See you over by the sweet spot - betwixt conjectural bluster and doctrinaire conformity
Reflections on self-honesty, proportionate scepticism and why I land where I do on shouty topics
Upfront it's worth warning that this turned into an epic. Especially if you follow the links (it's really built around them).
It begins with some thoughts about so-called conspiracy thinking and veers into a wider exploration of how hard it is to navigate the entire information landscape at this point. And how I’ve ended up doing it. It’s also about being human in a machine world.
There's plenty before the paywall for free readers. For everyone else, maybe spend a while dipping in and out of this one over time. In the end, it's a whole series of recommendations for enquiry, with bits of personal commentary in between.
[nb this is way too long for the usual email format, so when it cuts off you'll have to navigate to the web version by clicking on the heading]
Spoiler/TL;DR: there are very good reasons to mistrust 'authorities', no magic bullets and - sorry - no solutions that don't begin with self-knowledge and personal responsibility.
On truth-seekers and sheeple
Many people believe that they wish us harm. Perhaps they have formed a plot to kill us with a vaccine that purports to make us safer. Or they were so eager to make money that they just got reckless about testing it and now choose to cover up their complicity in death and other harms.
Another significant minority belief is that they want to make us poorer and have invented a problem called climate change to do it. It's designed to cost us all a lot of money to fix, or just to stop us from having things we want.
It's common for these kind of belief sets to be labelled as 'conspiracy theories', although there are rational reasons to believe them. It's reasonable in a technical sense, to call them conspiracies, because they implicitly hang on there being bad actors conspiring to hoodwink or harm the rest of us, instead of being upfront about what's really happening.
In the context of this piece a conspiracy belief set is defined in the following limited way;
Belief that one has reliable knowledge of something not recognised as valid by information providers who lean toward doctrine and that this knowledge is being suppressed or dishonestly contested/denied by people who wish us harm.
This distinguishes certain more important controversies from ideas such as the flat earth, suppressed knowledge of ancient civilisations, alien abductions, faked moon landings and so on.
In those cases the conspiracy is mostly about a fascinating truth hidden by vested interests. Like, perhaps, archaeologists who would be embarrassed to have to abandon the conclusions from a couple of centuries of painstaking work.
Where or not they're 'true' might be interesting but what this piece looks at is how we approach thinking about them.
How do we personally end up occupying the poles they generate - and what the middle ground looks like. So let's go.
Disclosures (personal prejudices and preferences)
Perhaps predictably, I tend to occupy a liminal space in the world and on this Stack, between oppositional poles.
From this vantage point I tend to think that most of the proponents on both sides of every issue are basically decent, sincere people, motivated in similar ways and similarly flawed. I share their motivations and flaws.
The story that each side tells probably reveals as much about themselves and how we all react to today's information glut as they relate to actual facts.
How I observe these poles makes me reflect on my own information processing, biases and reactions.
[To label the poles I'll borrow the terms 'Thesis' and 'Antithesis'. Where thesis means a broadly consensus position with the property of cultural heft (where establishment and social media mostly reflect the viewpoint). And antithesis is a passionately advanced contra narrative.]
You can call them mainstream vs dissident/heterodox, but I don't much like how those adjectives colour things.
Like everyone, I'm somewhat reactive to the ways of others and often judgemental.
I don't like it when I see the antithesis view rejected on the basis that people who believe it are stupid or unhinged.
It might sometimes be a fair assessment, but often those people are obviously not stupid or unhinged.
Discounting people on grounds of intelligence or sanity rarely gets you closer to reality. Pathologising folk for believing something when you don't understand how they got there seems like a thought-stopping move. A kind of avoidant behaviour.
I've believed and then not believed many things during my life. I was no more or less stupid or eccentric in my 'true' ghost story and Ufology phases long ago than I am today. Intelligence or soundness of mind were never the issue. Self-knowledge was.
I prefer to understand why than to know what, a lot of the time. Which is why I gave up on 'the news' as a succession of data points that just ended up seeming like noise.
Rather than taking a nihilistic position in which there are no knowable truths, I'm avidly attached to the notion that there is a reality independent of what we perceive or think. That's one of the reasons I dislike the relativism of much postmodern, post-materialist theorising.
Those are my prejudices and priors. I come at almost nothing without those colouring the approach.
The point is that we all come at things in particular ways. A lifetime of being that way inevitably leads us to feel confident that we've nailed how to know things.
Understanding begins at home.
Knowing yourself sounds glib and obvious, but it's pretty damned hard1
Admitting your underlying predilections sounds blindingly obvious as a step toward not being wrong about things. But it isn't always easy, because self-awareness only tends to come with intention and practice, rather than being inherent.
The cruel trick nature plays on us here is that you don't know what you don't know. So you don't know that you aren't self-aware. Read Flatland to visualise this, but swap the geometry for ways of being in the world.
It takes practice and a kind of discipline to keep yourself honest. You have to be ready to admit things that most of the people around you wouldn't.
There are no external rewards for self-knowledge. You have to want it for its intrinsic value alone.
The harsh reality is that even if you think you know why you're tippy tapping those queries into a search engine to prove or disconfirm something, there's a good chance that you really don't.
No wonder everyone accuses everyone else of confirmation bias.
I practice noticing what I'm really up to all the time and it's wild. But each time I realise that I'm trying to prove something because it suits me, I'm happy about it. I know not to trust myself.
Recently I suddenly realised that having four Covid vaccines under the hood could get scary if they did turn out to be as commonly harmful as some people keep saying. Then I caught myself looking for debunks on those claims. Even though I normally won't give debunking the time of day, since it has typically become an ideological tool.
So I stopped Googling vaccine safety and went back to being interested in the tone of whatever passes for debate on the subject.
Of course, I recognise that you aren't like this because you are purely evidence-led.
You've looked it all up and those vaccine sceptics are just idiots. OK.
Or…
You keep finding new information that supports your contention that a crime is being committed against humanity. OK.
I feel you. Honestly, I do.
You can't kid a kidder.
But what about the wrong evidence? Don't we have a duty to resist it?
At one time I became I tiny 'name' in the field of 'disinformation' and advising on how to spot it.
I was a parvenu and there were a lot of us suddenly, with our long Twitter threads bandying around words like 'Opsec', 'bots', 'hybrid warfare', 'astroturfing' and so on.
Mentions in mainstream media, an international conference keynote, thousands of Twitter followers and bits of journalism came my way. It was lucrative and I don't regret any of it, even if there's much I thought and said then that I wouldn't stand by today. Not that I said anything that was false, as such. It’s just that I was participating in a moral panic by blowing some things out of proportion.
Then came an epiphany that longtime readers already know about. That everyone was treating 'disinformation' as a supply-side challenge when really it's a demand-side phenomenon.
This is why 'fact-checking' is a largely idle pursuit when it comes to correcting what you see as people's misapprehensions. There's also plenty else going on in the 'fact-checking' industry. Most of which isn't really about 'the facts' as such.
Of course there are facts which are separate from fiction. But it's easy to misinform and mislead without ever resorting to fiction. Establishment media in particular works like this all the time. And so do people who specialise in antithesis narratives.
Wake up, sheeple - no, you wake up, post-truth morons
The trouble is, there's almost always a grain of truth in these archetypes.
Some of us really do find our comfortable place in alignment with doctrine and some of us love to feel ourselves to be especially insightful outsiders. One side prefers not to go against the grain, while the other makes a point of it.
My preferred place is the space between. Glancing askance at each, wondering what's really happening, what's fundamentally at stake and why it matters so much to them both.
The only thing I'm generally confident about is that something is going on that's more interesting than one lot being cleverer than the other lot.
Sometimes it's nothing more than different evidence assessment and processing styles, coupled with feelings.
Scott Alexander identifies anomalous data in particular as a point of divergence. There's always some anomalous data, after all. Those often become the really compelling data for some people. And if your approach to evidence is coloured by feelings, expect to be steered in quite obvious ways.
People are mostly just trying to make sense of the world while having feelings.
A problem is that everyone thinks they know what being rational is too.
Once we had the word of God to tell us how the world works and we fought over which God was right. Then we ditched that in favour of making observations of nature and basing predictions on that. Now we fight over which observations are right and whether the resulting predictions are too.
Even more so, we fight over which observations (which inevitably lead to predictions - and ultimately public policies) are relevant.
If you think you know what's relevant in any given area and what's not, good luck to you.
John Vervaeke calls this problem relevance realisation and I recommend diving into his work, because it goes to the heart of how we fail so often to find common ground on things that feel obvious to us.
Like many things we take for granted it's interesting to step back and look afresh at relevance. We've all grown up thinking we know how to sift the epistemic wheat from the chaff. But Vervaeke breaks it down and also reveals the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Go there. It's worth your time.
We've all encountered the relevance problem in the case of pattern recognition, as a cognitive feature that varies quite wildly from person to person. I know someone who places great stock in pattern recognition. She and her friends find patterns all over the place.
For example, she informed me that when the Ever Given ran aground and blocked the Suez Canal it was probably because some Egyptian mummies had been moved from their original tombs. The disruption was a kind of payback for a sacrilegious act. The timing and locations formed a pattern for her.
She is not a stupid person. She's enviably accomplished and successful in a field that requires high intelligence, dilligent data gathering, sifting, sorting and presentation in published writing. She writes books, not blogs. She also processes certain information quite dramatically differently to me.
I indulged my love of people knowing how shit works porn by reading the blow-by-blow account of the incident in Popular Mechanics.
Then I realised that it didn't prove my friend wrong. She just has a different frame. A story-based frame. I prefer falsifiable accounts of what's going on and angry ancestral spirit energies are, at least currently, unfalsifiable.
But God, these people are morons doesn't work for me. I like her story. I see how it introduces meaning into a world that was largely shorn of meaning when materialist reductionism replaced religious faith.
A pet theory I ponder is that there is often a perceived cost in acknowledging other possibilities, especially ones we feel to be outlandish. The cost is perhaps a perceived threat to identity. A fear that one is somehow lessened by others thinking what they do. Hence the vehemence or contempt with which some people react.
I am a materialist rationalist and if your story about angry mummies were true it would be bad for me. So I cannot be neutral about this.
This is where I think emotional reactivity enters the frame, when we're juggling with complex epistemology. It begins with fear that gets expressed as anger and sneering contempt. We identify in totalising ways. In a very real sense some notions are offensive because they threaten our very being.
This is also possibly why we update our beliefs so rarely. If you change your mind on something that you always identified as core to you, in some way, it might mean that something more than just an idea is lost.
Why else would people be so scornful about it when other people wear N95 masks to the shops? Because, perhaps, at some level it's weirdly invalidating of your sense of self. If you don't think masks offer any benefit to the wearer or the people around them, someone minding their own business with their mask on is disrespecting you and your superior grasp on reality.
So here's a thin hypothesis; it takes more than 'good' facts to change your mind or find equanimity with uncertainty. It takes a secure sense of self.
My intuitions on this turn out to be somewhat unoriginal. I'll take the validation.
In the end, all this seems to be about the difference between wisdom and knowledge. You can spend a lifetime accumulating facts and still know nothing that matters for a good life. You can know more than anyone around you about how the world works mechanistically and still remain bereft of meaning.
When Voltaire said that we should tend to our gardens ("cultivons notre jardin"), he wasn't being flippant.
There's an oft invoked dichotomy between being right or being happy, which seems relevant. It's tangentially explored by Rob Henderson in his wonderful piece The Happiness-Accuracy Tradeoff and the Limits of Rationality.
My personal takeaway, after three or so years of reading and thinking around these issues, is that totalising is bad for the world and and bad for you. I can also see how it might be comforting and suspect that a lot of what looks like discourse is actually people talking to themselves. Reinforcing something for themselves.
Blaming the system is fun. Recognising how you operate in the system is more fun.
Various features of 'the system' and 'the culture' are often blamed for the dysfunction we experience.
My internal picture of 'the system' and 'the culture' looks like this:
Internet + information proliferation + hegemonic doctrine + moral Right Think + fetishisation of credentials + low trust + really bad leadership + perverse incentives + desire for certainty + terrible education + parasocial bonding = big narrative arc club formations, a lot like religions, led by prophets who promise a one true path that doesn't exist.
Of these, trust in authority may be the clincher. And you'd have to be living under the proverbial rock not to recognise how this mistrust has been earned.
I speculate that three factors lie at the heart of this, which interact in unhelpful ways and lead to a form of epistemic anarchy. They're very human weaknesses.
Our desire for certainty (have I ever mentioned this?)
Profoundly poor top-down communication (which seems to be a manifestation of credentialed class 'elite' entitlement)
Educational failure (when were you ever taught how to think rather than what to think?)
Let's contrast two totalising propositions, familiar to everyone.
You can't trust anything that consensus science says because <insert examples of favoured theories turning out to be incorrect or various examples of scientific malfeasance >
Not accepting consensus science is irrational, stupid and spells the end of the Enlightenment
The first is essentially the view you come to after lots of cherry-picking. The second is scientism as a faith.
One is common in the Covid vaccines and climate change arguments. It involves choosing the 'real' science (the science you like best) over all the other science.
The other, at its heart, is an argument from authority. It's effectively stay in your lane and leave it to us/them.
Both are argumentative fallacies of the cognitive or logical kind and they each lead, as often as not, either to conjectural bluster or a kind of doubling down petulant incuriosity.
Yet they're both entirely understandable as well as being broadly equivalent in dogmatic quality. Cherry picking is an infuriating phenomenon. But so too is the failure to acknowledge that science and being rational is not a panacea.
An argument that relies, for example, on appealing to the existence of a process called 'peer review' as a guarantee of quality fails to impress anyone who has made more than the most cursory investigation of how peer review works.
Insofar as I have 'faith' in anything, the scientific method is right at the top of my trust hierarchy. And yet even I know that peer review is (as Churchill said of democracy) the worst possible way of guaranteeing the highest quality of research apart from all the other methods anyone has come up with. Some professional researchers I follow despair of the biases inherent in their own fields. They are scientists who don't like a big part of the way science is done.
It's common to hear peer review cited sententiously as why you should trust what gets past it, only to see an argument that says but not THAT peer review.
Those in the know have been worrying about the state of peer review for years. Yet I've never seen this mentioned anywhere outside of niche media. Like many things, a good concept doesn't always translate into a good process.
The point here isn't that a method that is often not fit for purpose means that we can reasonably reject scientific endeavour in general. That's just the flattening and totalising desire for certainty at work again.
But promoters of a perspective that demands passive deference to 'science' need to realise that the argument from authority won't cut it for a growing number of people who can read.
This includes those of us who also recognise well-documented problems like publication bias, the replication crisis and all the incentives, imperfections and frailties of the humans we label 'scientists' yet still refuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
When you don't respect people who refuse to defer, you get what you deserve. This now happens at scale and so-called 'science communicators' and their media allies have basically asked for it.
Then there's establishment media. Another basically sound source that has deservedly - but also unfortunately - lost its authoritative status.
Anyone who spends too much time online knows that journalists are rejected as a class, in certain quarters, as if one necessarily requires a quality of malevolence to be one. Unless, of course, you're someone like Glenn Greenwald (who I also have a lot of time for). Then you're the one true journalist. Or any of the other 'heterodox' voices who also happen to be genuine journalists rather than, say, YouTubers and bloggers.
The reasons are well-documented and, by now I'd hope, too familiar to relitigate here.
Few entities in authority seem interested in earning trust. They all focus on ensuring their in-group audiences double down on their existing loyalties. This leaves those of us who are not content with deferentially falling into line to navigate our natural and growing mistrust more or less alone.
This is resulting in some good work, of late. It's a relief to see that others have noticed the dearth of solutions being offered by those who complain endlessly about media bias, beyond DON'T EVER TRUST ANYTHING THEY SAY.
Zvi Mowshowitz makes a valient attempt at applying the concept of 'bounded mistrust', that first surfaced in the rationalist community on lesswrong.com.
Zvi's effort is outlined here.
It references Scott Alexander (again) arguing that the media very rarely actually lies. Even Infowars isn’t necessarily making everything up. Believe it or not, you dissident haters of establishment media and you dogmatic ignorers of niche media, technically he appears to be right.
Both writers are tackled quite hard in their respective comments too, which is worth paying attention to.
Mention of Zvi's piece is not an endorsement of his conclusions so much as a celebration that some people are at last moving past the moaning and into the fraught territory of possible solutions.
I did take one thing from Zvi's piece, though, which was the concise gem;
"Read less news"
I think he's right. News is, after all, mostly just noise. And noise is not conducive to a clear head.
There's another tip that I liked in Luke Burgis's book on mimetic desire, 'Wanting'. There he suggests reading the news a week later, once ‘mimetic influence’ has waned.
By this he means the urge of the news outlets to ape each other and copy their 'models' (the people they are trying to emulate, which is typically the leadership class on their side of the aisle).
Here's a still unfolding example of where Burgess's advice is spot on.
It took at least a week for American media to stop reflexively arguing that confidential state papers turning up among President Biden's personal possessions was not the same at all as Trump hanging on to such papers.
Note that papers have continued turning up, since that piece was published.
Then again, while it may be comforting to reject all establishment media, doing so isn't really going to make you better informed. It will only make you differently informed. The different information you receive from niche operators can be fantastic. But that doesn't mean there's no value in the mainstream.
Perhaps the most striking defence of mainstream media I've ever seen landed recently.
For those who don't know of him, Richard Hanania is a provocative libertarian who (as he openly declares) loves to piss people off. He pisses off the right by constantly lamenting the 'stupidity' of the current conservative base in the US. He pisses off the left by arguing things like 'women's tears' are making everyone's life worse at work and elsewhere.
He's now shown himself to be an equal opportunities pisser offer by publishing this. Everyone who has rejected establishment media wholesale will struggle through this. I did too. But I also found it persuasive.
But I'm still sympathetic when intelligent and thoughtful people refuse to recognise any authority in mainstream/establishment/corporate media (call it what you will).
I understand what they see, because I see it too. Plus, I’ve been there, at the coalface.
There’s a relentless but subtle process of thought-shaping by news organisations that really do know better. Whether it's falsely captioning a photograph for use across the world or editorialising news reports, the personal positions of journalists are too often leaking through. We expect this of newspapers and websites that everyone knows have partisan leanings. We do not expect it of theoretically impartial news wire providers,
A personal bugbear is the use of 'baseless' to describe beliefs that have at least some basis, even if the basis is somewhat flimsy. Reuters and AP routinely and casually use this word all the time.
No compelling evidence of mass voting fraud has emerged from the US 2020 election, at least none that persuades me. But concerns about some of the legislation passed by Democrat administrations under the guise of Covid measures are obviously reasonable as some basis for questioning aspects of that election outcome.
'Baseless' is a word that does not belong in a news report. It is a colour word, rather than a factual reference. Anyone with a basic grasp of media language is seeing this every day and it inevitably kills trust in establishment news outlets.
As Scott Alexander's discussion of alien-built pyramid conspiracies indicates, it's genuinely rare for a belief to be entirely without foundation.
This is not to say that the foundation is strong. When people allege that Trump was the actual winner of the 2020 US election because something something voter fraud it is not baseless. It may not be true, but the claim has some basis and is therefore not baseless. What evidence there is of fraud is doubtless hyped and misinterpreted. But that evidence is a base. Like the speed of light coincidence in the dimensions of the Great Pyramid.
I dislike this approach by establishment media, on three grounds. One is that this kind of perfunctory smugness is just annoying in itself. Another is that it is technically inaccurate and misleading in places where technical accuracy and integrity belong. Finally, it's stupid. Because people can see it.
But then, many journalists at this point seem to be writing for each other as much as for anyone else. Which manifests all too often as social desirability bias.
Watch out for the manipulative power of popular buzz phrases
Back in 2016 I was pretty upset about the twin surprises of Brexit and Trump. That was a mild reaction. It led someone close to me onto Prozac.
Suddenly my social feeds and chosen establishment media sources were awash with a particular word; Authoritarianism.
There was a mood developing and I was gripped by it. Someone began posting a weekly series on Medium headed 'Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you'll remember'. This went on and on, detailing various things that Trump had said or done. Week after week.
It was designed to be portentous and frightening.
I loved it. It felt like I was in on something big. I'm always like this. While I'm predisposed to anxiety, that propensity is usually outweighed by a thrill of novelty.
Nuclear war threat escalation? Wow, that's so interesting. Rising sea levels wiping out half of London? Cooool, what will my native country look like then? That's me. (Curiously, I'm not like this at all about deforestation, dwindling biodiversity or species extinction though).
It's interesting to look back on those Medium pieces now. They are listicles of mostly asinine and inconsequential snippets, often amounting to nothing more than the sort of stupid things Trump was wont to tweet in his pomp. Like dunking on Newt Gingrich for questioning his likely success in 'draining the swamp'. Or agreeing with Putin that Hilary Clinton was a 'sore loser'.
This was apparently how we were going to end up with an authoritarian regime in the free world.
I now see it for what it is; shrill hysteria, qualitatively inseparable from claims that Covid vaccines are a crime against humanity.
So I understand how it feels to be hooked by this, because I've been there. It's scary, yet invigorating, to know that you're onto them. That you are part of a select group who knows and can therefore resist.
In-words always emerge for this purpose. They get used so much you stop questioning them.
Those of us who didn't support Brexit were steeped in this idea that it was an example of 'authoritarianism'. It wasn't. Brexit was a weird combination of factors, ranging from vainglorious nostalgia, through venal self-interest, despair, frustration and some genuine principles. It wasn't authoritarianism. In this way, certain words simply cease to be signal and become noise.
See, also, 'racist'.
'Conspiracy' is often used in the same way.
Calling something a 'conspiracy theory' can sometimes correctly convey that something relates to people conspiring to hide or do something. But mostly it's designed to invite mockery and dismissal.
It is now commonplace to argue that people who are suspicious about the agenda of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum are essentially barking at the moon because the WEF openly publishes its ideas on a website.
Haha! Those conspiracy cranks who think something underhand is afoot. And yet the WEF literally publishes it all for everyone to see.
It's interesting to read this, in Leighton Woodhouse and Michael Shellenberger's Public newsletter, keeping that perspective in mind.
As an aside (stealing my own comment on that piece) there's also a bitter irony here.
"Any suspicion that the elite class may not really have our interests at heart is to be pathologised rather than engaged with. Pretty much the definition of authoritarianism"
Wait, though. Are you just advocating a nihilistic epistemic anarchy in which 'true' and 'false' are redundant notions?
No. You may be much more capable of identifying the most salient information than I am, then processing it in ways that aren't flawed. If so, go for it and maybe tell me what you know to be definitely true about whatever complex and nuanced issue you happen to have totally nailed.
I have my own practice. What I do to circumvent the fact that I am incapable of finding, analysing and reaching conclusions about complex issues such as vaccine safety, climate science or whatever questions of material reality most vex large and passionate contingents of people.
Stand by for a disappointment.
I'm sorry for this. I really am. But it begins by not giving the finger to the people who don't think like you do. Or blaming 'the internet' or 'social media'. Or invoking vague terms like 'post-truth' (which, anyway, usually just means people adopting a view that I personally don't like).
These things are just contexts in which we operate. The internet cannot make you mistaken. Social media cannot make you a horrible, stupid person. You do not have to align with any cultural current if you don't want to.
It may be less entertaining than putting others down but where it all starts is with personal responsibility.
Which entails determined self-awareness. Not just about your typical reactions but your entire sense of self. How do you identify? Is your shoulder pushing hard against the barbarian hordes closing the door on the Enlightenment? Really? Do you see yourself as a torch bearer for freedom, opposing abhorrent injustices being committed in the name of public health? Really?
Do you feel a duty to speak out?
Try to let go of those things when it comes to epistemology. They're good and necessary values to carry, depending on who you are, but they don't reveal material truths.
That is the only possible way to begin knowing the difference between believing that you hold position X because that's where the weight of evidence lies and preferring that X is the case because that just feels better.
Be unafraid of groups. Especially your own.
This was illustrated in a comment about how the media operates, from an ACX reader (credit to 'Rosenkrantz'). It's a simple pointer for self-examination and also recognising how others operate.
start with the question of what would make writers feel good and validated and included in a community, and what they think will make their readers feel good and validated and included in a community. Being confronted with confounding truths or insights will eventually force many people to give up these emotionally rewarding world views (being right feels good too, especially about things that are actually part of your life and where correct beliefs will generate rewarding predictions, as opposed to things happening way over there in DC or the ancient alien past, where false beliefs tend to be cost-free)
But it seems to me that, with conspiracy theories, the truth is a secondary part of the story that merely exerts a contradictory pressure on what is most rewarding to believe.
Stop blaming 'the system'. My car can exceed any speed limit in France. When I get a ticket I don't blame the car or the laws of the road. When someone else gets a ticket I know how it happened. We all get tickets. We all think wrong things. It really is all about us.
If you think that the world should be run by technocrats who must be respected because that's better than a malthusian struggle between elements of the mob, fine. But know that you are coming at everything from a truly authoritarian perspective and recognise how that colours what you choose to respect as true or denigrate as false.
Go on then, genius, if science and media and every other authority is so flawed, what do you do?
That's right. All I can say is what I do. Not what you should do. In fact, I don't care what you do. I'll think no less of you if you spend your whole time on InfoWars or absorbing every word in The Guardian, as long as I don't have to.
This is more than just a glib aside.
In fact, I cannot stress enough that sneering and judging people for what they fear, hope, believe, like, hate, whatever, seems antithetical to feeling OK in the world. It's just not for me. When I catch myself doing it I always notice that my day isn't improved. And I didn't learn anything, except that maybe my ego was momentarily in need of a favourable comparison with another.
How do I deal personally with being confronted by two tribes implacably warring over whether something is a plot to kill us or a wonderful advance in lifesaving?
You're going to be disappointed. You'll want to judge me. You're going to want to tell me how wrong I am.
And I'm not going to care.
Because everything has to have a name, I'll call all this 'proportionate scepticism'.
My personal rule of thumb is a simple question - which would be the biggest shock?
It's naive and messy and I don't care that it wouldn't win a debate. It's the best I can do. It looks like this.
I won't be at all shocked when various assumptions that power the models of climate prediction turn out to be wrong.
Or next time someone reveals that no journals would publish their legitimate paper because it went against doctrine.
Or any number of things that will be advanced by genuine, good faith researchers in the field which will be seen by many as undermining the whole idea that humans can significantly influence the global climate in a bad way.
I won't be surprised whenever an update to the knowledge in this area supports the sceptics.
I will be incredibly shocked if it turns out to be a politically and financially motivated hoax.
I will be incredibly shocked if it turns out that the entire community of people who spend their lives trying to figure this stuff out turn out to have been too blinkered or cowardly to approach their work differently and speak out when they see bullshit becoming doctrine.
At the same time I'll continue to roll my eyes at the climate doomsday complex and wish that we could be treated as adults by all sides, but it will take more than a few fringe voices to get me excited about how the mainstream has got it totally wrong. I'll regard most climate scepticism in the same way as I see those who reject 'germ theory' and assume they're every bit as perversely incentivised toward their position as the people whose views they reject.
I'll also continue to assume that most of the measures that governments and establishment figures insist will successfully decarbonise our lives won't do much good and, in fact, will probably often cause as much harm as the thing they're designed to help with. Similarly to how I increasingly suspect that Covid lockdowns will turn out to have done more harm than good. While still seeing no reason to be sceptical that Covid-19 is a very bad disease that kills a lot of people.
It will take much more than amateur internet sleuths pulling out data about excess mortality to persuade me that they are statistically competent to extract causal relationships between vaccines and death.
I’ll continue to note that when several million people were recorded as Covid deaths, the sceptics insisted that they were dying with Covid, rather than from Covid. And that they have now abandoned this distinction, so that when people die with the vaccine, they are apparently dying from the vaccine.
At the same time I'll fully expect the likes of Pfizer to have been underhand and probably abjectly dishonest in many respects, because they have form.
And I'll continue to watch growing public surveillance on grounds of health and increased authoritarianism to exert control over the 'plebs' with dismay.
I will not take sides. They are all right about some things. And they are all wrong about some things.
I'll worry about having four lots of Pfizer and Moderna mRNA product in me when I - or someone in my orbit - shows signs of inexplicable health problems. Or when someone produces a tangible statistical risk number for being vaccinated that I can then compare with the risk of driving my car.
Until then, I'll focus on accepting that people will think what they think and that we all have our reasons. Which are often found within ourselves and generally don't include being stupid.
Some discursive concluding thoughts
These seem to be normal times. It's also a crisis, and I see all the evidence of that out there in the world.
Then again, people love talking about crises. It sells books and gets you onto podcasts.
Sure, lots of people broke into the America's Capitol building, milled around a bit, got rounded up and are now going through the courts. Many people in Brazil don't like a man jailed for fraud, who was released without being exonerated, winning an election by a margin of less than one per cent, so they stormed the congress building and will now go through the courts. Democracy isn't over, despite the fashion for saying so.
Also, storming buildings after election results you don't like is almost always BAD and is best not tolerated. If it happened in France I'd be nervous about what it portended.
People think things and some of them step across a line while most other people don't much care. It's business as usual, in 2023.
I don't know. My view swings, depending on the day. I'm OK with that.
These are good times, too, if you're curious. Really cool and weird things are surfacing all the time. Like the rise of the authoritarian centre. Or the rejection of biological reality by highly educated people. Identity becoming so important that there's literally a trend in pretending that you're BIPOC.
Mad stuff, like the word 'field' being deemed insensitive because something something slavery. Vast, entertaining narrative arcs about global networks of blood-drinking paedophile elites and a whole movement of people who want to engineer away death altogether. Each mad, in their own way.
I love being alive now. It really is mad. In a good way.
Big things are happening. There are more hyper objects than you can shake a stick at and we're all touched by them, whether we know it or not.
Covid seems to have upended Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations theory. Some of his carefully explicated axes of care/fairness and authority/sanctity ended up reversing the positions of right/conservative and left/liberal. Masks and Covid purity, along with Original Sin and ancestor worship are now left-coded. Who would have seen that coming.
At the same time, it's all plus ça change.
Conservative writers publish endless jeremiads about how everything is terrible, in much the same way they did when I was much younger. Leftists continue pursuing their social engineering visions and complain about Capitalism, man. Capitalism seems to continue to work better for improving more lives than any other system anyone has thought of. I'll continue to prefer the European version that helps the people who don't do so well under it.
There's much that I personally dislike about the direction of travel for many things. I'm suspicious of technological interference in privacy. And people going around with bionic brains are going to be quite annoying, I expect.
Also, I'd rather be living now than at any time in the past.
Not yearning for the future nor the past feels pretty good to me. I'm OK with it being today.
Problems will always arise when you have content for every niche and it's incredibly easy to become networked and start riling each other up. Things get amplified and 'hyper objects' create an ambient anxiety, fear and anger. It's terrible.
Also, I love that there is content for every niche and that I can be networked with so many cool people. Especially people who will probably hate a lot of what I've written here. It's great. I'm OK with it all.
I'll also keep thinking it's all terrible.
Then I'll remember that change is permanent and think about the dinosaurs and neanderthals and all the other things that came and went. I won't know what to really make of it and I'll wish that polar bears or orang utans could thrive. I'll live my life without being as reckless about the resources I consume as I once was.
We're on a ball of rock, hurtling toward certain eventual oblivion. Inflation, Twitter, vaccine trials, carbon targets, those entitled c*nts at Davos, whether or not you'll ever be happy while owning nothing, none of it will matter.
You will die, Klaus Schwab will die, Elon Musk will die, Donald Trump and Joe Biden will die, I will die, then all our successors will live and they'll still be droning on about how terrible everything is, while also just getting on with their lives. Then they'll die too.
Of course life is a serious business, really. But there's something here that I'm grasping for, perhaps not too successfully.
It's something about proportion. Or perspective. I don't know.
I just know that I no longer wish to conform to the rules. And that (I'm not being flippant) in a genuine sense, I love you all, whatever you think.
A tiny housekeeping matter
A reader comment on something I can’t remember now gave me pause. They observed in passing that capitalising certain phrases signals that you're writing for an in-group.
I do this all the time and have resolved to reduce it as much as possible. It's a cliched tic of the postmodern ironic tradition.
Some recent examples from RC are Serious People Who Wear White Coats (meaning scientists), Wrong Opinions (meaning views that are contested by the dominant - typically socially liberal - group) or Bad People (those who don't conform to mainstream views).
The trouble with this style of writing is that it comes across as self-consciously insisting that one is somehow above sincerity. Look how much of an outsider I am. Or see how I stand apart from the normies.
So I'm calling it. Ironic detachment is passé.
Two credits to Rebel Wisdom here. That was where I first encountered the notion of 'thesis' and 'antithesis'. And, although I'd already concluded that knowing yourself was a necessary precursor to knowing many things about the world it was satisfying to find Rebel Wisdom centring this idea. They seemed unique, when I first found them, in understanding that real 'sense making' only happens when you work to understand and monitor yourself. Like the best bands, who chose to retire before becoming irrelevant, Rebel Wisdom called it a day when they had said all they wanted. Fortunately their work lives on and you can find it at https://rebelwisdom.co.uk/
It's taken me some time figure out how to respond to this piece. I had to sit with it a while--still not 100% that I've worked out my thoughts, because as much as I love to see your breakdowns of the kind of psychological dysfunction that comes from (or results in?) ideological rigidity, I can't help feeling like there must be *more* on the far side of this process--more than the passivity of gently spinning in place, satisfied not to seek truth, and having given up on meaning entirely.
I have the intuition that to hold and nurture epistemic uncertainty should be something of an instrumental choice--something done consciously and willfully, in order to place oneself at the center of an ideological superposition where one can to effect maximum reach across many different ways of thinking. There might not be any real truth to be found in this world; maybe everyone needs to construct a truth of their own in order to ultimately feel okay existing at all. Of course, going about this requires wisdom and a pretty rock-solid moral center, of the sort that is difficult to actually establish when you've decided to put yourself in charge of delineating your own truth... No, I don't have a solution to the issue. We're operating on vibes here.
Might leave this thought half-finished, because it's been one of those days and I can't find the words to round it off. But thanks as always for the hard work you put into these pieces, Mike. (Hope I didn't lose the plot in the process of trying to digest a long-form essay; hope I haven't terribly misunderstood any of your points. What a fool I would feel like then!)