I thought your ivermectin post was great. It provided something more than just a dismissive, "the experts say ivermectin doesn't work so you shouldn't take it". There is an underprovision of writing for people who want more than a news article but don't want to spend a week ready peer reviewed publications.
He seems to resent people for being curious, in the same mold that the folks who criticize others for "just asking questions" seem to do: just because he's afraid they'll come to a conclusion he doesn't like. I think one consequence of this that he is missing that many of the questions people are asking have implications far beyond whatever narrow culture war issues he's caught up in.
Here he is complaining that people are trying to figure out how robust ChatGPT's guardrails are:
The most ridiculous line of Kavanagh's: “If studies had supported Ivermectin as an effective treatment it would have been adopted by medical and public health authorities.”
Evidently, Kavanagh's mental model is that authorities operate according to a neutral, objective rationality and are not subject to their own institutional biases. As if we did not see a very great deal during the pandemic that demonstrates the opposite.
This is all downstream of: Kavanagh thinks learning and understanding things is relatively easy, while Scott thinks learning and understanding things is very, very hard. Kavanagh sees the light blinking *Science*, and stops, while Scott never stops.
So perhaps I’m stupid and worthy of ridicule, but I *still* buy (a version of) Hancock’s theory. Hancock himself is not to be trusted; he’s far, far too credulous, and much of his evidence is easily rebutted (such as the frozen mammoth corpses in Siberia being evidence of a rapid climactic shift). But he doesn’t seem to be *dishonest,* and I found the case he presents in *Underworld* compelling. There, he doesn’t talk about Atlantis; instead he presents a picture of a near-world-girdling coastal civilization (or set of civilizations) that was drowned out at the end of the last ice age. This makes *tremendous* sense to me, and explains a lot that nothing else does, such as evidence of truly ancient cultural ties between South America and Africa.
Any thoughts on the difference between doing the Ivermectin analysis privately (and coming to whatever conclusion you decide but keeping it to yourself) versus posting the Ivermectin analysis as a public blog post? It seems like there should be some consideration of the fact that you cede the ability to be a neutral observer of the phenomena when you choose to discuss it in a public instead of a private medium.
Bret Devereaux linked a few weeks ago to this piece by Alexandra Sills making a related argument that academic historians need to engage with the general public more than they do. She even uses the same central example of having once believed in Atlantis, because that's what the sources who *did* want to engage the public plausibly argued.
"It is to escape from this conclusion that some philosophers, accepting as a principle the impotency of reason, have emphasized the need of belief on the part of human nature, either asserting the primacy of belief over reason or else affirming a radical separation between reason and belief, that is, between science and philosophy on the one hand and religion on the other. Such is the position taken by Kant, when he distinguishes between pure reason, confined to subjectivity, and practical reason, which alone is able to put us by an act of faith in relation with objective reality. It is also a fideistic attitude which is the occasion of agnosticism, of positivism, of pragmatism and other modern forms of anti-intellectualism. As against these views, it must be noted that authority, even the authority of God, cannot be the supreme criterion of certitude, and an act of faith cannot be the primary form of human knowledge. This authority, indeed, in order to be a motive of assent, must be previously acknowledged as being certainly valid; before we believe in a proposition as revealed by God, we must first know with certitude that God exists, that He reveals such and such a proposition, and that His teaching is worthy of assent, all of which questions can and must be ultimately decided only by an act of intellectual assent based on objective evidence. Thus, fideism not only denies intellectual knowledge, but logically ruins faith itself."
I sometimes think about what it would be like to be just getting onto the internet now, or even to not be a Very Online person (an ultimate goal of mine at which I keep failing). I would definitely be a conspiracy theorist.
The reason is because Internet Discourse is about 12 layers deep and only the first few make any sense (See Zvi's Simulacra stuff). So you get online and someone says a pretty reasonable-sounding thing ("I like spaghetti"), and you retweet it, and suddenly you are a racist and a sexist, and an idiot. Because you didn't know that some celebrity Nazi streamer *also* liked spaghetti and that therefore all Right Thinking people hate spaghetti and anyway what Americans eat isn't actually spaghetti, and also did you know the guy who brought spaghetti to the Americas was a pedophile. If the Nazi streamer was even a little coy about being a Nazi he'd radicalize a more naive me in about 20 minutes in that environment.
The controversy over Ivermectin is mis-framed, the victim of recent-history amnesia.
Around 2020, when Trump began boosting it, Ivermectin became a token of one’s politics and therefore of one’s attitude to the pandemic. For the true believers, for the Trump camp, Ivermectin was a cure for Covid, a cure that made the pandemic nothing to worry about and a reason to open up, to get on with life and keep the economy humming along so Trump could be re-elected in 2020.
Within that framework, if authorities had conceded that Ivermectin might work, the Trump political machine would have translated that as the end of the pandemic and all the contrary voices demanding we do difficult and costly things would have been silenced. We’d have been swallowing Ivermectin, not vaccinating, and the death toll would have been in the millions.
Perhaps those in the Ivermectin-is-junk camp were too certain, perhaps they dismissed some evidence more forcefully than the science at the time justified, but I’m darn glad they did. This never was an Atlantis-type controversy and you mustn’t judge it by the same criteria.
It's unfortunate you gave up on Atlantis because sunken lost civilizations definitely exist; they're along the underwater coastlines all over the world from during the last glacial maximum. Naturally many now-submerged areas were considered important to their milieu and legends grew up around them. Most of human history can't be uncovered well by current archaeological processes because most humans lived along coasts that are now underwater, and are in many instances too dangerous to explore.
“If all I’ve heard is that the pro-skub people say that you should look at evidence [...] I’m already 90-something percent sure pro-skub are the good guys”
I’d always assumed this heuristic was universal, until the last 5 years falsified me in spectacular fashion. It seemed obvious that without getting a PhD in skub, this is the best you can do. Is this way of thinking just a peculiarity of rationalist-type people?
Another thing to keep in mind, is you can get pretty far by reasoning about pharmacological mechanisms. Basically, ivermectin isn't the kind of molecule that would be expected to do anything to SARS-CoV-2. And it isn't targeted at any host immunity factors, either. So the prior for it working against COVID is low.
So someone explain to me why I shouldn’t take the conspiracy theorist position that people like Kavanagh are systematically (and to some meaningful extent, deliberately) perpetuating a faith-based, authoritarian structure to induce us to blindly believe whatever the institutional incentives of Science want us to believe.
I feel like this Chris individual exemplifies a particular subtype of a type of person — the people I've started, mentally, calling "aggressive conformists."
Curiosity is bad, trust in Authority, believe with all your heart in the Sanctioned Things. My place and time in history is the one that got it right.
The same sort of person that, many years ago, would have been sneering at anyone who didn't see the obvious danger of witches.
Atlantis is real tho (above water, the eye of Africa matches platos description and that area had a famous king atlas and humans were probably more seafaring then usually noted and using slave labor to cut the various stones monuments on and off for milliuna)
To impress an ancient Greek, you need clean water, the ability to move the big blocks, and able to cross the ocean.
That kind of lazy, snobbish attitude may do as much practical work to further ill-founded conspiracy theories as anything Alex Jones does. Treating adults like toddlers is often going to harden their beliefs. Why do they ignore the basics of human nature?
Maybe just in it for the clicks? Or a fulfilling sense of supremacy?
What Scott calls fideism, I think I frequently see referred to on the greater net as "scientism": which is itself misrepresented, if I trust Wikipedia. WP calls scientism the belief that science is the best or only way to reach truth. I see people commonly use the term to refer to people who employ arguments from authority, where the authority is some scientist, as opposed to people who rely on the scientific method, and at most use scientists as a heuristic or possible time saver.
If I'm accurate, then scientism sounds like a special case of fideism. Scientism is faith in scientists.
I guess my point here is that Scott's far from alone in being frustrated by people who appear scientific but only because they profess faith in people who call themselves scientists. They just use a different term. (And TIL what fideism is!)
...and imagine what this is like for religious people. We experience stuff every day that Scientists and Experts think isn't real. To extend the scuba metaphor, we're going to visit the underwater pyramids with our whole family and all our friends, and they're telling us the ocean isn't real.
It takes a steely will to treat the Ivermectin debate seriously.
Yes, I've noticed the phenomenon that to many people the best arguments in favor of anything are "everyone we know believes it", "most high status people believe it", "people who don't support it are routinely mocked".
There are doubtless good evolutionary reasons for this - and also good reasons that a minority won't find this credible, at least not in all cases, and will insist on investigating for themselves, or at least privately regarding the "truths" in question as either "not proven" or even "probably false, given the effort to get people to (pretend to) believe them".
My personal eye opening experience was with climate change. Even a MOOC supposedly on the mechanisms of climate change started by informing me that some (large) percent of climate scientists believed climate change was real. And asking questions on their forums drew all kinds of flack. Apparently wanting predictions of the impact expressed in terms I could easily grasp ("how do the predicted effects compare with the medieval warm period?") was evidence that the person asking was a climate change denier come to the class to troll. It was damn clear that many prolific posters wouldn't have recognized the scientific method if it bit them, and didn't understand any details of climate change or its mechanisms.
It's your curse - and mine - to be abnormal, born with traits only useful to society in times of change. You can tell the difference between evidence and insult. You don't always automatically believe the highest status person in sight. You can distinguish between "what We believe" and "what's most likely to be true," at least some of the time.
That's a very uncomfortable position to be in. If one is lucky, these traits can be useful in becoming The Authority to be believed by a collection of Believers (a politer term than "sheeple," and more specific than "normals"). Mostly though it tends to put one on the outside looking in.
I'm not certain if this is precisely Kavanagh's position but I do think he leans this way - there seems to be a belief that the flow of potentially harmful information online requires (I'm probably over generalizing a bit) a kind of strong containment effort. It's a kind of public policy instinct - this is where Neil Young calling for Spotify to take off Joe Rogan or the broad misinformation expertise sphere comes from. And I can see how that mindset leads to "this empowered the Bret Weinsteins of the world to add marginal value to a conversation where the Experts had already reached the right conclusion."
But yeah, I think you're right in the effectiveness of the tone, I think it's pretty fair to be curious about the nuances of things, I don't really trust the instinct of someone to even be a misinformation expert, and I can't get past the idea that some people are gonna want to think about things and may even google it and the like and that's fine.
Anyone with a controversial opinion, which includes both conspiracy theorists and also things which are mainstream but also have a lot of opponents (like feminism) are surrounded by not just a bubble, but an anti-bubble.
In a previous job I had a colleague who was a Christadelphian. He was an amazing engineer, and in his job he got a lot of respect for reading up on the original literature of different problems and producing innovative solutions. Then in his evenings, he got a lot of respect for doing analyses of the bible and predicting the date of the second coming (or something like that). Mostly we did not talk to him about this, and if he mentioned it he would be a bit embarrassed - at some level he must have known we thought it daft.
The one person who did start a discussion about this was the least tactful person in the office. Which wasn't very untactful by the standards of twitter (this was before twitter); but nevertheless the conversation was a bit cringeworthy. My point in all this is that the anti-bubble is made up of the people least likely to be able to persuade them that they are wrong.
In another incident, someone I respect, who was usually very confident, diffidently admitted in a forum (that they ran) that they occasionally thought that God had spoken to them directly. They were worried that admitting this would make people lose respect for their intelligence. All the friends in the group who were christians rallied round and said that they thought this was wonderful and that they didn't lost any respect. I was silent. I've often looked back on this and thought - I should have had the confidence to say "it wouldn't be the act of a friend not to point out that there are other possible explanations - irrespective of you being religious, I still have enormous respect for you" (or something along those lines).
I hope you'll talk to Destiny (aka Stephen Bonnell) someday; as you guessed, his community has a massive presence on Manifold Markets, but he's also one of the most rhetorically competent people in the YT streaming sphere. He's read several SSC posts on stream in the past, and he accepts and reads emails from his community, so I'd think he'd be relatively easy to get in touch with.
"Either these people didn’t understand the arguments for and against Atlantis, or they did. If they didn’t, they were frauds, claiming expertise in a subject they knew nothing about. If they did, then at any moment they could have saved me from a five year wild-goose-chase - but chose not to, because it was more fun to insult me."
Fukin' Amen. this is the best sentence ever to describe Kavanagh's "Guru's" podcast. it's hours upon hours of the above.
I was very grateful for your Ivermectin post- I don't have a lot to add, other than those of us who are a bit closer to 1.01^infinity than average appreciate you sharing your thought processes and journey in such a compelling way!
I'm 100% certain he would talk identically about any number of sensitive topics, such as biological sex and race differences - I've seen his exact language used to describe a belief that cognitive ability differs by race. So nobody should be obliged to take what he says seriously.
Let me repeat - people like this shout down legitimate scientific statements all time using this language, so it would simply be a coincidence if there was no valid and worthy scientific debate to be had around ivermectin.
"pro-science" people have unquestionably, unequivocally allowed their ideology to influence what they think of as scientifically valid, so they have no leg to stand on when they want to declare that something doesn't even warrant investigation.
I think that, for most people, Kavanagh's type of argument is effective. A typical person believes following whatever their ingroup tells them to believe is the best path to the truth. And if it ever becomes clear that their ingroup is incorrect, then they'll still pretend to believe in order to avoid the social consequences of believing the "wrong" thing.
I think the reasoning of people like Kavanagh is a bit more involved than you make it sound; in fact, it is somewhat closer to the EA mindset.
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Consider Ivermectin. I think it's pretty obvious by now that it doesn't work at preventing COVID. Every person who chooses to trust in Ivermectin instead of getting a vaccination runs an appreciable risk of dying (or being crippled for life); what's worse, this person runs the risk of transmitting COVID to others. Most people are not doctors nor biologists; they're just regular John Does trying to make it through the day. They have neither the time nor the skill to delve into every little study and re-run their own statistical calculations; they just need to know which choice is right: Ivermectin or vaccination.
Thus, by undermining the clear and accurate message -- "choose vaccination" -- you are influencing at least some number of people to make the wrong choice; thus, you are causing deaths both directly, and indirectly (through secondary infections). It doesn't matter that your intentions are good, and that your work is thorough; in essence, you are privileging the lives of a few science nerds over (potentially) millions of ordinary people. You are condemning millions to die over your intellectual vanity.
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Unfortunately, I think the argument above is true; it's just not the whole truth. It omits the massive negative knock-on effects (yes, including deaths) that result from normalizing ignorance and propaganda over critical thinking; however, such effects are long-term and difficult to measure. COVID deaths, on the other hand, are readily observable. Short-term thinking will always win out over long-term planning, and this situation is no different.
I mostly agree with your criticism of Kavanaugh. But I think a better version of the kind of critique he is making is thet it can be a mistake to treat people as acting in good faith and making arguments based on rational assessment of evidence when they're not. In the former case a rational breakdown of the evidence helps, in the latter it just draws more attention to them which they use to convince more people.
This is complicated in practice because most fringe beliefs that have a large following will have a mixture of both. There's the people selling magic beans for money who know that's what they're doing. And people who've been convinced by them that the beans are magic and innocently try and tell their friends.
The theoretical ideal response is to help the latter without being exposure to the former, but these kind of people often try and stoke controversy because because if a thousand new people learn about them from the takedown, and 999 agree they're frauds, they've still gained one customer/follower.
Years of dealing with similar controversies in Rootclaim taught me that truth is hard. We are constantly surprised by the results of our analyses, and each time find a different party to be correct. Sometimes it's US, sometimes Russia, sometimes China. Sometimes democrats, sometimes republicans. Sometimes the mainstream, sometimes the fringe. Sometimes experts, sometimes laypeople.
In the case of Kavanagh, it's easy to see how his simplistic approach leads him to wrong conclusions:
He takes the mainstream opinion on the chemical attacks in Syria (https://twitter.com/C_Kavanagh/status/1128388814525743104). Our analysis originally yielded 92% for the opposition carrying out the Ghouta attack, and that was recently shown to be the case after a video of opposition fighters launching chemical rockets was geolocated to the attack's launch location.
Good article as usual: mostly hits points I've heard from you before, but it's good stuff to hear (and the underwater pyramid thing is a fun anecdote). Also, looking forward to your discussion of the "Five More Years" predictions from 2018 soon!
Assuming you still have some of that Atlantis passion, I would read a lengthy post summarizing the arguments that initially convinced you in favor of Atlantis existing, what the discrepancies in the coherent narrative exactly *were*, and then the arguments which ultimately convinced you against.
(Also — and I have no memory of my source here, talking out of my ass based on something I read about in middle school — isn’t the best candidate for Atlantis the ancient civilization of Tartessos in southern Spain/Biblical “Tarshish”? Which is enigmatic in the way pre-Bronze Age Collapse civilizations are but which isn’t any kind of geographic anomaly).
I appreciated this a lot. I was taught six day creationism growing up and read YEC apologists voraciously. The book or two I was able to find at the library were pretty scarce and the Creationists seemed to have an exhaustive answer for everything. Every smart person I asked about evolution had some kind of dismissive comeback that made me think maybe the Creationists were right.
Then a single individual who was well acquainted with scientific literature decided to engage me in good faith, starting with an argument about HERVs that I had never heard before. I also found a book by the kind of para-scientific writer that sometimes gets made fun of, but he had taken time to write a book explaining the reasons why evolution made a lot of sense. I was stunned and it completely changed the course of my life.
Trusting the experts is not really an epistemic heuristic. The best option epistemically is to read so much that you become an expert. Trusting the experts is really about efficiency. People want to be able to dismiss conspiracy theories because it is too much work to have to refute literally every incorrect argument all the time. Most people who have the same argument (and win) three times get tired and dismissive and announce they are no longer going to argue with anyone about this subject. That's reasonable - they want to be able to move on to new subjects and new knowledge and not be weighed down by people behind them.
But the reality is: when a lot of people believe something, it is important to investigate it in depth and thoroughly explain why the thing is right or wrong. Maybe this isn't "cutting edge" intellectual work, but it's extremely necessary work that someone needs to do.
The "don't even engage with the question" tweet reminds me a bit of epistemic learned helplessness, where you can't trust yourself to reason correctly, so you should never try. I guess it's the correct advice for some people, but someone somewhere does need to evaluate the evidence and if Scott can't do it, who can?
Wiki on cargo cult science (categorised by Feynman).
„Cargo cult science is a pseudoscientific method of research that favors evidence that confirms an assumed hypothesis. In contrast with the scientific method, there is no vigorous effort to disprove or delimit the hypothesis.[1] The term cargo cult science was first used by physicist Richard Feynman during his 1974 commencement address at the California Institute of Technology.[1]“
The cargo cult is what Kavanaugh apparently wants.
Meanwhile Scott’s post assumed nothing and went through all the studies on Ivermectin, finding out that it’s useless against covid. Since Scott came to a conclusion that Kavanaugh agrees with, the problem Kavanaugh has is that Scott didn’t start with the „correct“ assumption and proceed from there. Feynman would have no problem taking sides here - he would side with Scott.
> There may be people so far gone into the outer darkness that they can’t be saved, but you are forbidden from ever believing with certainty that any specific individual is in this category.
Emphatically endorsed. It's a simple rule, but it feels like a cheat code for empathy.
I guess the steelman of this would be that an individual of a certain level of celebrity should not be addressing these concerns. I don't want the President of the United States weighing in on a schoolyard fight, or debating a homeless man's conspiracy theory that someone is a Cylon. To do so would create far more confusion than it would clear, no matter the strength of the argument.
But I don't think he's saying that. That would imply that Scott is an Internet behemoth pulling average folks along in his wake, but Kavanath is complaining about "the rationalists"; that suggests the Rationalist Community is itself a behemoth on the political landscape. And if a behemoth is interested in the topic, then it SHOULD be followed up on. You can't claim consensus while ignoring the questions of behemoths.
The default epistemology is "believe what you've heard" and when a conflict arises, resolve it with "believe who you trust more". Believing things for reasons is always going to be the hardest way to go, but the more of it we can get, the better. Think of humanity's collective beliefs like a bunch of caches pointing at other caches. The system only works is because real information is injected occasionally (by people reasoning and experimenting), otherwise you just get loops of beliefs pointing at each other.
As a child, I grew up in a house full of second-hand books, and with no internet. I learned about evolution from books that I knew were out of date, which mentioned that we didn’t know how wings could have evolved because half-a-wing can’t be used for flying. I had a few ideas of my own about partial wings, along the lines of flying squirrels gliding, and maybe you could run faster with some flapping, or maybe elaborate sexual displays, but I had nowhere to look up what the current ideas would be. So I waited years until we finally learned about it in school, and I asked my biology teacher.
I had, of course, learnt school survival techniques like never giving away that you already knew about this topic, and asking everything as a careful question without your own thoughts or prior knowledge, but these weren’t enough here! Because even asking this question had my biology teacher decide I was a religious fundamentalist who was opposed to evolutionary theory, and so everything she taught us from that moment on had weird patronising comments thrown in about “unless you don’t believe in that”. It had never even occurred to me that this was a possible danger (it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would oppose evolution for religious reasons past the Victorians).
My biology teacher didn’t have any good answers for me about wings. If a child asked me that, and I didn’t have up-to-date knowledge, I’d probably prompt them for their own thoughts, not assume I knew a position they were taking in some cultural dispute. Children sometimes do ask me about things that they have clearly come across as part of some cultural dispute, and are pretty much always looking for someone to talk it through with and suggest some broader context rather than actually embedded in a political position.
In short, people treating curiosity as a sign that someone is the wrong sort of person, and refusing to actually answer questions properly, also makes me very cross.
I'm just here to point out that the Richat Structure is DEFINITELY the former site of Atlantis. This isn't even a conspiracy theory, just a seriously under-investigated archeological thesis that someone with enough money could definitively prove or disprove.
I liked your posts on ivermectin, but I do think there is a genuine cost to posts like it, which Kavanagh seems to me to be at least hinting at.
When you take conspiracy theorists arguments seriously, it implies a higher prior on conspiracy theories than when you dismiss them out of hand. This can lead to your readers (consciously or not) increasing their priors on conspiracy theories and being more likely to believe future conspiracy theories they come across.
If their prior on conspiracies were not previously too low, this is a relevant cost.
Maybe I'm being too charitable when I mentally translate the statements 'pro-mainstream-anti-conspiracy people' make as pointing at this issue, but I do think the issue is real.
Not saying the benefit isn't worth the cost. Not saying the 'pro-mainstream-anti-conspiracy people' do a good job of pointing out that cost or doing any sort of cost-benefit analysis.
Just saying the cost exists, and is not entirely irrelevant. There probably exist some conspiracy theories it would be actively harmful for you to publicly take seriously because that cost would outweigh the benefit of practicing forming opinions.
I just spent the past two minutes scrolling through this Kavanagh guy's Twitter feed. 0/10, would not recommend. Smug, all the hallmarks of "too online," insults people rather than engage with anything they said, nothing original or insightful, lots of braindead left-right kayfabe jabbering, etc. Scott, you need to pick better online feuds! Jay-Z doesn't respond to a diss track from some Bronx drill rapper who's still trying to get exposure on Spotify by texting his friends and posting links on Facebook! The Undertaker doesn't beef with some meathead freshly hired from a Gold's Gym in San Jacinto!
Ugh. You did spill a lot of ink without actually doing it in the right way that could have actually been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
It's not really enough to "sort of" be a rationalist and "sort of" of be scientific. Do it the right way and get it accepted in a publication or leave it to the experts. All you had to do was wait about 6 months:
The other thing I find odd about the anti-conspiracy stuff is the particular hatred towards 9/11 truthers. Some beliefs are inherently bad, for instance Holocaust denial, but disbelieving the main narrative about 9/11 isn’t that.
I mean if the entire population were truthers in 2003 then we might have 1 million fewer dead Arabs. And no doubt back in 2003 the 20% of people who didn’t believe that the existence of WMD had been proven by the experts overlap significantly with the truthers.
Who are the dupes here? The odd thing about post 2003 is that after the abject failure of the establishment media to hold government and the military to account, what we learned was that the problem was the people who didn’t subsequently trust the government or the media.
As for myself I don’t see much merit in 9/11 theories, it’s all too complex.
This is the most I’ve ever loved you. But if you prove to me the spotted owl really was being harmed by logging activities and the bard owl intruding into its habitat was just coincidence I’m going to need a minute to process that.
This guys the worst. All he does is shit all over anyone with a podcast/blog that discusses things, ironically I believe he has his own podcast too. You wanna critique Rogan fine, but this dude took the time to shit all over Andrew Huberman who literally cannot possibly be more credible and transparent when discussing health topics in his show. He bends over backwards to acknowledge the relative strength of the evidence when he discusses something, yet for some reason this guy still shits on him. Literally the worst type of person, just reeks of insecurity.
The bottom line is that “trust the experts uncritically and scientists are the experts” is a nonsensical statement, because the whole point of science is that you trust data, not people. An expert you trust uncritically isn’t a scientist, they’re a priest.
(And of course it’s worse than that because in practice “trust the science” really means “trust the Twitter user who retweeted the pundit who read the article that summarized the results of the study that a scientist did that may or may not be replicable”)
I know you have a burning anger against anti-conspiracy bloggers like me, so I will not bother you with some of the subtle misgivings in your rant above.
However, one thing that might be useful; conspiratorial ecosystems are NOT "reasoning like everybody else just with worse vigilance". This is incorrect, there are multiple behavioral and cognitive differences stemming from epistemic, social and existential motivations that are not 'like everybody else'
I think Kavanagh/anti-both sidesism arguments presupposes there are a class of people who are really bad at doing research/using reason and so you want to model blind trust in experts for them so that they just do what is socially normal on important questions.
It does seem to me that there are issues that appear as settled questions to most people and if you raise the salience of them or present them as open questions some people, who would never have otherwise practiced epistemic learned helplessness on the issue will attempt to apply reason and arrive at wild conclusions. Flat earth has kind of peaked as a phenomenon, but I would expect that if major cable news shows had held formal debates on the subject prior to its peak that it would have increased the population of flat earthers just because more people who are conspiratorially minded/exceptionally bad at rationality would have engaged with the question.
Now in this model of the world there does need to be a class of experts who does science and reads studies and applies rationality but everyone outside of the relevant group of experts should defer to them and model deference.
If you think the sort of rationality ability + subject matter knowledge people need to avoid 0.99^infinity going to zero is quite high then I think this makes some sense as a model of the world. But it's very undemocratic, it leads to all sort of "Who Watches the Watchmen" issues if we all defer to small groups of subject matter experts.
I do think that's the real thing people find annoying about rationalists though. Is that there's sort of a pact within elite knowledge worker institutions to settle these sorts of disputes within institutional channels and rationalists break that pact. And I mean, it's not wrong to say non-subject matter experts critiquing subject matter experts through non institutional channels has dramatically lowered trust in institutions (revolt of the public), people just like it when it happens to institutions they don't like and dislike it when it happens to institutions they do like.
To behave rationally is a pretty nice quality. To be a "rationalist" these days means you spend way too much time stretching every system, machine, and model to fit the particular Russian nesting doll you're invested in proving (i.e., big picture, it's the opposite of rational behavior).
And the favorite nesting doll amongst libertarian rationalists is "the cathedral," or the supposed ignorance/corruption/biases of professional educators, researchers, etc. It requires a naïve tone, a la FoxNews, "We're just asking questions, just wondering, just doing our due diligence," just expanding on the chaotic creativity of those hardwired to tear down structures rather than build or repair.
When you use so much bandwidth on something like ivermectin, it's like devoting your show to Hillary's emails for two years. Even if you don't tell a single lie, you're still just playing to your audience. So why not spend your time on things that might really make a difference because of rampant misinformation -- things that you really need to learn about, personally, like when you went scuba diving for original source material -- like reading and reviewing the full Mueller Report?
Great essay. Precisely the sort of thing that made me subscribe in the first place. I particularly love the Atlantis analogy, since it takes it out of the realm of politically-charged topics.
The one area I'm not so sure about is the argument against the PR angle. It certainly seems to me that there is a level of credibility given to ludicrous points of view when presented side-by-side with the patently obvious truth, and so it's easy for people who are skimming stuff to get some subconscious impression of "there are good arguments on both sides". And there are a lot of people who apply far less care to evaluating a claim than an ACX reader does, from time pressure or lack of developed habits.
But a topic like "the world is obviously round, here are some people who think it's flat and look at how silly that belief is / they are" is something that most people can check against their daily experiences. They can see, for example, that ships sailing out of the harbor disappear from view hull-first and mast-last. So there's not a lot of risk to both-sidesing an article like that. However, "the Holocaust obviously happened and here are some people who have decided otherwise and how many bad things result from that", is riskier, because that's not a claim that is readily evaluated against daily experience. You learn from history textbooks, from lots of reading, seeing pictures of the camps and their liberation, etc... but an article that starts with "some people say the Holocaust happened. Others say that's a filthy lie. Let's treat both sies with dignity" does in fact have some PR risk attached. Someone who's normally thin-slicing new information can read that and come away with an impression that there is legitimate debate, where in fact there is only illegitimate debate.
I don't know where or precisely how to draw the line on "there is a valid PR concern here" vs "nonsense, there is plenty of space to treat the argument fairly, and deal a mortal blow to one side with very simple evidence and reasoning." It's clearly a hard problem. But I'm pretty sure that the line isn't as far to the side of "we should never worry about PR concerns relating to both-sidesing something" as the essay here appears to argue.
With every pseudoscientific movement, there is a corresponding dispute over whether scientists should address their arguments. Those arguments often are produced with a level of obsessive detail and sophistication where it takes a decent amount of education to understand where they go wrong, but are error-prone enough that having a decent understanding why is usually accessible to reasonably intelligent undergrad or even high schooler who has put in some work towards it. The bigger pseudoscientific movements usually have whole cottage industries dedicated to pumping out seemingly reasonable arguments that take some effort to pick apart.
The proponents of those movements set up a heads I win, tails you lose proposition when it comes to engaging scientific rebuttal. If people refuse to address them, they'll claim that this is because scholars are suppressing them, afraid to address their arguments, are dogmatic, etc. This can look compelling to outside observers who lack the capacity to understand why their superficially reasonable arguments are bad. It looks like scientists are ducking them, which fringe theorists are happy to parlay into their claims of improper suppression.
But, at the same time, if scholars do engage them, they use the fact that this is happening to create the impression that they are one legitimate side in a serious controversy where reasonable people can disagree. And this furthers their goals too. When their goals are obtaining institutional legitimacy, such as being taught in public schools or affecting public policy, this is significant.
This debate comes up again and again. From creationism, to climate denial, to more obscure stuff like facilitated communication you'll see this as a central conundrum for scientists and other scholars who have their actual academic responsibilities to worry about.
I see Chris Kavanagh as offering a variation of the latter argument here. Scott, by writing a lengthy address ends up creating a false impression that there's a serious dispute here where reasonable people reasonably disagree. Scott is a little out of his depth trying to rebut someone even more so, but making up for it with relentless gumption. So now you have naïve observers perhaps thinking this is a topic of academic controversy or that they're capable of engaging with the contours of the scientific claims on a level they are not, which is a trap to get rabbit holed into their own bad beliefs.
Scott offers the classic counter-argument to this, which is that detailed debunkings help people on the fence see how these ideas go wrong, and perhaps help them reason better next time they encounter a pseudoscientific claim with the appearance of sophistication. This is a service that more than outweighs the risk above.
Having seen this kind of dispute many times over, I'm never quite sure how I side on it. Both sides have pros and cons in a way that isn't easy to settle. I have long appreciated lay-attempts at long public debunkings and have offered them myself on subjects I know more about from time to time. But I have also witnessed how this dynamic has caused blow-back and led people way astray on their own understanding. It's not obvious to me which concern weighs more. So I offer my comment merely to note the tension.
So here's my speculation about why the discourse between defenders of the mainstream like Kavanagh and contrarians ends up being so political and disconnected from object-level reality:
As I've gotten older and wiser, I've learned that I'm susceptible to a certain kind of marketing for things that present themselves as the Alternative to the Mainstream Thing. The way this has often played out is that I get all excited about how the Alternative Thing is going to dethrone the Mainstream Thing and change everything, and I will raise my status in expectation by being an early adopter of the Alternative Thing, but instead I just end up learning in an unnecessarily roundabout way that there are actually good reasons the Mainstream Thing is mainstream and the Alternative Thing is marginal.
I think the reason I've been so susceptible to this is related to the dynamic described in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures: The subcultures that form around mainstream things tend to be older and larger, so the status competitions within them are fiercer, and I correctly feel ill-equipped to win status competitions in a crowded field. So I instinctively pursue higher variance strategies that at least give me a chance of achieving high status, conditional on some Alternative Thing actually winning and becoming the new Mainstream Thing, which does happen occasionally. Unfortunately, the way this feels from the inside is not "I'm taking calculated risks because high-variance strategies are rational for me," but rather "Why do I keep Believing in the Underdog really hard and then being disappointed 😭😭😭 I guess I'm just gullible."
Anyway, I think mainstream defenders recognize that positioning oneself as a promoter of the Alternative to the Mainstream Thing is a great grift, because there's an inexhaustible supply of insecure status-hungry people like me who are always scanning the horizon for high-variance Alternative Things to bet on. This means that contrarian beliefs can sometimes get more uptake than they deserve for status-competition reasons, and gives mainstream defenders an incentive to directly attack the social status of contrarians and their beliefs. Of course, gossiping about status also has the advantage that it's just easier than engaging on the object level, and is more fun, to most humans, most of the time.
ETA: To elaborate further on why contrarians attract the ire of the status-police, I think adopting contrarian stances tacitly signals both "I don't have what it takes to succeed according to the mainstream status hierarchy" and "I am ambitious, so I'm going to join this insurgent movement and try to overthrow the mainstream." This combination of weakness and ambition seems to paint a target on one's back.
I agree with Hitchens. "Picture all experts as if they were mammals." I don't know Chris Kavanagh's background, but I suspect he wasn't raised in a fundamentalist household or some place else where as a child the near experts/authorities were decidedly irrational and you painfully discovered this over the course of several years.
The way we make sure experts are experting correctly is by asking them to show their work. If they can't do that, they're not any different than fundamentalist parents who won't let their kids watch Thundercats because "it's Satanic." It's the same appeal to authority.
Having the "right answer" but not being able to show your work is not really having a right answer - it's just being lucky. The experts were lucky here.
Scott, I thought that your exploration of Ivermectin was fascinating and insightful.
Trashing you, because you did the work to understand why the studies revealed what they did, seems like just a few steps away from declaring that you're an apostate
Hm. I would have thought that Kavanagh's take was Bad on Purpose to Make You Click, and that there aren't actually people who think that way for real. I haven't seen any evidence otherwise.
A very reasonable response to a numbskull. Not a numbskull in the stupidity sense, but numbskull in that this K individual is clearly nothing more than a rabid attack dog on Twitter. The precise type of individual in the secondary role of mob leader's lieutenant for a witch burning.
This is a great post that contains a lot of truth. And yet … I also see a grain of truth in Kavanagh’s position. Like, I get emails every single day from P=NP crackpots and quantum mechanics crackpots and now AI crackpots too. Some of them probably *would* be better off never trying to think for themselves again, and just Trusting Science and Trusting the Experts. Sure, the experts are sometimes confidently wrong, but not as consistently so as they are! And for my part, I can’t possibly write 25,000 words to explain why each and every crackpot is wrong. As a matter of survival, I *have* to adopt a Kavanagh-like heuristic: “this person seems like an idiot.”
Where Kavanagh goes off the rails, and badly so, is here: if *someone else* spends 25,000 words to explain painstakingly why the experts’ knee-jerk instinct was right after all, then the only proper response is undying gratitude.
This makes me think a contrarian marketplace or database would be useful; ask a bunch of smart people to give probabilities to various wild theories that experts dislike, so you can see which are the reasonable ones worth looking into and which ones are wild.
Yeah, you're basically right. But maybe you've put too much energy into the question of ivermectin? Sure there are still people who argue, but I think that after six months of honest debate in 2020, the answer became pretty darn clear. There's really a LOT of evidence that it doesn't work as claimed.
To defend Chris very slightly - after reading the ivermectin article I almost commented something like "a quick trip over to Alexandros' website makes it pretty clear that he's employing motivated reasoning and is 100x less impartial than Scott is on this topic... did this really deserve >10,000 words?"
Looking back, I recognize that's a pretty unhelpful thing to say, and that Scott deserves a lot of credit for his thoroughness. But I get the impulse to think it kind of sucks that Alexandros's arguments get so much respect and airtime.
The fact that Scott wrote *this* article in addition to the original just goes to show how much he cares about the value of steelmanning. Respect.
Re: trapped priors, this post o' mine might be of interest: <https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/02/04/just-in-time-bayesianism>. In particular, given Laplace's rule of succession, if you've been bitten by a dog before, your probability of a dog biting you is 2/(n+2), where n is your number of interactions. But then in expectation by the time you halve that, you've received another 2 dog bites. So the optimal thing is to not gather more evidence.
I’m trying to go up a level and think about why otherwise reasonable people, who would probably agree in the abstract that evaluating evidence is important, are motivated to take such a hard-line stance in favor of expert institutions. Not sure if I’m using this totally correctly, but what event traps your ‘trust experts’ prior?
Is it a result of some conspiracy arguments being too weak?
For example, maybe the protracted discourse over climate change trapped many educated liberals’ priors about scientific institutions because there is a high degree of consensus among climate scientists, the slow decline of many natural systems has been emotionally burdensome, and for a long time the most high-profile opposition arguments were not necessarily the most convincing ones (i.e., instead of nuanced discussions about the propriety of making certain forecasting assumptions, there was a lot of “Sure was cold this winter…”) Do people bias themselves toward absurd-sounding conspiracies and hindsight bias away the actual conspiracies and examples of institutional failure?
Or is it a result of some conspiracy arguments being too strong?
For example, I’ve been in plenty of arguments online, and occasionally the resistance you encounter on an issue you are confident about is unexpectedly strong. Your interlocutor just has this endless pile of argument trails and bunny paths to traverse, and while they individually are dubious enough upon inspection that you don’t update very much on them, they are too numerous to dispatch in any reasonable time frame as you go around and around and down the forking fractalline paths of disagreement. If you’re like me, you may begin to feel a psychologically damaging sense of epistemic uncertainty. I can imagine that instead of either getting overtaken by the force of logic or going back and developing some more general probabilistic heuristics that keep you from arguing into infinity, many people would like to just throw up their hands and say “Nobody seriously believes that birds are fake! I can’t exhaustively prove you wrong on every single thing but I know that it’s true! Even if I argue forever, your prior is trapped in bird fakehood and you’re still going to think the evidence supports you, so it’s pointless to even try! But I’m a humble and rational person so I’ll just defer to so-and-so who’s a Harvard professor and they say…”
Or something else? Or is that just not the right frame for this kind of thing entirely?
I think the unsaid, but implied, message to Scott is something like this:
Dude, we have the power now, we won the culture war. We now can just ban the other side on Facebook, on Twitter, anywhere in the media, get them fired from their jobs, get any venue to cancel their speeches or be burned down by somebody we certainly know nothing of but who will definitely show up to burn whatever we say needs to be burned. Soon there will be the law declaring their view illegal, and taking licenses and professional degrees from anyone who proclaims the heresy. Stop being a cuck and pretending like those are people and you have to argue with them. It's embarrassing and diminishes the Great Victory. People like you may cause them to occasionally be taken seriously and then we'd have to fight the culture war again, and we want to just enjoy the spoils of victory. We do not want to declare you the enemy but you are really walking on the thin ice here...
In other word, however I hate this, I must admit sometimes all these pomo critical theories are right - sometimes it's not about the facts but about the power.
> "I agree this might not have been the best use of my time, and I would accept this criticism from anyone except Kavanagh - who’s devoted his whole career to thinking about ivermectin and ideas closely aligned to it."
Probably a case of hyperbole not translating over internet; but what does this mean?
A quick search seems to have Kavanagh as a researcher in cognitive and evolutionary anthropology, writing articles about religion and ritual.
So I think that he has a day-job, but that he likes to put on his vigilante mask and go on twitter crusades after dark.
Might not be completely fair to say that his whole career is devoted thinking about ivermectin and so on.
Given that I (and probably most people) waste hours and hours on nonsense, all the "you spend too much time on X" critiques always seem completely empty.
Scott: As one scuba diver to another, where were those "pyramids"? I've heard of such things, but I've also heard reports by divers that didn't find the ones they saw all that impressive. From the photo, yours might be worth a trip sometime.
I learnt in my Indian philosophy class when reading about something new to you - first read without any analyzing on your part. Read the second time arguing along with the author. Then read a third time arguing against the author. Only after that form your opinion. Never blindly accept anything no matter the reputation of the author. Unfortunately a bit too time consuming in real world but does lead to a more nuanced view.
I agree that Chris Kavanagh's comments are not great, but I'm going to go against the grain and say that he actually is groping towards something real. There's a certain type of bad argument that the Rationalist community is susceptible to: it's hard to explain, but it's essentially an argument where the details are correct but the whole thing, when viewed from a distance, doesn't hold together.
The Atlantis thing mentioned in the post is one of them; Ivermectin, too. Some others are the aquatic ape hypothesis, the bicameral mind, and Slime Mold Time Mold's recent posts about obesity.
I think the reason the Rationalist community has such a hard time refuting these is that the problem isn't the individual sub-arguments, but the way the whole thing hangs together, and the Rationalist community mindset is all about examining and testing the smallest details.
I also think that people like Kavanagh aren't (in this instance) just arguing "weird arguments by weird people are weird and stupid", but trying to express a heuristic for dismissing these bad arguments. In this case, listening the experts or dismissing things because they sound dumb are actually viable strategies. The problem is that those strategies have their own failure modes.
Thanks for the detailed response Scott, I think you've misinterpreted some of my arguments and have pegged me a bit wrong (I don't think I've ever written anything on Ivermectin outside of some tweets?). I'll try to reply properly in time but I think the anecdote you offer at the start is very telling of the divide between us.
To explain, I too read Graham Hancock when young and found some of his arguments compelling. From your description you could not locate any good criticism and ended up scuba diving to investigate ruins firsthand, learning geology from the ground up, and going on "a five year wild-goose-chase". It sounds like this was a valuable experience but perhaps one that left you a bit bitter at what you describe as sneering anti-conspiracists.
For me on the other hand, I did locate a bunch of good criticisms both in the skeptic community and from relevant experts, even though this was young internet time. Part of this (I think) was from following the disparaging comments on Hancock's blog back to the people he was disagreeing with. I did not scuba dive in ruins (though it looks fun) but I did learn about how superficially compelling it was to present alternative histories as forbidden knowledge and that the actual history was drier but more interesting& complex. I did not come away from this resenting Hancock or people that found him convincing. Indeed, I think he is both sincere and good at making his arguments appear compelling to a lay audience. I did gain an appreciation of the frustration of experts he disparages who have dedicated their careers to the topics he covers though.
I also don't think I would have the same intuition you have that personally exploring the ruins would be informative. I think that would actually be likely to skew my perspective as it feels like it would deliver potentially inaccurate intuitions and that it would require already having the expertise to properly assess what you are seeing. I still do think it sounds and looks fun though, so maybe you made the better choice ;).
In any case, I think it's interesting that we both took rather different lessons from our early encounters with Hancock but maybe a place we do both agree that there is value to detailed critics laid out for a curious lay audience by experts who have an alternative opinion.
"Just asking questions!". Just because a question is falsifiable doesn't make it scientific. Instead the implication goes the other way: scientific questions are falsifiable, but also ideally focus on relevant extensions to current knowledge without unnecessarily complicating the picture. The Ivermectin/Atlantis hypotheses are just daft, but yet, falsifiable. I'm with Chris on this one.
It's a well-written essay, and logically I think you 100% have the better argument. But...I'm also a little sympathetic to the other side. People are people, and they don't always, or even mostly, work remorselessly rationally, and it is even somewhat less than fully rational to operate as if they do.
Thing is, you should try just dealing with cranks over and over and over again. A person of good will and optimism will *start off* as you did here, being careful and measured, taking each hypothesis no matter how implausible it seems to you and treating it with respect, gathering the evidence, working out the math, writing it down line by line so any reasonable person can see the point.
And then one of two things happen: (1) they say well that's all well and good, but here's *another* line of argument that leads to the same conclusion, so ha! or (2) yeah well here's this one little place where you skipped a step, so your whole argument is suspect (sort of the grammar/analogy Nazi's approach that says if you misspelled a keyword, or your analogy isn't perfect in some miinor way, it shatters every logical link). And they are just indefatigable. It takes them 30 seconds to think up a new challenge, and it takes you 6 hours to patiently refute it, and after a while the economics just kills you, and you give up and say something nasty and ad hominem.
Not only that, but the point is unfortunately sound that when you treat a crank argument as worthy of close attention and discussion, people *do* take that you're agreeing there's a chance what they're saying is right, regardless of how strongly you put your final conclusion that they are not. So you're saying there *is* a chance? It's just a theory, what you're saying? There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio...! and you realize that your patient deconstruction of the central hypothesis of their obsession has not discouraged them *at all*, not prodded them to any introspection and doubt, but rather perversely *increased* their confidence that the central hypothesis is true -- look! Expert/Famed Reasonable Man/Authoirty took this seriously enough to debate! I must be *this* close to the actual truth! Let's roll out v2.0 or v5.0 or v948669.0 and try again...!
It's not logical, it's not reasonable, but it's human nature. I don't know that there are any great solutions. I fully agree with you that people with knowledge and ability should try to be more patient, take seriously hypotheses that seeem on the surface absurd, or unlikely, or which are presented offensively, offend the shibboleths, et cetera. This is why I feel it's deeply wrong to use phrases like "climate change denier," which short-circuits engaging rationally with an ad hominem label, and it's equally wrong to accuse everyone who proposes differences in outcomes between the races and sexes may in some cases arise from perfectly innocent causes of irredeemable racist or sexism. So logically we should treat people who think vaccines are useless or evil, and folk remedies sure-fire, with enough respect to engage the argument reasonably.
But it's difficult, and I can't too much blame people who lost their cool and fling about regrettable contemptuous dismissal. Boo humans.
"The first agenda tries to scare college kids away from abusing Adderall as a study drug by emphasizing that it’s terrifying and will definitely kill you. The second agenda tries to encourage parents to get their kids treated for ADHD by insisting Adderall is completely safe and anyone saying otherwise is an irresponsible fearmonger. The difference between these two situations is supposed to be whether you have a doctor’s prescription. But what if you are the doctor, trying to decide who to prescribe it to? Then what?"
Here is what is troublesome. People mistrust the medical system. An air of suspicion surrounds any decision taken by the public health authorities (PHA). This should not be the case. Whose fault is it? The burden is then on the PHA to regain the population’s trust. In the meantime, Scott comes to the rescue.
To Scott’s point, the PHA must do a better job of communicating their findings or lack thereof to the public. Dry journals are not cutting it. Condescending expert opinions are not slicing it. PHA need to do some serious communication-soul-searching. It is of essence in public health, and they are losing the battle in this new era.
I agree with Chris that contending the conspiracy-theories give them an air of legitimacy. I also value the role of Scott in dissecting them, opening them on the table for everyone to see, and putting them
back into the refrigerator once they are declared dead. But I would advocate to do it swiftly, as to avoid more confusion generated by crowds agglomerating around the table.
Another point. Of course you would want to do critical thinking. Of course you would want to study the trials by yourself. But at the end of the day there is a reason we all are specialized - to advance faster as a society. Specialization is key to our prosperity and survival. I know, trusting is hard, but it is necessary.
BTW,
Ivermectin is not effective in preventing deleterious outcomes from COVID-19 infection, such as hospitalization.
Roughly 5,000 patients were randomized in the TOGETHER and COVID-OUT randomized controlled phase III trials, to ivermectin, placebo or other intervention (metformin, fluvoxamine in the COVID-OUT). Ivermectin did not improve outcomes. These results were published in the NEJM.
Just these two large trials falsify the hypothesis that ivermectin is effective in treating COVID-19.
“But there other trials that show a positive effect”. Yes, but they were of poor methodological quality, low patient sample. “But look at this other trial, it had 1,000 patients in it!” Even if that trial was of rigor, other large well-conducted trials fail to reject the null hypothesis of no difference between treatment groups. Then you do a meta-analyses, ideally including trials with similar study characteristics and primary outcome.
Now, if you try that hard to prove the effectiveness of a treatment, it is because there is no treatment effect.
No need to apologize for being curious, or wanting to properly vet the scientific evidence in an area of public interest (both that it’s a “greater good” to try to discern whether ivermectin works or not; and because quite a large segment of society were happily subscribing to the “conspiracy theory”…this was not a couple of joes with foil hats and soap boxes on a street corner). When something is that prevalent, the concept of “I’m not gonna dignify that question with a proper answer” doesn’t suffice.
In general, I am in complete agreement with you, and against Kavanaugh. I’ve listened to Kavanaugh’s podcast and been extremely turned off by his tendency to psychopathologize his ideological opponents, in lieu of just debunking their arguments. ‘My opponent is an ignorant fool’ is a deeply satisfying argument to make, but it’s never as convincing to hear as it feels to say. There is one thing I will say, though, and that is that there is a particular type of personality (Alexandros) who insincerely baits sincere thinkers (you) into public disagreement, and then takes advantage of that public disagreement to elevate their public profile. It’s a type of parasitism on good faith, and should be discouraged. So while I agree that it is good to respond to crackpots, I feel one should only do so when those crackpots are demonstrating a real sincerity, and one should try hard not to be used as a prop in their personal PR campaign.
Ironically it seems to me that both Weinstein and Kavanagh share a model of the world that Scott disagrees with. Namely, that most people are “sheeple” that can, by shame or censorship, be forced by the Establishment into holding the “correct” beliefs. Fundamentally Kavanagh and Weinstein just disagree about whether or not this a good thing.
Really appreciate this post, find myself very much agreeing with you. (For what it’s worth, I‘ve actually worked in PR, and one of the most important things good PR campaigns do is treat their audience with respect. Any condensation can be smelled a mile away.)
I think Kavanagh's argument is that there are a near infinite number of controversies to discuss. By choosing among them to focus on ivermectin and award it tens of thousands of words of blog space, Scott presents the impression that the controversy has more to it than it really merits. That's why it's "indulgent".
Now, let's be honest: most "readers" will not read all or even any of the 30+k words of Scott's ivermectin posts. The arguments in them actually are irrelevant except to the union of the sets of sufficiently bored, curious, pedantic or engaged readers, because they actually won't be read. The very existence of two giant posts about ivermectin will already push many readers and onlookers of this blog toward the belief that ivermectin is effective, even if Scott's conclusions were mostly the opposite.
For a fairly influential writer like Scott, the choice of topics is as important as the content. The menu matters as much as the dishes. By giving airtime to ivermectin, Scott is supporting it, whether he likes it or not. This may not be what we like, but it's the reality of how writing works, on the Internet or off it.
There's an economic efficiency / due process point buried here. Imagine a prediction market: "Ivermectin will be de-bunked within 12 months". Scott decides he will only invest in a deep dive into conspiracy theories that markets say are > [10] [or] [20]% likely to be true. Seems like a good way to optimise Scott's time. That said, the way Scott writes about the 1-2% cases like ivermectin is incredibly entertaining. And some of those 1-2% cases have huge option value--what if Scott had found that ivermectin was solid? Huge benefit to society. So I'm all for Scott delving into conspiracies. But if I were in charge of grant or tax dollars, I would pass.
This reminds me of an argument with my brother, a scientist, about that Nature paper that said Covid couldn’t have come out of a lab because the binding was only 88% optimal. I am probably not getting get science jargon quite right, but the point being that if someone engineered Covid in a lab, they would do 100%. I said, this is illogical. If you want to use it as a weapon, maybe you intentionally do sub 90% because 100% looks suspicious. Or maybe you developed it by running it through lots of animals and letting it mutate or something. Or maybe you had every percent created from 88% to 100% but only the 88% leaked out. My brother, a scientist, would just say “I’m a scientist and you should trust scientists.” And I was like, “but I’m the one doing science here! Isn’t logic science?” Reading this I probably should have added “I may be bad at science, but at least I’m giving it a shot!”
> I’ve looked into this pretty hard and my conclusion is that conspiracy ecosystems fall prey to the exact same biases that all of us have, including experts and correct people. But experts and correct people have slightly less of them, have better self-correction mechanisms, and manage to converge on truth, whereas conspiracy theorists have slightly more of them and shoot off into falsehood. I think of this as very subtle: 0.99^infinity goes to zero; 1.01^infinity goes to infinity. We all struggle with the same tendencies. The trick is in understanding and controlling them.
I'd have assumed it would often just be a case of what social environment you were shaped by, what cues you were exposed to more. In other words, getting lucky. Since you just said yourself, the supposed good guys are often not actually putting in the cognitive work, but rather just looking down on people who believe differently than them. 1.01^infinity would end up at a legitimate correct belief, but these people don't have a legitimate belief.
Admittadly, I've probably given this much less thought than you have.
I can confirm that in Bulgaria, where I live, some people STILL tout ivermectin as a wonderdrug against COVID. I have heard (from close people) about different wild schemes how to dose animal ivermectin. I have heard experts on TV (back when the pandemic was something people actually cared about) advertise ivermectin. Thankfully, policies didn't change like in Latin America, but it is worth noting that Kavanagh lives in a bubble, where real-world people believe only what he believes, and the worst thing is the most unscientific thinking: "Do not replicate science. Do not question science."
That bubble does real life harm because the failure to interact with misinformed people does not change misinformation.
Note: I do not know of his work outside of this thread.
I think it's funny that a decent proportion of the comments boil down to some version of "he sucks, ignore him" which is exactly the kind of ad hominem dismissal Scott is arguing against.
I agree 100 percent. I just wanted to add that in fact finding missions like these it's important to not be overwhelemd by bad faith arguments (fall victim to a gish gallopp). And especially if you are a public figure it's worth considering if you are contributing to what could be perceived as a false balance (This would be my very favourable interpretation of Kavanagh's argument).
I am personally very concerned about climate change and I'd say that science has already definitively answered the question of man made climate change multiple decades ago. I find it hard to not get angry when I'm confronted with arguments of climate change deniers and I think the rise of these arguments may be partially the fault of enganging with bad faith arguments and creating the illusion of broader scientific disagreement on this topic. But I'm not sure whre the line between honest discussion and troll-feeding can be drawn, if there even is one.
>There’s a Hindu legend (maybe apocryphal?) about an atheist philosopher who spends literally every second of every day denouncing God. When he dies, God welcomes him into the highest heaven, praising him as a great yogi - for he never let his consciousness stray from awareness of God even for one moment.
Reminds me of Ravana, who is the villain of the Hindu Ramayana, who hates Ram/God so much that he sees him in everything, eventually even himself, thus reaching enlightenment (while literally getting speared by Ram).
In the same vein, I think this is also the deeper reason why Christians see a fear of God as a good thing and there is advice like "cast all of your fear (and other emotions) onto God".
The thing about big Youtube streamers is that basically half of them were banned from Twitch for various reasons, so it's a pre-selected most-controversial subset of the successful ones.
This is just as tedious as the other online celebrity beefs. Either talk it out directly, or let it drop, but don't do this nonsense where you talk past each other and (deliberately?) misunderstand each other. Like if you're at the point of writing "What is his complaint? At the risk of putting words in his mouth..." and then doing that very same thing, maybe you could ask him? I understand that isn't good for the blog post writing business (which is why YouTube streamers do this, too. It's """content"""), but if this is where the blog has fallen to since 2015 it's probably time to pack it up anyway.
On something like Ivermectin or vaccines, I agree wholeheartedly with Scott. But what does one do about the complex of things such as QAnon, anti-semitic conspiracy theories, theories about the Masons, etc.? Theories like these have historically shown the potential to acquire real power and to carry out violent action. And, notoriously, they have proven resistant to falsification (because the lack of evidence for such theories' truth just shows how powerful the conspirators are--or that the person who can't see the evidence still needs their red pill, or whatever). I'm not asking this in a "gotcha" spirit. I'm genuinely curious what rationalists would say about this issue.
Question: Do some people claim to be rationalists (we should probably operationalize what we mean by rationalists) to hide the fact that they are not really rationalists at all?
I wasn't put out by the ivermectin post but I was somewhat put out by the post about the pro-ivermectin guy who wrote the equivalent of a long book's worth "just asking questions" about whether ivermectin works.
I can really recommend Graham Hancock's Netflix series "Ancient Apocalypse". Not only is it well directed and edited, and so shows the quality of argument you're up against when you're trying to debunk a conspiracy theory, but it's also good rationality training to try and form a mental counterargument that's better than "U R DUMB" (ideally at least DH4 on Paul Graham's scale of argumentation).
I imagine a detailed counterargument would involve a mathematical model of the precession of the equinoxes to the point where you could show that the claimed alignment of some temple entrances with a particular prehistoric date range and no other, is actually well within the range of more modern dates plus a small amount of "noise". But everyone who doesn't have a PhD in astrophysics is likely to get stuck before they get to this point.
More generally, as each new generation enters school, to the extent that we still teach using your own intellect rather than trusting authority, we will come across students who have not yet been taught for example the historical consensus on World War II and just how strong the evidence for some things is, and we'll occasionally get someone genuinely asking "Couldn't there be a grain of truth in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as some blogger on the internet suggested?". And then the answer is not U R DUMB but "actually, this topic has been studied very, very extensively - and here's the findings". (Yes, for each one of these honest questions there will be 100 trolls. I don't know what to do about that either.)
"So tearing down is at least as good (or bad) in general as building up, since they are 2 sides of the same coin."
Your statement begs for a fitting aphorism: Cutting down a tree is a whole lot easier than putting it back together. Does this mean we can never cut down a tree? Of course not. Just that it's hubristically reckless to equate the two.
Humanity (on behalf of the vulnerable) has struggled way too diligently and collectively, bending the long, moral arc of the universe toward justice through imperfect, evolving institutions (such as democracy itself); we can't afford to be sanguine in the face of bros like Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Donald Trump, so flippantly eager to toss all this fragile progress into the trashbin, ostensibly for creative "disruption," but their willingness to dismiss/ignore history itself (such as the Mueller Report) is fueled mainly by their unchecked egos, and then bolstered blindly by cesspools of capitalism such as Fox News, today's version of Father Coughlin.
If someone wants to believe FDR steered us too deeply into socialism or whatever, fine. But this is a debate for the marketplace of ideas. It's not a legitimate excuse for casually toppling structures you declare unhelpful. Our social contract (not to mention our Constitution) cannot abide self-proclaimed saviors who find insurrections amusing and think fraud is a legitimate political tactic.
Scott, you are deservedly pissed about this. Frankly, so am I. I was on the fence about Ivermectin. You were not, but you were also determined to give Ivermectin a fair shake. And in so doing, you further convinced yourself and also talked me down off the fence.
Kavanagh says that we are both idiots; you for entertaining the question and me for being on the fence in the first place.
So, to paraphrase Ken White of Popehat, in response to Kavanagh, I say:
Just to add to the pile of interesting case studies, I was thinking about the recent UAP controversy last night. I think there’s an interesting parallel to the situation you describe regarding underwater pyramids.
This is obviously classic skeptic territory, and I think a still generally valid account is something like: “Your prior that extraterrestrials have visited earth and have entirely escaped notice *except once by accident by bystanders with relatively primitive technology* should be low enough that even a combination of several improbable mutually reinforcing events is still more likely to be coincidence after updating.”
But even so, if the events are multiple and mutually reinforcing enough, it’s enough to at least be curious enough to look into what the heck is going on, right?
Enter the USS Nimitz incident. Like Bem’s Psi research, it seems made to clear your evidentiary bars:
--Readings from multiple independent instruments (radar and FLIR camera)
--Eyewitness Reports from four people across two naval aircraft, corroborating one another for an observation period of about 5 minutes (!)
--Confirmed authenticity by the Pentagon, which added, they are "part of a larger issue of an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years"
Most of these end up kind of falling apart under closer scrutiny, but you can’t know that from the outset.
How do we assess the expert consensus on this matter?
Astronomers if asked will probably give you something like the reasoning I started with, which we’ve priced in already, and typically don’t spend a lot of time on the particulars, being that they aren’t privy to all the relevant information and I suspect are tired about getting asked about this sort of stuff. You can say that Adam Frank’s NYT piece gives you basically the right interpretation of the evidence, but it’s pretty easy to suspect that this is cope.
As far as I know, there isn’t a climate-change-esque study on consensus opinion on alien visitation (the best I could find was the Wiki on the Fermi paradox, which says “The consensus scientific view is that although they may be unexplained, they do not rise to the level of convincing evidence” but then cites an article that doesn’t actually prove that this is a consensus view) There seems to be some consensus that extraterrestrial life existing is likely, and per SETI:
“From the Report of the Astronomy Survey Committee, National Academy of Sciences, 1972: ‘More and more scientists feel that contact with other civilizations is no longer something beyond our dreams but a natural event in the history of mankind that will perhaps occur in the lifetime of many of us ... In the long run, this may be one of science’s most important and most profound contributions to mankind and to our civilization.’”
As for the people who have the most direct knowledge of the incidents, US Defense agencies, they are overall famously tight-lipped about the whole affair, given national security concerns, and the statements they do make can be kremlinologized in a variety of ways. Meanwhile, the people substantially running these programs and conducting research specifically in this area, like Chris Mellon, Lue Elizondo and Avi Loeb (along with Tom DeLonge, for some reason) are sounding the alarm about this and calling for more thorough UAP research.
The media, the conduit to the experts for the hoi polloi, for their part expressed their share of hedging and credulity, perhaps most notably on the 60 Minutes episodes, which featured interviews with Nimitz eyewitnesses. Plenty of popular podcasters hop on the hype train too, of course, notably for Kavanagh’s beat JRE, Sam Harris, and the Weinsteins.
Hm. Maybe there’s something to this after all?
Meanwhile, who is really doing the hard work of documenting evidence, picking apart all the threads of the Nimitz incidents, critically interviewing participants, and even making physical models and simulations (!) to test whether a faraway plane’s IR signature might look like a tic tac? As you might expect, it turns out to be a community centered around…the guy who programmed Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater?
Mick West (and the associated community at Metabunk) is a really good example of how a technically inclined but basically dilettantish person with a lot of free time (AFAIK, West is not a credentialed expert on aeronautics, military technology, astronomy, photography, etc…) can make real research contributions to questions that really do need answers and provide a valuable public service in doing so. I don’t see a ton of daylight between a lot of the work at Metabunk and the spirit of Scott’s posts on Ivermectin.
…I guess what I’m saying is that in hindsight a lot of this uptake in UAP was probably Chinese spy balloons.
Late to this, but I was also quite persuaded by Fingerprints of the Gods as a teenager and it took me a while to find the holes all on my own, no one ever explained more than 'because it's stupid,' so I try to make more of a presumption of good faith on seemingly-ridiculous beliefs, or at least an assumption of social pressure or the like.
It did lead me to things like Hamlet's Mill, which while also having an overarching bullshit conclusion is full of interesting tales, which in turn led me to things like the Kalevala and the Hero with A Thousand Faces. So, mixed bag!
I mostly agree with this article, but there is one point which I can object to a little bit.
Even if we don't know why giant underwater pyramids are there. That doesn't mean that Atlantis existed. Nor does it mean that aliens built them, nor does it mean that god built them. Nor does it mean that a society of some other intelligent species built them.
Well, I read/listen to you both. I agree with your argument and Chris seemed to be trolling more than trying to get at some truth. But I agree with Chris mostly about B. W. I can't wade through what I perceive as his Trump-like narcissism enough to feel like I can learn anything from him.
He is making a social argument, not an intellectual one. The best people know this to be true, you fool, you fool. Maureen Dowd is even making jokes about it, dude, how much more evidence do you need?
> It sounds kind of like fideism, the belief (more common in atheists’ imaginations than real religion) that somebody who reasons their way to belief in God is a sinner, because a real saint would have believed through blind faith, without having to reason.
Scott, thank you for pointing out that the notion of fideism and "blind faith" is an atheist strawman not found in actual religious thought. I have some thoughts on the subject, of why faith is in fact an integral part of everybody's life, even non-religious individuals, but it's too big to put in a comment so I made it into a response post.
I'm going to stick my neck out on this one and say that Scott is even more right than he knows. I think we should definitely question the Holocaust.
Now put the pitchforks down and please notice I didn't say "deny". My point is this: I have been an astronomy buff since I was a kid, but I still remember the wrenching feeling when, at age 23, I first looked down a telescope and saw the rings of Saturn for myself. It's hard to put into words, but it was something like "Oh my god, it's all real."
I had a similar experience, though much less pleasant, when I read "Lying about Hitler", Evans account of the David Irving trial. Again, I'd grown up - like most of us - with the Holocaust as the great morality tale, about what happens if we let bad people be bad (insert the Cartman clip from South Park, which nails this approach). Anyway, when I read Evans carefully laying out the evidence page by page I had the same wrenching experience, except much more Lovecraftian - opening up a universe of horror.
I suspect that most people operate in a similar state of unreality about the Holocaust and so much else, which is why we are drowning in asinine Hitler analogies (or communist analogies, from the right). For most people, who haven't seen the evidence, the Holocaust has about as much 'reality' as the destruction of Alderaan. Since then I've concluded it is always, always worth going and checking the evidence for things pretty well established that you think you know - to make sure that you do, in fact, know them.
I doubt that you'll see this, but I think it's a problem when everyone doesn't take pains to be sure they're accurately characterizing their interlocutor's viewpoint.
Here I discuss your discipline in that regard with Andrew Gelman (and others) on his post about your Ivermectin piece:
"When experts have strong opinions on something, this is a good opportunity to practice your opinion-forming skills, see whether you get the same result as the experts, and, if not, figure out where you went wrong."
Or where they did. Consider the case of Barry Marshall.
> "The ONLY reason you could ever believe it is because you’re a racist who thinks brown people couldn’t have built civilizations on their own.”
This gets at an important aspect of conspiracism to which many "rationalists" are vulnerable. It's objectively true that there's a moderate cognitive tension between (a) the received Western "common sense" that Europeans came to dominate the globe because they were better at making advanced civilization (probably because of their higher genetic IQ, come on, it's not PC to say so but everyone knows it), and (b) the fact that a millennium or two ago, brown people were building mountains and temple complexes and breeding corn and potatoes while Europeans were languishing in dark ages (again, the eggheads get mad when you say this but, come on).
Obviously that doesn't mean this single factor is why every Atlantis theorist believes Atlantis theory, but it stands to reason that this tension makes it slightly more tempting to imagine that all these non-European ancient civilizations were just copying something else, and marginally increases the number of people weaving hypotheses and writing books about Atlantis theory. So, a good Bayesian should see this argument as evidence that many white Western people are motivated to overstate and lend excessive credence to evidence for Atlantis theory.
However, if you try to explain this to a white Atlantis theorist—ironically, especially one who prides himself on his rationality—he will often take so much offense at the suggestion that his culture's subconscious biases have anything to do with his individual reasoning in this case that he'll uncharitably caricature your explanation just as Scott does in the quoted line, and the explanation will backfire. Thus, an explanation with positive *explanatory* value has negative *persuasive* value—and identifying as a "rationalist" is a risk factor, because the "rationalist" community is for whatever reason happy to admit to and fight individual cognitive biases but considers it uncool to do so for culturally pervasive ones.
Scott, what is your expertise? Readers who don't have sufficient expertise in the domain of interest, really have no way of knowing whether you know what you're talking about.
For instance, I'm a self-esteem researcher. If I saw some substack article who has no PhD in psychology (i.e., years of systematic research training & experience) making contrarian claims about self-esteem, I would find it easy to dismiss whatever they claim. That's because I have a deep knowledge of the literature and issues! What about the regular reader who is simply a fan of the of the substack writer? Not a chance in hell they could know otherwise. They basically take the writer's claims and ostensible analysis on faith.
"Doing your own research" is arrogant and misguided. If you spent 4-6 years studying a research field in a systematic way, guided by mentors, having your research constructively criticized by peers, and having publications along the way, then you have a leg to stand on. Even then, if you want to make claims about the research, you need it to be evaluated ~within the community of expertise~. Substack bypasses all that. Readers who are not experts have practically zero basis to evaluate your claims or arguments. In truth, they need to accept much of what you say on faith.
It's like when I saw a 2-hour documentary skeptical that there was a very large holocaust. I went looking for counterarguments and mostly just found people saying "oh those horrible antisemitic people!"
Eventually I did find the counterarguments, but on a web site *dripping with hatred for the people arguing against the holocaust*. Geez, I thought, this is not how you convince someone.
The case of Dr. John Campbell[1] is probably illustrative. I saw one of his videos a couple of years ago, and noted that he said a lot of correct things, plus a few things that were questionable, or raised red flags for me but not for him. He seems to me like an average doctor with average intelligence, trying his best to understand what's going on, but getting a few things wrong.
And when he gets something wrong, how do people react? I'm not sure. I bet some were nice and tried to gently correct his misinformation, but this is the internet, so I bet others were mean and flippant, while still others might have responded with misinformation of their own coming from a different political orientation. And what will an *average person* do with this mixture of incoming messages? Probably he will listen more to the nice ones, at least at first, especially if they are backed up by charts and data he could use on his channel ... and the mean ones are likely to make him more skeptical of whatever counter-narrative they push.
So it's sad how mean and flippant people usually are when they "correct misinformation".
"Either these people didn’t understand the arguments for and against Atlantis, or they did. If they didn’t, they were frauds, claiming expertise in a subject they knew nothing about. If they did, then at any moment they could have saved me from a five year wild-goose-chase - but chose not to, because it was more fun to insult me."
Kavanagh's reasoning seems to me to be in line with the tendency in the media to circle the wagons in defense of experts and mainstream science, part of which strategy is to dismiss anything perceived as questioning that consensus out of hand. This approach strikes me as deeply misguided in the current info ecosystem. I am thinking of Gurri's "Revolt of the Public"- it used to be that elites could declare something to be correct or taboo, and there weren't any ways for non-elites to get any other messages out in the open. So the circling-the-wagons strategy worked reasonably well. Nowadays if you try to shut other views down, people go off and create their own bubbles.
This is why I take a pretty extreme stance on engaging with weird, and even horrible, views. I think smart, informed people should engage with the arguments of, for example, white supremacists. Ignoring them or denouncing them does not make these views go away, but feeds into the story that elites are seeking to suppress any dissenting views.
"When I tried reviewing ivermectin, I said - here’s a case where the experts have spoken with unusual unanimity about which side is right."
Uhm, what?
As far as im aware, US experts as embodied by its health institutions, still have not taken a stance and hide behind deflections such as 'you shouldnt take horse dewormer' and more garden variety generalisms such as 'you should not take drugs for purposes which we have not evaluated'. To what extent have they actually taken a positive stance against ivm?
Insofar as experts have taken a stance; it has been approved for the treatment of covid, in a majority of countries around the world.
Omit the U in kavanagh
Might I inquire about the sudden interest in Youtube streamers? Is it because of Aella?
I thought your ivermectin post was great. It provided something more than just a dismissive, "the experts say ivermectin doesn't work so you shouldn't take it". There is an underprovision of writing for people who want more than a news article but don't want to spend a week ready peer reviewed publications.
A great article, but my main takeaway is a great desire to go visit underwater pyramids.
He seems to resent people for being curious, in the same mold that the folks who criticize others for "just asking questions" seem to do: just because he's afraid they'll come to a conclusion he doesn't like. I think one consequence of this that he is missing that many of the questions people are asking have implications far beyond whatever narrow culture war issues he's caught up in.
Here he is complaining that people are trying to figure out how robust ChatGPT's guardrails are:
https://twitter.com/C_Kavanagh/status/1622772800598712320
If you're still interested in lost underwater civilizations of questionable historicity, you may be interested in the black sea deluge theory.
They ARE hostes humani generis, but reversed stupidity etc.
I must admit, Alexandros is a better fake last name than Alexander. Even though the geographical difference (Greece vs Macedonia) is rather tiny.
The most ridiculous line of Kavanagh's: “If studies had supported Ivermectin as an effective treatment it would have been adopted by medical and public health authorities.”
Evidently, Kavanagh's mental model is that authorities operate according to a neutral, objective rationality and are not subject to their own institutional biases. As if we did not see a very great deal during the pandemic that demonstrates the opposite.
This is all downstream of: Kavanagh thinks learning and understanding things is relatively easy, while Scott thinks learning and understanding things is very, very hard. Kavanagh sees the light blinking *Science*, and stops, while Scott never stops.
Kavanagh is wrong. Scott is right.
So perhaps I’m stupid and worthy of ridicule, but I *still* buy (a version of) Hancock’s theory. Hancock himself is not to be trusted; he’s far, far too credulous, and much of his evidence is easily rebutted (such as the frozen mammoth corpses in Siberia being evidence of a rapid climactic shift). But he doesn’t seem to be *dishonest,* and I found the case he presents in *Underworld* compelling. There, he doesn’t talk about Atlantis; instead he presents a picture of a near-world-girdling coastal civilization (or set of civilizations) that was drowned out at the end of the last ice age. This makes *tremendous* sense to me, and explains a lot that nothing else does, such as evidence of truly ancient cultural ties between South America and Africa.
Any thoughts on the difference between doing the Ivermectin analysis privately (and coming to whatever conclusion you decide but keeping it to yourself) versus posting the Ivermectin analysis as a public blog post? It seems like there should be some consideration of the fact that you cede the ability to be a neutral observer of the phenomena when you choose to discuss it in a public instead of a private medium.
So you're saying I shouldn't believe in a worldwide body that oversees the game of chess?
Perhaps CK desperately wants you to engage with him as an ego boost. Just ignore him and let him flail around in a vacuum.
Bret Devereaux linked a few weeks ago to this piece by Alexandra Sills making a related argument that academic historians need to engage with the general public more than they do. She even uses the same central example of having once believed in Atlantis, because that's what the sources who *did* want to engage the public plausibly argued.
https://ancientalexandra.wixsite.com/domus/post/knights-on-white-horses
I am Gregory XVI, and I approve of this message 😁
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06068b.htm
"It is to escape from this conclusion that some philosophers, accepting as a principle the impotency of reason, have emphasized the need of belief on the part of human nature, either asserting the primacy of belief over reason or else affirming a radical separation between reason and belief, that is, between science and philosophy on the one hand and religion on the other. Such is the position taken by Kant, when he distinguishes between pure reason, confined to subjectivity, and practical reason, which alone is able to put us by an act of faith in relation with objective reality. It is also a fideistic attitude which is the occasion of agnosticism, of positivism, of pragmatism and other modern forms of anti-intellectualism. As against these views, it must be noted that authority, even the authority of God, cannot be the supreme criterion of certitude, and an act of faith cannot be the primary form of human knowledge. This authority, indeed, in order to be a motive of assent, must be previously acknowledged as being certainly valid; before we believe in a proposition as revealed by God, we must first know with certitude that God exists, that He reveals such and such a proposition, and that His teaching is worthy of assent, all of which questions can and must be ultimately decided only by an act of intellectual assent based on objective evidence. Thus, fideism not only denies intellectual knowledge, but logically ruins faith itself."
I sometimes think about what it would be like to be just getting onto the internet now, or even to not be a Very Online person (an ultimate goal of mine at which I keep failing). I would definitely be a conspiracy theorist.
The reason is because Internet Discourse is about 12 layers deep and only the first few make any sense (See Zvi's Simulacra stuff). So you get online and someone says a pretty reasonable-sounding thing ("I like spaghetti"), and you retweet it, and suddenly you are a racist and a sexist, and an idiot. Because you didn't know that some celebrity Nazi streamer *also* liked spaghetti and that therefore all Right Thinking people hate spaghetti and anyway what Americans eat isn't actually spaghetti, and also did you know the guy who brought spaghetti to the Americas was a pedophile. If the Nazi streamer was even a little coy about being a Nazi he'd radicalize a more naive me in about 20 minutes in that environment.
The controversy over Ivermectin is mis-framed, the victim of recent-history amnesia.
Around 2020, when Trump began boosting it, Ivermectin became a token of one’s politics and therefore of one’s attitude to the pandemic. For the true believers, for the Trump camp, Ivermectin was a cure for Covid, a cure that made the pandemic nothing to worry about and a reason to open up, to get on with life and keep the economy humming along so Trump could be re-elected in 2020.
Within that framework, if authorities had conceded that Ivermectin might work, the Trump political machine would have translated that as the end of the pandemic and all the contrary voices demanding we do difficult and costly things would have been silenced. We’d have been swallowing Ivermectin, not vaccinating, and the death toll would have been in the millions.
Perhaps those in the Ivermectin-is-junk camp were too certain, perhaps they dismissed some evidence more forcefully than the science at the time justified, but I’m darn glad they did. This never was an Atlantis-type controversy and you mustn’t judge it by the same criteria.
It's unfortunate you gave up on Atlantis because sunken lost civilizations definitely exist; they're along the underwater coastlines all over the world from during the last glacial maximum. Naturally many now-submerged areas were considered important to their milieu and legends grew up around them. Most of human history can't be uncovered well by current archaeological processes because most humans lived along coasts that are now underwater, and are in many instances too dangerous to explore.
“If all I’ve heard is that the pro-skub people say that you should look at evidence [...] I’m already 90-something percent sure pro-skub are the good guys”
I’d always assumed this heuristic was universal, until the last 5 years falsified me in spectacular fashion. It seemed obvious that without getting a PhD in skub, this is the best you can do. Is this way of thinking just a peculiarity of rationalist-type people?
So, um. How do these geological forces work? The ones that build the underwater stairstep patterns?
Another thing to keep in mind, is you can get pretty far by reasoning about pharmacological mechanisms. Basically, ivermectin isn't the kind of molecule that would be expected to do anything to SARS-CoV-2. And it isn't targeted at any host immunity factors, either. So the prior for it working against COVID is low.
So someone explain to me why I shouldn’t take the conspiracy theorist position that people like Kavanagh are systematically (and to some meaningful extent, deliberately) perpetuating a faith-based, authoritarian structure to induce us to blindly believe whatever the institutional incentives of Science want us to believe.
I feel like this Chris individual exemplifies a particular subtype of a type of person — the people I've started, mentally, calling "aggressive conformists."
Curiosity is bad, trust in Authority, believe with all your heart in the Sanctioned Things. My place and time in history is the one that got it right.
The same sort of person that, many years ago, would have been sneering at anyone who didn't see the obvious danger of witches.
Atlantis is real tho (above water, the eye of Africa matches platos description and that area had a famous king atlas and humans were probably more seafaring then usually noted and using slave labor to cut the various stones monuments on and off for milliuna)
To impress an ancient Greek, you need clean water, the ability to move the big blocks, and able to cross the ocean.
While I largely agree with Scott, I also think Bret Weinstein *deserves* Chris Kavanagh.
Thanks for this post.
That kind of lazy, snobbish attitude may do as much practical work to further ill-founded conspiracy theories as anything Alex Jones does. Treating adults like toddlers is often going to harden their beliefs. Why do they ignore the basics of human nature?
Maybe just in it for the clicks? Or a fulfilling sense of supremacy?
What Scott calls fideism, I think I frequently see referred to on the greater net as "scientism": which is itself misrepresented, if I trust Wikipedia. WP calls scientism the belief that science is the best or only way to reach truth. I see people commonly use the term to refer to people who employ arguments from authority, where the authority is some scientist, as opposed to people who rely on the scientific method, and at most use scientists as a heuristic or possible time saver.
If I'm accurate, then scientism sounds like a special case of fideism. Scientism is faith in scientists.
I guess my point here is that Scott's far from alone in being frustrated by people who appear scientific but only because they profess faith in people who call themselves scientists. They just use a different term. (And TIL what fideism is!)
...and imagine what this is like for religious people. We experience stuff every day that Scientists and Experts think isn't real. To extend the scuba metaphor, we're going to visit the underwater pyramids with our whole family and all our friends, and they're telling us the ocean isn't real.
It takes a steely will to treat the Ivermectin debate seriously.
Yes, I've noticed the phenomenon that to many people the best arguments in favor of anything are "everyone we know believes it", "most high status people believe it", "people who don't support it are routinely mocked".
There are doubtless good evolutionary reasons for this - and also good reasons that a minority won't find this credible, at least not in all cases, and will insist on investigating for themselves, or at least privately regarding the "truths" in question as either "not proven" or even "probably false, given the effort to get people to (pretend to) believe them".
My personal eye opening experience was with climate change. Even a MOOC supposedly on the mechanisms of climate change started by informing me that some (large) percent of climate scientists believed climate change was real. And asking questions on their forums drew all kinds of flack. Apparently wanting predictions of the impact expressed in terms I could easily grasp ("how do the predicted effects compare with the medieval warm period?") was evidence that the person asking was a climate change denier come to the class to troll. It was damn clear that many prolific posters wouldn't have recognized the scientific method if it bit them, and didn't understand any details of climate change or its mechanisms.
It's your curse - and mine - to be abnormal, born with traits only useful to society in times of change. You can tell the difference between evidence and insult. You don't always automatically believe the highest status person in sight. You can distinguish between "what We believe" and "what's most likely to be true," at least some of the time.
That's a very uncomfortable position to be in. If one is lucky, these traits can be useful in becoming The Authority to be believed by a collection of Believers (a politer term than "sheeple," and more specific than "normals"). Mostly though it tends to put one on the outside looking in.
This is my take on internet fame:
https://www.mattball.org/2023/02/the-path-to-internet-fame-2-of-2.html
I'm not certain if this is precisely Kavanagh's position but I do think he leans this way - there seems to be a belief that the flow of potentially harmful information online requires (I'm probably over generalizing a bit) a kind of strong containment effort. It's a kind of public policy instinct - this is where Neil Young calling for Spotify to take off Joe Rogan or the broad misinformation expertise sphere comes from. And I can see how that mindset leads to "this empowered the Bret Weinsteins of the world to add marginal value to a conversation where the Experts had already reached the right conclusion."
But yeah, I think you're right in the effectiveness of the tone, I think it's pretty fair to be curious about the nuances of things, I don't really trust the instinct of someone to even be a misinformation expert, and I can't get past the idea that some people are gonna want to think about things and may even google it and the like and that's fine.
Anyone with a controversial opinion, which includes both conspiracy theorists and also things which are mainstream but also have a lot of opponents (like feminism) are surrounded by not just a bubble, but an anti-bubble.
In a previous job I had a colleague who was a Christadelphian. He was an amazing engineer, and in his job he got a lot of respect for reading up on the original literature of different problems and producing innovative solutions. Then in his evenings, he got a lot of respect for doing analyses of the bible and predicting the date of the second coming (or something like that). Mostly we did not talk to him about this, and if he mentioned it he would be a bit embarrassed - at some level he must have known we thought it daft.
The one person who did start a discussion about this was the least tactful person in the office. Which wasn't very untactful by the standards of twitter (this was before twitter); but nevertheless the conversation was a bit cringeworthy. My point in all this is that the anti-bubble is made up of the people least likely to be able to persuade them that they are wrong.
In another incident, someone I respect, who was usually very confident, diffidently admitted in a forum (that they ran) that they occasionally thought that God had spoken to them directly. They were worried that admitting this would make people lose respect for their intelligence. All the friends in the group who were christians rallied round and said that they thought this was wonderful and that they didn't lost any respect. I was silent. I've often looked back on this and thought - I should have had the confidence to say "it wouldn't be the act of a friend not to point out that there are other possible explanations - irrespective of you being religious, I still have enormous respect for you" (or something along those lines).
I hope you'll talk to Destiny (aka Stephen Bonnell) someday; as you guessed, his community has a massive presence on Manifold Markets, but he's also one of the most rhetorically competent people in the YT streaming sphere. He's read several SSC posts on stream in the past, and he accepts and reads emails from his community, so I'd think he'd be relatively easy to get in touch with.
While I largely disagree with Scott, I also think Bret Weinstein *deserves* Chris Kavanagh.
"Either these people didn’t understand the arguments for and against Atlantis, or they did. If they didn’t, they were frauds, claiming expertise in a subject they knew nothing about. If they did, then at any moment they could have saved me from a five year wild-goose-chase - but chose not to, because it was more fun to insult me."
Fukin' Amen. this is the best sentence ever to describe Kavanagh's "Guru's" podcast. it's hours upon hours of the above.
I was very grateful for your Ivermectin post- I don't have a lot to add, other than those of us who are a bit closer to 1.01^infinity than average appreciate you sharing your thought processes and journey in such a compelling way!
I'm 100% certain he would talk identically about any number of sensitive topics, such as biological sex and race differences - I've seen his exact language used to describe a belief that cognitive ability differs by race. So nobody should be obliged to take what he says seriously.
Let me repeat - people like this shout down legitimate scientific statements all time using this language, so it would simply be a coincidence if there was no valid and worthy scientific debate to be had around ivermectin.
"pro-science" people have unquestionably, unequivocally allowed their ideology to influence what they think of as scientifically valid, so they have no leg to stand on when they want to declare that something doesn't even warrant investigation.
I think that, for most people, Kavanagh's type of argument is effective. A typical person believes following whatever their ingroup tells them to believe is the best path to the truth. And if it ever becomes clear that their ingroup is incorrect, then they'll still pretend to believe in order to avoid the social consequences of believing the "wrong" thing.
I think the reasoning of people like Kavanagh is a bit more involved than you make it sound; in fact, it is somewhat closer to the EA mindset.
---
Consider Ivermectin. I think it's pretty obvious by now that it doesn't work at preventing COVID. Every person who chooses to trust in Ivermectin instead of getting a vaccination runs an appreciable risk of dying (or being crippled for life); what's worse, this person runs the risk of transmitting COVID to others. Most people are not doctors nor biologists; they're just regular John Does trying to make it through the day. They have neither the time nor the skill to delve into every little study and re-run their own statistical calculations; they just need to know which choice is right: Ivermectin or vaccination.
Thus, by undermining the clear and accurate message -- "choose vaccination" -- you are influencing at least some number of people to make the wrong choice; thus, you are causing deaths both directly, and indirectly (through secondary infections). It doesn't matter that your intentions are good, and that your work is thorough; in essence, you are privileging the lives of a few science nerds over (potentially) millions of ordinary people. You are condemning millions to die over your intellectual vanity.
---
Unfortunately, I think the argument above is true; it's just not the whole truth. It omits the massive negative knock-on effects (yes, including deaths) that result from normalizing ignorance and propaganda over critical thinking; however, such effects are long-term and difficult to measure. COVID deaths, on the other hand, are readily observable. Short-term thinking will always win out over long-term planning, and this situation is no different.
Well it is quite fun to insult people. (extremist conformist authoritarians like this Kavanagh character, moreso)
The chance of maybe causing the insulted person to add for themselves some injury to the insult, makes it even more thrilling.
Was it a conspiracy theory that COVID-19 leaked from a lab?
Was it a conspiracy theory that masks were worthless for stopping COVID-19?
Was it a conspiracy theory that Fauci didn't know what the hell he was talking about?
There are two kinds of faith: faith in that which has been disproven, and faith in that which has not been proven.
A reasonable person has principles, which guide him when information is insufficient. They can fail you but are beneficial when they usually don't.
I often present an expert on one side with a well-supported argument on the other and ask them to reconcile. Sometimes they do...
Minor correction: 0.99^infinity = 0. What you meant is that 0.99^n goes to 0 (with n).
I mostly agree with your criticism of Kavanaugh. But I think a better version of the kind of critique he is making is thet it can be a mistake to treat people as acting in good faith and making arguments based on rational assessment of evidence when they're not. In the former case a rational breakdown of the evidence helps, in the latter it just draws more attention to them which they use to convince more people.
This is complicated in practice because most fringe beliefs that have a large following will have a mixture of both. There's the people selling magic beans for money who know that's what they're doing. And people who've been convinced by them that the beans are magic and innocently try and tell their friends.
The theoretical ideal response is to help the latter without being exposure to the former, but these kind of people often try and stoke controversy because because if a thousand new people learn about them from the takedown, and 999 agree they're frauds, they've still gained one customer/follower.
Can you do a post talking about the meta-analysis of mask effectiveness studies?
You are completely right on this issue.
Years of dealing with similar controversies in Rootclaim taught me that truth is hard. We are constantly surprised by the results of our analyses, and each time find a different party to be correct. Sometimes it's US, sometimes Russia, sometimes China. Sometimes democrats, sometimes republicans. Sometimes the mainstream, sometimes the fringe. Sometimes experts, sometimes laypeople.
In the case of Kavanagh, it's easy to see how his simplistic approach leads him to wrong conclusions:
He takes the mainstream opinion on the chemical attacks in Syria (https://twitter.com/C_Kavanagh/status/1128388814525743104). Our analysis originally yielded 92% for the opposition carrying out the Ghouta attack, and that was recently shown to be the case after a video of opposition fighters launching chemical rockets was geolocated to the attack's launch location.
https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/Who-carried-out-the-chemical-attack-in-Ghouta-on-August-21-2013
He does the same for the origins of sars-cov-2 (https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40C_Kavanagh%20lab%20leak%20evidence&src=typed_query&f=top), where the evidence strongly favors a lab leak.
https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COVID-19-SARS-CoV-2
There are no shortcuts to truth.
Good article as usual: mostly hits points I've heard from you before, but it's good stuff to hear (and the underwater pyramid thing is a fun anecdote). Also, looking forward to your discussion of the "Five More Years" predictions from 2018 soon!
Assuming you still have some of that Atlantis passion, I would read a lengthy post summarizing the arguments that initially convinced you in favor of Atlantis existing, what the discrepancies in the coherent narrative exactly *were*, and then the arguments which ultimately convinced you against.
(Also — and I have no memory of my source here, talking out of my ass based on something I read about in middle school — isn’t the best candidate for Atlantis the ancient civilization of Tartessos in southern Spain/Biblical “Tarshish”? Which is enigmatic in the way pre-Bronze Age Collapse civilizations are but which isn’t any kind of geographic anomaly).
I appreciated this a lot. I was taught six day creationism growing up and read YEC apologists voraciously. The book or two I was able to find at the library were pretty scarce and the Creationists seemed to have an exhaustive answer for everything. Every smart person I asked about evolution had some kind of dismissive comeback that made me think maybe the Creationists were right.
Then a single individual who was well acquainted with scientific literature decided to engage me in good faith, starting with an argument about HERVs that I had never heard before. I also found a book by the kind of para-scientific writer that sometimes gets made fun of, but he had taken time to write a book explaining the reasons why evolution made a lot of sense. I was stunned and it completely changed the course of my life.
Trusting the experts is not really an epistemic heuristic. The best option epistemically is to read so much that you become an expert. Trusting the experts is really about efficiency. People want to be able to dismiss conspiracy theories because it is too much work to have to refute literally every incorrect argument all the time. Most people who have the same argument (and win) three times get tired and dismissive and announce they are no longer going to argue with anyone about this subject. That's reasonable - they want to be able to move on to new subjects and new knowledge and not be weighed down by people behind them.
But the reality is: when a lot of people believe something, it is important to investigate it in depth and thoroughly explain why the thing is right or wrong. Maybe this isn't "cutting edge" intellectual work, but it's extremely necessary work that someone needs to do.
The "don't even engage with the question" tweet reminds me a bit of epistemic learned helplessness, where you can't trust yourself to reason correctly, so you should never try. I guess it's the correct advice for some people, but someone somewhere does need to evaluate the evidence and if Scott can't do it, who can?
Wiki on cargo cult science (categorised by Feynman).
„Cargo cult science is a pseudoscientific method of research that favors evidence that confirms an assumed hypothesis. In contrast with the scientific method, there is no vigorous effort to disprove or delimit the hypothesis.[1] The term cargo cult science was first used by physicist Richard Feynman during his 1974 commencement address at the California Institute of Technology.[1]“
The cargo cult is what Kavanaugh apparently wants.
Meanwhile Scott’s post assumed nothing and went through all the studies on Ivermectin, finding out that it’s useless against covid. Since Scott came to a conclusion that Kavanaugh agrees with, the problem Kavanaugh has is that Scott didn’t start with the „correct“ assumption and proceed from there. Feynman would have no problem taking sides here - he would side with Scott.
Both of your ivermectin articles were long, but I finished reading both of them and learned some things from both of them.
I have never been able to finish an episode of "Decoding the Gurus".
> There may be people so far gone into the outer darkness that they can’t be saved, but you are forbidden from ever believing with certainty that any specific individual is in this category.
Emphatically endorsed. It's a simple rule, but it feels like a cheat code for empathy.
I guess the steelman of this would be that an individual of a certain level of celebrity should not be addressing these concerns. I don't want the President of the United States weighing in on a schoolyard fight, or debating a homeless man's conspiracy theory that someone is a Cylon. To do so would create far more confusion than it would clear, no matter the strength of the argument.
But I don't think he's saying that. That would imply that Scott is an Internet behemoth pulling average folks along in his wake, but Kavanath is complaining about "the rationalists"; that suggests the Rationalist Community is itself a behemoth on the political landscape. And if a behemoth is interested in the topic, then it SHOULD be followed up on. You can't claim consensus while ignoring the questions of behemoths.
The default epistemology is "believe what you've heard" and when a conflict arises, resolve it with "believe who you trust more". Believing things for reasons is always going to be the hardest way to go, but the more of it we can get, the better. Think of humanity's collective beliefs like a bunch of caches pointing at other caches. The system only works is because real information is injected occasionally (by people reasoning and experimenting), otherwise you just get loops of beliefs pointing at each other.
As a child, I grew up in a house full of second-hand books, and with no internet. I learned about evolution from books that I knew were out of date, which mentioned that we didn’t know how wings could have evolved because half-a-wing can’t be used for flying. I had a few ideas of my own about partial wings, along the lines of flying squirrels gliding, and maybe you could run faster with some flapping, or maybe elaborate sexual displays, but I had nowhere to look up what the current ideas would be. So I waited years until we finally learned about it in school, and I asked my biology teacher.
I had, of course, learnt school survival techniques like never giving away that you already knew about this topic, and asking everything as a careful question without your own thoughts or prior knowledge, but these weren’t enough here! Because even asking this question had my biology teacher decide I was a religious fundamentalist who was opposed to evolutionary theory, and so everything she taught us from that moment on had weird patronising comments thrown in about “unless you don’t believe in that”. It had never even occurred to me that this was a possible danger (it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would oppose evolution for religious reasons past the Victorians).
My biology teacher didn’t have any good answers for me about wings. If a child asked me that, and I didn’t have up-to-date knowledge, I’d probably prompt them for their own thoughts, not assume I knew a position they were taking in some cultural dispute. Children sometimes do ask me about things that they have clearly come across as part of some cultural dispute, and are pretty much always looking for someone to talk it through with and suggest some broader context rather than actually embedded in a political position.
In short, people treating curiosity as a sign that someone is the wrong sort of person, and refusing to actually answer questions properly, also makes me very cross.
I'm just here to point out that the Richat Structure is DEFINITELY the former site of Atlantis. This isn't even a conspiracy theory, just a seriously under-investigated archeological thesis that someone with enough money could definitively prove or disprove.
I liked your posts on ivermectin, but I do think there is a genuine cost to posts like it, which Kavanagh seems to me to be at least hinting at.
When you take conspiracy theorists arguments seriously, it implies a higher prior on conspiracy theories than when you dismiss them out of hand. This can lead to your readers (consciously or not) increasing their priors on conspiracy theories and being more likely to believe future conspiracy theories they come across.
If their prior on conspiracies were not previously too low, this is a relevant cost.
Maybe I'm being too charitable when I mentally translate the statements 'pro-mainstream-anti-conspiracy people' make as pointing at this issue, but I do think the issue is real.
Not saying the benefit isn't worth the cost. Not saying the 'pro-mainstream-anti-conspiracy people' do a good job of pointing out that cost or doing any sort of cost-benefit analysis.
Just saying the cost exists, and is not entirely irrelevant. There probably exist some conspiracy theories it would be actively harmful for you to publicly take seriously because that cost would outweigh the benefit of practicing forming opinions.
I just spent the past two minutes scrolling through this Kavanagh guy's Twitter feed. 0/10, would not recommend. Smug, all the hallmarks of "too online," insults people rather than engage with anything they said, nothing original or insightful, lots of braindead left-right kayfabe jabbering, etc. Scott, you need to pick better online feuds! Jay-Z doesn't respond to a diss track from some Bronx drill rapper who's still trying to get exposure on Spotify by texting his friends and posting links on Facebook! The Undertaker doesn't beef with some meathead freshly hired from a Gold's Gym in San Jacinto!
Ugh. You did spill a lot of ink without actually doing it in the right way that could have actually been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
It's not really enough to "sort of" be a rationalist and "sort of" of be scientific. Do it the right way and get it accepted in a publication or leave it to the experts. All you had to do was wait about 6 months:
https://www.cochrane.org/CD015017/INFECTN_ivermectin-preventing-and-treating-covid-19.
Cochrane did not have any of the ad hominems, speculations, or things that you backtracked on.
Also longer doesn't mean better. Surely, you could have written less.
Finally, I am not sure that admitting that you had a dumb idea as a teenager is helpful.
The other thing I find odd about the anti-conspiracy stuff is the particular hatred towards 9/11 truthers. Some beliefs are inherently bad, for instance Holocaust denial, but disbelieving the main narrative about 9/11 isn’t that.
I mean if the entire population were truthers in 2003 then we might have 1 million fewer dead Arabs. And no doubt back in 2003 the 20% of people who didn’t believe that the existence of WMD had been proven by the experts overlap significantly with the truthers.
Who are the dupes here? The odd thing about post 2003 is that after the abject failure of the establishment media to hold government and the military to account, what we learned was that the problem was the people who didn’t subsequently trust the government or the media.
As for myself I don’t see much merit in 9/11 theories, it’s all too complex.
It doesn’t read as sarcastic at all, to me. Humorless, actually.
This is the most I’ve ever loved you. But if you prove to me the spotted owl really was being harmed by logging activities and the bard owl intruding into its habitat was just coincidence I’m going to need a minute to process that.
This guys the worst. All he does is shit all over anyone with a podcast/blog that discusses things, ironically I believe he has his own podcast too. You wanna critique Rogan fine, but this dude took the time to shit all over Andrew Huberman who literally cannot possibly be more credible and transparent when discussing health topics in his show. He bends over backwards to acknowledge the relative strength of the evidence when he discusses something, yet for some reason this guy still shits on him. Literally the worst type of person, just reeks of insecurity.
The bottom line is that “trust the experts uncritically and scientists are the experts” is a nonsensical statement, because the whole point of science is that you trust data, not people. An expert you trust uncritically isn’t a scientist, they’re a priest.
(And of course it’s worse than that because in practice “trust the science” really means “trust the Twitter user who retweeted the pundit who read the article that summarized the results of the study that a scientist did that may or may not be replicable”)
I know you have a burning anger against anti-conspiracy bloggers like me, so I will not bother you with some of the subtle misgivings in your rant above.
However, one thing that might be useful; conspiratorial ecosystems are NOT "reasoning like everybody else just with worse vigilance". This is incorrect, there are multiple behavioral and cognitive differences stemming from epistemic, social and existential motivations that are not 'like everybody else'
Here is a 5 min summary:
https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/the-conspiracy-mindset
Alexander is better at scientific inquiry. Kavanagh is much, much better at recognizing the fox in the henhouse.
I think Kavanagh/anti-both sidesism arguments presupposes there are a class of people who are really bad at doing research/using reason and so you want to model blind trust in experts for them so that they just do what is socially normal on important questions.
It does seem to me that there are issues that appear as settled questions to most people and if you raise the salience of them or present them as open questions some people, who would never have otherwise practiced epistemic learned helplessness on the issue will attempt to apply reason and arrive at wild conclusions. Flat earth has kind of peaked as a phenomenon, but I would expect that if major cable news shows had held formal debates on the subject prior to its peak that it would have increased the population of flat earthers just because more people who are conspiratorially minded/exceptionally bad at rationality would have engaged with the question.
Now in this model of the world there does need to be a class of experts who does science and reads studies and applies rationality but everyone outside of the relevant group of experts should defer to them and model deference.
If you think the sort of rationality ability + subject matter knowledge people need to avoid 0.99^infinity going to zero is quite high then I think this makes some sense as a model of the world. But it's very undemocratic, it leads to all sort of "Who Watches the Watchmen" issues if we all defer to small groups of subject matter experts.
I do think that's the real thing people find annoying about rationalists though. Is that there's sort of a pact within elite knowledge worker institutions to settle these sorts of disputes within institutional channels and rationalists break that pact. And I mean, it's not wrong to say non-subject matter experts critiquing subject matter experts through non institutional channels has dramatically lowered trust in institutions (revolt of the public), people just like it when it happens to institutions they don't like and dislike it when it happens to institutions they do like.
To behave rationally is a pretty nice quality. To be a "rationalist" these days means you spend way too much time stretching every system, machine, and model to fit the particular Russian nesting doll you're invested in proving (i.e., big picture, it's the opposite of rational behavior).
And the favorite nesting doll amongst libertarian rationalists is "the cathedral," or the supposed ignorance/corruption/biases of professional educators, researchers, etc. It requires a naïve tone, a la FoxNews, "We're just asking questions, just wondering, just doing our due diligence," just expanding on the chaotic creativity of those hardwired to tear down structures rather than build or repair.
When you use so much bandwidth on something like ivermectin, it's like devoting your show to Hillary's emails for two years. Even if you don't tell a single lie, you're still just playing to your audience. So why not spend your time on things that might really make a difference because of rampant misinformation -- things that you really need to learn about, personally, like when you went scuba diving for original source material -- like reading and reviewing the full Mueller Report?
Wonderful! Also, I'm happy to see a reference to hostes humani generis.
Great essay. Precisely the sort of thing that made me subscribe in the first place. I particularly love the Atlantis analogy, since it takes it out of the realm of politically-charged topics.
The one area I'm not so sure about is the argument against the PR angle. It certainly seems to me that there is a level of credibility given to ludicrous points of view when presented side-by-side with the patently obvious truth, and so it's easy for people who are skimming stuff to get some subconscious impression of "there are good arguments on both sides". And there are a lot of people who apply far less care to evaluating a claim than an ACX reader does, from time pressure or lack of developed habits.
But a topic like "the world is obviously round, here are some people who think it's flat and look at how silly that belief is / they are" is something that most people can check against their daily experiences. They can see, for example, that ships sailing out of the harbor disappear from view hull-first and mast-last. So there's not a lot of risk to both-sidesing an article like that. However, "the Holocaust obviously happened and here are some people who have decided otherwise and how many bad things result from that", is riskier, because that's not a claim that is readily evaluated against daily experience. You learn from history textbooks, from lots of reading, seeing pictures of the camps and their liberation, etc... but an article that starts with "some people say the Holocaust happened. Others say that's a filthy lie. Let's treat both sies with dignity" does in fact have some PR risk attached. Someone who's normally thin-slicing new information can read that and come away with an impression that there is legitimate debate, where in fact there is only illegitimate debate.
I don't know where or precisely how to draw the line on "there is a valid PR concern here" vs "nonsense, there is plenty of space to treat the argument fairly, and deal a mortal blow to one side with very simple evidence and reasoning." It's clearly a hard problem. But I'm pretty sure that the line isn't as far to the side of "we should never worry about PR concerns relating to both-sidesing something" as the essay here appears to argue.
With every pseudoscientific movement, there is a corresponding dispute over whether scientists should address their arguments. Those arguments often are produced with a level of obsessive detail and sophistication where it takes a decent amount of education to understand where they go wrong, but are error-prone enough that having a decent understanding why is usually accessible to reasonably intelligent undergrad or even high schooler who has put in some work towards it. The bigger pseudoscientific movements usually have whole cottage industries dedicated to pumping out seemingly reasonable arguments that take some effort to pick apart.
The proponents of those movements set up a heads I win, tails you lose proposition when it comes to engaging scientific rebuttal. If people refuse to address them, they'll claim that this is because scholars are suppressing them, afraid to address their arguments, are dogmatic, etc. This can look compelling to outside observers who lack the capacity to understand why their superficially reasonable arguments are bad. It looks like scientists are ducking them, which fringe theorists are happy to parlay into their claims of improper suppression.
But, at the same time, if scholars do engage them, they use the fact that this is happening to create the impression that they are one legitimate side in a serious controversy where reasonable people can disagree. And this furthers their goals too. When their goals are obtaining institutional legitimacy, such as being taught in public schools or affecting public policy, this is significant.
This debate comes up again and again. From creationism, to climate denial, to more obscure stuff like facilitated communication you'll see this as a central conundrum for scientists and other scholars who have their actual academic responsibilities to worry about.
I see Chris Kavanagh as offering a variation of the latter argument here. Scott, by writing a lengthy address ends up creating a false impression that there's a serious dispute here where reasonable people reasonably disagree. Scott is a little out of his depth trying to rebut someone even more so, but making up for it with relentless gumption. So now you have naïve observers perhaps thinking this is a topic of academic controversy or that they're capable of engaging with the contours of the scientific claims on a level they are not, which is a trap to get rabbit holed into their own bad beliefs.
Scott offers the classic counter-argument to this, which is that detailed debunkings help people on the fence see how these ideas go wrong, and perhaps help them reason better next time they encounter a pseudoscientific claim with the appearance of sophistication. This is a service that more than outweighs the risk above.
Having seen this kind of dispute many times over, I'm never quite sure how I side on it. Both sides have pros and cons in a way that isn't easy to settle. I have long appreciated lay-attempts at long public debunkings and have offered them myself on subjects I know more about from time to time. But I have also witnessed how this dynamic has caused blow-back and led people way astray on their own understanding. It's not obvious to me which concern weighs more. So I offer my comment merely to note the tension.
So here's my speculation about why the discourse between defenders of the mainstream like Kavanagh and contrarians ends up being so political and disconnected from object-level reality:
As I've gotten older and wiser, I've learned that I'm susceptible to a certain kind of marketing for things that present themselves as the Alternative to the Mainstream Thing. The way this has often played out is that I get all excited about how the Alternative Thing is going to dethrone the Mainstream Thing and change everything, and I will raise my status in expectation by being an early adopter of the Alternative Thing, but instead I just end up learning in an unnecessarily roundabout way that there are actually good reasons the Mainstream Thing is mainstream and the Alternative Thing is marginal.
I think the reason I've been so susceptible to this is related to the dynamic described in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures: The subcultures that form around mainstream things tend to be older and larger, so the status competitions within them are fiercer, and I correctly feel ill-equipped to win status competitions in a crowded field. So I instinctively pursue higher variance strategies that at least give me a chance of achieving high status, conditional on some Alternative Thing actually winning and becoming the new Mainstream Thing, which does happen occasionally. Unfortunately, the way this feels from the inside is not "I'm taking calculated risks because high-variance strategies are rational for me," but rather "Why do I keep Believing in the Underdog really hard and then being disappointed 😭😭😭 I guess I'm just gullible."
Anyway, I think mainstream defenders recognize that positioning oneself as a promoter of the Alternative to the Mainstream Thing is a great grift, because there's an inexhaustible supply of insecure status-hungry people like me who are always scanning the horizon for high-variance Alternative Things to bet on. This means that contrarian beliefs can sometimes get more uptake than they deserve for status-competition reasons, and gives mainstream defenders an incentive to directly attack the social status of contrarians and their beliefs. Of course, gossiping about status also has the advantage that it's just easier than engaging on the object level, and is more fun, to most humans, most of the time.
ETA: To elaborate further on why contrarians attract the ire of the status-police, I think adopting contrarian stances tacitly signals both "I don't have what it takes to succeed according to the mainstream status hierarchy" and "I am ambitious, so I'm going to join this insurgent movement and try to overthrow the mainstream." This combination of weakness and ambition seems to paint a target on one's back.
I agree with Hitchens. "Picture all experts as if they were mammals." I don't know Chris Kavanagh's background, but I suspect he wasn't raised in a fundamentalist household or some place else where as a child the near experts/authorities were decidedly irrational and you painfully discovered this over the course of several years.
The way we make sure experts are experting correctly is by asking them to show their work. If they can't do that, they're not any different than fundamentalist parents who won't let their kids watch Thundercats because "it's Satanic." It's the same appeal to authority.
Having the "right answer" but not being able to show your work is not really having a right answer - it's just being lucky. The experts were lucky here.
Scott, I thought that your exploration of Ivermectin was fascinating and insightful.
Trashing you, because you did the work to understand why the studies revealed what they did, seems like just a few steps away from declaring that you're an apostate
Hm. I would have thought that Kavanagh's take was Bad on Purpose to Make You Click, and that there aren't actually people who think that way for real. I haven't seen any evidence otherwise.
I found his first tweet really irritating.
"You typed 25,000 words, and arrived at the right answer!" What kind of criticism is that?
A very reasonable response to a numbskull. Not a numbskull in the stupidity sense, but numbskull in that this K individual is clearly nothing more than a rabid attack dog on Twitter. The precise type of individual in the secondary role of mob leader's lieutenant for a witch burning.
Social media is poison.
This is a great post that contains a lot of truth. And yet … I also see a grain of truth in Kavanagh’s position. Like, I get emails every single day from P=NP crackpots and quantum mechanics crackpots and now AI crackpots too. Some of them probably *would* be better off never trying to think for themselves again, and just Trusting Science and Trusting the Experts. Sure, the experts are sometimes confidently wrong, but not as consistently so as they are! And for my part, I can’t possibly write 25,000 words to explain why each and every crackpot is wrong. As a matter of survival, I *have* to adopt a Kavanagh-like heuristic: “this person seems like an idiot.”
Where Kavanagh goes off the rails, and badly so, is here: if *someone else* spends 25,000 words to explain painstakingly why the experts’ knee-jerk instinct was right after all, then the only proper response is undying gratitude.
So - which microscopic error in cognitive bias management leads someone to accuse people who say things they don't like of being racist?
(or maybe you covered that in one of the articles you linked, I haven't read many of them)
This makes me think a contrarian marketplace or database would be useful; ask a bunch of smart people to give probabilities to various wild theories that experts dislike, so you can see which are the reasonable ones worth looking into and which ones are wild.
Thanks for explaining the rationale behind the ivermectin post. I appreciate that we have people like Scott to do the heavy lifting on these topics.
Yeah, you're basically right. But maybe you've put too much energy into the question of ivermectin? Sure there are still people who argue, but I think that after six months of honest debate in 2020, the answer became pretty darn clear. There's really a LOT of evidence that it doesn't work as claimed.
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To defend Chris very slightly - after reading the ivermectin article I almost commented something like "a quick trip over to Alexandros' website makes it pretty clear that he's employing motivated reasoning and is 100x less impartial than Scott is on this topic... did this really deserve >10,000 words?"
Looking back, I recognize that's a pretty unhelpful thing to say, and that Scott deserves a lot of credit for his thoroughness. But I get the impulse to think it kind of sucks that Alexandros's arguments get so much respect and airtime.
The fact that Scott wrote *this* article in addition to the original just goes to show how much he cares about the value of steelmanning. Respect.
Wait, can someone explain why believing in Atlantis makes you racist?
Re: trapped priors, this post o' mine might be of interest: <https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/02/04/just-in-time-bayesianism>. In particular, given Laplace's rule of succession, if you've been bitten by a dog before, your probability of a dog biting you is 2/(n+2), where n is your number of interactions. But then in expectation by the time you halve that, you've received another 2 dog bites. So the optimal thing is to not gather more evidence.
Best post in the rat->normie outreach series so far.
I’m trying to go up a level and think about why otherwise reasonable people, who would probably agree in the abstract that evaluating evidence is important, are motivated to take such a hard-line stance in favor of expert institutions. Not sure if I’m using this totally correctly, but what event traps your ‘trust experts’ prior?
Is it a result of some conspiracy arguments being too weak?
For example, maybe the protracted discourse over climate change trapped many educated liberals’ priors about scientific institutions because there is a high degree of consensus among climate scientists, the slow decline of many natural systems has been emotionally burdensome, and for a long time the most high-profile opposition arguments were not necessarily the most convincing ones (i.e., instead of nuanced discussions about the propriety of making certain forecasting assumptions, there was a lot of “Sure was cold this winter…”) Do people bias themselves toward absurd-sounding conspiracies and hindsight bias away the actual conspiracies and examples of institutional failure?
Or is it a result of some conspiracy arguments being too strong?
For example, I’ve been in plenty of arguments online, and occasionally the resistance you encounter on an issue you are confident about is unexpectedly strong. Your interlocutor just has this endless pile of argument trails and bunny paths to traverse, and while they individually are dubious enough upon inspection that you don’t update very much on them, they are too numerous to dispatch in any reasonable time frame as you go around and around and down the forking fractalline paths of disagreement. If you’re like me, you may begin to feel a psychologically damaging sense of epistemic uncertainty. I can imagine that instead of either getting overtaken by the force of logic or going back and developing some more general probabilistic heuristics that keep you from arguing into infinity, many people would like to just throw up their hands and say “Nobody seriously believes that birds are fake! I can’t exhaustively prove you wrong on every single thing but I know that it’s true! Even if I argue forever, your prior is trapped in bird fakehood and you’re still going to think the evidence supports you, so it’s pointless to even try! But I’m a humble and rational person so I’ll just defer to so-and-so who’s a Harvard professor and they say…”
Or something else? Or is that just not the right frame for this kind of thing entirely?
I think the unsaid, but implied, message to Scott is something like this:
Dude, we have the power now, we won the culture war. We now can just ban the other side on Facebook, on Twitter, anywhere in the media, get them fired from their jobs, get any venue to cancel their speeches or be burned down by somebody we certainly know nothing of but who will definitely show up to burn whatever we say needs to be burned. Soon there will be the law declaring their view illegal, and taking licenses and professional degrees from anyone who proclaims the heresy. Stop being a cuck and pretending like those are people and you have to argue with them. It's embarrassing and diminishes the Great Victory. People like you may cause them to occasionally be taken seriously and then we'd have to fight the culture war again, and we want to just enjoy the spoils of victory. We do not want to declare you the enemy but you are really walking on the thin ice here...
In other word, however I hate this, I must admit sometimes all these pomo critical theories are right - sometimes it's not about the facts but about the power.
> "I agree this might not have been the best use of my time, and I would accept this criticism from anyone except Kavanagh - who’s devoted his whole career to thinking about ivermectin and ideas closely aligned to it."
Probably a case of hyperbole not translating over internet; but what does this mean?
A quick search seems to have Kavanagh as a researcher in cognitive and evolutionary anthropology, writing articles about religion and ritual.
So I think that he has a day-job, but that he likes to put on his vigilante mask and go on twitter crusades after dark.
Might not be completely fair to say that his whole career is devoted thinking about ivermectin and so on.
Given that I (and probably most people) waste hours and hours on nonsense, all the "you spend too much time on X" critiques always seem completely empty.
Scott: As one scuba diver to another, where were those "pyramids"? I've heard of such things, but I've also heard reports by divers that didn't find the ones they saw all that impressive. From the photo, yours might be worth a trip sometime.
I learnt in my Indian philosophy class when reading about something new to you - first read without any analyzing on your part. Read the second time arguing along with the author. Then read a third time arguing against the author. Only after that form your opinion. Never blindly accept anything no matter the reputation of the author. Unfortunately a bit too time consuming in real world but does lead to a more nuanced view.
I agree that Chris Kavanagh's comments are not great, but I'm going to go against the grain and say that he actually is groping towards something real. There's a certain type of bad argument that the Rationalist community is susceptible to: it's hard to explain, but it's essentially an argument where the details are correct but the whole thing, when viewed from a distance, doesn't hold together.
The Atlantis thing mentioned in the post is one of them; Ivermectin, too. Some others are the aquatic ape hypothesis, the bicameral mind, and Slime Mold Time Mold's recent posts about obesity.
I think the reason the Rationalist community has such a hard time refuting these is that the problem isn't the individual sub-arguments, but the way the whole thing hangs together, and the Rationalist community mindset is all about examining and testing the smallest details.
I also think that people like Kavanagh aren't (in this instance) just arguing "weird arguments by weird people are weird and stupid", but trying to express a heuristic for dismissing these bad arguments. In this case, listening the experts or dismissing things because they sound dumb are actually viable strategies. The problem is that those strategies have their own failure modes.
Thanks for the detailed response Scott, I think you've misinterpreted some of my arguments and have pegged me a bit wrong (I don't think I've ever written anything on Ivermectin outside of some tweets?). I'll try to reply properly in time but I think the anecdote you offer at the start is very telling of the divide between us.
To explain, I too read Graham Hancock when young and found some of his arguments compelling. From your description you could not locate any good criticism and ended up scuba diving to investigate ruins firsthand, learning geology from the ground up, and going on "a five year wild-goose-chase". It sounds like this was a valuable experience but perhaps one that left you a bit bitter at what you describe as sneering anti-conspiracists.
For me on the other hand, I did locate a bunch of good criticisms both in the skeptic community and from relevant experts, even though this was young internet time. Part of this (I think) was from following the disparaging comments on Hancock's blog back to the people he was disagreeing with. I did not scuba dive in ruins (though it looks fun) but I did learn about how superficially compelling it was to present alternative histories as forbidden knowledge and that the actual history was drier but more interesting& complex. I did not come away from this resenting Hancock or people that found him convincing. Indeed, I think he is both sincere and good at making his arguments appear compelling to a lay audience. I did gain an appreciation of the frustration of experts he disparages who have dedicated their careers to the topics he covers though.
I also don't think I would have the same intuition you have that personally exploring the ruins would be informative. I think that would actually be likely to skew my perspective as it feels like it would deliver potentially inaccurate intuitions and that it would require already having the expertise to properly assess what you are seeing. I still do think it sounds and looks fun though, so maybe you made the better choice ;).
In any case, I think it's interesting that we both took rather different lessons from our early encounters with Hancock but maybe a place we do both agree that there is value to detailed critics laid out for a curious lay audience by experts who have an alternative opinion.
I always enjoy reading what you write but I honestly can't believe that this even had to be written.
"Just asking questions!". Just because a question is falsifiable doesn't make it scientific. Instead the implication goes the other way: scientific questions are falsifiable, but also ideally focus on relevant extensions to current knowledge without unnecessarily complicating the picture. The Ivermectin/Atlantis hypotheses are just daft, but yet, falsifiable. I'm with Chris on this one.
It's a well-written essay, and logically I think you 100% have the better argument. But...I'm also a little sympathetic to the other side. People are people, and they don't always, or even mostly, work remorselessly rationally, and it is even somewhat less than fully rational to operate as if they do.
Thing is, you should try just dealing with cranks over and over and over again. A person of good will and optimism will *start off* as you did here, being careful and measured, taking each hypothesis no matter how implausible it seems to you and treating it with respect, gathering the evidence, working out the math, writing it down line by line so any reasonable person can see the point.
And then one of two things happen: (1) they say well that's all well and good, but here's *another* line of argument that leads to the same conclusion, so ha! or (2) yeah well here's this one little place where you skipped a step, so your whole argument is suspect (sort of the grammar/analogy Nazi's approach that says if you misspelled a keyword, or your analogy isn't perfect in some miinor way, it shatters every logical link). And they are just indefatigable. It takes them 30 seconds to think up a new challenge, and it takes you 6 hours to patiently refute it, and after a while the economics just kills you, and you give up and say something nasty and ad hominem.
Not only that, but the point is unfortunately sound that when you treat a crank argument as worthy of close attention and discussion, people *do* take that you're agreeing there's a chance what they're saying is right, regardless of how strongly you put your final conclusion that they are not. So you're saying there *is* a chance? It's just a theory, what you're saying? There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio...! and you realize that your patient deconstruction of the central hypothesis of their obsession has not discouraged them *at all*, not prodded them to any introspection and doubt, but rather perversely *increased* their confidence that the central hypothesis is true -- look! Expert/Famed Reasonable Man/Authoirty took this seriously enough to debate! I must be *this* close to the actual truth! Let's roll out v2.0 or v5.0 or v948669.0 and try again...!
It's not logical, it's not reasonable, but it's human nature. I don't know that there are any great solutions. I fully agree with you that people with knowledge and ability should try to be more patient, take seriously hypotheses that seeem on the surface absurd, or unlikely, or which are presented offensively, offend the shibboleths, et cetera. This is why I feel it's deeply wrong to use phrases like "climate change denier," which short-circuits engaging rationally with an ad hominem label, and it's equally wrong to accuse everyone who proposes differences in outcomes between the races and sexes may in some cases arise from perfectly innocent causes of irredeemable racist or sexism. So logically we should treat people who think vaccines are useless or evil, and folk remedies sure-fire, with enough respect to engage the argument reasonably.
But it's difficult, and I can't too much blame people who lost their cool and fling about regrettable contemptuous dismissal. Boo humans.
As an example of the times when the correct answer isn't as clear as ivermectin, I'm reminded of a quote from the old SSC post about Adderall risks https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
"The first agenda tries to scare college kids away from abusing Adderall as a study drug by emphasizing that it’s terrifying and will definitely kill you. The second agenda tries to encourage parents to get their kids treated for ADHD by insisting Adderall is completely safe and anyone saying otherwise is an irresponsible fearmonger. The difference between these two situations is supposed to be whether you have a doctor’s prescription. But what if you are the doctor, trying to decide who to prescribe it to? Then what?"
He sounds like an arsehole.
Here is what is troublesome. People mistrust the medical system. An air of suspicion surrounds any decision taken by the public health authorities (PHA). This should not be the case. Whose fault is it? The burden is then on the PHA to regain the population’s trust. In the meantime, Scott comes to the rescue.
To Scott’s point, the PHA must do a better job of communicating their findings or lack thereof to the public. Dry journals are not cutting it. Condescending expert opinions are not slicing it. PHA need to do some serious communication-soul-searching. It is of essence in public health, and they are losing the battle in this new era.
I agree with Chris that contending the conspiracy-theories give them an air of legitimacy. I also value the role of Scott in dissecting them, opening them on the table for everyone to see, and putting them
back into the refrigerator once they are declared dead. But I would advocate to do it swiftly, as to avoid more confusion generated by crowds agglomerating around the table.
Another point. Of course you would want to do critical thinking. Of course you would want to study the trials by yourself. But at the end of the day there is a reason we all are specialized - to advance faster as a society. Specialization is key to our prosperity and survival. I know, trusting is hard, but it is necessary.
BTW,
Ivermectin is not effective in preventing deleterious outcomes from COVID-19 infection, such as hospitalization.
Roughly 5,000 patients were randomized in the TOGETHER and COVID-OUT randomized controlled phase III trials, to ivermectin, placebo or other intervention (metformin, fluvoxamine in the COVID-OUT). Ivermectin did not improve outcomes. These results were published in the NEJM.
Just these two large trials falsify the hypothesis that ivermectin is effective in treating COVID-19.
“But there other trials that show a positive effect”. Yes, but they were of poor methodological quality, low patient sample. “But look at this other trial, it had 1,000 patients in it!” Even if that trial was of rigor, other large well-conducted trials fail to reject the null hypothesis of no difference between treatment groups. Then you do a meta-analyses, ideally including trials with similar study characteristics and primary outcome.
Now, if you try that hard to prove the effectiveness of a treatment, it is because there is no treatment effect.
No need to apologize for being curious, or wanting to properly vet the scientific evidence in an area of public interest (both that it’s a “greater good” to try to discern whether ivermectin works or not; and because quite a large segment of society were happily subscribing to the “conspiracy theory”…this was not a couple of joes with foil hats and soap boxes on a street corner). When something is that prevalent, the concept of “I’m not gonna dignify that question with a proper answer” doesn’t suffice.
In general, I am in complete agreement with you, and against Kavanaugh. I’ve listened to Kavanaugh’s podcast and been extremely turned off by his tendency to psychopathologize his ideological opponents, in lieu of just debunking their arguments. ‘My opponent is an ignorant fool’ is a deeply satisfying argument to make, but it’s never as convincing to hear as it feels to say. There is one thing I will say, though, and that is that there is a particular type of personality (Alexandros) who insincerely baits sincere thinkers (you) into public disagreement, and then takes advantage of that public disagreement to elevate their public profile. It’s a type of parasitism on good faith, and should be discouraged. So while I agree that it is good to respond to crackpots, I feel one should only do so when those crackpots are demonstrating a real sincerity, and one should try hard not to be used as a prop in their personal PR campaign.
I'm wondering whether Kavanagh is famous enough for disagreeing with him to generate a lot of interest.
Ironically it seems to me that both Weinstein and Kavanagh share a model of the world that Scott disagrees with. Namely, that most people are “sheeple” that can, by shame or censorship, be forced by the Establishment into holding the “correct” beliefs. Fundamentally Kavanagh and Weinstein just disagree about whether or not this a good thing.
Really appreciate this post, find myself very much agreeing with you. (For what it’s worth, I‘ve actually worked in PR, and one of the most important things good PR campaigns do is treat their audience with respect. Any condensation can be smelled a mile away.)
I think Kavanagh's argument is that there are a near infinite number of controversies to discuss. By choosing among them to focus on ivermectin and award it tens of thousands of words of blog space, Scott presents the impression that the controversy has more to it than it really merits. That's why it's "indulgent".
Now, let's be honest: most "readers" will not read all or even any of the 30+k words of Scott's ivermectin posts. The arguments in them actually are irrelevant except to the union of the sets of sufficiently bored, curious, pedantic or engaged readers, because they actually won't be read. The very existence of two giant posts about ivermectin will already push many readers and onlookers of this blog toward the belief that ivermectin is effective, even if Scott's conclusions were mostly the opposite.
For a fairly influential writer like Scott, the choice of topics is as important as the content. The menu matters as much as the dishes. By giving airtime to ivermectin, Scott is supporting it, whether he likes it or not. This may not be what we like, but it's the reality of how writing works, on the Internet or off it.
There's an economic efficiency / due process point buried here. Imagine a prediction market: "Ivermectin will be de-bunked within 12 months". Scott decides he will only invest in a deep dive into conspiracy theories that markets say are > [10] [or] [20]% likely to be true. Seems like a good way to optimise Scott's time. That said, the way Scott writes about the 1-2% cases like ivermectin is incredibly entertaining. And some of those 1-2% cases have huge option value--what if Scott had found that ivermectin was solid? Huge benefit to society. So I'm all for Scott delving into conspiracies. But if I were in charge of grant or tax dollars, I would pass.
This reminds me of an argument with my brother, a scientist, about that Nature paper that said Covid couldn’t have come out of a lab because the binding was only 88% optimal. I am probably not getting get science jargon quite right, but the point being that if someone engineered Covid in a lab, they would do 100%. I said, this is illogical. If you want to use it as a weapon, maybe you intentionally do sub 90% because 100% looks suspicious. Or maybe you developed it by running it through lots of animals and letting it mutate or something. Or maybe you had every percent created from 88% to 100% but only the 88% leaked out. My brother, a scientist, would just say “I’m a scientist and you should trust scientists.” And I was like, “but I’m the one doing science here! Isn’t logic science?” Reading this I probably should have added “I may be bad at science, but at least I’m giving it a shot!”
> I’ve looked into this pretty hard and my conclusion is that conspiracy ecosystems fall prey to the exact same biases that all of us have, including experts and correct people. But experts and correct people have slightly less of them, have better self-correction mechanisms, and manage to converge on truth, whereas conspiracy theorists have slightly more of them and shoot off into falsehood. I think of this as very subtle: 0.99^infinity goes to zero; 1.01^infinity goes to infinity. We all struggle with the same tendencies. The trick is in understanding and controlling them.
I'd have assumed it would often just be a case of what social environment you were shaped by, what cues you were exposed to more. In other words, getting lucky. Since you just said yourself, the supposed good guys are often not actually putting in the cognitive work, but rather just looking down on people who believe differently than them. 1.01^infinity would end up at a legitimate correct belief, but these people don't have a legitimate belief.
Admittadly, I've probably given this much less thought than you have.
I can confirm that in Bulgaria, where I live, some people STILL tout ivermectin as a wonderdrug against COVID. I have heard (from close people) about different wild schemes how to dose animal ivermectin. I have heard experts on TV (back when the pandemic was something people actually cared about) advertise ivermectin. Thankfully, policies didn't change like in Latin America, but it is worth noting that Kavanagh lives in a bubble, where real-world people believe only what he believes, and the worst thing is the most unscientific thinking: "Do not replicate science. Do not question science."
That bubble does real life harm because the failure to interact with misinformed people does not change misinformation.
Note: I do not know of his work outside of this thread.
Do we have an idea why all the atlantis variants are sounding somewhat similar name wise?
Is there a ACX styled analysis of 9/11 truther stuff like WTC7?
lol
One of your best essays ever.
I think it's funny that a decent proportion of the comments boil down to some version of "he sucks, ignore him" which is exactly the kind of ad hominem dismissal Scott is arguing against.
I agree 100 percent. I just wanted to add that in fact finding missions like these it's important to not be overwhelemd by bad faith arguments (fall victim to a gish gallopp). And especially if you are a public figure it's worth considering if you are contributing to what could be perceived as a false balance (This would be my very favourable interpretation of Kavanagh's argument).
I am personally very concerned about climate change and I'd say that science has already definitively answered the question of man made climate change multiple decades ago. I find it hard to not get angry when I'm confronted with arguments of climate change deniers and I think the rise of these arguments may be partially the fault of enganging with bad faith arguments and creating the illusion of broader scientific disagreement on this topic. But I'm not sure whre the line between honest discussion and troll-feeding can be drawn, if there even is one.
>There’s a Hindu legend (maybe apocryphal?) about an atheist philosopher who spends literally every second of every day denouncing God. When he dies, God welcomes him into the highest heaven, praising him as a great yogi - for he never let his consciousness stray from awareness of God even for one moment.
Reminds me of Ravana, who is the villain of the Hindu Ramayana, who hates Ram/God so much that he sees him in everything, eventually even himself, thus reaching enlightenment (while literally getting speared by Ram).
In the same vein, I think this is also the deeper reason why Christians see a fear of God as a good thing and there is advice like "cast all of your fear (and other emotions) onto God".
The thing about big Youtube streamers is that basically half of them were banned from Twitch for various reasons, so it's a pre-selected most-controversial subset of the successful ones.
This is just as tedious as the other online celebrity beefs. Either talk it out directly, or let it drop, but don't do this nonsense where you talk past each other and (deliberately?) misunderstand each other. Like if you're at the point of writing "What is his complaint? At the risk of putting words in his mouth..." and then doing that very same thing, maybe you could ask him? I understand that isn't good for the blog post writing business (which is why YouTube streamers do this, too. It's """content"""), but if this is where the blog has fallen to since 2015 it's probably time to pack it up anyway.
On something like Ivermectin or vaccines, I agree wholeheartedly with Scott. But what does one do about the complex of things such as QAnon, anti-semitic conspiracy theories, theories about the Masons, etc.? Theories like these have historically shown the potential to acquire real power and to carry out violent action. And, notoriously, they have proven resistant to falsification (because the lack of evidence for such theories' truth just shows how powerful the conspirators are--or that the person who can't see the evidence still needs their red pill, or whatever). I'm not asking this in a "gotcha" spirit. I'm genuinely curious what rationalists would say about this issue.
Maybe this is useful additional context:
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/90109
Question: Do some people claim to be rationalists (we should probably operationalize what we mean by rationalists) to hide the fact that they are not really rationalists at all?
I wasn't put out by the ivermectin post but I was somewhat put out by the post about the pro-ivermectin guy who wrote the equivalent of a long book's worth "just asking questions" about whether ivermectin works.
I can really recommend Graham Hancock's Netflix series "Ancient Apocalypse". Not only is it well directed and edited, and so shows the quality of argument you're up against when you're trying to debunk a conspiracy theory, but it's also good rationality training to try and form a mental counterargument that's better than "U R DUMB" (ideally at least DH4 on Paul Graham's scale of argumentation).
I imagine a detailed counterargument would involve a mathematical model of the precession of the equinoxes to the point where you could show that the claimed alignment of some temple entrances with a particular prehistoric date range and no other, is actually well within the range of more modern dates plus a small amount of "noise". But everyone who doesn't have a PhD in astrophysics is likely to get stuck before they get to this point.
More generally, as each new generation enters school, to the extent that we still teach using your own intellect rather than trusting authority, we will come across students who have not yet been taught for example the historical consensus on World War II and just how strong the evidence for some things is, and we'll occasionally get someone genuinely asking "Couldn't there be a grain of truth in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as some blogger on the internet suggested?". And then the answer is not U R DUMB but "actually, this topic has been studied very, very extensively - and here's the findings". (Yes, for each one of these honest questions there will be 100 trolls. I don't know what to do about that either.)
"So tearing down is at least as good (or bad) in general as building up, since they are 2 sides of the same coin."
Your statement begs for a fitting aphorism: Cutting down a tree is a whole lot easier than putting it back together. Does this mean we can never cut down a tree? Of course not. Just that it's hubristically reckless to equate the two.
Humanity (on behalf of the vulnerable) has struggled way too diligently and collectively, bending the long, moral arc of the universe toward justice through imperfect, evolving institutions (such as democracy itself); we can't afford to be sanguine in the face of bros like Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Donald Trump, so flippantly eager to toss all this fragile progress into the trashbin, ostensibly for creative "disruption," but their willingness to dismiss/ignore history itself (such as the Mueller Report) is fueled mainly by their unchecked egos, and then bolstered blindly by cesspools of capitalism such as Fox News, today's version of Father Coughlin.
If someone wants to believe FDR steered us too deeply into socialism or whatever, fine. But this is a debate for the marketplace of ideas. It's not a legitimate excuse for casually toppling structures you declare unhelpful. Our social contract (not to mention our Constitution) cannot abide self-proclaimed saviors who find insurrections amusing and think fraud is a legitimate political tactic.
Scott, you are deservedly pissed about this. Frankly, so am I. I was on the fence about Ivermectin. You were not, but you were also determined to give Ivermectin a fair shake. And in so doing, you further convinced yourself and also talked me down off the fence.
Kavanagh says that we are both idiots; you for entertaining the question and me for being on the fence in the first place.
So, to paraphrase Ken White of Popehat, in response to Kavanagh, I say:
"First, fuck you."
As always, Scott, a pleasure to read you.
Just to add to the pile of interesting case studies, I was thinking about the recent UAP controversy last night. I think there’s an interesting parallel to the situation you describe regarding underwater pyramids.
This is obviously classic skeptic territory, and I think a still generally valid account is something like: “Your prior that extraterrestrials have visited earth and have entirely escaped notice *except once by accident by bystanders with relatively primitive technology* should be low enough that even a combination of several improbable mutually reinforcing events is still more likely to be coincidence after updating.”
But even so, if the events are multiple and mutually reinforcing enough, it’s enough to at least be curious enough to look into what the heck is going on, right?
Enter the USS Nimitz incident. Like Bem’s Psi research, it seems made to clear your evidentiary bars:
--Readings from multiple independent instruments (radar and FLIR camera)
--sudden, natural/human-technology implausible movements
--Eyewitness Reports from four people across two naval aircraft, corroborating one another for an observation period of about 5 minutes (!)
--Confirmed authenticity by the Pentagon, which added, they are "part of a larger issue of an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years"
Most of these end up kind of falling apart under closer scrutiny, but you can’t know that from the outset.
How do we assess the expert consensus on this matter?
Astronomers if asked will probably give you something like the reasoning I started with, which we’ve priced in already, and typically don’t spend a lot of time on the particulars, being that they aren’t privy to all the relevant information and I suspect are tired about getting asked about this sort of stuff. You can say that Adam Frank’s NYT piece gives you basically the right interpretation of the evidence, but it’s pretty easy to suspect that this is cope.
As far as I know, there isn’t a climate-change-esque study on consensus opinion on alien visitation (the best I could find was the Wiki on the Fermi paradox, which says “The consensus scientific view is that although they may be unexplained, they do not rise to the level of convincing evidence” but then cites an article that doesn’t actually prove that this is a consensus view) There seems to be some consensus that extraterrestrial life existing is likely, and per SETI:
“From the Report of the Astronomy Survey Committee, National Academy of Sciences, 1972: ‘More and more scientists feel that contact with other civilizations is no longer something beyond our dreams but a natural event in the history of mankind that will perhaps occur in the lifetime of many of us ... In the long run, this may be one of science’s most important and most profound contributions to mankind and to our civilization.’”
As for the people who have the most direct knowledge of the incidents, US Defense agencies, they are overall famously tight-lipped about the whole affair, given national security concerns, and the statements they do make can be kremlinologized in a variety of ways. Meanwhile, the people substantially running these programs and conducting research specifically in this area, like Chris Mellon, Lue Elizondo and Avi Loeb (along with Tom DeLonge, for some reason) are sounding the alarm about this and calling for more thorough UAP research.
The media, the conduit to the experts for the hoi polloi, for their part expressed their share of hedging and credulity, perhaps most notably on the 60 Minutes episodes, which featured interviews with Nimitz eyewitnesses. Plenty of popular podcasters hop on the hype train too, of course, notably for Kavanagh’s beat JRE, Sam Harris, and the Weinsteins.
Hm. Maybe there’s something to this after all?
Meanwhile, who is really doing the hard work of documenting evidence, picking apart all the threads of the Nimitz incidents, critically interviewing participants, and even making physical models and simulations (!) to test whether a faraway plane’s IR signature might look like a tic tac? As you might expect, it turns out to be a community centered around…the guy who programmed Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater?
Mick West (and the associated community at Metabunk) is a really good example of how a technically inclined but basically dilettantish person with a lot of free time (AFAIK, West is not a credentialed expert on aeronautics, military technology, astronomy, photography, etc…) can make real research contributions to questions that really do need answers and provide a valuable public service in doing so. I don’t see a ton of daylight between a lot of the work at Metabunk and the spirit of Scott’s posts on Ivermectin.
…I guess what I’m saying is that in hindsight a lot of this uptake in UAP was probably Chinese spy balloons.
Late to this, but I was also quite persuaded by Fingerprints of the Gods as a teenager and it took me a while to find the holes all on my own, no one ever explained more than 'because it's stupid,' so I try to make more of a presumption of good faith on seemingly-ridiculous beliefs, or at least an assumption of social pressure or the like.
It did lead me to things like Hamlet's Mill, which while also having an overarching bullshit conclusion is full of interesting tales, which in turn led me to things like the Kalevala and the Hero with A Thousand Faces. So, mixed bag!
I mostly agree with this article, but there is one point which I can object to a little bit.
Even if we don't know why giant underwater pyramids are there. That doesn't mean that Atlantis existed. Nor does it mean that aliens built them, nor does it mean that god built them. Nor does it mean that a society of some other intelligent species built them.
Well, I read/listen to you both. I agree with your argument and Chris seemed to be trolling more than trying to get at some truth. But I agree with Chris mostly about B. W. I can't wade through what I perceive as his Trump-like narcissism enough to feel like I can learn anything from him.
Maybe Erik Hoel got it right in his review of The Dawn of Everything.
Twitter is high school and Kavanagh is a Mean Girl.
He is making a social argument, not an intellectual one. The best people know this to be true, you fool, you fool. Maureen Dowd is even making jokes about it, dude, how much more evidence do you need?
Ho ho, Scott, weren't you were a silly young fellow to believe in Atlantis!
Just kidding - as a teen I read Chariots Of The Gods and even went to hear Erik Von Daniken speak.
Perhaps there's something in young men that needs a cause like this.
> It sounds kind of like fideism, the belief (more common in atheists’ imaginations than real religion) that somebody who reasons their way to belief in God is a sinner, because a real saint would have believed through blind faith, without having to reason.
Scott, thank you for pointing out that the notion of fideism and "blind faith" is an atheist strawman not found in actual religious thought. I have some thoughts on the subject, of why faith is in fact an integral part of everybody's life, even non-religious individuals, but it's too big to put in a comment so I made it into a response post.
https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/on-faith-and-action?sd=pf
Curious to hear your take on PMDD.
I'm going to stick my neck out on this one and say that Scott is even more right than he knows. I think we should definitely question the Holocaust.
Now put the pitchforks down and please notice I didn't say "deny". My point is this: I have been an astronomy buff since I was a kid, but I still remember the wrenching feeling when, at age 23, I first looked down a telescope and saw the rings of Saturn for myself. It's hard to put into words, but it was something like "Oh my god, it's all real."
I had a similar experience, though much less pleasant, when I read "Lying about Hitler", Evans account of the David Irving trial. Again, I'd grown up - like most of us - with the Holocaust as the great morality tale, about what happens if we let bad people be bad (insert the Cartman clip from South Park, which nails this approach). Anyway, when I read Evans carefully laying out the evidence page by page I had the same wrenching experience, except much more Lovecraftian - opening up a universe of horror.
I suspect that most people operate in a similar state of unreality about the Holocaust and so much else, which is why we are drowning in asinine Hitler analogies (or communist analogies, from the right). For most people, who haven't seen the evidence, the Holocaust has about as much 'reality' as the destruction of Alderaan. Since then I've concluded it is always, always worth going and checking the evidence for things pretty well established that you think you know - to make sure that you do, in fact, know them.
Scott -
I doubt that you'll see this, but I think it's a problem when everyone doesn't take pains to be sure they're accurately characterizing their interlocutor's viewpoint.
Here I discuss your discipline in that regard with Andrew Gelman (and others) on his post about your Ivermectin piece:
https://t.co/hjeqmmlALN
.
"When experts have strong opinions on something, this is a good opportunity to practice your opinion-forming skills, see whether you get the same result as the experts, and, if not, figure out where you went wrong."
Or where they did. Consider the case of Barry Marshall.
> "The ONLY reason you could ever believe it is because you’re a racist who thinks brown people couldn’t have built civilizations on their own.”
This gets at an important aspect of conspiracism to which many "rationalists" are vulnerable. It's objectively true that there's a moderate cognitive tension between (a) the received Western "common sense" that Europeans came to dominate the globe because they were better at making advanced civilization (probably because of their higher genetic IQ, come on, it's not PC to say so but everyone knows it), and (b) the fact that a millennium or two ago, brown people were building mountains and temple complexes and breeding corn and potatoes while Europeans were languishing in dark ages (again, the eggheads get mad when you say this but, come on).
Obviously that doesn't mean this single factor is why every Atlantis theorist believes Atlantis theory, but it stands to reason that this tension makes it slightly more tempting to imagine that all these non-European ancient civilizations were just copying something else, and marginally increases the number of people weaving hypotheses and writing books about Atlantis theory. So, a good Bayesian should see this argument as evidence that many white Western people are motivated to overstate and lend excessive credence to evidence for Atlantis theory.
However, if you try to explain this to a white Atlantis theorist—ironically, especially one who prides himself on his rationality—he will often take so much offense at the suggestion that his culture's subconscious biases have anything to do with his individual reasoning in this case that he'll uncharitably caricature your explanation just as Scott does in the quoted line, and the explanation will backfire. Thus, an explanation with positive *explanatory* value has negative *persuasive* value—and identifying as a "rationalist" is a risk factor, because the "rationalist" community is for whatever reason happy to admit to and fight individual cognitive biases but considers it uncool to do so for culturally pervasive ones.
Scott, what is your expertise? Readers who don't have sufficient expertise in the domain of interest, really have no way of knowing whether you know what you're talking about.
For instance, I'm a self-esteem researcher. If I saw some substack article who has no PhD in psychology (i.e., years of systematic research training & experience) making contrarian claims about self-esteem, I would find it easy to dismiss whatever they claim. That's because I have a deep knowledge of the literature and issues! What about the regular reader who is simply a fan of the of the substack writer? Not a chance in hell they could know otherwise. They basically take the writer's claims and ostensible analysis on faith.
"Doing your own research" is arrogant and misguided. If you spent 4-6 years studying a research field in a systematic way, guided by mentors, having your research constructively criticized by peers, and having publications along the way, then you have a leg to stand on. Even then, if you want to make claims about the research, you need it to be evaluated ~within the community of expertise~. Substack bypasses all that. Readers who are not experts have practically zero basis to evaluate your claims or arguments. In truth, they need to accept much of what you say on faith.
It's like when I saw a 2-hour documentary skeptical that there was a very large holocaust. I went looking for counterarguments and mostly just found people saying "oh those horrible antisemitic people!"
Eventually I did find the counterarguments, but on a web site *dripping with hatred for the people arguing against the holocaust*. Geez, I thought, this is not how you convince someone.
The case of Dr. John Campbell[1] is probably illustrative. I saw one of his videos a couple of years ago, and noted that he said a lot of correct things, plus a few things that were questionable, or raised red flags for me but not for him. He seems to me like an average doctor with average intelligence, trying his best to understand what's going on, but getting a few things wrong.
And when he gets something wrong, how do people react? I'm not sure. I bet some were nice and tried to gently correct his misinformation, but this is the internet, so I bet others were mean and flippant, while still others might have responded with misinformation of their own coming from a different political orientation. And what will an *average person* do with this mixture of incoming messages? Probably he will listen more to the nice ones, at least at first, especially if they are backed up by charts and data he could use on his channel ... and the mean ones are likely to make him more skeptical of whatever counter-narrative they push.
So it's sad how mean and flippant people usually are when they "correct misinformation".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGmRwQ4TZc4
"Either these people didn’t understand the arguments for and against Atlantis, or they did. If they didn’t, they were frauds, claiming expertise in a subject they knew nothing about. If they did, then at any moment they could have saved me from a five year wild-goose-chase - but chose not to, because it was more fun to insult me."
Well said.
Kavanagh's reasoning seems to me to be in line with the tendency in the media to circle the wagons in defense of experts and mainstream science, part of which strategy is to dismiss anything perceived as questioning that consensus out of hand. This approach strikes me as deeply misguided in the current info ecosystem. I am thinking of Gurri's "Revolt of the Public"- it used to be that elites could declare something to be correct or taboo, and there weren't any ways for non-elites to get any other messages out in the open. So the circling-the-wagons strategy worked reasonably well. Nowadays if you try to shut other views down, people go off and create their own bubbles.
This is why I take a pretty extreme stance on engaging with weird, and even horrible, views. I think smart, informed people should engage with the arguments of, for example, white supremacists. Ignoring them or denouncing them does not make these views go away, but feeds into the story that elites are seeking to suppress any dissenting views.
"When I tried reviewing ivermectin, I said - here’s a case where the experts have spoken with unusual unanimity about which side is right."
Uhm, what?
As far as im aware, US experts as embodied by its health institutions, still have not taken a stance and hide behind deflections such as 'you shouldnt take horse dewormer' and more garden variety generalisms such as 'you should not take drugs for purposes which we have not evaluated'. To what extent have they actually taken a positive stance against ivm?
Insofar as experts have taken a stance; it has been approved for the treatment of covid, in a majority of countries around the world.