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.
He is quoting the over-16 number which is cited in the link, and I agree it sounds implausably high but it's besides the point. A lot of those people were coerced or misinformed that it would "end the pandemic." The more relevant numbers are the huge dropoffs with every subsequent dose.
No? No. The massive spread and natural resistance that massive spread engenders did. Well, that and the fact that the public simply grew tired of trying to "stop" something that seemed completely unstoppable.
they’re both widespread mechanisms for effecting resistance, i don’t know how confidently you can assert the categorical significance of one over the other, especially when the one you’re dismissing was the only safe way of engendering resistance among the most susceptible population and ipso facto the most likely to overwhelm the capacity of the healthcare system, one of the most significant outcomes pandemic policy was seeking to avoid
That's fair. I cannot know it was more natural resistance than vaccine that contributed to the pandemic's end. It seems very obvious that, at least early on when I was still paying close attention to the data, the vaccines prevented a lot of death and hospitalization. However, the vaccines did virtually nothing to stop the spread of COVID, which leads to my second point: the pandemic never really "ended" -- we simply stopped bothering with the massive defensive actions against it, and it was not because the vaccines were so successful that we did so. It's because literally nothing we did seemed to affect the spread of the virus.
People may have given up on public health measures where you reside, but that is not true everywhere.
The pandemic is not over. We still have waves of infection not tied to seasonal changes. COVID appears close to becoming endemic, maybe by the end of the year, but not yet, and that assumes we don't get new variants that evade immunity.
The vaccines did a lot to reduce the spread of COVID. They didn’t stop it, any more than the massive involuntary infection with omicron stopped it. But after vaccination, spread dropped greatly, and after omicron, spread dropped greatly. And even at the height of omicron, vaccinated people got fewer cases than unvaccinated people, and thus were probably causing fewer cases as well.
The pandemic never ended except in the sense of official statements saying it had ended. Omicron still circulates and some people are even still testing themselves. Astoundingly the official UK COVID enquiry requires people to take a test or wear a mask or both in order to testify!
So is it a conspiracy theory that COVID is still dangerous enough to need to wear a mask? Or is it misinformation? Or is it an important safety precaution? And how exactly can some poor schmuck just trying to pay the bills know the difference?
That's why trust in media has collapsed: 1) major press outlets demonstrated themselves to be incompetent, and 2) alternate press outlets (like Noah here) have demonstrated themselves to have better information.
Well, they're incompetent at being unbiased and discerning the truth, not at every aspect of reporting. That's why there's been no new competition and what little has emerged is just individual bloggers who get their information from so-called "legacy" media, including our excellent host.
I spent some time a few years ago thinking through what I'd do if I were to spend $1M on a news startup, with the only goal of producing trustworthy news. I concluded you can't do anything with such a tiny sum. The idealized purpose of news is to produce an ongoing comprehensible lifelike portrait of the world. So there are obvious things like being free of bias, but the more basic requirement is to actually collect as much news as possible. Most news is actually reliable but it's also low impact so we don't think about it. What did the President say today? Commodity info, we don't worry (yet) about even very biased outlets making up quotes out of whole cloth, at worst they may choose to selectively drop something he said but they will actually know about it. So to compete with that you need a high degree of effort and competence in just the basics of reporting, which is 90% of the problem, and then delivering that in a trustworthy manner is like 10%. This is why you aren't seeing a bunch of competitors to CNN or the NYT or BBC appear that advertise trustworthiness - the raw info collection effort is both hugely expensive and totally unprofitable. It's a hard problem.
I disagree about the bloggers. Abigail Shirer, Bari Weiss, Chris Rufo, Michael Schellenberger, Andy Ngo. They're not getting their information from legacy media. Bari left and NYT to found the most popular substack around. Michael just found COVID Patient 0, 1, & 2. Abigail has been leading the charge on trans journalism for 2 years. Chris Rufo likewise for CRT and anti-whiteness in education. Andy has been attacked for front-line reporting on Antifa multiple times.
They have demonstrated themselves to be competent at reporting on particular aspects of the world in a reasonably and accurate fair way. That's journalism. It may not be a threat to CNN or NYT for a long time, but the latter will keep losing people as long as they hire and promote based on diversity instead of competence.
The link does say 97%, not 77%. That could be accidental misinformation; it lists the CDC as the source, but I couldn't find corroboration of that number! Note that the CDC classifies people as "fully vaccinated" only if they have received three doses, not just one dose! Also, note that most of the "unvaccinated" people in the U.S. are just kids.
NIH suggests that 15% of adults (16 and over) were never vaccinated. That sounds like an undercount to me because more than 15% of American adults are fervent Trumpers. The claim that 97% received at least one shot is clearly, clearly too high. They used to run news stories about people sneaking in to vaccine clinics in red states because they didn't want the community to know that they had been vaccinated.
NIH Article states: Overall, 15.2% of US adults were unvaccinated during 1 December 2021 to 7 February 2022, ranging from 5.8% in District of Columbia to 29.0% in Wyoming. Feb 17, 2023
Lots and lots of Trumpers were vaccinated (including older ones) - so I wouldn't count on that for an undercount. That said, the US healthcare / public health system is so lame at gathering data that almost any answer won't be super-accurate.
Your point about inaccuracy in healthcare statistics is right on. But non-vaccination was so much a part of the MAGA credo that I just can't see that more than half of them got vaccinated. I tried talking a few people I liked into being vaccinated and I flopped miserably.
That is what Noah’s source says but it is wrong. The correct answer is that 92.3% of adults have gotten at least one dose. And I am pretty sure that when presented with a better source, Noah will correct this. Spreading the truth is it’s own reward.
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.
Right, and the problem gets compounded when vaccine proponents exaggerate benefits and / or paper over problems (or even *appear to do so*) because anyone with a brain can see they are not about "just the facts." They lose credibility. These institutions must be *scrupulous* about providing facts and acknowledging shortcomings without worrying that people listening will take the facts the wrong way. Anything else is coercive and corrosively condescending.
Thr scientific consensus is still natural origin with a lab leak being highly unlikely. No one's produced anything that can compete with Worobey et al and Pekar et al
The most plausible version of the "lab leak" theory I've heard is that the Wuhan lab had the original, naturally occurring COVID-19 virus but never knew that it did: they had been sending people all over to get samples from bats so they could study bat viruses, and someone in the Wuhan lab caught COVID-19 somehow from one of those samples. The "someone made it on purpose" conspiracy theories seem like total nonsense to me, but "some dumbass fucked up when handling bat blood and got sick" is entirely consistent with what I know about dumbasses.
Nothing about "Hunter Biden's laptop" was "proved correct". You haven't seen it because Rudy's Chinese billionaire friend, who set it up, filled it with child porn before setting it up to make it look worse. This instead had the effect of making it impossible to distribute any contents from it.
I can't believe the number of people who fancy themselves enlightened critical thinkers with fully fledged and vetted opinions on a wide range of incredibly complicated topics simply by "trusting the experts." The experts in 1940 told us that black people were chattel.
Related: It occurs to me that the perceived increase in misinformation might have to do with the rise of the "that's just a conspiracy!" deflection.
If people learn that a true fact was declared to be misinformation in the past, they might be more willing to believe in other things labeled as disinformation. It matches my perception of many people on the right, who seem to hear "misinformation" and think "ah, some good reporting that the DNC is trying to silence."
No one should believe that vaccines are 100% effective. That is misinformation that was widespread pre-COVID. But it is misinformation to say that vaccines do nothing to reduce your risk of infection or transmission of COVID - it would be just as wrong to deny that a recent infection reduces your risk of infection and transmission.
The problem is that a lot of people incorporate into their identity that they never believe in anything labelled as a conspiracy theory, because they're not that type of person. If Joe believes in 1000 conspiracy theories and 2 are correct, and Bob believes in zero conspiracy theories ever, then because a conspiracy by definition can't be falsified it will always be Joe who gets proven right in the end (for the others, he can argue that the necessary proof just hasn't come out yet).
As an example, consider the idea that the US government is covering up contact with aliens, something RFK Jr apparently believes. A popular belief in the 90s. Just recently Congress passed a law that granted whistleblower protections specifically because they're worried that such a coverup might be real, and an NRO analyst came forward under them, to say that in fact there is such a coverup. I don't think aliens exist, but I believe it's plausible that some people in the US military incorrectly believe they do and have covered up that belief in various ways, which technically, would make this conspiracy theory be validated. And validated after ~30 years of being dismissed by all right thinking people, which is the real problem here.
>> "because a conspiracy by definition can't be falsified"
> Well it can, if you are a rational person. Hillary Clinton is not the leader of a pedophile ring.
I would quite like to see you use your rationality to demonstrate that it is necessarily factual that Hillary Clinton is not the leader of a pedophile ring.
Believing the Earth is flat isn't a conspiracy theory. Believing it's flat and that governments/teachers/everyone is covering up the truth is the conspiracy theory. If Joe's 998 beliefs are specifically about conspiracies, then they can't be falsified.
Now, you can argue that if you disprove the thing that's supposed to be covered up then you've also disproved the conspiracy, but technically that's not quite true. There can be a conspiracy to cover up something false, if the people doing it believe it to be true. That's probably what's happening with the alien craft claims by US MIC personnel. Some people hear fragmentary stories about classified missions to recover flying vehicles of unknown origin where unknown = "could be Russian or Chinese or we aren't quite sure" and this gets re-interpreted as aliens for whatever reason, and the story grows in the telling. But if those people then believe they have a sworn duty to suppress the truth as they see it, well, now you have your conspiracy. That's why it's tricky.
> The choice isn't between embracing conspiracy theories or dogmatically disregarding any and all theories being label conspiracy theory in principle (without even giving it a cursory glance).
Indeed it's not but in practice, most people do choose the latter option because it's widely understood that to be labelled a "conspiracy theorist" is social death and could easily get you fired, cancelled etc (maybe this is now changing in the past year or so). That's why so many things that aren't actually conspiracy theories get labelled as such. For example, journalists love to label "the vaccines were not effective" as a conspiracy theory even though (a) that's not an assertion of a conspiracy and (b) it's clearly true if you judge them by the standards they were introduced with!
Fair point. Maybe the debate should not be between RFK and Hotez, but between one of the small but significant minority of doctors/scientists who are skeptical about the risk-benefit tradeoff of vaccines and Hotez. But either way, I want that debate!
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.
COVID was not engineered in the Wuhan lab, but it’s unclear whether that’s the first place that a human caught the disease from a wild animal.
Masks and vaccines do not stop all transmission, but they do seem to reduce transmission by some significant percentage ranging from 5% to 50%, depending on the circumstances.
Check the WSJ yesterday. They reproduced Taibbi & Shellenberger's reporting. Their original story is here (https://public.substack.com/p/first-people-sickened-by-covid-19) but I miagine you will believe the WSJ morereadily. Patient 0, 1, and 2 have all been identified and are Wuhan lab researchers. 90%+ certainty at this point, COVID was engineered in the Wuhan lab.
At a lower threshold of certainty, it appears likely that the development was funded by NIH and DARPA using funds laundered through EcoHealth Alliance to avoid Obama's ban on gain of function viral research. Such a connection explains why the senior US public health establishment freaked out to label any Wuhan lab connection "misinformation" almost immediately. Me thinks they doth protest too much.
Come on. Did you actually read the article you just linked to? The *only* piece of evidence in this article is a claim that a US government official has told us the names of the three first cases, and that they were working in the Wuhan lab. Everything else in the article is just repeating the phrase “gain of function research” in order to sound scary, and using the word “furin cleavage site”, which was part of someone’s false theory two years ago for why COVID was so different from other coronaviruses.
There is literally nothing in that article that supports the claim that COVID was engineered - though if Taibbi is right that a US government official is claiming that the three first patients were lab workers, that would be fairly strong evidence that the virus was the result of a lab leak. Still, when Matt Taibbi comes up with something that makes a major institution like the US government look bad, I’m skeptical, because that is his biggest goal in life, and he isn’t above making things up to do this. (There is no such thing as a “blood funnel” on a vampire squid - the only vampiric thing about them is how they look.)
I'm not being clear. When I say "engineered" I don't mean "intentionally released as a weapon". I mean it was a natural virus that was being worked on in a lab using GOF techniques (these are real, not just scare words) and then escaped because someone wasn't careful.
That the US govt was funding research at the Wuhan lab (via Peter Danzig and EcoHealth) has previously been reported from FOIA documents. Was this particular research included? No one knows. Were we funding research at the lab involving hybridized coronaviruses? Yes.
I think you and I are mostly saying the same thing. The only difference I see is that perhaps you think COVID was a naturally occurring virus while I think it was a hybrid created in the lab, likely with US govt funding. But in the end, both of us are talking about an accidental release.
However, said lab leak and the resulting intentional coverup by both the Chinese govt and by the US public health establishment cost the world trillions of dollars, killed millions of people. And neither China (who unleased the virus on the world) or NIH / CDC (who funded the research and covered it up) will ever be held responsible.
"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.
I’m not sure this is a “problem” in academia. It’s true that it makes a general summary of journal articles include lots of false claims. But it’s also true that incentivizing people to publish unusual and original things rather than things that they think are most accurate is the only way that we end up with progress. We need lots of people with crazy wrong ideas in order to get a few with crazy right ideas.
I mean, if you want to publish original crazy ideas instead of things that are accurate then great, but that's called sci-fi, not research. We may value it but shouldn't all be forced to pay for it.
you're going to run out of novel accurate things to say pretty quickly if researchers are never allowed to posit anything that transcends the current paradigm
Researchers should be able to say things outside the current paradigm, but they shouldn't be encouraged to overstate their evidence. You can explore unconventional ideas while still being accurate to the facts as you have them.
I do think that we have a problem in academia where the researchers are incentivized to stretch the case for their theories. Lots of science scandals involving researchers hiding inconvenient bits of evidence that could get in the way of the next grant. And that's before we get into outright fraud.
You can be novel, accurate AND paradigm transcending all at once, it's just really freaking hard. But the supply of such ideas is nowhere near enough to satisfy academia's demand for them. Given the choice of which to sacrifice in order to increase supply, the correct one is "paradigm transcending", not "accurate".
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.
The first three statements you list are blatantly false and no one should have ever said them. Unfortunately, they seem to have sometimes suggested them in the same spirit with which they said the fourth statement, which was likely technically accurate, for some definition of “evidence”, that is highly misleading and problematic.
The fifth statement doesn’t mean anything and is very stupid.
The sixth and seventh just seem completely correct - something can be the best way of preventing infection waves even if it is less than 100% effective, just like something can be the best way of preventing traffic deaths without reducing traffic deaths to zero.
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.
Even though I suspect your politics and more are 179 degrees out of phase, I 100% agree with this sentiment. Our elites have demonstrated their utterly incompetence too many times, so we have lost confidence in them.
Noah highlights that chart as an example of how the GOP has gone off the deep end and embraced loony theories and media distrust. I look at the chart the other way. The Democrats are sticking with a horse that has repeatedly foundered badly, in defiance of all evidence that said horse should be put down. Maybe the GOP are the clear-eyes ones and the Dems are wearing rose colored glasses. (The fact that the independents media trust has tanked so much in the last 3 years also makes be suspect this.)
My politics can't easily be summed up, but to give you a hint. We have had about 3 presidents that didn't deserve to walk out of the White House and directly into prison. Publicly funded elections that use STAR voting, every election, political parties illegal. VERY strong anti-trust, like break google, apple, microsoft, cargill, CVS, pfizer, ect up each into at least 150 companies, make Amazon a common carrier (like phone, power, ect). Very strict rules about foreign firms operating domestically. Close all 800ish overseas military bases and mandate national defense exclusively. Build hundreds of nuclear power plants. strong capital controls, followed but implementing a 10 year prison sentence for anyone with a net worth >$10 mil, or mandatory asset forfeiture.. That $10 million can increase tied to some mnix of poverty level, low gini, ect. About a zillion things I would change to the banking sector. The government would only be allowed to subcontract in very limited ways. Publicly funded journalism not subject to editorial review by government.
I'm also not stupid enough to think even one of those things will happen in my lifetime.
Both political parties here lie about almost everything. If either party has ever done anything recently that improved your life, I can assure you it was an accident. I dug in hard on Obama because Noah treats him like he walks on water instead of steals poor people's homes. I could have gone just as hard on Bush, Trump, or Bidend. But honestly if you haven't heard our 'vibrante, diverse media landscape' criticize Trump for almost everything, as though they were talking with one voice, you must have been living under a rock for a while now. adding to it seems a bit overkill.
"f either party has ever done anything recently that improved your life, I can assure you it was an accident."
I love that line. And I overstated slightly, we're only about 120 degrees out of phase, but that's OK. I want my friends to be fun, have interesting things to talk about, and preferably well considered opinions. I don't need my friends to agree with me on everything -- 120 degrees out of phase is totally workable as far as I'm concerned. :-)
> You can criticize the elites without falling into conspiracy theory traps.
Except if your criticism is labelled a conspiracy theory by the media. It is a pretty impenetrable moat as long as you keep the public as dumb as is on display in these comments.
> if one upholds notions of rationality and evidence rather than
A problem: the same mind that does the thinking is doing the error checking. Someone being non-rational often lacks the means to detect it.
You're right, I can and do criticize the elites without making up conspiracy theories. I can hardly blame someone else lacking either the time, will, or know how to sort through the endless morass. Especially when there are plenty of times when there are essentially no honest actors and everyone is just trying to sell you different flavors of propaganda. Additionally, plenty of conspiracy theories get proven to be correct. It is hardly irrational for people to believe at least some. I'd honestly be more concerned with someone who never questions any authoritative information, or someone who thinks either worthless political party has a monopoly on truth. Sometimes completely bogus conspiracy theories, like say pizzagate, seam a lot less crazy (even though they are not any more accurate) in light of later events, like Jeffery Epstein’s actual pedophile ring.
Bottom line, under capitalism lies will always be profitable, debunking them never will be.
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?
Yep. The biggest problem with misinformation in society, by far, comes from the media/academic/ngo/government complex that employs millions of people who routinely insist with total confidence on things that are wrong, with no consequences whatsoever and often even rewards. Standing against them are ... a bunch of bloggers. Great. The firepower mismatch here is insane and it's all in favor of official misinformation.
> The distinction between 1. ridiculous conspiracy theories fit for supression and 2. reasonable but far fetched contrarian arguments is messy, admittedly. But everything in life is messy and on a gradient. It doesn't mean we should promote obvious bullshit.
I agree wholeheartedly that we should not promote obvious bullshit. The problem is that the vaunted "misinformation fighters" lump the two categories into one. So their main effect is to poison the well on legitimate discourse. And thus the practical effect of strengthening the anti-misinformation infrastructure or what have you, will be to further suppress legitimate discourse.
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 debating him is a waste of time and by doing so you lend credibility to a nutcase. You also have to deal with the crowd since the conspiracy theorist is more likely to both bring members of his cult and attempt to gish gallop you in an argument
While I'm sure that our always trustworthy media will be using mental illness as an explanation for why some people don't believe them, It seems a bit risky to go down that road given Biden's senility.
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.
I think you’ll be hard pressed to find people who *actually* say or do any of the things that appear earlier in this list than The Last Jedi. It can feel like they do, because they engage in the hyperbole of the later claims. But I don’t think they actually engage in the kind of hyperbole you are alleging in the first several, even though they are often somewhat misguided in the direction you suggest.
> 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.
As a scientist, a lot of claims that are made as "supported by science" are not necessarily accurate. There is this perception that science is unbiased which is so unbelievably not true. What scientists decide to study, what studies get funded, and what publishers decide to publish all create bias. From Thomas Aquinas declaring that Homosexuality was a crime against nature in the 1200's until the 1970's it was essentially impossible to get anything published about homosexuality in other species. Now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction there is so much shotty research published attempting to justify puberty blockers for teens. There isn't any solid evidence that puberty blockers decrease depression and suicide risk for teens who recently decide they were trans, but because a study on kids who have insisted they were trans from a very young age and had no other mental health problems reported that puberty blockers and transitioning help them anyone who wants anything short of handing them out like candy is considered to be literally murdering trans kids. https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/researchers-found-puberty-blockers
To be clear, I support trans people, I do think there are times when puberty blockers are appropriate, but I do think that activists online have pushed too far and made it too easy for kids to get puberty blockers. I know plenty of gay men and lesbians who wished they were the other gender when they were younger but are very glad they didn't transition.
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.
> Still, I don't believe the truth is simply what a person thinks it is.
At runtime, it kinda is: when it comes to actions and decisions, beliefs are perceived as truths. Humans are amazingly bad at assessment of rationality, especially self-assesment.
I agree with that. There is a large class of things that are true in the beholder's mind, and I'll add that there are also things that are still objective truths, whether a person believes they are or not. I remember reports of people dying of COVID who refused to believe COVID was real, but they still died from it.
It's true, lots of idiocy among anti-vaxxers...but then also, lots on the pro-vaxx side, and among The Experts as well.
I strongly believe that the "mainstream" focus solely on dumb anti-vaxxers is suspicious, as I believe shortcomings of smart people and people in positions of power is far more important - I think focusing on anti-vaxxers (flat earthers, etc) is to a large degree a ~semi-deliberate smokescreen.
Of course, 99% of people utterly lack the ability to think like this (gosh, I wonder why philosophy isn't part of standard curriculum, especially since everyone believes we "need more critical thinking"), and even better: if they do encounter someone who can, they've been well trained to perceive it as someone "thinking they're smart" (oh, the irony) so tricking them is about as difficult as stealing candy from a baby.
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.
He is quoting the over-16 number which is cited in the link, and I agree it sounds implausably high but it's besides the point. A lot of those people were coerced or misinformed that it would "end the pandemic." The more relevant numbers are the huge dropoffs with every subsequent dose.
did it not end the pandemic?
No? No. The massive spread and natural resistance that massive spread engenders did. Well, that and the fact that the public simply grew tired of trying to "stop" something that seemed completely unstoppable.
they’re both widespread mechanisms for effecting resistance, i don’t know how confidently you can assert the categorical significance of one over the other, especially when the one you’re dismissing was the only safe way of engendering resistance among the most susceptible population and ipso facto the most likely to overwhelm the capacity of the healthcare system, one of the most significant outcomes pandemic policy was seeking to avoid
That's fair. I cannot know it was more natural resistance than vaccine that contributed to the pandemic's end. It seems very obvious that, at least early on when I was still paying close attention to the data, the vaccines prevented a lot of death and hospitalization. However, the vaccines did virtually nothing to stop the spread of COVID, which leads to my second point: the pandemic never really "ended" -- we simply stopped bothering with the massive defensive actions against it, and it was not because the vaccines were so successful that we did so. It's because literally nothing we did seemed to affect the spread of the virus.
People may have given up on public health measures where you reside, but that is not true everywhere.
The pandemic is not over. We still have waves of infection not tied to seasonal changes. COVID appears close to becoming endemic, maybe by the end of the year, but not yet, and that assumes we don't get new variants that evade immunity.
The vaccines did a lot to reduce the spread of COVID. They didn’t stop it, any more than the massive involuntary infection with omicron stopped it. But after vaccination, spread dropped greatly, and after omicron, spread dropped greatly. And even at the height of omicron, vaccinated people got fewer cases than unvaccinated people, and thus were probably causing fewer cases as well.
The pandemic never ended except in the sense of official statements saying it had ended. Omicron still circulates and some people are even still testing themselves. Astoundingly the official UK COVID enquiry requires people to take a test or wear a mask or both in order to testify!
So is it a conspiracy theory that COVID is still dangerous enough to need to wear a mask? Or is it misinformation? Or is it an important safety precaution? And how exactly can some poor schmuck just trying to pay the bills know the difference?
That's why trust in media has collapsed: 1) major press outlets demonstrated themselves to be incompetent, and 2) alternate press outlets (like Noah here) have demonstrated themselves to have better information.
Well, they're incompetent at being unbiased and discerning the truth, not at every aspect of reporting. That's why there's been no new competition and what little has emerged is just individual bloggers who get their information from so-called "legacy" media, including our excellent host.
I spent some time a few years ago thinking through what I'd do if I were to spend $1M on a news startup, with the only goal of producing trustworthy news. I concluded you can't do anything with such a tiny sum. The idealized purpose of news is to produce an ongoing comprehensible lifelike portrait of the world. So there are obvious things like being free of bias, but the more basic requirement is to actually collect as much news as possible. Most news is actually reliable but it's also low impact so we don't think about it. What did the President say today? Commodity info, we don't worry (yet) about even very biased outlets making up quotes out of whole cloth, at worst they may choose to selectively drop something he said but they will actually know about it. So to compete with that you need a high degree of effort and competence in just the basics of reporting, which is 90% of the problem, and then delivering that in a trustworthy manner is like 10%. This is why you aren't seeing a bunch of competitors to CNN or the NYT or BBC appear that advertise trustworthiness - the raw info collection effort is both hugely expensive and totally unprofitable. It's a hard problem.
I disagree about the bloggers. Abigail Shirer, Bari Weiss, Chris Rufo, Michael Schellenberger, Andy Ngo. They're not getting their information from legacy media. Bari left and NYT to found the most popular substack around. Michael just found COVID Patient 0, 1, & 2. Abigail has been leading the charge on trans journalism for 2 years. Chris Rufo likewise for CRT and anti-whiteness in education. Andy has been attacked for front-line reporting on Antifa multiple times.
They have demonstrated themselves to be competent at reporting on particular aspects of the world in a reasonably and accurate fair way. That's journalism. It may not be a threat to CNN or NYT for a long time, but the latter will keep losing people as long as they hire and promote based on diversity instead of competence.
How much $ do you think it would take to build *something* that could make at least some non-trivial change?
There were some statistical issues in how they counted vaccinations, iirc at one point more than 100% of Florida seniors had been dosed. https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-12-21/uneven-reporting-raises-doubts-about-cdc-vaccination-numbers
The link does say 97%, not 77%. That could be accidental misinformation; it lists the CDC as the source, but I couldn't find corroboration of that number! Note that the CDC classifies people as "fully vaccinated" only if they have received three doses, not just one dose! Also, note that most of the "unvaccinated" people in the U.S. are just kids.
NIH suggests that 15% of adults (16 and over) were never vaccinated. That sounds like an undercount to me because more than 15% of American adults are fervent Trumpers. The claim that 97% received at least one shot is clearly, clearly too high. They used to run news stories about people sneaking in to vaccine clinics in red states because they didn't want the community to know that they had been vaccinated.
NIH Article states: Overall, 15.2% of US adults were unvaccinated during 1 December 2021 to 7 February 2022, ranging from 5.8% in District of Columbia to 29.0% in Wyoming. Feb 17, 2023
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › articles › PMC9943697
Lots and lots of Trumpers were vaccinated (including older ones) - so I wouldn't count on that for an undercount. That said, the US healthcare / public health system is so lame at gathering data that almost any answer won't be super-accurate.
Your point about inaccuracy in healthcare statistics is right on. But non-vaccination was so much a part of the MAGA credo that I just can't see that more than half of them got vaccinated. I tried talking a few people I liked into being vaccinated and I flopped miserably.
That is what Noah’s source says but it is wrong. The correct answer is that 92.3% of adults have gotten at least one dose. And I am pretty sure that when presented with a better source, Noah will correct this. Spreading the truth is it’s own reward.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-people-booster-percent-pop5
There is always the risk of this, which I unfortunately do far too much of:
https://xkcd.com/386/
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.
Right, and the problem gets compounded when vaccine proponents exaggerate benefits and / or paper over problems (or even *appear to do so*) because anyone with a brain can see they are not about "just the facts." They lose credibility. These institutions must be *scrupulous* about providing facts and acknowledging shortcomings without worrying that people listening will take the facts the wrong way. Anything else is coercive and corrosively condescending.
Thr scientific consensus is still natural origin with a lab leak being highly unlikely. No one's produced anything that can compete with Worobey et al and Pekar et al
The most plausible version of the "lab leak" theory I've heard is that the Wuhan lab had the original, naturally occurring COVID-19 virus but never knew that it did: they had been sending people all over to get samples from bats so they could study bat viruses, and someone in the Wuhan lab caught COVID-19 somehow from one of those samples. The "someone made it on purpose" conspiracy theories seem like total nonsense to me, but "some dumbass fucked up when handling bat blood and got sick" is entirely consistent with what I know about dumbasses.
Where is the scientific consensus posted so we know its latest value per topic?
Agreed, I know two people, one very healthy young person and my unhealthy mother, who were hospitalized as a result of their vaccine reactions.
Nothing about "Hunter Biden's laptop" was "proved correct". You haven't seen it because Rudy's Chinese billionaire friend, who set it up, filled it with child porn before setting it up to make it look worse. This instead had the effect of making it impossible to distribute any contents from it.
I can't believe the number of people who fancy themselves enlightened critical thinkers with fully fledged and vetted opinions on a wide range of incredibly complicated topics simply by "trusting the experts." The experts in 1940 told us that black people were chattel.
Related: It occurs to me that the perceived increase in misinformation might have to do with the rise of the "that's just a conspiracy!" deflection.
If people learn that a true fact was declared to be misinformation in the past, they might be more willing to believe in other things labeled as disinformation. It matches my perception of many people on the right, who seem to hear "misinformation" and think "ah, some good reporting that the DNC is trying to silence."
No one should believe that vaccines are 100% effective. That is misinformation that was widespread pre-COVID. But it is misinformation to say that vaccines do nothing to reduce your risk of infection or transmission of COVID - it would be just as wrong to deny that a recent infection reduces your risk of infection and transmission.
The problem is that a lot of people incorporate into their identity that they never believe in anything labelled as a conspiracy theory, because they're not that type of person. If Joe believes in 1000 conspiracy theories and 2 are correct, and Bob believes in zero conspiracy theories ever, then because a conspiracy by definition can't be falsified it will always be Joe who gets proven right in the end (for the others, he can argue that the necessary proof just hasn't come out yet).
As an example, consider the idea that the US government is covering up contact with aliens, something RFK Jr apparently believes. A popular belief in the 90s. Just recently Congress passed a law that granted whistleblower protections specifically because they're worried that such a coverup might be real, and an NRO analyst came forward under them, to say that in fact there is such a coverup. I don't think aliens exist, but I believe it's plausible that some people in the US military incorrectly believe they do and have covered up that belief in various ways, which technically, would make this conspiracy theory be validated. And validated after ~30 years of being dismissed by all right thinking people, which is the real problem here.
>> "because a conspiracy by definition can't be falsified"
> Well it can, if you are a rational person. Hillary Clinton is not the leader of a pedophile ring.
I would quite like to see you use your rationality to demonstrate that it is necessarily factual that Hillary Clinton is not the leader of a pedophile ring.
Believing the Earth is flat isn't a conspiracy theory. Believing it's flat and that governments/teachers/everyone is covering up the truth is the conspiracy theory. If Joe's 998 beliefs are specifically about conspiracies, then they can't be falsified.
Now, you can argue that if you disprove the thing that's supposed to be covered up then you've also disproved the conspiracy, but technically that's not quite true. There can be a conspiracy to cover up something false, if the people doing it believe it to be true. That's probably what's happening with the alien craft claims by US MIC personnel. Some people hear fragmentary stories about classified missions to recover flying vehicles of unknown origin where unknown = "could be Russian or Chinese or we aren't quite sure" and this gets re-interpreted as aliens for whatever reason, and the story grows in the telling. But if those people then believe they have a sworn duty to suppress the truth as they see it, well, now you have your conspiracy. That's why it's tricky.
> The choice isn't between embracing conspiracy theories or dogmatically disregarding any and all theories being label conspiracy theory in principle (without even giving it a cursory glance).
Indeed it's not but in practice, most people do choose the latter option because it's widely understood that to be labelled a "conspiracy theorist" is social death and could easily get you fired, cancelled etc (maybe this is now changing in the past year or so). That's why so many things that aren't actually conspiracy theories get labelled as such. For example, journalists love to label "the vaccines were not effective" as a conspiracy theory even though (a) that's not an assertion of a conspiracy and (b) it's clearly true if you judge them by the standards they were introduced with!
> It's all about the process of forming beliefs...
Like only 2 in 1000 conspiracy theories are true? Did you carefully assess the evidence and control for biased reasoning?
Fair point. Maybe the debate should not be between RFK and Hotez, but between one of the small but significant minority of doctors/scientists who are skeptical about the risk-benefit tradeoff of vaccines and Hotez. But either way, I want that debate!
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.
COVID was not engineered in the Wuhan lab, but it’s unclear whether that’s the first place that a human caught the disease from a wild animal.
Masks and vaccines do not stop all transmission, but they do seem to reduce transmission by some significant percentage ranging from 5% to 50%, depending on the circumstances.
Check the WSJ yesterday. They reproduced Taibbi & Shellenberger's reporting. Their original story is here (https://public.substack.com/p/first-people-sickened-by-covid-19) but I miagine you will believe the WSJ morereadily. Patient 0, 1, and 2 have all been identified and are Wuhan lab researchers. 90%+ certainty at this point, COVID was engineered in the Wuhan lab.
At a lower threshold of certainty, it appears likely that the development was funded by NIH and DARPA using funds laundered through EcoHealth Alliance to avoid Obama's ban on gain of function viral research. Such a connection explains why the senior US public health establishment freaked out to label any Wuhan lab connection "misinformation" almost immediately. Me thinks they doth protest too much.
Come on. Did you actually read the article you just linked to? The *only* piece of evidence in this article is a claim that a US government official has told us the names of the three first cases, and that they were working in the Wuhan lab. Everything else in the article is just repeating the phrase “gain of function research” in order to sound scary, and using the word “furin cleavage site”, which was part of someone’s false theory two years ago for why COVID was so different from other coronaviruses.
There is literally nothing in that article that supports the claim that COVID was engineered - though if Taibbi is right that a US government official is claiming that the three first patients were lab workers, that would be fairly strong evidence that the virus was the result of a lab leak. Still, when Matt Taibbi comes up with something that makes a major institution like the US government look bad, I’m skeptical, because that is his biggest goal in life, and he isn’t above making things up to do this. (There is no such thing as a “blood funnel” on a vampire squid - the only vampiric thing about them is how they look.)
I'm not being clear. When I say "engineered" I don't mean "intentionally released as a weapon". I mean it was a natural virus that was being worked on in a lab using GOF techniques (these are real, not just scare words) and then escaped because someone wasn't careful.
That the US govt was funding research at the Wuhan lab (via Peter Danzig and EcoHealth) has previously been reported from FOIA documents. Was this particular research included? No one knows. Were we funding research at the lab involving hybridized coronaviruses? Yes.
I think you and I are mostly saying the same thing. The only difference I see is that perhaps you think COVID was a naturally occurring virus while I think it was a hybrid created in the lab, likely with US govt funding. But in the end, both of us are talking about an accidental release.
However, said lab leak and the resulting intentional coverup by both the Chinese govt and by the US public health establishment cost the world trillions of dollars, killed millions of people. And neither China (who unleased the virus on the world) or NIH / CDC (who funded the research and covered it up) will ever be held responsible.
This story is fake, like the last ten stories that were also fake; it just means a source lied to them.
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.
Twitter isn't that important in the grand scheme of things. A much bigger problem is that the effect this has on academia.
I’m not sure this is a “problem” in academia. It’s true that it makes a general summary of journal articles include lots of false claims. But it’s also true that incentivizing people to publish unusual and original things rather than things that they think are most accurate is the only way that we end up with progress. We need lots of people with crazy wrong ideas in order to get a few with crazy right ideas.
I mean, if you want to publish original crazy ideas instead of things that are accurate then great, but that's called sci-fi, not research. We may value it but shouldn't all be forced to pay for it.
you're going to run out of novel accurate things to say pretty quickly if researchers are never allowed to posit anything that transcends the current paradigm
Researchers should be able to say things outside the current paradigm, but they shouldn't be encouraged to overstate their evidence. You can explore unconventional ideas while still being accurate to the facts as you have them.
I do think that we have a problem in academia where the researchers are incentivized to stretch the case for their theories. Lots of science scandals involving researchers hiding inconvenient bits of evidence that could get in the way of the next grant. And that's before we get into outright fraud.
You can be novel, accurate AND paradigm transcending all at once, it's just really freaking hard. But the supply of such ideas is nowhere near enough to satisfy academia's demand for them. Given the choice of which to sacrifice in order to increase supply, the correct one is "paradigm transcending", not "accurate".
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.
It's pretty good!
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.
The first three statements you list are blatantly false and no one should have ever said them. Unfortunately, they seem to have sometimes suggested them in the same spirit with which they said the fourth statement, which was likely technically accurate, for some definition of “evidence”, that is highly misleading and problematic.
The fifth statement doesn’t mean anything and is very stupid.
The sixth and seventh just seem completely correct - something can be the best way of preventing infection waves even if it is less than 100% effective, just like something can be the best way of preventing traffic deaths without reducing traffic deaths to zero.
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.
Even though I suspect your politics and more are 179 degrees out of phase, I 100% agree with this sentiment. Our elites have demonstrated their utterly incompetence too many times, so we have lost confidence in them.
Noah highlights that chart as an example of how the GOP has gone off the deep end and embraced loony theories and media distrust. I look at the chart the other way. The Democrats are sticking with a horse that has repeatedly foundered badly, in defiance of all evidence that said horse should be put down. Maybe the GOP are the clear-eyes ones and the Dems are wearing rose colored glasses. (The fact that the independents media trust has tanked so much in the last 3 years also makes be suspect this.)
My politics can't easily be summed up, but to give you a hint. We have had about 3 presidents that didn't deserve to walk out of the White House and directly into prison. Publicly funded elections that use STAR voting, every election, political parties illegal. VERY strong anti-trust, like break google, apple, microsoft, cargill, CVS, pfizer, ect up each into at least 150 companies, make Amazon a common carrier (like phone, power, ect). Very strict rules about foreign firms operating domestically. Close all 800ish overseas military bases and mandate national defense exclusively. Build hundreds of nuclear power plants. strong capital controls, followed but implementing a 10 year prison sentence for anyone with a net worth >$10 mil, or mandatory asset forfeiture.. That $10 million can increase tied to some mnix of poverty level, low gini, ect. About a zillion things I would change to the banking sector. The government would only be allowed to subcontract in very limited ways. Publicly funded journalism not subject to editorial review by government.
I'm also not stupid enough to think even one of those things will happen in my lifetime.
Both political parties here lie about almost everything. If either party has ever done anything recently that improved your life, I can assure you it was an accident. I dug in hard on Obama because Noah treats him like he walks on water instead of steals poor people's homes. I could have gone just as hard on Bush, Trump, or Bidend. But honestly if you haven't heard our 'vibrante, diverse media landscape' criticize Trump for almost everything, as though they were talking with one voice, you must have been living under a rock for a while now. adding to it seems a bit overkill.
"f either party has ever done anything recently that improved your life, I can assure you it was an accident."
I love that line. And I overstated slightly, we're only about 120 degrees out of phase, but that's OK. I want my friends to be fun, have interesting things to talk about, and preferably well considered opinions. I don't need my friends to agree with me on everything -- 120 degrees out of phase is totally workable as far as I'm concerned. :-)
> You can criticize the elites without falling into conspiracy theory traps.
Except if your criticism is labelled a conspiracy theory by the media. It is a pretty impenetrable moat as long as you keep the public as dumb as is on display in these comments.
> if one upholds notions of rationality and evidence rather than
A problem: the same mind that does the thinking is doing the error checking. Someone being non-rational often lacks the means to detect it.
You're right, I can and do criticize the elites without making up conspiracy theories. I can hardly blame someone else lacking either the time, will, or know how to sort through the endless morass. Especially when there are plenty of times when there are essentially no honest actors and everyone is just trying to sell you different flavors of propaganda. Additionally, plenty of conspiracy theories get proven to be correct. It is hardly irrational for people to believe at least some. I'd honestly be more concerned with someone who never questions any authoritative information, or someone who thinks either worthless political party has a monopoly on truth. Sometimes completely bogus conspiracy theories, like say pizzagate, seam a lot less crazy (even though they are not any more accurate) in light of later events, like Jeffery Epstein’s actual pedophile ring.
Bottom line, under capitalism lies will always be profitable, debunking them never will be.
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?
Yep. The biggest problem with misinformation in society, by far, comes from the media/academic/ngo/government complex that employs millions of people who routinely insist with total confidence on things that are wrong, with no consequences whatsoever and often even rewards. Standing against them are ... a bunch of bloggers. Great. The firepower mismatch here is insane and it's all in favor of official misinformation.
> Standing against them are ... a bunch of bloggers. Great. The firepower mismatch here is insane and it's all in favor of official misinformation.
A birdie told me there are some wheels in motion to rectify this power imbalance. 🤭
> The distinction between 1. ridiculous conspiracy theories fit for supression and 2. reasonable but far fetched contrarian arguments is messy, admittedly. But everything in life is messy and on a gradient. It doesn't mean we should promote obvious bullshit.
I agree wholeheartedly that we should not promote obvious bullshit. The problem is that the vaunted "misinformation fighters" lump the two categories into one. So their main effect is to poison the well on legitimate discourse. And thus the practical effect of strengthening the anti-misinformation infrastructure or what have you, will be to further suppress legitimate discourse.
> It doesn't mean we should promote obvious bullshit
What's "obvious" is a function of the frame of reference a d quality of cognition of the observer.
Being incorrect and being correct often feel identical, opinions are funny that way.
Who is vaunting these “misinformation fighters”? No one here as far as I can tell. (They may self-vaunt, the way the conspiracy theorists do.)
> since non-rational people will think "If they were wrong about X, perhaps they are wrong about Y too"
What is non-rational about that?
> ("If they were wrong about the Iraq war, perhaps they are wrong about Jewish space lasers also").
Cherry picking imagined strawmen to "prove" a point seems non-rational though!
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 debating him is a waste of time and by doing so you lend credibility to a nutcase. You also have to deal with the crowd since the conspiracy theorist is more likely to both bring members of his cult and attempt to gish gallop you in an argument
While I'm sure that our always trustworthy media will be using mental illness as an explanation for why some people don't believe them, It seems a bit risky to go down that road given Biden's senility.
> I also think that mental illness is associated with many conspiracy theorists
It's easy: just write a clever article or simply post a comment online associating the two: they are then "associated" - neat eh?
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.
This. Supply for the Demand. The universal SxD
LOL which is pennies compared to the profits raked in by big pharma...
Absolutely. But that doesn't change my point (or respond to it really at all).
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.
I think you’ll be hard pressed to find people who *actually* say or do any of the things that appear earlier in this list than The Last Jedi. It can feel like they do, because they engage in the hyperbole of the later claims. But I don’t think they actually engage in the kind of hyperbole you are alleging in the first several, even though they are often somewhat misguided in the direction you suggest.
> 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.
I would agree he sounds good and add that is one of the biggest challenges - people who sound sane but are claiming things not based on the science
As a scientist, a lot of claims that are made as "supported by science" are not necessarily accurate. There is this perception that science is unbiased which is so unbelievably not true. What scientists decide to study, what studies get funded, and what publishers decide to publish all create bias. From Thomas Aquinas declaring that Homosexuality was a crime against nature in the 1200's until the 1970's it was essentially impossible to get anything published about homosexuality in other species. Now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction there is so much shotty research published attempting to justify puberty blockers for teens. There isn't any solid evidence that puberty blockers decrease depression and suicide risk for teens who recently decide they were trans, but because a study on kids who have insisted they were trans from a very young age and had no other mental health problems reported that puberty blockers and transitioning help them anyone who wants anything short of handing them out like candy is considered to be literally murdering trans kids. https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/researchers-found-puberty-blockers
To be clear, I support trans people, I do think there are times when puberty blockers are appropriate, but I do think that activists online have pushed too far and made it too easy for kids to get puberty blockers. I know plenty of gay men and lesbians who wished they were the other gender when they were younger but are very glad they didn't transition.
A manipulative person was able to convince you? Will wonders never cease
If you believe their veracity, you are right. I will base my opinion on what I hear from him now.
The interesting part: it wasn't "quotes", it was accusations. I wonder how many people noticed that.
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
We need way more people with your attitude homie!!
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.
Prediction markets? As the saying goes, a bet is a tax on bullshit.
I think that's a great idea.
> Still, I don't believe the truth is simply what a person thinks it is.
At runtime, it kinda is: when it comes to actions and decisions, beliefs are perceived as truths. Humans are amazingly bad at assessment of rationality, especially self-assesment.
I agree with that. There is a large class of things that are true in the beholder's mind, and I'll add that there are also things that are still objective truths, whether a person believes they are or not. I remember reports of people dying of COVID who refused to believe COVID was real, but they still died from it.
It's true, lots of idiocy among anti-vaxxers...but then also, lots on the pro-vaxx side, and among The Experts as well.
I strongly believe that the "mainstream" focus solely on dumb anti-vaxxers is suspicious, as I believe shortcomings of smart people and people in positions of power is far more important - I think focusing on anti-vaxxers (flat earthers, etc) is to a large degree a ~semi-deliberate smokescreen.
Makes sense. On the last part -- are you saying a smokescreen to protect powerful people?
Of course.
And, only a mild conspiracy (if any) would be needed:
a) Noam Chomsky to BBC-journalist: "If you believed different you wouldn't been sitting here." https://youtu.be/1nBx-37c3c8
b) https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/george-carlin-on-conspiracies/
c) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
Of course, 99% of people utterly lack the ability to think like this (gosh, I wonder why philosophy isn't part of standard curriculum, especially since everyone believes we "need more critical thinking"), and even better: if they do encounter someone who can, they've been well trained to perceive it as someone "thinking they're smart" (oh, the irony) so tricking them is about as difficult as stealing candy from a baby.