Think this is a typo: “yet about 97% of Americans over the age of 16 got at least one dose of Covid vaccine.” The link says the number is 77% of the population has received at least one dose, not 97%. Accidental misinformation.
The thing about conspiracy theories / misinformaition is that some (a small number) are proved correct: Hunter Biden's laptop, the Lap leak theory, etc. So I am glad you are team-debate. Personally, while I am a pro-vaccine, I am skeptical of the benefit of Covid vaccines for non-vulnerable populations. And I am not alone: lots of people know someone who had severe reaction to the Covid vaccines and we've all know people who are fully vaccinated that have caught and spread Covid and there is plenty of good quality data that supports the idea that the efficacy is limited and the side-effects can be severe. And a 'proof' is to playing back your argument to you: people are comprehensively rejecting the CDC advice to get the bivalent boosters: take up when I last looked was only just over 5%. So on the conspiracy theory that we rushed into adminstering a poor vaccine is well worth the debate. Shame that Hotez is running scared.
The "trust in the media" chart is useful. Up until 2016, everyone is moving downhill in parallel. Donald Trump ruptures this. The media embraces Trump Derangement Symdrome (TDS), and the Right embraces a Trump personality cult. After that, both are seeing reality through an ideological lens. It's the Independents that are the most interesting though -- their ideological lens is always a lower prescription. They moved like Democrats in 2016-19 and generally before that, which you would expect. For people who don't follow this stuff regularly, if it's on CBS News it must be true, and CBS News is essentially DNC News (as is CNN/ABC/NYT/etc). COVID altered Independent's perceptions though; since 2020 their trust in media has dropped by 1/3rd. TDS didn't make them doubt, but the obvious absurdity of COVID did. I hope they'll rebound, but I doubt it. Once largely disengaged people are convinced of something, getting them back takes a while -- they're disengaged.
Noah acts like "misinformation" is obvious, but it isn't. Is Ukraine's offensive winning? Did NATO push Russia into invasion? Was COVID engineered in the Wuhan lab? Do masks prevent COVID spread? Were 2020 protests "mostly peaceful"? Even Noah's example "COVID vaccines are safe and effective" isn't that simple. Do the vaccines prevent transmission or just disease? Even asking that question was verbotten in 2021. In hindsight, it's clear some of the most egregious "misinformation" about COVID was shouted from the loudest megaphones of officialdom in the country. In the most recent case, Michael Shellenberger and Matt Tiabi have found evidence for Patient 0, 1, & 2 being Wuhan lab researchers and therefore the definitive origin of COVID (something which I believe is still unsayable on YouTube). This has been confirmed by the WSJ. But it was racist and misinformation for years.
I suspect most Americans have no more confidence in their elites' ability to truthfully determine "misinformation" than they do in media in general. That is undoubtedly not healthy for society, but it's an utterly logical reaction to the last 3 years.
"What is the cause of all this disagreement among the experts over basic historical issues? Economic factors. If you're a historian and you want to write a best-selling book, you have to come up with a new wrinkle. If you go to a publisher and say you want to write that Harry Truman was a blunt-spoken Missourian who made some unpopular decisions but was vindicated by history, the publisher will pick you up by your neck and toss you into the street, because there are already bales of such books on the market. But if you claim to have uncovered evidence that Harry Truman was a Soviet ballerina, before long you'll be on national morning television, answering earnest questions from David Hartman in a simulated living room."
Matt Yglesias has suggested that Twitter has the same dynamic going on, and that's why contrarian takes (most of which are necessarily false) get disproportionate attention.
Are you optimistic about featurea like community notes helping curb misinformation? It does seem to be working to some extent and is theoretically free from bias.
Yes we need to protect people from misinformation like
"The vaccinated do not carry the virus"
"If you get vaccinated, you won't get sick"
"Natural immunity after recovery is a myth / is worse than vaccines"
"We have not seen a signal that these vaccines cause myocarditis "
"Maybe it was always just meant to be a 3-dose vaccine"
"We know that vaccine mandates are the best way to prevent future waves" (said in LA county like 2 months before their biggest wave ever)
"Vaccine passports are the key to our city's recovery"
You're right it does take a lot of time to confront all of this, especially when those messages are funded by the government while it is mostly a ragtag group of dissenters with dayjobs who need to fight the misinformation. Thankfully with 95% of parents skipping the bivalent dose for their kids I think the message is getting through and people are learning to make more informed risk/benefits decisions for themselves and their families.
Obama ran on "hope and change" but decided to "look forward, not backward" on Bush's war crimes, then proceeded to do everything in his power to reconstitute the banking system just as it was, with as little change as possible. Relying on 'changing animal spirits' to fix the economy' (propagandizing the public into thinking the economy is doing better until enough believe it that t starts to improve) l https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/03/the-empire-continues-to-strike-back-team-obama-propaganda-campaign-reaches-fever-pitch.html
The only people who did see change were poor and middle-class families, with most of their wealth tied up in their house. Obama INTENTIONALLY refused to pursue cramdown, breaking promises he made pre-inauguration while whipping votes to pass TARP, creating HAMP instead. While cram down would have kept people in their houses if they could make reasonable payments, HAMP was designed to "Foam the Runway" for the banks, Aka prolong and maximize the number of foreclosures. https://prospect.org/economy/needless-default/
If the elites are entirely immune from consequences, they have no reason NOT to lie to us. As recently as the S and L crisis we were throwing hundreds of bankers in jail. Now, I can't think of more than a half dozen executives that have even had their insanely large bonuses clawed back, much less spent any time behind bars. On the off chance corporate wrongdoing is ever pursued enforcement is always fines paid by the company, tax deductible of course, that are just written off as the cost of doing business.
After all of that you expect people to just trust the experts on COVID? When the expert consensus has gone 180 on multiple issues; Don't wear masks, then mask mandates, you’re a racist if you believe anything besides wet market to 100% sure lab leak. For the first year and a half CDC insisted that COVID was transmitted via fomites (large moisture droplets that sink quickly when exhaled), hence the however many feet apart rule, hand washing, and surface disinfecting. It wasn't until May 2021, they admitted it was airborne, which was obvious to anyone with half a brain cell. Did they pivot and push for dramatically improving ventilation in public places? Nahhhh that would involve rich people having to spend money.
The worst part about all this, is I now know half a dozen people personally who no longer believe in climate change because their default is to assume experts lie. This country is so completely evil and utterly worthless, everyone with any amount of authority or significant wealth should spend the rest of their life in jail, at the very least.
Quite frankly, "misinformation" is a tendentious term.
It's racist to think covid came from a lab leak.
Hunter Biden's laptop is a Russian hoax.
Natural immunity is weaker than vaccine immunity.
Anti-lockdown protests are a public health threat, but BLM protests are not.
Kyle Rittenhouse gunned down innocent black people.
Nobody wants to take away your guns.
Nobody in the US government wanted to ban gas stoves.
Vaccines prevent you from spreading the virus. (past mid-2021. In early 2021, they really did, but Delta and then Omicron changed that)
All of these, and many more, are provably false. You and I both agree that people running around screaming about 10 million supposedly dead from the vaccine are nuts (though I will emphasize their first amendment rights, like everyone else's are sacrosanct). But why should I care about "misinformation" in the sense it's so often talked about, when most of the vaunted "misinformation fighters" are deeply invested in spreading disinformation of their own, and using it as a political cudgel to dishonestly delegitimize views they disagree with?
I also think that mental illness is associated with many conspiracy theorists. RFK Jr is a prime example. Noah, I would enjoy hearing you debate RFK Jr!
I think there's one additional dimension to the professionalism argument: there is financial incentive to provide a good that targets a large (large in real terms even if not in relative terms), but relatively underserved market. So if there's a significant appetite for counter-institutional, counter-mainstream narratives (say, because of a massive loss of faith in the mainstream narrative machine by some large groups of people), it should come as no surprise that anyone with a bent in the counter-narrative direction can earn far more remuneration serving the counter-narratives. The Internet is what unlocks this situation, making it very easy for buyers to find their sellers and vice versa.
I'm gonna get all Both-Sides-y for a moment to say that liberals have their own misinformation problems:
The deadliness of COVID, which has a 50% chance of killing you outright and the other 50% will cripple you for life.
The obsession with treating slavery as the US's Original Sin, because no other country or society anywhere ever in history ever engaged in slavery; it was only white settlers in america that had the idea of owning people, and it has only ever been done to black people by white people.
The belief that police just like hunting black people (I've seen a well-to-do ultra-liberal man of color who used to be a friend of mine performatively hide in fear of cops...waiting in line at a taco truck. He also exhibited most of these other beliefs, especially when there were affluent women around to posture for.)
That college campuses have a higher incidence of sexual assault than a 3rd-world warzone.
That every single teenager (or gradeschooler) who says they're gender non-conforming MUST be put on hormonoes/blockers/surgery and removed from parental custody if the parents won't allow this.
Everything done by a politician they don't like is Fascism. Everything that isn't socialism is fascism, and true communism hasn't been tried.
That despite the wage gap having long been debunked, and despite women now making up most college graduates, we still need more female drone pilots.
If you don't like The Last Jedi, you're a bad person who hates women and minorities.
That it's important to constantly say stuff like "There's too many white people around here." To other white people. While being white yourself.
The finger-snapping thing.
Everything you don't like is because of Capitalism.
Yes, most of the things I'm talking about are distortions of reality rather than Conspiracy Theories (I do think some veer into being practical conspiracy theories). But this is the sort of misinformation that I have to wade through in my social life, and with some people it comes up with the same regularity that turbo-Christians bring up Jesus, but somehow even more smug, and it's slowly eroded my desire to be social.
> about 97% of Americans over the age of 16 got at least one dose of Covid vaccine
...no? What? This is a totally unserious estimate. Serious estimates, backed by good data, have it around 80%. Personal experience, even in deep blue areas, also cuts against this.
There is a psychological aspect here that might help explain why it is so difficult to combat "misinformation" and the bifurcation of our susceptibility and appetite for it.
The Attachment Theory developed by Bowles and Ainsworth studied how the first few formative years of an infant's life set its outlook on its relationship with others and society in general. Keeping it simple; those with loving, nurturing relationships with primary caretakers developed a generally positive outlook and being open to life's vagaries and change. Those with distant or hostile relationships tend to view the world, like their early experience, as dangerous and untrustworthy. Once the emotional thermostat is set, it is very difficult to reset.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out information that confirms our basic beliefs. If we believe the world is honest and supportive, then we will trust our leaders and scientists. If our experience is that the world is dangerous and out to kill us, we will desperately seek any information that gives us comfort in having an "edge" of knowledge of the treachery at the core. Yes, because it is so existential, it can easily become a pseudo-religion promising salvation.
How do we 'fix' the problem? Well, there is no magic wand approach and 'reasoning,' pretty graphs and all is fruitless. The long-term solution is to treat our children better so they do not need to find confirmation for their emotional pain and anxiety. "Hurt people, hurt people"... and are attracted to leaders who promise to punish those who hurt them.
As far as the causes of misinformation, I've always thought of it as a large-scale leveraging of confirmation bias - people wanting to read what reinforces their beliefs.
What is the implication for democracy if misinformation is more incentivized than correct information? Right now, the incentives to rebut misinformation are low, but could there be ways to better incentivize accurate information?
I agree a lot of what is said out there is debatable and depends on your values and assumptions. Still, I don't believe the truth is simply what a person thinks it is. There are not "alternative facts." There is some truth in the world, and some things are clearly more certain than others. There is a benefit to believing in science and verifiable knowledge claims.
Think this is a typo: “yet about 97% of Americans over the age of 16 got at least one dose of Covid vaccine.” The link says the number is 77% of the population has received at least one dose, not 97%. Accidental misinformation.
The thing about conspiracy theories / misinformaition is that some (a small number) are proved correct: Hunter Biden's laptop, the Lap leak theory, etc. So I am glad you are team-debate. Personally, while I am a pro-vaccine, I am skeptical of the benefit of Covid vaccines for non-vulnerable populations. And I am not alone: lots of people know someone who had severe reaction to the Covid vaccines and we've all know people who are fully vaccinated that have caught and spread Covid and there is plenty of good quality data that supports the idea that the efficacy is limited and the side-effects can be severe. And a 'proof' is to playing back your argument to you: people are comprehensively rejecting the CDC advice to get the bivalent boosters: take up when I last looked was only just over 5%. So on the conspiracy theory that we rushed into adminstering a poor vaccine is well worth the debate. Shame that Hotez is running scared.
The "trust in the media" chart is useful. Up until 2016, everyone is moving downhill in parallel. Donald Trump ruptures this. The media embraces Trump Derangement Symdrome (TDS), and the Right embraces a Trump personality cult. After that, both are seeing reality through an ideological lens. It's the Independents that are the most interesting though -- their ideological lens is always a lower prescription. They moved like Democrats in 2016-19 and generally before that, which you would expect. For people who don't follow this stuff regularly, if it's on CBS News it must be true, and CBS News is essentially DNC News (as is CNN/ABC/NYT/etc). COVID altered Independent's perceptions though; since 2020 their trust in media has dropped by 1/3rd. TDS didn't make them doubt, but the obvious absurdity of COVID did. I hope they'll rebound, but I doubt it. Once largely disengaged people are convinced of something, getting them back takes a while -- they're disengaged.
Noah acts like "misinformation" is obvious, but it isn't. Is Ukraine's offensive winning? Did NATO push Russia into invasion? Was COVID engineered in the Wuhan lab? Do masks prevent COVID spread? Were 2020 protests "mostly peaceful"? Even Noah's example "COVID vaccines are safe and effective" isn't that simple. Do the vaccines prevent transmission or just disease? Even asking that question was verbotten in 2021. In hindsight, it's clear some of the most egregious "misinformation" about COVID was shouted from the loudest megaphones of officialdom in the country. In the most recent case, Michael Shellenberger and Matt Tiabi have found evidence for Patient 0, 1, & 2 being Wuhan lab researchers and therefore the definitive origin of COVID (something which I believe is still unsayable on YouTube). This has been confirmed by the WSJ. But it was racist and misinformation for years.
I suspect most Americans have no more confidence in their elites' ability to truthfully determine "misinformation" than they do in media in general. That is undoubtedly not healthy for society, but it's an utterly logical reaction to the last 3 years.
Here's Dave Barry in 1985:
"What is the cause of all this disagreement among the experts over basic historical issues? Economic factors. If you're a historian and you want to write a best-selling book, you have to come up with a new wrinkle. If you go to a publisher and say you want to write that Harry Truman was a blunt-spoken Missourian who made some unpopular decisions but was vindicated by history, the publisher will pick you up by your neck and toss you into the street, because there are already bales of such books on the market. But if you claim to have uncovered evidence that Harry Truman was a Soviet ballerina, before long you'll be on national morning television, answering earnest questions from David Hartman in a simulated living room."
Matt Yglesias has suggested that Twitter has the same dynamic going on, and that's why contrarian takes (most of which are necessarily false) get disproportionate attention.
Are you optimistic about featurea like community notes helping curb misinformation? It does seem to be working to some extent and is theoretically free from bias.
Yes we need to protect people from misinformation like
"The vaccinated do not carry the virus"
"If you get vaccinated, you won't get sick"
"Natural immunity after recovery is a myth / is worse than vaccines"
"We have not seen a signal that these vaccines cause myocarditis "
"Maybe it was always just meant to be a 3-dose vaccine"
"We know that vaccine mandates are the best way to prevent future waves" (said in LA county like 2 months before their biggest wave ever)
"Vaccine passports are the key to our city's recovery"
You're right it does take a lot of time to confront all of this, especially when those messages are funded by the government while it is mostly a ragtag group of dissenters with dayjobs who need to fight the misinformation. Thankfully with 95% of parents skipping the bivalent dose for their kids I think the message is getting through and people are learning to make more informed risk/benefits decisions for themselves and their families.
Or MAYBE it could be that within a decade we saw Bush start an illegal war based on lies, murdering about a half a million people; followed by Wall Street committing a truly unfathomable amount of fraud, trashing the world economy and absolutely no one responsible was held to any account whatsoever. https://bettermarkets.org/analysis/banking-crisis-exemplifies-the-feds-enforcement-failures-heres-what-to-do-about-it/
Obama ran on "hope and change" but decided to "look forward, not backward" on Bush's war crimes, then proceeded to do everything in his power to reconstitute the banking system just as it was, with as little change as possible. Relying on 'changing animal spirits' to fix the economy' (propagandizing the public into thinking the economy is doing better until enough believe it that t starts to improve) l https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/03/the-empire-continues-to-strike-back-team-obama-propaganda-campaign-reaches-fever-pitch.html
Which he was warned against, because it would prolong the recession and cost more, but of course he ignored it. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-quiet-coup/307364/
The only people who did see change were poor and middle-class families, with most of their wealth tied up in their house. Obama INTENTIONALLY refused to pursue cramdown, breaking promises he made pre-inauguration while whipping votes to pass TARP, creating HAMP instead. While cram down would have kept people in their houses if they could make reasonable payments, HAMP was designed to "Foam the Runway" for the banks, Aka prolong and maximize the number of foreclosures. https://prospect.org/economy/needless-default/
If the elites are entirely immune from consequences, they have no reason NOT to lie to us. As recently as the S and L crisis we were throwing hundreds of bankers in jail. Now, I can't think of more than a half dozen executives that have even had their insanely large bonuses clawed back, much less spent any time behind bars. On the off chance corporate wrongdoing is ever pursued enforcement is always fines paid by the company, tax deductible of course, that are just written off as the cost of doing business.
After all of that you expect people to just trust the experts on COVID? When the expert consensus has gone 180 on multiple issues; Don't wear masks, then mask mandates, you’re a racist if you believe anything besides wet market to 100% sure lab leak. For the first year and a half CDC insisted that COVID was transmitted via fomites (large moisture droplets that sink quickly when exhaled), hence the however many feet apart rule, hand washing, and surface disinfecting. It wasn't until May 2021, they admitted it was airborne, which was obvious to anyone with half a brain cell. Did they pivot and push for dramatically improving ventilation in public places? Nahhhh that would involve rich people having to spend money.
The worst part about all this, is I now know half a dozen people personally who no longer believe in climate change because their default is to assume experts lie. This country is so completely evil and utterly worthless, everyone with any amount of authority or significant wealth should spend the rest of their life in jail, at the very least.
Quite frankly, "misinformation" is a tendentious term.
It's racist to think covid came from a lab leak.
Hunter Biden's laptop is a Russian hoax.
Natural immunity is weaker than vaccine immunity.
Anti-lockdown protests are a public health threat, but BLM protests are not.
Kyle Rittenhouse gunned down innocent black people.
Nobody wants to take away your guns.
Nobody in the US government wanted to ban gas stoves.
Vaccines prevent you from spreading the virus. (past mid-2021. In early 2021, they really did, but Delta and then Omicron changed that)
All of these, and many more, are provably false. You and I both agree that people running around screaming about 10 million supposedly dead from the vaccine are nuts (though I will emphasize their first amendment rights, like everyone else's are sacrosanct). But why should I care about "misinformation" in the sense it's so often talked about, when most of the vaunted "misinformation fighters" are deeply invested in spreading disinformation of their own, and using it as a political cudgel to dishonestly delegitimize views they disagree with?
I also think that mental illness is associated with many conspiracy theorists. RFK Jr is a prime example. Noah, I would enjoy hearing you debate RFK Jr!
I think there's one additional dimension to the professionalism argument: there is financial incentive to provide a good that targets a large (large in real terms even if not in relative terms), but relatively underserved market. So if there's a significant appetite for counter-institutional, counter-mainstream narratives (say, because of a massive loss of faith in the mainstream narrative machine by some large groups of people), it should come as no surprise that anyone with a bent in the counter-narrative direction can earn far more remuneration serving the counter-narratives. The Internet is what unlocks this situation, making it very easy for buyers to find their sellers and vice versa.
I'm gonna get all Both-Sides-y for a moment to say that liberals have their own misinformation problems:
The deadliness of COVID, which has a 50% chance of killing you outright and the other 50% will cripple you for life.
The obsession with treating slavery as the US's Original Sin, because no other country or society anywhere ever in history ever engaged in slavery; it was only white settlers in america that had the idea of owning people, and it has only ever been done to black people by white people.
The belief that police just like hunting black people (I've seen a well-to-do ultra-liberal man of color who used to be a friend of mine performatively hide in fear of cops...waiting in line at a taco truck. He also exhibited most of these other beliefs, especially when there were affluent women around to posture for.)
That college campuses have a higher incidence of sexual assault than a 3rd-world warzone.
That every single teenager (or gradeschooler) who says they're gender non-conforming MUST be put on hormonoes/blockers/surgery and removed from parental custody if the parents won't allow this.
Everything done by a politician they don't like is Fascism. Everything that isn't socialism is fascism, and true communism hasn't been tried.
That despite the wage gap having long been debunked, and despite women now making up most college graduates, we still need more female drone pilots.
If you don't like The Last Jedi, you're a bad person who hates women and minorities.
That it's important to constantly say stuff like "There's too many white people around here." To other white people. While being white yourself.
The finger-snapping thing.
Everything you don't like is because of Capitalism.
Yes, most of the things I'm talking about are distortions of reality rather than Conspiracy Theories (I do think some veer into being practical conspiracy theories). But this is the sort of misinformation that I have to wade through in my social life, and with some people it comes up with the same regularity that turbo-Christians bring up Jesus, but somehow even more smug, and it's slowly eroded my desire to be social.
> about 97% of Americans over the age of 16 got at least one dose of Covid vaccine
...no? What? This is a totally unserious estimate. Serious estimates, backed by good data, have it around 80%. Personal experience, even in deep blue areas, also cuts against this.
I suppose Adam Schiff comes to mind.
I listened to RFK Jr interview by All-in Podcasts. He did not sound like a nut job to me. I do not know what he may have said in the past.
There is a psychological aspect here that might help explain why it is so difficult to combat "misinformation" and the bifurcation of our susceptibility and appetite for it.
The Attachment Theory developed by Bowles and Ainsworth studied how the first few formative years of an infant's life set its outlook on its relationship with others and society in general. Keeping it simple; those with loving, nurturing relationships with primary caretakers developed a generally positive outlook and being open to life's vagaries and change. Those with distant or hostile relationships tend to view the world, like their early experience, as dangerous and untrustworthy. Once the emotional thermostat is set, it is very difficult to reset.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out information that confirms our basic beliefs. If we believe the world is honest and supportive, then we will trust our leaders and scientists. If our experience is that the world is dangerous and out to kill us, we will desperately seek any information that gives us comfort in having an "edge" of knowledge of the treachery at the core. Yes, because it is so existential, it can easily become a pseudo-religion promising salvation.
How do we 'fix' the problem? Well, there is no magic wand approach and 'reasoning,' pretty graphs and all is fruitless. The long-term solution is to treat our children better so they do not need to find confirmation for their emotional pain and anxiety. "Hurt people, hurt people"... and are attracted to leaders who promise to punish those who hurt them.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/attachment.html
As far as the causes of misinformation, I've always thought of it as a large-scale leveraging of confirmation bias - people wanting to read what reinforces their beliefs.
What is the implication for democracy if misinformation is more incentivized than correct information? Right now, the incentives to rebut misinformation are low, but could there be ways to better incentivize accurate information?
I agree a lot of what is said out there is debatable and depends on your values and assumptions. Still, I don't believe the truth is simply what a person thinks it is. There are not "alternative facts." There is some truth in the world, and some things are clearly more certain than others. There is a benefit to believing in science and verifiable knowledge claims.