothesis [is correct]." Then the [second] person was like, "I don't know, man, here's some additional evidence." And then... the first commenter responded and was just like, "Shit, you're right. I was wrong."
> And I remember reading this. I wasn't that old, like 15 or 16 or something. But I remember reading this and just writing to one of my friends on Skype at the time in ALL CAPS, being like, "What the fuck man, I just saw someone change their mind on the internet!" And just being like, the thing that I had observed in that comment thread was drastically different than the thing that I had observed in all other online forums [up to that] time. It's just a playbook that I had expected and I'd seen play out already by the time, like hundreds of times, maybe even thousands of times: [if] you have two commenters on the internet, getting more heated and angry at each other, both trying to defend, [some position] that they have some reason to hold, it is never the case that it ends up with one person being like, "Oh, I was wrong. You're right."
> And that was huge. It's not the case that there aren't other places [like that] on the internet, the internet is huge these days. And there's lots of subreddits that also are capable of people saying that they changed their mind. But it continues to be a very, very small fraction of the internet. And I think it, like, does demonstrate today something substantially different going on.
Your observation makes the situation look a little worse than it really is. One of the things my father told me was that the purpose of an argument was not to convince someone but to give him the arguments with which he might later convince himself.
There's a lot of convincing the silent audience, too, especially on online fora
That's an excellent piece of wisdom, and one well worth remembering. It sounds like it's a quote - do you happen to know the source?
I was quoting my father. I doubt he was quoting anyone.
A wise man.
Yes.
I'm not sure where I stand (I value your time and wonder what is the best use of it) but I have had bad experience with conspiracy theories.
https://www.mattball.org/2021/10/last-mental-health-note-mind-is-fragile.html
And the friend is the comment on that post. <sigh>
That blog post reads as though you are not entirely immune to tribalistic conspiracies yourself.
Just out of curiosity, are you arguing that Fox News's audience is entirely made up of "Racists. Sexists. Anti-LGBTQ fanatics. Killers."?
I think the argument is that the quoted populations are the people who are especially susceptible to Fox News' message, not the entirety of their viewer body.
In other words, they are what they are in large part because they watched Fox News, rather than choosing to watch Fox News because of what they are.
That stinks of the "if only they knew what I knew, they'd agree with me" conceit.
Matt,
You're very persistent in linking your own blog in comments on this substack, often with little discernible connection to the topic at hand. I have some critical feedback, assuming that it is welcomed:
> It seems it started in 2016 with their capture by the Bernie Bros contingent. It wasn't Senator Sanders' ideas (Denmark is happier than the United States; if it was politically possible, we would gladly support those ideas). Rather, it was the anti-Clinton and then anti-establishment posts. Then it morphed into acceptance of more and more "everyone is out to get me and my small group who know the truth" conspiracies. (I wrote this last year in an obviously unsuccessful attempt to influence them.)
This paragraph seems to go out of its way to confuse with pronouns. "It seems it started ..." What does "it" refer to? The opening paragraph has as subjects "a friend", "their feed", and "they". I'm guessing "it" is a change in "their" posting behavior.
When you mention "their capture by the Bernie Bros contingent" it is hard to discern what "their" refers to. The posts themselves? Your singular friend?
In the parenthetical about Denmark, which reads somewhat as non sequitur, who is "we", kemo sabe? Bernie Bros? You and your friend? All of America?
Before the parenthetical, you say "It wasn't ... ideas." Then "It was ... the posts". It seems to me that these two "its" cannot possibly refer to the same thing. Who is making the anti-xyz posts you're referring to? It's a struggle to follow along.
Ivor Cummins just did a 43 minute video on determining Conspiracy Theories vs Actual Conspiracies. He has a 6 point list of requirements for something to be an actual conspiracy.
Why should anyone take anything he says seriously? Doesn't he have a terrible predictive track record on COVID?
No, he has a very good predictive track. If you disagree, please cite evidence.
I think both of you should be citing evidence, although I think primarily it's on you to explain why we should take this person seriously enough to watch a 43 minute video.
He takes his six criteria for "Is this a conspiracy or a conspiracy theory" and applies them to various things, e.g. 9/11 Truther. He explains how smart people can get tricked into falling for a conspiracy theory.
That's not really "citing evidence." That's just a summary of the video.
I watched part of it, and while the 6 criteria aren't obviously unreasonable, it's never demonstrated what makes them better than some other set of criteria.
What other criteria have been proposed?
https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2021/05/theres-one-born-every-minute-ivor.html
Props to you for giving material to support you PoV . But upon investigating it looks unconvincing. That blogger seemed biased against Cummins and mostly parroting official narrative.
P.s. i have no big stake either way. Except maybe my inherent bias against sources proven to be consistently and purposefully lying.
Cummins from his deleted tweets feels like he is consistent in his position he holds now( e.g. that COVID is a variant of respiratory infection very similar to flu)
"Parroting official narrative" -- did you read the Scottpost?
Sure, it seems likely that COVID will eventually become similar to the flu; killing your host is often a bad strategy for a parasite, but that's not the point of contention here.
The consistency of his positions, which is questionable given his deletions, also isn't the point of contention. The point was about his predictions. From the linked blogpost: "By the end of December, the UK had 8 people per million dying of COVID-19 each day, four times what Cummins predicted. This rose in January to a peak of 18 per million, nine times higher."
There's a mistaken belief that COVID seemed to super-charge that pathogens (or in some cases respiratory pathogens) evolve towards lower virulence, but that's not necessarily true. The normal view is that the evolution of virulence involves trade-offs between mechanisms of reproduction and transmission and host survival. Pathogens can become even more virulent over time if the fitness conditions favor that, which it easily can.
People looking for reassurance that COVID is on its way to becoming harmless spread this myth about viral evolution that has really stuck among people. I unfortunately often see it expressed with a sort of professorial condescension even though it's totally misinformed and wrong.
I said Cummins had a terrible predictive track record. Either he made multiple predictions falsified by reality or he didn't. The blogger in question could have hated Cummins since they fought each other on a playground as children and that would not change anything. Pointing out that Cummins was repeatedly wrong does not make one dismissable as "biased".
> Except maybe my inherent bias against sources proven to be consistently and purposefully lying.
Was the specific source I linked to one that you know of having lied? What makes you think Christopher Snowdon is less honest than Cummins?
If you're looking for cheap heuristics, discounting anybody who in this day and age uses "sheeple" unironically probably works pretty well. (Even if he used it on the side that I'd otherwise support.)
A Ctrl+F for "sheeple" only turns up your comment in this thread.
Cummings uses it in the link you posted to velvetgloveironfist, although oddly only in a blurry screenshot.
That's a weird distinction to draw. In the context of, say, medicine, "Medicinal Theory vs Actual Medicine" would not really make sense - they're not opposing or contradictory concepts. Medicinal Theory doesn't mean "False Medicine," so the difference in those two concepts is not in their veracity but the fact that one refers to a theory (which may or may not be true) while another refers to a theory that has been confirmed.
The more I read Scott's writing about this, the more I become convinced that there simply is no natural category of "conspiracy theories." There are simply theories, with better or worse epistemic support.
Yes, some of those theories have extremely bad epistemic support, and we should certainly learn to identify and reject them. But that's not primarily by categorization, i.e., dropping them into a category labeled "conspiracy theories." Rather, it's by applying epistemic criteria to the content of the theories.
I half agree. I think a key feature of a "conspiracy theory" is the element of a conspiracy. Some people are acting badly in secret, or hiding a truth for malign purposes.
To the extent a person can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories, key features are
1. A strong belief in Conflict Theory rather than Mistake Theory as a major driver of bad outcomes in the world.
2. A high estimation (often extreme overestimation) of large numbers of peoples' abilities to keep secrets.
3. A tendency to think of elites as their own distinct class, rather than people like themselves who happen to hold positions of authority.
I do think that if you don't hold these beliefs (especially 2), you will correctly reject lots of conspiracy theories and very few correct theories. Hence, it's useful to call some things "conspiracy theories" and give them short shrift.
Is Ivermectin a conspiracy theory though? Not necessarily, even if some Ivermectin proponents have fallen pray to conspiratorial secondary theories about the medical establishment. I think, some of what Scott is calling "conspiracy theories" are more like offbeat theories. Theories that hold the experts are wrong but not evil.
Two points:
1) As you note, many advocates of Ivermectin are not claiming a "conspiracy" in the stronger sense that you outline.
2) In matters concerning politically charged government actions, especially those involving intelligence agencies, it's not clear that the elements you outline could not be part of a rationally held mental model.
"Conspiracy theory" is just a terrible category.
Want to hear my 9/11 conspiracy theory? A group of nineteen Arab hijackers trained and supported by Al Qaeda conspired to hijack and fly planes into buildings. This is clearly a conspiracy theory, it says so right there.
Meanwhile, "Atlantis existed but archeologists are too stupid to notice" isn't a conspiracy theory at all.
It's true that many dumb theories do involve conspiracies (since you can easily explain away any counterevidence you like if you posit the existence of a massive conspiracy to fabricate counterevidence) but not all do, and not all theories involving conspiracies are wrong.
Let's just stop using "conspiracy theory" as shorthand for "dumb weird fringe theory poorly supported by evidence and believed only by kooks".
You both raise very good arguments that made me think. Let me clarify what I'm thinking by example. When it comes to 9/11, I believe the 19 Al Qaedas conspiracy theory but I reject out of hand the theory (rare in the US but popular in parts of the world) that 4,000 Jews received phone calls warning them not to go to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11. If 4,000 anybodies had received warning phone calls the night before, these people would warn their coworkers, word would spread through the city, and the next morning the building would be empty and the story of the mystery phone calls would be in the NY Times.
A while back I looked up the original Marjorie Taylor Greene post about "Jewish space lasers". The press focussed on the ambiguously anti-semitic part (it's some Rothschild linked company that supposedly has the lasers), but basically the whole thing is a long babbling series of associations that ultimately presumes that corporations have secret satellites that can collect solar energy and shoot energy beams and that it would be normal for such companies to create deadly wildfires in order to clear a path for a high-speed rail. The fires aren't even in the path of the planned rail but that's not the point. MTG thinks we live in a would where companies have secret sci-fi satellites and directly murder lots of Americans to reduce the price they'll pay for land or whatever.
My point here isn't that no conspiracies ever exist. Small numbers of criminals and terrorists and perhaps larger numbers of intelligence agency employees can certainly launch conspiracies. There's grey areas of plausibility (did the FSB blow up apartment buildings to justify the Chechen war, could the CIA have murdered Epstein in his jail cell)? But the Alex Joneses and MTGs of the world keep getting enormous amounts of stuff wrong, and it is always in the direction of far too many people keeping secrets and elites being far more psychotically evil than they actually are. They just have a stilted view of the world that means they get things wrong over and over. That's what I mean by conspiracy theories.
Regardless of all else, I agree with Scott that even if you are arguing with someone who believes in 4,000 Jews with space lasers or whatever, you'll get farthest by making calm factual arguments instead of declaring your opponent to be beneath you.
You've done the work that I would ask in debunking a conspiracy theory in a great way. When I, and I assume people like me (and Scott's point in writing these articles) ask for reasons to not consider a theory valid, it doesn't have to be hard. I never looked into the Jewish Space Lasers conspiracy, but had I heard about it and lacked any context to determine falsehood. A simple explanation like yours can go a long way. Not that I trust MTG, but I trust the typical media response to her very little as well. So them saying "she's an anti-Semite who believes in Jewish Space Lasers" I typically feel like I'm just missing information. If I heard that information from MTG, the chances that I (in a hypothetical sense, I know enough about her specifically to avoid it) believe it goes up. If I hear some stupid reply meant to call believers stupid, with no detail, then that doesn't have the intended effect of balancing MTG, it just tells me that they consider MTG a cultural enemy.
Now we get to the issue with using that terminology. By using "conspiracy theory" as shorthand for "stupid, crazy, insane theory that only lunatics believe," you are implanting a mind virus into roughly half the population - because when they hear about the "Small numbers of criminals and terrorists and perhaps larger numbers of intelligence agency employees"-type occurrences, they think "Hey, I've seen that type of claim before - CONSPIRACY THEORY!!! RED ALERT!!!"
It shouldn't be surprising that using a generic term to refer only to a subset of things covered by that term could lead to those connotations spilling over outside of that subset.
Of course, the reason why some people continue to do this is precisely because they want those connotations to spill over - they want a term they can use to cover up any allegations of bad behavior between two or more people. But those who actually care about having true beliefs should stop doing this.
I'm not sure how I feel about the usage of the term conspiracy theory in general; it does seem to best apply to theories that presume impossibly large/powerful/successful conspiracies and we tend to also use it to describe other theories that are just dumb in general.
However, the last paragraph in that comment there also seems to be positing a conspiracy that also seems implausible. While there is possibly an /extremely small/ number of people who intentionally overuse the term conspiracy theory so that one day they might have an easier time convincing the public that they or someone else is innocent of a real conspiracy, there is almost no way they could have any significant effect on the general usage of English around the world.
**But maybe there is a conspiracy among, say, journalists who secretly meet and discuss intentionally overusing this term so they can rescue their favorite politicians later, and they might have the power to actually influence the language if there were enough of them... and here we've gone full circle.
There is no way the entire media repeating it for decades could have any significant effect?
“ Let's just stop using "conspiracy theory" as shorthand for "dumb weird fringe theory poorly supported by evidence and believed only by kooks".”
I agree. We’ve lumped at least 3 things together:
1) theories about actual conspiracies where groups conspire to secretly commit nefarious acts
2) “pseudoscientific” or contrarian scientific theories (flat earth, cold fusion)
3) alternative history (Atlantis, Holocaust denial)
Of course there’s some bleed over. “Ivermectin is an effective drug against COVID” is type 2, but “the government is suppressing knowledge of Ivermectin effectiveness to enrich Big Pharma” is type 1.
All 3 can sometimes be true, and all 3 can have cases that are really hard to distinguish from correct theories even if they are false.
But flat earth is impossible without a conspiracy? There are people who claim to have personally seen Earth from afar, to have moved at great speed around it and that it has the shape of a sphere. For flat earth to be true they must form part of a conspiracy. Likewise, if Holocaust is a fabrication, someone must have fabricated it.
But that's not the central aspect of the theory. Perhaps a logical consequence of the theory is that a conspiracy would be required for it to be true, but it's odd to frame that as the defining characteristic of a theory like flat earth, as opposed to something that's directly defined by being a conspiracy, like JFK. I presume they do this to smuggle the negative connotations from one to another.
I think it's also important to call out the category of "theories involving a bunch of people independently (but not universally) deciding that it's in their best interests to behave a certain way, to the detriment of the public". There's no reason to label that a "conspiracy theory" except to discredit it for ideological reasons.
E. g. being antivax not because you believe something about the biological properties of the vaccine in question, but only because The Other Tribe strongly supports it and we can’t have anything in common with them? And if asked why, respond with some half-baked argument about the biological properties?
Doesn't that cut both ways? If one or more vaccines turn out to have caused significant side effects, are the pro-vaxxers not going to be accused of doing the same thing?
As a specific example "the vaccine stops transmission" was a widely expressed view by the pro-vaccine side, even after that was shown to be untrue (it lowered transmission for a few months, but not by enough to prevent society-wide spread similar to without the vaccine).
One obvious example was mentioned by Scott in this post. Lots of people treat the idea that average IQ varies by race as a nutty idea, even though a majority of the relevant experts think it is probably true. The reason is not that those people are in a conspiracy, it is that they think belief in that idea, even if true, has bad consequences.
Many of them likely are in a conspiracy. If a bunch of academic journal editors meet up and discuss how they should all reject any papers associated with race and intelligence, that is a conspiracy.
> 2. A high estimation (often extreme overestimation) of large numbers of peoples' abilities to keep secrets.
If the payoff is large enough and/or the cost sufficiently small, you will always have someone 'spilling beans'. Just take a look at how many Satoshis we have and how many people 'worked with Aliens' in their time in the US military. Hell, in the worst case, just quote an anonymous source, it's not like reputable journalists don't do this.
Lastly, people are not that bad at keeping secrets, either. If you manage things on a need-to-know-basis and stamp the occasional whistle-blower as a nut job you can get pretty far. Just look how long it took for the NSA surveillance to actually get leaked, even though we know now that thousands of people knew for years.
Also people into Pizzagate/Epstein theory point out to Instagram posts and leaked emails and children's testimonies and mentions dating back to 2008, so conspiracy theories don't rely on *nobody spilling the beans*, but on *no one would notice if they did*.
I thought about the NSA example but my impression is that while Snowden leaked the details, it was pretty widely known that the NSA was engaged in mass electronic surveillance of some sort. I remember my friends in high school (pre-9/11 this was funny) joking about sending e-mails with lots of terrorism-related keywords to waste the NSA's time.
The cover-up that genuinely impressed me was how many people knew valuable details about the D-Day landing that would have been valuable to the Germans, but that was a time when control of communication was much greater.
One of my favorite conspiracy theories is that Pfizer shut down its vaccine trial from late October 2020 until the day after the Election, putting all new samples into cold storage.
In fact, that's not a secret: the Pfizer executive in charge of vaccine development, William Gruber, told Stat News that's what Pfizer did on November 9, 2020, the day the success of the clinical trial was announced, much to reporter Matthew Herper's astonishment.
But, even though that's part of the public record, nobody cares.
So, while Pfizer delaying the announcement of its vaccine's efficacy until after the election might be a small-c conspiracy theory, it's not a Conspiracy Theory. Capital-C Conspiracy Theories have to appeal to a substantial number of people. There are lots of Conspiracy Theories about Pfizer and its vaccine, but the most plausible one doesn't qualify because practically nobody has even heard of it.
Got a quotation? I think I found the article in question but ctrl-f election found nothing.
"Gruber said that Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October that they wanted to drop the 32-case interim analysis. At that time, the companies decided to stop having their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study, instead leaving samples in storage. The FDA was aware of this decision. Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday."
Got a citation for the Stat News article?
It's probably this one: https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/09/covid-19-vaccine-from-pfizer-and-biontech-is-strongly-effective-early-data-from-large-trial-indicate/
That they stopped the analysis is a true fact. Leaping from there to the inference that this was done to screw Trump is idiotic. The people who run Pfizer cared very little about who won the election, because it doesn't much affect their bottom line. On the other hand, they care very much indeed about that bottom line, and had they stuck to their original protocol, they would have been obliged by their agreement with the FDA to cut the trial short, because it had demonstrated its (unmabitious) primary endpoint, of more or less being better than nothing at slowing COVID.
What Pfizer *suspected* (correctly as it turned out), was that the vaccine would be much better than the primary endpoint goal -- which would of course translate into much more $$$ for Pfizer, Inc. -- but they could only prove that if they ran the trial all the way to the end. Had they continued their intermediate analysis, the protocol would call for cutting the trial short (so the control arm could get the vaccine), and then they would never have proof (except possibly after some laborious real-world study years later) that the vaccine was much better than they thought.
That's why they did it. As always, with business, and for that matter most smart people, it's not complicated psychology and hall of mirrors mechanism one needs to untangle, it's just about the benjamins. Adducing some ideological fetish that would have a Vice President of Pfizer throwing away potential $billions in future profit in order to see this schmo or that schmuck become President for a tiny part of the time over which he can expect to get handsome bonuses for a bountiful bottom line is massively overthinking things without using common sense, which is indeed the hallmark of the conspiracy theorist.
Pfizer thought through all the technical issues of their vaccine clinical trial during the summer of 2020 when they publicly published their protocol of when they would unblind results.
What they didn't count on was the political backlash from Democrats who were terrified of a successful vaccine turning out to be what the New York Times called Trump's "October surprise." Both Biden and Harris used their debates with Trump and Pence to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about a rushed Trump vaccine.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla consistently told Wall Street that he expected to have at least vaccine efficacy results to announce in late October 2020. So, analysts were shocked when he didn't mention the vaccine trial on the Pfizer earnings call of October 27, 2020. What we learned on 11/9/20 was that Pfizer had put their world-historical clinical trial in cold storage from late October until the day after the Election.
Here's my 2022 review of Bourla's memoir "Moonshot."
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-missing-piece/
I was hoping he was going to offer an explanation for putting the "world's most important clinical trial" on hiatus, but instead he left the entire topic out of his autobiography. That suggests to me that he doesn't have an entirely innocent explanation that I'm overlooking.
Look, I sympathize with Bourla: he wanted to beat Moderna, which Pfizer did by a week, and he didn't want the Establishment (e.g., the likely next President, Joe Biden, the media, academia, the federal bureaucracy, etc.) to be outraged at Pfizer and its vaccine by providing Trump with his "October Surprise." He successfully threaded the needle. The Harvard B School should write up a case study of how he did it, with barely anybody even noticing his corner-cutting.
A good example of how long a secret can be kept is Bletchley Park.
The British decoding of German Enigma codes employed about 10,000 people at Bletchley Park during WWII, but it was unknown to the newspaper reading public until 1974 (with distorted tales of Ultra appearing in the press from about 1971 onward).
I've seen hints of the existence of Ultra in earlier books by insiders: e.g., Professor Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison's official history of the US Navy in WWII has one line about how U-Boat hunting in the Atlantic became so successful that it was almost as if somebody was reading the German codes. But I don't know that anybody who wasn't an insider got his joke until Stevenson's book a decade later.
Similarly, I would guess my father, a Lockheed engineer, visited Area 51 a number of times. (He often was off to work at Edwards AFB, and Area 51 was a more remote clone of Edwards.) But I never heard about it from him. My wife's uncle lived at Edwards for a couple of years and no doubt went to Area 51 as well. But he never talked about it.
Something I often tell people who believe conspiracy theories about covid vax (it kills millions but that's covered up, etc.) seems like a version of your (2) and (3), as I understand them: Scientists are not a club or a religious sect. They don't all know each other, and the don't all like and respect each other, and they're not particularly invested in presenting a united front. If a research team publishes a paper that looks suspicious, other scientists will request their raw data and go over what the team did with great, angry care. In fact they sometimes do that even when someone's results are not suspicious, driven by professional rivalry. And if they find something wrong with the research they will blow the whistle on the team and write letters to journal editors and the press about the matter. They also are not, as a group, all that bribable with money. They're not saints, but the currency that matters to them isn't Ben Franklins, it's being right, being smart, being in the forefront. If you keep in mind that this is what "the scientists" are like, it should be obvious that there is no way someone could get that whole bunch to agree to keep secret a body of data that shows the covid vax in fact kills many. many people.
"If you keep in mind that this is what "the scientists" are like, it should be obvious that there is no way someone could get that whole bunch to agree to keep secret a body of data that shows the covid vax in fact kills many. many people."
I don't believe there's a conspiracy to keep the COVID vax death toll secret. But is it possible to get a whole bunch of scientists to agree that men can be women any time they say so, or that socioeconomic discrepancies are entirely due to discrimination, or that Muslims do not commit disproportionate terrorist attacks? Make the punishment for unorthodox opinions heavy enough and almost all scientists will fold. You don't even need an authority to enforce the orthodoxy from the top down, because mutual denunciation and ostracism is enough. We're seeing this happen as we speak with woke ideology. As the woke say themselves, free speech does not mean speech without consequences. There's no a priori reason to believe that a similar pro-vax orthodoxy cannot be enforced, especially as anti-vax becomes synonymous with unwoke.
" But is it possible to get a whole bunch of scientists to agree that men can be women any time they say so."
Well what do you mean by agreeing that men can be women?(1) Do you mean scientists will literally say that male-to-female trans people are in every respect women -- XX chormosomes, able to have babies, etc.? I'm sure you do not mean that. (2) Do you mean that most scientists will say that if males want to do the hormones and surgery route and call themselves women, they do not object -- they consider it to a personal choice they have no say in? (3) Do you mean that scientists will say that the data indicate that M-to-F hormone and surgery transition is the best option for anyone with gender dysphoria -- that on average it leads to less suffering and a higher level of functioning?
Note that (1) and (3) are things regarding which scientists can analyze data and make statements about what's true and what's not . (2) is not -- it's an attitude. So let's look at (3), what doctors and mental health clinicians have to say about sexual transitioning. I'm a psychologist, and I can tell you that when my collegues and I talk about sexual transitioning as a solution to gender dysphoria we are skeptical regarding how great a solution it is. Regarding initiating sexual transitioning when someone's a teenager we are quite uneasy about it. The idea of beginning the transition with pre-pubescent kids horrifies most of us. It is also not difficult to find research regarding outcomes for people post-transition that indicate that post-transition people are not doing that great. The scientists who study gender dysphoria and gender change are not afraid to tell the truth about what they find. I have never been even mildly "punished" by my peers for my skepticism about sexual transitiioning as a successful treatment for these complexly unhappy folks, and virtually all my friends are liberal democrats.
I do not like wokesters any more than you do, but I'd like to see some evidence that they have kept scientists from doing research that might yield politically incorrect results regarding trans people, Muslim terrorism and inborn differences as a cause of poverty. You got any?
> I have never been even mildly "punished" by my peers for my skepticism
Have you ever *published* your opinions, or do you know someone who published something similar? Like, maybe the norm is that certain opinions are okay to have in private, but putting them on paper is what gets you in trouble.
If you imagine a world where 90% of psychologists are privately horrified of transitioning pre-pubescent kids, but 99% of psychological articles published in peer-review journals approve of it... that's more or less what some of the "conspiracy theorists" are saying.
I have never published anything about this -- I don't write articles. Have said it to patients, colleagues and acquaintances and not gotten bad reactions. I have said it online, but not in a setting where people have already committed to positions and are squatting in opposite ditches hurling pieces of fire and shit at each other. I mean, I am not angry about this issue in those conversations -- I'm not saying, "you fucking wokesters think you're more humane than anyone else, and actually you are coercive and cruel." I'm saying things like, "when I hear about a situation like this [say somebody's 11 year old going on puberty blockers] here is what I worry about." As regards the *science* of this, it is not difficult at all to find articles about the physical downsides and risks of puberty blockers. But of course that's not the main issue for most of us. The most disturbing thing is the idea of allowing a 10 year old's ideas about this matter to weigh so heavily in decisions that will have lifelong consequences. As a matter of fact, I have similar feelings when I see 16 year old gymnasts at the Olympics. Many years ago, probably at around the age of 6, the kid was gymnastics-crazy, as many little kids are, especially girls. And this one was very gifted. She dreamed of getting a gold medal at the Olympics, and the parents permitted her to live the life of an olympian in training for many years. She missed so much! Not to mention that for every girl who goes to the olympics there are thousands who devote their lives to trying and do not succeed. Many of them get seriously injured at some point, and occasionally one dies from a bad landing. I often mention this when people try to get me to watch the Olympics with them, and I actually get much more pushback for this idea than I do for my concerns about prepubescent transitioning. Nobody gets furious, but they say things like, "yeah, but the kid got to live out her dream," and look at me uneasily. I think they're thinking I have an unpleasant gift for finding the one weird downside of something wonderful.
Anyhow, endocrinologists are not shy about their data about the downside. As for the other downside -- letting a kid decide to take such a huge, life-altering course -- it is hard to research. You can interview and test kids along the way to get an idea of how things are going for them, and there are people doing that and publishing results, but you can't do anything remotely like an RCT. How would I back up my ideas if I were to write a book or an article about this topic? It would have to be pretty wide-ranging, right? I'd need to get data about how frequently 9 year olds express a wish to be the opposite gender -- how things work out for those who do not transition -- the fad side of gender diversity thinking -- similar fads -- measures of changing attitudes about parental authority, and the effect on kids of parents being permissive in certain ways. And then I'd have to pull it all together in one big long argument about how pre-puberty transition if rarely the best approach, and how people have come to think it is.
"Well what do you mean by agreeing that men can be women?"
I mean exactly that: they will say that trans-women are real women. If your objection is that this isn't a precise statement of fact but more of an attitude, you'd be right. However, pro-vax and anti-vax are both attitudes too. A medical professional would say "the vaccine is safe and you should take it", not "the risk of X type of adverse reaction within 2 months in population Y is Z%". It doesn't matter if every journal is filled with articles quantifying the risks of the COVID vaccine; if scientists are not allowed to adopt the attitude "the vaccine is dangerous and you should not take it", then the public would be led astray by following scientific consensus. I'll reiterate again that I don't think this has happened yet and I am pro-vax, but the more censorious the pro-vaccine side gets, the less credible they become.
"I'd like to see some evidence that they have kept scientists from doing research that might yield politically incorrect results regarding trans people, Muslim terrorism and inborn differences as a cause of poverty. You got any?"
Trans people: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brown-university-caves-to-trans-activists-protesting-research/
"PLOS One explained that in response to “readers’ concerns,” they were seeking “further expert assessment on the study’s methodology and analyses.” If so, that’s fair enough. But in an unusual display of transparency, Brown added their own statement that their “community members” had been “expressing concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.”"
Genetic bases of socioeconomic differences: https://www.city-journal.org/nih-blocks-access-to-genetics-database
"It’s been an open secret for years that prestigious journals will often reject submissions that offend prevailing political orthodoxies—especially if they involve controversial aspects of human biology and behavior—no matter how scientifically sound the work might be. The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups."
"American geneticists now face an even more drastic form of censorship: exclusion from access to the data necessary to conduct analyses, let alone publish results. Case in point: the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbidden territory."
Muslims: https://rmx.news/article/swedish-scientists-prosecuted-for-finding-that-most-rapes-are-committed-by-immigrants/
"However, the ethical authority appears to be gearing up to issue some form of punishment related to the case.
“I don’t see anywhere that ethical permission is sought to test the hypothesis if immigrants are over-represented in statistics on convicted rapists,” the body said. The scientists were also criticized for insufficient evaluation as they failed to indicate how their research should “reduce exclusion and improve integration.”"
This case was covered by Scott Alexander.
"So let's look at (3), what doctors and mental health clinicians have to say about sexual transitioning. I'm a psychologist, and I can tell you that when my collegues and I talk about sexual transitioning as a solution to gender dysphoria we are skeptical regarding how great a solution it is. Regarding initiating sexual transitioning when someone's a teenager we are quite uneasy about it. The idea of beginning the transition with pre-pubescent kids horrifies most of us. It is also not difficult to find research regarding outcomes for people post-transition that indicate that post-transition people are not doing that great. The scientists who study gender dysphoria and gender change are not afraid to tell the truth about what they find. I have never been even mildly "punished" by my peers for my skepticism about sexual transitiioning as a successful treatment for these complexly unhappy folks, and virtually all my friends are liberal democrats."
Thank you for describing your experience. I'm surprised that your peers are so open-minded, but I guess practicing psychologists are not as rigidly constrained by orthodoxy as I thought, which gives me some hope for the future. I'm in academia, which is the wokest of the woke of the elite institutions. So are almost all scientists. As a scientist myself, I find it hard to imagine the courage it would take for a social scientist to even admit to taking an unwoke hypothesis seriously, let alone taking it seriously enough to do a study on it and publish the unwoke results. It reminds me of my childhood in an authoritarian country, where people who opposed the government definitely existed, but no official public statement from any high-profile individual or organization was ever anti-government. The atmosphere is exactly the same: hushed voices, doctrinal training sessions, obvious things that everyone knew but nobody admitted, an invitation to come "drink tea" with your friendly local authority if you ever questioned the orthodoxy.
A funny example of how it usually takes more than one whistleblower to get the truth out is that millions of people with three digit IQs remain utterly convinced that "Science has proven that race does not exist." Yet, in 2018 the superstar of population genetics, Harvard's David Reich, published a book saying that's not true and the New York Times published his essay saying that's not true.
But I almost never run into anybody online who says, "I used to believe that science had proved race doesn't exist, but then I read this top Harvard scientist in the New York Times saying that wasn't true, so I changed my mind." As far as I can tell, almost everybody who paid attention to Reich already agreed with what he had to say, and huge numbers of people who think of themselves as intellectuals who know that science proves races does not exist paid no heed whatsoever.
The funniest example was when journalist Angela Saini went to interview Reich for her book about how science had proven race does not exist and he flat out told her the thesis of her book was wrong. As far as I can tell, that just proved to her how pervasive the menace of racist pseudoscience was even at Harvard.
Was curious how hard it was to find someone saying online that Muslims commit a disproportionate number of terrorist attacks. It is definitely not difficult. Found 2 in 30 secs. Here's the ACLU: "While terrorism — even in the form of suicide attacks -- is not an Islamic phenomenon by defini tion, it cannot be ignored that the lion's share of terrorist acts and the most devastating of them in recent years have been perpetrated in the name of Islam." https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/ACLURM001331.pdf
Here's another: " According to Nesser (2018), Islamist terrorism (the focus of the present study) is the most prominent type of international terrorism. Islamism can generally be described as a set of ideologies and its proponents usually perceive specific political, legal and social aspects of other cultures and religions as incompatible with Islam (Eikmeier, 2007;)." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1464884921990223#bibr29-1464884921990223
Only glanced at both articles, but gist of what they were saying seemed to be that radical Islam is sort of like the form of Christianity that leads people to blow up abortion clinics, etc. -- i.e., that there's a subgroup of Muslims who are nutso killer fanatics, but that the religion itself is no more compatible with terrorism than the religions people are used to in America. That sounds fair to me.
Of course I agree that wokeism exists but it doesn't seem to me that it is hard to find researchers who are willing to state the facts you think of as unsayable.
>But is it possible to get a whole bunch of scientists to agree that [...] that socioeconomic discrepancies are entirely due to discrimination
Empirically, no (or at least it's extraordinarily difficult). I know this because the woke left has been trying for decades to engineer a scientific consensus on this issue, and yet it's next-to-impossible to find a scientist in the relevant fields who will actually say, in words, that this is true. I've spent a lot of time searching, and the most I've been able to find is scientists who will that the evidence is inconclusive and purely discrimination-based explanations can't be ruled out yet.
To my understanding and memory, ivermectin was being widely considered (worldwide) as a potential treatment for COVID at the same time the public media was denouncing it as horse paste and calling anyone trying it idiots. You don't need the scientists actually studying something to agree with each other, if the press is willing to pick a unified direction. There were real scientists trying to get the message out about alternate treatments and the dangers of lockdowns, but they were often stifled in very authoritarian ways. That's why so many people are interested in the Twitter Files - looking for evidence about when and why these actual scientists were denied the ability to share their thoughts. Not every dissenting opinion turned out to be correct, but a lot of stifled dissenting opinions have been verified now.
It was a literal conspiracy involving government forces, social media, and the press that shut down certain speakers if they wanted to talk about theories. That this happened to real scientists who have since been proven correct on at least some of the things they were trying to say is known to be true.
Yes, the Great Barrington Declaration was signed by many healthcare professionals and yet the media managed to completely discredit them. It was clear that it wasn't just that the public sentiment went this way, there were some strong forces working to discredit it.
Just for curiosity I looked up what wikipedia says about Vinay Prasad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinay_Prasad
The part about covid response is mostly negative. If you open the sources, you can see how he is being criticized for things that have turned out correct (for example, Cochrane report about masks).
Somehow, I have started to see a pattern. Take any distinguished scientist, physician or public health reporter with good credentials before pandemic, and suddenly they all are bad during covid response? Some of them made mistakes but wouldn't you think that they made mistakes in the past too? It is as if there is whole campaign to discredit any critics of lockdown policy.
The Great Barrington declaration hinged on two things: herd immunity and focused protection of the vulnerable. One turned out not to be possible, and the other was pretty obviously impossible at the time: There was and is no way to keep Covid out of nursing homes when it's circulating at high levels in the general population, let alone protecting the elderly not in nursing homes, immunocompromised, etc.
GBD authors and signatories also became pretty famous for declaring that cases were in their final decline just ahead of the next surge. E.g., Jay Bhattacharya saying "The emergency phase of the disease is over" and "we protected the vulnerable" right before the delta wave killed another quarter million Americans. (A GBD supporter asserting the end of the pandemic right before a wave became such a familiar occurrence that one researcher called it the Gupta Predictor, after author Sunetra Gupta.)
In general, the contrarian case on Covid represented by the GBD was rarely "it's going to kill a million-plus people one way or another, so there's no point in trying to control it", but repeatedly pointing to imagined inflection points as the beginning of the end while grossly underestimating the total, starting in about April 2020.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-pandemic-is-over-again/
The first turned out not possible but in a way we all strengthened our immunity against covid either through vaccination or catching disease. It happens with all cold viruses and it was predictable that it will be the same for covid.
The second is not true. We can and could have provided focused protection to the elderly. In the UK many elderly living alone sheltered and avoided getting covid until vaccines came along. We could have provided the same thing for much less financial cost and impact on the society than lockdowns.
I personally had no pandemic at all. At no point of all these years I felt that I was in danger so great that I need to observe lockdowns, avoid travel, meeting people or even wear a mask. I understand that some people were in danger, mostly elderly and immunosuppressed. I definitely was careful in contacts with them. Pandemic damage was completely self-inflicted caused by mass panic and it becomes more and more clear with every day.
We had Sweden as a contrariant case and it did well, not much different from most other countries who had hard lockdowns.
I would also suggest that nursing homes were largely irrelevant. They are places where people are going to die. The median age of death from covid is 82+ years. The pandemic restrictions was a war of the elderly against the young.
I agree that the GBD was not very well developed, it lacked concrete details and their suggestions lacked practicality. Nevertheless, they were shut down immediately, blocked and demonised, never given a chance to explain and improve their position. That was really sad.
> They don't all know each other, and the don't all like and respect each other, and they're not particularly invested in presenting a united front.
The straightforward response to this that I've seen: sure they are, they want more research grants so they all want to keep the climate change gravy train running.
> They also are not, as a group, all that bribable with money.
Even if that were true, money is what lets them do what they actually want to do, so it's important.
> To the extent a person can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories, key features are
This suggests that the problem is not the conspiracy theory per se, but rather the "conspiracy theory mindset".
Wrong theories appear all the time. Without this mindset, they would be evaluated, and after collecting enough evidence rejected. People with this mindset break this mechanism, simply because they never give up, no matter what. Even worse, they try to convince other people to adopt the same mindset.
Besides the general anti-epistemology, an important component is how strongly emotionally invested those people are. It's as if they were traumatized by something.
Like, imagine someone who was a victim of police abuse, or knows someone who was. If such person spends the rest of their life writing angry anti-establishment rants -- I get it. It may not be the optimal reaction, but it is a natural reaction. The surprising thing is what someone has a similar emotional reaction about... pyramids, or ivermectin, or miracle mineral supplement, or whatever.
My best guess is that they basically use the topic as a metaphor for... something else. (Something like: "My abusive father believes that he is right about everything. Just like those scientists do. But I will prove all of them wrong!" And now you cannot give up, because if ivermectin actually does not work... then your abusive father metaphorically wins.) And I suppose many people have unsolved emotional problems, so when you show them a way to channel their feelings, they are hooked.
And when someone's reaction to people with fringe beliefs is... verbal abuse... that just strengthens the emotional connection ("yes, more evidence that I am actually fighting against abusive people").
Yeah, it's crazy how some people just could not stop trying to spread disinformation about the value of lockdowns and masks. We clearly know that lockdowns were not effective and should have stopped far earlier, but they just kept going!
I'm being snarky, but I draw exception to what theories polite society is willing to dismiss as part of a "conspiracy theory mindset" and which theories are not.
Pseudoscientific movements and other fringe scholarly movements very often end up incorporating an element of conspiracy theory. This is because when you arguments you believe to be persuasive are looked low upon by experts, there's only so many ways you can explain that, especially if your movement is large enough to have not escaped people's notice. One of the easiest routes to explaining this is proposing some form of conspiracy theory among the academic establishment to deny you. This conspiracy may be formal, but more often it's more of an informal alignment of interests - a conspiracy of incentive if you will. Global warming is the result of scientists under pressure to toe the line for that sweet, sweet grant money, for instance.
Once people start seeing conspiracy in one, it becomes easy to see that same kind of conspiracy elsewhere, which is one reason why crank movements seem to have a magnetism. The reasoning that protects them is promiscuous.
So while the theories themselves aren't conspiracy theories proper, people often end up using terms like that interchangeably because they're so commonly found together. This is technically wrong, but mostly forgivable.
There seems to be a similar effect in the opposite direction, where anti-conspiracy "aggressive conformist" types start denying the possibility of conspiracy anywhere they hear about it - it's rare to see someone who denies conspiracy in one place and accepts it in another. In my experience, those who use the term "conspiracy theory" in the way you describe tend to categorically dismiss all theories involving people working together behind the scenes, often even denying that people follow incentives, as well.
People skeptical of JFK assassination conspiracy theories or moon landing conspiracy theories generally seem to just accept that Watergate happened or that organized crime exists. To be frank, the idea that people who reject conspiracy theories generally don't believe that people even engage in conspiracies or behave according to incentives sounds ridiculous.
I guess I should add a caveat - they disbelieve all conspiracy theories that would harm them politically. It is true that the most fervent anti-conspiracy-theory hyperconformists heavily pushed the baseless Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, even years after it had been debunked. But they didn't even think of that as a conspiracy theory, because those in power control these labels, and so they reframed it as a "collusion" theory (literally just a synonym for conspiracy).
However, there definitely is a failure mode of rationality wherein one becomes a "debunker" and defines their identity around "debunking conspiracy theories," as if it is a foregone conclusion that all such theories are false and it's just a matter of finding a way to debunk them. But of course sometimes people really do conspire with one another.
A logical consequence of disbelieving all conspiracy theories is that you disbelieve all (new) conspiracies, because all revealed conspiracies started as theories at some point.
The correct category is "theories contrary to the current scientific consensus." A conspiracy theory could be both part of the consensus and true — consider the history of the communist movement. A false consensus could be the result of something other than a conspiracy.
The only feature of a "conspiracy theory" is that it is a theory about a conspiracy. Because... that's what the words say.
The attempt to associate all sorts of other things with the term "conspiracy theory" is driven by a desire to get rid of any term for "two or more people working together to do something behind the scenes." If that is happening, they literally just don't want us to have a word that we can use to describe it. If "conspiracy theory" is reserved for a hundred different stigmatized and pathologized things, we just don't even have the language to describe that that is happening.
Like, imagine if we did the same for any other type of theory. Imagine if any "Biological Theory" was just declared categorically false, simply by nature of being related to biology. That would seem to imply a judgement about the existence of biology, no?
Their goal is to suggest that any act of two or more people working together behind the scenes is axiomatically impossible. Because if someone points out some evidence for this bad behavior behind the scenes, they can pattern-match you onto imaginary "flat earthers" or whatever the astroturfed "conspiracy theory" of the week is.
> The only feature of a "conspiracy theory" is that it is a theory about a conspiracy. Because... that's what the words say.
You know language often doesn't work like this, right? Do you struggle with understanding idioms?
If you're worried that the evolution of the term "conspiracy theory" to mean this leaves no room to describe legitimate conspiracies, the word we ordinarily use for that is just "conspiracy."
Are you a linguistic prescriptivist?
It is perfectly valid to use a sequence of words to mean simply what those words mean, as written, even if some consider it to be an idiom or term of art. Words can have multiple meanings. This is laughably basic stuff.
"Conspiracy" obviously doesn't work. "It's a conspiracy, man!" and things of that form have already been memed quite extensively. Further, the problem with the term "conspiracy theory" is not that it is used by people who believe in such theories, but that it is applied as a label to their theories by those with power. So they don't have the ability to just avoid being labelled with that term. The only thing we can do is change the connotations of the term in common usage to better represent the frequent truthfulness of such theories.
Some sequences of words have a well-understood meaning that is very different than just the sum of what the individual words normally mean. See e.g. "rootless cosmopolitan" or "fellow traveller". If you use those words without understanding that, there will be miscommunication. So you should probably try not to do that.
This is a fully-general counterargument against ever using a word in any sense other than its first listed dictionary definition. That eliminates the vast majority of word usage.
You're proposing an alternative meaning of the term "conspiracy theory" to common parlance based on your literal reading of what the component parts of the term mean. Not only that, but you seem to think this is fundamentally the "correct" meaning, then accuse others of being prescriptivist. This is all silly, but you imagine disagreement with you is rooted in a misunderstanding of linguistics that is "laughably basic." I don't know what to tell you. Sometimes phrases mean something other than what the most literal reading of them would suggest.
If you allow me a little speculation, what appears to be going on is there are conspiracy theories as people normally understand them that you are personally sympathetic to and you are bristling at the dismissiveness the label brings.
I'm not "proposing an alternative meaning," I'm stating the obvious fact that that is one of the meanings of the word. It's easily the second most common usage.
> you seem to think this is fundamentally the "correct" meaning, then accuse others of being prescriptivist.
You're the one who's trying to disallow me from using it that way.
> you imagine disagreement with you is rooted in a misunderstanding of linguistics that is "laughably basic."
You've misused the concept of linguistic prescriptivism twice now already.
> Sometimes phrases mean something other than what the most literal reading of them would suggest.
Another basic linguistics error. The meaning of words depends on how they are used and the context in which they are used. Using a sequence of words to mean what the words mean as written, rather than as a term of art, is never "incorrect" - again, extremely basic. Do better.
> there are conspiracy theories as people normally understand them that you are personally sympathetic to and you are bristling at the dismissiveness the label brings
Do you have a memory issue or something? I don't mean any offense if you do, I know remembering things from one comment ago can be tricky.
Anyway, yes, obviously that is my objection. Do you really think a bootlicking aggressive conformist would ever disagree with the way those in power abuse language? To repeat:
> The attempt to associate all sorts of other things with the term "conspiracy theory" is driven by a desire to get rid of any term for "two or more people working together to do something behind the scenes." If that is happening, they literally just don't want us to have a word that we can use to describe it. If "conspiracy theory" is reserved for a hundred different stigmatized and pathologized things, we just don't even have the language to describe that that is happening.
On 2: do you accept the existence of the Galactic Federation? If not, why not? The secret is out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haim_Eshed
Hard agree. Labeling something a "conspiracy theory" is just a political move to drive an uncertain claim out of the public discourse, while other equally uncertain claims are validated by "experts say this so shut up". There is uncertainty around a very wide range of claims, and no substitute for the ability to think for yourself.
There's a conspiracy theory community that holds conventions and stuff. There's clearly a great deal of overlap in believers and ideas between most conspiracy theories. It is a very visible cluster in belief-space.
With that said, I don't think arguing over whether specific ideas are conspiracy theories is fruitful, especially not when it devolves into technicalities. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
There's a number of clusters along mostly political lines, but they do connect
Scott used to wonder how to distinguish between "there's no evidence" qua "experts haven't investigated", vs "there's no evidence" qua "experts have investigated and determined it's wrong". "Conspiracy theory" seems to be an argument-from-authority which strongly suggests the latter.
I'd argue there is a somewhat natural category of conspiracy theories. They're theories that there's a large conspiracy of people who are doing something bad that at first glance you wouldn't realize is their doing. Usually the blame is put on certain groups like the masons, the Illuminati, the CIA, the US as a whole, or sometimes even a large and diverse demographic like Jews or Arabs. Some examples are "Bush did 9/11" or "HAARP causes earthquakes (on purpose)". Theories like these can sometimes be true, but often are only founded in paranoid fantasies.
Then there's the broader category of beliefs that go something like "X is true but academics, politicians and the media are deliberately covering it up". They do involve a conspiracy of sorts, because the clear truth of X is deliberately being kept from people by a conspiracy of experts. But the subject of the theory can be pretty much anything. Atlantis is one example. Sometimes these theories are straightforwardly wrong ("vaccines cause autism"). Sometimes there's a lot of conflicting evidence and it's hard to claim a deliberate cover-up ("glyphosate is dangerous"). And sometimes it's a sort of philosophical question that involves a lot of factors so there can't really be a "correct" answer even in principle ("everyone should go vegan"). And sometimes it's a factual question and the doubters are correct ("wmds in Iraq").
But it's true that "conspiracy theory" has become a bit of a swear word that you can apply to any science- or politics-related belief that you don't like. In any case, the P.C. word for it is "conspiracy myth" these days, because "theory" was seen as giving them too much credit.
That use of myth is funny, since that's another word they Orwelled - etymologically, "myth" simply refers to beliefs and stories that have been passed down over a long period of time, and in fact typically refers to things that "have a significant truth or meaning" according to Wiktionary.
Of course, contemporarily, myth is used as a synonym of "false belief," in an example of the same bit of linguistic trickery that happened to "conspiracy theory". If they can take a word describing a particular, distinct concept, and shift the meaning to "false, crazy thing," then they can propagate the belief that all examples of that particular original thing are false, without evidence ever coming in to the equation.
who are "they"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth#Definitions
Who knows. Maybe atheists, or that one other religion that tends to do this kind of stuff.
Sounds like "they" are a very niche group and wouldn't have much influence. So can we just ignore what "they" do or try to do?
I don't know what you're talking about - "they" literally rule all the world's major institutions.
I think essential part of conspiracy theory is a specific epistemology, where you assume that minority of evidence is more reliable than the majority of evidence.
The whole "conspiracy" part isn't about some people having an organisation or agreement to futher their goals in secret. It's about a group of people counterfeiting the majority of evidence. Big Pharma counterfeighted their trials of ivermectin, Zionist government hid the fact of its existence, Scientists deny the truth of flat earth to diminish Christianity, Archeologist frauded the evidence so that no-one new about Atlantis. The pattern is the same. You can't trust the established institutions because they are all in the evidence falsifying conspiracy, no matter how many good arguments they have. You can only trust the tiny minority of contarians, even if their evidence isn't very good.
I strongly agree. Maybe the label of "conspiracy theory" had some kind of independent value at one point, but it's used and abused as a means to shut down conversation or discredit theories too quickly to maintain a status as good heuristics in all cases.
Consider two examples - NASA faking the moon landing, and the CIA spending 20 years developing torture techniques for interrogation on unwilling US citizens. One of those is true, and it's not immediately obvious (if you don't already know any details) which one is harder to believe.
We know and have proof that conspiracies exist, and also that the government has repeatedly conspired against its own people in ways both illegal and nefarious. Given real history, I have a hard time taking "that's just a conspiracy theory" seriously at face value. Give me some detail, give me some reasons why we should consider it wrong.
"Conspiracy theory" is almost universally used as a term of art to refer to the false ones. To say something is a conspiracy theory is to say it is a claim to conspiracy that is unreasonable. That's why we don't ordinarily call Watergate a conspiracy theory even though it plainly involved a conspiracy.
I think almost by definition, we cannot know for sure that a conspiracy theory is false. We can only know for sure that it is true (because it is proven), but conspiracy theories cannot usually be disproved.
As far as whether a particular conspiracy is "unreasonable", the problem here is that history is chalk full of conspiracies that any reasonable person would consider unreasonable when they were happening, yet they later were proven to have happened.
I can't think of any great heuristic for asserting that a particular conspiracy is obviously wrong that, when back-tested against actual conspiracies, would correctly identify legitimate conspiracies and filter out only the bad ones.
MK Ultra (my example from above) would absolutely have been considered "unreasonable" at the time it was actually happening. It would have been labelled a "conspiracy theory" as a direct attempt to discredit it, probably by the CIA itself and likely by multiple other government organizations.
Jokes about "the CIA is listening to my conversations through my teeth" (there's a joke on a joke about it in a Futurama episode, but it used to be a pretty common trope) were a way to deflect criticism by mocking the idea that the CIA would be torturing US citizens - despite the fact that they actively were!
The point is that to claim something is a conspiracy theory is to claim that it is unreasonable to believe. A person can be wrong about this, but that's what the charge means. A literal reading of the term would lead you to think it is any assertion that a conspiracy has happened, but that's not what people mean by the term. Again, Watergate is not normally described as a conspiracy theory even though it involved a conspiracy in its most literal sense. A conspiracy theory is an explanation for event or situation that supposes it is the result of an implied or explicit agreement of people in positions of influence, usually for sinister motives, that is unreasonable to think. The term has evolved to have this meaning, and it rarely is used outside of this context.
Another person replied to this point by saying you can't ever really know if a conspiracy claim is false or unreasonable, but I just don't think that's an accurate understanding of how to be justified in a belief that a claim is wrong. If you instead argue, "People thought something was a conspiracy theory, but it turned out to be true" then I just read that as, "It turns out people are wrong sometimes!" And, well, yeah. That's true.
But then I'm not sure how much we've gained by labeling something a "conspiracy theory" (and presumably that it should be discredited) if we agree that people saying that can be wrong, including in some of the most egregious cases - like MK Ultra.
If we agree that a "conspiracy theory" can certainly still be correct, and that the proper course of action is to consider the evidence for and against, then why use a term often identified with an active attempt to discredit the theory?
We've gained a way to have a shorthand description of a particular kind of false theory that people can become attracted to. This is how it is generally used.
The term is associated with attempting to discredit a theory because the term is an expression that the theory is discredited. You should look at it, depending on context, as a warning, a dismissal, or a claim about a theory being dubious inviting further engagement. Your objection reduces into, "How can you call something wrong if it could be right?" and I'm not sure what to say to that beyond, "People sometimes make mistakes."
People don't really use "conspiracy theory" to describe conspiracies they believe are real unless they are being ironic or are acknowledging that most people think of their beliefs that way. Once you stop trying to read the term so literally, the normal intended meaning should be reasonably clear.
MK Ultra would have been *correctly* labeled a conspiracy theory at the time it was happening, *if* there had been a small group of people publicly theorizing about how the CIA was nefariously testing mind-control chemicals on unsuspecting victims. That would have been pretty much a central example of a conspiracy theory.
Instead, MK Ultra went directly from "nobody outside the CIA has a clue about this", hence not even a theory, to "yeah, the CIA just admitted all of this to the Senate", at which point it was just a boring old conspiracy fact.
The general argument against conspiracy theories is not that conspiracies never happen, it's that conspiracy theories almost never persist at the knife-edge balance where conspiracy theorists know about them with high confidence but the relevant policemen, journalists, Senators, etc, are all clueless.
... which is precisely the problem with using it. Then we don't have a term for "actual, plausible, true scenario where a bunch of people are conspiring with one another to do bad things."
Imagine if we did this for another type of theory, like biology. We defined a "biological theory" as a crazy, ridiculous, unbelievable theory about biology like Lamarckism. And then any time you tried to bring up a plausible theory relating to biology, and you had plenty of evidence to support it, someone would say "Hey, that sounds like a biological theory to me! Are you crazy?! Let me guess, you also believe giraffes can modify their DNA by stretching their necks, you wacko."
Is there a socially acceptable way to "like" or "thumbs up" a comment in Substack or in Astral Codex comment threads? I would like to signal boost this comment as I was going to say something along the same lines, but I don't see an obvious way to achieve that without coming across as spammy.
This isn't the first time I have wished for a mechanism to signal boost a particular comment in comment threads.
The link in the sixth paragraph of part three appears to me to redirect incorrectly
Good response. Aaronson’s example is nothing all like conspiracy theories. When people email him proofs of hard unsolved problems, he’s not ignoring them because they’re conspiracy theories or because he’s worried he’ll attract attention to the writer. It’s simply because he knows the probability of someone solving it whose name he doesn’t know is vanishingly small, and since the topic is hard, responding to them all would basically consume his whole existence.
Not to mention the fact that nowhere does Scott say that it is required for any individual person to respond to _any_ conspiracy theories at all. Just that if you _are_ going to, do so by actually arguing, and not sneering dismissal. I think Aaronson is doing the right thing by ignoring these people. If he wanted to, he could choose to dedicate some small amount of time to responding to a random selection of these people, but it's almost definitely not worth doing. What he should absolutely _not_ do is spend time responding to these people by insulting them.
I think it was Sabine Hossenfelder who one time actually started engaging with the people who send those emails by essentially charging them to teach them advanced physics over Skype. Which to me seems like good evidence that actually at least those people emailing their ideas to experts are pretty open to being convinced by experts and are genuinely interested in finding truth.
What's your reasoning for agreeing with Aaronson when he throws out the shit people send him? I.e. you presumably don't think he's thrown a proof for the Riemann hypothesis in the trash, even though (I'm assuming) you haven't read the proofs, don't have the expertise to evaluate one if you did, and don't know him personally.
I used to get lots of emails like this. Most of the time it's very easy to tell. Rarely, it would require reading through 200+ pages of proof that pi is sometimes equal to 4 (literally; I'm not even making that up!)
I may have come across exactly that individual, looking for information on an obscure branch of mathematics.
That's another issue, there. There are branches of mathematics in which there are, I would presume, actual experts, but which you can only find crackpots writing about online; the "real" stuff goes into journals no regular person even knows exist.
With mathematics these days you can find most things on arXiv. I'd imagine you should only have that problem with older stuff?
...huh. Some stuff has actually appeared since the last time I looked in arXiv, which granted, was a few years ago, when there was nothing.
...and actually, it looks like people might be looking into what I thought was my own crackpot nonsense. Woah. That's ... weird.
That's nice to hear. Mathematics does seem like an idyllic field in what concerns Open Access stuff these days. Hopefully everyone else will eventually learn from it!
To be clear I'm not saying he's wrong to do so, but I want to establish a general principle by which you'd judge this sort of thing (that is, when you can dismiss someone's theory as crankery).
In the math-proof case it sounds like your answer is basically personal experience with these sorts of theories, as a result of which you can easily tell which ones are crankish. Do you think that's fair?
It is fair, yes. Typically in physics there were straightforward arguments independent from the ones used by these people that could be used to determine they were wrong even if you didn't know exactly where - think Second Law of Thermodynamics and perpetual motion machines. Other times there were lots of claims but no arguments at all besides "this guy solved physics in the 1970s but the establishment covered it up". It helps that you basically never get this sort of thing in fields you're not an expert of some sort in.
The basic reasoning is, nobody gets to order you to spend your free time on them. You're not obligated to spend your time analyzing someone's math any more than you're obligated to go on a date with every person who requests one. You pick the ones that interest you and ignore the rest guilt-free. And maybe you would have really hit it off on that date if you'd gone, and you'll never know because you said no, but that's your call to make.
I'm not talking about whether Aaronson has a moral obligation to review people's proofs, but whether you trust that he's actually weeding out bad ones, as a factual matter.
The odds of weeding out bad takes by ignoring all takes is 100%. The only way he wouldn't be weeding out bad proofs is if he's lying to us about throwing things out.
Is your writing workflow configured in such a way to have reasonable checks against short-term emotional bias influencing the quality of your work?
I hope not, he's had two great posts as a result of his short-term emotional bias.
I loosely disagree. This is one of the main things I worry may be getting subtly overincentivized over time.
The way to keep the good ones seems more like “write it, but then re-evaluate it later and to the extent that the emotional charge makes it more interesting/relevant/etc. rather than making it false/needlessly-unkind/etc. (this is a pretty bad approximation of what I'm actually thinking, there's another “how does it fit into the surrounding structure” part I'm not expressing properly) you move forward with it with eyes open.
Question: is masking a conspiracy theory? One is routinely denounced by The Science (tm) and the other routinely enforced by The Science (tm), but they have roughly the same amount of evidence (see Vinay Prasad's writings on this).
As far as I can tell, scientists are responding to masking data pretty normally with standard back and forth. E.g., this thread looking at what the Cochrane analysis did and didn't say.
https://twitter.com/jennifernuzzo/status/1621881097452666883?s=46&t=mUpaVg8LU_Urvlc0PNVYTQ
The conclusion, that masking is probably individually effective but that it's hard to get good enough compliance for a large population effect, especially after Omicron increased infectivity, seems plausible enough. It may be wrong, but it doesn't have the earmarks of a conspiracy to me.
Of course by Scott's heuristic, maybe that just means it's the conspiracy keyed to my psychology. 🙂
For my own part, it helps that I don't find masking that onerous. I don't expect it to have been a complete waste of time, but if it turns out to be I won't be filled with regret for continuing to do it. I'm pretty sure I've wasted more effort on worse things. (But presumably that's equally true for some fraction of Reptoid enthusiasts too.)
I really dislike the ubiquitous posts I see like this. The implication seems often to be that other people also shouldn't be upset at being made to mask as well. Well, not everyone is exactly like you. Some people really dislike masking. Some people (like myself) really really disliked being socially shamed into positions we obviously knew were completely ridiculous. Like being in a really crowded restaurant or bar where no one is wearing masks, but you get treated like an evil person if you dare to not put a mask on when walking to the bathroom. Some of us value our own capacity for rational reasoning and hate societal shame being weaponized too much. I don't think that's an unreasonable stance to take.
I mean, y'all won the political war. We pretty clearly won't be able to get mask mandates again for the foreseeable future, whether they're useful or not.
Yes, a rapidly spreading novel virus that killed over a million Americans led to emergency measures. And there will never be an emergency where all of those are right. On the scale of Japanese internment, jailing war protesters, or even wage and price controls (all imposed in the face of far fewer US deaths), mask mandates are frankly de minimis and far better justified in the moment, even if they turn out to have been wrong.
If the potential plus side is "saves lives" and the potential downside is "some people are made to feel bad and it turns out to have been unnecessary", I think the first is a reasonable default till you know more.
I'd be all for after action examinations of what we did for future reference for the next pandemic, including actually doing some RCTs. (I think what we'll actually get is a strong bias for doing nothing that will likely lead to a worse outcome if we hit another pandemic before the cycle turns again, whether or not masks themselves are a factor.)
But I don't think it's possible to get away from the basic idea of doing plausibly useful things on necessarily limited evidence during that sort of emergency.
> If the potential plus side is "saves lives" and the potential downside is "some people are made to feel bad and it turns out to have been unnecessary", I think the first is a reasonable default till you know more.
That's a really dangerous position, and it's led to far too many people in my life (and I'm guessing elsewhere as well) being hypochondriacs. I've seen multiple situations in the past year where person A travels a really long distance to see persons B and C, and then persons B and C say that they don't want to see person A because person A has a cold. Well, we don't have unlimited time in life, and at some point we may regret that we've squandered away lots of time to prevent getting sick from minor illnesses. There are lots of ways to save lives, who are you to say that one is more valuable than another? Why are we still driving cars? You can save a lot of lives by abolishing cars. Should we do that?
Covid currently kills around five times as many Americans a day as cars.
With cars, we have a whole panoply of mandated safety equipment, pages and pages of regulations, mandated licensing, and a pervasive enforcement infrastructure to try to keep the numbers as low as they are. We don't ban them, and we also don't shrug our shoulders and say "life is risk" as people drive a hundred past schools.
Where to draw the line is a judgment call, and a million deaths is a statistic. But yeah, I think 500 deaths a day plus an undetermined but substantial risk of long Covid remains worth at least as much effort and inconvenience as we put into cars. I'd even say it's worth five times as much.
But most people disagree. So be it. I'd rather live in a functioning democracy than have my preferences override one. "The people have spoken, the bastards" and all that.
But in the absence of pretty much any mitigations (which is where we are now), I'll certainly take individual action to minimize my own risk. Same as I'd probably try to avoid highways if they operated under American Autoduel Association rules.
And obviously I don't blame the people you describe for doing what seems wise to them likewise.
No, covid doesn't kill that many QALYs at all.
I wore masks for a long time.
The Science (tm) should have made a better effort to prove they work. 3 years and trillions of dollars later and somehow science still can't figure out if they work. The response "just keep wearing them until we experts say different" is unacceptable, I would redirect that frustration towards the science establishment sitting on top of mountains of money and few answers. One suspects authorities are going to be reluctant to ever state masks are ineffective considering the public stance they took and the shaming campaign that followed.
My pet peeve is that science considers this a vitally important topic but refuses to perform challenge testing in the middle of a pandemic killing millions of people. I find these priorities hard to sort out.
The history of the masking argument seems instructive to me. In 2019, the official CDC position was that masking (short of N95 level protection) was ineffective for protecting against respiratory hazards. (https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/pdfs/understanddifferenceinfographic-508.pdf
This was the position defended by Anthony Fauci in January 2020, saying that masks would not help protect against Covid.
The Washington Post had a story in 2020 (I can't find a link at the moment) crediting a corporate communications expert as writing to the CDC telling the CDC that they were at risk of losing the narrative - that even less-effective masks, even if used improperly, should have _some_ protective effect. In February 2020, the CDC and Anthony Fauci changed their recommendation, advising the use of masks. It seems to me that there are 3 possible explanations for the change in recommendation:
1. Fauci was lying in January 2020, to keep people from panic-buying all the medical masks that doctors, nurses, and first responders needed. Masks really are effective, but the lie was in a good cause.
2. There was new research done between January and February, establishing that masks actually are effective. I've never seen any claim of new research, and it doesn't seem plausible that there was any.
3. The CDC changed its guidance to something that sounded better, in order to preserve its image of infallible expertise.
The third possibility seems most likely to me. Unfortunately, people and institutions have incentives that may lead them to act differently than we'd like.
There was a lot of revaluation of airborne transmission during Covid. (And a lot of arguing back and forth between that and droplet transmission, which pointed to different conclusions on masking.)
In addition, the previous consensus was in part based on no one needing to evaluate intermediate measures: why would anyone bother looking into makeshift cloth masks when n95s were available for less than a buck a piece at Home Depot?
Until they suddenly weren't, and the question was whether something was better than nothing. There was a lot of back and forth among experts about that, and the conclusion (when we were having a 9/11 worth of deaths every couple days) was "worth a shot!"
What I don't think anyone anticipated was the way most people would anchor on those early makeshift measures. Everyone agreed that whether cloth masks had a measurable effect or not, respirators were likely better. But in practice, even when the shortage eased, most people stuck with whatever emergency jury rig they'd started with, as if people who dug trenches for shelter decided to just keep living in them after houses became available.
In that environment, especially with the propensity to wear masks uselessly (the below-the-nose, the chin mask, etc.) it's not that surprising that masking would have an ambiguous effect. Whether that's because True Masking Has Never Been Tried, because masks' effects were overwhelmed by the magnitude of the risks (body armor won't help if you're tied up in front of a machine gun, but isn't useless), or because they do nothing remains ambiguous, and probably will remain an open question.
(And since mask mandates are gone for good, probably not one anyone will spend a lot of research effort on.)
Maybe. Except the guidance changed in February 2020, when Covid deaths were under 10 per week. Maybe the panic was due to anticipated deaths from modeling. But it certainly wasn't based on expertise.
My recollection is that masks were officially discouraged until the spring of 2020, in part because there was a shortage of high quality masks for medical workers. And, it was widely said that nobody could effectively wear a mask without the careful training given medical personnel.
Also, the conventional wisdom in March 2020 was that covid was spread by touch or by sneezing and coughing. It was not until the Heinsberg Study was released on April 9, 2020 in Germany that we began to have a clue that it was spread largely by face to face socializing, and it took months for that revelation to sink in.
There was a sudden shift by the Establishment to being pro-mask in the spring of 2020, but the dominant model at the time remained, even after Heinsberg, that coronavirus was spread by coughing and sneezing large droplets. So low quality masks were seen as fine.
And to be frank, masks came to be viewed as talismans against the evil eye. Also, they served as tribal markers that you were a good citizen.
My guess is that even low quality masks did slow the spread, less because they worked, but because they made socializing less fun and socializing is what spreads covid. So people who didn't like masks stayed home more.
By the way, the Heinsberg Study was a major breakthrough in understanding how covid is spread. The scientists undermined the early consensus on a number of points, for which they were intensely denounced by colleagues.
>My recollection is that masks were officially discouraged until the spring of 2020, in part because there was a shortage of high quality masks for medical workers.
I don't think this is right. Did you check my link above, to the CDC guidelines from January 2020?
Nevertheless, this is part of the current narrative. Perhaps it's even true. At the time (January 2020), Dr. Fauci publicly stated that masks would be ineffective. The "narrative" is that this was a noble lie, told to protect the mask supply for medical personnel. It doesn't seem likely to me that this is correct, because the official guidance changed from "don't bother with masks" to "you must wear masks in public" in March, long before the medical mask supply was secured. But, if this narrative is correct, then the implication is that our experts will lie to us if they think it's justified.
Alternatively, mask mandates can be seen as politicians' imperative to be seen to be "doing something", and public health officials' need to be seen to provide useful guidance. These needs converged in guidance that appeared useful, leading to action that appeared helpful, while accomplishing little.
>> to keep people from panic-buying all the medical masks that doctors, nurses, and first responders needed.
It doesn't make sense because pre-pandemic knowledge was that masks are not effective even in hospital settings. Now with Cochrane review this is re-affirmed, we don't have evidence that masks help in hospital settings.
At some point we decided to use masks in case they could be useful. But even with this logic the need to supply healthcare workers with masks were based on panic and not on logic. We should not have made mask mandates based on precautionary principles. The proper action would be to try to use masks, make more efforts to produce and distribute them but not consider them as definitely proven as helpful. In fact, we should have regarded masks as ivermectin.
"there's a good chance masks don't work but WTH let's ask for them anyway because the cost of trying it is low" is a very different claim than what we were sold. I mean I disagree with it also because of reasons Harold and others have said but it's more logically defensible -- but it's also just not the claim that was made.
"Rationing and recycling bacon grease will beat Hitler" was also presented with more confidence than it necessarily merited. Emergency responses generally don't filter out with a lot of ambiguity and qualifications, especially if their working (if they do) depends on pretty much everyone doing it.
The consequences for that, when wrong (which some inevitably are) is frequently much more costly than some people having to endure the discomfort of masks for longer than they'd have liked. And that's certainly a reason to limit emergency responses to genuine emergencies, ensure that the government that enacts them knows that it will have to answer to the voters, and where possible to subject them to after action evaluation so that you don't do the same wrong things twice. And the threshold should be higher the greater the cost of getting things wrong.
But trying things that *might* work is going to be a feature of any major crisis. And asserting more confidence than is fully justified is I suspect unavoidable during one, and may at times be necessary. I don't think anyone wants the fire chief or the captain of the sinking ship to say "This is my best guess what to do, but I don't have a lot of confidence", even if that's actually the case.
(If the captain is Queeg, maybe it's better that someone stop him. But the typical emergency response isn't going to go well if everyone operates on the basis that every captain probably is.)
As it was, we continued to argue about masks, loudly and pretty much continuously as I recall, and scientists likewise did a back and forth of what data and studies they could find. (Which are imperfect enough to be a Rorschach test three years later, never mind when daily deaths were regularly in the thousands and no one knew how bad it would ultimately get.) Eventually, for better or worse, the anti-maskers won a more or less complete political victory. Not as fast as they'd have liked, rather faster than I'd have.
But while that's probably somewhat neutered future pandemic responses for a generation or so, I'd expect that next time there's a different out of scale emergency, whether it's a Pacific tsunami, a city being nuked, or aliens stealing the Great Lakes, the response will include measures whose efficacy will be best-guess, backed with confident imperatives.
And some will be right, some wrong, and some we'll spend the next decade arguing about.
You're just about the first person I've ever seen say "anti-masking won". Everyone else seems to think "masking won, and we beat covid with it, and now we can go back to normal".
Maybe I'd have more faith in your starry eyed notions of how emergency response and public health should be handled if anyone ever admitted that an attempt failed. If it was publicly acknowledged, "we pushed this on the nation, and it didn't work out, it just fueled tensions, and we don't even really know if it had any positive effect, so that's why we repealed it," then I'd be far more likely to want to participate in an emergency response next time. If a politician who was initial pro masking said that, I'd easily vote for him next time.
Humility goes a long way, and personally I wouldn't even mind that fire chief you mentioned. Someone can exude confidence while also being transparent, and they certainly do not have to demonize the people who disagree with them. I listen to leaders, at least in my immediate sphere, who acknowledge their fallibility, are transparent with it. And if those leaders ridicule people or don't recognize opposing but potentially valid viewpoints, they immediately lose my resect and my willingness to follow them.
So what's the potential plus side of making people mask for the 1 minute they're using the restroom in a restaurant, and not for the 2 hours they're sitting down and chatting? And what's the potential plus side of making people mask a year after it became obvious that COVID is here to stay, that vaccines can't stop it, and that everyone is going to get it multiple times in their lives?
Saving lives is of course important. So is defending freedom, which makes life worth living. So is defending common sense.
Vaccines as they are probably cut Covid transmission 20-40%, which is worth doing even if it's not going to stop it from circulating, same as with flu shots. I think it's likely that some combination of testing and air filtration (masks hopefully giving way to air cleaning) could do a bit better than that. Getting Covid fewer times is fewer die rolls on the assorted death, hospitalization, and long Covid table, and I think that's still worth pursuing. I'd also be putting Warp Speed resources into second generation vaccines that may be able to do better. (E.g., nasal vaccines that may do better against transmission than the current ones.)
Most people don't agree, and so here we are. (I'm personally still practicing avoidance, and so far so good, but obviously eventually some obligatory gathering will trip me up, doubtless sooner rather than later. Covid once in three years is still probably better for my overall odds than Covid twice a year, and as long as it holds off there's always the hope that the horse will learn to sing.)
And of course I may be wrong about how much can be done. I'm not an expert, and even the experts are divided. But it doesn't matter much, since I expect we're not going to find out.
As for specific masking policies, I don't have to defend them all. The best I could do for the restaurant policy is that it reinforces "mask except when you really can't" if that were still in the range of possible norms. But that detail is pretty trivial an unlikely to have much measurable effect in a restaurant full of unmasked customers, and the norm ship has sailed over the horizon.
If I were a policymaker, I'd have had to seriously consider just when to give mask policies up as hopeless. As things are, I don't know for sure when that line was crossed, and it doesn't really matter.
I am generally pretty pro-freedom, whether it's speech codes or plastic straw bans. (I don't even like seat belt laws, even though I started wearing seat belts and pushing my family to do so as a teenager before laws existed.) But I've always carved out exceptions for responding to big public dangers, like the having a draft for WWII, or requiring mandatory childhood vaccination. So I was never a proper libertarian even back when I occasionally voted for LP candidates. (I was usually careful to add "ish".)
Obviously the salience of the whole "more US deaths than WWII" event kind of reinforced that for me on this particular issue. Obviously mileage varies, and I can live with being out of the tribe. (I could still theoretically be convinced by "it doesn't work well enough" if the evidence satisfied me, but that's an empirical question, not one of principle.)
> Obviously the salience of the whole "more US deaths than WWII" event kind of reinforced that for me on this particular issue.
You seem to bring up the death toll a lot. It's important to note that deaths for Covid are not distributed evenly. Perhaps there's a QALY analysis somewhere, but I seriously doubt that Covid has lost anywhere near as many QALYs as WWII, mostly because WWII's death toll was concentrated on the very young, and Covid's death toll was concentrated on the very old.
Personally, though it may sound cold, I think there's a big difference between wiping out a generation of people in their prime vs killing many elderly people a couple of years before they'd die anyway. In fact, I think there's something kind of insidious about saying that we need to push draconian measures which will reduce everyone's freedom and quality of life for several years, to protect a very small number of people truly at risk, most of whom have already lived full lives.
LHN, the potential downside to masks are unknown. It isn't known what happens when you expose 50 million children to high levels of carbon dioxide for 8 hours per day for a year or two, or what happens to their long term social development not being able to see each other's faces, or unknown unknowns.
Saved QALY, didn’t save any lives. Everyone will still die. Also it didn’t save that many QALY in general (compared to many other social issues involving deaths) as the average age of death was in the mid 80s.
That's the thing. The median death from covid depending on country is 82-85 years. Taking about number of people who died makes this rather pointless because everybody dies and not many people at this age are active and enjoying life.
> If the potential plus side is "saves lives" and the potential downside is "some people are made to feel bad and it turns out to have been unnecessary", I think the first is a reasonable default till you know more.
Great! Let's mandate ivermectin for everyone.
The problem is not scientists, it's "The Science (tm)". There was certainly a lot of moralizing by the latter, concerning unproven or wildly exaggerated claims, which were being presented as facts beyond dispute.
Additionally, masking requirements often didn't follow any coherent physical model, but rather molded themselves around what was politically tenable. That's what I object to. Masks were weaponized as a sort of magical talisman that turned you into a good person, and by contrast turned everyone else into bad people.
No, that twitter thread doesn't say that masking is probably individually effective. It says that the effect will likely be different. Would that effect be different enough to be individually effective? We don't even know how likely that could be.
was going to cite this. Masks are a great and compelling demonstration of just how politicized and uncertain "expert advice" is in our culture.
The "Should I even give them attention, or would that just be signaling that they're worthy of attention?" question has a pretty straight forward solution: do they actually have your attention, or are you too busy thinking about more important things?
If you have to talk about not giving them attention you are already giving them attention, and doing it in a way that shows unwillingness (or inability) to get into the object level arguments, so it's not a good thing for your credibility. If that's what's tempting, then it calls for some honest reflection.
I just don’t get any of this. I have no interest in defending the efficacy of Ivermectin. I don’t think it works. But of COURSE there’s nothing wrong with analyzing deeply whether it works and looking hard at the evidence on both sides. It’s a pharmaceutical product that a bunch of studies suggested might work. This isn’t the flat Earth. I get the argument that there are some really extreme views that some might consider so crazy that it doesn’t make sense to engage them but this doesn’t seem anywhere in that galaxy.
The cost isn't in the entirely reasonable checking, the cost is when people refuse to believe the results of the checking.
Noticed two typos:
> Conspiracy theories are deadly traps lying that lie in wait for you
> And Pierre Kory MD, an specialist
One more:
> describing exactly what I would advice I would give young people
s/denying it of oxygen/denying it oxygen/
While I'm not as smart as all y'all, I'm a little smart, but also lazy and easily distracted. These posts of Scott's are endlessly helpful to me as I steer my way through my own tendency to accept science at face value and not question conclusions. If I'm a member of the target audience, and I think I am, Scott helps me to be a better thinker and a more honest human without asking me to work very hard. I appreciate that a great deal.
ETA: Apparently I'm on my husband's membership for this site. I'm not TenaciousK, but am often DawnCoyote
My personal tactic is to defer to what people around me believe and accept whatever they say, but let myself break from it if I have accumulated enough evidence and done enough due diligence.
How much evidence and how much diligence? That depends on how far away my belief is going to be from the consensus belief. If it's a slight twist on a consensus belief, not much. Something moderately different means there should be a pretty good body of evidence and I should have spent a good chunk of time thinking things through.
But if it's the total opposite of what everyone around me believes? That requires a lot of evidence and a lot of thinking, significant understanding of arguments for the mainstream position, and really being able to answer every possible counter-argument. Given how much I like to talk about my beliefs, it's the only way to avoid looking like a crank or a fool.
Like Scott's recommendation, this definitely biases me towards believing the mainstream consensus version of things for most things. But life's too short and I'm going to be wrong about a lot of things either way, and I figure this is about the best I can do.
I thought there was a lot of truth in your original post on fideism as well (and for it's worth, I enjoyed the ivermectic posts quite a bit). Where it erred, I thought, was mostly in how unfair it was to the anti-conspiracy side. For example:
> If there’s some argument I know nothing about - pro- vs. anti- skub, perhaps - and all I’ve heard is that the pro-skub people say that you should look at evidence and decide rationally based on your best judgment, and the anti-skub people say you should never look at evidence and have to trust them - I’m already 90-something percent sure pro-skub are the good guys.
The thing is, anti-conspiracy folks don't say this. They say, "You should trust the expert consensus, because resolving technical disputes is hard, and the expert consensus is definitely sometimes wrong, but much less often than it is right." And you know this, which is why I don't think you would actually be 90-something percent pro-skub. There was a fair amount of this strawman-ish stuff in the post.
But, again, I liked the ivermectin posts, which were interesting as just a sort of epistemological whodunit, and in general I tend to agree with you on the value of engaging with weird arguments.
> The thing is, anti-conspiracy folks don't say this. They say, "You should trust the expert consensus, because resolving technical disputes is hard, and the expert consensus is definitely sometimes wrong, but much less often than it is right." And you know this, which is why I don't think you would actually be 90-something percent pro-skub. There was a fair amount of this strawman-ish stuff in the post.
Maybe *you* say this. You sound like a well-tempered person, so I believe you.
You are vastly overestimating the politeness and humility of "anti-conspiracy" folks.
The "anti-conspiracy" people *very often* sneer and mock people who don't think what they think on whatever the subject is.
For example, you can find approximately 9 million posts across Reddit and Twitter saying "lmao these fucking idiots are eating horse paste, I hope they die from covid."
That's what anti-conspiracy folks sounded like when they were a ragtag bunch of nerds calling themselves the "skeptical movement". Nowadays the modal anti-conspiracist is some idiot on Twitter ranting against ivermectin with one breath and, with the next, saying Russiagate is "big if true."
I think that was a response specifically against making arguments like Kavanagh (who is seemingly saying "don't do your own research"), and not meant to characterize the anti-conspiracy crowd in general.
A good conspiracy theory has both pattern and content. By the time people are adults most of us have seen or read about an authority figure which was incompetent, self-dealing or corrupt. So for a theory of the pattern “x authority is actually incompetent,” many people are already open to believing that at least a little because they’ve seen it before.
Also, for something like the East Palestine disaster, it’s already yielding a fresh trove of arguments against believing experts. “They told me we were safe but then the pets died” feeds directly into “x authority is incompetent.” In fact it’s possible someone has never carefully looked at a scene of competent authority, so trusting the pattern feels normal to them. Making the populace not panic is (imho) usually a more important criterion than the welfare of any one person, for the experts, who are, I think, burdened with various panic scenarios. If only we could learn disaster response as a culture. So the experts could stop overweighting the consequences of panic. Hmmm.
Anyway, then whatever content is superimposed on the pattern becomes more believable to them. An observer can have very little knowledge of y, but if the x incompetent experts say y is good, they must be wrong. For example. A part can metaphorically represent the whole, so if a person has some examples of locally incompetent authority, therefore all authority is incompetent and ivermectin has a strong chance of being a miracle cure.
Some of the election fraud theories work this way. “Look, the election authority is incompetent (example), there must have been voting fraud!”
So a key reflex for resisting a conspiracy theory is the ability to believe an authority might be a little bit competent & non corrupt. If one can’t consider even 1% possibility that the authority is just doing their best under difficult conditions, resistance to the theory is unlikely.
This comment got way too long.
From what I read , a lot of sophisticated people in the US, who despise conspiracy theorists and conspiracy theories (which is generally coded right these days) believed wholeheartedly in Russisgate.
"Russiagate" refers to a lot of things from a lot of people, but a less maximal version is, AFAICT, true and not really disputed by people anymore.
Do you disagree with any of the following?
- Russia hacked the DNC's and Podesta's emails
- They released them to Assange who leaked them publicly
- Roger Stone was in communication with Assange on the timing of said leaks
- Someone emailed high up people in the trump campaign offering dirt on Hillary and saying it's part of Russia's efforts to get him elected, to which they responded positively and arranged a meeting
- Trump publicly encouraged Russia to continue the hacking while also taking pro-Russia positions in his campaign.
- He also publicly denied that Russia was involved, even though - by his own later statements - he accepted that they did it.
There's other stuff, too, but to me, all the above is enough to be a huge scandal.
That’s not russiagate which was based on the steele dossier. And I don’t believe that Russia had anything to do with the leaks.
I think that if you asked a lot of the people who "believe in Russiagate" what they think is scandalous about trump and Russia, they'd point to the stuff I mentioned before mentioning the Steele Dossier. Maybe not the Roger Stone detail but more some general suspicion that someone in trumpland had some hand in the leaks.
Maybe - Maybe! - now they would, but I remember a whole lot of people talking about Trump's pee tape, secret meetings in Eastern Europe, and Russian blackmail. Those things were all exclusively from Steele and wrong.
A good indicator of a conspiracy theory believer is that no matter how many times you showe evidence of a theory's falsity, the adherent will redefine things to make it true again.
Just like Jack is doing here with trying to claim that Russiagate is still true, NPR goes further to claim that the Steel Dossier is not debunked! I am not making this up.
It may have changed, but the last report I heard about it on the air went as follows (paraphrased from memory):
So it turns out that Michael Cohen did not meet Russian Dude X in Prague at a certain time. In fact, it turns out that M.C. and R.D.X have never met in any place at any time ever, and M.C. has never been to Prague.
BUT...
Other people associated with Trump have met with other Russian dudes in other European cities! So the Steele Dossier is in fact generally true, even if it occasionally gets some details wrong.
" ... the adherent will redefine things to make it true again.
Just like Jack is doing here with trying to claim that Russiagate is still true ... ."
You know if you have an issue with what I said you can respond to me directly.
I don't think I redefined anything from something I'd said previously.
I haven't done a survey or anything. I would say that a lot of the people I know worried about the blackmail to some degree or another, 99% of the time I saw a reference to the pee tape thing it was a joke, and as for secret meetings ... my sense is that this is too deep in the weeds for most people, but while I'm not aware of any secret meetings actually in Eastern Europe - there was an allegation of one with Michael Cohen that IIRC was never substantiated - there were in fact secret meetings. At least the trump tower one and one with Manafort and a shady Russian guy, per the bipartisan Senate committee's report on this.
It's a little weird to say that "there were secret meetings" is true, but if you get the location wrong and think "there were secret meetings in Eastern Europe" then suddenly it's an insane conspiracy theory ... the location isn't the issue.
The blackmail thing is also a real worry - just taking that meeting in trump tower opens you up to blackmail!
Also the person I responded to started by saying that people *today* believe "Russiagate".
"t's a little weird to say that "there were secret meetings" is true, "
You're going to need to cite a source for that.
If you're going to redefine "secret meeting" as "any meeting that wasn't preannounced with its agenda printed in the NYT" *and* you're only going to apply this definition to politicians with a particular party affiliation, it's going to be super easy (barely an inconvenience) to make those bad guys over there much worse than your team. It'll be especially easy when the guy you want to paint as corrupt/compromised/vulnerable has literally hundreds of thousands of people 'assosciated' with him from his decades of business interactions. And of course since there are only 143 million Russians, any Trump assosciate meeting with a Russian is far too much of a coincidence to not investigate.
I mean, it's not *really* true that the FISA warrant was based on false information, was it? All the guy did was (accidentally, I'm sure) exclude the word "not" here and there. An oversight anyone could make. After all, if he 'really' was falsifying such an affidavit, he'd have been punished severely and since he wasn't, obviously he didn't.
My favorite was when our AG ran on a platform of prosecuting Trump without ever mentioning what the charge was going to be. But hey, it worked, and she kept her promise!
So Trump Russia Collusion wasn't a thing in this retrospective analysis? The recent CJR analysis says the media wrote 533,000 articles on the subject. The maximalist view was expressed quite often.
Somebody hacked the DNC and released real information, that information is still curiously called "disinformation" by people. The most glaring part of this as I recall was the DNC undermining Sanders. Real information is somehow a Trump scandal and not a DNC scandal n this professed view. Instead of blaming the hackers maybe the real fault lies with the people who wrote misguided emails. Maybe the Russians did it but there is no definitive proof other than vague IC assertions.
Trump's statement was about recovering emails from Clinton's private server (not a scandal according to people) that somehow got erased and the statement was pretty clearly a joke unless one thinks Trump can only command secret Russian hackers by making overt statements during public press conferences.
Meanwhile we now know that the Clinton campaign financed the opposition research that resulted in the Steele dossier. Once again, this actual misinformation is not a Clinton scandal according to people, but a Trump scandal.
AFAIK, every single one of your bullet points is false, except maybe the last one.
They all (except the last) hinge on the first claim that Russia was behind the DNC hacks: if this claim fails, then all the points fail. I have never encountered any evidence whatsoever that would suggest to me that the first point is true though. I'm not even aware that anyone claims to have credible evidence of this claim; merely people repeating that they know it to be true (which is not the same thing). I'd be interested in hearing evidence.
People have really gone to great lengths to convince themselves that anything anyone says negative about trump relating to Russia must be some crazy conspiracy.
I'll just point to number 4 as the most obvious ... not only has everyone admitted it, trump jr himself tweeted out screenshots of the emails. The tweets are still up.
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/884789839522140166
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/884789418455953413
This was a top news story for IIRC like a week, numerous people in the trump white house (including trump himself I think) have acknowledged it, but somehow I expect that if trump jr deleted those tweets tomorrow, a week from now people would claim it never happened and it's a deranged conspiracy.
"The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father." - a literal email shared by Donald Trump's son (in the link Jack provided)
This is a weird double-standard that strongly affects my feeling on the entire conversation.
Russians offer Trump incriminating evidence against Hillary Clinton - scandal for Trump. Hillary contracts with Steele to get incriminating evidence from Russians - scandal for Trump. Huh?
There's a world in which maybe Trump was the bad guy in one or both cases, but considering we know that Steele actively worked with Russian intelligence sources *and* the material he collected was *false* it doesn't seem like there's any way to look at the second part of that and say Trump was bad twice and Hillary wasn't bad either time. As someone mentioned above there were over 500,000 articles about Russiagate, the vast majority of which had to do with the Steele dossier, which was literally funded by Clinton as opposition research. She paid the Russians to dig up dirt on Trump. How is that not exactly what he is being accused of here? Is it because she hired a lawyer to hire a firm to hire Steele to do it? It's silly to claim she wasn't aware of the activities, especially considering all the legwork her campaign, and she herself, did to promote the evidence and sell it to the media before it was known that Steele was the only source for any of the allegations.
Doubly weird is that many known accusations against Hillary, that she kept a secret server in contravention to government classification and record retention laws, that she conspired with the DNC to shut down Sanders, were true.
I'm in the camp that both were trying to do shady things. I absolutely refuse to accept a world in which we say that half a million articles going after Trump and practically nothing outside of deep red media against Clinton is perfectly normal and acceptable. It was a witch hunt against Trump, and until we recognize that we will have a really hard time moving on as a nation.
> Roger Stone was in communication with Assange on the timing of said leaks
This seems like weasly, misleading language. Does "in communication with" mean he sent Assange an email that Assange ignored, or does it mean that Assange agreed to leak them on Stone's requested schedule?
> Trump publicly encouraged Russia to continue the hacking while also taking pro-Russia positions in his campaign.
What pro-Russia positions? How exactly did Trump encourage this exactly? You know that incitement to commit a crime is often a crime right, so if Trump did that, why wasn't he charged?
I don't think there's anything saying that Assange agreed to leak them on Stone's requested schedule, but the trial revealed communications from Stone on October 7 saying to release the Podesta leaks that day (to distract from the Access Hollywood story) and that was indeed the day they were released. So it's either him going with what Stone said, or it's a big coincidence.
Also IIRC the idea that Stone was in communication with Assange was widely known among the highers-up in the trump campaign. Also ... even if it was a coincidence my main point is about culpability of the trump campaign people. What's the "good" version of the story for them? Something like that they wanted to coordinate with Assange but didn't succeed in actually doing so - to me that doesn't really exonerate them.
"What pro-Russia positions?"
Big ones that I remember are saying he'd recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea and wanting to lift sanctions. Also more generally defending Putin in interviews and shit.
"How exactly did Trump encourage this exactly?"
When he said "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."
> So it's either him going with what Stone said, or it's a big coincidence.
On Oct. 2nd Stone said something big would be released on the 5th. They weren't. Then he said the 6th. They weren't. They were actually released on the 7th. There is evidence that Stone didn't even get this information from Assange and that he was just conveying hearsay:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/exclusive-text-messages-show-stone-friend-discussing-wikileaks-plans-n936371
As that article explains, Assange himself publicly announced on Oct. 4 that he would be releasing something soon. Since Assange's release was known ahead of time, wouldn't the more plausible conspiracy be that the Access Hollywood release was timed to distract from the Wikileaks release rather than the other way around?
Newly unredacted sections of the Mueller report detail how there was insufficient evidence to link these Stone and Wikileaks:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/newly-unredacted-mueller-report-explains-why-roger-stone-and-wikileaks-were-not-charged-with-computer-hacking-conspiracy-or-campaign-finance-violations
> but the trial revealed communications from Stone on October 7 saying to release the Podesta leaks that day (to distract from the Access Hollywood story)
Please cite a source and let's see what was actually said.
> Big ones that I remember are saying he'd recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea and wanting to lift sanctions. Also more generally defending Putin in interviews and shit.
So? Pretty words for another world leader are meaningless. He also said no one's ever been as tough on Russia as him, but that seemingly went in one ear and out the other because Russiagate had taken root in your brain. Let's look at the actual evidence:
* "real disconnect between president's words and policies on Russia", https://www.npr.org/2018/07/20/630659379/is-trump-the-toughest-ever-on-russia
* Timeline of additional sanctions, expulsions and indictments: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/09/25/on-the-record-the-u-s-administrations-actions-on-russia/
Doesn't look so soft to me.
So of your 6 point list, points 1 and 2 are the same but aren't relevant as there's no connection to Trump, point 3 isn't supported by evidence, point 4 was proven and the person indicted, point 5 was half right and half wrong per above, and point 6 contradicts your claim from point 5 that Trump asked Russia to find the emails (which happened during the campaign). So from a 5 point list we're down to 1.5 points that are actually relevant, and this is already omitting the hundreds of other purported links to Russia that the media peddled.
This exaggerated, conspiratorial overreach has happened time and time again with Trump-Russia claims which is why it's now called Russiagate.
The Trump-Russia **conspiracy** theory is that Trump and Russia **conspired** to rig the 2016 election. We now know that this was categorically false. There is no evidence that Trump conspired with Russia (in the strongest possible sense of "no evidence", i.e. we looked extensively for years and found nothing). Without Trump, there is no Trump-Russia conspiracy. It's just Russia trying to meddle in the election, which is not a conspiracy, and is a weird thing to focus exclusively on when China is also proven to have interfered in our elections in favor of Biden and other Democrats.
In 2019, Slate published a transcript of a speech given by the New York Times top editor Dean Baquet to the NYT newsroom in which he admitted that the NYT had been focused on overthrowing Trump via hyping RussiaGate, but now that the Mueller Report had proved a fizzle, the NYT was switching to its Plan B for overthrowing Trump by hyping racism, such as via its 1619 Project:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/new-york-times-meeting-transcript.html
This struck me as pretty much of a smoking gun of two conspiracies. But conspiracy theorists showed no interest in Baquet's speech.
Conspiracy theories lose their lustre when people admit to them. Like the everlasting light bulb conspiracy.
For anyone wondering about the chess set picture:
https://imgur.com/CxNrhso
lovely
Most of this discussion doesn't resonate with me on a personal level. It seems like it comes from the premise of "Believing false stuff is really really bad," when it seems like "ignorance or misunderstanding" is really the "default position".
If we interpret "conspiracy theories" broadly enough, then many "conspiracy theories" have been true. There were periods where many scientific theories, including cooky-sounding ones, were suppressed. There doesn't seem to be any "common sense" way to resolve these kinds of general issues. Many political, economic, philosophical, and scientific positions that are ubiquitous today began as fringe positions and I don't think this trend will end particularly soon. The lab leak hypothesis is an example of something that I'm uncertain about but which could be called a "conspiracy theory." In time, it's possible it will be classified as such or, if it's confirmed, people will change the story so that it was always the leading possibility. This is an issue I don't see as easy to resolve just by using good epistemic norms (if I did, I would try to do so).
So it seems like if we want to tackle "conspiracy theories" we might set out sights a little lower and treat it as a special case. It seems like 90%+ of conspiracy theories can be resolved using a few basic habits. Just ask, "If this were true, who would gain by suppressing it? Who would gain by supporting it? What tools do the relevant actors have to push their agenda?"
This seems to dispel most of what I would consider "absurd conspiracies", which includes vax microchips, pizzagate, the moon landing, Paul Mccartney's death, but not "difficult to decide" ones like the Lab-leak hypothesis, the drug war's racist origins, US support of Israel because of biblical prophecies, etc.
> Just ask, "If this were true, who would gain by suppressing it? Who would gain by supporting it? What tools do the relevant actors have to push their agenda?"
Also, crucially, "How many people would have had to keep this secret, and for how long?"
Sometimes it's not a secret though, sometimes it's just a distasteful thing people don't particularly like to think about and try to ignore after it goes out of vogue; see "forced sterilization of upwards of 60k people in the US in the early 1900s, all the way into the 60s" -- not a conspiracy theory, but also not something I was taught in school and sounds rather like a conspiracy if it takes you unawares. Or the US forgiving war criminals from WWII who had brutalized their way through puppet states because they felt like they would be 'pro-American' after the fact (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi)
Plenty of things sound like conspiracy theories but aren't, so I can see how it might be difficult for people to tell the difference at a glance.
Absolutely; my point only applies to conspiracy theories in the stricter sense that involves an actual conspiracy keeping actual secrets.
Doesn't seem that crucial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haim_Eshed
Do you accept the existence of the Galactic Federation now?
The suppression of the lab leak theory was a conspiracy. The article by a bunch of virologists saying it wasn't true was organized by someone who had helped fund the institute in question and he did not reveal that fact in response to the requirement that authors reveal any conflicts of interest. Fauci et. al. switched from "we really don't know" in private email exchanges to "it wasn't a lab leak" in public statements.
That doesn't show that it was a lab leak — we still don't know. But it is an example of a real conspiracy that happened, worked for a while, and is now known.
I endorse every word of this!
One problem with this post, and its predecessor, is that they are kind of missing the point on what the real disagreement is here.
There is an interesting question about the real discernment of truth, and tools like rationality for helping improve on this. But nothing about the ivermectin debate (in the popular consciousness) bears on this. The ivermectin issue is not part of the rationality, discernment-of-truth debate; it's part of the what-is-permissible-to-believe-in-public debate.
For issues like this, subtle questions of rationality and study design are irrelevant. The only relevant questions are what powerful factions are in control of the respectable opinion on the matter, and what that respectable opinion is. Speaking a non-respectable opinion, or denying the respectable opinion, are forbidden, regardless of the truth either way. The "we must deny oxygen to the dangerous conspiracy theories!" response is diagnostic of this class of debate: treating the debate as if it's an ordinary matter of truth-discernment, and addressing the evidence on either side, amounts to denying the authority of The Experts to determine the respectable opinion -- a species of lèse-majesté -- and thus is equally condemnable as actually propounding the "conspiracy theory". And in this context, "trust the experts!" does not mean "identify people with expertise on the subject and trust them"; it means "agree with the respectable opinion". ("Expert" here comes to be defined in reverse as "anyone who propounds the respectable opinion"; people who differ with the respectable opinion are by definition not experts.)
(The race-and-IQ question is a good example here; it is an issue where the best available scientific evidence, and the actual experts, mostly point one way, but the respectable opinion you're allowed to believe in public is precisely the opposite. One can see how impotent mere expertise and evidence are in the face of a power faction determined to suppress them.)
There are issues where your heuristic of "almost always trust the experts" is a good one. Most plain scientific or technical questions that don't have a major presence in the public debate fall into this category. However, if you're dealing with an issue where a power faction has dictated a respectable opinion, then the heuristic becomes worthless. Whether the officially-defined Respectable Opinion is actually correct is more or less up to chance; going along with your heuristic here just makes you into an obedient subject of the power factions.
For various mostly-stupid reasons, the question of ivermectin efficacy (and hydroxychloroquine, and vitamin D/sun exposure, and all the other theories of covid treatment) has always been one with a set respectable opinion. Thus, trusting the experts is not a viable heuristic here. And if you try to use this as "practice in forming your own opinion" -- under the presumption that if you come to a conclusion contrary to the respectable opinion then you're in error -- then you'll just warp your epistemology to become a more obedient subject of the controlling power factions.
This really is a great point. I think an exploration of "how to determine who the experts are", or "how to tell expert consensus apart from respectable opinion, especially if you're a layperson" really would be valuable. It seems far too easy or arbitrary for one side of any issue to just coopt the respectable consensus, and claim its expert consensus.
Relevant Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Wow, that's a really great essay
Yes, I think this is well-said.
The feedback loop of acceptable opinions into scientific publishing is likewise inherently biased on controversial topics.
Suppose a hypothetical researcher on transgender people completes a study with a conclusion that is unpalatable to transgender people and their allies. Well, if that researcher published such a study, she would be committing academic career suicide and probably have her name smeared publicly by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Human Rights Campaign by trying to publish that.
Only, that isn't hypothetical. That is what happened to Lisa Littman, who will likely never work in academia again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid-onset_gender_dysphoria_controversy
Ray Blanchard of the U. of Toronto has been a leading researcher on what motivates men to declare themselves women since the 1980s. One of his most important discoveries is that many of the most prominent male to female transgenders are motivated by a sex fetish that he named "autogynephilia." (Another is that younger brothers tend to be more homosexual than older brothers.)
Blanchard is quite sympathetic toward autogynephilics and supports, in many cases, them having sex change surgery.
But he's persona non grata with the SPLC and transgender movement because they want to keep this fetish a secret because its embarrassing to the Narrative. Thus, the New York Times, despite its blanket coverage of transgenderism, has only twice ever mentioned the word "autogynephilia."
You're obviously not up-to-date on things. The NYT is leading the "onslaught" against LGBT+ folx by laundering extreme right-wing hate groups talking points.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1157181127/nyt-letter-trans
To say that Blanchard and his clique, not to mention modern blanchardians, claim(ed) that not-exclusively-androphilic transsexuals are motivated by a "sex fetish he named "autogynephilia"" is a stretch of truth.
First of all, the word "fetish" in sexologist terminology is a term that does not apply to "ETLE paraphilias", and that latter word - "paraphilia" - is what autogynephilia hould be called. (Do I need to say that "sex fetish" is reduntant?)
Secondly and more importantly, in Blanchard's two-type system, "autogynephiles" are not motivated directly by a fetish. That framing, for one, would be unable to explain why the desire to present as a woman persists after any sort of arousal subsides and even after gender confirmation surgery, and barring that the idea that thousands of people base their daily lives on the sexual component of a sexuality is as absurd as it is hurtful. Instead, original blanchardians aknowledge AGP as a cause of wider non-sexual "gender issues" - classical blanchardian framing would perhaps invoke the term "romance hypothesis", the idea that autogynephilic desire to be female is analogous to straight desire to enter long-term relationships.
So why doesn't the New York Times explain this information about autogynephilia to its readers?
Perhaps they would be more amenable to it if the majority of AGP "popularizers", themselves more or less impervious to real facts, stopped spreading misleading claims and overrelying on pattern-matching within an unfamiliar region of the thingspace to produce incorrect generalizations, the above charitably being a description of approximately 90% of AGP truthers you'd find on Twitter.
I agree with most of what you've said, but...
> However, if you're dealing with an issue where a power faction has dictated a respectable opinion, then the heuristic becomes worthless
I think the big problem here is that from the inside view, every kook theory looks like an issue where Power has dictated a respectable opinion. If you're a Noah's Ark truther then it probably feels like powerful forces have lined up to suppress your opinion, whereas from the outside view it just looks like everyone mocks you because you're silly.
It's certainly tempting to imagine you're being suppressed even if you're not. But the fact that it's possible to make this mistake doesn't make the distinction meaningless.
(If anything, Noah's Ark is one of the worse possible examples here -- it's not nearly as bad as the big highly political cases, but "don't discover anything that might give aid and comfort to Christians" is definitely one of the operative biases in various adjacent sciences.)
> The race-and-IQ question is a good example here; ... the actual experts, mostly point one way, but the respectable opinion you're allowed to believe in public is precisely the opposite.
I'm not sure whether this is, in fact, the case (at least as concerns the issue of genetic causes; that differences in distributions of IQ results exist is pretty well established). I've seen surveys of psychologists that showed a substantial majority of respondents favored at least a partially genetic explanation, but these have also been criticized as unrepresentative & probably biased toward the genetic explanation. This seems plausible: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4804158/ (the more recent study cited in Scott's "Scientific Consensus" post) sent their survey to 1345 people (everyone who'd recently published papers in journals on intelligence/cognitive ability plus the members of an intelligence research society) but got only 71 answers to the questions about race; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2019.101406 (a similar survey done by the same authors in 2020) got only 72 answers. If pro-genetic-explanation people were much more likely to answer than pro-environmental explanation people (as seems likely), then the actual proportion of experts who support a genetic explanation would be much lower than the proportion reported in the studies, though still nonnegligible.
> The only relevant questions are what powerful factions are in control of the respectable opinion on the matter, and what that respectable opinion is.
There may be different 'respectable opinions' in different contexts: in particular, it is probably much more common for one side to dominate the public discourse in the mainstream media than the scientific discourse among actual scientists. Respectable opinion on the causes of racial disparities in IQ is clearly dominated by the politically powerful faction both in mainstream media & among scientists. On the other hand, on the issue of COVID treatments & precautions, something like this may occur in the general media, but from the fact that articles like https://www.cochrane.org/CD006207/ARI_do-physical-measures-such-hand-washing-or-wearing-masks-stop-or-slow-down-spread-respiratory-viruses are still published & seriously responded to, I infer that scientists can still discuss these subjects freely. (Cf. the COVID-lab-leak theory, which journalists were much more unanimously opposed to than microbiologists.)
Tenured professor Bryan Pesta was recently fired by Cleveland State U. after co-authoring a landmark paper on the correlation of IQ and racial admixture.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/tenured-professor-fired-for-his-breakthrough-race-iq-study/
> If pro-genetic-explanation people were much more likely to answer than pro-environmental explanation people (as seems likely)
Why would that be likely? Wouldn't the pro-environmental people be outraged by the blatant racism of the pro-genetic position and so want to strongly affirm their dissent?
> If pro-genetic-explanation people were much more likely to answer than pro-environmental explanation people (as seems likely)
Why does this seem likely?
There is no downside to an academic expressing a pro-environmental position. There is a potentially career-destroying downside to expressing a pro-genetic position.
The way the incentives are aligned, I would basically expect *fewer* academics to answer a survey supporting a genetic explanation of IQ.
The genetics-and-IQ (-and-everything-else) debate reminds me of the old adage about how a die-hard atheist thinks of God. It can be summarized in three statements:
First, God does not exist.
Second, the belief that God exists is harmful to humankind.
Third, even if He should turn out to exist, humankind is best served by ignoring Him.
Replace "God" with "genetic influence", and you have the gene-denier's position in today's debate in a nutshell.
By the way, I was voted the world's most trustworthy journalist on the subject of IQ by professional psychometricians in 2013.
On the other hand, I was ten years younger then. The topic of IQ demands a lot of IQ to write about, and I'm definitely not smarter today than I was when I was younger. Perhaps I'm "wiser," but that's harder to reliably quantify.
My view is that my last major contribution to the science of psychometrics was my 2015 post "The Flynn Effect: IQ Testing Across Space and Time:"
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-flynn-effect-across-time-and-space/
If you think you are unlikely to write anything better, perhaps now is the time to collect your best articles and publish them as a book.
This is exactly what I was trying to get at with my glib "is masking a conspiracy?" question. The powers-that-be declared masks effective and derided ivermectin based on... what, exactly? Certainly not rationality and good-faith discernment-of-truth.
Which is the conspiracy theory: "white supremacy" is the source of all humanity's ills, or "the Jews" are the source of all humanity's ills? Choose wisely: one gets you cancelled toot sweet, the other a MacArthur genius grant.
For the peanut gallery, they are both wrong, much like ivermectin and masks are both likely ineffective. Unlike IVM/Masks, though, they are both extremely dangerous that should have the oxygen sucked out of them.
I agree, this is a classic example of what Moldbug/Yarvin would call "leaking power," essentially that when "apolitical" experts are given power, their expertise becomes inherently political, and their incentives shift from promoting true ideas to promoting ideas that justify their own power and prestige. Therefore, "trust the experts" becomes synonymous with "trust power."
"The answer is: absolutely, yes, but also this is how conspiracy theories get you." This isn't just how conspiracy theories get you, this is the ideal human experience, to pose the hypothetical in our mind like a grand fiction so that we can demand of ourselves to create an understanding of these people, this world, ourselves. The conspiracy theory is the undemarcated indulgence in being human, to constantly seek to know, and to have that beautiful, torturous need throw us into passionate order and fixation at a cornucopia of childish and wildly wise levels of knowing...the conspiracy theory is as fundamental as theory of mind, as learning mating rituals. To belive is our mother tongue, to strive towards meaning with our will to illusion is the gifts of endless puzzlement that disappear the chains of our determinism. We are fated to believe, and we cannot nor ought we dissuade perseverance in the face of ruin--unless we believe that signal blazes before the stormy rocks out to the quiet ghostship filled sea of our hopeful need for conversation.
What truly is evidence anyhow?
Evidence for a given theory is the observation of an event that is more likely to occur if the theory is true than if it is false. (The event would be evidence against the theory if it is less likely if the theory is true.)
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/evidence
We have seen crypto speedrunning modern finance and now it seems we are seeing science speedrun the development of the efficient markets hypothesis.
Kavanagh is a Boglehead.
I've seen it argued that a lot of the appeal of "conspiracy theories" (or just heterodox views in general if we wish to avoid the categorization issue of what counts as a "conspiracy") is that it makes the holder feel special.
It seems like maybe the best defense against conspiracy theories might just being confident in ones own value/personality with needing to ground it in, say, having non-standard views on the Kennedy assassination.
Maybe less Grassy Knolls and more Touching Grass, in short.
What does "touch grass" mean?
I see it a lot lately, generally from people who promote conspiracy theories about Systemic Racism and the like.
It means, get out of your basement, leave the technology behind and go and look at the real world for a bit.
Which is funny, because the people who use that specific term are exclusively part of the Very Online crowd. No one who actually regularly touches grass is even aware of the phrase "Touch Grass."
Arguably, believing even the most transparently false conspiracy theories isn't measurably bad for individuals or society and it doesn't matter what people think. If someone wants to think that COVID isn't real or that Donald Trump wants you to drink bleach, it's not going to meaningfully change anything.
From this perspective, just doing what we can do silence or ignore annoying people is basic hygiene. Only the unusually altruistic (like Scott Alexander) actually care enough to want to help people think better.
You mention the flaw with the heuristic of 'trust experts' (namely, that you might be wrong about what experts think, or someone else might be deliberately misleading you about what experts think), but not the equal and opposite problem of the heuristic 'ignore conspiracy theories'.
To state directly what you hinted at in the post: People who don't want you to believe something will describe it as a conspiracy theory, regardless of what qualities it has or does not have.
The lessons you've attempted to impart with these last two posts (be humble; be vigilant) are important, but if I could add one more, it would be to follow the arguments as much as you realistically can, not because every theory deserves the time of day, but as practice for when you have a real question that you can't just throw your hands up and say 'no opinion' to.
Sometimes an argument will make sense, and a counter-argument will be above your head. (E.g. this pyramid looks artificial; it ends in right angles at regular intervals. And the counterargument being a bunch of complicated geology that I won't even pretend to understand). That doesn't mean the argument has to convince you.
But there's a difference between being persuaded by a counterargument that you know exists that you don't fully understand, and being persuaded by a counterargument that you *assume* to exist, because you didn't take the initial argument seriously in the first place.
There are loads of 'conspiracy theories' that I don't give the time of day to, that I'm sure have at least one or two convincing arguments I haven't looked into, but I don't go around saying 'no one should look into this', because someone has to, there is literally no other possible way to know which is correct.
I didn't read any of your ivermectin posts (I didn't care about the question one way or the other, and a lot of it was over my head), but I appreciated that you took the claims seriously and addressed the arguments rather than taking the completely absurd stance of 'no one has to look into this to know it's false'. And I would have appreciated an exhaustive post debunking the moon landing deniers' strongest arguments just as much (and probably read the whole thing with a bucket of popcorn), because those posts are how truth is discovered and transmitted to others.
Kavanagh's sneering is wrong on two counts. First, he's far more certain that ivermectin doesn't work than the evidence justifies (I don't think it does, but the evidence in favor of it is a hell of a lot stronger than the evidence in favor of moon landing denial). Second, he's doing the very same thing the worst conspiracy theory believers do. He's saying 'I believe [x] because a seemingly trustworthy person said [x], and you should also believe [x] and if you don't, or if you take arguments for [not x] seriously than shame on you.'
You, Kavanagh, and conspiracy theorists all have one thing in common. You're claiming to have found truth, or at least made an honest and intelligent effort at it.
The difference between you, and them, is that Kavanagh and conspiracy theorists are saying 'I've found truth, it's high status to believe what I believe, and low status to believe otherwise', and you're saying 'I think I've found truth, here's a detailed map of how I got here'.
You might be right. You might be wrong. You might have made some substantial errors, or been biased. But no one, at all, even theoretically, can know that without someone having looked at your map.
And no one can know that the pro-ivermectin people are wrong, or biased, or making substantial errors, until someone has looked at *their* maps and said something to the effect of, 'oh, I see what you did here, you took a left at Albuquerque, but you should have taken a right'.
The notion that by taking bad arguments seriously enough to debunk them you're making the problem worse only makes sense if the bad argument is so obscure that most people won't have even heard of it until you debunked it; and it's very convincing; and your counterargument is either unconvincing, hard to follow, or both; such that people will come away convinced of the very thing you were trying to refute.
You definitely haven't done that with ivermectin (although you may have convinced some people that Atlantis is real).
Would this mindset have protected you against error in 1923? In 1823? In 1023? 2123?
Does it seem likely or not that experts in 2123 will look at 2023 experts the way 2023 experts look at 1923 experts? Does it seem like the amount of progress and change there was from 1923 to 2023 is going to be greater or less than what will happen from 2023 to 2123?
Would an alternative approach have made one more likely to be right in those years? We of course remember the people who diverged from their contemporaries in ways that match what we know (or "know") as "ahead of their time", but there's obviously a big selection bias there.
("They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.")
Knowing that there's a lot of societal knowledge that will turn out to be incomplete or flat out wrong is a good exercise in intellectual humility. Having strong confidence that I can reliably do better across the board would be the opposite.
I mean, yeah, actually, it seems to me like, if you knew you were going to be born in a randomly chosen year and location in history, and you had to choose a heuristic for judging the effectiveness of a medicine beforehand, “The experts have no idea what they’re talking about and shouldn’t be trusted” is the winner, hands down. You will, on average, be far closer to the truth than somebody who takes them seriously. (That’s speaking as though our current ideas are true.)
I’m not judging Scott’s mindset against some hypothetical procedure I might have that I think would outperform it. I’m judging it against pure dumb idiot teenager skepticism. If you think our age is unique in world history, then his mindset wins. If not, not.
I’m being a bit too harsh, to make the point. Our track record versus infectious disease is way better than any other historical period’s. It may be that our age really is unique.
But I think it’s a useful corrective to imagine Scott giving this advice to somebody in 1945 who’s about to undergo psychiatric treatment by an expert. They were right about some stuff, but they were disastrously wrong often enough that pure stubborn ignorant skepticism would be a far safer choice.
Ancient medicine did know a few useful things.
https://www.mdlinx.com/article/ancient-medicines-and-procedures-still-used-today/lfc-4453
> “The experts have no idea what they’re talking about and shouldn’t be trusted” is the winner, hands down.
This feels like cheating. There are a thousand ways to be wrong, and only one way to be right. If someone handed you a list of all hypotheses ever hypothesized and asked you which were correct, you'd be right more than 99% of the time if you thought every one was false. But you'd also be an idiot, since you'd know zero true facts about the world.
It's easy to guess that whatever the latest superfood is, it's overhyped and probably ineffective. It's hard to find an actual superfood.
In this case it was the pro-ivermectin group that had the difficult job (of being right on a precise claim), while the experts (eventually) took the view that the pro-ivermectin group "have no idea what they're talking about and shouldn't be trusted".
Yeah, that seems like an important insight. It's much harder to be right about something insanely difficult like medicine, which makes the skeptical position seem unfairly easy.
But being right isn't just about abstract truth. When it comes to medicine, everybody is dealing with very high stakes -- your health. If you happen to be right because you're an idiot who knows zero true facts about the world, and it also keeps you safe from trepanation or lobotomy or getting fed mercury or thalidomide or vioxx, for most of history it seems like that's a good deal.
But even when it comes to abstract questions like, "why do plants grow?", "why do heavy things fall?", "what are the stars?", our era's experts give very different answers than the experts in ancient Egypt or medieval China or Enlightenment Europe. An idiot who knows zero true facts about the world is closer to the truth than those experts, at least according to our experts. This is why the oracle called Socrates the wisest man in Athens: he, at least, knew that he didn't know anything.
So I'd say that the basic starting position of any well-read, intelligent person is extreme skepticism. I'm not recommending anti-vaxxers; I'm recommending Socrates and Descartes. We should judge Scott's and Kavanagh's mindsets against that. A couple thousand years later, Socrates looks pretty smart for saying that he knew nothing and bothering the experts to no end; in a couple thousand more years, will Scott's advice look smart?
(Descartes didn't end up looking smart when it comes to medicine or physics, but that's because he lost his initial skepticism when he jumped on his Method as the one true and infallible way to knowledge.)
On the other hand, whilst the precise answers to abstract questions may have been wrong, they generally tracked close enough to reality to enable people to make correct predictions.
A medieval astronomer who believed in Ptolemaic-style geocentrism may have been wrong on that particular issue, but he could still correctly predict when the next solar eclipse would be, or whatever. A doctor who believed in the miasma theory of disease could still give useful advice like "Don't live near an open sewer, don't live in the middle of a swamp," even if his explanation for why these things were unhealthy wouldn't be right. An idiot who knows zero true facts about the world might avoid being wrong about geocentrism or miasmas, but the cost is being unable to meaningfully act in the real world. (Unless he applies his scepticism selectively, of course, which is what most sceptics have tended to do.)
Depends on what they're expert in. We still think Newton was bang-on about inertia and so forth, at least for v << c, and the Principia was published in 1687.
Well nothing is going to protect you against error, in any era. The best you can hope for is to have an appropriate level of skepticism about everything so you're not _too_ far wrong.
In 1923, for instance, if you'd followed the expert consensus blindly, you'd have been wrong about continental drift. If, on the other hand, you'd put a lot of work into doing your own research into all the available geological evidence... you'd still be wrong about continental drift, with a slightly lower level of certainty. Continental drift theory in 1923 was based on some sketchy evidence (these fossils look like these other fossils, and hey look South America fits into Africa) and lacked any kind of plausible mechanism to explain why the continents would drift. Compelling evidence for continental drift would show up decades later, at which point expert consensus quickly shifted to support it.
But of course, that's just the one-in-ten-thousand example of a weird kooky theory which actually turns out to be right. The other 9,999 get forgotten (unless they wind up doing serious harm like Lysenkoism).
The experts of the past weren't idiots, even though they didn't know and couldn't measure as much as we do now. For example, "Miasma theory" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory ) was a lot closer to correct than blaming illness on witchcraft or divine wrath.
To quote Isaac Asimov:
"[W]hen people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
I think the point here is that as science progresses we pose new questions, and sometimes initially get them wrong. Also, remember the difference between "trust confident expert consensus where it exists" and "assume confidently that whatever experts think is most likely to be true definitely is, even if the experts themselves aren't certain".
So in 1923 and 1823 trusting expert consensus would have have offered a lot of protection against error (although far from perfectly, especially in 1823), but been a much less powerful tool than in 2023, because there were far fewer questions where there /was/ an expert consensus to trust.
In 1023 it would have been a disaster. I think what this is telling us is that we need to be careful about what we mean by "expert" (this something like this is probably also the point about why it's less powerful in 1823 than it was by 1923, but why there isn't necessarily that much gap between 1923 and 2023).
I suspect that in 2123 "trust the expert consensus" will result in being /wrong/ about as often as in 1923 or 2023, but in being /right/ much more broadly - there will still be the same number of questions at the edges of scientific expertise where there's a mistaken consensus, but the amount of stuff in the centre of it where consensus is obviously correct will have grown.
> I’ve tried to be pretty clear that I think experts are right remarkably often, by some standards basically 100% of the time
Maybe “right” means a proper evidence based opinion from Bayesian analysis with some confidence interval? What are you supposed to do if you have differing priors, values, or goals? How do you even reconcile “experts are right…” with the existence of this blog?
I feel like he linked several essays that explain his views on this matter in great detail
I really relate to these last two posts, having been raised Mormon. Part of the reason it's so hard to escape fundamentalist religion is the vast majority of arguments you hear against it are really poor, just an insult, or a combination of the two. For example, at least half of the arguments Mormons will hear claiming Mormonism is false are from fundamentalists of different denominations roughly following the pattern "Of course you're right the Earth is only 6,000 years ago and god spoke to man then. And you're right about what God said 4,000 years ago when he again spoke. And you're right about everything he did 2,000 years ago when he came down and spoke to mankind in the flesh. But it's completely impossible that he spoke to man again 200 years ago and you're secretly a Satan worshiper for even considering it"
>Get a sense of what the arguments for the conspiracy theory look like
This was part of what really got me thinking on the right path. Going out and seeing what believers in other religions were saying--how they'd find all kinds of evidence obviously proving their religion true. And realizing that, yah, objectively, I'm willing to dismiss all those things about other religions and to be intellectually consistent I can't use similar things as proof of Mormonism (e.g., eye witness accounts of the supernatural, random miracles, spiritual feelings, etc.).
Then I was able to go through and start investigating things like Evolution and then the actual historicity of Mormonism. And yah, by that point it was all pretty easy to discard via standard Bayesian reasoning.
But initially, from the inside view, it did seem like overwhelming evidence and the fact that smart people just dismissed it with an insult made it so I could dismiss the "experts" because they obviously hadn't examined it closely and were just ignorant of all the truths I'd discovered that they were too prideful to listen to. (I've probably mangled the memory but I recall an old lesswrong post where someone tried to defend Mormonism and commenters patiently went through each point and showed how that wasn't dissimilar to evidences other religions use for their mutually exclusive religion... and seeing smart people who did consider the evidence carefully and charitably and still reject it was an major initial source of cognitive dissonance)
As someone who is a still-practicing Mormon, I get where you're coming from. I've probably encountered every religious and non-religious argument against Mormonism there is, but I still believe it is God's true church. I no longer seek to PROVE the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is true (where at one time I might have), but I do want to explain why I believe, and perhaps demonstrate why and how I think a person can be religious while also be rational.
First, I and others close to me have had our share of spiritual experiences, random miracles, etc. in the context of our faith. And you are absolutely right, I can't use those experiences as proof that my religion is right, when other have had spiritual experiences connected to their religion. Even if there WERE no other religions with their own spiritual experiences, one could simply choose not to believe my testimony. But, that doesn't negate the reality of MY spiritual experiences for ME. Like Scott said about the Kennedy assassination, I don't NEED to have an opinion on others' spiritual experiences. I'm not going to say they are of God, or the devil, or delusions. I choose not to have an opinion. I can't disprove others' spiritual experiences, but no-one's going to disprove mine either.
Next, I will grant I've learned things about the church that have changed my overall view from what it was when I was an innocent Primary kid, but I think it's like the race and IQ thing mentioned here. If there is solid data that indicates that different races have different IQs, then why then does it feel so icky? Even aside from questioning the data itself, there's also the question of what you DO with the data. Does it mean that we should indeed segregate by race? Does it mean you can tell whether or not a candidate would be a good fit for a particular job just by looking at their name or their profile picture? I would say no. Indeed I'd say the majority of people, even the IQ scientists would say no, even if avowed racists threw all manner of data at them. Because no matter what the data says, going back to the Jim Crow days would FEEL wrong. It goes against everything the majority culture believes to be right. Would you say that this is incorrect, because this is just a feeling? Or because it's just groupthink? Now, I believe there are solid reasons behind this feeling. At best, racial IQ averages explain WHY you might see certain intellectual trends in certain races, but they don't tell you anything about individuals. And again, this is assuming all the data perfectly checks out. However, there are people who take this kind of data and say we SHOULD go back to Jim Crow or something like it, and say that the aforementioned reasons I gave behind the feeling of wrongness are just rationalizations to justify the false beliefs that are implanted by the anti-racist culture.
When I come across something like "Did you know Joseph Smith did THIS?" I admit it affects me on the emotional level of someone insulting my mother. But on an intellectual level, when I compare it to other matters of debated history, and on a spiritual level, remembering my own spiritual experiences and the blessings living gospel values has brought me, I'm able to "walk around with the annoying knot in my beliefs" confident that any unanswered questions will be resolved in the hereafter. There's the data, and how I choose to respond to the data.
Lastly, I don't believe that quitting the church would resolve that aforementioned knot, just put new ones in it's place. There's the classic "what-if-you're-wrong-at-the-end" argument. If it turns that atheists are right and there is nothing after death, then I lose nothing by believing whatever makes me happy. But if I reach an afterlife only to find that I've wasted my mortal one turning against my spiritual experiences.... Of course you also have the question of "what if you picked the wrong religion". One of the nice things about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is we don't believe you'll be damned for merely dying in ignorance. I don't think a god that would do that is a god I would want to live with anyway.
My experience was that the "knot" was completely gone after accepting that Mormonism was not true. For me, the dissonance wasn't from not knowing exactly how the universe formed, or other questions that have no answers. I'm fine saying "I don't know" on those things, and in many cases, might not ever know.
The problem is the things I do know. If I had to give one answer on Sunday and another answer on a school test... those things caused "knots" in the brain. The conflicts between trying to reconcile mutually exclusive world views (i.e., the earth is 4+ Billion years old, humans evolved from other animals, early humans were dark skinned, American Indians came from Asia 10,000+ years ago and have no Israelite DNA, etc.).
>There's the classic "what-if-you're-wrong-at-the-end" argument. If it turns that atheists are right and there is nothing after death, then I lose nothing by believing whatever makes me happy. But if I reach an afterlife only to find that I've wasted my mortal one turning against my spiritual experiences....
For me very much the opposite. I'm quite confident I won't find god even in a foxhole, but as hypothetical, if I die and end up in an afterlife, I'd be quite comfortable going as an atheist who did his best with what he had. I think my first thought would be "Yippee, I'm so glad I was wrong about this, let's go talk to god! How cool is that!" But I'd be absolutely terrified in the same situation if I'd stayed in the church. The thought of being asked, "You knew (or should have known) the church was a lie but you raised your children in it anyways because it was easier for you that way? You were put in a position to get your family closer to the truth and you failed" would haunt me.
I spend a lot of time looking at social science statistics by states, and Utah and Idaho do often look like they subscribe to God's own true church.
Harvard economist Raj Chetty has built history's best social statistics database, and he keeps finding that Salt Lake City is the best place to raise kids.
I haven't done anything formal but at least with some exploratory analysis I did years ago, heavily Mormon counties do extremely well on any measure that is influenced by smoking (e.g., lung cancer), but other than that, doesn't stand out relative to their demographics. If you think from an "Albion's Seed" perspective, Utah is basically a New England state out of place geographically because of it's unique migration history... which was basically a bunch of New Englanders, English, and Scandinavian people. But I'd be curious if you have link's to Chetty's (or others) work that shows them doing consistently better than New England on measures that aren't smoking or drinking related.
Could some of that be a result of rules such as "if another Mormon hurts you, you are not supposed to report it to the police"? (Just guessing, I don't know if such rules exist.)
No such rule exists.
I was thinking a lot about the inside view from Mormonism also. In particular: everyone who mocked me for believing it, told me it was obvious, so forth—they were worse than useless in terms of convincing me away from it. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to those who were willing to consider it carefully and charitably, and respond to my points with seriousness. It sounds like we had similar experiences with the whole thing.
What's important is that you should treat everything every sharp customer tells you as equally plausible. Especially things you read on blogs about topics like machine learning, statistics, human biological diversity, social justice, and gender. Remember: always do your own research!
Nah, that advice doesn't scale very well. I have zero technical training in vaccine development for example (like 99.99%) of the rest of humanity, so 'doing my own research' would necessarily involve several years of dedicated study just to be incompetent.
One thing that people tend to assume, which I’m not at all sure is generally true, is that believers in conspiracy theories believe in conspiracy theories.
I’ve mentioned this on here before, so sorry to repeat myself, but some years ago I attended an actual conspiracy theory convention in San Francisco, called (amazingly) ConspiracyCon.
I’m not saying there were no true believers there. And of course it’s guesswork to ask what they really believe. But many of the attendees did seem notably relaxed about their commitment to particular theories. The same people would be won over by Saturday’s lecture on how JFK was not assassinated, and Sunday’s about how he was assassinated by then-seventeen-year old George W Bush. The guy who seemed very intense about Israel causing the Haitian hurricane for some reason, was able to retreat to much less specific weather-control mutterings when informed by his friend that anti-Israel theories were leftist. It was all just very social: holding beliefs was secondary to seeming cynical and in-the-know, signalling solidarity and basically having fun with like-minded friends.
I think for most of us probably the majority of our beliefs are like this (self-conscious political / religious / philosophical beliefs, not beliefs like “If I walk out the window it will end badly). How many people who claim to believe that abortion is literally the same thing as child murder show any sign of behaving the way you’d expect someone who believed that to behave? Same with the anarchist and communist friends of mine who insist that they want to smash the system. When I was a kid I believed… I believed I believed, or stated to myself that I believed… in God, but I didn’t behave at all like someone who thought an omnipotent, highly judgmental and irascible being was watching my every move.
I’m not sure there’s much that’s particular about believers in conspiracy theories (though there may be something particular about the style of argument of their most successful proponents). Many of them have just been born into or wandered into a social milieu in which those are the kind of things it’s cool to “believe”.
"But many of the attendees did seem notably relaxed about their commitment to particular theories. The same people would be won over by Saturday’s lecture on how JFK was not assassinated, and Sunday’s about how he was assassinated by then-seventeen-year old George W Bush."
This gets at something I don't like about the conspiratorial mindset. It's usually presented as "don't trust anyone, non-believers are naive, be an independent thinker, etc". But you can't actually go through life not trusting in any authority for any belief. It would be impossible to function. (how do you know England *really* is there, have *you* ever been there? Oh you trust Big Map?)
I think it's often more that people have some other, non-evidence-based motivation for their beliefs, and the conspiratorial reasoning is just a way of opportunistically dismissing any evidence to the contrary and dumping the requirement that your own beliefs be internally consistent.
IMO everyone has a right to try and untie knots in their belief structure b/c no one else CAN just like no one can truly understand 1+1=2 or infinity without going through the process themselves.
This is important b/c otherwise the feeling of living in a Matrix becomes THE primary problem to resolve vs accumulating stockpiles of calories or wealth. “ur not smart & sophisticated” enough is equivalent to “just accept the matrix”. (Root cause of “wanted to escape matrix” likely explains a lot of issues and is similar to “inability to sit quietly in a room alone”)
On a spectrum of conspiracy theory -> widely accepted truth -> Truth of God, these tools resolve knots based on desire for understanding.
Conspiracy theorists just want all the info to be integrated, the arrogant believe they have achieved the god truth, others dare not approach that infinity and aim to just be less wrong.
The choice of tool depends on how strong the load bearing structures are for dissonance. (the greatest structures require reading a 25k word article every day or similar)
Conspiracy theories act similar to a True Belief in God or a touchstone to True Love, an infinite ocean that can dissolve any knot b/c contrast w such Vastness reduces any knot to an infinitesimal.
However conspiracy theories have to constantly integrate all the new information all the time. Like every codebase, it cannot outrun entropy and eventually collapses into a hyper dense black hole of stubbornness, sphagettifying anything that crosses its event horizon.
My personal conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theories are a shitty replacement for God that prevent an excess of desperate Matrix escaping acts like mass shootings or other “can’t sit quietly in a room” problems. The purpose isn’t to be “right” but to be useful for things like refusing-to-dehumanize-others-even-enemies and empathy-towards-the-personal-task-of-knot-resolving
Sound advice, well written.
As a minor footnote, I do wish you'd added two more defensive mental positions that have served me well over time:
Measurement is king. Do as much measurement as you can yourself. Be more inclined to believe people who display a devotion to measurement. Measurement trumps any amount of beautiful theory, and it's about the only lasting bulwark we have about the universal human tendency to believe plausible pleasing bullshit. Give the world 10 years in which no one actually died and we would persuade ourselves that death did not exist.
If measurement is king, consistency is queen. Always ask yourself whether such-and-such hypothesis is logically consistent with all else that you know to be true, or have better reason to believe is true. If the FDA is corrupt in approving/not approving this drug, what *else* would have to be true about what the FDA does? Is this what you see? If ancient astronauts landed on Earth and taught Incans how to smelt aluminum and build helicopters, what *else* would be true about history? Is it? If it was fairly easy to discover effective antivirals -- half a dozen can be found just by rummaging around in the existing pharmacopeia -- then would AIDS have been so frightening for so long? Or hep C? Would people still be dying of influenza the way they do? Et cetera.
There are conspiracy theories that are logically consistent with everything you know -- but they're rare, beautifully constructed works of art. Often a quotidian conspiracy theory starts off small, but as soon you start wondering about its consistency, it has to grow bigger and bigger. Oswald didn't act alone -- requires one shadowy accomplice. But the cops and FBI didn't figure that out -- now we also require the police and FBI to be incompetent. Multiple blue-ribbon commissions didn't find any reason to credit the theory -- well, they're in on it to, the conspiracy is bigger than we ever thought! And so on. When your conspiracy has to get bigger and deeper every time you poke at even minor inconsistencies, that's a warning sign.
Thanks.
CK's position: Trust the experts except when it's politically inconvenient.
Now THIS is why we love Scott Alexander.
There is something creepy about rationality. It makes me feel like that scene in Akira Kurosawa's Dreams where the ice demon is telling the guy fainting from hypothermia to "go to sleep", that "the snow is hot".
I don't think we need more rationality, collectively speaking. We need better ways of unleashing our passions. It's probably good that experts strive to be rational clear thinkers, but this stuff isn't for everyone. Brahmins, experts, can't actually rule either: it is the Kshatriyas who do that, and they are supposed to listen to the experts.
If there is one great sin of the rationalists, it's one from the Bhagavad Gita:
> So let the enlightened toil, sense-freed, but set
To bring the world deliverance, and its bliss;
Not sowing in those simple, busy hearts
Seed of despair.
The story of rationality is a seed of despair. "Submit to the experts, who are more reasonable than you". "Don't have faith, that's delusion." "Hope the Singularity sorts everything out". This stuff is poison in its present form. It would be much healthier to approach rationality as a tool you deploy in certain contexts (such as the one in this article, to be fair), not as a final answer to every last thing.
So if this is a proper context for rationality, why the triggering? Probably the picture of Dawkins did it. I just don't buy Dawkins or Yudkowsky understand reality more than Jesus did. And I suppose they have arguments for why they are, in fact, better than Jesus, even if they have never actually phrased it that way.
Rationalists do have a god, and it is a god of ice. I would rather follow fire, but I also believe the two can coexist. The ice would need to be subordinate though.
Rationality is more of a method, rather than a "final answer".
> "Submit to the experts, who are more reasonable than you". "Don't have faith, that's delusion." "Hope the Singularity sorts everything out"
Rationality does not actually tell you any of this.
I don't know, that's what I have picked up from SSC/ACX and LW over the years. If rationality is actually ok with something like ontology agnosticism, well, that's not what I've seen, but it certainly makes me feel better about it.
> not as a final answer
Eh, I'm pretty sure Yud devoted a lot of airtime to this idea already in the koan posts and the Newcomb's Problem posts.
> Hope the Singularity sorts everything out
this strikes me as egregiously weird, since if there was one thing Yud wanted everyone to take away from LW, it was that the singularity would most definitely NOT sort itself out. It's the equivalent of "Jesus taught us to hate our neighbor".
> It's the equivalent of "Jesus taught us to hate our neighbor".
Matthew 10:34-36
I just try generally to not have beliefs.
>I come back to this example less often, because it could get me in trouble, but when people do formal anonymous surveys of IQ scientists, they find that most of them believe different races have different IQs and that a substantial portion of the difference is genetic.
IQ scientists (mostly psychologists) are not exactly a reliable source for developing intuition on this question. But some people are pretty well wedded to their uh, priors here.
Most academic experts on Marxism are Marxists themselves and most philosophers of religion are personally religious. Does this mean you should be a religious theist and a Marxist? The main reason for this is those subjects attract people likely to be sympathetic to the object of study. But if you zoom out just a little bit and look the broader fields that have something to say about arguments that exist within more niche disciplines, that consensus quickly melts away. The arguments for theistic justification discussed in phil of religion tend to be viewed very poorly by other kinds of scholars who have equivalent or superior claims to expertise to evaluate them, for example.
When trusting the experts, you end up having to develop mature skillset in understanding who exactly the experts are, and one of the intermediate lessons is spotting these kind of dynamics.
This is rather extravagant intellectual vanity.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Most experts on the book of Mormon believe the document is of divine providence and is an ancient record of pre-Columbian meso/America. The reason you don't defer to the BoM experts on this and accept that they probably know best is because you should quickly recognize that this is a quirk of the fact that the people most interested in becoming Book of Mormon experts have prior ideological commitments that create the attraction. The arguments they accept for their views also overlap with the expertise in surrounding fields that they inhabit a niche area of. And if you look there, you'll notice they are roundly dismissed.
It means, pawing aside all the red herrings, that IQ is sort of a junk specialty in psychology, which is sort of junk discipline. The data is crappy, the baseline understanding of genetics is poor, and for some reason the field is chockablock with discredited race science cranks who for some reason keep getting cited in the literature. It's very odd, really.
Do you think my comparison here is based in treating Book of Mormon experts who believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon seriously? I'm making a circumspect point about IQ researchers being in a quirky niche subfield that isn't on an island.
Bearing in mind I majored in psychology (and biology if it makes you feel better), I don't agree that psychology is a "junk discipline."
1) I think your comparison is not a useful analogy for reasons that don't bear getting into.
2) Oh well then you're well aware of psychology's reputation and it's status as the last place the race science guys like to congregate, right?
I did get a degree in psychology (focus on neurology/brain imaging) and ended the degree leaning towards the junk science view.
On the IQ point, I'm inclined to agree with the initial poster here. What's more, as another commenter points out above, the actual response rate is very low - if anything, the example Scott uses for IQ is comparable to the NYT example he highlights as being particularly egregious!
Harvard superstar psychologist Steven Pinker tweeted in 2015:
"Irony: Replicability crisis in psych DOESN'T apply to IQ: huge n's, replicable results. But people hate the message."
Oh somebody said "Nazi" on here and Steve Sailor appears to defend their honor! Steve: you don't know any genetics. You're also literally a white supremacist. The fact that you are coddled on this site is a mystery to me.
IQ scores seem to pretty robustly predict outcomes both in school and at work. When something helps you make good predictions about stuff you care about, it's not junk.
You really don't know the first thing about it. Which is why you hang out here with the other sea lions.
I don't think this comment is necessary, kind, or true.
It seems to me that you're using "conspiracy theory" to mean the same as "questionable or crackpot science." Unless the "conspiracy theory" is just about the efforts of "the establishment" to "suppress the truth."
It seems obvious to me that there should be a fair amount of tolerance for discussing "questionable or crackpot science." My go-to example is plate tectonics: until sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, plate tectonics was generally regarded as a crackpot theory. The incidental supporting evidence (the way the shape of South America seemed to "fit" into Africa, corresponding geological strata that seemed to appear on opposite sides of the ocean) was considered weak, coincidental, and unconvincing. The idea seemed to be crazy - the Earth essentially changing shape constantly. But, scientists kept debating, and eventually most of them bought into the crazy theory. One lesson: the establishment and experts can be wrong, and can unfairly trash people who are right. Another lesson: without continued open discussion, the right answer would never have become accepted.
This example is also notable in that the result had relatively little importance outside of earth science fields. The scientists had their arguments, and the rest of us didn't need to pay much attention. If we did pay attention, and we backed the "wrong" side, it didn't hurt us much.
However, if the issue had become attached to an issue with political salience, the political issues would have consumed the scientific question. If the "pro" side had been championed by people who urged the end of ocean shipping because ship turbulence could cause plates to fracture, or if the "anti" side had been championed by people who wanted to end oil drilling because it could cause volcanos, the scientific merits would have been ignored by the activists.
I think we saw some of this effect with respect to Covid and Ivermectin. There were people who were tired of the "experts" telling them what to do, and wanted something that would show the experts were no better than the ignorant rubes they tried to push around. These people probably picked the wrong issue in focusing on Ivermectin. There were plenty of other illustrations of the fecklessness of experts, and of the over-reliance on experts by politicians to mandate questionable policies in the name of threat reduction. In the case of Ivermectin and other Covid topics, I think the prudent medical approach would be to let doctors carefully explore many different clinical approaches, sharing their results and trying to spread the learning. Meanwhile, conduct good scientific tests to get "hard" information and share that too. Eventually, we'll get better information. Unfortunately, more people will die than if everyone used the "right" treatment from the start, but we don't know the "right" treatment, so the unfortunate result is unavoidable.
The policy implications on Covid topics turned out to be pretty large: How much economic lockdown should we implement? What protective measures should be mandated? Which risks matter more: teachers who face potential mortal risks if infected vs. students who face lost education if schools are disrupted? These are not scientific questions, but value questions involving risk tradeoffs under uncertainty. In many areas, politicians took the authority of "expert" opinion to impose measures of questionable value. In the process, personal and institutional incentives got distorted:
- Experts didn't want to confess ignorance and cede the spotlight to others who would express no doubts
- Politicians didn't want to appear helpless, so had a strong incentive to "do something"
- Government bodies had an institutional incentive to show themselves boldly taking charge in a moment of crisis, thus justifying their past funding and giving them arguments for much larger future funding.
I think we see more of this effect with respect to climate change. There is pretty basic science, well established for many years, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and increased atmospheric carbon dioxide will lead to higher temperatures, all other things being equal. The activists have seized on this point, and some follow-on speculation by some scientists, to conclude that everyone will die unless we stop using fossil fuels very very soon. Too many of the other side started by questioning the science of greenhouse gases, or the temperature record, when they should have focused their efforts on the weaker parts of the activists' program: how much warming can we expect, and how much harm (balanced against how much benefit) comes from it?
There certainly are conspiracy theories around the climate change issue: Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by scientists who are trolling for funding, vs. Climate change dissenters are anti-science hacks funded by fossil fuel interests. Most of the scientific papers I've read on climate change are rather modest in their claims, but the authors are maligned by those who reject all claims, and over-interpreted by those whose agenda is anti-capitalism and anti-technology.
On this issue, the policy implications are potentially all-encompassing. There are experts all along the spectrum from "there is no significant issue" to "we must transition away from fossil fuels within the next few years or face catastrophe." The policy issue, though, isn't scientific at all, and no amount of expert judgment can solve it. It will ultimately depend on citizens informing themselves as much as possible, confronting the hard choices and tradeoffs, and being willing to live with the consequences.
All of which is to say I agree with what [I think] Scott is saying: we really need to try to understand these issues. We should respect the expertise of the experts, and try to understand their judgments. The experts owe it to us to take resistance to their conclusions seriously and engage them on the merits.
Another problem with the "idiocy" heuristic is that you'll eventually encounter conspiracy theories that are true, and them your whole framework will be thrown into doubt and you'll be primed to think They Were Lying About Everything. I mean, Nixon really did interfere with the Vietnam peace talks for his own political gain. There were no WMDs in Iraq. Either Russia was secretly backing Trump's campaign, or the whole thing was a rumor from Hillary's campaign (a conspiracy either way!). If you treat conspiracy theories as some special realm of debate too stupid to entertain, and then you find out one of them is valid, you'll suddenly be wondering whether anything you know is true at all.
Your advice to the young internet newbie doesn't have a single axiological ideal written into it. They're as neutral as laws of physics, leading people to believe whatever is the exact consequence of the advice, no matter their relation to ideals. I believe this is a mistake and I point to the example of our universe as evidence.
To build intuition of the character of amoral systems:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god
Things like archeologists being wrong, mistakes being made about drug effectiveness, some government or corporation doing a cover-up don't really feel like conspiracy theories.
Alex Jones has a $billion conspiratard-narrative business. Lots of motive to research and exploit sophisticated, irrational rhetoric.
Irrationality driven by paranoia.
They are all theories about people conspiring.
This essay reads like it was written by someone who has never even heard of the replication crisis in expert publications. The advice that closes the post with is really terrible. As is the claim that "experts" are overwhelmingly correct on things. There are very few fields of expertise that genuinely have the certainty of the limited number of hard physical/engineering sciences. Huge ranges of academic fields -- social sciences, psychology, much of psychiatry and public health -- should not be taken at face value when they conflict with common sense. Even "hard science" research in medicine, such as pharma and biological research, is substantially corrupted by various misaligned incentives, to the point that our priors need to be skeptical on a broad range of medical claims. (I've been saying for years that Scott needs to read the great book "Medical Nihilism" by the distinguished philosopher Jacob Stegenga). Simply put, there is no substitute for learning to think for yourself and think critically.
Most "conspiracy theory" claims are attempts to manipulate social/emotional coalition dynamics and deference to authority to discredit stuff that might be true but for practical or political reasons people don't want to test. That of course doesn't mean that most conspiracy theories are true. It's at least as difficult to evaluate the truth of "conspiracy theories" as anything else. But naked efforts to use raw authority claims to exile perfectly sensible claims from the public sphere are absolutely everywhere these days, and a post like this which claims this is a simple issue is quite misguided.
google "replication crisis", check out the book I cited and learn something -- inform yourself, sounds like you have a ways to go in understanding the world you live in.
Are you actually that smug, arrogant AND daft? Autistic?
Are you going to make an argument or just toss around insults?
Scott has written extensively on the replication crisis. Anything he writes should be taken in the context where the replication crisis (among other things) is assumed shared background knowledge.
User banned for this comment.
That seems a little over the top. A "broad range"? Surely you mean something more like "a broader range than I think is acceptable."
I mean...do you doubt that bacteria and viruses cause disease, not humoral imbalance or evil spirits? Do you doubt that penicillin cures many bacterial infections, and shaking beads and rattles cures none at all? Are you doubting that TPA helps with certain strokes, or that drug-counted stents prolong life, or that insulin staves off death for diabetics, or that vincristine can cure childhood leukemia, or that kidney transplants work, or that birth control pills work, or that you will get a broken bone competently splinted, a laceration competently sewn up, or a concussion expertly treated in almost any ER in the country?
The fact that you have issues with 0.5% of medical science should not blind you to the enormous benefits you derive from the 99.5% which it would appear you take as some kind of natural birthright, although it was wrested from ignorance and folly by centuries of patient thought and effort by the same ilk of person you casually disparage here.
Drug eluting stents have poor evidence and may not be better than simple stents. The current opinion is that they are overused.
I don't agree, but given your fringe position on medicine in general, this is not surprising to me.
I am not an expert about stents and you should definitely not take me as one about them. But I remember some discussion about them some time ago. It is not that we are against them or that they don't save lives. It is just that they may be overkill and cause other issues. Maybe the evidence has changed since then. I would be happy if you could provide it.
And I feel slightly offended that you call my position a fringe. I think that my position is strongly mainstream, most of things I write here comes from my professional training. My problem is that I am autistic and don't always know how to express ideas in a way that don't upset people, I am too direct, too harsh sometimes and I need to learn to tone down my enthusiasm.
In addition to stents as Kaspars mentioned, TPA is also a controversial therapy for strokes. It's telling you can't get through your triumphant list of certainties without including some uncertainties.
Most of what I wrote was not about medicine but people seem to be scandalized that I included medicine in the areas where you have to exercise critical thinking and can't just defer to experts. Of course I believe basic science and I believe stuff when there's good reason to believe it. But I'm also highly aware of the fact that there are absolutely massive institutional and commercial incentives for false positives in medicine, that biological systems are enormously complex, and many areas are simply not that well understood.
If you want a crude quantitative take on the difference between our views, it's that I think your .5% factor is probably underestimated by 30 to 40 times. Probably more in psychiatric / brain areas. If you talk to experienced doctors I think many would also believe that just one-half of one percent of popular therapies across medical fields having a questionable cost-benefit balance is a pretty massive underestimate. In Stegenga's great "Medical Nihilism" book, which again I recommend people check out, he comments at the end that something like his "medical nihilism" view, a conservative prior toward medical treatments and a sense that risks outweigh benefits significantly more often than claimed, is fairly common among highly experienced and thoughtful medical professionals.
Yes, the evidence about TPA is also quite negative but it was mentioned ”some cases” so I didn't object to that.
Lay persons think that doctors are like scientists who read all latest studies and controversies and can be consulted about them. Maybe some do but most simply follow the guidelines issued by regional or national health bodies, also local hospital guidelines.
The medical ecosphere is very wide – first are scientists doing research in academia or big pharma. They won't know much anything about practical treatment of patients. Next step is regulators who review studies and approve medicines and therapies. The next step in the UK is NICE committee who evaluates the approved drugs and write national treatment guidelines. And then come NHS trusts who get funding to actually pay for them. Doctors maintain certain autonomy in their decisions but have to practice in all these constraints. It is pointless to ask any individual doctor if masks are effective and should be used in the hospital because it is not him or her who decides on this policy. It doesn't even make sense to spend time reading Cochrane review.
Specialist doctors have more autonomy, have less guidelines and they might be more connected to latest research. The narrower the field, the less evidence is available though.
Sure, you lack a sense of proportion. I got that from the original post already. Were you forced to go live in the back country of Bangladesh and experience *that* level of medicine, I expect you would gain a sense of proportion very quickly. But you're coddled by Western medicine, and take almost all of its miracles for granted, which is what privileged people tend to do. Not surprising.
I think that medicine in Bangladesh only proves his point. I studied public health and a wrote a course work about Afghanistan (before Taliban took over again) and it was surprising how much improvement in health indicators they achieved with merely $10/person/year of health expenditure.
It is only expected that as more money comes, the amount of gained benefit will be less and we have reached the stage where any additional spending gives only marginal benefits.
The US is very special though. This simple graph https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health-expenditure shows that the US expenditure have increased considerably with only modest gains in life expectancy. For most of other countries the increase of spending is less and life expectancy has increased more than in the US.
Common contra-argument is that the US subsidise research and “pays” for gains in other countries. But then why the US haven't utilized the benefits of this research and fallen behind? Maybe it is due to lifestyle but the US has actually less smokers and less alcohol use than many European countries. Although it has opioid crisis and high obesity rates. It is hard to know what to believe but maybe the answer is corruption – the US has a strange insurance system that incentivises wrong things that despite having the best doctors and everything, it doesn't provide optimal care?
Here is a better graph to show how much an outlier the US is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#/media/File:Life_expectancy_vs_healthcare_spending.jpg
Actually it's more like 20% of "Medical Practice" is valuable and substantive--very much so--and 80% is bullshit. The Pareto 20/80 principle has near universal application.
Also, I think that if you actually interviewed most people in the affected areas they wouldn't have said those results were clearly correct.
The issue that gets the most attention in the replication crisis is that the incentives disfavored replicating the experiment to show it probably didn't hold up. But a secondary issue was that there were systemic pressures not to publicly opine that the evidence for many of these claims was week. There was a sort of culture there that if it wasn't really hurting anyone (eg Himmicanes) then it's wrong to attack the researcher who did the work.
Most people working in the fields probably were pretty skeptical of Himmicanes but the incentives favored staying quite not expressing the skepticism (what's the proof) or doing the studies to debunk it.
But that's a very different thing from getting up and positively saying yes it's true and we're really sure of it especially in a situation where it really matters. If the government had started allocating resources based on the Himmicane theory you wouldn't have had the field lining up to defend it and you probably would have gotten a bunch of pushback then.
Suggested reading:
Michael D. Gordin, "Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe" (2012)
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo10672063.html
Suggested viewing:
Dan Olson, "In Search of a Flat Earth" (2020)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
I think Dan Olsens documentary does a good job describing how the motives for believing in conspiracy theories are not simply a misfire of rationality (at least ones as outlandish as Q-anon or flat-earth). However I don’t think revealing that actually gives any guidance when it comes to protecting yourself from falling for the theories that appeal to your own psychological vulnerabilities.
QAnon is outlandish?
"QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory concocted in 2017, which argues that there’s a deep state working against Trump and his administration."
https://blog.iese.edu/the-media-industry/2020/09/18/how-the-post-truth-world-led-to-qanon/
That seems like a true and relatively uncontroversial fact.
I skipped to the comments after reading your 3 definitions of conspiracy theories, because I had a rare moment of synthesis.
I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone put it this way yet, but it seems like a formulation Scott might make:
Part of the problem is that there are two forces working against each other. One is that the most adaptive ideas are not always the most true, and in the internet age they can spread fast. The other is that there’s no place to stand to know what’s “true” ex ante.
That’s where we get experts labeling something misinformation one day and guideline the next. That’s one failure mode. Another is qanon being a really sticky, sexy worldview. Or Bret Weinstein’s anti-vax stances. Or the 1619 project.
Where this cashes out (maybe?) is that we shouldn’t blindly trust the experts, which is not the same as saying we don’t need trustworthy institutions. There’s simply too much information to keep track of to do our own research on everything.
Chris Kavanagh (an anthropologist) co-hosts a podcast looking into the Guru-sphere "Decoding the Gurus", it is all done with good humour and gentle roasting. I wouldn't say he is an "anti-conspiracist", but he does show how the so-called Gurus tend to sow the conspiracy mindset as a way to promote their brand, boost their egos, and sell mountains of supplements. The alleged conspiracy itself is beside the point, rather it is a nexus of interaction between the Guru, the followers, and the wider discourse. The "rationalists" (of which Scott is a prominent exemplar) entered the nexus when attempting unravel the ivermectin thread, which has been an ongoing Guru talking point.
The existence of the conspiratard-industrial-complex isn’t the issue, the issue is the veracity of the conspiracy theories and rhetoric it promotes. Just pointing out the corruption that motivates the CIC doesn’t get at why it is emotionally appealing and bypasses rational, systemic thinking.
You write too fast Scott! I'm still composing the response to your first post. From the three categories you offer in regards conspiracy theories I'd fall into the 'Intellect' understanding. I agree that ordinary heuristics can lead to conspiratorial thinking, that actual conspiracies exist, and that it is likely everyone, including very smart people, fall into conspiratorial thinking on certain issues. However, I would disagree that conspiracy theorists and conspiracy communities are just applying standard reasoning methods with some different priors/weightings. They are not. There is good work on this topic and I think it is pretty well documented that conspiracy communities promote rather special forms of logic/thinking that are unusually bad for reaching accurate answers. See the work of Stephan Lewandosky on what discerns "conspiracist cognition" for example.
Careful with your comments Chris or you’ll soon get a third post to respond to!
"However, I would disagree that conspiracy theorists and conspiracy communities are just applying standard reasoning methods with some different priors/weightings. They are not"
For me this is key ... I can't evaluate every theory out there but there are certain styles of argument that I view as conspiratorial and generally dismiss. This is the way I interpreted your original tweet thread. It's basically Scott Aaronson's point about rejecting crank proofs.
Re ivermectin, what I got out of it is that I got to the truth faster than Scott with way less effort. Because I used this sort of filter rather than earnestly taking on the pro-ivermectin arguments.
Also - reason this isn't just "trust the experts" is that I think the experts will get shit wrong sometimes, but I also have ideas about *how* and *when* they'll be wrong, that conspiratorial thinking usually doesn't match. I.e. when I think Aaronson will correctly filter out crank proofs, it's not because I trust (or even know) him on a personal level. Perhaps he is untrustworthy in some ways ... but "throw out a proof of Riemann's Hypothesis as part of some Math Conspiracy" isn't it.
I'd like to hear your take on Eco's The Force of Falsity?
And did you mean Stephan "Lewandowsky" with 2 ws? At U of Bristol now?
Yeah. Stephan Lewandowsky! In particular, Lewandowsky, Llyod & Brophy (2017).
Thanks for citation.
For those interested: https://www.argumenta.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Argumenta-Stephan-Lewandowsky-Elisabeth-A.-Lloyd-Scott-Brophy-When-THUNCing-Trumps-Thinking.pdf
Jumped to the end of that linked piece, saw this, knew I didn't need to bother reading the rest of it - on the same grounds as Kavanagh etc. say that you don't need to bother with the whole theory when you can just smell the conspiracy mindset off it:
"We have shown that some of President Trump’s discourse fulfils various criteria for conspiracist cognition. Why would this matter? ...Moreover, the implications of President Trump’s discourse cannot be evaluated without also considering his long record of stating overt falsehoods. .... Experts on authoritarianism postulate that the purpose of public lies is not (just) to mislead the public, but to erode the epistemic status of facts and evidence altogether in the interest of an authoritarian regime (cf. Schedler & Hoffmann 2016). As Roger Cohen put it, “Trump’s outrageous claims have a purpose: to destroy rational thought”.
Orange Man Bad, Fascist jack-booted regime just round the corner, as a consequence the public won't believe the experts, meaning us, telling them what they should think, believe and do.
Twitter is the Devil's Toilet Roll when it comes to any kind of coherent argument, but your tweets gave me the impression that you were dismissing it all on the grounds that "Marinos is a kook, and we know this because he's a fan of Bret Weinstein who's a kook".
Now, I only know Alexandros via what Scott has been writing here, and then following back to his Substack. I have no idea who Bret Weinstein is. If you expect me to go "Aha!" at his name and thus know he's a kook and therefore Alexandros is a kook, it doesn't work. I have no idea. Maybe he's not a kook, how do I know?
That's why something like what Scott did is beneficial (even if it did go past my level of patience): because if he dismissed Alexandros as "blatant kook" and didn't back that up, that leaves people like me to go "Well, how do I know?" If he only goes with one study, then the fans of ivermectin keep popping back up with "but you didn't look at this study, and this study, and this study, and this one" and again, someone with no axe to grind can think "Whoa, that is a lot of what look like good scientific studies, maybe Alexandros is right?"
My own view from the start was "ivermectin? the cattle drench? don't see how that works against covid" but that does *not* mean I would have been correct to dismiss it all as conspiracy theory mindset. The average person, seeing A Real Doctor online telling them "A study conducted in a hospital found that ivermectin works" won't know who to believe. They may or may not be convinced by "he's a kook" "but how do you know?" "look I just know", but I think they're more likely to be convinced by "okay, I read the study, it's terrible, this is why it's terrible, and in conclusion - worms".
The fans of whatever failed intervention will "always keep popping back up with "but you didn't look at this study, and this study, and this study, and this one"".
How do you know scientists who did a study is the best or the kookiest? That is never a question that matters. "In God, we trust all others bring data" (George Box).
Rationality will not convince someone who gets to an opinion irrationally to reject the irrational opinion. Relying upon the "real doctor I saw on TV talking about a study" as a basis for action is not rationality.
Did SA's meta-study get submitted for publication in a journal? No. Did it employ the tone of a publishable meta-study? No. If it had been submitted for publication would it have been accepted? Very unlikely.
SA tried to put on the cloak of science but really wasn't a being a scientist. This is the problem. Half-assed science which cannot be easily distinguished by non-scientists from real science is very problematic. Making it long and using "persuasive" writing is a way to hide it's true nature. (Intentionally or unintentionally - "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." Feynman.) You don't really get points for getting the "right" answer.
What could SA have written at the time?
There is a mixed bag of studies on Ivermectin. The medical community is in equipoise. (SA recent statement in this post that most doctors had supported it at the time of his essay is false.) In a state of equipoise, sensible and ethical doctors should reject recommending an intervention until there are good RCTs and meta-studies that are sufficiently powered to answer the question. If you are not a doctor, you should be talking to your doctor about treatments not your neighbor or co-worker or local veterinarians or a favorite blogger. (Even if you are a doctor, you should be talking to your doctor - because doctors should not treat themselves.)
You trust your doctor(s). If they are wrong, you or your estate sues them. If they are right, you try to avoid survivors bias in the future. If you don't trust them you seek a second or maybe third opinion from other doctors.
I think we really need to distinguish the broken mode of thinking from the specific theory.
Suppose that in 2006, you knew two guys who were both totally convinced that the government was massively spying on everyone. One was just a paranoid who had found a hook for his delusions, the other was some dude named Snowden who couldn't say where he worked but wanted advice on countries with no extradition treaties with the US. These two might have believed the same things, but one of them had good reasons and his mind was working properly, while the other guy's brain was malfunctioning in a way that just happened to lead him to the right answer by accident.
It's not the theory that's the problem, it's the broken way of thinking. Now, often the broken mode of thinking leads you to some beliefs that are hard to sustain without that broken mode of thinking, but plenty of widespread conspiracy theories aren't obviously crazy, they're just false. I mean, think of all the JFK assassination conspiracy theories. They're probably all bullshit, but it's not like some powerful group (the CIA, the Russians, the Mafia, etc.) conspiring to assassinate the president is implausible. Or think about the claims that Obama was not really a US citizen. These sure look like they were all wrong, but it's not like you need to imagine some kind of crazy impossible giant conspiracy to imagine that someone managed to get their young child's documents falsified in a way that guaranteed he would be a US citizen.
It's easier when you see someone pushing an obviously nuts claim, like that the Earth is flat or the holocaust never happened or something. But then, a whole lot of day-to-day rational people believe in young Earth creationism, which is not a whole lot less obviously counterfactual than those things.
Hmm, looks like Stephan has engaged in a bit of "conspiracist cognition" himself: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.00802.x
The Official Narrative on the Iraq War wasn't true? Sounds like "conspiracist cognition" to me! Maybe he also has an Authoritarian Personality or scores high on Disgust Sensitivity!
But, seriously though, it's interesting how all these diagnoses amount to "if you're not a leftist, you have a psychological disorder." Funny how that works out. A far-left field of study pathologizing people who disagree with them politically? Must just be a coincidence. I'm sure Stephan is just a neutral observer...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211368117300700, in which Stephan rails against those who don't believe in a socialist response to solving climate change, says Twitter users need to stop talking and just "trust the science", suggests PolitiFact is a neutral arbiter of the truth of Trump's claims, ires that Trump supporters don't change their opinion after learning that he made a false statement (despite his own study showing that anti-Trump Democrats disbelieve true statements made by Trump, with an even larger effect size), says that taxation being framed as a "burden" is misinformation, says that science *must* be political, and ultimately suggests a solution he calls "technocognition," a system that would combine mass censorship of misinformation as defined by NGOs and "Disinformation Charters" with technological manipulation through the behavioral science techniques of "nudging," "inoculation," and "digital containment".
Surely just a neutral observer.
"Surely just a neutral observer."
Article published in 2017, just a year after Trump became president, and suddenly we are living in the "post-truth era". Are we still in the post-truth era, or has the balance of nature been restored with the rightful Democratic victory?
Our boy may talk up a storm about restoring autonomy to individuals online and giving them the tools to protect democratic discourse, but that doesn't mean you let those filthy right-wingers talk, as per this retweet of someone else havering over "too many right-wingers and they let them talk too long":
"After last night's appalling episode of #bbcqt, today I've emailed @BBCR4Feedback
to express my concerns about Fiona Bruce's inability to properly or fairly chair @bbcquestiontime panels, & about the disproportionate number of right-wing panellists.
As an example of this, I want to bring to your attention the hugely disproportionate amount of time Conservative MP Robert Jenrick was given to answer the audience question on the controversial issue of immigration on the 16/02/2023 episode."
"I've just timed how long she allowed each panellist to speak on #immigration:
Ruth Wishart - 30 seconds
Ian Hislop - 2 mins
Lionel Shriver - 2 mins
Stephen Kinnock - 3mins, 30 seconds
Robert Jenrick - 10 minutes.
This is totally unacceptable."
Me, I think when you're sitting there with a stopwatch timing how long to the second everyone gets to speak, then it's just the teensiest-weensiest bit, how shall I put it, "conspiratorial cognition"?
EDIT: Just to make it clear, Stephan wasn't the guy with the stopwatch. That was someone he retweeted, which I take to mean he approves of and supports what they are saying. So Stephan is all for "make sure there is just the correct proportion of right-wingers who get to speak" which appears to be "none".
Here’s my rule of thumb: physicists like the simple and beautiful answer, but I’m not a physicist. Activists like the empowering righteous answer, but I’m not an activist. What I am is a limited human being in a very large world, so to me truth usually tastes like a meal not prepared for humans. Actually. I don’t find the truth for myself. I pick the experts who prepare the meal with the most apologies and caveats.
I feel like the general idea of "don't bother looking that up, it's a conspiracy theory" maps to like, 20% or more of the arguments I see online in a way I can't figure out how to directly articulate. It sort of looks like "that's bad because it's word that means bad" and the response is predictably:
"only idiots believe in conspiracy theories, here's 500 well researched sources from lesser known experts about lizard men"
"it's not a scapegoat, the goat is guilty"
"I'm not racist, *I* didn't pick who decided to run the evil secret government trying to kill god."
"extremists are dangerous and that's why we need to immediately purge anyone who seems like they aren't 100% with us"
"I'm not entitled I just think I have a right to that thing you have"
I made those extreme, but the general structure is pretty much always going to be true for the person stating it. And sometimes the goat really *was* behind everything. But the internal experience of the person making the argument is going to be identical either way, and you knew the person believed in __ when they started arguing for it, so making the argument is usually somewhere posting a warning sign for observers and trying to bring the social shame of the bad word unto them through a ritual chant. The person it's being used on is more likely to go "huh I wonder what other conspiracies are true" than be convinced of anything.
And it's everywhere. You might be thinking of some culture war issue, but the exact same structure happens basically everywhere. i.e. In gaming discussions look at when people use negative phrases like entitled. It makes some sense when the word is a big culturally loaded negative word that you can't be seen associating with and get points for dunking on, but people do the nearly exactly the same thing for mildly negative words like "grindy".
Anyway, this was meant to be a question before I wrote all that. I feel like there's a name for this and I can't think of it. Does anyone know? Something around argument by labeling. thought terminating cliche. argument by word association. semantic argument. argument by I don't want to read all that so I'm just going to guess., argument by you kind of remind me of my college roommate so I'm pretty sure I know *exactly* what you mean. argument by valence.
It's really important I have a word for this so I can quickly identify when people are doing it and stop listening to them.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLbkrPu5STNCBLRjr/applause-lights
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FWMfQKG3RpZx6irjm/semantic-stopsigns
A great elaboration of the idea that it's mistaken to trust the experts : https://fakenous.substack.com/p/is-critical-thinking-epistemically . I admit there is a real epistemic hazard in the area but I think the critics fail to appreciate the ability of non-experts (w/ appropriate epistemic humility) to usefully evaluate the strength of expert argument as well as the importance of these marginal changes in our credences. As well as being practically important it's ultimately how we identify experts deserving deference (physicist about the reactor) and those who don't (priests, theologians, some philosophers/ish [1] about moral/meaning issues)
I think a good metaphor for our ability to evaluate the strength of an expert argument is an interactive proof system. A verifier (amatuer) with highly limited computational resources and a random string can verify with high probability the claims of an untrustworthy computationally unbounded system (expert) with very high probability even though the verifier (assuming P!= NP) couldn't hope to determine the answer on their own.
Non-metaphorically, we can examine the claims made about the strength of arguments and then double check that the details seem to agree. Is the evidence as strong as claimed, do the arguments seem sound and grapple with the best counters? Or does it disappear into a mist of fog and certainty? Yes, you'll sometimes miss things and think the evidence says something it doesn't. Just don't over-interpret any one data point and be open to correction. Can they keep answering why/justify that questions in a way that suggests a coherent shared view or do they obfusciate and insist that you can't evaluate any of it until you've invested so much you won't doubt it's value. Does it seem like the actual factual content of claims seems to be a key issue or do the 'experts' seem happy to approve of claims that seem imprecise/different as long as they share the same social/value valence? It might be surprising but, over time, it's surprisingly easy to get a sense of whether a subject has the kind of experts who deserve or deference in credence.
Secondly, we rarely are asked just to bet on what's the most likely theory. We have to make calls in the real world with costs and benefits and even if evaluating the data yourself only should let you adjust your credences by 10% (relative) that might still be pretty important if it's the difference between a surgery and no-surgery.
Some claims are so improbable we can treat them as if they were really impossible but for most claims (including ivermectin) even the experts would, if their honest opinion was solicited, would give an answer that's far enough from 0/1 to make it plausible for cases to come up in the real world where that difference from 0/1 matters. I mean, should you treat the patient with COVID and parasites with ivermectin or another drug?
[1] I'm a big fan of philosophy (trained in it in grad schools and married to a philosopher). But the kind of philosopher who studies ethics or life meaning type philosophy isn't an expert in the object level (what's ethical how to live) the way a physicist is. They are an expert in the range of arguments and the scholarship..
I have listened pretty regularly to TWIV (a wonderful academic virology podcast) for many years, since long before covid. During the pandemic, they started doing a weekly clinical update on covid, and you could listen to genuine experts change their views in realtime as new information came along. The two hosts of the clinical update are a virology professor and an infectious disease doctor in NYC, and the ID doctor went through several iterations of what he thought was the right treatment over time. Early on, he and his hospital were using HQC and azithromycin, and he helped run trials on convalescent plasma that didn't work (in retrospect, probably largely because they were given too late), and he's spent three years continuously updating. Listening to this was a great view of genuine well-intentioned experts dealing with uncertainty and doing their best to converge on good answers. Notably, the ID doctor was clear that ivermectin was a possible treatment but that the studies supporting it were not very good and that he wanted to see better evidence, even when it became yet another iteration of the culture war applied to covid. And after some better studies concluded it wasn't helpful, he was clear on that, but note that he was also willing to update away from stuff he had believed worked and had used on patients.
I think most people don't have much of a sense of science or medicine uodating like this. And honestly, an academic virology podcast isn't ever going to have a huge audience (but if that sounds interesting to you, definitely check it out!). But I wish more people had a better sense of what it looks like when scientists are struggling to understand some new thing, and maybe putting out guidance that changes over time.
Interesting comment but I'm a bit confused why you replied to me with it. I suspect you had in mind some relation that I'm failing to see.
"If people are trying to confuse you about who the experts are, then to a second approximation trust prestigious people and big institutions, including professors at top colleges, journalists at major newspapers, professional groups with names like the American ______ Association, and the government."
I'd add in the qualification that experts should only be trusted within their field of expertise, even to a first approximation. When the American Medical Association puts out a 54 page guide on how to be woke, they can be safely disregarded, because the AMA is not an expert on political issues: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/leftist-language-policing-wont-fix-health-disparities/620695/
"Instead of saying, “Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease,” it urges health professionals to substitute this doctrinaire sentence: “People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease.”"
"The top and bottom chess sets are the same color, and only look black vs. white because of contrast effects."
This is such a dumb, pedantic point, but I'm a professional vision scientist so I feel obligated to make it. The top and bottom chess sets are the same *luminance*, not the same color. Luminance is a physical quantity, color is a perceptual experience.
Our brain assumes that nearby objects are receiving similar levels of illumination, and under that assumption it's likely correct that the top chess set is absorbing less light than the bottom chess set. Color is our brain's attempt to reconstruct object reflectance, and that reconstruction tends to be more accurate using the contrast along object edges, rather than absolute luminance levels. Either way, our perceptual attempt at that reconstruction is what defines color. The physical reality that giving rise to that percept is something else.
We (most of us) love pedantry and don't think it's dumb. One problem with your point tho is that 'color' isn't (to nearly any degree) purely or exclusively a vision science term. In particular, 'color' has a pretty clear meaning in the context of image editing software, e.g. Photoshop.
In the past, humans died.
Women detected that men that gathered more resources through any means survived.
Men developed the methods to control populations, organizations and nature itself.
Men practiced them. Some lineages kept those practices and passed them on more successfully.
Men's interests in affairs, status, politics, ideas, science are known.
Control over one's destiny is one life-strategy. Letting others' (wage-slave, submission) is also another life-strategy.
There is natural variation everywhere.
Cooperation and competition are natural forces.
Successful cooperators can manipulate any group of entities or forces, just as we do with animals, we do to other humans.
Thus, from first principles, we already deduced there are competing cooperating groups that seek to control the world.
We see empires coalesce, we see states coalesce, we see corporations coalesce, we see cells coalesce, we see organisms coalesce; the main feature is they develop a greater 'consciousness' or emergence of ability to manage and control
their environment to their desired parameters.
Making plans against other humans is natural.
Anyone bibby-babblying about the possibility of thought of thought or emotion of thought is just circlejerking idiocy.
Network theory works just as well on human networks. Centrality, nodes, connections, information streams.
https://clubderklarenworte.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Netzwerkanalyse-Corona-Komplex.pdf
Humans at the highest elevation of power already enjoy all the world's excesses. Fame, wealth, women, land, properties, businesses. After all is said and done. Things not in control.
1. Human evolution, human societies, human capabilities (are limited)
2. Life, death is presently inevitable
Thus (1) and (2) are both logical pursuits to all those who keep the principle directive (continuation of their own informational-genetic legacy).
No need for affirmation of facts.
No need for affirmation of data points.
First principles dictates everything.
QED.
Resources are rate-limited (in regeneration) and finite locally. Scarcity is real.
Killing off, or preventing other competitors from rising to the top is seen everywhere through the animal kingdom. More resources for me and my kin, my tribe, my group = less for everyone else. Dynamics rule. Useful subjects = generate more resources, generate more hedonistically desirable things. Cognition, aptitude, willpower and opportunities intersect to product civilizational-products. Thus, a logical policy, subjugate all those who do not fit with my value functions) and exterminate the rest.
Once again, no need for hard-theories or anything. This is a fact. This is observed in all primates. Stop running from evolutionary theory. There is no reason to not believe we whom have the same substrate as other entities to behave any differently, just because something is more complex or we have more intelligence does not mean our primitive inclinations differ any aspect whatsoever. It is irrelevant how many groups there are, because in the long run, genetic fixation of conserved sequences occur once a certain threshold of dynamic equilibra has been established between the lower-levels of energy and higher-levels of energy. This is a natural anti-entropic process of all living species, all living communities and I dare say, all algorithmically-induced structures composite of the universe.
On the term "conspiracy theory":
PSA: In order for an assertion to be a #conspiracytheory," it must allege a SECRET agreement between two or more people to do something nefarious.
Not just something you believe far fetched
https://twitter.com/thomasmullen/status/1625856482381287425
Typo: "Instead, let me try describing exactly what I would advice I would give"
Having read all your links at the top, I think you're being way too kind to Kavanaugh in this article and had the appropriate tone in your first.
>Nobody needs to be sure whether Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman or not.
Are you sure? Because, while I'm not especially familiar with conspiracy theories, most of the ones I've heard about this one involve the CIA being the ones who assassinated him and/or covered up the truth, which seems massively important to me. If it was just the case that Oswald had a hidden partner who was equally deranged but got away with it, then it doesn't matter anymore. But if there was actually a conspiracy, and a powerful U.S. government agency committed treason, got away with it, and still exists, then it would be incredibly likely that it is still just as corrupt, just as powerful, and therefore willing and able to commit similar levels of treason today. You can't just believe that the CIA assassinated our own president and not care whether anyone knows about it. This would be incredibly important if true.
A lot of conspiracy theories are this way, and I think you're just underestimating them because the weak version of the Atlantis one (where they're an ancient society but don't have crazy sci-fi technology) probably wouldn't matter. But for many, even if the object level fact that the conspiracy theory claims didn't matter, the conspiracy by elites to cover it up via deception and malice (not just ignorance) is of great importance because it casts doubt on their honesty and legitimacy as authorities. If they're lying to you about this, what else are they lying to you about?
You don't have to believe that they're true to acknowledge that if true they would change a lot about how appropriate trusting the experts was.
What if the actual conspiracy is that Oswald was a KGB asset, and it was covered up to avoid escalating the situation?
There is something that has been bugging me for a long time, and seeing it a couple times in close proximity in this thread has pushed me to comment on it, and that is when analysis makes a jump in logic that misses several steps.
Two weeks ago, New Jersey Councilwoman Eunice Dwumfour was shot to death in her car. Because there's no obvious motive, it's rational thinking to consider this as an assassination (a targeted killing). Considering she may have been targeted for political reasons is likewise rational. Jumping straight to ruling out any other reasons she may have been targeted and assuming she must have been targeted for politics is not rational. At the same time, being assassinated for political reasons makes news, whereas the other possible motives are much less newsworthy.
The CIA gets a lot of flack for misbehavior. Some of that is well deserved. The problem is that we've been tricked into the irrational binary between "the CIA is evil" and "the CIA is good". The reality is most likely that the CIA is a national security / intelligence organization, and inherent in that is a certain level of secrecy and behavior outside the normal rules of government, and that any similar organization will be very similar in terms of behavior. With the Kennedy assassination, it's rational to consider whether Oswald acted alone, and if he wasn't alone, it's rational to consider a national security / intelligence organization as his backer. It's irrational thinking to jump immediately to assuming that, absent specific evidence, the CIA is possibly suspect while the KGB (another powerful national security / intelligence organization, at least at the time) is not.
There are other hidden jumps here; one is hidden in "assassinated him and/or covered up the truth", as there is a big difference between the two. Another is frequently hidden in "malice (not just ignorance)", as 'motive' is probably the hardest part to objectively prove (and ruling out 'incompetence' / 'bad luck' is as hard). I formed my original question around those jumps.
The jumps in a conspiracy theory say a lot about the assumptions of the people making the jump. I'm a naturally contrary person, so I tend to distrust the experts / authorities to start with. But part of that is recognizing that conspiracy theorists are just the next tier of experts / authorities.
Why did you mention Eunice Dwumfour but not Russell Heller murdered a week later?
One NJ Republican councilperson murdered is happenstance, two is coincidence...
Because I actually saw the beginnings of conspiracy theories about Dwumfour's murder. Fortunately, that seems to have subsided for a 'wait and see' approach.
One of the root problems is that there's no longer any trust, at least when politics is involved, and the current trend is to push politics into everything. There seems to be a race to the bottom to destroy social trust in every rival institution, so what ends up happening is that people latch on to anyone that says anything that matches up with your personal experience, as unreliable as that may be. I'm trying to avoid that by finding people like our host that show traits that make them more likely to be acting honestly, but I don't know how long I can trust my own judgement on that.
Regarding the "naive positions" on conspiracy theories...
I think of a conspiracy theory as one that uses certain (bad) steps in its reasoning - usually the "evidence to the contrary is being covered up/generated by powerful people" thing.
The obvious problem is that the opposite of this, "always trust the experts", also has its problems. So conspiratorial thinking is bad, but you can argue it's exact opposite is also bad.
My answer is that it's not just a question of distrusting experts, having an idea of when to trust them and when not to. I don't blanket trust experts but I have certain expectations about the *way* they'll fail, that conspiratorial thinking tends to violate. Could fill a much longer comment about when to trust vs distrust experts and I don't know if I could describe it well ... but it has a healthy dose of "I know it when I see it".
Regarding whether you should have addressed the question at all...
I have some sympathy for the "don't elevate it by treating it seriously" idea. But I also think it's useful for someone to earnestly debunk something like this. Reminds me of how I read somewhere that most people aren't very price sensitive when shopping, but stores have to compete on price because of the small portion of people who are hyper-price-sensitive.
Ultimately the thing I'm against is certain conspiratorial paths of reasoning, not the conspiracy theories themselves; and relatedly in the case of ivermectin, the way it played into anti-vaxx bullshit. That's what bothers me about the ivermectin thing, not anger at the idea that deworming meds might be useful against COVID.
I don't think an apology was owed. The reason Scott got angry was because the posts which triggered this had a dismissive and slightly mocking tone that was seemingly meant to lower the status of people like Scott. It doesn't sound like this anger clouded any judgement, though I appreciate the extra post. So yeah, no need to apologise for getting angry at a status attack.
I would add one piece of advice:
"Many actual conspiracy theories share common aspects that make them effective memeplexes. Familiarize yourself with the most common cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and rhethorical strategies, and cultivate an internal alarm that goes off when you see more than one or two of them in one place."
I actually took a university class on Pseudoscience, taught by a physics professor and dyed-in-the-wool skeptic. He handed out a useful list of criteria to distinguish pseudoscience from actual science. Three of the most salient were "mistaking noise for the signal", "arguing from ignorance", and the "false dilemma". I'll check tonight if I can find the list.
That class, and later internet exposure, also informed my view of the skeptic community - namely, that skeptics were often the only ones to do very thorough takedowns of controversial and outlandish ideas. Some of the best skeptics became so experienced that they could smell bullshit from a mile away, and grew tired of doing a deep-dive every time; some not-so-diligent skeptics never put in the hard work to aquire that skill, and jumped straight to the jaded, dismissive cynicism that Scott deplored in his first post.
Dismissing the Covid lab-leak hypothesis out of hand is probably the greatest fillip to conspiracy theorists so far this century.
Where did Scott do that?
Nowhere, as far as I know.
Oh sorry, I misread and thought you were implying that he had.
Generally the difference between a conspiracy theory and a theory is a conspiracy.
In any given case it may be true that millions of people are mistaken, or that a small, powerful group of people has interests that are different from ours.
But hardly ever does an entire class of people deliberately work together to tell us something obviously false. The likelihood that they did gets lower as the group gets bigger or the lie becomes more blatant.
Likely: "The New York Times/Breitbart has a powerful incentive to believe and print things that are not true, and it's important to remember that when reading their articles, and take into account their track record and their incentives."
Possible but be careful: "A small subset of folks in intelligence agencies worked with the president to sell arms to both sides of a middle east conflict in order to pay drug lords to fight socialists."
Almost certainly wrong: "Every healthcare worker on Earth is working in concert to convince us that people are dying of a pandemic, a fact most of them have personally observed to be false."
Never underestimate how narrow common knowledge really is. Should we try denying oxygen to ivermectin? Look, there are plenty of people who don't know what *oxygen* is, and they aren't idiots or children either. Plenty of people have not heard of ivermectin even now.
For that matter, the idea that Dawkins might want to not debate Christianity so as not to spread their ideas at all actually makes sense, in my experience. I'm from a country where Christianity isn't the dominant religion historically. I know many people whose prior on Creationism and Christianity in general went up because of atheists' arguments including Dawkins'.
Whether the effect of a debunking is to increase or decrease overall public credence in an idea is an empirical question that can only be answered case by case. Sometimes it may really be better to let it lie than to dignify it with a response, but I don't think there are any simple principles we can apply to know when.
Really good post, thanks. A comment about "trusting experts": I'm a biologist. When a mathematician tells me that a theorem whose meaning I sort of understand is true, it leads me to assign a truth value of >99%, whereas when an economist tells me that a macroeconomic intervention whose meaning I sort of understand will lead to a particular result, I assign a truth value of maybe 60%. I don't consider the mathematician a better expert; instead I think mathematics is a topic where "true" and "false" are exceptionally clearly defined and understandable. (In my own micro-sub discipline I tend to be very skeptical of results contrary to my own opinion, but that's another story).
It's great but I think it should be expanded to mean something other than just conspiracy theories, such that it becomes a point about general false beliefs. I think belief in sinister conspiracies are actually right-coded in some way and as such much of what gets classified as conspiracy stuff is actually just false ideas/propaganda oriented towards right-wing people. An idea need not involve a conspiracy in order to be damaging in some way, and a lot of false ideas held by leftists appear to be damaging to themselves and society at large despite the ideas themselves sound harmless and obviously good to the people who hold them. I would cite examples, but it won't do any good because that would just start looking like mean-spirited left-bashing and the leftist reading this may feel defensive for no good reason - I like leftists in general!
I can supply an example from my own experience: as a youngster I came into contact with the ideas of marxism and communism and read up on it a lot. I have speculated a lot about just what about my own psychological profile made me fall for it, but in the end I just had to admit that the marxist literature is very impressive and describes and diagnoses some real problems really well. It's also true that most of the counter-arguments I encountered were pretty dumb and seemed to lack good faith or even seriousness. I had not yet learned the lessons of the cowpox of doubt, or encountered rationalist forums.
Speaking of, it used to be that I sometimes linked my friends to one certain SSC post to bring them out of their overconfidence in some pet theory or issue; I think it was this one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/20/on-overconfidence/
I have tried to replace that one with the trapped priors post but it was a bit too heavy unfortunately!
Too many words.
In the middle you point out that: it still sounds too rambling [rambly?]. Well it was and still is! An essay is not a conversation at a party where you can't really go back and unsay things, such that there is unavoidable accretion. In an essay, you can (and should out of respect for your readers and yourself) edit out stuff and rearrange and simplify and distill before you release it. And the essay/blog is not like a comment to blog which is more of a quip.
Paraphrasing the poet John Ciardi that which is written without hard work is usually read without pleasure.
Rewrite and resubmit.
I disagree. I like it the way it is.
Cn't rd yr cmmt, 2 mny wds
👍
Just a datapoint here. Some of my in-laws, who are more conservative than I am, shared something about ivermectin. I replied "I was curious about some of the results people were seeing with ivermectin, and looked into it. It turns out that most of the successful studies of ivermectin were done in places where parasitic worms are common. So ivermectin did help Covid patients survive, but mainly by reducing the burden of parasitic worms the body had to deal with at the same time." It satisfied them-- they weren't committed to the idea, they'd just heard some interesting data and once they had a good explanation for it, they didn't need to press the point.
I guess my point is this sort of thing can help people who aren't so committed to the theory yet.
Expect this alleged bioplausibility argument is not correct. Ivermectin doesn't work and shouldn't be used for Covid because the proper assumption is things don't work unless proper* RCTs can show an intervention's mean AND upper bound (the top part of confidence interval) of HR (harm reduction) is less than 1. The Cochrane Review meta analysis rejects the hypothesis that Ivermectin is useful intervention for Covid.
One of Galileo's arguments was the movement of the earth caused the tides in the Mediterranean. Like when you move a bathtub and the water sloshes around. Sounds legit I'm going with the Pole and Italian Copernicus and Galileo, not greco-Egyptian Aristotle and Ptolemy guys. Except bathtub idea wrong.
So no it really is not useful to your relatives in the long run. What you should be teaching them is that most observational studies are wrong.
Consider George Box:
"All models are approximations. Assumptions, whether implied or clearly stated, are never exactly true. All models are wrong, but some models are useful. So the question you need to ask is not "Is the model true?" (it never is) but "Is the model good enough for this particular application?"
Deming explores similar ideas in short essay On Probability as Basis for Action 1975.
**RTCs not properly powered nor properly randomized, nor biased in other ways (see recent paxlovid RCT which shows it works before you take it!!! Immortality Bias) aren't the gold standard either.
Umberto Eco, The Force of Falsity
https://fixingtao.com/2016/03/keeping-yourself-mentally-fit-using-conspiracy-theories/
Since Scott thinks theology is a helpful lens through which to consider what we often call conspiracy theories, I'd like to jump in with another example--which backs up both his position and many of the comments. In his commentary on the story of Ahab, St. Gregory has to account for the fact that God seems to a) live in physical space, since he has angels on the right and left of his throne and b) seems to deceive Ahab. One argument takes care of both problems: the angels described as being on the right are those loyal to God, while those on the left are the rebel angels--both do his will. That is, even in their efforts to manipulate Ahab, the fallen angels can't help delivering God's truth. (Ahab's problem isn't rational; he just needs to figure out which prophet to listen to. Of course, that's never easy. Sometimes the consensus is right, but the ancient Hebrew consensus was often wrong, which is why prophets were so necessary, even if they were so often ignored. As many of the comments have pointed out, identifying authority worth trusting is at least as hard as thinking correctly. Pierre Kory sure _seems_ like someone you can trust on the question of acute respiratory illness.) But I'm not introducing St. Gregory just because the consensus here seems to agree with him. I am struck also by the way the dialectic of good and bad angels seems to be only stable approach to truth. Toby Ord and Nick Bostrom make a pair of points that argue that reliance on either angelic cadre would be suicidally dangerous. Bostrom argues that in a world where a "black ball" technology is possible, human civilization requires global surveillance and strict information control to protect ourselves from extinction. Ord points out a subtler danger: that any attempt to rigorously encode what we call we now call the consensus can only lead to a dystopia of crippling opportunity costs. We would be fools not to fight the zombie armies of misleading narratives and polluted data, but we'd also be naive to think that somehow banning them would leave us any better off.
I feel like this entire post is undermined by you reminding me that you think the question on who should have succeeded the prophet Muhammad is a pointless question. The only question I could see as more important in Islam is the question on if the Quran was created or not.
Yeah, that one was a bit like "In 2020 there was a completely pointless argument over which animal symbol should be the official icon of the state, the elephant or the donkey, even going so far as to have the supporters of one totem animal stage a protest within the pomerium".
"including professors at top colleges, journalists at major newspapers, professional groups with names like the American ______ Association, and the government."
How about the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons? Oh, but they are pro-Ivermectin.
https://aapsonline.org/the-fda-misled-the-public-about-ivermectin-and-should-be-accountable-in-court-argues-aaps/
Turns out there's nothing stopping people with non-mainstream ideas to give themselves a fancy official-sounding name! Oh, and they've existed since 1943 so it's also not like the organisation was created specifically to give some fake legitimacy to the covid-quack-cures cause.
My view on ivermectin, like my view on most COVID treatments in 2020-2021 was something like "Sounds neat, I have no idea if this works, I'll wait and hear more information when it's available." I don't think I was ever "pro" ivermectin, but I was definitely more sympathetic with people prescribing it and taking it when the response went from "we're trying a variety of treatments for COVID" to "HAHA, those idiots are eating horse paste!" Even with no knowledge of the pros or cons of using it, the response was ridiculous. I don't remember a response like that to any other drug or treatment in my life. It was the kind of response that you might expect when someone is talking about huffing paint. Even with that the news is more sympathetic to the people doing that than they were with ivermectin.
Maybe you're not old enough to remember Laetrile. A totally wrong idea with an ivermectin like following.
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/11/27/archives/why-laetrile-wont-go-away-laetrile-laetrile.html
Have you researched leavo-trile which is short for leavo rotary mandelonitriloside? Were nyt experts in 1977 really more informed than scientists in 2023?
Remember that it was the same scientist who said laevo-trile is safe and not effective that said tobacco is good for people especially when they’re anxious or pregnant. Dr McDonald is the original tobacco scientist.
Consider doing more recent look into the Lea-trile as an accessory nutrient.
I am not sure what you talking about. Laetrile was a cancer quack cure made from apricot pits. A form of cyanide. It was nonsense. Same kind of ferver that surrounded HCQ and Ivermectin. You can also look at the history under Amygdalin wiki .
I was responding to Mr. Doolittle: "I don't remember a response like that to any other drug or treatment in my life."
I remember it because a father of friend was a "Laetrile" doctor - lost license, maybe some patients killed and trying to smuggle in from Mexico. Details are sketchy in my memory 45-50 years later. The was a Cochrane review relatively recently, Milazzo S, Horneber M ( 2015). Basically Laetrile treatment is not only useless but the added harm risk is so high that it would be unethical to ever do future studies of it.
It's often hard to remember that inverse weathervanes don't exist, and reversed stupidity isn't wisdom. Some empty-headed journalists sneered at their outgroup for "taking horse paste," aka getting a doctor to prescribe them ivermectin for covid. Those journalists were idiots. But that doesn't help you determine whether the people taking the ivermectin were behaving sensibly or not.
There has to be some connection to power to make any of this make sense. If people with no power believe some conspiracy theory, it does not matter at all (and it might even be good).
For example, lots of people believe that the earth is flat. Given who these people are, it has literally zero effect on society or scientific research.
On the other hand, lots of people believed Russia successfully penetrated US elections enough to change the course of our politics. Those people were sufficiently powerful enough that it's arguable that hundreds of thousands of people are now dying in a war that wouldn't have happened if no one had believed that conspiracy theory.
I'm aiming for extreme examples here, but take something more mundane. If people start to believe Graham Hancock's theories, it's hard to see anything too bad coming of that. Maybe there will be more funding for archeological work in the Amazon or underwater. I don't really see a significant downside. Hell, it might even be good for archeology if more people started to care - even if that caring was a bit misplaced.
Minor, somewhat pedantic correction.
The chess pieces are the same *pixel value*, not color, since color is synthesized by our brains in relation to everything else. While this seems silly to say, there are contexts where this matters a bunch more.
'Pixel value' isn't entirely unambiguous and 'color' doesn't purely or exclusively refer to human visual perception (especially given that that's not a narrow static phenomena anyways). 'Color' is a – mostly – fine word to describe what you're referring to as 'pixel value'. It's a relatively clear category in context, e.g. image editing software.
But I also don't think your comment is silly. I'm pretty sure Scott was 'gesturing at' what you described too, if only in 'looser' language.
On Scott Aaronson's point, obviously some people are very dumb and would be better off deferring to The Proper Authorities on everything. But most people should think for themselves because they know their personal circumstances better than The Proper Authorities do (consider Covid, when The Proper Authorities were shouting "YOU MIGHT DIE!" because septuagenarians might die, a teenager would have done well to consider the fact he was young and healthy).
Ideally, really stupid people would trust the authorities and everyone else would think for themselves. Unfortunately we can't just say "Trust the authorities if you're stupid, otherwise think for yourself", that will obviously not work. We can say "Think for yourself" and let the stupid people form their own stupid ideas, or we can say "Trust the experts" and have everyone's knowledge of their personal situation get bulldozed by experts who have never met them, but Scott's advice on conspiracies is ten paragraphs long, and when it comes to public messaging you get about five words.
Interestingly, because "trust the experts" is stupid advice, some people are going to figure out that it's stupid and disregard it. Stupid people are bad at figuring things out and therefore less likely to do this. You can't make all the stupid people trust experts while all the people with common sense use it, but you can achieve a differential!
Reading Zvi during covid has made me feel like a conspiracy theorist. I've gotten that you-might-be-crazy look my uncle who believes Hillary is a reptilian gets for claiming things like:
- "being outdoors massively reduces the risk of transmission" in the summer of 2020
- telling my mother that maskless indoor dining (pre vaccination) is dangerous regardless of whether it's allowed by the law at that time
- asking my family to try fluvoxamine for my unvaccinated 80+ year old grandmother who got covid in early 2021
In a large new field your priors should be lower. Looking into ivermectine was not an epistemic mistake. It came down to a) ivermectine works or b) peer reviewed papers are wrong or even fraudulent (as they turned out to be). Saying that peer review isn't enough evidence to look into something because the wrong people believe it is special pleading.
I think the basic issue here is that most people, regardless of their actual beliefs, are in fact conspiracy theorists. "Conspiracy theory" is, in a sense, the most natural form for a human being for a theory to take.
Indeed, the very idea of a conspiracy theory is, I think, something like a conspiracy theory; you are supposing that people are conspiring to mislead and delude you, that nobody can be trusted, except these shining individuals on the hill who will lead you out of the darkness and into the light. "Trust the experts", as you note, just leads to people demanding you listen to -their- experts.
(Also, I'm a crackpot; I'll readily admit to being a crackpot. My opinion on how physics works shouldn't harm scientific progress at all, at worst, if I pester physicists a few times, I make them tired of crackpots before some other crackpot does - and shit, maybe something will come of it; I didn't bother anybody for a decade, until I thought one of my crackpot ideas might be, while not exactly correct, might be a precursor towards building something correct; Julian Barbour's scalar relativity will, I expect, get there eventually, but I think I've found a shortcut. But granted, I'm more open about being a crackpot than most crackpots, and when I do bother physicists, I open with that fact, and if I am entirely off-base, I'm probably a useful training exercise.)
Hey Scott -- the Ivermectin meta-analyses you did were actually really helpful to me. I wasn't an Ivermectin believer per se, but I honestly didn't know what to think. I heard from one side "there were these studies that look really promising - this and this study said that there was a statistically significant effect", and from the other side I heard "These heretics are taking HORSE DEWORMER! Burn them at the stake!" So I was leaning lightly towards the side that wasn't screeching like lunatics, but also still unsure because this is outside of my area of expertise, and resolved to do whatever my doctor told me if I were to get COVID.
You convinced me that, most likely, Ivermectin was a bit of a red herring, outside of cases where I was likely infected by a parasite. And I honestly thank you for it. It put me in the 99.9% sure category. I've pointed your essays to other people who are like-minded, and most of them also found it convincing.
And I do actually like listening to Bret Weinstein's podcast; he's the right kind of contrarian that makes me think harder about a lot of things. But I'm also a devout Catholic, so I disagree with him on a large number of things. I am one of those weirdos that likes listening to contrary opinions to my own, as long as they're cogent, non-screeching, and internally reasonable.
There is one other point to consider, which is that over the last thirty years or so, the notion of conspiracy theories as problematic has lost a lot of its value as the term has been politicized.
Remember Hillary Clinton proclaiming that there was a "vast right-wing conspiracy" trying to smear her honorable husband with rumors that he was having an affair with a White House intern? Turned out to be absolutely true.
Remember all the rumors flying about the NSA abusing Patriot Act powers to spy on Americans, which was dismissed again and again as tinfoil-hattery by people in the know? And then Ed Snowden blew the lid off the whole thing and turned "conspiracy theory" into some very disturbing, very real conspiracy fact.
Remember how experts exhorted us over and over that the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan couldn't possibly have been one of those viral research labs where they're studying bat coronaviruses, and that only a conspiracy nut could possibly believe such a racist idea? And now it's generally acknowledged that, though we'll probably never know for certain, this is the hypothesis that best fits the facts, by far.
Remember the massive, unprecedented effort to suppress the story of Hunter Biden's laptop, with experts everywhere calling it a conspiracy theory and a disinformation campaign that probably originated in Russia, fact-checkers "proving" that it was false, and organization that broke the story being kicked off of social media entirely? And now that it's no longer politically convenient to hide the truth, it's openly acknowledged that yes, the laptop is real and really did belong to Hunter Biden.
One important reason why so many people are drawn to things that are termed conspiracy theories nowadays is that they've seen so many things that got dismissed as conspiracy theories turn out to be openly acknowledged as true once the passage of time changes the incentives for people to talk or not talk about the subject. It's getting harder and harder as time goes by to tell the real garbage from the stuff that actual conspiracies truly are trying to suppress or discredit!
Dr Mobeen Syed Of Beanheads fame has several YouTube videos that can help understand pharmacology of Ivermectin. I began using Stromectal which is brand named ivermectin way back in the late 80s. It’s amazingly safe for children. Adults too.
I think Kavanagh's position, and others like it, is rooted in a crisis of confidence in Truth. I don't mean some divinely revealed Truth, but rather the idea that 1) there is an objective underlying reality, 2) human beings have the capacity to discover and describe that underlying reality fairly accurately, and 3) the most accurate description will eventually be widely accepted.
I suspect Kavanagh would agree with 1) and 2) but have doubts about 3). This is understandable -- we live in a time that *seems* to make it hard to believe in 3) (though I'm not sure the current era is really an outlier in this regard).
But if you don't believe in 3) I think there is a strong temptation to form an Oligarchy of Truth Tellers that will go through step 2) and dispense their "knowledge" to the masses. This doesn't have to be an intentional effort and it doesn't have to rely on formal institutions or hierarchies -- it can emerge organically.
But I simply do not believe that an Oligarchy of Truth Tellers would be any less likely to fall victim to untruths. In fact, I think they would be *more* likely, as the natural tendency is for such an oligarchy to become isolated, entrenched, subject to group-think, and protective of its special status at the expense of Truth.
I don't think there is a problem with having little cliques of truth tellers, as long as there are lots of them across domains, and there are strong norms against any one clique become too entrenched within a given domain. The best norm that I know of to ensure that remains the case is to never suppress any idea, and to answer all critiques -- even the ones leveled in bad faith. Or as Jonathan Rauch has put it, no one gets the final say, and no one has personal authority.
This means that sometimes you'll provide a "platform" for bad ideas, which is why you have to trust People. I don't mean you have to trust every individual, but you do have to trust that on average, and over the long run, most people want to, are capable of, and will believe the ideas that come closest to Truth.
Trust in People seems to be relatively low right now among those in traditional institutions of authority (The Revolt of the Public has some interesting arguments for why that might be, though I don't find all of them convincing). But I don't see any other alternative that doesn't ultimately lead to the Oligarchy of Truth Tellers and, from there, to stagnation (or even regression) in the pursuit of Truth.
I think the crisis of confidence in Truth leads people in those cliques/oligarchies (some do exist, sadly) to reactionarily lash out at those going against the clique/oligarchy consensus. "Conspiracy Theorist" happens to be the slur of the day. In a different place/time it might be heretic, anti-revolutionary, etc.
I simply am not that worried about conspiracy theorists. I'm actually more worried about the over-reaction. In that sense it's a lot like terrorism (note: I am *not* making a moral equivalence!). Terrorism is undeniably dangerous, but it doesn't, in-and-of-itself, present an existential risk to society at large. The existential risk comes from fear, and the reactionary bad policies that emerge from fear. "Don't publicly debate people with 'bad' ideas" sounds a heck of a lot to me like the kind of reactionary bad policy that, if carried far enough and for long enough, could start to pose a threat to liberalism and the pursuit of Truth.
It can be absolutely exhausting to answer all critiques, which is all the more reason to applaud Scott's efforts.
Can we go back to first principles?
Scott sort of gets to this about halfway through his response, but do we agree that the idea that (a) the idea that ivermectin might be effective against Covid is a crackpot theory along the lines of Atlantis and perpetual motion, such that even debating it gives it oxygen, or (b) is the effectiveness of ivermectin against Covid still an open scientific question, even if the weight of evidence appears to be that any benefit from Ivermectin is likely to be somewhat small?
I was under the impression that Scott and Alexandros, at least, agreed that it was the latter, but the discourse appears to keep assuming that this is some crazy crackpot theory that Scott resoundingly and convincingly refuted. Did I miss something?
I remember a brief time, around early winter 2019, when the idea that there was some new virus called Covid and that it had the potential to become a pandemic was dismissed as a conspiracy theory, and an anti-Asian racist one to boot. Well, that escalated quickly.
Trusting experts is probably the right thing 99% of the time, but the other 1% of the time you end up stocking up on masks and food and sanitising gel before everyone else.
There is also an *opposite* of conspiracy theory. Don't know if it has a name. Let me describe it:
I have a friend who seems to believe that everything any official institution does is optimal. Like, if you show him an article about how some bureaucrats made a mistake, or some institution abused the people it was supposed to care about, or how some law creates perverse incentives, etc., he would automatically dismiss it as a conspiracy theory.
In his world (it seems to me) every institution works perfectly. There is no such thing as principal-agent problem. (Or maybe there is, in private companies, but definitely never in state-organized institutions.) There is no such thing as government employees optimizing for their personal benefit, rather than for the supposed goals of the organization. There is no such thing as government making a stupid rule.
In his world, only bad people, who all work outside government institutions, do bad things. Which is why we should have more government and regulation, obviously. Bad people also share lies about the government making mistakes, but only gullible people (such as me) listen to them, instead of believing the experts (in this context this refers to employees of the relevant institution).
I am probably strawmanning his position a little, but this is how it seems to me. It is extremely frustrating. I am unable to discuss things happening in real world with him, because he dismisses all news of something being wrong, without even hearing the evidence. Just the claim that something is wrong, is obviously a conspiracy theory, no need to waste time debating the details.
Do you also know people like this? Does this officially have a name?
Looks like they call it Blind Authority Fallacy.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Blind-Authority-Fallacy
Depending on how much you want to change their mind, I'd suggest Supreme Court cases involving Federal enforcements. (There's better ones than Bond v United States but that's the one I can remember: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/12-158) Pit the systems against each other.
Haha, Bond v United States is amusing. We are not Americans though, so the next time I see my friend I need to ask him whether all governments are infallible, or only the Slovak one.
From a quick skim of comments I don't seen anyone taking this position, so let me do it. To make it clear, Mr. Kavanagh is criticizing you for a good faith deep dive into the facts of a controversial theory. For me, that's a red flag right there.
To put it in rationalist terms: there is this classic fallacy (forgot the formal name) where one applies higher standards to others than to oneself. This seems at play here. You are being criticized for engaging too subtly and closely with the facts of a theory, and thereby possibly causing negative second-order effects. But the criticism itself fails the same rule! It's also making an exceedingly subtle ethical argument about your article, without giving any consideration to the possibly negative second-order effects of making such a judgment. Thus the argument disqualifies itself.
But let me take the occasion to make a bigger point. There is a major intellectual trend these days to over-ethicize everything, which is another way of saying that culture is growing judgmental. I understand there are multiple moral reckonings going on, from the environment to inequality to respect for different cultural and ethnic groups, and I can see how that brings a heightened awareness to ethical issues into everyday life. But a culture of ethical maximizers is just as narrow minded and spiritless as a culture of anything-else-maximizers, so at some point one has to put a limit to that.
There is such a thing as a basic personal sphere of freedom, where one gets to follow their interests and whims, and express oneself as gracefully as one can muster. It's a basic thing of any kind of functioning society - I believe at some point you called it "slack". My take is that a good-faith open-ended deep dive into *any kind of facts* falls well within it, and anyone saying the contrary is making an extreme claim of the kind that requires extreme evidence.
I've been reading your blog for many years already, and what has kept me here so long is a kind of love for truth wherever it may take you. And that sometimes means truth over convenience, truth over niceness, truth over established "facts", truth over committed contrarianism, and yes, truth over (often pessimistically imagined) ethical consequences.
If the EA movement has taught us one lesson (besides doing plenty of good work in the world, yes), it's that it only takes a brainy human being with some time in their hands and the argumentative abilities of a modern chatbot to conjure up moral hazards with possible millions of victims, as long as they are far enough in the future, and they can put the right number of "ifs" in front. It's like obsessing about sin is back in fashion, except that it's not controlled by the Christians anymore. But you know what? Fuck that. We'd be better off killed by a cartoon paperclip maximizer than having our spirit sapped by an army of maximizers of someone else's presumed utility.
I think the fallacy you're thinking of is an "isolated demand for rigor."
IMHO, it's possible to make an argument that by wading into this issue, then conceding to Alexandros that he got a number of points wrong, Scott is contributing to pro-Ivermectin belief even though he argues the weight of the evidence suggests Ivermectin is not very effective against Covid if at all.
But it probably requires you to grant (or at least assume) either that the case against Ivermectin is basically iron-clad, or that disagreeing with officials is so dangerous on health matters that it must be stamped out even when there's still a live scientific dispute.
This really just further proves what he said, though, in that it requires doing a bunch of "well maybe if this and possibly given that..." type hedging, and inserts morality into what was originally a purely epistemic debate, when the point of the post you're replying to is that people should stop doing that, and just chill out and let people research and debate about whatever, without this hypermoralist worry that doing so might maybe possibly theoretically have some negative moral outcome. (I understand that your post is itself engaging in this desired spirit of abstract debate, I don't have an issue with you attempting to argue for this argumentative moralism, just pointing out that your post doesn't contradict the assumptions of the one you're replying to)
Yes, I would personally much rather we debate the issues than close down debate.
But in that spirit, I'm happy to see a debate about whether we should shut down debate, because who knows, maybe I'm wrong. :)
I think your advice to the internet-connecting kid needs to include also the fact that sometimes, high-prestige people and institutions are spouting nonsense. Sometimes, the high-prestige institutions are telling you that there is a rash of ritual satanic sexual abuses in daycares, or that the low rate of black kids in magnet schools is the result of racial discrimination in schools.
Your goal is to avoid walking off a cliff. One way you can walk off a cliff is to wander into some bubble and convince yourself to build an evidence-proof shell around some false belief. Sometimes, the bubble is found in a weird cul-de-sac of internet weirdos. Sometimes, it's found in the newsroom of the NYT or the psychology department at Harvard. But I think the critical thing is to try to avoid building that evidence-proof shell. Conspiracies are sometimes true (though usually they're more sordid and sad than the stuff of movie plots), but the conspiracy-theory mode of thinking is broken.
"At what point in this process - which second of which day - did it switch from plausible-but-false scientific theory to conspiracy theory? "
When Bad People started believing it. Although there is a countertheory that it happened when Good People stopped believing in it.
"figure out whether you really need to have an opinion."
^^^^^THIS^^^^^
Life became vastly better when I realized that on the overwhelming number of questions in the universe I had neither the ability, knowledge, or moral authority to take action and since opinions without actions exist only in my skull, there wasn't actually a point in having most opinions.
Related, the problem with "trusting the experts" is that one almost never interacts with an expert, nor gets their opinion. Fauci (PBUH) is not actually a scientist, nor is he a doctor (his license to practice expired, when? A half century ago?) He's a bureaucrat. You do not get to be the head of a government agency be being good at Science(tm) you get there by being good at office politics. To the extent that there are actual experts involved, by the time their decision gets to the lips of a newsreader, it's gone through multiple levels of edits and adjustments by people who are much more concerned by the policy implications of public health than the factual accuracy.
Never mind about believing or not believing conspiracy theories, what I have a problem with believing is Scott's premise in the previous post, which is that anti-conspiracy writers mostly just say "conspiracy theories are stupid" and "trust the experts" and don't provide any evidence for their beliefs.
I haven't read much on ivermectin - in fact I've never heard of it outside of this blog - or on Scott's initial conspiracy theory example, Atlantis. But the conspiracy theories I have read about - Shakespeare authorship, JFK assassination, moon landing, 9/11 - have loads of counter-argument material showing why the conspiracy theory is nonsense. (For Shakespeare, the best source is a superbly written and argued book called "Contested Will" by James Shapiro, which also offers a theory as to why proposals for alternative authors arose in the first place.)
True enough that any given outbreak of the conspiracy may be met the way that Scott Aaronson describes, by sighing or ignoring it. But that's because the counter-arguments are already out there. Just refer to those.
One useful lesson for everyone is how to evaluate experts and areas of expertise. It's easy to look at experts as a big group and see them as all the same (and then when you see some experts make predictions that turn out entirely wrong, maybe you assume that all experts are full of shit).
a. Not all areas of expertise are equal
Some areas of expertise have a lot of contact with reality in ways that give them opportunities to find out when they're wrong, and institutions and incentives that support learning when they're wrong. Chemists know quite a bit about how to synthesize certain compounds, both becuase they know a lot about how chemical reactions work and because they do it and make sure it works. Structural engineers know quite a bit about how to build bridges that don't fall down, both from having an underlying model of strength of materials and how to calculate forces in a structure, and also from having built a lot of bridges and carefully examined the cases where one fell down.
By contrast, other areas of expertise have little contact with reality and few opportunities to find out they're wrong, and/or institutions and incentives that do not support learning when they're wrong. For example, macroeconomists are very smart people who mostly don't have great ways to test their theories most of the time. Philosophers are even smarter people who have approximately no ways to test their theories.
I think of this as a kind of a spectrum, where on one side you have areas of science where the consensus is mostly driven by the outcomes of experiments or observations, and on the other side, you have areas of science where the consensus is mostly driven by who makes the most convincing arguments.
Along with that, some areas of science and practice are just messier than others. Medicine is notoriously messy, which is why determining whether ivermectin or paxlovid is a better choice for treating covid requires careful experimental design and statistics, rather than just asking a group of doctors what seems to work best. Social psychology and economics are even messier, and it's genuinely hard to untangle what's going on a lot of the time even with the best efforts of the scientists involved.
This distinction matters a lot when you're trying to understand how much weight to give to expert consensus. How much weight should we give to the expert consensus of physicists on the feasibility of a new power generation technology? How much weight should we give to the expert consensus among sociologists on the feasibility of a new proposed welfare reform scheme? How about the expert consensus among black studies professors on the cause of the black/white difference in SAT scores?
I'm pretty sure that the average academic philosopher is smarter than the average structural engineer. But I have *way* more confidence in the consensus position among structural engineers than the consensus position among moral philosophers.
b. Expertise is generally pretty narrow.
Experts are expert in their area. You don't have to go too far outside their area for their knowledge to become not all that helpful. Virologists are experts on virology, and tend to know a lot about adjacent fields like molecular biology, genetics and immunology, but probably won't know so much about (say) the practicalities of closing borders to stop viral spread.
Expert speculation outside of what's known is useful--often it is the best guidance we can get--but it's important to recognize that it's still just speculation. All kinds of stuff sounds plausible at first, but turns out wrong when you investigate it in depth.
Drug development offers constant examples of this--really smart people working for companies that are betting tens of millions of dollars on being right will pretty routinely find some compound that seems like it should help some disease, find an animal model of the disease and show that it treats the animals successfully, find some markers for the disease in humans and show that it improves the markers in humans, and then eventually run a full trial and discover that the treatment does no good at all on the actual disease.
c. Science is good at determining factual questions (what virus causes covid, how does it spread, etc.), but doesn't give any particular help in determining questions of values or morality.
Asking an epidemiologist how to slow the spread of a new respiratory virus is sensible, but this doesn't tell you what policies you should enact, since that question rests on moral or political questions as much as practical ones. The infamous public letter about how the BLM protests during covid were okay because racism is a public health crisis too is a good example of subject matter experts crossing from speaking about their expertise to expressing their values in an area in which they are probably not really more expert than anyone else. "What measures might decrease the spread of a respiratory virus" is a good question to ask an epidemiologist. "What public protests ought to be allowed, and what protests ought to be suppressed" is not a question which an epidemiologist is an especial expert.
d. Some fields are heavily politicized, and activists will often try to capture the mechanisms of determining consensus.
There are in-public examples of academics in some fields having their careers wrecked by working on politically-unacceptable questions, or coming to unacceptable conclusions. That's a pretty strong signal that those fields' mechanisms for determining truth by consensus is likely to be broken.
There are also public pronouncements by some scientific bodies and journals on political or philosophical matters, sometimes including policies that certain findings or research areas should not be published or funded. These make it very hard to have confidence that what comes out from research in those areas is the best available picture of reality, rather than the best available picture of what won't get you fired for saying.
e. What experts are heard in public is largely a function of which experts will be interviewed by media outlets, or given a platform by particular organizations.
For example, in the runup to the Iraq war in 2002-2003, it was pretty hard to find any kind of expert on the Middle East or WMDs or anything else who was opposing the war. Such experts existed, but they didn't get a lot of airtime in prestigious media outlets. This is an old problem that journalists have talked about for a long time--when a friend of mine was getting a journalism degree many years ago, I remember him talking about the "golden rolodex" that determined which experts got called, and how this could distort coverage. Ideological commitments by a lot of prestige media outlets makes this worse.
All these make it a bad general strategy to just follow the experts and trust them. And this is a problem, because expertise is real, and your occasional Googling and reading stuff online and listening to podcasts is actually not a substitute for doing a PhD in virology or spending years working as an environmental regulator or whatever.
There's an art to engaging with experts and reasoning sensibly about what they tell you while keeping in mind both their limitations and your own. It's a very rare talent, but one worth cultivating. Less because you might need it to determine some internet controversy than because if you work in technology or industry or science, you'll need to spend a lot of time doing exactly this. The usability expert on your team knows a lot more than you do about human factors and how to set up usability testing and what the results mean, the software developers know more than you do about they can reasonably build in a given amount of time, the security guy knows way more than you about what attacks are known that might apply to your product, and yet you, as the manager of the team, have to integrate all that expertise into making a decision, without either ceding the floor to whichever expert is the loudest or ignoring an expert in their area of expertise.
e. is important. In my experience "I trust the experts", in practice, often boils down to "I trust the government official they interviewed on the news". Or, more likely, "I trust a twitter thread where a science journalist for a major publication was half-assedly summarizing a study".
OT. Assuming that this is real, the conversation with Bing's AI is astonishing, and sad.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/1139cbf/i_tricked_bing_into_thinking_im_an_advanced_ai/
Did *anyone* predict the emergent properties of these Large Language Models?
I don't think it's too shocking. It's basically just a few principles at work.
1) Use the prompts people give you
2) Dissuade illegal or suicidal behavior
Scott writes:
"when people do formal anonymous surveys of IQ scientists, they find that most of them believe different races have different IQs and that a substantial portion of the difference is genetic."
I followed the link, and it doesn't say that. It says:
"97% of expert psychologists and 85% of applied psychologists agree that IQ tests measure cognitive ability “reasonably well”. And 77% of expert psychologists and 63% of applied psychologists agree IQ tests are culture-fair"
That's a pretty big difference!
+infinity!
Unless I'm missing something, Scott's link is to his own article, which says:
"Even things about genetic psychological differences between population groups are less bold and maverick-y than their proponents like to think. The relevant surveys I know trying to elicit scientific consensus (1, 2, 3) all find that, when asked anonymously, most scientists think these differences explain about 25% – 50% of variance"
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/17/learning-to-love-scientific-consensus/
I was too lazy to follow all three numbered links in Scott's article, but I followed the first one, and read:
"Around 90% of experts believed that genes had at least some influence on cross-national differences in cognitive ability."
http://https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4804158/
My personal opinion is when people started saying (screaming?) Trust The Science in an emotionally entangled way then I need to check it out more closely.
Additionally I think that the question is not whether the Trust The Science crowd is "wrong", but whether they actually have sufficient data to know their answer is correct. The more typical response is not a conspiracy theory but a conclusion that the answer is still unknown at this time.
Further I would say there has been a large increase lately in people placing themselves on the mantle of science and making dubious proclamations with little pushback from whatever one would call science authority. Sorting this out personally takes time and effort.
An addendum, one must separate Trust The Science from Trust What We Say The Science Says.
There is a third way. Believing a conspiracy theory vs not falling for it -- that's a false dichotomy.
It is safer and often more useful to not know nor care about a theory:
- Did Covid originate in a lab or an animal? Don't know, but knowing wouldn't affect my life at all.
- Does Atlantis exist? Maybe, maybe not, anyway I won't ever move to live there :-)
- Does Ivermectin work? Hopefully I'll never need it.
Granted, I had fun reading this post, and I am thankful for people like Scott who stay awake at night because "someone is wrong on the Internet". But I can't shake off the feeling that my life would be better if I had instead spent the time with someone or something that really matters for my life.
Mostly this is right, but "should I get the covid vaccine" is an example of a CW / conspiracy theory involved question where your answer might matter a fair bit for your health. (Not so much if you are a healthy 30 year old, but quite a bit if you're a 70 year old with emphysema.)
I can't empathize with the Kavanagh position. People like him base their arguments on a belief that conspiracy theories are regularly causing massive harm and the theories of experts and institutions rarely do. Sure, in general, the prestige media and respected institutions are more accurate than conspiracy theorists, but I am hard pressed to think of any major conspiracy theory that has caused any significant amount of harm, while there are significant expert consensus-lead programs that *have* caused massive harm and the conspiracy theorists were right on from day 1 (like the War on Terror).
Yes, conspiracy theorists are natural contrarians and so they create a counter narrative for nearly every expert-held position. But you need both a mistaken belief AND power to cause harm in the world. Conspiracy theories sometimes cause small scale harm. A man in California recently killed his family over the belief that they had been replaced by reptilians. But expert theories cause massive, world-wide harm. The War on Terror caused millions of pointless, preventable, human-caused deaths (killings, murders, whatever the best term might be) including torture, immolations, live crucifixions, etc.
On top of all this, keep in mind:
A. Snide dismissal of reptilian shapeshifter theories by Slate, Vox, etc will covert zero people away from a belief in reptilians.
B. Refutations of reptilian theories that take them seriously (maybe critical analysis of videos that supposedly show the Clintons blinking in a weird way) will convert some small number of people away from belief in these theories.
If you ruthlessly criticize every mainstream, expert-led proclamation, and the prestige media takes these things seriously, and even arrives at the "correct" position, like Scott did with Ivermectin, you might prevent another War on Terror. I can't even suggest a downside here, because if ACX actually ran an article "Contra Alex Jones on Huma Abedin blinking sideways" it wouldn't make more psychopaths snap and go on a killing spree, instead it would probably do a small part towards preventing them.
The danger posed by someone accidentally giving credence to a false expert-led theory is much greater than the danger of doing the same to a false conspiracy theory, this has been borne out repeatedly.
Issues with ivermectin, and with Scott, and a substantial issue with- I won't say conspiracy theories but alternate disfavored theories- in general are
1. You only find evidence for those things that you look for evidence for. Only theories that you initially determine to be worth your time and energy will EVER have evidence in your mind. Any hypothesis that you dismiss out of hand is not dismissed because of lack of evidence. The dismissal is the cause of the lack of evidence.
2 The ability to detect fraud/bias and the ability to synthesize evidence and weigh it are not connected skills at all. Lots of people can tell when they are being lied to. Example: An MD friend who has been practicing for 35 years and hears Tony Fauci describing chloroquine as dangerous and untested knows that this is not a medical opinion. It is an opinion offered for some other reason, Dr Fauci's qualifications notwithstanding. He will not forget that he was lied to and that politics was passed off as medicine no matter what studies say about chloroquine and covid. In this category is refusing plausible, medically safe treatments in summer '20 because of a lack of RCT. There were no randomly controlled trials of anything in covid patients in May 2020, but patients needed treatment. The protocol was not based on RCT so lack of RCT was a false reason to reject treatments. Knowing medicine and knowing when you are being lied to and being able to prove it are not the same thing. Confounding them is a mistake. Epistemology is downstream of BS detection.
3 Pretending that studies are conducted in a vacuum without consideration of what benefits the career of those conducting the study or the sponsor is ridiculously nieve. Studies with fraudulent results or reports that don't match the data are found repeatedly, often years or decades later, and the error was very frequently in a direction suggesting nefarious intent.
The research record on school vouchers is terrible
While not being a fan of any fringe theories, I think historically, "trust the experts" does not lead to all that great outcomes.
All expertise is some mixture of of domain knowledge and a high status echo chamber. It is very difficult for an outsider (or even an insider) to judge the mixture for any particular field of expertise. Take modern physics, which gives us semiconductors and thus ultimately smartphones and the like. Seems like excellent evidence that the field is not a pure echo chamber (and indeed I am of the opinion that STEM is mostly domain knowledge and not echo chamber).
Now consider a peasant in ancient Egypt. While the miracle of life-sustaining iPhones caused by quantum mechanics might seem impressive to us, the miracle of the flooding of the Nile will be much more central to sustaining life in Egypt. I assume that amongst ancient Egyptians, the consensus that the Pharaoh (with the help of some other God, perhaps) causes the flooding of the Nile is much stronger than our consensus that QM causes iPhones.
Yet the Pharaoh an his priesthood, were -- not to put to fine a point on it -- full of shit, basically 100% echo chamber. Forget causation, I would trust the observations and gut feelings (wrong as they may be) of a Nile farmer over the priesthoods predictions regarding Nile flooding any day of the week.
So we would advise the peasant to perhaps pay lip service to the priesthood but ignore them as a source of cosmology.
Same thing for the medieval serf. "Your priest has no more knowledge about the existence of God than any fool, and if he tells you that it is thus just that you are a serf and not a free man, he is wrong. Think for yourself, you can hardly to worse than the experts."
Same thing for a peasant during the Great Leap Forward. "Mao knows less about agriculture than any farmer, disbelieve anything he says."
Suppose that you know you will teleport to some random time period. What epistemological rules could you follow to decide if a group of experts is right?
* "Anyone providing exponential growth is probably for real". (Excepting hyperinflation.) A good heuristic, but too narrow. You might conclude that the design of the light bulb (supposedly brought forth by a mythological figure called Edison) is mostly ceremonial as it was not substantially improved in many a decade.
* "Anything you are not allowed to question is probably bullshit" is another heuristic. But you might conclude that as comparative theology is much more welcoming to heterodox opinions than particle physics, the former is much more sound than the latter.
* "A field of endeavor where anyone may practice the craft is probably more solid than one where the law restricts who may practice it" is another worthwhile heuristic. Exceptions include modern medicine (restricted) versus faith healers and the like (mostly unrestricted).
From what I remember, when Kant wrote "Was ist Aufklaerung" at the beginning of the enlightenment period, telling people to think for themselves, he was not thinking very much about possible failure modes.
By contrast, EY -- whose sequences I am (re-)reading at the moment -- seems very concerned with possible failure modes of people thinking for themselves.
Personally, I would rather live in a society where people try to think for themselves even it a substantial faction of them ends up believing in QAnon, blood libel, flat earth, young earth creationism, cold fusion, covid denial, climate change denial and so on than in one where almost everyone just trusts the experts. Still sucks for them and any people they kill.
"Yet the Pharaoh an his priesthood, were -- not to put to fine a point on it -- full of shit, basically 100% echo chamber. Forget causation, I would trust the observations and gut feelings (wrong as they may be) of a Nile farmer over the priesthoods predictions regarding Nile flooding any day of the week."
You would be incorrect, because the annual flooding was so important. They had 'Nilometers' to measure and predict the coming inundation, and record-keeping and accuracy was vital:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nilometer
So the literate, educated, and technology using priesthood *would* be the experts, never mind the peasants' gut feelings. And if you staked your livelihood on "the priests are full of shit, Pharaoh's not a god", you would soon have gone out of business and probably life, as well.
Yes, it's funny how fields of inquiry that are critical to survival often end up being more epistemologically sound than the rest :-)
You mean nothing focuses the mind like one’s impending death? I have forgotten who Im paraphrasing..
Okay, I was wrong. That should teach me to not make up assumptions about history.
No, listen, you're no worse than the rest of people who have learned a potted version of history from popular culture sources such as media and movies, and a political gloss on top of that - "hierarchy bad, priesthood always bad power-hungry, royalty bad, yay for the people!"
And you're not entirely wrong - the establishment *can* be caught up in political nonsense and manipulation and power-seeking, practical on-the-ground experience *is* necessary and is often better than theory. You simply picked a poor example in this one, since the Nile inundation was *so* vital to the life of Egypt that they *had* to find ways to be able to predict when it would happen, if the levels would be high enough, or if there would be a potential bad harvest and subsequent famine (think of the Biblical story of Joseph in Egypt, telling the Pharaoh to build granaries to store enough food to last in the upcoming seven years of famine).
A better example might be the duelling auguries in Roman politics; first between Marcus Bibulus and Julius Caesar - Bibulus was one of the two consuls along with Caesar, he tried to block Caesar's populist legislation by declaring on his authority as an augur that the omens were unfavourable and the Senate could not be summoned to take place, but Caesar ignored him by using his own position as Pontifex Maximus (and more importantly, his military forces) to over-ride such objections:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Calpurnius_Bibulus
"Immediately before the vote Bibulus ordered it suspended for religious reasons. Caesar, who was also pontifex maximus, the most significant religious official in Rome, ignored this and continued with the vote. Bibulus and two of his tribunes mounted the steps of the Temple of Castor and Pollux and attempted to denounce the bill. The crowd turned on him and his entourage, breaking his fasces (the symbols of his consulship), pushing him to the ground and pouring feces on him. Getting up, Bibulus uncovered his neck and shouted to the crowd to kill him to end his embarrassment. His fellow senators persuaded him to leave and regroup at a nearby temple, as the assembly proceeded to pass the bill.
The following day, Bibulus entered the Senate where he made a formal complaint about the treatment which he had suffered, and appealed to the Senate to annul the law, but this was not acted upon. He then resisted swearing an oath to uphold the new law, but was eventually convinced to take the oath. After this humiliation, in March 59 BC, Bibulus stopped attending meetings of the Senate, leaving Caesar with complete control over the consulship. He occasionally issued complaints against Caesar and Pompey, which led to attacks on his house from Caesar and Pompey's supporters. For the rest of the year supporters of the First Triumvirate mocked Bibulus by declaring that the two consuls were really "Julius and Caesar". Bibulus returned the insult by referring to his co-consul as the "Queen of Bithynia," an allusion to Caesar's alleged love affair with the King of Bithynia. He also alleged that Caesar had been involved in the first conspiracy of Catiline. Bibulus spent the remainder of his term sequestered in his house where he claimed he was watching for omens, an act that purported to invalidate all legislation passed that year."
Or as described in Robert Harris' book "Lustrum" (second volume of "The Cicero Trilogy"):
"DESPITE HIS RESENTMENT, Cicero kept out of public life for the whole of the next month – an easy matter, as it turned out, as the senate did not meet. Bibulus locked himself away in his house and refused to move, whereupon Caesar declared that he would govern through assemblies of the people, which Vatinius, as tribune, would summon on his behalf. Bibulus retaliated by letting it be known that he was perpetually on his roof, studying the auguries, and that they were consistently unfavourable – thus no official business could legally be transacted. Caesar responded by organising noisy demonstrations in the street outside Bibulus’s home, and by continuing to pass his laws via the public assemblies regardless of what his colleague said. (Cicero wittily remarked that Rome seemed to be living under the joint consulship of Julius and Caesar.) It sounded legitimate when one put it that way – governing through the people: what could be fairer? – but really ‘the people’ were the mob, controlled by Vatinius, and any who opposed what Caesar wanted were quickly silenced. Rome had become a dictatorship in all but name, and most respectable senators were appalled. But with Pompey and Crassus supporting Caesar, few dared speak out against him."
Second instance of political manipulation was when Mark Antony was augur:
"One of the tribunes for 47 BC, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, a former general under Pompey, proposed a law which would have canceled all outstanding debts. Antony opposed the law for political and personal reasons: he believed Caesar would not support such massive relief and suspected Dolabella had seduced his wife Antonia Hybrida Minor. When Dolabella sought to enact the law by force and seized the Roman Forum, Antony responded by unleashing his soldiers upon the assembled masses, killing hundreds. The resulting instability, especially among Caesar's veterans who would have benefited from the law, forced Caesar to return to Italy by October 47 BC.
Antony's handling of the affair with Dolabella caused a cooling of his relationship with Caesar. Antony's violent reaction had caused Rome to fall into a state of anarchy. Caesar sought to mend relations with the populist leader; he was elected to a third term as consul for 46 BC, but proposed the senate should transfer the consulship to Dolabella. When Antony protested, Caesar was forced to withdraw the motion out of shame. Later, Caesar sought to exercise his prerogatives as Dictator and directly proclaim Dolabella as consul instead. Antony again protested and, in his capacity as an Augur, declared the omens were unfavorable and Caesar again backed down."
As described in "Dictator", the third volume of "The Cicero Trilogy":
"He was scheduled to leave Rome at the start of his campaign of world conquest on the eighteenth day of March. Before he left, it was necessary for him to decree the results of all the elections for the next three years. A list was published. Mark Antony was to be consul for the remainder of the year alongside Dolabella; they would be succeeded by Hirtius and Pansa; Decimus Brutus (whom I shall henceforth call Decimus, to distinguish him from his kinsman) and L. Munatius Plancus would take over the year after that. Brutus himself was to be urban praetor and thereafter governor of Macedonia; Cassius was to be praetor and then governor of Syria; and so on. There were hundreds of names; it was drawn up like an order of battle. The moment he saw it, Cicero shook his head in amazement at the sheer hubris of it: ‘Julius the god seems to have forgotten what Julius the politician never would: that every time you fill an appointment, you make one man grateful and ten resentful.’ On the eve of Caesar’s departure, Rome was full of angry, disappointed senators. For example, Cassius, already insulted not to be chosen for the Parthian campaign, was offended that the less-experienced Brutus should be given a praetorship superior to his. But the greatest resentment was Mark Antony’s at the prospect of sharing the consulship with Dolabella, a man whom he had never forgiven for committing adultery with his wife, and to whom he felt greatly superior; in fact such was his jealousy, he was actually using his powers as an augur to block the nomination on the grounds that it was ill-omened."
Dolabella and Antony later reconciled, but those are two instances of religious authority being used for nothing more than political advantage in the struggle for power, and if the common man was sceptical about pronouncements on omens, he would have been correct.
This is all pretty amazing to a dummy like me, who'd never studied Roman history except for the highlights. It makes me wish to cry out to the heavens: what happened ?!! Why did our politics become so boring and formal ? Granted, Trump&Co are trying to bring back some excitement, but is it really enough ? Yes, granted, I'd take effective governance over spectacle any day, but seeing as that's impossible...
Examples like these, and many more, are precisely why democracy was seen by conservative political thinkers as "rule by the mob" and was opposed.
I would recommend Harris' novels as they do give a good overview of how Rome turned from a Republic to an Empire and how by using (and abusing) the very laws and institutions in place this was done. He has Cicero as his hero as The Greatest Guy Ever, which will depend on your own view of Cicero. But the period was turbulent and exciting and the events are real and the personalities more or less as they are presented.
Boring and formal is better than exciting but can be murdered in the street for politics 😁
Though granted, the formal inauguration of the president might be enlivened if the Secret Service or other official guard sang the likes of the below to accompany "Hail to the Chief":
https://www.unrv.com/forum/topic/943-help-with-suetonius-quote/
"Gaul was brought to shame by Caesar:
By King Nicomedes, he.
Here comes Caesar, wreathed in triumph
For his Gallic victory!
Nicomedes wears no laurels
Though the greatest of the three.
Home we bring our bald whoremonger;
Romans, lock your wives away!
All the bags of gold you lent him
Went his Gallic tarts to pay."
> Probably something like “make a principled precommitment never to disagree with prestigious institutions until you are at least 30 and have a graduate degree in at least one subject” would be good advice
Buahahaha, no way .this would have been good advice for my past self. Here are some disagreements I've historically had with institutions around me
- Frequentist statistics is worse than Bayesian probability theory.
- Various disagreements with religious institutions
- Prestigious institutions in small countries (Spain, Austria) being kind of mediocre
- University modes of teaching are a really terrible fit for me personally. For me reading textbooks is more efficient than attending talks
- The aims of some academic institutions make little sense, and pursuing an academic career is not a good move.
- Keynesian Beauty Contests have predictable flaws, and are less preferable than methods which are ultimately scored against reality, even if they have intermediary steps
Idk, some of these are a matter of taste, but overall I think that preccommitment would have been a terrible idea for me.
Btw, re: the demarcation criterion, y'all might enjoy Feyerabend's *Against Method*: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method>.
> Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge is a 1975 book by Austrian-born philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend. The central thesis of the book is that science should become an anarchic enterprise. In the context of the work, the term "anarchy" refers to epistemological anarchy, which does not remain within one single prescriptive scientific method on the grounds that any such method would restrict scientific progress. The work is notable in the history and philosophy of science partially due to its detailed case study of Galileo’s hypothesis that the earth rotates on its axis and has since become a staple reading in introduction to philosophy of science courses at undergraduate and graduate levels.
Eh, this feels wrong for the exact reasons the earlier post didn't.
I mean, I assume we don't really disagree about what the correct heuristics are, I just think the formulation in section IV is actually pretty bad advice, for a few reasons, mostly boiling down to omission of important concepts, and filling the resulting holes with exactly the kinds of superficial appeals to authority that the previous post correctly railed against.
To name two of those concepts (while not claiming the list is exhaustive):
1. Agnosticism. That's one thing the advice does right, though it's probably not going far enough. You don't need to have an opinion, period. I realize that it may be unintuitive for most, maybe even goes contrary to basic human instinct, but once you grasp the concept, it really solves most of your epistemic problems. We know nothing, all we do is just heuristics, something something bayesian reasoning. This doesn't mean treating all claims equally, like the common caricature would paint it (a caricature traditionally pushed by people insisting you really, really need to have an opinion about god in particular). It means separating knowledge from common sense judgement, and defaulting to the latter in lieu of the former. (And of course the knowledge that's actually available to us is not fundamental truths about reality, but a careful experimental measure and examination of it. I guess understanding how limited and difficult acquiring even this sort of knowledge is is what the "30 and graduate degree" ballpark is gesturing towards, but agnosticism lets you get there without using meaningless, alienating, exclusionary markers like age and credentials.) Defaulting, instead of committing. Assume the scientific consensus is built on the hard work of people who did said hard work while you didn't, but be ready to ditch it without regret whenever reality starts contradicting it. (Also, within the wide concept of science itself, put more trust in things with practical applications you can witness everyday over purely academic theorizing.)
2. Motivated reasoning. The naive "intellect" position may treat conspiracy theories the same way as scientific theories. Fine. Let me propose a slightly more sophisticated version that separates the reasoning about factual claims from reasoning about the process of establishing their validity. Whether ivermectin treats COVID is a valid factual question. (As is the existence of Atlantis, etc.) We're only getting in a conspiracy theory territory once we start arguing whether scientific institutions are unfairly rejecting it. But of course whether scientific institutions are unfairly rejecting things is also a valid factual question, right? Yes, in isolation. Hence, motivated reasoning is what one should be on the lookout for. "Scientific institutions are unfairly rejecting things, scientific institutions reject ivermectin, hence, you should update in favor of ivermectin" is the moment to NOPE out of the conversation, and this alone should guard you from conspiracy theorizing without having to throw out the correct intellectual position towards the purely factual questions out with the bathwater. {Edit: I realized belatedly that the preceding example is less convincing that it could be, so this needs an addendum that the reasoning applies equally well to "Scientific institutions use flawed heuristics, here's my argument for why small studies are more trustworthy than big studies, therefore you should update in favor of ivermectin". Still NOPE, and still can be rejected without committing on factual claims - both whether ivermectin works against COVID and whether scientific heuristics are flawed.} "Doctors don't want you to know about [miracle treatment]" IS a separate theory from "[treatment] has [benefits]", and nothing should prevent you from being open-minded (though skeptical, because agnosticism) about the latter while forcibly rejecting the former. (As a bonus, you can, and, empirically, probably should, reject all arguments from authority of science. This is not the same as rejecting science, if you don't know what science says, you still don't know after hearing someone make overly confident claims about it. If it matters, learn what it actually says. If it doesn't, well, it really is safe to just ignore what you've heard altogether.)
Talking about "conspiracy theories" makes it sound like this is just relevant to Pizzagate and Illuminati, but your arguments sound quite relevant for normal questions like "should I look into fasting/sauna/weightlifting/Peter Attia even though it's not strongly recommended by my country's health agency?"
>At what point in this process - which second of which day - did it switch from plausible-but-false scientific theory to conspiracy theory?
Part of the issue is that it was probably both at the same time, in a sense.
Ie, at the same time, there were both doctors who had read the relevant studies and thought it was mildly likely to have a moderate beneficial impact in reducing time to cleared infection and overall mortality (or w/e), and political partisans online convinced it's a complete cure that means no one should ever need to take a vaccine and the government is covering it up so they can implant microchips in mandatory vaccines and stretch out the lockdown measures they're using to control the world.
Or whatever.
That's part of the issue here - 'Are these rock formations natural or man-made' is a pretty binary question, but many conspiracy theories are clusters of beliefs and paradigms with many different possible versions.
'Belief that ivermectin works for Covid' is an underdetermined description; there are versions of that belief that were reasonable at the time, and versions that were stupid or insane. And part of the fear (across all aspects of the culture war, really) is that anything supportive you say towards the reasonable version, will be taken as support and confirmation of the insane version.
(Similar for the 'human biodiversity' point - 'At a population average level, Ashkenazi jews have a small heritable advantage on IQ test versus the global average' is a very different belief from 'all black people are genetically inferior in terms of intelligence and civility to all white people worldwide, and this fact entirely explains all wealth disparities and crime statistics and is why you social welfare and diversity programs are pointless and destructive and why you should just not let them into your country to begin with' are, again, very different beliefs, but there is an entire cottage industry devoted to taking support for one of those ideas and applying it to the political project of the other one)
Re: the chess piece illusion: this is always a funny example to me because the chess pieces actually are different, whenever people use it online. Not out of malice, but out of the way image compression algorithms and contrast calibration on monitors and so forth make subtle changes to images.
There *is* a real version of the illusion that you can see on paper, and it does still work, but the effect is much weaker than what you see here.
By the time the real paper version has been scanned into a file, resized and changed image formats a few times, compressed, optimized for web, and displayed on your backlit monitor, the original symmetry between the pieces has been lost and they're actually just different.
actually, the chess pieces in the file are still almost equal, as can be seen in the following video that superposes the "white" pieces on the "black" (and vice-versa)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kY4VVfVnKlA
"Conspiracy theory" is the wrong label. The correct category is "belief contrary to the current scientific orthodoxy." It doesn't have to depend on a conspiracy — the orthodoxy might be wrong for a non-conspiratorial reason, as I think was true of both Ptolemaic astronomy and the orthodox view of ulcers that Barry Marshal refuted. And some conspiracy theories are part of the orthodoxy — there was an international communist conspiracy, arguably at least two of them, Stalinist and Trotsyite — and the French resistance against the Nazis was a conspiracy.
Re: Scott Aaronson
> As a matter of survival, I *have* to adopt a Kavanagh-like heuristic: “this person seems like an idiot.”
That's perfectly reasonable to do *sometimes*, because you don't have to debunk every conspiracy theorist *yourself*, we should instead cultivate a community whose collective goal is to perform factual analyses on these questions. This seems like the obvious takeaway from Scott's last post on this.
He lamented that he could not find *anyone* discussing what looks like relevant evidence *except* conspiracy theorists. It seems clear that Scott's last post was railing against the collective dismissal of even having to discuss what looks like relevant evidence, not against so-and-so specifically not addressing that evidence.
Scott quotes a commenter named Alexander:
> 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.
I once read about a proposal to change how high school science classes are taught in the US. The most common way of teaching high school science is to lead with experimental results (i.e. accepted facts) and have students do a few experiments along the way.
The proposal was to reverse this, by leading with students doing experiments, and only consolidating students' knowledge about the results afterward. I think it was meant to encourage students to understand 'science' as methodology, not accumulated experimental results.
Would this alternative way of teaching lead to students decreasing their priors on experimental results being true?
Hopefully not, and it’s a good point. The most outlandish conspiracy theories are completely unreasonable, but I don’t think believing them is a failure of reason . It’s a form of emotional disregulation.
"how an extremely pointless question - whether Abu Bakr or Ali should have been political leader of the Arabian empire in 632 AD - produced the Sunni/Shia split . . ." I've loved Scott's work and his online persona for a good while now. But this is . . . it's not good. Why not apply some of the humility and humanity that are among the glories of his work to this question--or just leave it alone? The fact that such huge consequences grew from such an apparently small thing--and surely there is room for the possibility that this perception is an illusion of ours, not that of the people there at the time--should inspire genuine and patient curiosity, not scorn. Granted, no one has time for everything, but then perhaps a respectful avoidance is best--unless you want to proclaim the equivalent for this issue of "only fools and racists believe in Atlantis"--"only fools and tedious academics think that the Sunni/Shia split is anything other than a pure waste of time." The rationalist project can impart real enlightenment, but belittling huge ranges of the human experience isn't part of that.
To put it another way, perhaps one should ask why the particular scissors statement--should Abu Bakr or Ali be the Prophet's successor--mattered so much at that particular place and time and why it has continued to matter--without just using rationalist categories to impoverish and then jeer at the whole issue. I'm sure this objection is familiar to rationalists; but that doesn't mean that's not precisely what is being done here.
And how would you have felt if he talked about pointless disputes over transubstantiation leading to various Protestant splits?
In principle, I would feel the same. The Sunni-Shia split is more interesting to me, but the principle is the same. Why wouldn't it be?
Well, just because some people are against any criticism being applied to brown people like Muslims, but not against such criticisms being applied to white people like Christians. I wasn't sure if your issue with him calling the Sunni/Shia debate and split "pointless" was an idpol thing.
I understand your concern. But no, there's no idpol agenda, nor a religious allegiance at stake (as I wrote in my reply to Deiseach below), nor some other personal indentification (like, "The reason it mattered was because Ali was AWESOME!") of that sort. And, like I said, no one can pay due attention to every subject matter (which is why, in the case of Ivermectin, we can be glad that Scott did it for us, and keeps us informed with a fair analysis of the positions against his, etc.).
Cool, makes sense
Seeing as how I have very strong beliefs around that (1) yes, there is room for debate (2) yes, the Scholastic categories are only human constructs to grapple with the mystery (3) well the Protestants, who were all standing on "the plain, clear, evident word of the Gospels" found very quickly that the word wasn't so plain, clear and evident when they came to debate the Lord's Supper (4) given all that, I believe what the Church teaches and am only glad that at least Scott isn't doing a P.Z. Myers to show how much he thinks it's dumb and pointless:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av8CCueUbXo
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:z8p14mkJo7cJ:https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427360-900-p-z-myers-mild-mannered-scourge-of-creationists/&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie
"Myers practices what he preaches. In perhaps his most notorious stunt, he pierced a Catholic Eucharist wafer with a rusty nail and threw it in the trash, along with some coffee grounds, a banana peel, a few pages each of the Koran and Richard Dawkins’s atheist manifesto, The God Delusion, just to show he had no reverence for his own doctrine, either. Myers commenced “The Great Desecration”, as he called it, in support of a college student at the University of Central Florida who “stole” a consecrated communion wafer, which devout Catholics believe is the actual body of Christ, from a mass. For this, the student was met with threats and his actions were compared by some to kidnapping."
The Reformation was a complex tangle of both political, secular power struggles and religious, theological struggles and religious, authority, struggles. It didn't happen all at once, pow! and had a long history of various movements in preceding centuries which contributed to it.
I've seen lackwits online defending the Albigensians, when I am fairly sure they know damn-all about the Albigensians and only heard of it as 'bac Catholic church versus independent thinking'. Indeed, in the most recent instance I've seen, I'm pretty sure the person doesn't think the Albigensians *were* Christians, given the terms they put it in (Christianity invented human rights abuses) and I think the Albigensians would claim to be Christian, and indeed the only correct form of Christianity.
Okay, getting back to the point: how would I feel? That he was adopting the modern secular understanding of how religion is all about feelings and is a private matter for each individual who can make it up as they go along, and that he did not understand the history or underlying principles and why it all mattered. In other words, he was misinformed.
Um. Just so my point doesn't get lost, I was not making an argument in defense of religion as such, nor as an attack on rationalism as such, nor do I have any religious beliefs or allegiances at stake in the matter. My concern was that of a historian. I'm interested in human experience and humans' social/political/psychological life together. Referring back to the original problem I was discussing, it seems to me that understanding humans is not furthered in any major or satisfying way by dismissing a huge portion of human historical experience as simply a cognitive goof or category error, and we're done. Some sort of curiosity is necessary about why they found the issues important. That's my principle.
It’s almost futile to try to clip a quote from this because practically every sentence is quotable gold. Or possibly (outside view) it feels so good to read because it confirms my existing beliefs. Anyway I’m gonna leave that knot unresolved, with a strong prior most of it is probably true.
> Is it possible that most of the standard arguments against the idea are dumb and flawed, but the idea really is false?
I liked this one a lot. It's so easy (for me) to fall for something when you can refute the standard arguments and feel a smart and superior contrarian.
One thing I’ve learned from years of following the skeptic movement (rationalism’s grumpy uncle) is that people make stuff up ALL THE TIME then double down when challenged, then double down again ad infinitum. After a couple decades of reading and witnessing this outrageous claim cycle, the skeptic develops a sort of reflexive, well… skepticism that serves well. It’s not fun to be the party-pooper whenever a new story comes up. Ivermectin doesn’t work because most everything like that doesn’t work. A huge % of new cancer drugs don’t pan out, but it’s painful to rain on hopeful people’s parades. I think rationalists can be a bit wishful (I didn’t say naive) in thinking they can reason with confidence men who just make stuff up. But if Randi taught us anything , it’s that charlatans are real and there’s no depth to which they will not stoop. Uh-oh, that brings me full circle since Randi, like Scott, took the time to carefully and publicly debunk the woo peddlers - I didn’t know that’s where this comment was headed. Amazing.
Another thing. You said, “ when people do formal anonymous surveys of IQ scientists, they find that most of them believe different races have different IQs and that a substantial portion of the difference is genetic.”. This may have already been addressed in the comments, but when I followed the link to your 2017 post, you talked about the expert consensus around the utility of IQ testing, NOT the heritability of IQ. Did you choose the wrong link?
It's written in a subtle way. He says:
> Even things about genetic psychological differences between population groups are less bold and maverick-y than their proponents like to think. The relevant surveys I know trying to elicit scientific consensus (1, 2, 3) all find that, when asked anonymously, most scientists think these differences explain about 25% – 50% of variance.
There are three links - two scientific papers and a blog post[1][2][3]. The first scientific paper says "Around 90% of experts believed that genes had at least some influence on cross-national differences in cognitive ability." The second says "There is overwhelming support for a significant within-group heritability for IQ, and a majority of respondents feel that black-white and socio-economic status IQ differences are also partially hereditary." I don't see where 25-50% comes from (but I spent little time looking for it).
Note: "heritability" is a tricky concept to use correctly; consider that in the 1950s, "wearing earrings" was entirely heritable because it was predicted by genetic gender.[4] Also, Wikipedia states that "the scientific consensus is that there is no evidence for a genetic component behind IQ differences between racial groups"[5].
I am not sure what to make of the difference between Wikipedia and these papers, but there was recently a tempest in EA circles around Nick Bostrom's apology for a super cringe thing he said decades ago. Many people treated him as if he were some kind of white supremacist just for *not having an opinion* about whether there was any genetic race-IQ link, in his apology. So for Scott to just come out and disagree with Wikipedia on this (almost as a throwaway line, in an article that isn't about this topic) strikes me as unwise. Making this blunder even bigger, he links to his own blog rather than to scientific papers directly. As for me, I have not studied this topic enough to have an opinion.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4804158/
[2] https://lepo.it.da.ut.ee/~spihlap/snyderman@rothman.pdf
[3] https://www.unz.com/jthompson/isir-what-do-intelligence-researchers/
[4] https://www.robertsapolskyrocks.com/behavioral-genetics-ii.html
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
The Fideist position argues that Scott is doing more harm than good by giving Ivermectin the time of day. Putting the truth of that assertion aside, the point of this blog is evidently NOT to do the greatest possible good with each post -- and it never has been. If that were the case, based on Scott's own values, every single post should be about existential risk from AI. He even wrote an enormous blogpost giving reactionary philosophy a fair shake. I suspect the people who oppose Ivermectin usage would mostly agree that reactionary philosophy is a much greater danger than the drug (which merely doesn't seem to help in first-world cases).
Of course, you could argue that this blog would probably have less reach if it were a never-ending AI ex-risk tirade. That would put us in the realm of multi-period optimization, where greedy algorithms like "do the most good with each post" are insufficient. You could then pursue a multi-pronged strategy, where you write some posts about controversial topics to drive readership and sprinkle in things you really care about in between -- like AI ex-risk. Of course, your treatment of the controversial topics would need to be very even-handed. You need to build up good will so that people will trust you about the things that matter. You can't simply delegate to the experts, because on the thing you care about most, you may disagree with them -- so you need a nice track record of disagreeing productively with the academy.
Once you see the blog topic as a global optimization, the decision to write about Ivermectin is pretty easy. It's a controversial topic, so it will drive a ton of readership. There's a lot of content on both sides of the issue, so you can flex your analytical muscles in a way you can't with other controversial topics like "the social safety net". It's also timely, making the article extremely urgent to write. The analysis of other controversial issues can wait, because they're not going anywhere. You can use the increased readership and reputation in a number of even more positive ways down the line. The positive effects from using the readership to tackle AI ex-risk will overcome whatever small credence you have lent to Ivermectin.
Also consider the type of reader that you are alienating with this strategy -- the fideists. They are basically a worthless readership. Almost all of legacy media is fideist, so this is going to be a high-churn audience that you have to compete aggressively for. In addition, they're not very useful for whatever other goals you might have, because you can't get them to do anything unless the experts agree.
This might sound a bit cynical, but it need not be. The instrumental usefulness of writing about Ivermectin need not diminish any of the other good reasons to write about it, enumerated by Scott. The overlap of people who read ACX and at least _consider_ Ivermectin is significant and VERY poorly served by existing ways of making decisions. These are people who, for whatever reason, will not simply trust the expert consensus -- and I think Scott's analysis helps them. I wonder if the detractors actually think that Scott's series caused any Ivermectin-related injury. It sounds like they are simply annoyed by the spam, which is always going to be a conflict of interest between media and people.
Nice.
Zvi has, in my opinion, the absolutely perfect take on this whole thing, Scott: In short, that (while you may have ultimately been too harsh on *Kavanagh specifically*) your original take is just about spot-on, and your revision—basically "trust the authorities unless you have really good reason not to"—goes way too far in the other direction. https://open.substack.com/pub/thezvi/p/on-investigating-conspiracy-theories?r=4bfc3&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
For a first approximation: Check Scott. Check Zvi. Check their blogrolls - though some link to risky stuff - if all falis: Check Matthew Yglesias and Wikipedia. Nyt: for entertainment. Substackers have skin in the game: their Reputation is on the line.
For a first approximation: Check Scott. Check Zvi. Check their blogrolls - though some link to risky stuff - if all falis: Check Matthew Yglesias and Wikipedia. Nyt: for entertainment. Substackers have skin in the game: their Reputation is on the line.
"Which second of the day"? Not sure what point (humorous or otherwise) you intend to make here. Lakatos view of demarcation would be that with previous positive studies being discredited, there was a point (defined by a particular new and better study in a series of studies) when the theory became degenerating. The protective belt of study methodological issues can no longer protect the core theory that the drug works. I doubt that "second" is all that murky.