How much should responsible news organizations report on stupid things?
If they don’t report at all, the stupid things go unchallenged. But if they report too much, then they signal-boost the stupid thing and give it free publicity (eg Donald Trump). Also, people who mistrust the media might reflexively support the stupid thing just because the media hates it (eg Donald Trump). Also, the more time you waste covering stupid things, the less time you have for real news (eg Donald Trump).
I recently read Causes And Consequences Of Mainstream Media Dissemination Of Fake News: Literature Review And Synthesis, which argues that the news might be covering too many stupid things right now. The authors note that “only 2.6% of visits to current affairs articles were to fake news websites” (though other sources suggest more) and that the mainstream press bears some responsibility for spreading inaccuracies beyond this small demographic. But they also understandably worry that maybe if the mainstream press wasn’t so aggressive in covering and debunking fake news, then fake news would go uncorrected.
When I think about this problem, I remember creationism.
In the early 2000s, creationism was Public Enemy Number…maybe not One, but somewhere in the top ten. If you’re old enough to remember the decade at all, you probably recall the key flashpoints. The Discovery Institute. Michael Behe. “Teach the controversy”. The Creation Museum. Of Pandas And People. That one anti-Richard-Dawkins rap song which somehow despite everything managed to be really good.
And you probably remember the efforts by “the reality based community” to spread awareness of the dangers of creationism – the xkcd comics, the petitions by 1400 scientists named Steve, the New York Times articles:
Frequency of the word ‘creationism’ in the New York Times as a percent of all words, source here but currently down
…yeah, the 2000s were a weird time. I’ve talked about this particular conflict already in my post New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed. Today I want to focus on another aspect.
All those creationists are still there. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 40% of Americans believed “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so”, little different from 44% who believed it when they first asked in 1983 or the 46% who believed it in 2006.
And the Discovery Institute! They’re still there! You can read their very modern-looking website at discovery.org. Their blog has three new posts on creationism just from the past two days (eg A Hot Seller From Discovery Institute Press: New Book Offers Intelligent Design In A Nutshell).
Same with the Creation Museum! Last year they completed a $5.5 million upgrade, including a planetarium, “4D theater”, and a snazzy “Biblical authority exhibit”. And they still have their full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark (looking more and more prescient these days).
Same with Michael Behe! He’s still publishing! Last year he released his newest book, Darwin Devolves, which “gives a sweeping tour of how modern theories of evolution fall short and how the devolving nature of Darwin’s mechanism limits them even further”. Also, in case you wanted to read Behe’s opinions about the coronavirus, that is a thing you can do.
As far as I can tell, the creationists are putting in just as much effort today as they did in 2006. But the mainstream went from fiercely challenging them, to totally ignoring them. And the change didn’t help them at all. They haven’t won any major victories, or convinced any more people. If anything, they’re doing worse – nobody hears about them. Although the decline in media coverage hasn’t prevented people from being creationist, it hasn’t helped creationism spread or build clout either.
I see people using rivers of ink to fight the modern equivalents of creationists. Pizzagaters, flat-earthers, moon-hoaxers, QAnon, deep-staters, people who say the coronavirus is a bioweapon, Alex Jones. Are they sure it’s not equally useless? Equally counterproductive?
Even beyond that, I see people willing to legitimize any tactic if it gives them a leg up on this group – censorship, social shaming, no-platforming, changing social media from a free public square to a carefully-monitored walled garden. Spreading the cowpox of doubt, teaching people to optimize for solving easy problems in ways that make it harder for them to think about the hard ones. The justification is always the same – if we don’t tighten control, then facts and science will lose out to bullshit and denialism, and fringe ideologies will burst into the mainstream and overwhelm it.
If that were the only way to save civilization from anti-science barbarism, maybe it would be a worthwhile trade. But the experience of unchallenged creationism suggests maybe we can relax.
Do we actually know the lack of media coverage is hurting creationism in any real way? You may not hear about it anymore in your liberal-techy bubble, but it’s a belief that spreads through churches, not the media, and its target audience is people you don’t talk to in real life. So it’s probably doing fine. And indeed you say that 40% of the country believes this nonsense, which is not exactly a fringe number like flat-Earthers.
What I’d be curious to know is if they won any victories in schools. That’s what I remember as the big outrage, attempts to evict evolution, or to force in teaching of creationism alongside it. Have there been none – or have there been none reported because the topic has started to bore people?
I agree it’s not clearly hurting them, my point was that it doesn’t seem to be helping them.
It drives bifurcation.
The problem (and I’m not sure if this is worse or better than the other problem you’re talking about here) is that instead of a public debate now you have, to use your apt metaphor, a light-matter and a dark-matter universe where in one universe Creationism is obviously false and people who believe it are weird sub-human troglodytes and in the other universe Creationism is obviously true and anyone who doesn’t believe it is obviously woefully uneducated about the Bible or simply an unashamed degenerate.
I don’t think we’re there yet on this in the same way we seem to be with MAGA vs non-MAGA (I live in a red state, with red family, friends, and coworkers, etc and even with all of those Trump voters know not one single person with a hat/bumper-sticker/Trump toupee), but that’s the danger on the other side of the equation.
Are you saying there won’t be that attitude if there’s public debate? Can you give an example of a hotly-debated topic where that isn’t the prevailing attitude?
@yug
It isn’t a question of existence, it’s a question of degree. Again, using MAGA as an example, there is no debate.
You’re either in the MAGA club or you’re in the MAGA-haters club and while the two sides do plenty of screaming at each other they do precious little talking with each other. As an interesting exercise, consider what public platform a debate could even take place in. Social media? No way.
Compare and contrast the storied debates mentioned in the Godlessness that failed post, the famous debates like Dawkins vs Lennox, etc. I mean, plenty of the vile atheist/brain-dead fundie attitudes were around, but at least there was an actual debate.
Just like with creationism, we could expect such a debate to change ~0 minds.
Everyone creates their own impenetrable reality now, on every issue, not just creationism vs. evolution. We could pat ourselves on the back for our civility and rationality, then return to our incompatible realities with views unchanged.
So how far back in time would you go to get a reasonable MAGA debate?
@Corey
I’m confused about your diagnosis. If civil conversation is useless, are you advocating we simply ignore each other, or are you imagining a more antifa-esque approach to our differences would be in order? Or something completely different?
True, but we’d at least bring with us the knowledge that the other side, while obviously wrong about every single thing ever, was at least human beings that it was possible to have a civil discussion with.
I mean, “stupid idiot who’s boneheadedly wrong about everything” isn’t a particularly flattering idea to have about someone, but it’s better than “howling demon that exists solely to spread vile hatred.”
@North49: I have no solution. None is possible. *Maybe* banning the concept of making money from an audience? Make communication harder somehow, in defiance of technological progress and all trends? Radically rewire human nature?
We are literally doomed to live in incompatible realities, forever.
I don’t think it’s that impossible to find reasonable debates about the Trump presidency, I just don’t think they happen online.
For instance I am a Trump basically-supporter who nonetheless acknowledges his many flaws. My wife is a Trump basically-opponent who acknowledges that Trump is right about some things too. We can discuss politics sensibly because we do it in private, rather than on public Internet forums, which means we’re not going to be interrupted by morons with louder, dumber opinions. On the internet sensible debate is more or less impossible because loud morons always interrupt and then derail the conversation.
If the creationism debate was less bad than the current political debate, it’s because the underlying subject matter was less emotive, and there was at least some kind of intellectual barrier to entry.
I think it absolutely did change minds. Not sure why you’re assuming otherwise.
I mostly live in the dark-matter universe, and this just isn’t true. When I was growing up in the 2000s, creationism was seen as vital and talked about a lot. I’ve been to the Creation Museum twice. But the last time I heard about creationism in church was 6 or 7 years ago. Unfortunately not the same church, but just from my general sense of the dark matter zeitgeist, it’s not nearly as much of a thing as it was 15 years ago. The mainstream ignoring it made it a lot less of an issue everywhere, and there’s probably a lot less bifurcation today than there was back then.
My experience lines up too. When I was a teen in the 2000’s, our Sunday School classes regularly mentioned creationism as an important doctrine. Now, I’ve never heard it mentioned at my current church. When it happened to come up in conversation with our associate pastor, he shrugged it off with “Well, I believe X, but it’s really not an important issue; there’re good Christians with all positions.”
I’ll concur, as another dark-matter constituent.
I also think it needs to be pointed out, when talking to an audience of highly systematizing nerds, that the vast majority of people don’t think too hard or often about this stuff.
Some people were evangelized into evolution, and so they believe humans came from monkeys, but they hold all sorts of ideas that are radically off-base. They might think evolution implies that we’re all getting smarter and nicer to one another, they probably believe some things that are basically Lamarckian, and so on.
At least in parts of the US, a lot of these same sorts of people were evangelized into a Creationist view. But they haven’t thought long and hard about it. They might nod their heads when a ranger at a national park says a rock formation is many millions of years old, and also nod their heads when a preacher says the Earth is a few thousand years old, without thinking for a second about the contradiction. But the question they heard the interviewer in this survey asking was whether God and the Bible are true, so of course they’re going to agree with that.
The sort of people who are deeply interested in matters of cosmology and the origin of life — whether professionally or as a matter of simple intellectual curiosity — aren’t going to be influenced too strongly one way or the other by whether they were “taught the controversy” by their 6th grade teacher (who in any case has her own beliefs and is probably teaching anything she disagrees with without enthusiasm).
Ultimately, the culture war is largely a proxy war. Most people who fight for/against creationism or for/against BLM, care about the issue itself for 0-30%, while they are more motivated by:
– scoring a victory in the larger war
– gaining personal status
– being part of a movement/mob
– getting to do things they like to do, that have little inherently to do with the cause
– etc, etc
That’s why these are fads that burn out when most people get tired of repeating themselves, while a small minority, who actually care very strongly about the issue itself, get abandoned by the majority.
Logically, this also means that this is highly misleading: “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
If your side gets the power to make change during the conflict, you should take it, because not merely can the moment pass, the entire issue can pass.
@Aapje:
I grant you that such people exist, and are incredibly vocal, but are they really the majority ? In my experience, many Creationists really care about the actual Creationism; same thing goes for atheists. Don’t get me wrong, both sides view the issue as a symptom of an overall moral/intellectual malaise that is afflicting the country; but that doesn’t mean they view the issue itself as incidental.
Speaking of the dark matter zeitgeist, one of the logical fallacies evolution’s lay partisans enjoyed taking down back in the day was the creationists saying evolution leads to racism.
The fact that hardcore Christians were anti-racist enough to lower their status making that particular argument remains unnoticed in the visible matter universe.
@Bugmaster
There is caring and there is caring. Lots of people care about things, in the sense that they say they care if you ask them, yet they do nothing in favor of that thing.
My claim is that actual engagement is for most people driven by other factors than concern, but rather, typically more selfish reasons.
I think Scott’s point is that it is doing fine but it was also doing fine when it was being consistently challenged. So if these things are going to be unaffected by your coverage, you can’t justify your coverage by saying “think what will happen if we don’t do this!” because actually reality looks the same, only everyone is less stressed out. Everyone didn’t become a creationist when people stopped arguing so much with creationists. Everyone isn’t going to become a [insert crazy idea here]-ist if we stop arguing so much with them.
The school victories is an in interesting point. If creationists had definitively won those fights, the numbers might be above 40%. The constant contesting of their ideas might have contributed to them failing to durably influence the education system (any further than they might have already). Which would suggest that it wasn’t a pointless endeavour.
You *especially* can’t justify violating normal rules because of the urgent need to fight the encroaching creationists.
I wonder if the numbers might be *lower” if creationism were taught alongside the middle school/high school version of evolution. I suspect many sort-of-creationist students just tune out today. They learn enough to pass the unit test and then let the knowledge decay. Later, the hole is filled by church and family and friends.
An honest “teach the controversy” might actually work their minds and create some lasting impressions. It would also give teachers a chance to actually deal with students’ doubts if the students feel free to challenge things and ask questions they think the powers that be will think less of them for.
Beware that “teach the controversy” won’t be implemented by Ideal Teachers but by Actual Teachers. Middle School Me wouldn’t have felt too free to actually challenge a teacher unless the teacher actively worked on it.
from bean May 28, 2020 at 8:46 am below:
“Second, I got a very interesting paper from the guy teaching [Creationism in church]. Unfortunately, I lost it and can’t provide a cite, but it was a study of how student attitudes towards creationism changed over the course of a freshmen Bio 101 class, depending on how they taught it. There were three groups: normal, really hammering on evolution, and one where they actually engaged with intelligent design as a theory. And as anyone familiar with things like ego protection should expect, the heavy evolution one saw the least change in student attitudes, while the [engaging with] ID one saw the most. I read it and said “everyone is on the wrong side of the battle they’re fighting over the curriculum”. Weirdly, the guy who gave it to me didn’t see that. Well, maybe not so weird, given how bad he was at understanding science in general.”
Engaging with ID as a theory doesn’t make sense, as it isn’t one.
Why should it bother you that they believe it? Kids who will grow up to be scientists will benefit from familiarity with unscientific beliefs they can dismantle – and from learning that believers will resist the dismantlement. If they are any good, this will be a minor warm-up for their later struggles with the scientific establishment. For others it doesn’t matter much one way or the other – creationism demands little in the way of actionable consequences in one’s life choices.
Edit: and it doesn’t matter if the future scientists believe it themselves as kids. You will never be a scientist if you don’t have some false beliefs you can test against observation.
I noticed I was confused about the high quality of the rap by Michael Edmondson (Float On Films). Some quick googling suggests that it was not created with a Creationist agenda:
https://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/04/21/who-made-the-beware-the-believ
A caveat to this is that there were some key political and legal victories over efforts to push creationism in schools. This didn’t stop existing creationists from spreading it through their churches and to their friends and families, but it did deny it a pretty significant official platform that might have allowed it to break out of the “40-45%” of the population. Eventually folks defending science didn’t even need to challenge rules mandating the teaching of creationism anymore in court, because school boards even in conservative states started balking at including it.
Yeah, this is I think the big mistake: the reason there was so much concern about intelligent design back in the day is because the President endorsed it being taught in schools and there was a big court case over the matter. Kitzmiller is almost certainly the reason the graph peaks in 2005.
So, I think this sort of gets things backwards: Starting in the late ’90s or early 2000s, creationism proponents made a big push to get creationism taught in schools. When their cause went before a court, there was a big response to this, and subsequently (though I do not claim a causal connection here), the creationists were defeated in the Kitzmiller ruling. After this, attention to creationism mostly went away.
Assuming this list is comprehensive, there has been no new “teach the controversy” legislation introduced since about 2009, perfectly correlating with no media interest in creationism.
EDIT to add:
It’s incredible to me that in the 108 comments posted so far, mine is the only one to mention Kitzmiller. Everyone is treating the mid-2000s focus on creationism as endogenous, like we need to explain it in terms of media incentives, or tribal conflict or random walks through culture war topics or whatever, when very plainly it was exogenous to the fact that there was a concerted effort to push creationism into the US educational curriculum. Once that effort was defeated, the focus on creationism went away.
It’s not clear that the media attention played any role in those political defeats, but it’s not implausible, and that’s what we need to judge.
EDIT: again to remove the embarrassing misstatement that Kitzmiller was a SC case.
+1 for keeping your eye on the object-level ball.
I was a creationist in 2005 and can confirm the above is what was going on. The movement felt like it had grown up and could frame its arguments in a scientific enough way that they might be able to get into schools, especially considering they had the most sympathetic president in office that they were ever going to get.
Interesting. If you don’t mind my asking: are you still a creationist? If not, what changed? How did you feel about the Kitzmiller decision at the time, and what were people saying they should do in response?
My impression was that Kitzmiller was a symptom of the endogenous upsurge in Creationist sentiment.
Yeah, sure, but Scott is framing this from the perspective of opponents of creationists, as if there was just a concerted decision by atheists or the liberal media or whoever to stop caring about creationism–from their point of view, the upsurge in creationism is the exogenous event they responded to.
The upsurge in creationism is probably related to the evangelical faction of the Republican party having its preferred candidate selected President; obviously the chain of causes extends even further back, if you want to keep going.
I agree that was the proximate cause of the attention. But the legal effort got defeated through a legal countereffort. The cultural/intellectual focus was part of a general cultural/intellectual focus on atheism vs. religion at the time.
I read your post as implying that the NYT graph and Project Steve and all that were just some weird mid-aughts cultural phenomenon like listening to Metric or shakycam movies, when they were clearly not. Maybe I read you wrong, but I do think it pretty strongly gives that impresion; the “the 2000s were a weird time” especially makes it sound like we should read that NYT graph as capturing some weird media fad.
I also think the post implies that the NYT perhaps ought not to have given so much attention to creationism at the time–the very first line of the post is “how much should responsible news organizations report on stupid things?”, with the obvious reading that perhaps creationism was a stupid thing the NYT shouldn’t have reported on. But that can’t be right when creationism was actually an important political story at the time.
I also think this bit:
gets the causation backwards: creationists lost some major victories, became uninteresting, and so everyone started ignoring them.
Your version makes it sound like the media, for independent reasons decided to start paying attention to creationists to discredit them, and later got bored or something, and wandered away. I think that version is pretty decisively false.
All of the above is possibly me just misreading the post, in which case, sorry, but I genuinely find it hard not to read it that way.
Finally, moving away from the media to the broader intellectual tumult: the creationist effort was not just a legal effort (recall Bush saying he thought ID should be taught in schools), and its defeat was not entirely a legal countereffort–the Kitzmiller decision was never appealed because the pro-ID school board members were decisively voted out shortly before the decision was reached. I do not know, but it would very much not surprise me, if an anti-creationist political climate mobilized voters who were otherwise fairly indifferent to the school board to show up.
I think incentive structures are largely overlooked when viewing these ‘phenomenons’ a few years after the fact. These is no greater boon to any person or any organisation than an unwinnable war. The creationism debate made Dawkins a super star and Creationists rallied behind pseudoscientific organisations (all of whom employ people, all of whom need money to keep employing people).
I think a lot of these very public debates foster an almost symbiotic relationship between both sides: neither really wants the other to go away as that cuts off their source of income.
All this is to say, if you want to know why these sorts of very public, shade-throwing debates happen then look at who wins. It isn’t people buying books or Those who donate to ‘Fight the good fight’.
A lot of the abortion debate is like this. A bunch of people can make money for infinite time promising to make $CHANGE or stop $CHANGE.
Maybe the people who profit off of selling arms to the culture wars, too.
What examples are there of people campaigning to protect abortion rights/access who you think don’t actually care about doing so?
I imagine there are many pro-choice and pro-life politicians who don’t care all that much about abortion as a legal issue, but care a lot about the donations and volunteers they can gain by having the right stance on the issue.
The gun debate is the perfect example of this. The NRA fundraises off the groups who want gun control and the gun control groups fundraise off the NRA. There is so much money to be made and nothing really gets done.
to be fair, the NRA has actually succeeded at expanding gun rights in the last couple decades or so. Admittedly though, they are about the only right wing pressure group to achieve anything substantive.
Possibly the Revolt at Cincinnati took control of the NRA away from the people who wanted to profit from an unwinnable war (build a $30m HQ) and handed it to those who wanted to win it (direct the funds to the ILA instead). That could be why they’ve achieved something while all the others are failing to stop ‘Cthulhu swimming left’.
What this doesn’t explain is how the New Guard (presumably) resisted their Molochian incentive to play the same game (at least, enough to gain some effectiveness at the organisation’s declared goals. I don’t doubt that they still played it a bit). Normally a coup like that goes full Animal Farm pretty quickly.
Christ, Scott, this performative “Ornage Man Bad” crap is cringy. You used to be better than this.
I originally only had (eg Donald Trump) on one of those sentences, which I think was important – there was a pretty strong case that he won the GOP primary because he got more free coverage from (offended)(liberal) media organizations, and I think that made it much clearer what I was talking about. But then it seemed weird to have (eg Donald Trump) on one of those sentences and not the others, so I added it to all of them.
Fwiw I found it funny, sometimes a cheap joke is good when it works in the flow of the essay. And I think all the examples are pretty legitimate.
Even if you’re on Trump’s side its hard to disagree that he benefitted from media reaction. His campaign team have very explicitly said that they aimed for that in interveiws and writing about the campaign
As someone who supported Trump in 2016 (because I’m not in Utah), I thoroughly agree, and read Scott’s line as actual analysis rather than performative “Orange Man Bad.”
As did I.
The point was about the effect of media outrage, not it’s subject.
Also funny.
I concur, this seems pretty innocuous.
I think there’s an argument that it is just better writing as well. Remember, and this is important, that comedy always comes in threes.
I’m disappointed it wasn’t ironic self-aware signal boosting of Donald Trump.
Although really, for the last sentence, it presumably applies to the first clause, rather than the second as its current placement implies.
-1
Using the same example for three different things is quite a Scott thing to do and expressing your opinion isn’t performative outrage.
The Orange Man *is* bad though, and if it bothers you when people mention it, I think it tells us more about you than about Scott. Here’s an article about it: https://thebulwark.com/actually-the-orange-man-is-bad/
I think the problem with the media’s anit-Trump coverage is that it’s so overwhelmingly hysterical that it oversaturates people’s panic receptors and makes them basically ignore the whole issue. That’s what “Orange man bad” means: “yes, yes, another anti-Trump story, what else is new”.
Which is a shame, because Trump is doing some (arguably, many) legitimately bad things. He is also doing some (arguably, few) good or just neutral things. But by shouting “Trump is the literal Devil !!11!!” every single day, the media drowns the useful signal in noise.
Consider a possible world in which nobody is actually shouting “Trump is the literal Devil”, and the amount of strong criticism Trump is getting in the media is quite commensurate with the amount of many, as you say, legitimately bad things he’s doing.
In such a world people who are strongly anti-media or pro-Trump or both would be strongly motivated to convince themselves that the criticism is out of all proportion and hysterical.
To achieve that, they’ll look for rhetorical devices that’ll represent any strong criticism as ridiculously overblown or irrational, such as “Trump is the literal devil” or “Orange Man Bad”.
Since anti-Trump criticism exists on a spectrum (as does everything else), they will also be able to take the more extreme examples and convince themselves that that’s what all or most anti-Trump criticism is like.
And, since Trump himself is very much attuned to the minute movements of pro- and anti-Trump rhetorics, he might be motivated to do or say many things which are not especially interesting to his supporters but tend to cause strong criticism coming from his opponents, which would help the supporters to continue convincing themselves that the criticism is out of all proportion.
How would you say this possible world is different from the actual world, in demonstrable ways?
who are strongly anti-media or pro-Trump or both would be strongly motivated to convince themselves that the criticism is out of all proportion and hysterical.
I don’t like arguments of the style “people will just make up the bad things we do, so let’s just do bad things anyway.”
The anti-media pro-Trump people would strictly be in a worse position if the media didn’t make up things about Trump, because they couldn’t point to actual things the media has made up.
And the media has made up things about Trump.
Maybe having 83 units of made-up-stuff-about-Trump is not different from having 84 units of made-up-stuff-about-Trump, but it’s a lot different than having 4 units.
I think putting Trump’s name in a headline substantially increases the number of clicks you get, especially if you can make the headline sound like Trump is personally doing some bad thing. That means that we get tons of “Outrage: Trump Does X” stories even when X is something every president does (outrage stories about Trump being friendly with Saudi Arabia despite their human right record) or any Republican would do (outrage stories about Trump rolling back some last-minute change done by Obama on his way out), alongside the actually serious stories like “Outrage: Trump keeps firing inspectors general.” it’s like a denial-of-service attack–I care about actually awful things Trump does (and he does some pretty bad stuff), but not about stupid manufactured outrage about Trump being a big asshole on Twitter or cozying up with dictators (which is done by every president–our foreign policy has the sausage property in spades).
I’m seeing responses to this that don’t address the underlying point:
In Universe A, Trump really isn’t all that bad. No worse than any other president. Maybe even better than a lot of them! For idiosyncratic reasons the media constantly whips up enormous storms of falsehoods against him, an order of magnitude more than they have ever done against any president in the past, describing him as 20 times worse than any other president.
In Universe B, Trump really is extraordinarily bad, 20 times worse than any other president. The media reports this mostly accurately, correctly saying that he’s 20 times worse than any other president. Maybe some days they overshoot or undershoot a little, and report it as 15 or 18 or 22 or 25, but the average is 20.
…
Both of these descriptions of the universe are at least superficially self-consistent. Both explain why it seems like literally every media outfit that is not strongly, specifically, deeply committed to a strategy of “boost the Republican Party and re-enforce Red Tribe values” is constantly reporting that Donald Trump is terrible.
This is, indeed, exactly what you’d expect if Donald Trump were terrible, OR IF the media has for some reason swerved to unite as one to condemn him except only for the actively Republican-aligned media who are being objective about him.
…
The question we need to be asking ourselves is, if we think we live in Universe B, how do we KNOW we’re not in Universe A? Conversely, if we think we live in Universe A, how do we KNOW we’re not in Universe B?
See also Dark Side Epistemology.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology
I think you might be vastly overthinking the issue. Yes, anti-Trump criticism exists on a spectrum, and IMO the people would be better served if the media stuck to the factual policy end of the spectrum.
Thus, all of the following types of statements would be cut:
“Trump is super orange”
“Trump is the worst President ever, and, quite possibly, one of the worst people who ever lived”
“Trump misspelled a word on Twitter”
“Trump claims he has no plans to exterminate all puppies, but in fact, someone as evil as he is would totally exterminate all puppies”
“In this era of Trumpism, all puppies everywhere are at risk due to unspecified moral reasons”
“Everyone who voted for Trump is either an idiot or a monster”
And the following types of statements would be retained:
“Trump’s financial policy is on track to cost Americans a trillion dollars by 2021, according to the following analysis”
“Although Trump advises against wearing masks, most experts agree that wearing a mask will in fact help prevent the spread of coronavirus”
“It remains to be seen whether Trump’s aggressive foreign policy will have a positive effect in the long run”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not naive. I realize that in-depth analysis doesn’t sell; moral outrage does. But even on that basis, I think the media is starting to suffer from tragedy of the commons: they’ve overfished the Tump-attention pond, and now fewer and fewer people pay any attention to them, which still translates into fewer clicks in the long run.
@Simon_Jester
The reason I believe I’m in Universe A is because when I scratch the surface of approximately 90% of anti-Trump headlines they’re doing what would happen in Universe A: Trump has done something good or neutral that the article is falsely presenting in maximally evil light. See my post further down on the topic.
What about Universe C, where Trump’s badness is irrelevant, because either way the media consistently reports him as significantly worse than he really is (not “sometimes overshoots and sometimes undershoots” but “consistently reports everything in the least charitable way”)
This happens often enough and consistently enough that anyone so disposed can find enough examples of media bias / overhype that they stop trusting the media at all, even the parts that are factually accurate, and it becomes a conflict theory thing where the pro-Trump side competes to be as anti-media as possible.
Are you confident we aren’t in that universe?
You could try looking at what Trump actually does, ignoring how he frames it, ignoring how the media frames it, and ignoring all the stuff he says he’s going to do but never gets around to. Then compare to what other presidents do, with the same constraints.
So, hypothetically, if Trump rips twice as many immigrant children away from their parents and puts them in cages as did Obama, you ignore the part where Trump brags about this and you ignore the part where the media says it makes Trump the evilest president ever, and you don’t ignore the stuff Obama did just because he and the media don’t highlight it. And then you conclude that you live in the universe where Trump is twice as evil as Obama but not twenty times as evil.
Averaged across all the potentially evil stuff that presidents do, of course. Fortunately, media bias mostly hasn’t reached the point where significant presidential actions go wholly unreported, or are fabricated outright.
@ John:
Broad agreement, though I think there’s an important stipulation that things can have either positive or negative values and the answer can change depending on weights and order of operations.
How do you adjust for opportunity/circumstance? Bush II undoubtedly did more damage than Trump has, but I’m unconvinced swapping them would have significantly improved things.
@Simon_Jester
There is no objective ‘bad’ that the media judges by. The media is outraged by a mixture of the perceived end goal (may be (partially) made up by them), the perceived methods used (may be (partially) made up by them), the style with which it is executed, the ‘team’ that the person is on, violation of (subjective) taboos, etc, etc.
There is often disagreement whether these goals, methods, styles, etc are good or bad. For example, polling suggests that 80% of Americans dislike political correctness, yet much of the media likes it. It that because they tend to be the 20%???
There is a strong halo effect here, where favorable (subjective) goals to the specific media person/outlet results in great tolerance for less savory methods and vice versa.
The end result is that great outrage by a media person/outlet can mean that the president is particularly poor at presidenting, but also that he violates taboos (of those media).
Note that the media aren’t merely observers, but are themselves power brokers. For example, Kavanaugh now has to deal with lots of people who consider him a rapist, while Biden is seen as the silly uncle. The media has framed accusations against both in different ways, to boost these frames.
The very behavior of the media has an impact that itself may be considered of dubious moral character. For example, a strong bias that makes many people stop regarding much of the media as objective, can result in lots of media attacks being seen as strong evidence that the politician supports a different agenda than the media. So not only did they then disqualify themselves as objective observers, they anti-qualified themselves, where their disapproval is seen as a necessary part of a politician who has a different agenda.
Anyway, the point is that if the media aren’t actually objective, then you can’t tell by their reaction whether the president is actually that bad, in the same way that you can’t tell by the reaction of a national-socialist whether the a person is a hardcore tankie that wants to gulag everyone, or just a Jew (and they may be a bit of both…).
It’s a choose-your-own-reality world – nothing is uncontroversially true, so it’s not possible to be considered unbiased. (There goes the Wall Street Journal pushing their obvious spherical-Earth agenda)
It’s a big Internet – no belief is so fringey that it can’t have a loud group of adherents who will adjust their reality to make it true. Then they can build an infrastructure others can point to to lean on it. It’s Answers in Genesis, but for QAnon / flat earth / whatever.
As is often the case, I disagree with this perception of the media. The media *I’ve* been consuming seems to have been more-or-less proportionate to the awfulness of Trump. I can’t speak for what you’ve been consuming.
I had a similar reaction to Scott and the rationalists criticizing early media coverage of the coronavirus. The media *I’ve* been reading was viewing it as a potentially big deal back in January. I didn’t read a single article telling me it’s only a flu. I can’t speak for what media the Scotts were reading.
This is a general problem with criticisms of “the media”: it is not a monolith. It is made of many separate individual actors, not all the same, not all sharing goals or capable of coordinating narratives. If you’re reading too many “Trump is literally Hitler” stories, get a better media diet. (Of course, another possibility is that your media diet is similar to mine but you view it as “Trump is literally Devil” whereas I view it as proportional. But we cannot know if that’s the case when we use vague terms like “the media” rather than specific examples.)
“If you’re reading too many “Trump is literally Hitler” stories, get a better media diet.”
Id love to hear more as to how you actually do this. Ive been been developing rules to help limit my intake of BS news stories (of which the “Orangeman Bad!” stories definitely fall) and i must say i feel happier and, frankly, better informed.
Once i stepped back a little bit, i started noticing that most of the subjects Scott mentioned, Flat Earth, moon hoaxers, hard core creationists and, yes, most of the Orangeman Bad stories are just there to stoke your sense of outrage. More importantly, they are really just selling you a feeling of superiority over *those people*. “Trump tweeted x” is just a “Florida Man” story for those that imagine themselves politically aware. That is to say, its a story that says “you may not have any accomplishments of note, but at least you arent as stupid and awful as *those people*
I wonder how many of the NYT creationism articles Scott mentioned above were legitimate attempts to learn anything vs articles congratulating the reader for not being one of them.
In general, most news sources are big on urgent and upsetting, and not on important.
@bonewah: Not OP but I’ve moderated my media diet, partially on purpose, partially accidentally.
Part of it: my outrage gland blew out years ago, so now I just don’t feel outraged at news. Don’t know how to replicate that though – drugs?
Also, like others here, I started noticing the optimization for outrage generation going on. For example, I quickly learned that “Republican politician says [insert outrageous thing]” invariably referred to some podunk county commissioner or other with a constituency of about 25. I think you can get some of that from lateral reading, and some from overuse / experience (is there anyone who clicks on “one weird trick” headlines left?) There’s also the matter of what they don’t say (e.g. above, if it was someone I had heard of like one of my Senators, they would mention that in the headline).
@Corey So i guess your rule could be formalized as avoid stories that are “someone unimportant says something stupid.” A good idea.
Sounds like this is a good time for you to give specific examples so we can resolve the question. I’m sure I’m not the only one who is curious.
1) Algorithms are Literally Moloch and to be avoided at all costs. Be it YouTube recommendations, Twitter Home feeds, or Facebook Home lists, these are optimized for engagement rather than information. Making sure your curation process is dominated by squishy humans won’t solve everything by itself, but there is a good reason why Russell used these as an example of Unfriendly AI.
2) Keep the incentives straight. Whether it’s aggregators, links on social media, or just an article your buddy sent your way, you must keep in mind the filters a piece traversed before it arrived in front of you and how those filters each distort the media landscape. Some of those are endemic to the structure of the business and will need to be compensated for. Others can be removed by short-circuiting derivative works (see below). Run screaming when someone links something to disagree with it but fails to articulate any thoughts of their own. (Or demonstrates that they themselves didn’t do 4).) Subscription models are really good for this, and if you aren’t willing to pay a few bucks then reconsider whether you’re really after free entertainment. (I have a spiel about time equivalency of money and irrational preferences but that’s a tangent.)
3) Read the original when possible. Media is incestuous, and an awful lot of pieces are coverage of coverage. In print media at least, there will usually be attribution and often a direct link – click it, and read that instead. The piece you started on may or may not be useful commentary, but it’s going to be at least substantially derivative and it can certainly wait five minutes. (Do this recursively, as applicable. If you need to go more than two layers deep, something has gone wrong – see 2) above.)
4) Read the whole article. Headlines are not summaries, they are advertisements – ones frequently written by a different person entirely and A/B tested to optimize engagement. It’s not uncommon for a headline to directly contradict the substance of the piece, and in such cases the headline is almost always in the wrong. As part of this, glance at the byline and see who wrote the article – this won’t be immediately useful, but over time you can get a sense of an individual’s output and this can be useful in tailoring your diet further.
5) Actually, read the whole paper. Define a bounded body of work and get in the habit of reading all of it on a regular basis: this can be a specific section of an actual newspaper, the 10 most recent articles on a website, or the twitter posts of half a dozen named individuals. This gives you context for when something’s actually important, and lets you get a sense for how a source covers a wider range of topics.
That’s a quick overview of the theory, at least. One looking for a tl;dr is mostly missing the point, but if pressed I’d tell you to start by reading every article on the Reuters front page at least 3 days a week for a month and get back to me then.
@Dan L Thanks! I worry sometimes that my own filters might be working against me.
Good phrasing.
@bonewah: I endorse some of the other suggestions above. But also:
1. Know the difference between the “news” and “opinion” sections of a news outlet. They are usually written using different voices; the news section tries to appear unbiased, while the opinion section has articles that try to push an opinion. I find that 80% of complaints about the media boil down to people complaining about hot takes in the opinion section. Also, pro tip: “editorial” means it’s written by the editorial board, endorsed by the newspaper, but it is still just an opinion piece. Avoid if you want to avoid sensationalism. “Op-ed” basically means it’s an opinion piece written by a guest (not a regular columnist of the newspaper).
2. Avoid outlets that don’t clearly distinguish between news and opinion. This includes most 24-hour TV news outlets and most video news in general. It also includes outlets like the National Review, many online-only outlets, and many smaller magazines. Stick to the big players like NYT and WaPo (people are going to yell at me that NYT and WaPo have Trump derangement syndrome; those people should read (1) above, and stop confusing opinion and news sections).
3. Avoid following links from social media like reddit and (especially) Facebook. Go directly to nytimes.com or whatever.
All the above are ways to avoid hearing too much “Trump is literally Hitler”. They aren’t something you have to always do; I sometimes *like* hearing people describe again all the corruption that the toddler in the oval office is engaged in. But at least when I read an opinion piece or follow a link from reddit, I know what I’m getting.
The media *I’ve* been consuming seems to have been more-or-less proportionate to the awfulness of Trump.
Where are you getting your independent measurement of awfulness to compare it to?
@Mary: obviously, that’s my perceived awfulness of Trump. You might think that’s tautological (since perceived views are governed by media consumption), but somehow this is *not* the case for all the people complaining about negative media coverage of Trump: their self-assessment of the awfulness of Trump is way off from that of their media intake, according to them. You can fix that either by fixing your media intake or by adjusting your views on the awfulness of Trump.
Why should their difference of views — for which they have offered reasons — justify your lack of difference?
@LGS:
I don’t think you have answered Mary’s question.
Your perception of Trump is, by your account, about the same as what you get from the media. That’s consistent with the conjecture that it is based on what you get from the media, in which case you have offered no evidence that the media is right. For your view to be such evidence, you have to have some other and additional source of information, and Mary is asking whether you do and what it is.
People whose view of Trump is very different from the media’s can’t be basing it entirely on the media view, so the question is what their alternative source is. I think one or two of the Trump supporters here have answered that, to the extent of pointing out particular cases where they argue that the media is seriously misrepresenting Trump, in a consistent direction.
@David (and Mary): well then, let me clarify. It was not my intention to debate the extent to which Trump is awful, which I view as self-evident. I was giving OP the benefit of the doubt that he or she agrees with me on this matter, so that the disagreement is elsewhere. I don’t have much to say to people who think that Trump is merely so-so as a president.
Am I concerned that my belief happens to agree with my media consumption? Perhaps I’ve been brainwashed by the media? I’m not too concerned, for the following reasons:
1. It appears that the majority of people do *not* get their views on Trump primarily from the media. We know this because they disagree with the media on Trump! It would be weird if I’m the only exception. Perhaps I’m particularly easy to brainwash compared to all the Trump fans around here… but this possibility doesn’t keep me up at night, to say the least.
2. Scott Alexander’s views on Trump (as far as I understand them) appear to roughly match mine. If you think I’m brainwashed, presumably you’d have to think that so is Scott, but then what are you doing here on his blog?
3. The media sources I’m reading were correct on the coronavirus, as I’ve mentioned. The media Scott and the other rationalists were reading was apparently wrong on the coronavirus. This means what I’m reading has a good track record, and so even if I’m brainwashed by these sources it doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
In any case, if you’d like to accuse me of Trump Derangement Syndrome or whatever, then stop playing coy. Out with it; say plainly that you don’t think Trump is bad. I don’t care for these meta-arguments about whether I’m the only brainwashed person around here because I don’t hate the media I choose to consume.
The media are mostly anti-Trump, so one would expect Trump fans to be skeptical of what the media say about Trump, and perhaps about the media more generally. That doesn’t require them to be harder to brainwash, just that it is harder to convince someone of something he doesn’t want to believe than of something he does want to believe.
I think both that Trump is pretty bad and that much of the media routinely exaggerates how bad he is. I can’t speak for Mary.
@LGS lots of assuming bad faith here.
Also suggest that tabooing ‘bad’, ‘awful’, etc. Worse than an average president, at what metric? Worse than the average citizen would be at being president? Has performed morally evil acts? What exactly has the media been accurately reporting about Trump relative to your impression of Trump?
I also think even if someone were able to properly correct for the amount of bias in each Trump story, the sheer volume of them is enough to sway someone into having an overall unfavorable opinion of Trump, simply because Trump has been under an unprecedented level of scrutiny even relative to past presidents.
“this week in trump” tends to be multiple things that would end the career of most politicians. But he knows that as long as there’s something new next week it’ll all just fuzz together.
And it also works on his followers.
Anything that fuzzes together into the background and doesn’t lead to consequences for trump just becomes part of the new normal. The logic seems to go
“Trump did it, nothing bad happened to trump hence it’s ok.” and “Since it’s OK these libs whining about it are whining about something that’s OK and doesn’t matter, they do that a lot hence they can always be ignored because whining about things trump does is just what they do”
This will continue until we reach some kind of theoretical zero point where the bar hovers around the earths core and the red tribe laugh at the libs for trying to make a big deal about trump molesting and eating a toddler on live TV near the end of 2024 causing his approval ratings to slighty increase among republican voters.
the red tribe laugh at the libs for trying to make a big deal about trump molesting and eating a toddler on live TV near the end of 2024
Considering the “libs” who came right out and said “I don’t care if Biden really did rape Reade, I’m voting for him anyway”, is this a fight you really want to pick?
““this week in trump” tends to be multiple things that would end the career of most politicians.”
But maybe thats the problem. What is the value in the sort of “gotcha” journalism that makes up like %95 of these stories? Should “basket of deplorables” or “what is allepo?” really disqualify you from holding office? Are we doing ourselves any good parsing through these peoples every utterance, their every action for something that can be presented out of context to end people’s careers?
I think that is a big part of what people are pushing back on, its not that Trump can do anything, its people who are sick of the media as self -appointed king makers using every gaff, every lie and innuendo as a weapon to claim yet another scalp.
Right. Trump’s biggest insight was that he could simply ignore and brush this stuff off, rather than apologize or make excuses for it, and that his supporters wouldn’t care.
The reason all that nonsense ruins other politicians is because other politicians for some reason play along and act like it should ruin them.
Mitt Romney’s crucial errors were not saying “lots of people don’t pay taxes” or “I have binders of women” but was acting like saying those things was somehow some shockingly horrible thing he did.
@Deiseach
The grim version of the trolley problem: vote for the guy who might have eaten one toddler or the guy who boasts about regularly eating toddlers.
Also the voting system in place means that if you care about the issue of toddler cannibalism refraining from voting for either works out as roughly equivalent as a vote for the latter.
@bonewah
EY wrote a short SA on that :
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153991776834228
but in reality I strongly doubt that the his supporters are supporting him for the sake of pushing back against “gaff” media.
It seems a far better approach if anyone ever wanted to push back against “gaff” media would be to pick a reasonably upright figure and support them, ignoring the gaffs rather than picking the most odious conman in town. The latter would just seem to prove the value of easily discarding politicians if the apparent alternatives is someone so unpleasant.
It would be like if someone “protested” credentialism by hiring an inept slimeball at their company rather than… say… picking an otherwise highly appealing and highly skilled candidate without a degree. The former would just convince others that the old system was better.
“It seems a far better approach if anyone ever wanted to push back against “gaff” media would be to pick a reasonably upright figure and support them, ignoring the gaffs rather than picking the most odious conman in town.”
We dont always get to pick. And was Romney too unreasonable to support? Sarah Palin?
(Edit) And its not just “gaff” media, its the whole ecosystem. Its breathless page one coverage of every Kavanaugh accuser while barley mentioning Tara Reade on page 23 on easter sunday. Its Savaging Sarah Palin for her lack of experience while aggressively ignoring Obama’s lack of experience. Its the double and tripling down on the Covington boys are racist story long after it was obvious they werent. Its the fact that the Covington boys were a story at all. Its a million things that add up to a media that squandered its credibility long ago.
It’s a general problem with political coverage: you want to have a feel for what’s going on, but most reporting is about day-to-day minutia that will not matter in a week. (Similar to the stock market). It helps to stick with “analysis” stories rather than “event” ones, but they’re not immune either.
(Of course it’s also possible, politically, that we’re beyond a choose-your-own-reality event horizon, and so literally nothing matters).
I asked someone here before the election, why the support from the religious community for someone so cartoonishly irreligious as Trump? The answer was “my family was skeptical, but it came down to gay wedding cakes.”
Culture war trumps all, so we could expect to see a similar thing with Biden: no matter how bad, Team Blue will hold their noses and vote for him because [insert liberal cause here; maybe the other side of “gay wedding cakes”].
As a comment on “How can people who have morals support someone like Trump?”, I’m seeing the trope/meme more often that “Trump is our weapon.”
The idea is that Trump is far from perfect, but he’s doing what his supporters want, which is to disrupt or even destroy the “elites”/”deep state” who control the government. The argument goes that most “civil servants” (not appointed positions) are left/blue-state/woke/Democrats/whatever. They can’t be gotten rid of easily, but Trump can reduce their power and influence.
A related thing I’m seeing more often is people on the right wanting to return to the 19th century, when the party in power could fire “civil servants” and replace them with members of their own party (this used to extend to Post Office postmasters).
(Not sure how this survives the first time the “bad guys” get in power, of course.)
I like the analogy that Trump is Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. We may not like his methods. We may not even like him. But we need him (to build the) on that wall.
Been a while since I saw that, but was Jack Nicholson actually right about his methods being necessary? The way I remember it, he was deluded into believing it was.
The message of the movie is clearly “No.” Or at least “Even if so, it’s not worth his methods.”
But popular culture hasn’t necessarily agreed. In red tribe circles in particular, the notion that protecting the public is often dirty work that requires dirty people and that the protected are in no place to pass judgment is reasonably common.
I like the analogy that Trump is Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. He’s a terrible person that you don’t need, even if he says you need him.
(Talk about two movies).
I mean, yeah, that’s how I parse the analogy. Seemed to me like a bad analogy to want to make if you’re a trump supporter.
@Deisach
@bonewah
If it’s any consolation, my experience is that the farther left you go, the more you find that Democrats and left-of-Democrats care about the Tara Reade accusations.
Most of the internal opposition to Biden within the center-left coalition that is the Democratic Party comes from the left. A lot of them were saying well before Reade came forward that someone like her would, and that the center-left should pick a less gropey presidential candidate.
Many of these left-leaning members of the Democratic coalition are either feeling very unhappily vindicated, or gritting their teeth to vote for Biden anyway because they’re earnestly worried that if the demonstrably impeachment-proof Trump wins re-election in 2020, the next election will never be held.
…
@Matt M
This is one of the signs that we need a word for the favored political ideology of today’s Red Tribe other than “conservatism.” A “conservative” will not, in general, be backing the guy who wants to burn down institutional norms for the sake of quick results.
There are or ought to be other names for a right-wing political movement that does, that has openly embraced the idea that we need a Dirty Fighting Guy We Shouldn’t Question out there guarding the walls, and that if he breaks all our rules, so much the worse for the rules.
The reason all that nonsense ruins other politicians is because other politicians for some reason play along and act like it should ruin them.
Mitt Romney’s crucial errors were not saying “lots of people don’t pay taxes” or “I have binders of women” but was acting like saying those things was somehow some shockingly horrible thing he did.
Many in the red tribe think that most media institutions from the New York Times on down are already run by and filled with blue tribe zealots. So when the tribal enemy alleges something, the reflex is distrust… but if the tribal champion acknowledges it, well, now there’s credible evidence.
A related thing I’m seeing more often is people on the right wanting to return to the 19th century, when the party in power could fire “civil servants” and replace them with members of their own party (this used to extend to Post Office postmasters).
(Not sure how this survives the first time the “bad guys” get in power, of course.)
That’s an easy analysis, and the same one that saw the rise of Fox News. When a group of people are persuaded that the ostensibly neutral experts are actually hostile, they hold that supposed neutrality cheap.
If the “bad guys” got into power under a spoils system civil service, what could they do? Appoint a bunch of blue tribe zealots? That’s not much of a threat for someone who believes the civil service is already dominated by blue tribe zealots.
“A “conservative” will not, in general, be backing the guy who wants to burn down institutional norms for the sake of quick results.”
Is that what is really happening though? Or is that view a byproduct of a generally Trump hostile media’s reporting?
At a tangent on the Biden mentions …
I’m not, of course, a Biden supporter. But if I were, believing Reade’s story wouldn’t persuade me not to vote for him. It happened a long time ago, he stopped his advances once it became clear to him that she wasn’t interested, and what it signals is not that he was (still less is) an evil person but that he was clueless about that dimension of interpersonal relations. That’s a bit surprising for a successful politician, but he is a successful politician, so that particular weakness doesn’t keep him from doing the job he is running for.
The significance of the Reade story, to me, is not about Biden, it’s about the hypocrisy of people who treated this case and the Kavanaugh case so differently. Similarly, the important thing about Warren claiming to be a minority for professional advantage, as I think it’s clear she did early in her career, isn’t what it says about her but about what the lack of reaction of her supporters says about them, given their views on such issues.
Murphy, my point there was that it was not hypothetical Red Tribe in 2024 laughing off something egregrious for political partisanship, there were examples of Blue Tribe in 2020 writing it off as well for the same reasons. There are people on both sides who are gritting their teeth and going “He’s despicable but he’s Our Guy”, so there’s plenty of bad faith on both sides.
Simon_Jester, I’ve seen tonight on a social media site somebody really really upset over Biden (they’re even spelling his name as you do with a slur that you don’t want to use in full, thus “b*den”) but gritting their teeth to vote for him because, and I quote,
(Apparently there is some storm in a teacup going on amongst the more fraught because some actor wore a Biden hat, and Not-Orange Man Bad Also).
By this point, I’m just glad our most recent political scandal was the Taoiseach being photographed shirtless enjoying the fine weather in the Phoenix Park during our lockdown because this makes us look like a mature and sane democracy by comparison
@Deiseach
Sure, and “toddler canibalism” is just a standin for generic creepy sexual harassment.
If someone cares whether politicians sleeze, harass or sexually abuse people then, when faced with 2 choices and a voting system that makes not voting roughly equivalent to a vote for whomever you like least, a candidate who boasts about sleezing, harassing and sexually abusing people or a candidate who might have harassed someone then choosing the lesser of 2 evils isn’t hypocrisy like you seem to want to paint it.
Were those crucial errors, though? Granted, Mitt Romney didn’t win the Presidency, but if he had won, I’d imagine that Democrats would be far more willing to work with him than they are with Trump. And I can’t see him receiving even a small fraction of the vitriol that Trump receives from the mainstream media on a regular basis. Furthermore, Romney is still an enormously successful politician who holds a great deal of influence within American politics, and likely will continue to be long after Trump is gone.
My father is a lifelong Democrat, but he said back in 2012 that he didn’t think of Romney as a bad candidate, just not as good a candidate as Obama. Needless to say, he has very different opinions on Trump. I also remember an online discussion a few weeks back where a Biden supporter said that “Romney’s 47% comment and Hillary’s basket of deplorables remark were both basically correct,” and while he got some pushback for being classist from some of the more progressive Democrats, a lot of the centrists agreed with him.
The situation in the movie was (IIRC) that a misbehaving/not-fitting-in soldier was killed during some kind of outside-the-written-rules discipline. The way I understand it, Micholson’s character is basically saying “keeping an elite military organization running can’t be done by always staying within the rules, sometimes you need to do stuff that is unsavory and wouldn’t get formal approval but is effective and necessary.”
You sometimes see approximately this argument made about the use of torture (maybe we’re better off having rules against it but turning a blind eye to it in serious cases), or about police brutality (maybe the world works better overall if the police can get away with beating people up who resist or are otherwise too difficult).
Murphy:
I think the issue here has to do with people on different sides weighing the issues differently. Like, if most of the right thinks extramarital affairs are seriously wrong, and most of the left thinks they’re kinda wrong but not all that big a deal as long as you’re discreet, then you can imagine why the left and right split over Bill Clinton’s behavior in the white house. But then you come to Trump and it’s pretty hard to keep using that model–the members of the right who voted for Trump were apparently willing to overlook the extramarital affairs and nth trophy wife when it suited their purposes.
Similarly, when the Kavenaugh case came down, you could kind-of model that left/right split as a split over whether impossible-to-verify allegations of past sexual assaults should be believed by default or ignored by default. But then, the Reade allegations came up against Biden, and….
Of course, one reason for both of these is people saying “Even if this candidate is an awful human being, he’s better than the other guy.” But that’s just as true for family-values Trump supporters who thought Hillary was even worse as it is for believe-all-women Biden supporters who think Trump is even worse.
@DavidFriedman wrote “he stopped his advances once it became clear to him that she wasn’t interested”.
Your description of “advances” doesn’t seem to me to fit with:
Is that really how you’d describe that story? Because in most jurisdictions I’m familiar with, that would be a clear accusation of rape.
@FormerRanger:
I mean, at least in theory the government gets its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, right? Voting for a guy who says “I’m gonna take on the Deep State / drain the swamp” seems like a signal that the governed don’t consent at all; and if the man voted to be the head of the Executive branch doesn’t actually have the power to control the Executive branch in any meaningful way, are you really a republic?
Back in December 2015 I posted the following on Google+ (yes, I was one of the three people who actually used G+. I still miss it.)
What I could have added, but did not, was the line to which the above quote is a footnote: “once Zaphod Beeblebrox had announced his intention to run as President it was more or less a fait accompli: he was ideal presidency fodder.”
Trump is a conversational black hole–you start with a discussion about some other interesting thing with little or no connection to Trump. Then his name shows up, and somehow we’re debating whether Trump is really racist or merely an asshole, or rejudicating his pussy-grabbing comment instead of whatever other thing we were talking about.
In my academic institution, mentioning Trump wouldn’t consume the conversation because everyone would already agree he is an asshole. The black hole part comes from there being many Trump supporters and non-Trump supporters in the same place. From my perspective, one of the two groups is outright crazy, and yeah, this craziness tends to consume all other discussion.
Practically everyone agrees about that. The one small disagreement …
@David, it’s a rather similar situation to Creationism, I suppose. Since you appear to be in an epistemology-debating mood (judging from your other reply to me as well), let me ask you: do you think one can be confident about whether creationism is right or wrong, knowing that (nearly) half the country confidently disagrees?
And, as a followup, if one manages to form a confident opinion on Creationism despite this epistemological conundrum, would it make sense to assume — at least as a prior — that the half-a-country that was wrong about the Creationism question is also the half that’s wrong about Trump?
@LGS:
I’m not sure where you draw the line on “confident,” but I think it very unlikely that young earth creationism is correct. I don’t believe in the less direct versions, with guided evolution or God putting souls in humans at some point, but I can see how a reasonable person starting out with different priors than mine could believe in something like that. Similarly, I don’t believe in life after death, but since I don’t think I understand the nature of consciousness I cannot confidently reject it.
There are a fair number of things that I think I am entitled to be confident about despite many people disagreeing. Thus, for example, while I cannot be confident that free trade is a good idea, I can be confident that many of the arguments against it are wrong, because those arguments depend on logical errors, errors of a sort that I can easily believe many people make. Similarly for the effect of minimum wage laws, although I’m a little less confident about that after reading the Card and Kruger argument on the subject — not the data but the explanation. Similarly for various things I have first-hand knowledge about.
No. My guess is that there is some correlation, but not anything like complete.
Also, I don’t share your confidence that people who voted for Trump, who are presumably your half-a-country, are wrong about Trump. Many of them may have held no strong opinion, or even a negative opinion, of Trump and simply been right about his opponent. I didn’t vote for either of them and I don’t know if the country would be better or worse off if the election had gone the other way.
My experience in my very blue workplace is that Trump is still a conversational black hole–we all talk about how Trump is a incompetent jackass but somehow the original discussion gets lost and it’s All About Trump. And the worst part is the realization that this is pretty-much how Trump wants things to be….
That’s not exactly what “ORANGE MAN BAD” means. It’s more like, regardless of what Trump does, good, bad, or neutral, large important swaths of the media are going to report it as Trump doing something bad. Even if they have to torture the facts to make it so.
So, when a story about Trump doing something unconscionable is presented to me, I have to ask, “did Trump really do a bad thing, or is the media just flogging another ORANGE MAN BAD story?” And almost every time, it’s the latter.
As a topical example, apparently we’re doing a much worse job with COVID-19 response because “Trump disbanded NSC pandemic unit that experts had praised.” Oh no, how could he do something so stupid and unconscionable? Blood is on his hands for this evil and incompetence!
Well, no:
There’s still people advising Trump about pandemics, just in a different office. Is this good or bad? I don’t see any obvious reason having the people who advise about natural plagues are worse off doing it if they’re sharing office space with people who advise about man-made plagues. At a naive glance I’d guess maybe a little better because these things are closely related, both being about plagues and all?
Major news outlets do this so often, it’s nice to have a shorthand to describe the phenomenon. “Did Trump really do Awful Thing X?” “No, he did Somewhat Reasonable Thing Y, but the media’s reporting it like Awful Thing X. It’s just another ORANGE MAN BAD story.” “Oh okay.”
The National Review is not providing you with an accurate and unbiased assessment here.
We previously had an independent directorate focused on pandemic monitoring and preparedness led by a senior member of the NSC who was entirely focused on pandemic response. Then, that official was relieved of duty, a substantial portion of the staff that was in the directorate either left or were reassigned to other issues and the task of monitoring pandemics was merged with a completely unrelated directorate.
This change:
1. Meant that there were less staff directly working on pandemic monitoring.
2. Meant there was now no longer a senior staff member who’s sole responsibility was advocating for pandemic response efforts.
3. Was likely (and accurately) seen as a prioritization of the pandemic response office in Bolton’s new NSC.
All of these came together to result in a white house that was less able to monitor pandemics, had less senior-level attention focused on responding to them and was less able to act when one arose.
Do you have links to support these claims?
But the problem is that the rest of the media was treating this in a maximally uncharitable way, as if Trump had specifically singled out pandemic response as something he uniquely didn’t give a damn about.
It sounds like this was part of a general streamlining process meant to cover the same areas with a more efficient organizational structure. Maybe that was implemented badly, but it’s not a prima facie stupid idea.
Reading the headlines, you’d think Trump just canned everyone looking at pandemics, crippling our ability to respond, out of spite and stupidity.
And that’s how I’ve always interpreted “Orange Man Bad” – it’s certain parts of the media never being satisfied with reporting straight on some bad thing Trump did, or actually engaging with why he may have done it or what he really meant. Instead, it’s maximum lack of charity, maximum conflict theory, all the time.
+1 to gbdub
That may possibly be true! But you haven’t presented any evidence (for all we know, combining the offices for pandemics and bioterror resulted in less confusion and a more streamlined, coherent, and effective agency), and the articles I saw in the media didn’t even try. The information these articles want the casual viewer to take away is “because of Trump, we’re unable to respond to pandemics.” Not, “Trump’s actions means he may be getting slightly less good advice on National Security implications of pandemics.”
@gbdub
From my point of view, there comes a point at which a man has fucked up badly enough that it’s pointless to complain that “you’re exaggerating how big a fuckup he is!”
Debating whether someone is a Level 1 Fuckup or a Level 2 Fuckup is productive.
Debating whether someone is a Level 9 Fuckup or a Level 10 Fuckup is less so.
…
The problem is… 80% of “terrible” may well still be “terrible.” At some point it’s not worth bothering to fuss over the details, the correct response is broadly the same, which is to say “gee this is terrible” and start behaving as if it is some level of terrible instead of being ‘basically okay’ or what have you.
So you’re free to lie / be wrong about about Trump as much as you want, because you’ve already decided he’s at least a level 9 fuckup? I certainly think some folks in the media have that attitude, and that’s precisely the problem! They don’t even pretend to address issues thoughtfully or charitably, it’s “welp, Trump’s doing it so it’s probably wrong, let’s figure out how to say that in the most click-inducing way”.
Look, the specific issue we are talking about here is not a “level 9 vs. level 10 fuckup”. If it is a fuckup at all, it is mostly one in hindsight, and it’s mostly being brought up because people are looking real hard for a reason to blame the pandemic on Trump.
Actually it’s worse than that – it could just be a “fuckup” (which I usually think of as a major but unintentional error) that the media is portraying as a deliberate act. Reorganizing the various offices that deal with pandemics MAY have been incompetent. The headlines portray it as DEFINITELY negligent, as if limiting the effectiveness of pandemic response was the intended effect of Trump’s reorganization efforts.
Along related lines …
As I understand what I have read, a stockpile of protective gear was established under Bush as a precaution against future epidemics. Under Obama it was allowed to decrease to zero or close. Under Trump it remained as it had been. Anyone with more precise information is welcome to correct that account.
Where are the outraged news stories blaming Obama? Is there any doubt that if the sequence had happened one administration later there would have been outraged news stories blaming Trump?
I certainly think it’s fair to place some blame on Obama, but my understanding is that the stockpile was “allowed to decrease” to zero because the masks were actually used for the swine flu; leaving this out suggests a rather misleading reading.
What’s more, Obama requested the money to replenish the stockpile in his 2011 budget; see pg 4 in my link:
The budget was rejected by Republicans in the House. Over the rest of Obama’s term, he made occasional attempts to secure more money for the stockpile, i.e. during Zika, when again Republicans in Congress gave the administration less than half of the money requested.
This is not to exculpate Obama, but it’s misleading to suggest that Obama ignored the stockpile–he tried to replenish it, but obviously he didn’t do enough.
In contrast, the Trump administration has consistently tried to reduce funding for the CDC and the office that oversees stockpile; Congress has apparently given Trump more money for the stockpile than he has requested in budgets every year of his administration. As recently as February’s budget request for 2021, the White House proposed cutting funding to the office that oversees the stockpile.
So, while it’s true that the stockpile remained underfilled under both Obama and Trump, Obama tried to fill it but was held back (in part) by Republicans (and in part by his unwillingness/inability to find other ways to solve the problem)–Trump did not try to fill it.
This certainly doesn’t let Obama off the hook, but it does suggest that a direct comparison between the two presidents leaves out important context and detail.
@Simon_Jester: Hard disagree, the exact nature and severity of a person’s fuckups matter. Truth matters. Your kind of logic would justify going around claiming that Nazis ate babies. After all, Nazis are particularly evil and horrible and “they ate babies” certainly conveys that they were evil and horrible, so why not? It’s not like the things they actually did do are that much less evil than eating babies. They shot babies, bayoneted babies, gassed babies, and incinerated babies, what’s so bad about claiming they ate babies too? Well, for starters, when people discover that you’re lying about Nazis eating babies, they’re going to suspect that you’re lying about all the other things they did to babies as well. By deciding that once someone gets bad enough you can claim that they are maximally bad in all respects, you have eroded your trust-worthiness so as to score cheap points that you did not actually profit from scoring.
This is not a trivial matter, I have seen this in action. A friend of mine once told me, sounding very annoyed, that he was researching the Holocaust to double-check whether it really happened. Some crazy far right stuff he’d been reading was pointing out hypocrisy and lies in the Official Narrative and their arguments kept being supported by the evidence. It was frustrating him because he didn’t want to believe them, but he couldn’t not when it all checked out. It’s no surprise really, every Official Narrative is going to have its own self-serving lies, which dissidents can successfully poke holes in because they have the truth on their side. The issue is that having used the light of truth to get their hooks in, the far righters then tried to leverage that into arguing the Holocaust never happened, which was of course their own self-serving lie.
Now my friend was pretty sure this was exactly what was happening, that when they poked holes in the narrative of the first thing it was truth, but when they poked holes in the narrative of the Holocaust it was lies. Nonetheless he had to check, and he was very angry and frustrated that he was pushed to the point that he had doubts about this at all. I helped walk him through it, and we agreed that indeed the Holocaust did in fact occur more or less as he previously understood. Nonetheless his trust in the Official Narrative is permanently damaged, and he’s likely to be more receptive to claims against it from far right corners in the future. This is the problem with lying about things, when you are discovered it makes those who trusted you being to question their beliefs, and makes them susceptible to the lies of others.
This is an issue I’ve been involved with extensively in intra-libertarian controversy. My chief criticism of another prominent libertarian anarchist, no longer alive, is that he was willing to deliberately make dishonest arguments as long as they led to what he considered the right conclusion. One result is to greatly reduce his usefulness to the rest of us, since one can’t use anything he says as a reason for belief without first checking it out for yourself.
The curious will find some of that discussion in this post on my blog and the comments.
@Lillian: I completely agree with your principle, but as a conservative religious person who likes to read old books, I have little interest in fact-checking the Holocaust.
“There’s an Official Narrative that mis-teaches Nazi Germany’s atrocities” would not be a Weltanschauung shaking shock shifting me toward the truth claim “Hitler did nothing wrong.”
If there had been literally zero death camps, the way German soldiers, the SS and civil authorities treated multiple outgroups: Jews, Roma, Soviet (but not Western) POWs, disabled gentile citizens, and more, are beyond dispute as Stalin-level mega-homicides, done under directives from the elected central government. The attitudes of the Nazi Party that led to murderously mistreating those groups were well-documented by the guilty at the time; it’s a quick thing to source (albeit in translation for non-German speakers). If I wanted to prove how much of the Official Narrative about gas chambers and crematoria is true, there are multi-volume histories of just the Holocaust in the strict sense sourced to the standards of modern history (and post-printing-press historical events are held to stricter epistemic standards than things like the deeds of Alexander the Great, due to the inherent nature of written sources from different times). But I’d rather read other history books, and am at no risk of agreeing with Hitler over this lack of specific rigor.
My limited exposure to Holocaust deniers is that all they do is try to undermine truth claims about the logistics of camps erected by the Nazi regime, which is (quite intentionally) missing the forest to nitpick a tree.
@Le Maistre Chat: Sure, Holocaust denier arguments are extreme weaksauce. That’s why my friend didn’t believe them, that’s why he was angry that he even felt the need to check. It was obviously bullshit, only barely connected to the initial truthful argument by the most thin and tortured of threads. Yet it was nagging at him, so check he did.
I also want to note that at the time he knew considerably less about the history of the Nazis and the Holocaust than you do, so he wasn’t in as good a position to dismiss the question on the grounds you can dismiss it. He knows more now, partly with my help and partly on his own account, so that’s no longer an issue.
Just remember that not everyone will be have the context necessary to tell when someone is deliberately missing the forest to nitpick the trees. Which is why it’s so important not to abuse people’s trust and put them in a position that they feel they need to evaluate such claims seriously.
This book has a very useful discussion of how people stumble into questioning the holocaust, and the broader issues involved.
Same. And I think this is crucial to understanding their mindset. I don’t think most of them believe Hitler did nothing wrong. What they are obsessively worked up about is the lying they’ve discovered, and everything connected to it. (This can happen with other topics). For some people, this is very destabilizing, and the don’t have the mental ability to get at what’s really going on, and it also validates a lot of prior suspicions they had about authorities, trustworthiness, groupthink, manipulation, etc.
They are upset and angry and it becomes all about how they were betrayed and no one believes them and instead persecutes them. It’s a self-absorbed, narcissistic approach that the person was probably always prone to. I think the majority of such people doesn’t actually weigh the indisputable parts of the Holocaust against the lying and conclude the latter is worse. They don’t bother with the first part, because it doesn’t affect them.
Other groups attract this kind of person–anti-vax is one. I believe many in both groups would casually agree with a large portion of the “facts,” and then harp on some seemingly trivial thing–the concentration camp death rate is a little off, this one person made up their testimony, “I’m okay with my kid getting nine of the vaccines but not this tenth one, and no one gets that disease anymore, so why not just let parents decide?” They are sensitive to feeling of being taken advantage of or dismissed, but can’t envision a larger field in which to express this sentiment–they attach the feeling to the issue, even though only a couple of minor beliefs are shared with the conspiracy theorists’, such that as a matter of proportion the affiliation makes little logical sense. It’s self-expression, and the easiest way to compensate emotionally for the pushback they get for having asserted an unpopular view.
This unbelievable disregard for the forest naturally appalls most people, but that’s kind of their defining trait. They didn’t think through it enough to see the forest, because they stopped early on, in a state of emotion, or they lack the intellectual ability to piece it together. If they did see the forest, they’d be like the guy who wrote the book I linked (a Jewish historian and writing professor), or like Lillian, who are able to guide others into seeing the forest, while also acknowledging the problematic tree, which they put into perspective. Or they’d realize this must be a broader issue and criticize the dangers of this sort of noble lying in a variety of contexts, where mentioning these inaccuracies wouldn’t look so nit-picky because the target would clearly be deception and not the Holocaust narrative, which is what the author does–the book is about the fallacies that tend to occur in writing history and their commonalities.
Interesting analysis, thanks.
Is there anything in the AP story that is factually correct? What argument do you have that it’s misleading? How do you justify saying “Well, no”, as if the AP story is flat out incorrect? You present a NR article saying that the unit was absorbed into other units, which any reasonable person would interpret as claiming that the AP story dishonestly left it out, yet the AP article says:
Looks to me like you’re the one being dishonest.
Then there are these quotes from the article:
So Trump and his proxies, rather than civilly presenting their explanation for their actions, engaged in insults and ad hominem and expressed ignorance. You don’t get to attack anyone who questions your acts rather than calmly explaining your reasoning, and then complain that people aren’t considering your point of view.
This is what’s known as “burying the lede.” Most people don’t read much past the headlines. The story itself is a non-story, meant to mislead people into thinking that because of Trump, we’re unable to respond to pandemics.
For instance, Mike Bloomberg said:
Where do you think Mike got his wrong idea that “we don’t have the experts in place that we need?” Probably from misleading headlines like the AP’s.
This gets at something that’s been bothering me more as time goes on. Less and less my observation is that people don’t debate facts. They debate a fact about that fact, a reaction to a fact, or an opinion about a fact.
The original comment above about “Orange man bad” being performative doesn’t even address whether Scott is right or wrong about the media and voters’ reactions to Trump. It’s just “how dare you bring up Trump in relation to whatever else you’re talking about.”
Another example is with the recommendation to wear masks. I see a lot of people not even talking about the effectiveness of masks (which is a reasonable discussion and Scott started one a while back), but now the conversation is “well the CDC said they weren’t effective a month ago so they are obviously not effective now”. As if a political reason to endorse or not endorse masks only runs one-way. But again, no discussion of the effectivness of a mask, just that the CDC changed their mind and that is now the fact being discussed.
I know why people are doing it (easier to win the argument you want to win) and I’m not immune from doing it myself, but it happens in every. single. sphere. of. life. And it’s driving me crazy.
I don’t think they ever said they are useless. Their original position was that given that the high importance of medical professionals having access, the low importance of the general public using them, and the shortage, that the general public shouldn’t use them. Given that the shortage has eased, especially with people making home-made masks, their recommendation has changed. So it’s not exactly “changed their minds”, but “have a different recommendation because the situation has changed”.
The problem I think is bothering most people now, is that the news itself has become the news. It’s not about Trump; it’s about the news’ reaction to Trump. Or more generally, the news’ reaction to anything. As subscriber revenues become increasingly unsustainable in a world where all information can be copied for pennies once produced, media relies increasingly on ad revenue instead, and that means eyeballs, and that means sensationalism.
You say get a better news diet. I did, years ago. As a result, I think Trump is kind of meh as a President, but that’s swamped meanwhile by my impression that everyone’s suffering from a deficiency of usable political information, coupled with an increasing dependency on political content. Politics has become our alcohol, complete with its own anti-abstinence movement, pillorying us unless we shove more down our gullets.
Another problem bothering most people about Orange Man Bad news is that it relies on underlying premises about what makes someone good or bad, that are conspicuously unused when it comes to candidates OMB news prefers. We’re assailed by claims of OMB, and nothing on how crummy the alternative is. Or, OMB because of OM’s inherent nature, but Other Man Bad because of special circumstances, or Other Man Alleged Bad, or Republicans Pounce on Other Man, or something spinny like that. It becomes obvious that OMB news isn’t an objective analysis of OM. For people with no opinion on OM either way, the takeaway information isn’t OMB, but rather “OMB according to OMB news”, which is almost no information at all.
To top it off, whatever evidence there is for “OMB according to real news” is hopelessly drowned by the former signal. (As is “OMG according to real news”, come to think of it.)
This is a common Lefty argumentation style. They just decide we’ve “conceded” to something an then call us “irrational” for not accepting that the we’ve lost the argument. No. There’s a pandemic, that does not mean that it’s the equivalent of disrupting a funeral to call the media the enemy of the people. The media is the enemy of the people. I particularly liked this part:
Of course it’s not professional behavior in the workplace, that’s part of the humor in it! How much you want to bet the author of the piece was the teacher’s pet in 4th grade? And then this:
Ted Cruz is the only person quoted in this article, that would be like making judgements about Joe Biden supporters and then using Bernie Sanders as an example. Couldn’t even find someone who supported Trump in the primaries. The author would struggle to name one, I’m pretty sure he couldn’t pass an ideological Turing test as one.
Don’t get me wrong as far as my own views of Trump, I plan on staying home in November to protest his empowerment of the neocons.
I read the first one as a fairly salient example of the point he was trying to make, and the other two as a joke, I laughed at the third one, and I don’t think the mirth came from any political affiliations I might have.
That’s almost exactly the way I read it, and I thought it was both pretty funny and pretty mild as far as criticizing Trump is concerned. I will admit, though, that my laughter was tinged with a slightly guilty feeling.
Orange man bad is bad, but I thought his examples were funny and not at all histrionic like some of the worst offenders.
I don’t think orange man is bad, but even I had no problem with Scott’s framing in the OP. Regardless of what I think, the media perspective is certainly that Trump is stupid and bad and they do in fact justify covering him anyway for all the reasons Scott lists.
+1. I thought Scott’s point was valid and his joke humorous. I chuckled.
I thought it was appropriate insofar as Trump plainly benefits from this phenomenon. He is, in essence, a real-life internet troll, and to the extent he is effective it’s because he continuously makes outrageous noises and gets his opponents to fixate on that instead of concrete actions they can realistically oppose. There’s no way to stop him from saying asinine and inflammatory things, but he keeps saying asinine and inflammatory things, and people keep dwelling on it because it’s great for clicks and actual meaningful things he does are not so satisfying to swat down.
He says AOC is a Mexican immigrant or something, and everybody rushes to drown the statement in fact-checks and in-depth analyses of all the different ways it’s racist. Then he says Muslims used to practice human sacrifice, and everybody rushes to drown the statement in fact-checks and in-depth analyses of all the different ways it’s racist. Then he says he’s a better floobleball player than any previous president, and everybody rushes to drown the statement in claims that he just made that sport up and saying that is probably somehow racist anyway. Meanwhile, he’s appointed three more federal judges, but come on! Floobleball? You can’t let that go unchallenged!
It’s like Charlie Brown and the football, except Charlie Brown realized he was being made a fool of.
For the most part media organizations and public intellectual figures are their own estate, highlighting controversies and taking positions on them is their bread and butter with the caloric value determined by the amount of attention and engagement generated, not the actual importance of the subject. This goes double about politically rallying issues which all of the examples here are.
I also don’t think creationism is left unchallenged as such, rather it is seen as vanquished as far as being a serious threat to education and the public sanity waterline goes and just like with theism this might yet turn out to be premature and misguided.
I guess it’s worth asking the question in the reverse, in that does covering real news actually help? Has the extensive coverage of climate change done anything to improve the accuracy of what people commonly believe? Does (did) news media actually contribute beneficially or does it take more than mere information to change people’s beliefs and behaviours at the population level?
Population-level beliefs about climate change have become more accurate in the past several years[1], and I think it’s reasonable to conclude that media coverage played a significant part in that.
[1] https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/climate-change-in-the-american-mind-april-2020/3/
First graph: 71-10 split in 2009, 73-10 in 2020
Second graph: 51-5 split in 2009, 54-6 in 2020
Third graph: 57-32 split in 2009, 62-29 in 2020 – the first graph to show a change beyond Lizardmen Believer Percentages, and it’s on the somewhat-tangential issue of “do you believe that global warming is caused by humans or is the result of natural ebbs/flows”.
Fourth graph: 46-33-2 yes/maybe/no split in 2009, 56-24-3 in 2020 – “undecideds” become “yes”, no real yes/no change, but, fine, if you want to point to 10% of survey respondents shifting from “I think there’s debate amongst scientists” to “I think scientists are largely in consensus that global warming is happening” as evidence that the constant GW news cycle has caused people to become more accurate about something related to global warming, I guess that’s your brass ring to clutch onto.
It’s an interesting comparison. However, creationism is a centuries-old concept with many other factors sustaining it beyond the media. This includes the institutions of some faiths as well as the many other beliefs it is inherently attached to by historical texts. Modern hoaxes and conspiracy theories are new and do not yet have the roots that creationism enjoys. So I cannot see the presence or absence of discourse in the media having much of an effect on creationism whereas it is certainly a bigger factor in modern hoaxes/conspiracy theories.
Can we define what we mean by “creationism”, because the Gallop Poll cited has three alternative answers and only the “God directly created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago” is treated as the Creationist one; the “Man developed, with God guiding the process” is not.
I would say the Intelligent Design lot come into the second category, but they seem to be treated as Creationists for most purposes, and indeed for all I know most of them may well be Creationists (in the “young earth, Biblical literalism” sense). I know some aren’t, because there were Catholics arguing the ID side.
So if by “Creationist”, we mean “believes in God, believes God created the Universe” then I’m a creationist, if we mean “believes in 6,000-10,000 year old young earth” position, then I’m not.
Part of the problem is the fuzziness of the definition, which is mostly set by the anti-Creationist side who tend to the atheist/rationalist/science/non-believer spectrum and means, so far as I can see, “anyone who believes in god/gods”. So on that reading, the Pope, Answers in Genesis, and John Shelby Spong are all creationists which, uh 🙂
Also that this is mostly an American row and the American context doesn’t translate across directly (e.g. “controversy over teaching creationism in schools” where I went to school run by the nuns, my Leaving Certificate biology teacher was a nun, and there was no row over ‘religion/science’ in schools, at least until we got an atheist Minister for Education).
Point of order: it is entirely possible to believe in gods without being a Creationist. For example, the animists believe that Kami exist, but not necessarily that they created the Universe; certainly, your local river-Kami didn’t create much (not even the river).
That said, in my experience, atheists use the term “Creationist” to mean, “evolution denier”. There’s a spectrum of beliefs under this umbrella, ranging from “God created every living creature by hand 6000 years ago”, to “God created the Universe and set everything in motion, but he created humans by hand 300,000 years ago”.
Actually, the spectrum could range even further at least to “God created the Universe, set everything in motion along a path He’d calculated in advance, and then reached down several billion years later to put souls into some hominids.” I was reading a theology book last month that took that view and almost called it Creationist.
Thanks for saying this. “Creationism” is mostly an American Evangelical Protestant thing.
Like a lot of relatively traditionalist Catholics (eg, Thomist philosopher Ed Feser, whom Scott blogged about at his old place years ago), I don’t have any problem with evolution at all.
For Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysical reasons, I suspect God may have had a hand in abiogenesis, and for doctrinal reasons I believe He must have intervened to give the first behaviorally modern humans (Adam & co.) rational souls, and must’ve created the universe (or multiverse or whatever).
But otherwise, evolution looks like a process that God allowed to proceed through an orthodox neo-Darwinian random walk through organismal design space. And if our fine-tuned universe is part of a multiverse, He may have allowed something similar with the laws of physics. All of which seems like an elegant way to create.
FWIW, while I agree that this position technically counts as “Creationism”, I’ve never heard any atheist refer to it as such. As I said above, the word “Creationism” is (in my experience) reserved for worldviews that explicitly deny evolution, either in whole, or just those parts that pertain to humanity.
I was wondering when we’d finally get around to Aych Bee Dee.
Indeed, it’s hard to believe in anything approximating an Abrahamic God without implicitly believing in this version of Intelligent Design.
An omnipotent god creating a universe must surely be picking the initial conditions. And an omniscient god who has seen the initial conditions of the universe is effortlessly able to compute exactly what those conditions will lead to in the future. So by picking the initial trajectories of all the particles at the Big Bang He designed humans along with everything else.
Possible counterargument: that’s why God invented quantum mechanics — to throw in a source of ongoing randomness that even He can’t predict, just so He can be surprised by how things pan out.
I take issue with the implied claim that no Catholics are creationists.
I take issue with the implied claim that no Catholics are creationists.
Define your terms.
“Creationist” = “believes God created the universe and all it contains” – Catholics are creationists.
“Creationist” = “believes Earth is only 6-10,000 years old” – well, since Archbishop Ussher is the one most associated with that time scale and since he was Protestant, no we’re not. (Way before then? Okay, yeah, but argue it out with St Augustine).
Some individual poorly-catechised ‘cultural Catholic’ thinks “uh, you’re telling me the Bible says the Earth is only 6,000 years old? well okay” – sure, entirely possible, this is because as every fule kno Catholics don’t read the Bible so we have to take it on trust when Protestants tell us “The Bible says” 😀
I think I know what you have been reading.
St. Augustine dedicates some chapters of De Civitas Dei to the age of the Earth. He says it’s young and the Egyptians confabulated millions of years of history.
Humans having only 3,500 years of history (in his time) but being ~100,000 years old as anonymous hunter-gatherers and there being billions of years of Deep Time before humans wasn’t in 4th century philosophy’s debate space. The standard model used against belief in Genesis was that Earth was the infinitely old center of the universe and human history was periodically wiped out by global floods.
Excuse me?
Do you not see the inherent contradiction here?
I mean, obviously you do, because you say “the decline in media coverage hasn’t prevented people from being creationist”. But if your solution to the problem is “pretend that the 40% creationist population doesn’t exist”, then, sure, creationism probably won’t take over the world, but I also predict you’re going to get a lot more Donald Trumps in the years to come.
All right, I’ve changed it to “nobody hears about them” – still kind of invites your objection, but I feel like there’s an important difference between 2006 and now that I have to talk about somehow
You can have a belief without being aware there is a whole movement pushing for it.
Alright. I am a flat-and-hollow-earher, pizzagater, qanon-is-a-lizzardpersoner, the-moon-doesn’t-exister, etc…
We take conflict theory very seriously. Politics is the mindkiller, but the political enemies you have are the your-tribe-killers.
The mainstream media is a very powerful weapon of the enemy. Not because it’s telling me that the earth isn’t both flat AND hollow (and full of reptile people), but because it’s controlled by a subset of the population that is hostile towards the subset of the people I support and has huge penetrative power. (Sure, there are instances of mainstream media that are controlled by the people that aren’t hostile, but these don’t really count).
We know the media doesn’t ALWAYS lie. That would be contra productive. But we have neither the time nor the smarts to separate the wheat from the chaff from the poison in every word they say (they can talk much longer than we’re able to listen, in fact). And we have children, untrained neural networks extremely vulnerable to a mix of truths and lies that would push them into the kid-diddling scaly arms of the enemy. Not to mention emotional manipulation.
So we do the easy thing.
We build a in-tribe set of incorrect but orthogonal-to-adaptivity beliefs that the media would never pay lip service to (because that would enrage their own base). Our children are trained to notice hostile dismissal of these and mark the speaker as an enemy, preventing contamination. We are besieged so constant vigilance is key and we are quick to identify new subjects the enemy media would never treat like an actual honest controversy, which we automatically include in our tribal mythos as further defensive layers. Thus we discovered that covid19 is a bioweapon, which we would have easily missed otherwise.
(sadly, this is starting to backfire cancerously by spawning actually maladaptive beliefs such as “covid doesnt’ exist, masks are the real mind control tool by the enemy” and similar, but that’s why we insist on having 3+ children. We can afford to evolve the way God intended, by natural selection. The enemy cannot, most likely because the earth is too cold for their egg-laying reproductive habits right now)
Sure, it will harm us long term by isolating us from the good stuff if the other side keeps up technological innovation up rather than collapse under its own weight, but we are short on options right now. And besides, we expect to be able to get our children to learn enough practical skills to still be able to participate economically while remaining culturally and politically insulated. Sure, they might never experience the joys of drugged up orgy after bleeding out a child for the glory of satan, but that’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make in their stead.
P.S.
Ultimately, as you pointed out, the media is learning to bypass these defenses by masking their disdain, so we might have to change our strategy further. So far we’ve started dismising the speaker when he’s merely presenting the mainstream position as an accepted fact. Maladaptive, sure, but our backs are close to the wall at this point. We’re on the losing side of history. The only realistic hope for my people is that modernity collapses. We do expect it to happen, sure, but we can’t know if it’s one of those silly tribal beliefs, or a reasonable expectation based on current trends when compared to the rise and fall of previous great civilizations.
I personally don’t even hate the current day high-tech distopian wonderland, you know. I feel it has great potential. Sure, you guys are killing babies and chopping little boys’ dicks for kabbalistic rituals, but nobody’s perfect. If you manage to get space travel to a point where the different human tribes can disperse towards differnt star systems on one way trips, youll’ve done more good to our species than Jesus and Trump combined. We think it’s unlikely, but we are saving our collective spare change in the bottom drawers just in case.
Fellow non-winner of history here. Or at least, fellow non-winner of the last 300 years.
I feel it is a mistake to go all conflict theory. And it is inadvisable to deliberately lie.
I believe that the victory of the last 300 years can be overturned (And the current winners will become non-winners).
If a person extends their eyesight beyond the last 300 years, they will notice that an age approximately lasts 300 years.
A new age will come to be any day now. 🙂
ikew, I find you very fascinating (very perceptive and reflective, as well as very different from what I know and am familiar with), I’d love to hear more about how you see the world.
I felt the same way, I really enjoyed this breakdown.
Hostile in the sense of disagreeing with? Hostile in the sense of disliking? Hostile in the sense of wanting to physical destroy?
Well, no, not literally destroy. You’re in a liberal democracy. You are not going to get massacred.
Not wearing a mask won’t just threaten your life, it endangers others. At this point your tribe have basically escalated the war from a metaphorical one, a war about ideas and identity, into an actual life-threatening one. Your side, not your enemies.
Because our enemies don’t want to massacre us? Or because they don’t yet have sufficient power that they think they could do so without suffering unacceptable losses on their own end?
I think roughly 10% of the population would, in fact, kill their political opponents, if they thought they could get away with it. For the sake of fairness, let’s assume it’s 5% on both ends of the spectrum.
One of the major functions of a liberal democracy is that it prevents broadly unpopular policies like genocide from being implemented just because a minority wants them. So yes: you’re in a liberal democracy. They’re not going to have sufficient power to massacre you. Not unless the general population becomes surprisingly accepting of mass murder.
Likewise, it’s always annoyed me how widespead the assumption is that the US is itching to ban / persecute / etc. the religion 3/4 of the country belongs to. AFAIK literal kings couldn’t pull off something like that (and keep their heads).
There are, at this very moment, state officials who have issued bans on religious gatherings, and put restrictions on them much more severe than they did on commercial businesses.
One county even went to the effort of banning the Eucharist.
What commercial businesses? Don’t compare apples to oranges. Some commercial businesses can operate without crowding or spreading virus droplets (take-out restaurants come to mind). Restrictions on large gatherings of all sorts (not just churches) have been banned in some states. It is very hard to maintain social distancing in a church (or a movie theater, or a concert, or a play, etc.). Where churches are concerned, singing is actually an issue (choirs have been common vectors of covid-19).
@FormerRanger, is it harder to maintain physical distancing in a church building than in a Costco checkout line?
Yes, Costco is doing good work keeping people six feet apart in checkout lines. Churches can do the same thing – and they’ve been doing it, when states haven’t preemptively closed them down. Yes, loud congregational singing is probably an added risk factor – so states can restrict singing, and churches can worship in other ways.
@Jaskologist
You can bet that those bans will evaporate as soon as society gets a handle on the coronavirus. Like, seriously, they will. No political organization now extant in the United States has the wherewithal to survive the ensuing shitstorm, or can plausibly expect to benefit from it.
There’s a conspiracy at work here, but you’re getting the causation backwards. It’s not a conspiracy to weaponize fear of coronavirus to shut down Christian churches, because no one actually benefits from doing that enough to eat the insane combined inconveniences of coronavirus plus zillions of irate Christians.
It’s a conspiracy to shut down Christian churches in order to destroy coronavirus, because that way the cost-benefit math adds up for the governments involved. Accepting coronavirus forever to shut down the churches forever is a terrible tradeoff, even for the most anticlerical of governments. Accepting a shutdown of churches in exchange for a shutdown of coronavirus is a much better tradeoff and far more likely to motivate action.
@Jaskologist: What commercial businesses are being allowed to operate where people congregate indoors for 90 minutes or more continuously? I’m having trouble thinking of any, but since the policy is obvious persecution it ought to be obvious.
If such congregation is unique to churches, well, there you go.
@Corey, I’ve been on ninety-minute shopping trips before. Grocery stores and department stores are still open, without time limits on how long customers can stay there.
But even if it was unique to churches, you still don’t say “Church services are banned.” That’s painting with far too broad a brush. Instead, you say something like “Church services can last no longer than $N minutes and cannot include singing louder than $threshold dB.” In short, you look for the least restrictive way.
Regarding what Jaskologist linked, it’s not about singing in churches, it is definitely banning them from having a communion service.
Which means for Catholics (and I presume Eastern Orthodox and some denominations of Protestants) it means not having any Sunday liturgy at all, because confecting the Eucharist is the central point of the celebration.
You could certainly have a “forty-five minute prayer and Scripture reading service” but it would not be Mass. By comparison, saying “sure, go to the hairdresser” does sound like preferential treatment. It’s rather ironic that it came out of Maryland, but I don’t think the official responsible had any anti-Catholic bias, just doesn’t understand why it’s a big deal to ban the Eucharist.
You can read the dictates yourself. Churches are being held to a much tighter standard than businesses. Why not simply say 50% capacity for both? Why did they specifically single out and ban a central, indispensable religious practice for Lutherans and Catholics? There’ve been a lot of assurances that getting COVID from food is highly unlikely, so go order take-out; is that no longer true, and have they banned takeout along with Catholic practice?
If we were still in the phase when Vox et al were telling us not to wear facemasks, you’d probably support a ban on burkas too.
Eating in company with a group of people is more dangerous than getting takeout and eating it by yourself. It’s pretty impossible to follow the usual rules while eating: you can’t wear a mask, your hands probably won’t remain clean, and of course you’re bound to touch your face.
If Catholic churches could send you home with a little to-go pack of communion, it would be one thing. But they can’t, and a lot of Catholics demand the priest should be allowed to put it directly on their tongue. Tongue touches happen and obviously that’s not sanitary.
Churches *have* been the source of outbreaks before, so I don’t think it’s singling them out to prevent them from following their usual practices. Things will gradually loosen up as we learn more, if there are no further outbreaks. I know one church in Texas opened and then had to reclose because the priest died. Catholics have a lot to lose here, because priests are few and many are old.
But there’s very little evidence that it’s the eating-in-company part that’s dangerous – far more superspreader events in bars and nightclubs than restaurants, for example. Almost certainly it’s the talking that people do while they are eating together that is the high-risk part, particularly loud talking, and communion is typically a soft-spoken, quiet affair.
Religious exercise, in the manner that the religious prefer to exercise it, is rightly subject to strict scrutiny in the United States. If someone is proposing an evidence-based requirement that e.g. communion wine be served from individual shot glasses rather than a common chalice, that’s fine. What I’m mostly seeing, though, is “My outsider’s understanding of the modal church service is that it has a lot of stuff I intuitively think is dangerous, so we have to keep the churches closed and send the worshippers home with this thing that unbeliever I think is an acceptable substitute”. And that’s not fine.
But if we are going to make up our own new practices for other people’s religions, then my vote is that we require the communion wine be 140-proof brandy. Now about those baptismal fonts…
Isn’t this more or less always true in every country? Yes, increased polarization is something to be concerned about, but I don’t think the existence of people with violent political fantasies is necessarily a harbinger of the end of democracy.
Liberal democracy is a useful mechanism for productive cooperation between groups that would actually want to massacre each other, given the chance.
> a war about ideas and identity
Except that absent actual direct violence, there are no limits to the types of harm which will be allowed. Ex. – don’t subscribe to a particular view on human gender, that’s a firing. Don’t want to be forced to do something against your religious views? There goes your job/business/whatever or you’re left with huge legal bills.
And if you view your *culture* as under attack rather than your people, it’s even worse. There’s a huge amount of effort going in to make it hard to practice traditions which the majority doesn’t like, despite being present at the founding of the country.
Atheist liberals could have made the same complaints any time more than fifty years ago. Crazy beliefs were not necessary to solve the problem.
In some European countries, there are laws that prevent employers from firing people for their political opinions. That is a limit right here.
Hostile in the sense of wanting to physical destroy?
Well, no, not literally destroy. You’re in a liberal democracy. You are not going to get massacred
Interesting topic switch.
I think that would only make sense if the purpose of not wearing a mask was to spread the infection, and that doesn’t make much sense, since it would be spread to allies as well as enemies.
Consider an analogous case from the other side. It’s my opinion that FDA regulation of medical drugs has greatly slowed their development, resulting in a lot of increased mortality. Indeed, I like to point at the FDA’s public statement when they finally approved a beta blocker to be used to prevent a second heart attack as their admission to killing a hundred thousand people, although that is not how they phrased it.
Would it be legitimate for me to describe that as the center and left escalating their war against the enemy?
Hostile in the sense that if they have their way, the tribe will cease to exist as an entity.
I mean, I assume this is a persona, but it tracks with the way I was raised. I absolutely did dismiss most mainstream sources because they took as a given that God didn’t exist or that it was okay to be gay. And now I can’t share any reputable links with some of my acquaintances because “that’s the MAINSTREAM MEDIA, they think trans women are women, how dare.”
I don’t really know how to combat this though. It’s not like all mainstream sources should pretend every single question is still open, for fear of reinforcing the conditioning. The conditioning is always going to be reinforced. They’ll always have something. Even if the NYT always was careful to say that the Rapture was an open question, the people in that bubble still wouldn’t trust it, because it doesn’t have all the bona fides of an in-bubble source. Because it’s funded by liberals and atheists write for it and they have approving articles about gay people. It’s hard enough for even in-bubble sources to stay pure enough. I’m always getting updates from my old bubble saying we can’t trust N anymore because N said the f-word or had a gay friend or wrote a bad take. The NYT would never qualify.
Is that an unreasonable position for them? Like, I’m pretty sure God doesn’t exist and they’re wrong, but from their own perspective of being pretty sure God does exist, the MAINSTREAM MEDIA are making an embarrassingly easy mistake on an incredibly important question. If you woke up tomorrow in a bizarro world where the media insisted that the sky was green and trout were mammals, how much would you trust their ability to report on the news of the day? Their certainty might prompt a little introspection about whether the sky was really green, but once you looked outside and concluded that no, it’s definitely blue, what are you supposed to think? There is clearly something badly wrong with their ability to either find or report truth, and the parable of Gell-Mann Amnesia teaches us that therefore we maybe shouldn’t trust what they say about coronavirus either.
This argument is extremely common, and bad. It assumes journalists, as a group, are equally ignorant in all areas. The most extreme form: “this guy makes basic mistakes about the nature of Linux kernel governance, how can I trust them on Presidential politics?” We can all spot that one as bad, but when it’s our own areas of expertise, suddenly not knowing something is fully general.
I dunno – I think it’s more like “If journalists can’t be bothered to get the basic facts of basic stories right, why should we trust their statements on far more advanced and complicated matters,” which seems plenty reasonable to me.
Like, the very basics of journalism that you learn when you work on your middle school newspaper are things like “establish the who, what, when, where, why, etc.” Find the basic facts and report them accurately.
Someone who has repeatedly failed at even doing that (which is supposed to be their field of expertise) cannot be trusted to provide a recommendation on the cost-benefit analysis of imposing large-scale government lockdowns, wearing a homemade cloth mask, (obviously well outside their field of expertise) etc.
I think that in many cases the incentives are not lined up to encourage journalists to be careful to get the facts straight. Simple narratives and easily-accessible stories with clickbaity headlines are what pays the bills.
The way it looks to me as an outsider: outrage-bait headlines with low-effort stories are easy to write, and make money in the form of clicks/ad revenue. In-depth reporting that took a month of investigation and turns into three long articles on (say) how the VA wasted a huge pile of money on a failed move to all-electronic medical records (or something–this is just a made-up example) costs a whole bunch of money, and most people aren’t going to read it because it’s long and complicated and kinda boring.
The result is that we get lots of relatively quick, low-effort pieces, and not many carefully reported high-effort pieces.
I’m prepared to defend that one. Because if this guy simply didn’t know about Linux kernel governance, that’s fine, most people don’t and I wouldn’t expect otherwise. But if this guy is confidently talking about Linux kernel governance while knowing nothing, this establishes the twin facts that his level of confidence has nothing to do with his level of knowledge, and that incentives are not aligned for him to acquire accurate knowledge about the things he discusses. You can dispute whether a particular domain is an exception, but both of those seem broadly generalizable.
It is reasonable to think that a person’s ability to evaluate information is similar across different subjects. You would be hard pressed to find a false statement about the Linux kernel that I’ve made, not because I am an expert in the Linux kernel, but because I don’t feel qualified to present myself as an expert in the Linux kernel, and so haven’t made any statements to be wrong. If I were a journalist and there were some news story about the Linux kernel, I would try to find someone who knows about it to write the article, or find someone who can explain it to me.
And the question isn’t whether what they’re saying is true, it’s whether we can trust that what they’re saying is true. If they say something false on one thing, that should lower the degree by which them saying something on another subject causes us to trust that.
I generally just ask people if they’ve ever read a news story or opinion piece about a topic they are an expert on, or that they have first-hand knowledge of the events involved.
Then, once they consider that, I mention that all the other news stories they read are also about that same level of accuracy.
That usually helps put the news into perspective. At best you might get an idea of what happened after consuming multiple stories on the same topic from multiple media perspectives.
Many people are way too overconfident in the news they read, but don’t have any expertise in.
Umm, yeah. It is.
That’s just restating the premise. One cannot justify a proposition by simply stating that one has a worldview that implies the proposition.
Even as an atheist, it’s pretty tone-deaf. I remember when CNN temporarily got a “faith and values correspondent” and I though to myself: how can they be so distant from such a common element of peoples lives that they need a specialist for it. And to wrap all of that whole section of human existence into a single correspondent also came across as so limited.
Huh? News programs have a sports guy, a weather guy, a consumer protection guy, etc. Does this show a distance from sports, weather, and buying stuff?
I think you’re getting at something important, but I’m having trouble following it. Let me see if I understand.
You’re saying there are important true things that the mainstream media gets wrong (I don’t know your position, but probably lots of people would use atheism vs. Christianity as an example). In order to prevent children and other members of your tribe from listening to the media, you scatter rumors that lots of other irrelevant correct things are wrong (eg sphere-earth, vaccines) in order to make sure nobody trusts the media. Or because the kind of media that disagrees with you about the important things would also disagree about those particular irrelevant things for correlated reasons, so it’s a good way to identify dangerous media outlets.
But I’m having trouble figure out *how this helps*. If you have enough control over your children to get them to believe flat-earth, surely you have enough control over your children to get them to believe Christianity directly? All that flat-earth does is add some extra danger that they read a basic astronomy textbook, figure out you’re lying, and then doubt all the other stuff as well (including Christianity). Whereas Christianity is actually really complicated and much harder to disprove. How does adding a lot of weak things, any one of which will blow up in your face if it fails, make you net stronger?
It’s counterintuitive, but purportedly, everyone believing dubious things reinforces the group rather than weakens it. As David Friedman is fond of noting, you’ll even find greater agreement for those tenets the smarter the member is*; they’ve set their big brain to the demanding task of making it all cohere. David
has speculatedreports this is argued to be rational behavior, since it’s usually more important that you fit in with your group than that you know the truth.No comment on this as a Catholic, of course. 😉
*From a footnote to David’s Legal Systems Very Different from Ours book:
If you reduce the hyperbole in the example, I think it tracks rather well.
I was raised Catholic and now identify as soft-agnostic.
As a Catholic, you’re taught at a young age the Adam and Eve story of the world creation; which pretty much explicitly says “God created man in his current form”, leading you to answer #3 on that story and lumping you in with the young earth creationists (ignoring the 10000 year part, as from a faith perspective time is relative, e.g. many figures in the Old Testament lived over 200 years).
Now, the creation myth/story/truth has no bearing on your life today. From both a career perspective and a home life perspective, this belief has no practical effect–you can farm or program computers or cook or whatever else, and believing in a Sky God (or not) affects none of this. But all your friends and family grew up with your beliefs, even if they only casually hold on to them, or even deny them now.
And then comes along a hostile media apparatus, that portrays all religious folks as troglodytes and ridicules them. And to you, those troglodytes were your classmates and coworkers, and even if those beliefs may seem silly now, they’re still being taught to your 6 year old, as something they’ll mature out of and will in the meantime ground them in you culture. But now someone on the TV is calling your kid and your friends’ kids stupid and brainwashed.
You will naturally stake out the opposite position.
Based on this, the important difference between flat-earth theory and creationism is that while the media will disagree with creationism, it is too mainstream for them to tactlessly make fun of the belief (despite some exceptions, I think this is generally true). Flat-earth theories, on the other hand, are constantly subject to ridicule. The first kind of treatment is much kinder and much more likely to change minds, the second is only going to push people with those kinds of beliefs away, thus giving the “inoculation” against anything else they might say about creationism.
The signaling people would say that asking group members to believe patently absurd things functions as a useful signal of group loyalty: the guy who accepted Flat Earth is definitely not going to be questioning the Bible.
I find signaling theories annoying, but I think that basically the above story can be reframed into a model of artificial selection. Suppose some people are natural skeptics such that no matter what you do they’re going to decide all this God business is terribly flimsy and eventually leave. The worst thing these people could do is stick around for a few decades as their faith gradually tatters, arguing with people, creating an impression of disunity and sowing doubt in the minds of more faithful members. Tell them the Earth is flat and it’ll take them about five minutes to realize you’re full of it and pack their bags. Wacky beliefs get rid of the doubters you didn’t want to keep around anyway.
@Scott Alexander
The really weird extra beliefs serve the role of canaries in the coal mine, and when the canary dies there are extra measures to enact.
Suppose Pastor Bob is trying to ensure that his religion continues to propagate itself among the children of his church. As part of Bob’s religious indoctrination, he then inculcates the belief that a Satanic conspiracy wants to turn everyone gay so that everyone will go to Hell and so that no babies will be born and human civilization will end.
If the child is questioning their beliefs, then belief in the conspiracy will be first to go, because it’s the most outlandish component. If any given child in the Bobbist Church starts questioning the conspiracy theory, it immediately alerts Bob that something is ‘wrong.’ Then the child can be targeted for extra indoctrination, extra social pressure to publicly affirm allegiance to the group and its beliefs including the wacky ones, or in extreme cases ostracism and ejection from the group to ensure that the heretic cannot ‘infect’ other members of the group.
Now, this strategy is suboptimal for maximizing the percentage of your supporters who still believe SOME OF your ideas 40 years from now, because it increases the number of people you’re booting out for heresy each year.
But it’s quite effective (potentially) for maximizing the percentage of your supporters who believe ALL your ideas 40 years from now, because it lets you so aggressively allocate resources to stop any truly large-scale penetrations of outside ideas that subvert the ones you were trying to propagate.
I’m pretty sure such a strategy would not primarily be based on specific beliefs, but upon strongly developed habits and aesthetics tastes:
The premise behind the idea is that the media are trying to use appearances of respectability, accuracy, honesty, authority etc: the appearance of truth, to push their poisonous ideas, and that they are so good at this that there is no hope in trying to keep up with them. (-situation analogous to descartes demon)
The mirror response proposed to this, then, is to develop a strong reflex in favour of of rejecting the appearance of truth (throwing off the shackles of (false) reason-, RAWR, REEE), for the simple mechanical reason that “appearance of truth” is the vector your enemies are trying to ruin you and yours with.
i.e. It isn’t that the lizardman narrative seems more rationally and measuredly plausible than the alternative, but that OP is (or is steelmanning the idea of) abandoning those kind of heuristics altogether as a war-effort move against overwhelming enemy propaganda. – The ability to make fine judgements on tricky questions is not being refined to compete, but relinquished wholesale as unpracticable under current beleagured conditions.
(so if someone who has this full on lizardman reflex/habit, and they they pick up an astronomy textbook, the question they’re asking shouldn’t be “is this true, and if so how should I change my beliefs”, but “is this harmful to me and my clanfolk”)
TL:DR: Not a logical approach of specific doctrines that don’t fit together in the jigsaw of truth with those of the enemy, but a generalised and aggressive (weaponised) embrace of “epistemic helplessness”. – Not incompatible beliefs, but a general habit and taste for rejecting the (presumed-false) appearance of truth.
_
other more meandering/less compact
commentsthinking out loud:1. The basic reflex of being suspicious when a story sounds too good is an extremely common one. What’s weird is taking an instinct that normally lies dormant to protect one by triggering in a specific scenario, into a general and unbreakable rule to actively lead one’s conduct from the front. -It’s unnatural, it’s a hack.
2. if this ever or at all makes sense, it’s in response to a world where the appearance of truth is not something neutrally floating about in the ether, but something under the control one’s enemies. (either wholly, or so far that it would be foolish to try and use it).
3. Were this actually the case- for a somewhat exagerrated case, lets say there is a literal mind control wizard who has made it his mission to beguile you with cunning illusions, then this kind of reflexive suspicion can easily be sympathised with.
4. But is it the case? Despite people’s ambitions (surely some people would not being literal mind control wizards), IRL people’s powers are limited to indirect means like lying and misrepresentation, false consensus, and social presssure.
5. For me personally this settles the issue. -You shouldn’t resort to drastic scorched earth tactics in order to combat such a weakly grounded advantage, and when your enemy has a great strength, but it’s built on a weak foundation, that isn’t the place to give ground, but to break them.
6. But I’m pretty smart, so maybe I’m not fully appreciating the struggles that less nimble-minded people go through when the narratives and atmosphere of the world are controlled by rabid 130IQ sophists.
7. Bearind this in mind, what still stops stops me from fully sympathising with the position though But you can’t trust that someone who takes this stance really judges in a good faith manner that they are fighting the good fight against descartes demon. – -Rejecting truth as a weapon fallen into the hands of the enemy is an extremely invigorating oppurtunity for larping.
8. And much of basic morality is rejecting the lure of such oppurtunities. -It’s noble to launch a crusade against a legitimate danger, but it’s common existential treachery to make up a need just so you can have a crusade. It’s brave to “hoist the black flag and start slitting throats” when it’s time for that, but it’s also a selfish (if admirably grandiose) temptation to do so when it isn’t time.
8. In any case, there’s a conflict of interest here. Some few people might need aggressively weaponised epistemic heplessness to cope, but if so they should do it in private, as a vice, because a society where everyone lives in their own irrationalist bubble is a society that soon becomes clueless about what is what.
11. …However, we don’t exactly have a truth driven “(inter)national conversation” now though, so maybe this point is somewhat moot. (this is the biggest concession I would make to any irrationalist: things were like this when you got here.)
12. The other biggest things I’d grant to the irrationalist is that if a belief is wildly untrue, it doesn’t always mean it’s wildly innacurate. -The idea the world is run by literal non-human lizardmen is preposterous, but if we excise the word “literal” from that idea, it becomes a commonplace platitude and applause light. In some sense lizardmen types are no worse than positivists: all they are doing is prioritising accuracy of the models over truth of the theory.
13. Lastly lots of people who haven’t committed to going full lizardman will gladly play the “ha-ha-ha, you think you can fool me with your logic?! think again!” card when intellectually outmanouvered, which is a lot more annoying than someone who starts out with an open and honest gibbering unwillingness to settle things with reason. I find something honest (or at least, straightforward) in someone who abandons the pretense of speaking in terms of truth, where every word they speak is imbued with unreason, rather than trying to steal some reflected glory from the enlightenment when your real loyalties lie with instinct and practicality.
I’m not sure it helps, but it makes sense that if you have concluded that what you are told by the generally accepted authorities about a subject you have strong beliefs about is ignorant nonsense, you will become less willing to accept what such authorities tell you about other things where your own knowledge doesn’t help and much less willing when they tell you things that go against what you do or want to believe.
That doesn’t imply that you will believe in a flat Earth, but it makes you less certain the Earth isn’t flat, more willing to take seriously the arguments of those who argue for it. And even if you are not persuaded, you will be inclined to see the flat earthers as allies in the common rejection of the conventional authorities. You don’t treat them as idiots, and being treated as idiots by those you interact with is one reason not to believe things that cause them to treat you that way.
I’ll do my best to clear any confusion, but to start with – carvenvisage did a very good summary before diving into whatever the second half of his post was. newstorkcity hit the nail on the head on the narrow subject he expanded on.
So, my own answer.
Symmetrical cultural warfare takes the shape of the good old motte-and-bailey. But what happens when you’ve already lost yours decades ago? Imagine the other tribe came with siege equipment beyond anything you had prepared for and just started blasting?
What can you do when the axioms of your people have more or less been factually proven wrong? Christianity might be hard to disprove in its most abstract form, but the pillars of our temple are much more than shaken. They are part of our identity. We neither want nor can give them up. Further, even if they are factually and objectively wrong, they might still be less wrong than whatever the group-that-wants-our-tribe-to-unexist would like to push down our throats. We gave ourselves these axioms because we needed them and because we wanted to help ourselves long term. We would be foolish to expect the same utility from the ones forced upon us by the enemy and their damn facts and logic.
So we are wildly outgunned, have nowhere to hide and giving up is essentially a death sentence for our tribe (the humans in it will live on, but the tribe would be unmade). What can we do?
Asymmetrical memetic warfare. Memetic insurgence. Memetic terrorism, if you count Trump as and IED. Bailey? Here’s your new bailey, it’s called The Northern Wastelands of Antivax. Try taking your armies through there, see how your troops like it. Then there’s The Hollow-Earth Forest where giant spiders stalk the tree tops. What, you passed through? Welcome to Mount Moon-landing-was-fake. Enjoy your climb. What’s waiting at the top? Oh, just the barren Monsanto Cancer Valley…
Each of these location is not defensible in an all-out-fight, but it’s not that important either. It’s a fake cardboard defensible position with a fire lit on top.
Wait, you might think now, so you’re not actually believing any of these silly things, they are just weaponized stupidity serving to widen the divide between your tribe and the rest of humanity?
Not as simple.
First, we believe some of these positions hold actual merit. Antivaxers are the vanguard in the fight against mandatory blanket vaccination where a regulatory organ (or Bill Gates) decides what shots must be given to your children based on lobbying and corporate bottom lines. That’s how you end up with vaccines that do more harm than good in a couple of decades. The feedback mechanism must stay. People must be able to vote for a particular vaccine with their feet. But that doesn’t fit well on a T-shirt. So we just prop up the antivax people, observe where the attacks come from and try to keep ourselves out of their zone of unresistible influence (sorry California, it’s not us, it’s you). Yes, we firmly believe that most slopes are slippery on a long timescale.
Second, asymmetrical memetic warfare has close parallels to actual asymmetrical warfare. It’s a hit and run thing, where you have to be able to switch between unrelenting ferocity and low-profile civilian-ing as the battlefield changes. So, we are pretty sure the earth must be round, since we do fly on planes from time to time and a lot of things don’t make sense if the earth is flat. But then we see that some people somewhere have rolled some rocks together on a pile, struck a flag at the top and announced this is their flat-earth-fortress and the rest of the globe is not welcome there. If we had slack, we’d shrug and wish them the best, since we culturally support the freedom to be as stupid as you want unless you are an unelected government official. Under the circumstances however, things are different. Since we can clearly see they are under memetic siege, we approach and see if we can be of use to each other.
In gunpowder-and-steel warfare, we’d be helping their supply lines, harassing the advancing enemy, clearing retreat corridors. Well, this isn’t, so we instead do the following – we accept seemingly harmless memetic contamination from them that we kind of allow to run in our thoughtspace. We boost their signal a bit through our own memetic channels, which serves to expose them to more outside awareness. And then every time the wider world mocks them, we internalize this mockery as if we were the primary and direct subject of it, strengthening up the us-and-them divide we’ve manifactured. We radicalize further.
It’s not a hill we’d die defending memetically by any means. However, emotionally, it’s a hill where a thousand of our-ish heroes have met their bloody end. We bought some martyrs at the low cost of allowing non-maladaptive believes to to integrate with our collective unconscious. Kind of.
And so it goes. We are, as individuals, aware evolution happens and can explain our own origins. As a tribe, however, we benefit immensely from the existence of creationist strongholds that we won’t personally die defending, but we’ll harass their enemies memetically and internalize any mockery as if we straight up believed God created us in his own image while on break from building the pyramids. It can’t be too healthy to actively seek new sources of cognitive dissonance to cram inside your head, but neither is using mud as camouflage or laying in ambush in a literal swamp. We don’t do it for fun. We do it because the enemy promises are extremely alluring and we need to create as big a rift between us and them to avoid the siren call from reaching us. If tomorrow cold fusion breakthrough makes hydrogen powered cars a $10,000 reality and the entire world leaves the middle east alone, our muslim brothers would probably return to civilization building in a few generations. Nobody wants to live in caves.
Further, it’s unsafe to assume your enemies might not be actual demons. The Clintons must be literally killing children to deserve the hostility we need to harbor towards them to keep up the good fight. And there is sufficient evidence that they are, if you look in the right places. Is that evidence factually correct? Very hard to check. Who can we even trust to do the checking? CNN? Snopes? FBI? Tools of the enemy, all of them. Of this we have more than sufficient proof thank you.
As for the deepstate, here we might have an actual motte to defend. Since deepstate can simply mean “decision makers whose links to power are not dependent on the democratic process and who will not be held accountable for their mistakes by the public”. They may or may not drink adrenochrome to prolong their lifespans. But I digress.
When a goal driven intelligence (such as a tribe) meets another, the result depends on the goal matrix of them and their relative strength. Our tribe’s goal is mere survival. The other intelligence’s goal is a mystery to us, but at a glance it seems to be some sort of maximizer, and this is one of the scariest things a non-friendly goal-driven intelligence can be. So we cover ourselves in mud, lay in the swamps, fight dirty, radicalize ourselves and our children and hope for a miracle. Our win condition is an island on the archipelago.
And our case is not unique. There already is a recent real world example of a small, dedicated tribe that not only survived against all odds in a world of hostility, but in their darkest hour rather than merely surviving they won their own island, their holy land. After losing a (little known, small scale) real-guns-war, after something very close to an all-out extermination effort against them by the winner, they somehow prevailed by memetic means and set an example. We can learn from them that as long as you give up no ground you can’t afford to lose, hold no ground you can’t afford to protect, keep your memespace clean of outsider influence, train your children to be soldiers in a culture war from birth, you have a chance.
I have known many conspiracy theorists and this seems wildly overly complicated a model. My impression was that they generally didn’t actually have a rigorous epistemological system (see, most people) which this seems to imply, they were perfectly willing to trust ‘The Enemy’ on most things not directly related to their particular fringe theories. The impetus for their belief seemed to be largely born from a fully generalizable higher state of paranoia, which also infected their interpersonal lives. They were consistently higher drama than non-conspiracy theorists, consistently tried to engage in, at least to me, clumsy social manipulations, etc.
I am fairly low on the curve for SSC, and have very low executive function which possibly served to lower my overall life outcomes further, but this kind of strategic thinking is just unbelievably rare in my peer group. It is rare even when engaging in literal strategy games with my peer group. While this might plausibly explain the behavior of highly intelligent flat earthers, I find it hard to believe it could be applicable to the average case.
Have they ? How do you know ? The news won’t cover them, after all. Which is kind of a shame, since personally I’d like to know how the struggle for the Texas curriculum (circa 2017) turned out.
From what I can gather, Creationism had not achieved total victory, but rather, modest gains. In many places (AFAIK Texas included), biology textbooks carry the “evolution is only a theory”/”teach the controversy” stickers, and the curriculum is designed to allow teachers to bypass evolution completely, should they choose to do so. The nation-wide acceptance of creationism had not changed much, which is also a minor win — since you’d normally expect it to slowly die off over time, just as other fringe beliefs. Instead, Creationism seems to have been mostly normalized in some states, and ignored in others. I predict that, unless something changes, it will continue to creep slowly forward, unchallenged, until it is evolution that is seen as a fringe idea in most places — other than extremely liberal ones, such as e.g. the Bay Area.
In many places (AFAIK Texas included), biology textbooks carry the “evolution is only a theory”/”teach the controversy” stickers, and the curriculum is designed to allow teachers to bypass evolution completely, should they choose to do so.
Argh. Y’know, I think the American “victory” over school prayer backfired; I feel things would be easier if sure, you can say some anondyne basic ‘bless us all Lord’ prayers at morning assembly, then the science teachers teach the curriculum including evolution, and nobody has to wage war via the textbooks. (Stroppy Bible-bashing kids and stroppy young atheist kids both get told “sit down, shut up, and learn the lessons”).
I understand that this might be your preference, but what on earth would suggest that would be the stable equilibrium?
In my experience this is pretty close to the stable equilibrium here (in the UK).
That doesn’t mean that equilibrium is achievable elsewhere, of course: it’s all conditioned by the legal & constitutional system, history of education etc.
I’d suggest that the lack of effort to put creationism in schools in the UK has less to do with this stable equilibrium and more to do with the fact that there are very few creationists in the UK to begin with. The Church of England certainly doesn’t support it, nor does the Catholic Church, and I’m not sure about all the minor denominations but they don’t add up to much.
The problem with the USA and its prayer in school (or lack thereof) is that the entire country was designed from the ground up to be multi-religious. Originally, that just meant that you could have different brands of Christians living together; but, over time, this was expanded to include Christians, Muslims, Jews, all kinds of Pagans, and yes, even those evil atheists.
Now you have a problem, because when you say, “Bless us all Lord”, what a Muslim student would hear is, “This school officially endorses Jesus and not Mohammed, you heretic”; and what an atheist hears is, “God officially exists, get over it”.
This is not a problem in Britain, where, historically, the country’s position was, “this entire country is built to worship a very specific God, and if you disagree, off with your head”. Anodyne basic blessings are a lot easier to implement when everyone is already on the same page.
The abolition of school prayer was itself a result of 19th-century anti-Catholicism backfiring. While Britain and Canada incorporated Catholic schools into their state-funded school systems, the Protestant establishment in America didn’t want to give their tax dollars to the hated Papists and passed laws in most states declaring that publicly funded schools had to be nonsectarian, with the unspoken understanding that nondenominational Protestantism would be practiced. Fast forward to the ’60s, and some people who are neither Catholic nor Protestant are attending the only government-funded school system and protest that they have to partake in Christian prayer… without the Blaine Amendments the solution would be obvious.
The essentially uninterrupted, centuries-long trend of history is for conservative/religious retreat and defeat in matters of culture. This should be the default expectation here, at least for periods measured in decades.
In the scale of centuries, provided there’s no singularity (at which point all bets are off), there will be some sort of cultural reversal due, ironically, to the evolutionary inevitability of pro-natalism’s victory over anti-natalism. But I don’t see any reason to expect it before then.
I don’t think that’s true. In both Islamic and Christian history, you see long periods of declining belief interrupted by revivals during which belief sharply increased. The Great Awakening in the 18th century would be an American example.
Which is why the atheist USSR is still a threat but Islam is part of the dustbin of history?
I think it’s likely that real, materialistic impacts on society and life killed off all those debates. Remember, the 2000s were the last hurrah of credit consumerism. Sure, the wealthy have been coasting on cheap money since 2008, inflating asset prices and stockmarkets, but for most people it’s been pretty shit. Real paychecks are either stagnant or decreasing.
So, 2008 was a watershed, and whatever people did in their spare time on internet fora just got blown out of the water by the real economic crisis.
The cycle repeated a bit over the past decade: in the faux growth since 2010 we’ve seen a resurgence of ‘how many angels fit on the head of a pin’ style debates in gender issues and diversity. Where I live, the Netherlands, you barely hear anything about that anymore since covid-19 broke out. People don’t care much about pronouns when the bodies pile up or they get foreclosed on.
If, and this is a big if, there is a serious economic rebound after covid-19, there will be another non issue filling the airwaves and interwebs for a few years. Then when the first hemispheric heatwave induced famine creates food riots, or whatever it may be, that issue will be killed off as well.
The level of New Atheism debate seemed to peak around 2012, so I don’t think the recession hurt it much.
I think it’s still plausible that Creationism was defeated, rather than a ceasefire called. That Creationists are still out doing their thing doesn’t mean they haven’t already lost, and your phrasing implies that because support for creationism decreased from 46% to 40%, that Creationism is also ~87% as viable as an idea as it was in 2006. Battles of ideas are more a function of epistemic validity and social signaling than they are of money and effort expended to promote them or fight them.
You first say that 40% of Americans believe in Creationism, but you then go on to say nobody knows they exist. Presumably most of the 60% of non-Creationist Americans know some creationists, and it might be that all of them fail to realize their acquaintances are not in isolated pockets (or that this post is characterizing these social dynamics incorrectly). Maybe many creationists are in isolated pockets, having been ridiculed out of the public sphere.
There are other things to check for. For example, what percent of young people think Creationism is true, and how has this changed over time? This could be an example of science (or infidelity) advancing one death at a time.
FWIW I live in California, and even I know some Creationists. Yes, their density is quite low compared to places like Texas, but still, they exist.
(I originally posted my comment in response to someone else, but somehow it got eaten (possibly by moderation), so here’s a rewrite)
One man’s climate change is another man’s Creationism. In the Blue states, most people think that global warming is a real problem, and Creationism is a silly holdover from the medieval times. In the Red states, people think that global warming is a liberal delusion (at best, and conspiracy at worst), and Creationism is the obvious explanation for how we all got here — so obvious as to not merit debate. Which news should the media cover ? What method would you use to decide ?
Science!
I know we’ve been through this before, but one man’s climate change risk is another man’s AI risk.
Which also has a basis in factual reasoning. Creationism depends entirely on a metaphysical assumption about the existence of God, and a few theological ones about Their moral nature.
They’re completely different categories.
I think that creationists would claim the opposite, that creationism has a basis in factual reasoning. They would say that evolution science and climate science are inherently unreasonable, and are based on faulty assumptions. You might call it nonsense, but that’s what they would claim.
But I don’t really understand Bugmaster’s question… are you asking how the media can determine what is TRUTH? How could the media possible be the ones to determine that? More than all the (other) smart people of society? 40% of American society, including some very smart people, believe the world was created 6000 years ago, despite the scientific arguments otherwise. They have their arguments, which they find convincing. Similarly, 60% of American society, including some very smart people, believe humans descended from other organisms and evolved for millions of years, despite the theological arguments otherwise. So too, they have their arguments, which they find convincing. So, you’re either convinced by the arguments for one side, or the arguments for the other side. The fact that somebody is a member of the media doesn’t magically give them special tools to make that determination.
Agreed, and I don’t think “the media should teach the controversy” is a good solution, because nowadays literally anything can be made controversial.
Corey, I agree, and I don’t have much respect for “teach the controversy”. Because somebody who says that is betraying the lack of conviction in their ideas. If you really think something is true, the last thing you want is to teach the controversy. Which kind of makes me question what I was saying before, of creationists being equally convinced of their own ideas as scientists are. Where was the push for “teach the controversy” coming from? Not the scientists, but the creationists. This makes me think that (at least some of them) were not absolutely convinced of what they claim, the same way a scientist is absolutely convinced of evolution.
@disluckyperson, if I was somewhere the public schools were teaching Holocaust denial, I’d gladly support teaching the controversy because it’d be better than the realistic alternative.
I was in the conservative Christian subculture in the 2000’s. Their support of “teach the controversy” was in part a conviction that public schools should be on some level religiously neutral, but in large part this.
Tell me again which view is the blind faith and which is the open-minded scientific one?
I disagree with your premise, it is too charitable–I think “teach the controversy” is probably tactical, not epistemological–but granting it the creationists sound more good-faith and open minded, in holding doubts and inviting both sides rather than admitting no possibility of error.
No, that was a rhetorical question. My point is that, indeed, there’s no way for the media (or anyone else really) to determine “what is TRUTH”. But the flipside of this is that there’s no way to determine what is “silly nonsense”, either. So, ideally, the media would just report on anything that’s notable, performing as much in-depth analysis as possible. I know, I know, it will never happen; still, a man can dream…
The implication of what I’m arguing here is that media should cover things they think are real and important. If the New York Times shouldn’t cover creationism, equally the Alabama Church Bulletin shouldn’t spend too many pages talking about how bad evolution is.
(although there might be an asymmetry because I expect the average creationist has to deal with a lot more unavoidable exposure to evolution than vice versa)
Right, but that just kicks the can down the road. What method should the media use to determine which things are “real and important” ? Creationism is undeniably real (in the sense that Creationists exist, and comprise 40% of the population), but is it important ? You (Scott) don’t think so. Your friendly neighbourhood preacher might think otherwise. Some portion of those 40% probably agree (I know I’ve met people who feel strongly about this issue, on both sides).
So, should the New York Times cover Creationism in their national news, or not ? Now, replace “Creationism” with “Climate Change”. Can you explain the algorithm they’d use to cover one but not the other ?
One difference between climate change and creationism is that climate skeptics tend to use scientific language and scientific arguments. So you can write an article where you compare the scientific arguments on either side, or straight up critique the climate skeptic view on that basis.
With creationism, only a small number of proponents claim that scientific evidence (alone) brought them to that view. Most argue that the bible or common sense convinced them of creationism, and then point out some flaws in the science of evolution to justify their rejection of it. If you want to argue about that view, you have to get into theology, which most people aren’t willing to do.
Not at all. Creationists use scientific-sounding language and arguments as well; it’s the major feature of their entire schtick. Yes, there are lots of religious people who simply say, “the Bible said God did it and that’s enough for me”, but those are not the people who are trying to teach Creationism in public school science classes.
For some examples, you can check out the Discovery Institute link that Scott posted.
I vociferously disagree with Well… on most media topics, but there’s a very important point to be made regarding how news organizations are beholden to their audience. An organization that prioritizes topics it thinks are interesting over topics it thinks its audience wants to hear about ceases to exist in short order. You can frame this as going out of business, ideological shift, cynical clickbait fishing, audience migration, whatever selection pressures you care about – the public writ large is going to get the media landscape it wants, rather than what it “needs”. I’m skeptical the causality every really runs the other way, with most of the apparent cases just being a consolidation of existing interest rather than creation.
(Are there exceptions? Absolutely – sometimes Ted Turner decides that America should care about space goddammit, and if that means the next three hours of primetime CNN are going to be a glacial spacewalk with quiet commentary then the people can either watch it or find another channel. But we can only be that lucky so often in the face of those various selectors, and their ability to budge the zeitgeist is dubious.)
On a more optimistic note, “the media landscape” is breathtakingly large these days – if you want discussion of the topic du jour tailored to your level of interest, you can usually find it with a modicum of effort. But that’s a very different process than expecting the dominant market participants to be operating on that level. (Or the meta-discussion about the media. (Or the meta-meta-discussion about that. (AVE GOSAGUL))).
By the same token, the lack of mass deaths from covid-19 is evidence the physical distancing measures were all unnecessary?
The post apparently fails to allow for the possibility, that at some point, all the important arguments have been made and have been distributed widely enough that the issue can be considered settled for all those who care about arguments. That’s what happens to almost any public/political issue and I fail to see the argument why creationism should be any different. Except in, it being faith based, the impact on believers should a priori be lower here.
That does however not mean arguing against it was unnecessary in the first place, because there are people who care about arguments and facts, and who read up on e.g. intelligent design with a semi-open mind and for whom the counter-arguments were valuable.
As for why this isn’t ongoing: (a) partially it is, it’s just a lot lower volume today, (b) public consciousness just works like that and (c) apparently there aren’t as many legal and educational confrontations which provide occassions for coverage these days.
Creationism existed for a very long time. It was down from medieval times when the war on it started. It’s gone down very little since the war on it. Do you think the trend changed noticeably because of the arguments?
With covid19 we have an exponential trend turned linear, flattened or squished.
Comparing the two doesn’t seem obvious to me
I find this hard to square with the small change in % creationist, and in creationist activity, between 2006 and now. I guess you could argue that the 60% non-creationists were all on the verge of becoming creationist until they heard anti-creationist arguments in 2006, then stopped. But most things don’t seem to work that way, eg global warming.
I made this point in a comment elsewhere, but I think this is a reasonable place to restate it:
In 2005, the danger was that creationism (in the guise of intelligent design) would be taught in public schools, on the principal that ID was an equally valid scientific theory. This may genuinely have exposed many people to creationism who might then go on to believe it.
Because the scientific community mobilized and argued forcefully that ID was not a scientific theory, and certainly not one with comparable support in the scientific community to evolution, attempts to put ID on the curriculum were struck down, thus stopping that vector of transmission.
Having convinced the judicial system, creationists gave up on that strategy, and so the issue died down.
This isn’t actually true, tho; many states are currently “teach the controversy” and have been since the early 2000s. In 2016, for example, Alabama finally mandated that evolution and climate change be on the curriculum for all schools–without getting rid of their mandate to have a page-long warning on all textbooks that teach evolution, calling it controversial, and encouraging students to study it critically!
Now, maybe this is just the evolution-favoring compromise, where the biologists grumble at the theory being called ‘controversial’ but are broadly fine with an exhortation to seriously consider the subject material. [And who knows, maybe biology seems sexier than chemistry to high schoolers because there’s a fight over it.]
That said, I can mostly find materials on how well states present the case for evolution. It seems very few publicly funded schools outright teach creationism (which I presume means not teaching evolution, or the controversy).
Interesting; my cursory inspection seemed to find no new attempts to put creationism in the curriculum since about 2009, and that roughly tracks with your claim that the states that do teach the controversy have done so since the early 2000s. This also is consistent with the article you cite, that teaching of evolution has improved since the mid-2000s.
Perhaps it’s more correct to say that the momentum was blunted in 2005 after Kitzmiller, and things settled into a stalemate, rather than a victory for the anti-creationist forces, but the fact that in 2016 Alabama finally adopted mandatory evolution-teaching suggests that the momentum is mostly the other way now.
I don’t think that a change from 46% to 40% creationist in the space of thirteen years is small at all, I think it’s quite large (if it’s real and not just data issues).
People are very unlikely to change their minds on these issues after a certain age, maybe 25. So to get from 46% to 40% you need to have the whole generation that has come of age since 2006 being *much* less than 40% creationist to drive the average down.
The post is great. I am always in favor of niceness and civilization. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the efforts of challenging creationism only made it survive longer.
If this is what happened, clearly challenging creationism is worthless. Given that 40% of Americans are creationists, it is only appropriate to teach the controversy. It is not as if sneering at them will make them like & respect science more.
Looking at the phenomenon of dis- and misinformation more broadly, there is a lot to worry about. I agree that focusing outrage on a literal interpretation of a set of stories (eg bible) designed to outline a set of moral beliefs by which a particular tribe might live is probably a waste of time. See: Wrestling with a pig.
Americans may look at this battle over the ‘soul’ of the internet as just more arguments in the public square, but there are countries that are taking the attack on truth much more seriously and see it as an attempt to undermine their legitimacy and destabilize their society. Just this morning, see here. In the case of Russian disinformation in the Czech Republic and elsewhere, propagating false narratives has a specific objective just as Trump had when he was furiously tweeting about the dangers of voting by mail in CA. As much as I dislike Trump, I’ve no beef with his use of Twitter and believed that Twitter’s response was both probably the ‘least they could do’ as well as the ‘most they could do.’ Like the Czechs putting a label on Russian disinformation and highlighting “this source of information is attempting to change the truth in a way that promotes their national objectives and undermines our own so take a closer look at the facts and decide for yourself,” Twitter did the same.
So, what’s this to do with creationism and the attack on casual beliefs? Science, particularly among this group on SSC, should be the pursuit of knowledge with no agenda other than the pursuit of truth. The attack on creationism made me a bit queasy because I believed (and continue to believe) it was attacking a larger set of beliefs (eg entire Bible) and attempting to undermine the role of religion in society (which, while perhaps a relic to some, continues to play a moderating role). The attack on this literal translation of a story on which other parables were built had behind it those that had a much larger agenda and Scott’s pointed out the futility of that.
But. The current attack on societal stability is targeting much more shaky ground than modern day theism and yes, what previously took an army to achieve is at least being attempted by Russia, China and others through other means. I despise the use of the terms “war” or “warfare” to describe these efforts as I’d prefer we keep “war” to the physical realm of killing people and breaking things to ensure there’s no confusion however, there’s no doubt that the actions of these countries in the realm of the information sphere are designed to increase their power and influence in a way that undermines and dis-empowers western institutions.
Unfortunately, our wonderful internet has provided the leverage to those that believe information can be weaponized to achieve goals previously only achievable by moving an army to an opponent’s capital. The speed with which information travels propagated by these entities Scott describes as a “free public square” (more on that later), the volume of information presented which is far greater than anyone has the ability to sort without the use of something called the “mainstream media,” and the ubiquity of mobile telecommunications have given every person (or bot) with a corner in Hyde Park.
There are those highlighting the potential for weaponizing social media platforms to achieve national objectives and describing the need for something called Cognitive Security (opens pdf) and have been doing so for years. Post Desert Storm (aka Iraq I), the military has been busy struggling with how to integrate this new ‘battlefield’ into its way of thinking variously calling it Information Operations, Operations in the Information Environment and now, more simply, just Information Warfare.
I’m content to let the creationists and vocal atheists duke it out in their little corner as it keeps them occupied doing relatively little harm to public discourse. I’m much more worried about these same platforms being used to attack the things I do think ARE important.
Oh, and about that “free public square.” A broad range of people agree that the social media empires built upon billions in income and profits are not a “free public square.” See right-wing critique of this idea here and the very middle of the road Lawfare bunch felt forced recently to exclaim:
Whatever Zuckerberg is building (and I’m still not certain he knows), it’s most certainly not going to be a public square unless he has some master plan to hand off his controlling interest to a newly established Secretary of Information.
Just as a good understanding of the Bible and it’s creationist stories requires some context and knowledge of world history in order to review it from a scientific perspective, the enormous increase in speed, volume, and ubiquity of information in our increasingly ‘noisy’ world need some context as well and so, putting a label on things in tiny print that says “you may want to get more information on this matter before taking this literally” is probably a good stopgap measure. Alternatively, you can be a bit more selective in what you read and, like Scott, take the time to seek out a deeper understanding of those things you do read. The treasure trove that is the internet will hopefully undermine the social media platforms or at least make them less of a filter of the information we consume.
The “free public square” question is one that the online media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) very much wants to keep in place. That is, they consider themselves to be content aggregators rather than publishers. Aggregators are not subject to libel laws and other expensive annoyances. Publishers are. (Speaking of the US here, I think the laws and precedents are different in other countries, such as the UK.)
Trump’s idea of whacking the online media by executive order, if he follows through, may well produce some legal outcomes that redefine (or confirm) the status of these “aggregators.”
> that the online media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) very much wants to keep in place
Except they also want to concurrently engage in censorship by denying Bad People and Bad Ideas of a platform.
Im not sure they want to so much as feel they have to.
Yes, the online media are not in total agreement on how things should work. I think Zuckerberg has actually called for regulation, for example. Mostly what they want is to be able to do whatever they want, without criticism or legal consequences. Weakening 230 would open them up to more lawsuits; they aren’t in favor of more lawsuits.
My understanding is that the decisions to “Fact Check” Trump’s tweets (I think it’s just two of them, so far) were made by a single person (or possibly two different people for the two tweets) in their
censorshipcompliance section.That section is not monitored by Dorsey except very indirectly. Having specific tweets FC’d and essentially made inaccessible is a giant can of worms. What about other similar tweets by lesser figures than Trump, for example? Twitter said that because Trump is so prominent and has so many followers, they (that is, the individual who did it) felt it was important to act.
They are probably hoping to “fix” this problem with machine learning, as good technocrats, but … good luck on that.
I feel like the use of the internet to attack information itself is just an inherently effective technique. In America (at least), power resides in the will of the people, and the will of the people resides in the internet, and so whoever can manipulate the internet can control the country. Turns out foreign governments can control the internet discourse pretty effectively, or at least push it into enough chaos that it doesn’t function. That’s it, the coup either already happened or is inevitable.
The relevant issue, then, is what will the next steady-state look like? One theory is that authoritarian states like China and Russia may be more able to survive in the era of the internet that democracies, so the next 50 years will just be more authoritarian.
Another possibility is that the ideological borders between states are melting and we’re just approaching one super-nation where the distinction between an American and an Indian isn’t strong enough to justify us being separate entities on the geopolitical stage. Ideology is inhomogeneous (i.e. people in different places believe different things), but that situation can only be stable if there’s some barrier to the flow of ideology. Ideology flows through schools and books and blogs. Historically language barriers and geographical barriers were the biggest barrier to that flow. Nation states assert their power by forcing everyone to speak one language, controlling the schools, building a postal service. If the internet makes it impossible to maintain ideological inhomogeneity, we’ll flow to the lowest-energy-state which is something like the EU except the whole world is as ideologically homogeneous as Europe is right now. We always imagined this single-nation future would be essentially western, which is the Golden Arches theory of diplomacy that America has been pushing for 70 years. Since Eastern powers are exhibiting so much influence, I now expect that the future will look more western than China, but also much more Chinese than my current worldview.
The important thing to remember is that by the time this future comes, definitionally we’ll all think it’s a great thing because we’ll have read a bunch of very convincing books and articles. Attacks of the type Russia is currently engaging in are difficult to unequivocally disavow, because they’re winning through convincing arguments (compare and contrast “convincing” and “valid”), not bombs.
You argue that giving lots of attention to your opponents is either counterproductive (Trump) or ineffective (creationism). Yet your conclusion is against the opposite tactic, trying to starve your opponents of attention (deplatforming, censorship). The more you accept the argument the less you should buy the conclusion.
I believe his point is that deplatforming and censorship do the opposite of starve something for attention. Unless you have the power to just make things disappear (including potentially the people who talk about certain things) in a relative instant, the mere attempt to censor will draw a gigantic amount of attention to something.
Scott doesn’t make that claim in this post, and while it’s clearly sometimes true that attempts to censor just bring more attention, I don’t think it usually is. I think the big platforms banning things usually does reduce the amount of attention they receive.
Right now nobody is putting any effort into deplatforming eg Michael Behe, and it’s going fine (in terms of him not convincing more people). If the news was covering Behe every day (in order to coordinate an attempt to deplatform him, or just to character-assassinate him) I’m not sure that would work better.
I would argue it would be worse. There are plenty of people who don’t support Behe, or are otherwise disinterested in any of the causes/ideas he is trying to put forward.
Then you start implementing censorship, deplatforming, and other tactics like that. This broadens the topic to one of individual rights, powerful corporations against individuals, and the possible spread of special tactics outside of fringe ideas. Who gets to decide what to censor today? Who decides tomorrow? Now you’ve expanded the base of support, from people who care about whether ‘intelligent design’ gets taught in school to all people who care about their personal civil liberties. People who don’t care about Behe’s narrow interests find themselves on his side for other reasons.
Tactics matter when a debate between two parties can be hijacked from the outside. Maybe other countries don’t care if Syria has internal conflicts they can’t resolve peacefully. Let them fight it out, it’s not our problem. But then they start using chemical weapons banned a century ago and we start to care. They start massacring people, refugees flee to all parts of Europe and Asia, and suddenly everyone is involved even if they don’t want to be. The outsiders don’t know the minutiae of where the conflict started. They don’t care about the rightness of the cause. They’re just here to see it through until it stops affecting things they care about.
+1
I can personally tell you guys that memes saying something to the effect of “They don’t censor you when/because you’re wrong” are commonplace on right-wing meme pages. People who might be inclined to believe Alex Jones update in favor of believing him when Twitter bans him… not the other way around.
Now the counter to that is that it’s harder for him to get his message out, so fewer people might find him, so on net it still might decrease the raw number of “Alex Jones believers” in society…
It’s not clear how much of the principle-based reactionary support for someone like Alex Jones translates into support for his message. In effect, someone saying, “I despise what you say but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” isn’t exactly the kind of supporter Jones is trying to attract.
However, the effect adds one more body to the crowd. So an outside observer might perceive a larger base of support for Jones and think there must be something behind what he has to say if there are so many people fighting for him. That casual observer doesn’t know that a large part of the crowd is just there to defend civil liberties, not the message. They think, “there’s smoke; let’s see the fire.” They look into it credulously, and a certain percent are convinced to support Jones.
The strategy isn’t to fight every battle as a huge public spectacle, the strategy is to build institutions that will quietly enforce standards on the big platforms. (That must be something like what you mean when you refer to “changing social media from a free public square to a carefully-monitored walled garden”, right? If people are only banned after massive campaigns that’s just what we already have now.)
Would this work against creationism? No, it’s too big and already has its own infrastructure. But against pizzagaters or flat earthers? Probably?
How about quieter forms of deplatforming? Suppose the academics in university English departments have a culture that strongly rejects some views and writers, endorses others. Would-be academics who don’t share those views don’t get offered positions. Students who disagree with those views are not encouraged to continue in the field, students who do agree are. Isn’t that a way of suppressing some views and encouraging others that, because it is less obvious, avoids the problem you are discussing?
Repeat for climate science. Indeed, to take a case where I happen to agree with the bad guys, David Card apparently stopped working on the minimum wage in part because publishing an article that reached a conclusion that a lot of the profession disagreed with, saw as supporting positions mostly based on economic ignorance, cost him friends. It shouldn’t have — the theoretical argument was a clever one, although I disagree with the conclusion — but it apparently did.
This reduces to the “science advances one funeral at a time” problem and has been around forever.
I vaguely member Megan McArdle mentioning a paper a while back that reached the “wrong” conclusion on the effect of weight on health and suffered a similar fate.
As much as they want to. They’re just entertainment companies. The only thing the word “responsible” is doing there is saying the news organization bothers to put on a higher-than-average amount of pseudo-scholarly affect.
Right. The most obvious answer to the question of “Why does the media cover Trump so much” is “because it gets ratings.”
You can try and be the big, bold, principled media outlet that says “We won’t cover Trump anymore because he’s bad and icky and covering him doesn’t make him any less popular” if you want. But doing so will almost certainly cause you to lose significant market share to your Trump-covering rivals.
Because talking about Trump is popular. Whether you talk good about him to attract some people or talk bad about him to attract others.
The basic answer to “Why did people used to talk about creationism a lot but now they don’t” is “because now they’re talking about Trump instead.” But they won’t talk about Trump forever. Eventually some other hyper-partisan thing will come about that replaces him. Probably not anytime soon, but probably within the next 10 years (note that the height of controversial creationism discussion was about 10 years pre-Trump)
I would guess many journalists authentically believe they are writing about Trump because it’s important to do so for some reason or another. Like, maybe in their minds, if the public doesn’t know about the latest thing Trump tweeted, then the public is not informed enough and we are at imminent risk of descending into a totalitarian dystopia or something, so they are providing a valuable public service by telling us about his tweets and offering responses from some experts, and they dress all this in pseudo-scholarly affectation so that people won’t just dismiss it as the unqualified opinions of some failed writer or actor.
It’s a tough job: journalists mostly make very little money, they work horrible hours to meet impossible deadlines, and they have to put up with a lot of unsavory people saying unsavory things to them all the time. If they didn’t tell themselves they were doing something valuable and at least slightly heroic, I’d bet many of them would never have gone into that field to begin with.
This is kind of a general argument against suggesting anyone do anything good, but the general counterargument is https://meteuphoric.com/2013/12/22/pretend-to-really-really-try/
I meant it as an argument against false expectations about what news organizations do, which is really an argument against a faulty understanding of what they are.
It makes sense to have expectations of responsibility (where “responsibility” means something beyond just not breaking laws) from organizations who exist to serve the public. Cops, public schools, boards of elections, the military, etc.
But why would you have that expectation of organizations whose job is comprised merely of looking and sounding like an authority on what is true and important, as a way to sell advertising space*?
*Really, how they make their money is irrelevant. Even if news organizations were 100% audience-supported, it wouldn’t change the fact that what they are is a bunch of writers and photographers and people trained to orate before cameras who use pseudo-scholarly affectations to convince you that they’re authoritative on what is true and important.
Yes, asking what sort of reporting is responsible to do is sort of like asking whether it’s responsible for casinos to ply their gamblers with free booze. They’re going to keep doing it either way, and theoretically unlike public services, it’s a mistake to discuss the issue as if your approval is important.
Even that analogy doesn’t go far enough, I think. It’s more like asking whether Burger King is using their power as monarchs responsibly, not understanding that “King” is just a part of the brand rather than a formal designation.
I would have expected my comment immediately above this one to be more controversial.
+1. Of course you could have more or less responsible entertainment companies, but any discussion about “what should media organizations do” should acknowledge that, unless we are talking about specialist media, they are primarily in the business of entertaining their audience.
But what does “responsible” even mean when we’re talking about entertainment companies?
Are you not entertained?
There’s a difference – nowadays everyone can create their own reality, and it’s easier / more comforting than updating beliefs.
Creationism was the original form of this – if you wanted, there was always a set of information-sources you could use that supported it. Church sufficed, you didn’t need the Internet.
Today there’s one of these for everything – if you want to believe that milk is a Communist plot, there’s probably a media ecosystem where that’s uncontroversially true. But it’s not leading to millions of fragmented belief-universes, it’s sorting into Red Package and Blue Package. I think this is because of beliefs being entangled in the old Less Wrong sense.
Entanglement may also explain some of creationism’s endurance – part of the standard package that tends to come along with it (call it the Fundie Homeschooler) is explicit separatism from secular culture.
You have it backwards. We don’t need these aggressive methods to save civilization, we need the threats to justify these tactics. The goal here is not to preserve science/reason/ingroup activity, but to gain power. The fastest way is generally to pick some group of people and then invent a reason why they deserve the most ruthless tactics at our disposal.
I think creationism is a good example.
1) There’s more than enough information out there for a person interesting in learning the anti-creationist argument to understand it.
2) The argument is of high enough quality that any journalist attempting to add to it is probably going to make it worse. I respect journalism, but frankly, the efforts of most journalists to explain complex topics in areas I’m familiar with is pretty low quality and often misleading.
3) So if Fox News decides tomorrow that they have a sacred duty to protect the world from creationists, they’re probably not going to convince anyone who isn’t already convinced, they’re probably going to say a bunch of things that are wrong or misleading, and they’re going to get identified as hectoring propagandists and end up without credibility to preach to anybody but the choir.
This doesn’t entirely contradict your post, but I don’t think you’ve accurately described how these battles play out.
When I see a mainstream media source take on, as you put it:
Nine times out of ten their approach is to refer to it as “debunked” or “discredited” and then move on. There is rarely actual engagement with the ideas. If there is more depth, it’s usually quoting an expert of choice who says that the idea is wrong.
The work of actual debunking is done in two places. Publicly it’s in the trenches of YouTube, the comments sections, debate forums, blogs, etc. More legitimately (but less accessibly) it’s done by scientists in reputable journals. Looking back at creationism, there were debate subreddits, youtubers such as Aaronra/thunderf00t/c0nc0rdance, talk:origins, and other such places that directly engaged with creationist ideas. These places often just took scientific ideas and explained them, though they did do some original debunking, too.
When did the Washington Post publish “here’s why carbon dating can’t be used to date very old things, and here are the dating techniques used for those”? When did the NYT put a painstaking explanation of how ring species can cause a change in ‘kind’ to print? If I’m about to be embarrassed by links to these articles then I’ll be gladly corrected — I never saw anything of the like. Where did I see these things? YouTube creator Potholer54, for one.
I feel like there’s more here, but I’ll leave my point to this: if you’re someone who reads and trusts the “mainstream” outlets then you’ll believe that the above conspiracies have been debunked. If you’re someone who believes these theories or is on the fence, you’ll just see condescension, stonewalling, and denial. The real work of engagement happens elsewhere. (Disclaimer: I’m not so sure how well it actually works.)
Of course, that’s because the real agenda is not the same as the stated agenda. The stated agenda is to fight creationism and anti-science; the real agenda is control over a brainwashed populace. In order to justify clamping down on free speech, Silicon Valley and the media have to manufacture and overhype fake threats in order to justify their repressive measures. This is also the same reason that radical left extremists see “Nazis” everywhere. In fact, I believe Metafilter even called Scott a Nazi at one point.
If the media really cared about science, they would target sociology or economics – two pseudosciences with no ability to consistently predict or replicate. The reason that they don’t do this is because a lot of our elites are heavily invested in those fields, and destroying the credibility of these two pseudosciences would result in a massive redistribution of status, wealth, and power. At the end of the day, mainstream media is controlled by powerful financial interests, and is incentivized to make those interests happy. Can anybody deny this obvious truth?
When you want to see who is lying to you in an attempt to manipulate you, just observe the logical inconsistencies in how their stated goals fail to match up to the results of their actions. That is a strong telltale indicator of an attempt at manipulation.
Yes. It’s a special case of the error by which socialists believe that, in a capitalist society, capitalists decide what is produced.
In a capitalist society, capitalists do their best to guess what customers want and produce it. The capitalists themselves are a small part of the market, so only a small fraction of what is produced is designed to be what they want. Similarly when what is produced is news.
In media there’s a counterexample – Sinclair pushes their stations’ local newscasts to the right, even where doing so loses them audience. (Of course in some places this gains them audience).
I don’t know your case, but I’m reminded of the Playboy interview with H.L. Hunt. He owned a string of right wing radio stations. The interviewer took it for granted that he subsidized them. Hunt’s reply was that, on the contrary, they made money:
“If this country is worth saving, it’s worth saving at a profit.”
One of my favorite lines. In the same spirit as Musashi:
“When fighting one against a hundred, be brave. Take prisoners.”
It’s partly a trust/coordination problem. Social media, news media, individual people, professionals in the relevant domains. We see a stupid idea with real-world consequences, and feel the need to report it (or are incentivized to do so). We look at the media that’s broadcasting it, which makes us feel the need to debate it. We see people debating it, which makes it seem like a serious issue. It seems like a serious issue intractable to debate, so we want to censor it. This whole process takes a long time, and by the end of it, there are three new stupidities for every one we started with. Although it might be easier to just ignore it all ,there are always enough people involved at some point in this Ouroboros of a process that it feels like an abdication by the thought leaders rather than a strategic silence.
One thing which makes this challenging is that the media also selects what the do cover (and declines to cover) in ways which signal tribal affiliation. For example, there are about 100 million legal gun owners in the US, about half the number of licensed drivers. Does CNN/NPR/whatever give roughly half as much coverage time to the SHOT show as they do to the North American Auto Show and on similar terms?
I suspect it also has to do with an inability to handle a lack of trust. What I rarely see asked and analyzed seriously are “why do people believe these particular things”. Sure, you’re going to have the occasional cantankerous person who thinks the earth is flat because that’s what their grandma said and nobody is going to tell them differently, or because they are natural contrarians. And a good number who are doing so as performance art. But what about those who are serious about it and go to conventions and stuff? Where are the deep-dives into the underlying philosophical premises these people hold or presume to hold? And that’s before you get to something complex like creationism which has hundreds of years of philosophy underneath it. Science itself makes certain assumptions about metaphysics, but these are rarely stated. And having different assumptions may lead to different results. But instead of going “huh – you have different unprovable assumptions about reality than I do” we get point-and-laugh instead.
A wonderful book that indeed asks, “why do people believe these particular things” is Jason Rosenhouse’s Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line. Rosenhouse is honest and respectful. (Maybe weirdly, I also found is a Straussian anti-pop environmentalism work.)
Pizzagate almost got people killed. Alex Jones became profoundly wealthy in no small measure by denying that various of our mass shootings — particularly the 2011 Sandy Hook shooting — were not in fact mass shootings. For good measure, Jones got programming miles from mocking the parents of slaughtered schoolchildren. COVID19 skeptics (like their even dumber brethren anti-vaxxers) can be considered a public health threat. I catch where you’re going with this but they are not all the same thing.
“Creation Science,” along with flat-earth advocates and moon landing denialism have proven to be relatively benign mental and spiritual tics, a threat only to their adherents credibility. They raise their own money for their own projects and have largely self-selected themselves into their own insulated universe. So as long as Clorox is forced to warn people not to drink bleach based on POTUS’ free-styling riffs on COVID-19, there are indeed bigger things to worry about.
Don’t give this stuff a platform and it gets less frequent, is the idea I think. In trying to make our world absolutely safe we enable the worst of it. That would be the counter argument to your (good) points.
Like Jeffrey Epstein?
Nope. Epstein is an altogether different kettle of fish.
Another way to distinguish between them is that the number of creationists seems to be static, and QAnon is on the rise. This could support more concern about QAnon, in terms of the fervor of the average believer as well as the numbers.
So can be people who insist that the official organizations are always right, and people who contradict them should be suppressed.
My general assessment is that many of America’s institutions are in rather poor shape credibility wise for a host of reasons. And my comment noted that creationists, UFO buffs, flat-earthers and moon landing skeptics are no threat to anyone; I think they should be left alone to contradict whomever wherever and however they so choose.
But the basic scientific claims of the utility and safety of vaccines are not up for debate. As deadly and painful diseases like smallpox, whooping cough and measles regain toeholds because their dishonest advocates have platforms on YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, they ought to be “de-platformed” right back to a shitty wordpress blog template.
I’m not an unreasonable man: When the anti-vaxxers can get a properly controlled, double blind clinical study completed and peer-reviewed that shows essential oils are better at blocking mumps, measles and tetanus than the current vaccine protocol, then of course they should be allowed back on.
I disagree strongly, on the grounds that I care more about preserving western norms of free speech and free inquiry than I care about saving that number of lives.
How do you know? Especially for recently introduced vaccines? I agree that approved vaccines are probably safe based on present knowledge, that most talk against vaccines is baseless, and that the benefits of getting vaccinated outweighs the risks for most people.
However, approved drugs have been found to have harmful side-effects before, sometimes serious enough that they were removed from the market. There is no reason to be certain that either an existing or a future vaccine won’t be found to be dangerous. Furthermore, some people have serious adverse reactions to vaccines that are safe for most people.
Let’s say that a recently introduced vaccine causes serious complications in a small number of cases, which hasn’t been caught in the clinical trials. (Ignore the essential oils part; let’s just talk about a vaccine being dangerous, without comparing it to essential oils.) What is supposed to happen? Some people start to notice that the complications seem to coincide with vaccination. Eventually it becomes suspicious enough that an RCT or a population study is organized.
My point is: anecdotal evidence is what eventually leads to a scientific study. If people are blocked from discussing anecdotal evidence, it will never get to the point of getting scientific evidence.
Maybe you only meant to suppress “stupid, delusional anti-vaxxers”, rather than more reasonable concerns. But in your zeal to deal with anti-vaxxers, you painted with a broad brush. That’s exactly what I expect the censors to do too. Even if Facebook cares to make a distinction in its rules, do you expect the moderator army that gets paid peanuts and spends 3 seconds to decide whether to delete a post that gets reported to be able to distinguish stupid anti-vaxxers from reasonable discussion?
In fact I prefer making important vaccinations compulsory but allowing opposition to making them voluntary but suppressing opposition. Free dialogue allows more chance to correct mistakes.
Nitpick: smallpox doesn’t. It has been eradicated. We don’t even vaccinate for it anymore.
10240,
I wrote that smallpox error and caught it only after I posted, so I’m glad you did anyhow. Please consider it retracted.
My sense in reading your post is that we are broadly in agreement, with a few slight-yet-important distinctions. For example, vaccinations are compulsory, or at least were, for my 4 kids in Ct. and NC — you can’t take your baby home from the hospital, send the child to school, summer camp or enroll in “official” sports leagues without them. And there was a parental exemption loophole (though I’m not sure how it works exactly since we didn’t use it.)
I would also not that while I support private companies like Twitter, Facebook or Youtube immediately deplatforming anti-vax absurdity I don’t think the fools should be A) be prosecuted (though I could imagine civil torts emerging from the angry parents of a child who contracted one of these diseases from a child whose parents exempted them) and B) prevented from making their case in any absolute sense.
Basically, the marketplace is working rationally and efficiently: Marginal, discredited and publicly dangerous ideas are being shunted aside and forced to the margins of society. They do have the right to peddle their horseshit without government interference but the privately owned commerce and communications streams also have the right not to risk embarrassment and liability emerging from hosting them.
So in the marketplace of ideas, I’m happy to see former MD Andrew Wakefield’s anti-vax acolytes having to set up camp in the far back of beyond, next to Stormfront’s thugs, and pro-ISIS terrorist sympathizers.
More generally, if we accept that certain claims can be banned on the grounds that they are obviously wrong and harmful, how can we know that only actually false claims get suppressed? You can be reasonably confident that anti-vaxxers are wrong because they are allowed to make their case, and they haven’t been able to come up with good arguments. If arguments for a claim are suppressed, you don’t know if there are good arguments for it.
You could say that the claims (whether it’s anti-vaxxers or something else) wouldn’t be legally banned, just relegated to obscure hellholes. If you want to decide whether banning them from mainstream platforms is justified, you can always go to the obscure hellholes and check out their arguments. But if you find that their arguments are actually reasonable, how can you disseminate that information, and get most people to support overturning the ban? On the mainstream platforms most people read, you can’t argue that banned claim is actually reasonable, and the ban should be overturned, because then you would be arguing for the claim, and you would get banned. The only way you can argue against the ban is on general free speech grounds, which doesn’t require actually arguing for the banned claim.
These are not just theoretical concerns. Big social media platforms ban or quarantine “misinformation”, while treating the word of official organizations like the WHO and the CDC as gospel when deciding what is misinformation. All the while WHO has to pander to China, and the CDC has clearly been wrong at some point (either when it recommended against face masks, or when it recommends them; the WHO still recommends against them). I’m not primarily concerned about evil conspiracies to purposely suppress correct information, but about overconfidence in official organizations and expert talking heads.
The fact that misinformation can be a public health threat doesn’t justify banning it. Often official information is probably right but might be wrong; if it’s right, then treating it as wrong can kill people, but if it’s wrong, then preventing the dissemination of arguments that it’s wrong can also kill people.
“Let’s say that a recently introduced vaccine causes serious complications in a small number of cases, which hasn’t been caught in the clinical trials. What is supposed to happen?”
It’s investigated, affected individuals can be compensated and the causes hopefully identified so that vaccine compositions are tweaked or special exemptions given to minimise the chances of the complications reoccurring.
Also note, ‘there may be an issue with vaccine X’ is a far cry from ‘vaccines are making all the children sick, and measles isn’t that bad really anyway’.
“Eventually it becomes suspicious enough that an RCT or a population study is organized.”
Which is fair enough. But when those studies turn up nothing (like has happened with autism, SIDS and every other bullshit claim made by anti vaxxers) then it should stop being brought up. But that doesn’t happen as the cultists always find some reason to justify why that debunking ‘doesn’t count’. That’s what’s most frustrating about the anti vax movement. They keep pushing proven (as much as science ‘proves’ anything) wrong claims as if they’re the brave mavericks bucking the establishment, whereas they’re really a collection of the sadly gullible and malevolent con artists peddling dangerous bullshit.
@Desrbwb How does anyone know that there is something to investigate? The initial impetus may be anecdotal evidence.
In more general terms, rigorous scientific experiments such as RCTs are the way to prove (or disprove) hypotheses, but not necessarily the way to make hypotheses to test. It’s a mistake to think that scientific progress only consists of rigorous studies, and everything else is pseudoscience.
Yes, but as I said, I have no confidence whatsoever that the moderators of Facebook or whatever will carefully make the distinction. We have no disagreement that anti-vaxxers (in the typical sense) are stupid, I just disagree that society is capable of only censoring definitely-proven-false claims, without slipping into censoring possibly true ones.
Every time I see “discredited conspiracy theories held by fringe elements” discsused as something that needs to be shut down by internet providers, I think of:
a. Well-documented facts that are often labeled as pseudoscience and shut down. (Race/IQ statistics, race/crime statistics, statistics on gender differences)
b Conspiracy theories that were treated as having little credibilty in the mainstream until it turned out they were true. (CIA secret prisons, NSA spying on everyone all the time, Madoff’s scam, the mortgage document forging scandal, the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandals)
These two make me extremely skeptical that centralizing the decision of what can be discussed will work out well. A responsible decider of what was allowed to be discussed might very well have suppressed suggestions of the massive Catholic sexual abuse scandal as clear anti-Catholic hate speech, and the claims that the CIA was running secret prisons where they tortured people kidnapped off the streets of cities all over the world as a crazy conspiracy theory. And at the same time, they’d probably forbid discussion of racial IQ statistics, since that’s just discredited pseudoscience.
I’ll use John Schilling’s definition of “conspiracy theory”. What has turned out to be true is not, “NSA spying on everyone all the time.” Instead, it’s, “NSA does a significant amount of collection on legitimate foreign targets that is authorized by law. Also, there was a sketchy interpretation of one statute that they used to collect everyone’s phone metadata.” The combination of this gets rounded off to, “NSA spying on everyone all the time.” But the former doesn’t count as a conspiracy theory, due to insufficient wrongness by American standards, and I don’t think anyone actually held the latter as a conspiracy theory. No one was predicting any particular conspiracy theory that NSA was just gobbling up phone metadata. They were predicting that NSA was collecting all of the things all of the time in all of the ways. So, do the facts actually confirm the conspiracy theory, or not?
Sort of along the lines of if the theory was, “Donald Trump is a Russian agent, and his underlings were used to communicate to other Russian agents,” one might ask whether, “Roger Stone worked to try to communicate with actual Russian agents,” confirms the conspiracy theory or not.
Collecting everyone’s metadata is indeed spying on everyone. We wouldn’t acquit someone of being a spy on the grounds that there were some secrets he failed to learn. I don’t think most people who suspected the NSA of spying on people thought they knew in detail just what information was being collected from whom.
Does it count as a conspiracy when the Director of National Intelligence lies about it in a congressional hearing?
The former depends on your definition of “spying” and whether you believe their two-step. Also, would you say that the tech companies, and the telecoms before them, who were the sources of the metadata, were “spying on everyone”? I think most people have a stronger expectation on “spying”. Perhaps we could take a time machine back and ask the various “conspiracy theorists” variations on the question and see how many stop their predictions anywhere near where the gov’t stopped… or if the prediction is just, “NSA collects some epsilon more stuff than minimal.” That’s pretty banal.
The latter is extremely banal – government official refuses to divulge classified information in a public setting, but immediately thereafter provides said classified information to Congressional oversight through proper channels. Or do you think that if some senator was stupid enough to ask the head of Strategic Command, “What are the codes to our nuclear arsenal,” in a public setting, that him lying about it would be considered a “conspiracy”? This fails Shilling’s “sufficient wrongness” prong.
EDIT: Let me try again. Suppose there was a conspiracy theory that the military has secret, extra-strong weaponry. Sometimes, this is described as just being basically super-power versions of conventional weapons; sometimes, it’s like, “They got alien tech, yo!” Then, some information about military research programs is leaked. And we see that, sure enough, they have marginally better tech (over the info that has been publicly released) that has been developed over mostly predictable lines. One was a direction that most people didn’t expect, but it was still a relatively modest improvement.
…has the conspiracy theory been validated?
Controls Freak:
One aside here: If NSA is substantially overstepping the legal limits on what they’re supposed to be doing, what would you guess is the probability that it will come out in public, and what would you guess is the probability that anyone will get in actual legal trouble for it? I’m not sure about the first question, but I think the probability of anyone getting into actual legal trouble for unquestionably illegal spying is almost zero. This makes me pretty uncomfortable about relying on any limits on NSA’s spying on Americans that are written into laws or formal policies or that we’re assured of by public officials.
My expectation, based on many past cases, is that if NSA is massively overstepping the legal bounds of surveillance on Americans and they get caught, when the dust clears, the only person in jail will be the whistleblower who caused it to come out in public.
Getting back to the original point, though, there are stories that sound like conspiracy theories and are denied by official sources and doubted by all right-thinking people until they turn out to be true or at least substantially true. The more we centralize the power to decide that these discussions ought not to be permitted (or should be hidden or de-emphasized or whatever), the fewer of those stories I would expect to come out into the open. And the power to suppress or de-emphasize those stories will be *very* attractive to lots of people who want to shape public beliefs, most of whom will not have the best interests of the nation or the world at heart.
I disagree with you on this. I think the NSA has significant internal and external oversight from multiple different sources, and most of those people have immense career incentives to blow any “substantial overstepping [of] the legal limits”.
Let’s review the main event that has shaped your thinking – Snowden’s revelations. 99% of what Snowden revealed was completely legal and legitimate foreign intelligence operations against foreign militaries and governments. This stuff has been massively overblown. The one genuinely controversial thing that he revealed was the interpretation of the 215 program that allowed them to collect metadata in bulk and have restrictions on querying, instead. That’s the one. Is this “substantially overstepping the legal limits”? I mean, maybe? Federal judges (including FISC) ruled 17-1 that it was Constitutional and 15-3 that it was statutorily authorized. But it was legitimately controversial. It was enough that Congress went ahead and tweaked the program (leaving it substantially the same; they were pretty modest tweaks, and there is no want for people on the pro-privacy side who claim that it didn’t really change much from the original program). Congress wanted basically the same type of program, but ever so slightly tweaked.
Is that “substantially overstepping legal limits”? Maybe kinda? They had legal authorization at the time from all three branches. So maybe kinda not? I think it’s way more accurate to describe it as, “They were pretty close to legal limits; it’s debatable as to whether they were over the line; they tried to make damn sure they had clear written approval from all three branches in order to CYA.” Does this imply that they’re “spying on everyone all the time”? I mean, it depends on what you mean by “spying” and “all the time”? Like, can we get some form of detail or accuracy in our conspiracy theory? If the conspiracy theory is, “NSA collects stuff,” then banal. If the conspiracy theory is, “NSA collects epsilon more stuff than I previously thought,” then probably banal. Most of the actual “conspiracy theorists” on this actually propose something like, “NSA collects every conversation, every camera feed, every piece of data in the world, and does so entirely in violation of every law we have that constrains them.” There is no world in which this conspiracy theory has been validated. If the conspiracy theory is, “NSA might have a program or two that debateably exceeds their lawful authority, but has been approved in some form by all three branches of government,” then pretty banal. I’m sure that we can find plenty of examples of this from almost every agency (even the not-so-secretive ones). “Government agencies sometimes go a bit too far,” isn’t very much of a conspiracy theory.
[EDIT: In addition, I usually say that even if NSA is totally unhinged from the law, it is, at bottom an Executive agency. I cannot imagine where we’d have gotten if it was truly unhinged from the President. If they were just out there doing ridiculous things, not only could it cause insane foreign policy headaches for the President, but it would absolutely cause major domestic problems for the President if they were caught being totally unhinged. We would need a conspiracy theory where they have sufficient blackmail or whatever on every piece of the reporting chain, going all the way up to the President.. of both parties, because it’s no use being totally unhinged for 4-8 years only to get blown up the second there’s a change in administration. The much much more parsimonious explanation is that NSA is actually at least trying to follow the law. They’re probably trying to push it some, but mostly trying to do so only in ways where they can get enough CYA so that any blowback falls on the politicians, not on them. And what we saw is that Presidents of both parties, Congressmembers of both parties, and a variety of judges thought that the one controversial thing they were doing was at least squinting close enough to what the law says they can do… and was in any event so close to what they actually wanted NSA to do that they explicitly reauthorized a slightly tweaked version.]
I was told essentially that by a friend who had NSA connections. That was before it turned out that the NSA had been conducting wiretaps that required FISA approval without getting it.
Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that was a felony that carried with it a penalty of up to five years and five thousand dollars. Knowingly using information obtained in that way is the same felony, of which Bush confessed himself guilty, although he didn’t put it that way.
Giving up the metadata was, I believe, in violation of the contract between the phone companies and their customers. When that issue was raised, Congress immunized the phone companies. Do you count inducing private firms to covertly violate contracts with their customers as within the legitimate authority of security agencies?
At that time, the justification given for the program was inherent Article II powers. A controversial argument, for sure, but that’s what it is. Note that, unlike the CIA RDI program, where the Obama administration reviewed but then ultimately decided against bringing criminal charges, I’m not aware that there was ever even a serious considering for criminal charges here. There was enough plausible legal CYA.
Pretty much all contracts say, “We give up information in accordance with applicable law.” Immediately after Congress explicitly authorized the program, no one thinks that the companies doing the exact same thing violated their contracts. The question of whether they had previously violated their contract just maps on to the first paragraph of this comment. If the squinty inherent Article II power argument was right, they didn’t violate any contracts. If it was wrong, they did. Congress decided that telecom companies had at least done their due diligence in trying to guesstimate this extremely tricky question, and so wanted to give them a break for what, at bottom, was cooperating with a difficult government request.
…but getting back to the top, I’m not sure how this constitutes a proper conspiracy theory that was then proven right. I don’t think anyone was predicting this type of thing at all. I think the conspiracy theories were (and are) just, “NSA bad! I bet NSA doing everything bad!” (Or stuff like, “I bet NSA has blackmail on [every politician].”) It reads a hell of a lot more like an agency (with knowledge/approval of the highest levels of elected government) got caught overextended just a little bit on something immediately adjacent to their legitimate purview. I’m sure you and I can come up with gobs of examples of agencies getting caught out just a little bit too extended; I don’t think they count as “conspiracy theories”. I think, “Yeah, sometimes, agencies will get a little bit overextended, and we try to have mechanisms in place to identify it and rein them in,” is just government theory.
Are you claiming that the NSA limited itself to intercepting such communications or that all other interceptions were done with FISA court orders? If you are making neither claim, what is your basis for denying that NSA agents, and the President in using the information they produced, were in violation of the statute?
For details on the surveillance, and opinions on it from multiple legal authorities outside the government, see this Wiki article. Note the part of the statute boldfaced above. That was repeatedly violated by the program as described.
That’s an argument for saying that what they did was not unconstitutional. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t illegal.
Is it your claim that Article II powers authorize the executive to deliberately break the law?
I had written:
It is well-known that there are plenty of Executive surveillance powers outside of FISA. In fact, most of the Executive surveillance powers are outside of FISA. The hard question is whether this was fell more in this bucket or that one. In any event, your quote references a specific section concerning certain collection of content, not metadata.
I don’t think you have any idea how many more details I’ve read about this than are in the Wikipedia article. At this point, I basically have a library.
Yep. People disagreed on this. It was a controversy. Stipulated above.
A statute cannot trump Article II authority (at least, not always; see Justice Jackson’s three-zone division in Youngstown, which has been quite influential). This is why we can find opinions from multiple legal authorities (inside and outside of the government) taking all sorts of positions on things like the War Powers Resolution.
EDIT: Oh, I just noticed in your link that you were referring to TSP, and before, I had been talking about what we learned from Snowden (because that’s usually what folks talk about these days). Yeah, TSP was kind of similar. One-end foreign. Justified by Article II at the time; was a scandal; immediately thereafter explicitly reauthorized by Congress in the form of Section 702. Because they had already gotten this approved by Congressional leaders (if with some tension), and it was extremely close to what Congress actually wanted them to do. Seems very much like, “Overextending into an area adjacent to their legitimate purview.” I think it still fits into my framework above.
I did say “That was before it turned out that the NSA had been conducting wiretaps that required FISA approval without getting it.”
And the text I just quoted at you says that is still illegal, without a FISA warrant, if it is likely to catch communications from an American person.
Do you agree that the NSA acted in violation of the statute — yes or no?
If so, is your argument that the constitution gave the executive the right to violate the law in that situation? That would amount to the claim that the statute was unconstitutional. That’s the only sense I can make of your argument.
The usual way of testing such a claim would be for the people who broke the law to be charged and to claim in their defense that the law they broke was invalid for constitutional reasons. That does not seem to have happened.
They broke the law and the government they were working for chose not to prosecute them. That tactic, if considered legitimate, appears to give the executive branch of any polity a blank check to violate its own law. Is that your position?
Not so much my claim as the claim of the Bush administration. And I’ll note that it was even sort of controversial even within the Bush administration. Charlie Savage relays the story of a bit of a crisis moment in the administration and roots it in the fact that then WH OLC Jack Goldsmith argued that they should root TSP in the AUMF (with a sprinkling of Article II), not just Article II. As a side note, the fact that they even seriously considered this, knowing full well that they wouldn’t be able to use this reasoning against anyone who wasn’t considered an “associated force” of 9/11-related terrorist groups is good evidence that the program was actually surprisingly restricted at the time. That is, they almost certainly were already targeting almost entirely folks who Congress had explicitly declared war on (which, itself, increases the support for Article II powers).
And it’s not so much that they considered the statute facially unconstitutional. Just that, as applied to the situation where the President is authorizing signals intelligence activities targeting enemy forces that the United States has declared war on, for example… the statute would be unconstitutionally infringing on the President’s Article II powers.
[EDIT: I don’t think this is entirely insane, btw. There is complicated case law for how the President’s commander-in-chief power can extend to the homeland. The obvious cases are things like the Civil War cases, where the President is literally fighting a war on domestic soil and is able to do things that, in peacetime, are restricted by statute to be “you can do this on foreign soil, not on domestic soil”. Where the lines are drawn here are complicated, and I seriously suggest all kinds of reading on this. Two easy-to-read primers (which have a slight slant in the opposite direction of Savage) are Goldsmith’s books “The Terror Presidency” and “Power and Constraint”. For a former law professor like yourself, you could probably jump directly into a much denser academic treatise that covers vastly more history and in-depth case law, but these are pretty quick and easy intros.]
I mean, sometimes? There’s a pretty long list of examples where there are these types of clashes occur. I’ve already mentioned the War Powers Resolution. Much ink has been spilled over presidential signing statements where the President says, “Yep, we’ll do this to the extent it’s consistent with separation of powers.” I wish I had curated a compiled list somewhere on the internet so I could just point to, “Look here for all the myriad examples where presidents of both parties have disregarded statutes on separation of powers grounds.” And frankly, the vast vast majority of the time, they don’t result in criminal charges to test the argument.
But I think what tends to happen is maybe not totally insane? If I were to guess how the sort of flowchart works, it goes like this. First, is there at least a half-decent argument for what they did? Bonus points if they’re appealing to equities that presidents of both parties want to retain (Obama may have disagreed on whether TSP actually was justified by Article II, but there was no chance he was going to just relinquish Article II power altogether). So, right off the bat, this cuts out a massive part of your proposed blank check. There are gobs of legal violations that don’t have any such plausible argument (see also: Watergate). We’re only considering a very small percentage of possible violations – those for which they have a pretty decent argument.
Then, there is a legitimate question on how to challenge them. Obama had considered criminal prosecutions for the CIA’s RDI program. It doesn’t appear that he really considered it for TSP. A lot of things pulled in that direction for TSP – the half-decent Constitutional arguments, the CYA getting-approval-from-all-three-branches while it was happening, the fact that Congress very quickly affirmed that it was actually the sort of thing that they wanted anyway. Some of these (especially the final one) cut the other way for RDI, and it pushed that a lot closer to criminal prosecution.
An alternative method to test these things is via civil cases or as part of a defense in criminal cases. There were a lot of examples of these things, through both the Bush and Obama administrations, leading to quite a few Supreme Court cases on a variety of Executive power topics. I can’t recommend Savage’s Power Wars enough for being a good introduction to the whole spectrum. And, as you had identified, this almost certainly would have happened in this case, too. Rather than having a blank check, there would have certainly been challenges along the lines of telecoms violating their customer agreements. That is, if Congress had not acted, the “blank check” would have stopped right there, basically as soon as the information became widely known. It is only because Congress affirmatively acted to say, “Actually, this is the kind of thing we approve of,” that there was no reckoning of their Article II arguments. If you’re saying they have a “blank check” because it’s possible that Congress could affirmatively act to endorse what they did, then I don’t think that proves nearly as much as the “blank check” rhetoric would normally imply. I read your “blank check” rhetoric as giving the Executive license to just ignore any law. I don’t think that’s true, and that the limitations are pretty much along the lines I’ve described here.
More precisely, any law whose enforcement requires prosecution by that executive. It’s an issue now with regard to police misconduct, of course. If the misconduct is public, there are ways of putting pressure on the executive, as we are seeing, but that doesn’t work if the law was being broken in secret, as in the FISA case.
Ango-American common law a few centuries back had a solution to this problem — private prosecution of felonies. That included, at least on paper, private prosecution of capital felonies via an appeal of felony, where the crown had no power to pardon the convicted felon. I may have mentioned here before the case where a magistrate ordered troops to fire on a mob protesting in favor of John Wilkes, then in prison, and the magistrate ended up tried for murder.
Which would be a different approach to some current U.S. issues.
I actually just had a lengthy conversation about private prosecutors in another venue, and I linked Scott’s review of your book.
I don’t have much to say in reply to this comment. I agree with much of what you say. Public/secret, private prosecutors being a different approach. If anything, I’d throw in that my view of how the current system is shaped to form sort of meaningful constraints on Executive power (even secret use of executive power) comes from Jack Goldsmith’s Power and Constraint, so if you haven’t read it, I’ll again highly highly recommend it. He talked about more features than I’ve mentioned here and even had a prescient section on what the phenomenon of Wikileaks was foreboding (this was published before Snowden).
Agree. My efforts to ignore Trump cause me to ignore most most MSM. I’m just not interested in reality television.
I am, however, interested in how well-intentioned gatekeeping suppresses freedom & innovation.
The last time I heard about creationism in church was 2013 or 2014. Yes, I’ve mostly been in different churches since then, but I haven’t switched the part of Christendom they were in. There were two takeaways. First, the presentation there was so bad that my entire family (most of whom are significantly more creationist than I am) stopped going to them.
Second, I got a very interesting paper from the guy teaching it. Unfortunately, I lost it and can’t provide a cite, but it was a study of how student attitudes towards creationism changed over the course of a freshmen Bio 101 class, depending on how they taught it. There were three groups: normal, really hammering on evolution, and one where they actually engaged with intelligent design as a theory. And as anyone familiar with things like ego protection should expect, the heavy evolution one saw the least change in student attitudes, while the ID one saw the most. I read it and said “everyone is on the wrong side of the battle they’re fighting over the curriculum”. Weirdly, the guy who gave it to me didn’t see that. Well, maybe not so weird, given how bad he was at understanding science in general.
Along related lines, I have long thought that actually teaching the controversy, ideally with one creationist teacher and one pro-evolution teacher and students exposed to both, would provide a useful educational experience. Arguing about something you care about can be very educational, since it gives you an incentive to look for evidence and arguments, understand the opponents’ arguments well enough to counter them, generally get seriously involved in an intellectual issue. It wouldn’t work for everybody, but it would, I suspect, work better than most attempts to get kids in school to think.
Did you see the debate a few years back between Ken Ham and Bill Nye? If so, how well do you think it would have served as such an exposition? (I never got around to looking it up.)
I didn’t see it.
I’m imagining a course where, for the first half of the quarter, half the students are taught by the creationist, half by the evolutionist. Then they switch. Students are invited to argue with the teacher and each other in both the first and second half, and the class is structured to promote interaction between the students, perhaps some of it as formal debates.
On the other hand,it would be terribly misleading because it would suggest that the issue isn’t settled science. And let’s remember that creationism is barely an issue in most western countries.
Well for starters, it certainly isn’t settled, by definition.
I think teaching that there’s such a thing as settled science would be even more misleading. It would suggest that science is just like any other religious institution, producing absolute edicts that are impervious to questioning. In other words, it would be teaching that science is the opposite of what it really is – a method for increasing the accuracy of our models of the natural world via constant questioning.
And one of the hardest won lessons of science is that our model will never be absolutely accurate. That lesson is so hard won that we’re apparently still suffering casualties today.
Now, one could teach that science produces claims that are supported by evidence, and some have more evidence than others, and that these are meta-claims that we’re tacitly committing to when we say we’re doing science, and that these meta-claims turn out to be inescapable if one wants to discover the natural world using reason instead of just reacting to it via emotional stimulus. But I see far too many proponents of science who fail to take it that far, and instead define science… using emotional stimuli.
It is settled science. The existence of a religious or political movement that wants to challenge the science doesn’t change that
Except that not all science is settled science
The fact that science is not a fixed body of dogma does not mean it can never reach consensus in any area.
In that case, you’ve just replaced the fight over whether something is settled science with a fight over what makes something settled science versus unsettled science. And your answer is still that some August Body gets to decide, which means you haven’t actually simplified the problem – you just dressed it in different clothing and then insisted it’s different.
When you do that, you make other people very suspicious that you’re not actually being scientific. Hence, why this is even more misleading.
We know of multiple cases where science reached consensus and was wrong. Do you still count that as settled science?
I don’t think the novel Coronovirus was intentionally created as a bio-weapon, but lumping that idea in with flat-earthers etc. seems a bit unfair. I would say there is maybe a 5% chance it was created, and there are only a few dozen people in the world who know the truth about that.
More likely (30%?) is that the natural virus was being researched in a lab and it accidentally escaped.
The CCP is not doing itself any favors by looking guilty.
It would be a very poor bio-weapon candidate. It does little to hurt the enemy’s military capacity, its effects on the general population are mild enough that they could be largely ignored in a total war situation, and it’s very likely to bounce right back at you.
As you say, an accidental release of viral material being cultivated for benign ends is conceivable. But the lab in Wuhan is fifteen or twenty miles away from what seems to have been the epicentre of the outbreak.
Playing devil’s advocate here but, we’re not in a “total war situation” with China. We’re not even in a limited war situation with China. We’re in, at most, a cold war situation with China.
In a Cold War, a biological weapon that is not just “very likely to bounce back on you”, but certain to hit you hard, fast, and early because it’s released in your own country first, would be very plausibly deniable. If the effect of the weapon were “mild enough” that an authoritarian command economy could contain and ignore it but that a liberal democratic society’s market economy in a not-total-war situation would suffer many trillions of dollars of damage, that might be useful to an authoritarian government with a taste for command economy and less than total wars. If the effect is also to completely dominate the news cycle in a democracy for a year or so, while being quashable in an authoritarian state’s press, then it might be a useful distraction during the year when you have to reconquer a rebellious democratic-ish province or two.
SARS CoV-2 is unlikely to be a biological weapon. But saying it can’t be a biological weapon because it is unsuited for what you believe to be the central use case of biological weapons, goes too far. And leaves you vulnerable to people with noncentral biowarfare strategies.
“Forty percent of Americans are Creationist” is a very unusual definition of “no one knows that creationists exist.”
Tell that to Molière,
Why do you say it was useless against Creationists? Creationists had substantial political influence back in the early 2000s, they haven’t now. Maybe this had something to do with the opposition they got.
Does it matter that the creationism* is kind of irrelevant, except as a tribal signal?
Like, I get the frustration that so many people believe something that seems so obviously and provably incorrect, but it’s not like being wrong about the age of the earth has any meaningful impact on the daily life of the vast majority of people.
Beyond that, there are plenty of non-creationists who believe equally dumb things. There are plenty of creationists who are pretty much on board with the rest of science apart from creationism. So I think the fear that people had that this large percentage of creationists meant that there was a huge and growing block of people completely immune to reason and science-based arguments was probably overblown (I generally think much of what looks like “believing / not believing in science” actually maps better to tribal and political alliances. Nobody is immune to confirmation bias)
*Young Earth Creationists are not strictly synonymous with “creationists”. I’ll use the shorter version for convenience and because it’s how Scott is using it, but consider my eyebrow duly cocked at this unfair conflation
+1
I’m sure people here will chastise you for understating the risks we face when potential epidemiologists are wrong about the age of the Earth by a couple orders of magnitude, but I agree that for most of the 40%, creationism does little to nothing to influence their behavior in any anti-social way.
I’m not convinced that it’s irrelevant; I wouldn’t be surprised to find a high correlation between creationism and vaccine denialism.
Correlation is not causation, and in any case I’m not convinced you’re right. There seem to be clusters of anti-vax in Blue Tribe enclaves too.
And if you are thinking it’s a “creationism = science denial = vaccine denial” thing, remember that a lot of anti-vaxxers couch their beliefs in (pseudo) scientific evidence. They are making a bad scientific argument, not a primarily religious one.
I mean, there are probably people who are anti-vaccination for religious reasons and more or less always have been, but that’s a different cluster than the “vaccines cause autism” crowd that’s popped up more recently.
Completely anecdotal, but all the anti-vaxers I know in my personal life are new age hippy types, not fundamentalist Christians…
I don’t know why we need anecdotal evidence when we can look at polling on the matter. 92% of Democrats say that it’s extremely or very important for parents to vaccinate their kids, as compared to 79% of Republicans.
10% of Republicans believe vaccines cause autism, compared to 5% of Democrats, and 53% of Republicans are unsure, compared to 40% of Democrats. That’s partisan, not religious, but it suggests that the “blue tribe” clusters are probably smaller than the red tribe clusters in general.
A few years out of date, but in 2017 white evangelical protestants were basically tied with the unaffiliated as the least likely religious group to support mandatory vaccination for a child to attend school. I wish they broke unaffiliated down more–my guess is these probably are the “new age hippy” types Matt M references, for the most part, but perhaps not–either way, they are approximately equally anti-vax as white evangelical Protestants.
For what it’s worth, I doubt a causal connection between creationism and anti-vax belief; they may have a common cause in distrust of science and mainstream sources of information, but my guess is anti-vax sentiment is more idiosyncratic. I saw somewhere that at least one religious anti-vax community rejected vaccines on the belief that the vaccine in question had been created with cells from an aborted fetus.
What’s the partisan breakdown of young earth creationists?
If all /most YECs are Republican, and nobody who is not a YEC questions vaccines, then at least half of YECs think it is extremely or very important to vaccinate kids! And 75% don’t believe vaccines cause autism!
Which would seem to put a cap on how effective creationism is on driving folks to question vaccines.
I’m not claiming that vaccine denialism is an exclusively red-tribe shibboleth; I’m only claiming that creationism correlates with vaccine denialism. I believe that there are separate belief systems supporting vaccine denialism on the left and the right, and that the right-wing version of this belief is linked strongly to creationism. I’ll admit to having a low confidence in this prediction, but I stand by it until I see evidence to the contrary; it matches well with my personal experiences.
I’m not sure that the correlation runs the way you think it does. If you’re raised in a Christian bubble, and are the type of personality who gets into things like anti-vaxxing, then you’re obviously going to ground it in Christianity and creationism, and will probably embrace those fairly hard. If you’re raised in a secular bubble and are that kind of personality, you’re going to do the same things, but ground them in Gaianism and lots of talk about nature. It’s the same people, just that one is buying essential oils from Young Life and the other is buying stuff from Gwyneth Paltrow.
For what it’s worth, from my experience people who believe one nutty thing tends to believe many others nutty things (nutty things as a gateway drug ?) and I think that there is some causation in that:
* They remove one obvious protection: if you disbelieve someone because they don’t believe X, you will trust them less when they tell you that Y is as stupid as X, and you will think their opponent as more likely to be right.
* If you prove to everyone that you can be easily manipulated, the merchant of FUD will try to manipulate you.
@Ant – I think that’s true… but at the same time, I think a lot of creationists live in bubbles where belief in creationism is not “nutty” at all. So belief in creationism may not be a strong indicator that you’ve got the sort of individual who is open to conspiracy theorizing.
@ant
What gbdub said. As someone from the Dark Matter universe, creationism is pretty mainstream here, while vaccines causing autism is just as weird here as it is where you live.
To be more specific, I was a pretty strong creationist up until college. I’ve been to the Creation Museum, and it’s quite convincing. My position changed mostly on the realization that creationism was mostly a distraction from more important spiritual issues. (I suspect that a lot of the heat evolution took was from parents who chose to blame it for their kids leaving the church. In practice, we lose people in college on Sunday mornings when they chose to sleep in instead of going to church, not in Thursday afternoon biology.)
I’m reminded of Scott’s Learned Epistemic Helplessness. The arguments in this area are hard and complicated, and essentially everyone has to take a lot of parts on trust. So you’re going to pick who you trust, and ignore all other arguments. But anti-vax is a fringe belief in most churches, just as much as it is wherever you live.
Depends on what you’re doing, e.g. if you want to discuss more or less anything related to biology or astronomy, you have to simply exclude YECs.
If a group of us are discussing developmental biology, there’s no difference between a creationist expressing their honest views, and a troll. Engaging would only lead to pain for everyone.
Often they’re happy to self-segregate, but if you’re trying to do this online, banning will be required. Yes, technically this leads to a bubble, in that none of you in that forum would live in fully disjoint realities.
The alternative: endless “teach the controversy” or tying oneself in knots trying to placate both worldviews, e.g. obviously the stonefish did not need its poisonous spines until after the Fall of Man (per Answers in Genesis dot org)
In my graduate developmental bio class, the second-highest performing PhD student was a creationist… (although not a YAC, I don’t think)
The course was notoriously difficult, taught by people utterly unsympathetic to anything resembling creationism, and the tests had 5-6 essay questions of the “Design an experiment to examine whether…” variety so you couldn’t brute-force your way through it by simply memorizing facts.
There are lots of parts of biology that are not evolutionary biology and there are lots of parts of astronomy that are not cosmology or exo-geology or whatever.
Why would developmental biology be a problem for a creationist? (Except for the ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ thing – but I understand that is currently under a cloud…)
Little in biology makes any sense outside an evolutionary framework. ORP isn’t fully true (not all ancestors are replicated during development step-by-step) but many properties of ancestors are replicated during development.
I don’t know if you’re a creationist, but it’s trivial to believe anything is debunked – a YEC at work told me “Lucy” was debunked; I didn’t pursue to try to find out what that would even mean.
I feel like once we’ve gotten to the point where “should the NYT denounce creationism?” is the question, we’ve (meaning all of us, pro- and anti- creationists) already failed. People have no problem hearing the NYT praise or denounce things that they have no tribal loyalty to, or if they feel like the NYT coverage is even-handed and objective enough that it isn’t going to cause harm to a faction they do have tribal loyalty to. But once most people are dealing with the topic in a tribal way, there’s no point to rational argument for or against. But, the good part with creationism is, the general public’s opinions on it are 1) almost completely harmless either way and 2) almost totally symbolic, in that many creationists happily interact with technology, drugs or other systems that have theoretical underpinnings in key parts of evolution and don’t seem to mind.
But that brings me to the point: the “intervention” you want needs to happen loooong before the “should the NYT denounce creationists” question comes up. You need to “intervene” long before then. In the same way that, hopefully (???), American politicians and voters have an allegiance to the constitution above partisan issues, we would want people to have an intellectual allegiance to the twin concepts of “if the proper, beneficial response to an issue is heavily dependent on objective information, try to avoid having a tribalistic signalling loyalty response to it so we can have a good and accurate response” and its corollary: “if an issue doesn’t require a proper, highly beneficial response, let people have whatever tribalistic signalling opinions they want, so as to not cry wolf and ruin our chances to have calm, objective discussions about the important issues.”
Is this hopelessly naive and optimistic? Probably, we may already be in over our heads in the Lake of Strongly Held Partisan Beliefs, so maybe we could all start laying the groundwork for the next cycle of less-than-extreme-partisanship, which usually occurs after some horrifyingly apocalyptic event finally convinces everyone of the negative side effects. But for a number of years, we really did have a general consensus that the constitution was more important that partisan issues. If the US could convince enough people of that, we can do the same with this.
In my 42 years on Earth, I’ve lived in very liberal states (MA, CA), very red states (SC), and purple states (NH, NV) – I grew up solidly blue collar, with a lawnmower salesman as a father and a mom in the construction industry. On Charles Murray’s liberal bubble test, I’m nowhere near having a bubble compared to most of my friends. And I have never – NEVER even met a young-Earth creationist. Now granted, this isn’t something that, say, my barber would reveal to me, so it might be a little extreme for me to assume I’ve never met one, but I’ve never had any reason to suspect that anyone that I’ve had a non-trivial conversation with believes in young-earth creationism. 40% of the US population? Where are these people? Are we sure that respondents aren’t just misunderstanding the question, or answering symbolically? Or maybe answering the question to signal tribe affiliation (kinda like how a third of democrats claimed not only that GWB knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks but helped to plan them)
I’ve known plenty of young earth creationists, enough that 40% sounds completely plausible.
I think it’s almost certainly one of these. The average person doesn’t really understand the nuance of debate between terms like “religious” “creationist” and “young earth creationist” but if they are pretty religious and they get asked a question that in their brain roughly maps to “are you religious or not” they’re going to pick the most religious sounding option.
This was my take also. I don’t think that these positions actually exist until you ask people about the issue, whereupon it becomes more about signaling than actual positions.
No, there are definitely people who believe the earth is literally 6000 years old.
But seriously, who cares?
I’m not confident that the average creationist or evolutionist, could answer the question “How old is the Earth” within an order of magnitude of accuracy. I don’t even know what the actual answer is myself, because I haven’t bothered to commit it to memory, because it’s completely irrelevant to my day to day life.
You know what is relevant to my life? What my children are going to be taught in school. So if I get a survey that I suspect might be used to answer the question of “What do local parents want the schools to teach?” you can bet your ass that I’m going to go with the most conservative, religious-sounding option they give me.
Presumably, the people making claims like
Do you think 10,000 years is a reasonable estimate for the age of the earth, or are you willing to be very wrong as long as the result is a more religious education?
The competing claims are generally about 6 orders of magnitude apart; you could be off by more than one and still fall into clearly into one bucket or the other.
Without looking it up, I put the Earth at around 4 billion years old, while the universe is about 14 billion years old. With slightly less certainty, since I don’t belong to that camp, I’m guessing that the young Earth creationist answer is about 10 000 years? (Kind of cheating here, since the number 6000 was just listed above, but you’ll just have to trust that’s also what I thought creationists believed before reading this thread.)
I’m guessing some people just care a lot more about the age and history of the Earth than others. I personally care just because it seems like such a fundamental and important question. But I can also understand that the perspective that “this doesn’t affect my daily life, and I pretty much never have to think about biology, so why bother worrying about it”.
@phi: The YEC answer is 6000 years old, from starting at 1 AD and working backwards through the Bible, leading to “let there be light” in 4004 BC. (Seems reasonable if you believe the Bible is the literal Word of God, to believe it over arcane science)
The real irony is that while I don’t actually know, off the top of my head, what the OFFICIAL SCIENCE answer is to the “How old is the Earth” question… but I do know that the YEC answer is 6,000 years old.
And that’s not because I follow or listen to a lot of YEC people. It’s because all the official science people I follow are far more interested in yelling and screaming about how 6,000 years is the wrong answer than they are in telling me what the right answer actually is.
@Matt M:
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter how old the Earth is, just as it doesn’t matter what shape it is. It could be round, or it could be flat, but when you want to go to the store to get some milk, you’re still going to take the same route, even if the Earth were a giant pyramid or something.
The little details only matter in edge cases. If you just want to go to the store, you can assume the Earth is flat. If you want to plot an ocean route, or fly a plane, or launch a satellite, then you kind of have to know the real shape.
Similarly, if you want to have a normal office job (well… a work-from-home job), you don’t need to know how old the Earth is. But if you want to engage with modern biology in any meaningful way, or pursue astronomy, or geology (including applied geology a.k.a. “drilling for oil”), then you pretty much can’t be a Young Earth Creationist.
The reason people fight so hard to have actual science taught in schools, as opposed to the more user-friendly “a la carte” approach, is because the latter locks out large segments of the population from certain life pursuits and careers. This is damaging to society at large in all kinds of ways. Ultimately, if everyone in America were a Creationist, then modern biological research would essentially cease… in America. It would proceed as normal in other countries.
Another answer to the “who cares?” question is that, this stuff matters for judging credibility across the board. “Who’s right about the age of the Earth, the scientific establishment, or religious fundamentalists” probably doesn’t have much to do with your every day life, but the answer bears on the question “Who’s right about vaccinations, the scientific establishment or X?”, and “Who’s right about global warming, the scientific establishment or Y?”–it’s actually quite important to know where to turn for accurate information on various topics, and having the wrong beliefs about the age of the Earth might mean that you are getting bad information on a whole bunch of scientific topics that are important.
Bugmaster:
I think this isn’t true. We had massive progress in biology done by people who were educated in schools that were forbidden by law to teach evolution. A lot of high school education is all-but-useless for people who study the field in depth later on. Just as plenty of historians had lame politically-shaped high school history courses and plenty of engineers had lame high-school physics classes because the teacher didn’t understand the material very well, plenty of biologists had high school classes that never mentioned evolution and then got their real education in biology in college and later grad school. For what it’s worth, my own high school biology teacher never mentioned the word evolution–I had read a bunch of popularizations by Gould and Dawkins by then, and I was paying attention.
I think the damage done by lousy high school and college 101-level classes in various subjects isn’t to the people who become experts in those fields–they’re going to learn way more than the 101-level class ever taught them. Instead, I think the damage is mostly people who never learn anything else–they go through the rest of their lives with a screwy understanding of some subject because they were fed bullshit instead of information during the one class they had on the subject. (The same statements holds w.r.t. news reports–many people remember the headlines, few remember the corrections on page A-37 two weeks later.)
@albatross11:
I think this might be selection bias at work. If we take 100 kids with high potential aptitude for biology (or astronomy/geology/etc.), and expose them all to a wide array of scientific topics, then maybe 50 of them would become biologists. If, instead, we drill into them that modern biology is all a lie, then maybe 2 of them will still become biologists. In both cases, you’d look at the lucky ones and say, “see, they turned out fine anyway”.
The problem is that we don’t have a crystal ball that says who has the potential for what (genetic tests notwithstanding). So, all we can do is make sure that everyone gets as broad of a childhood education as possible, in hope that something will stick.
Another, slightly more insidious problem, is that science is all connected (it kinda has to be, since there’s only a single Universe that we presently have access to). This makes it difficult to, say, reject radiometric dating but accept nuclear physics. Obviously, virtually no one needs to know nuclear physics anyway; but it’s difficult to reject that while still accepting all the other stuff that ultimately powers cellphones… and so on. I didn’t say “impossible”, mind you, just difficult.
That is to say, Creationism (and other anti-scientific dogma) doesn’t prevent people from becoming scientists or engineers; it just creates a chilling effect on the entire society. Whether you think this is important or not might depend on what value you place on science and engineering, as opposed to blue-collar jobs/humanities/routine office work/etc.
@Bugmaster: I don’t follow your logic.
Teaching the controversy would make better scientists, because someone who knows enough about the scientific method to debunk creationism or prove the Earth revolves around the Sun is by definition better at science.
Are you saying such a small percent of the population (2%?) have that mental capacity that exposing our potential future low-level scientists and engineers would deprive us of dozens for every two superior scientists the method makes out of the two highest-IQ kids in a class of 100?
Actually 6,023 by Bishop Usher’s chronology, the first day of creation being October 23, 4004 BC. Assuming I haven’t messed up the calculation by one around the year zero.
I can’t speak for him, but I’d say yes. In my experience, good critical thinking abilities tend to be a lot rarer than mere general intelligence.
Two out of a hundred for the general population, maybe. Two out of a hundred with “high potential aptitude for biology”, no. Almost tautologically no; in order to have a high potential for any science, you have to be able to recognize when the textbook and the teacher are wrong.
I have only had substantial conversations with a few members of my immediate family about this, and only a few times over the three decades of my life, but I’m pretty sure they’re 40% YEC (if not 60%). Even if you’re closer to them than the barber-customer relationship, lots of things never come up.
[I am reminded of a white couple who adopted a black child, and then discovered what fraction of their friends were racist, which they couldn’t have easily guessed beforehand.]
I think the way the survey frames the question is part of what drives the numbers. (which also seem shockingly high to me)
“Which of the following comes closest to your views on the origins and development of human beings?
1. Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided the process.
2. Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in the his process.
3. God created humans pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”
They somehow mange to make it both heavily leading and ambiguous.
I’d be a lot more interested in seeing the results of a survey that broke this up into several questions:
1. How old do you think the Earth is?
2. How long has there been life on Earth?
3. How long has there been human life on Earth?
4. How do you think life on Earth came to be?
5. How do you think human life on Earth came to be?
Or maybe even sneak in some questions to gauge their ability to conceptualize extreme differences in order of magnitude, without making any explicit reference to evolution and creationism.
I can think of two people I have known who might well be Young Earth Creationists. One thought evolution was obviously wrong, the other was a fundamentalist Christian of some sort, but I don’t know the details.
One of them I knew through the SCA, one is a West Indian immigrant who attends my wife’s church (the church is Episcopal, located in Silicon Valley, currently with a progressive female lesbian minister, so not where you would expect to find fundamentalists).
So although I have met two such people, both were contacts outside of what would normally be my bubble. There are people inside that bubble who are religious but not, so far as I know, fundamentalist or creationist.
I think people also overestimate how dangerous people who believe this stuff are at the individual level as well. My dad is a full blown conspirasist on any number of harebrained levels (aliens built the pyramids, every single person in Congress is irredeemably corrupted and will sell children into slavery for pennies, etc.) but if you look at what he’s actually *done* it’s really hard to pick out how any of those given beliefs have turned him into a danger to society as such. His life has been and remains utterly mundane and there’s no indication he’s ever done or ever will do anything outside of the average range of human behavior.
I do think we’re currently in a situation where how likely people are to wear masks is a significant factor, and this is driven by lots of things. Antibiotic resistance seems like the sort of thing that would be harder to develop in an evolution-literate society (as both doctors and patients would understand the underlying mechanism better), but now that I mention that it’s probably something that we can just check. (My guess is variation in agricultural practices will be the real driver here.)
I don’t really know any well now, but based on the Young Earth Creationists I knew from my youth, most of them don’t reject the idea of genetic change over time as such. It’s rather hard to deny that, say, dogs have hundreds of different breeds and humans are continually developing new ones or that a tall man who marries a short woman is less likely to have sons as tall as he is. They reject the idea that humans evolved from lower animals, that everything evolved from single-celled ancestors, and that given time mice can turn into whales and such.
That’s not a defense of ignorance on scientific issues, but in the particular case of abusing antibiotics I think people’s ignorance has less to do with understanding evolution and more to do with not understanding rudimentary biology generally. Most of them probably don’t really even understand what the difference between viruses and bacteria are and why that matters.
I think a much larger share of this really comes down to economic incentives as well. Agriculture as you say is the biggest driver but for sick people it’s probably more like “Can’t you just give me something, anything that might help? I *have* to work.” That’s really a sort of Moloch problem. Doctor A doesn’t want to give antibiotics but rationalizes it by saying that the patient will just go get it from Doctor B and he doesn’t want the bad Google review or whatever. Person A knows their kid probably just has the cold but is desperate to get back to work so they pressure the doctor to give antibiotics on the off chance it works and so on.
I recently read the book Deadliest Enemy by the epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, which gives an overview of what he considers to be the greatest disease threats people are likely to face in the future. In the chapter on antibiotic resistance he spends a good deal of time talking about how many of his students would work themselves up into justifying using antibiotics that didn’t work. It was a pretty insightful look into some of why that happens so much.
I’m pretty sure the median belief in “evolution-literate” society is that humans evolved from quasi-apes over millions of years, that mammals evolved from dinosaurs over millions of years, that life evolved from non-living matter over millions of years and that evolution is a thing that occurs over millions of years. If their high-school biology teacher ever mentioned anything about microbes, that was the boring part that they’ve long since forgotten, and nothing about their present intuition is helpful for understanding the rapid development of antibiotic-resistant strains.
If you take the time to talk them through the logic, they’ll probably follow it (and not really care, and forget it by the next day). But, if you take the time to talk a card-carrying YEC through the process, they’ll also understand it – and accept it, if you don’t bundle it with “and also your bible is wrong humans evolved from monkey-like things”.
If you want people to understand antibiotic resistance, and really almost all of the biology that matters in contemporary life, your best bet is probably to focus on evolution as it occurs on human timescales in the contemporary world, and leave human evolution for the AP or college bio courses. Also, at this point and probably for a generation to come, you might want to find a word other than “evolution”.
But if you expect this to meaningfully reduce the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains, I think you vastly overestimate the willingness of high school students to learn boring stuff and of adults to change their behavior on the basis of academic knowledge.
But it’s the exact same phenomenon, even if that isn’t readily apparent on the surface. Once you actually get into the details of how microbial evolution works, there’s no way to accept it without also accepting that the theory of animal and human evolution (i.e. the idea that animals evolved from less complex lifeforms and that humans evolved from other animals) is at least scientifically plausible. Sure, you can try to insist “God created humans from scratch 6,000 years ago, he just also created a universe that works in such a way that humans could have evolved from other lifeforms over the course of hundreds of millions of years,” but at that point, you’re basically ceding every argument but the last and biggest one to the evolutionist. It’s like the hypothetical paleontologist who says “Yes, dinosaur bones were planted there by Satan, but he wants to make it look as realistic as possible, so we can still use paleontology to accurately predict what kind of bones we’ll find in a given location.” At that point, you’re doing most of your opponents’ work for them.
John’s point was that Young Earth Creationists can likely be persuaded of the need to avoid overuse of antibiotics etc. – that is to say, their beliefs, even if misguided, need have no harmful effect on the human condition – regardless of whether they follow the chains of logic that you find compelling.
Of course there is. It’s called ignoring it. That’s a thing that people do all the time, with things that are uncomfortable to think about. It is, for example, absolutely possible to build and maintain working greenhouses in one’s spare time, while disbelieving in the greenhouse effect, if one’s day job is mining coal and one doesn’t want to feel guilty about it.
There’s also the related strategy of not doing the math. If it takes one year to evolve a resistant strain of bacteria in a hospital ward where penicillin is in regular use, then evolving a glorified monkey into a human being on the African savanna takes, what? A thousand years? A million? A billion? A trillion? One’s cosmogenic beliefs are going to be highly dependent on the answer, and since almost nobody can do that math from first principles the easy solution is to just handwave it and assume the math supports whatever you already believe.
The existence of a logical path between X and Y, does not, absolutely not, not even close, require a person who believes X to also believe Y. Outside of a handful of hardcore nerds, humanity doesn’t use logic that way. So if it’s important to you that people believe X, and Y is uncomfortable to them, you’re going to want to teach them X and ignore Y.
W/re our alleged desire to teach people about antibiotic-resistant bacteria, we’ve been hammering them with a deeply uncomfortable Y on the theory that, once we make them accept that, they’ll surely understand X as well. That’s just not going to work.
I thought state textbooks were a real battleground for this; it looks like in 1999 the creationists won the Kansas State Board of Education by a 6-4 vote, and then were defeated in the next election (because challengers in the Republican primary were pro-evolution!), with the standards switching back. It might be that national pressure made everyone care about not seeming backwards, instead of it just being ‘biologists specifically against religious hardliners’.
Texas, whose huge market for textbooks helps set national standards, seems to still have fights over this.
This is the wrong question. The news, in its own world, is the main source of information. This simply isn’t true generally: something like thirty to forty million people regularly watch news channels or read newspapers, maybe a bit more. Even if you presume those are all adult voters, that’s something like a third of the electorate. If those people disproportionately vote, that can still make them very important to politics. But it still makes them a minority, albeit a sizable one.
What’s the biggest information network in the US? Arguably the internet but the internet is more of a delivery system than a network. No one “follows” the internet or watches every episode of the internet. No, the biggest information network in the US are the churches, which have more regular attendees than all the people who regularly watch the news. (And who presumably pay more attention to the priest than a watcher does to Don Lemon.) Something like seventy percent of Americans attend sporadically or at least say they’re somewhat religious, which means they at least believe they should pay attention to what religious institutions say. (Contrast that to the news.)
The right question is what is the telos of news? Is it to inform people without passing judgment on that information? Then yes, they need to cover creationism. Is it to make its readers more informed about the world? Definitely, because they’ll at least encounter those beliefs in the wild. Is it to reproduce elite values and try to enforce them? Then no, it shouldn’t. Is it to make money? Then the controversy is great! Is it to act as some form of gatekeeper? Then it depends on what gate they’re keeping, though it’s also definitely failing at this job. The news never had the power to deplatform or delegitimize anyone outside of it clique. And for the majority of Americans (yes, the majority), what that group thinks doesn’t matter.
There’s an entire inter-Christian debate about creationism and I can tell you that creationism is on the backfoot due to pro-evolution Christians, who have not given up this fight. (Indeed, who have been fighting about this and young earth theories for about two centuries, including before evolution was discovered.) This doesn’t get covered because the science vs anti-science framing is more flattering to certain people.
QAnon and the like are much more fringe phenomenon. They also have much less in the way of history and institutions. But the same principle holds true: if you don’t understand how they view the world and their own beliefs, controversies, etc, you cannot influence them. Likewise in reverse, except I’d argue Christians are actually pretty good at arguing for their values to secular people on secular terms. There’s an entire stable of arguments for Christian positions made in secular, basically rationalist terms. (You may or may not find them convincing, but they exist.) There is nothing in reverse, arguments for rationalism made in Christian terms, except those formulated by Christians themselves.
The way people recognize lies is by learning and studying truth. That’s the only way. It’s the way the specialists sniff out forgeries…
Censorship only ends up making lies more “Interesting” because it puts things into the realm of the “Forbidden.”
The next thing then is: Do people really want “Truth” or do they love the lie? It’s pretty unsettling to realize that most people love the lie.
The issue then becomes:
Who is arbiter of “Truth”.
And last – we need to ask our selves “Who really cares?”
Seriously – your neighbor “believes” in Flat Earth or Tinfoil hats… Yet they live their entire life exactly the same as you do. Their kids go to the same school as yours. You go to (or avoid) the same church. You drink the same beer and laugh at the same jokes. You eat at the same restaurants. They pay their taxes and have about the same saved up in their 401K. So who cares. Theoretically they are “different” because they think “Butter side down” but for all intents and purposes they are “The Same” because they eat “Butter side up”… Just like you.
Until the president they elected has a divine revelation and decide to invade Irak because of it, forge evidence in the most blatant way possible to justify his invasion and then plunge the middle east into chaos for no apparent benefit to anyone.
Or if you want another example, what about homeopathy. No danger from homeopathy, right. After all no primary effet means no secondary effect too, so no downside to people taking homeopathy. Until you realize that some people can spend a few hundred euros on something that doesn’t make them better and increase their tendency to over medicate even with real medicament.
You want to nip in the bud those tendencies before they cause problem.
Over the past century, communism has killed a lot more people than religion, as well as keeping still more people poor. Presumably you would want to censor those ideas too?
Probably shouldn’t rant on 3 hours of sleep:
The way I see it is this: There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people, and those who believe there are more. 😛
Anyway, there are people who want to understand the world. They have a personal interest in understanding something. They’ll go seeking information and trying to build a coherent model. Maybe the information they encounter will be garbage, maybe it’ll be on the right track. There is a lot of digging, and testing and construction that people need to do to build something actionable that works. I don’t believe these people are primarily concerned with what other people think – they’re concerned with what *they* think. They’re not going to settle for nonsense, even if nonsense is all that’s on offer.
Then there are people who want to ensure everyone is thinking the “right” thoughts. They’re deeply concerned about what everyone else is thinking. Their focus is social. IMO, the truth value of their payload is secondary to making sure it gets hammered into everyone else’s heads. (There are also certain deficits to these worldviews: since the primary point isn’t understanding something, they seldom cash out in terms of the ability to use the knowledge to do something.)
The antitheists (of the activist crusading type) and the creationists aren’t on opposite sides of this in my view: They’re all trying to sell a worldview. If they can’t sell it, they’ll try to force it.
I have a lot of things I want to understand. I want there to be pure and total intellectual freedom. I don’t care if there is a lot of garbage out there in the noosphere. I’ve read books by lunatics, I’ve read books by unconventional people who had a point. I’ve read books by homicidal maniacs, communists, and literal Nazis. I want to be free to read whatever the hell I want, whenever the hell I want, for whatever reason I want without justifying myself to a mental hygene tribunal. I don’t need or want a bunch of nannies sanitizing the world of ideas for my “safety”.
AFAICT, most men have believed a lot of nonsense, most of the time. (I’m entertaining ideas that may be wrong or nonsense right now.) If you’re one of the crusaders, you think the monsters will come out in an intellectual free-for-all. When that free-for-all is destroyed, one tribe of ideological maniacs will have *won*. The world of available ideas will become sterile, and people trying to understand things will have to get very quiet to survive.
It’s a weird result if you model it like two speakers competing to persuade a common audience. But it’s more like two speakers addressing two different audiences, occasionally playing a clip from the other group to talk about how horrifying it is. To keep their audiences interested, they change topics from time to time. For a while, creationism was one of them; now it isn’t.
Another part of it is that creationism was part of the social conservative memeplex, tied up with attitudes towards abortion, homosexuality, gender relations, etc, and political social conservatism as a whole is much weaker now. Abortion is still controversial, but gets less attention than it did in the 00s, homosexuality is generally accepted, and the alignments around gender relations have changed with the rise of SJ.
I’ve long believed, as a working theory, that the reason creationism persists is that it, its archenemy evolution, and the implications of both theories, are just largely inapplicable to most people.
As much as my mother would like to tell me otherwise, I simply don’t see a kindly figure with long brown hair and a beard appearing on CNN or on Twitter or in a viral video in which he sticks up for me and takes a brutal beating that otherwise would’ve gone to me and several billion other humans, coupled with a downstream industry exploring that act of sacrifice. I mean, I see the industry, sure, but I never see the man himself, not in the same way I see videos of people training at boot camp and then running patrols in Afghanistan or operating radar equipment on an AEGIS cruiser. Neither do I see evidence of a somewhat bluish human with multiple arms and a gem embedded in his chest, reclining on a giant snake and sharing with us the latest aspect of the universe he dreamed up. Nor even, for that matter, do I see evidence of a hungry extra-universal writhing mass of tentacles accompanied inexplicably by terrestrial musical instruments.
And neither (probably) do most people. While it’s theoretically possible for any one of these to exist where we can’t see, that’s just it; we never see them, and they make no practical difference in whether we decide to buy Junior an ice cream or instead try to get him to eat his carrots one more time. I’ll go even further and say that the question of their existence won’t affect whether a guy will turn and stab the fellow next to him on the subway, nearly as much as whether he’s off his SSRIs.
So all these metaphysical theories persist, because they’re not testable by laymen, in the way one’s hunger is tested by not eating all day. This includes the theory of evolution of higher animals. Most people aren’t faced with iterative changes in lifeforms as adaptations to external pressures. Even the ones who do – epidemiologists, dog breeders, horticulturalists, etc. – might even compartmentalize it and exclude humans, who are unmistakably different from every other lifeform in one overwhelmingly important way. (Ever notice how creationists’ distaste for evolution is expressed in phrases like “monkey’s uncle”, and never as ridicule of people who think they can create a bigger tomato?)
Throw a creationism parade in every major US city tomorrow and every year thereafter; the same number of people are going to believe it as if you didn’t. Throw evolution parades instead; same result. The exact number of believers will change for completely independent reasons, like whether they find meditation or prayer puts them at peace, or whether giving up Judaism means Ben gets disinvited from the next big December party at the Hunan Delight and won’t get to see his hot third cousin anymore. The only thing you will have done is add a “doth protest too much, methinks” factor to the equation.
Another explanation I have for why alternate theories exist is that modern education shirks the groundwork of teaching how to tell whether a given batch of evidence is good, bad, or irrelevant. The cynical reason for this is that educators are too afraid that kids will apply it to everything, including whether they should trust educators. The boring reason is the same as my original working theory, though: the implications of sorting evidence simply aren’t applicable to most people. We get by well enough on heuristics like “trust your parents” and “go with what works” and “fortune favors the bold” and “curiosity killed the cat”. Evidence resolution has no killer app.
So what’s an evolution evangelist to do, then? Simple. You
kill the Batmanfind a killer app – a practical application of evolutionary theory that everyone can do on a routine, repeatable basis, as often as they switch on their TV set or their car.I’m betting you won’t find a way to apply this to humans, though, unless you’re willing to put up with some decidedly unpleasant effects. Alternately, you could advertise applications with non-human lifeforms and tolerate how humans get a different treatment. Or, you could find another hobby, like reading Derek Lowe’s blog and looking up every term you don’t recognize.
For me personally, the news lost most of its credibility long ago. At first, I thought its quality had gone down recently. But the more I started reading about the past, the more I realized that news sources were often misleading even then.
For example, when I was a kid I thought of Dan Quayle as an idiot who couldn’t spell “potato.” The real story is a lot more complicated. I thought of Waco as the government taking out evil white supremacists. As it turns out, a lot of the people at Waco were black (up to a third by some counts) and Janet Reno’s handling of the situation was very questionable. They almost certainly could have just arrested David Koresh on one of his many trips into town.
The media is a problem. And I don’t have a good solution, honestly. Skepticism is probably helpful, at least. And realize that more media consumption is not always better.
That seems…really poorly worded. The statement that “human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life” seems a rather Whiggish view of evolution, as if what the relevant hominids were doing millions of years ago was busily developing toward humanity. Were humans also already developing when only single-celled organisms were around?
(generic blanket statement agreeing with those who attribute the anti-creationist media phenomenon largely to the school stuff, and the fact that the President at the time vocally supported it)
(another generic blanket statement agreeing that the news media broadly gets things right and most of the bad stuff you hear about comes from opinion sources rather than journalistic reporting)
So Scott, if nothing the media does (fact-checking, mocking/satirizing, debunking) is actually effective at changing anyone’s mind, what does? The example of creationism is just one data point out of hundreds of big cultural issues, and it’s almost trivially true that cultural beliefs change over time. So what made people change their minds on, say, gay marriage/rights? That was also a huuuge cultural issue in the 00s, but support for SSM has steadily grown from 31% in 2004 to 61% in 2019, according to Pew research. What made this happen? In a similar vein, atheism/agnosticism/non-religious people have grown as a share of US population from 16% to 26% since 2007, so maybe the New Atheism movement wasn’t such a failure after all? Gallup also finds Americans describing religion as being “very important” in their life declining from a peak of 61% in 2003 to 49% in 2019, and the share of non-religious people growing from 8% in 2000 to 21% in 2019. It looks to me like a lot more people at the margins of the debate were “won” by the atheists than the creationists.
That was also a huuuge cultural issue in the 00s, but support for SSM has steadily grown from 31% in 2004 to 61% in 2019, according to Pew research. What made this happen?
The null hypothesis is that this has nothing at all to do with debates on the Internet.
One thing that might have made people change their mind on gay marriage was that, as lots of gays came out of the closet, people discovered that there were perfectly reasonable people, friends, colleagues, relatives, who were gay, and altered their views accordingly.
I can only think of one person I knew to be gay up to age twenty-five or thirty, plus one or two more I suspected might be. One of my parents closest friends was part of a two woman household, but it did not occur to me until many years later that they were almost certainly lesbians, and I have no idea whether my parents assumed they were and never mentioned it to me.
I don’t think Scott was saying that “if nothing the media does… is actually effective at changing anyone’s mind.” I think his point is that there is a potential “Trump effect” where constant reporting on the supposedly bad thing actually makes it more popular. I’m not sure if this is really true but… I’d like to believe that it is.
Okay, apparently anything beyond noting that my comments aren’t appearing – doesn’t appear. ?????
I see this comment.
We have banned words. Too many URLs in your comment may also make it get eaten.
Huh. Okay, I’m not sure which words are causing trouble, so I’ll have to check this piecemeal…
[EDIT] I’ve got it – it’s the words F.N…. Which is ironic because that’s in the title of the paper cited above.
I read a different moral into this. The reason we heard a lot about Creationism in the early 2000s is because George Bush was president, and he was a believing Christian. As I have had reason to drone on about at great length, the Blue Tribe recognizes one, and only one, sin, and that’s being Red. So the whole energy behind fretting about Creationism – and New Atheism generally – was “Hey, here’s this really cool stick to beat the Red Tribe with!
(I hear exempt the actual New Atheists – Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins etc. The poor, stupid, noble bastards actually thought that all those words about Reason and Science and Truth and Secularism meant something.)
Bush left office, and Creationism was dropped as an issue, because it wasn’t a stick to beat the Right anymore. The rise of Trump doesn’t change that – no one is convinced that Trump is a believing Christian, or that he really believes in anything at all. But paranoid nonsense being spouted online is a Trump thing, so people get het up about that.
If Creationism became a Blue thing we would suddenly see those who denounced it leaping into print to defend it.
This happened with Fake News.
I read a different moral into this. The reason we heard a lot about Creationism in the early 2000s is because George Bush was president, and he was a believing Christian. As I have had reason to drone on about at great length, the Blue Tribe recognizes one, and only one, sin, and that’s being Red. So the whole energy behind fretting about Creationism – and New Atheism generally – was “Hey, here’s this really cool stick to beat the Red Tribe with!
(I hear exempt the actual New Atheists – Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins etc. They really thought that all those words about Reason and Science and Truth and Secularism meant something. They really thought their audiences were genuinely against superstition.)
Bush left office, and Creationism was dropped as an issue, because it wasn’t a stick to beat the Right anymore. The rise of Trump doesn’t change that – no one is convinced that Trump is a believing Christian, or that he really believes in anything at all. But paranoid nonsense being spouted online is a Trump thing, so people get het up about that.
If Creationism became a Blue thing we would suddenly see those who denounced it leaping into print to defend it.
The same thing, after all, happened with paranoid nonsense. Scott doesn’t mention it, but back then, paranoid nonsense was a Blue Tribe thing. Anyone remember 9/11 truthers? Anyone remember Michael Moore – the Alex Jones of the Left – and his film “Farenheit 9/11“, and how half of the US democratic party went to see its premier? Abjectly paranoid conspiratorial thinking was the Blue Tribe’s thing, so it was defended in the same way that Trumpians defend it today. So, all of a sudden, it is, like, a totally bad thing.
You mark my words, should the political winds shift and the Blue Tribe rise to power backed by paranoid guff, it will suddenly become a non-issue.
Another way to frame this is “if you think a group is generally grossly misled about the actual mechanics of the world, you should probably criticize the root causes of that misunderstanding as best you currently understand them”.
New atheists *thought* the issue was religion, and they were wrong. The rise of Trump was the final proof of that, notwithstanding some earlier signs – whatever you may think of Trump, he is certainly not aligned with the explicit value-claims (civility, order, restraint, rule of law, tradition, religion) of the 2006-era red tribe!
There’s not *no* truth in what you say – there’s a culture war on, don’t you know. (And I am certainly no stranger to calling for any-means-necessary approaches to winning it.) But it’s not really fair to paint such reversals as a uniquely blue-tribe issue.
Red-tribe characterizations of blues shift kaleidoscope-like between “unruly mob that needs responsible governance” (when it’s poor people asking for welfare or black folks rioting over unequal treatment) and “elitist out of touch rich people who don’t understand Real Hard Working Americans” (when it’s scientists saying “actually this number is just definitely bigger than this other number” or social activists going “actually it really does benefit LGBT people to be treated as legitimate equals”). Or to put it as you do: look how fast fundamentalism became bad once it was Muslims and not Christians, or how fast the plight of the poor became a concern when it was West Virginia coal miners and not inner-city blacks.
I’d also like to point out that the kind of people who were new atheists, of all blue-tribers, ended up being some of the most likely to shift rightward in the interim, which I think weakens the “it was just a blue tribe weapon” hypothesis. If I hear someone talking about FACTS and LOGIC today, that’s a marker of a specific kind of conservative or nominal centrist intellectual, not a liberal. If anything, such people are often some of the few blueish-tribe conservative holdouts in this era of near-perfect tribal sorting.
I wouldn’t have described either of those groups as blue tribe. Blacks, in particular, are quite likely to be culturally closer to red tribe. They happen to be the political allies of the blue tribe, but that’s not the same thing.
True, the religious-black vote was crucial in getting NC’s anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment passed a while back.
This is a ridiculously bad faith interpretation of Blue Tribe motivations and thought processes. Even in a country as politically polarized as the United States of America, very few people actively and consciously say to themselves “I don’t actually care about this or believe anything that I’m saying, but I’ll keep saying it because it hurts my outgroup.” Sure, there’s probably some small number of political grifters who are like that, but the majority of the country’s population? It’s safe to assume that most people genuinely do believe what they claim to believe. Most of the people who opposed creationism back in the early 2000s still oppose it now. They might not talk about it that much, because it’s objectively not as relevant anymore (even in conservative areas, very few school districts are still fighting to teach creationism in schools, so it’s safe to say that the secular liberals won this particular battle). But if you specifically asked them about their opinion on creationism, I’m 100% sure that they’d still say it’s nonsense that deserves to be mocked and refuted.
But it would never become a Blue Tribe stance in the first place. I usually don’t fight against people’s hypotheticals, but this particular hypothetical is so absurd that it needs to be challenged. It would take literally decades for a sociopolitical shift of that magnitude to happen, at which point the Blue Tribe would be comprised of entirely different people anyway. Right now, any Democratic Presidential candidate who espoused creationism would never make it through the primaries, regardless of how firmly Blue he was on every other issue. His political opponents would have a field day with it, you’d see new articles and advertisements every day calling him out for “thinking that the Flintstones was a historical documentary,” it would be all over the media and the airwaves. You’re seriously underestimating how wildly unpopular creationism is among the Blue Tribe: Again, just because they don’t focus on it as much doesn’t mean they’re suddenly okay with it.
Granted, you’re right about this part. Hell, you don’t even need to talk about “the Alex Jones of the Left,” since Alex Jones himself was more associated with the left at that point and even had figures like socialist philosopher Noam Chomsky and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich on his show. But paranoia isn’t a specific belief, it’s a mode of thinking. People of all political affiliations are susceptible to this particular failure mode, especially when they perceive their political opponents as having more power than them (as American liberals did back during the Bush era, and as American conservatives do now). That’s different from a change in their object-level beliefs.
There are also some distinctions that you’re missing here. Actual far-leftists (e.g. socialists, communists, left-anarchists, and other revolutionary anti-capitalists) have always been prone to believing in paranoid nonsense, and they still are; it’s a great example of Horseshoe Theory in action. But those sorts of people are typically on the furthest fringes of the left. Most of the Blue Tribe is comprised of moderate center-left liberal reformists, rather than extremist revolutionaries, and those people have always been quick to reject conspiracy theories. Even back during the Bush era, when they were a little more paranoid themselves and more likely to make common cause with both far-leftists and libertarians (another political group prone to paranoid thinking), they still tended to roll their eyes at some of the more outlandish ideas being thrown around.
ChelOfTheSea, LadyJane, I’ll respond to you together, to keep this unified. Chel – if I may call it that – you seem to agree with my analysis when you say that the New Athesits were wrong. Okay, that’s an argument but that then supports my thesis that the energy driving the movement wasn’t a commitment to atheism or secularism.
Well, I enjoy my consistency here; I’ve always thought poverty was a Very Bad Thing. But as regards the first one, these are just not commensurable. When fundamentalist American Christians don’t like, say, the 10 commandments being removed from a courthouse, they peacefully protest. When fundamentalists Muslims don’t like, say, cartoons they… react rather differently.
That was one thing I noticed when I was involved with New Atheism: the majority were really, really big on talking about them thar dumb, stupid, rednecks who didn’t support evolution or abortion – and went completely quiet when the issue became murder for blasphemy, murder for apostasy, murder for being the wrong religion… Please read the first link in my original post.
Lady Jane, respectfully, Moore wasn’t the fringe of the Left. He was the center. He was pretty much the mainstream voice of the American – and even the broadly Western – left.
I think we’re talking past each other here. There’s an analogy with the f.n. problem. Very little in the media is fake, as in completely fabricated. FOX isn’t a pack of lies; it’s just extremely selective and prone to Isolated Demands For Rigor. As you say, FOX will discuss rural white poverty, but not black American urban poverty etc… The same thing is true across the spectrum. Lies aren’t told; it’s that the relevant questions are systematically avoided and not asked. As much as I loathe Chomsky, he’s right about manufactured consent.
That is the case with the Blue Tribe’s behavior in this case. Creationism meant anti-Bush meant it got covered. But it has become startlingly clear where the real source of extremely violent, reactionary fundamentalism comes from, and it’s from a direction that that the Blue Tribe doesn’t care to examine. So the whole question gets dropped; in fact if you read anything about capital-A Atheism, it’s usually a meditation on how atheism is Too White, or whatever. Atheist bashing is a left-wing thing these days.
(btw, I can totally see something similar happening if it comes to creationism – maybe not fully fledged creationism, but I could see a lot of handwringing about the racist implications of evolutionary theory etc. etc….)
In a way both of you make my point. You say that there isn’t a focus on religion or creationism since those aren’t really relevant anymore. That is, that American Christianity isn’t scary. I could have told you that. That’s not disagreeing with my point that it was always about opposing the red tribe, it’s saying that that was justified. Again, you can make that argument, but it doesn’t address my point
Especially as there is a certain other religion out there and the Blue Tribe’s response is beyond pathetic. I know that if I talk about honor killings, or murder for blasphemy, or the genocide of the Yazidi, or the slavery in Sudan and Libya, the Blue Tribe just does not want to know – indeed, it lambastes anyone who speaks about this stuff. Just look at the reaction that poor old Bill Maher get’s for daring to say stuff like, guys, I support MeToo, doesn’t that also include those women in Cologne?
Again, the New Atheists were against all religion. Christopher Hitchens was famously supportive of the secular and atheist movements in Iraq, helped back Ayaan Hirsi Ali etc. When you write that the reason people don’t back Atheism and Creationism anymore is because American Christianity isn’t as relevant any more, that’s my criticism to begin with. It was never about being against religion or superstition, it was about beating the Red Tribe.
I’m not an American and I really do think that reason is an absolute, that religion is superstitious nonsense, and that violent fanaticism needs to be opposed. I’ve taken part in demos demanding justice for the Yazidi, and written in defense of free speech. I know when I talk like this who has my back and who doesn’t. All I can ask is to take a closer look at this.
@Prussian: People care about issues that affect them directly, or directly affect people they know personally. The plight of the Yazidi people in Iraq is very much out of sight for most Western liberals, just like the plight of Tibetans in China or Tutsis in Rwanda. That doesn’t mean they’re in favor of oppression against those groups, or even that they’ve actively taken a neutral stance; if you asked them, they’d all agree that Yazidi/Tibetan/Tutsi oppression is a Very Bad Thing. Maybe you can even convince a few of them to donate to a charity dedicated to helping those people. But they’re not going to center their lives around something so distant. People have a limited amount of time and energy, and they’re generally more inclined to devote their efforts toward fighting closer and more visible forms of oppression, even if they’re intellectually aware that more distant instances of oppression are far worse in an objective sense. I don’t think this is necessarily irrational or immoral or hypocritical, and claiming that it is sets an unreasonably high standard that virtually no one would be able to meet.
But Free Tibet was a hippie-adjacent liberal slogan for decades…
Okay, the Yazidi are out of sight out of mind. But the massacre at Orlando was right in America. The fact that no one, not even in America, can publicly criticize Islam without living in permanent fear of your life, is extremely local. Heck, there are many Infidel and Apostate refugees in America who can tell you about their experiences at the hands of the Left.
Also, I notice that American blue tribers are perfectly capable of fretting about people far away, when it suits. For example, I see a lot of stuff fretting about Modi in India, or Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, or about politics in Europe, or, drum roll, about Israel and the Palestinians. But when you try to get some similar concern about, e.g., the massacre of the Fur people in the Sudan… crickets. I write that last bit with extreme bitterness. Please watch the link.
Lastly, as regards the Tutsi – here I’m pausing to pick my words with care – I remember that no one cared even slightly about the role that Clinton One had in greenlighting the Rwandan genocide.
@LadyJane
You are using the kind of sophist rhetoric that I see a lot from the left, where a demand for somewhat equal treatment gets exaggerated (“they’re not going to center their lives around something so distant”) and then dismissed as demanding too much. Often, examples of small acts that could be done, simply get ignored, like you did.
For example, Prussian brought up Bill Mayer, whose only significant difference to John Oliver is that the former is far more consistent in his political speech. They both talk to camera’s for a living, so having Oliver act more decently doesn’t require a significant change to his behavior. He merely would have to discuss things he now ignores.
Anyway, it’s pretty obvious that the entire ‘we care about things that are close to us’ is at best a half-truth, with very close things being ignored when they favor the wrong group (men, for example) & the plight of very far-away peoples being seen as important when it fits the right narratives (‘bring back our girls*’).
* Boko Haram was specifically murdering boys (and ignoring girls) before they started kidnapping girls, but there never was a ‘stop murdering our boys.’
For what it’s worth, I like both Maher and Oliver. I also don’t know that their actual views on Islam are that different; Oliver was certainly willing to mock Islamic reactions to depictions of Mohammed. The fact that he doesn’t mention or criticize Islam as frequently as Maher doesn’t come across as hypocrisy or cowardice to me; different political commentators tend to focus on different things.
Was this a problem endemic to left-liberal circles, or was this basically the case for everyone other than a very small minority of activists who cared about Boko Haram from the start? I’m rather doubtful that right-wing conservatives or centrists or the politically disengaged were any better on this issue. And if the “small minority of activists” I mentioned were mostly left-liberals (which seems likely to me), then I’d say liberalism is marginally better on this front than the alternatives, even if only to a very slight degree.
Granted, you could say that it’s worse for liberals because there’s a greater degree of hypocrisy involved: Treating girls as valuable but boys as expendable might be consistent with a conservative ethos, but it goes against the ideals and values that liberals claim to uphold. You’ve made similar arguments in our past discussions, and I don’t think you’re wrong, per se. But at the same time, it seems like that line of thinking will discourage people from ever aspiring to be better, since it carries the implication that it’s preferable to have low standards and live up to them than to have high standards that you fail to meet.
LadyJane,
Just some quick points. One, it occurs to me, that your comment that the fate of the Yazidi or the Fur isn’t of interest to the Blue Tribe American seems to contradict Scott’s assertion that the in-group for the Blue Tribe is Everyone On Earth Minus The Red Tribe. It suggests instead that the in-group for the Blue Tribe is the Blue Tribe, and that professing concern about group X is just a cultural shibboleth.
That was my problem to begin with. I ask humbly for 10 minutes of your time to read my linked post.
I really do need to press you on this point about Islam though – even if you ignore those professions and say that Blue moral concern stops at the Atlantic & Pacific, then this doesn’t explain Blue silence about honor killings in America, especially in contrast to the hysteria of an ‘incel uprising’. I think it’s clear that the chain here is incels = gamers = red = bad, while honour killings = Islam = anti-red = no problem.
Or look at the way that Michael Moore is suddenly bad news. Blue tribers all over the West have discovered that Moore is peddling fascism and racism, something they completely missed for decades before. The essence of this is Moore’s call for population control. Now, it’s been a Red talking point for decades that calling for population control is racist, but the Blue took it on board for the simple reason that now population control is related to concerns about immigration is related to red, is therefore Bad.
Before you ask, yes, the Reds can do this stuff too, especially in the era of Trump, where suddenly bailouts and protectionism are cool.
The essay to read here would be Orwell’s Notes on Nationalism..
My point does seem to stand though, that the reason New Atheism failed is its founders quaintly naive belief that they were changing minds and inspiring conviction in people, whereas the real energy that drove them was “RED TRIBE -BOO!”. I think even Scott makes a reference to George Bush in his piece on it…
Your linked post contains quite a lot of asserted facts and no sources or support — for all a reader can tell your facts are all invented.
It doesn’t say over how long a period of time your “33 known honor killings that have happened to date in North America” happened. Or how you know they were honor killings. Or whether the perpetrators were arrested and tried.
David, a misunderstanding. I refer to the post linked first in my original post. You can see it here. I’d appreciate your views on that also.
As regards honor killings in the United States, I leave that to google for the moment
Interesting piece. You make a number of points that may well be correct.
A few comments on one element of your argument. You write:
I’ve taken these two bits together because you can find Muslim majority societies in the past that treated non-Muslims much better than contemporary Christian societies treated non-Christians. Spain is the obvious case. Muslim Spain was Sepharad, a golden age of medieval Judaism, and the Muslim rulers made no attempt to forcibly convert or force out the Christian inhabitants. After the Reconquista, the Christian rulers expelled both Muslims and Jews and spent a good deal of energy thereafter hunting out secret Muslims and Jews who had only pretended to convert.
This is relevant to the second bit you quoted, because the Muslim rulers of Spain were still Muslims, as were the Muslim rulers of the Ottoman Empire and other medieval Muslim societies that were relatively tolerant by contemporary standards.
None of them, of course, were tolerant in the modern Western sense of considering religion irrelevant to the individual’s relation to the legal system. Non-Muslims in Muslim ruled societies owed different taxes than Muslims, were under different legal rules. But when the Sephardim were expelled from Spain, it was largely Ottoman ruled territory that they fled to.
That doesn’t tell us much about modern Islamist societies, but it does imply that belief in Islam is not inconsistent with a tolerant society.
@DavidFriedman: There is no Christian-majority state on Earth today that’s tolerant of religious minorities in the Muslim sense, and if there was, we can predict with Bayesian confidence of 99.99% who in the West would loudly denounce it as a theocracy. That hundreds of years ago Christian states tried to achieve homogeneous beliefs is irrelevant to today’s Overton Window, Culture War, etc.
Or what do you think would happen if India or Myanmar said you had to be a Hindu/Buddhist to serve in the military and Muslims would be subject to much higher taxes to compensate? This is all easy Bayes.
What bothers many of us is that Islam is held to Islamic standards of tolerance while other religions are held to strict standards of secular liberalism.
David, as you say, what concerns me is the world today. That even in supposedly moderate places like Morocco, Indonesia and Malaysia, the treatment of Infidels – not to mention women & gays – is horrible.
History, sadly, doesn’t protect us here. I feel that keenly – prior to Kaiser Wilhelm, Germany was notorious for being laid back and tolerant and happy-go-lucky, especially compared with the workaholic Americans (a book work reading is Alice Hamilton’s autobiography, Exploring the dangerous trades which has a great section on Germany). And we know what happened after that.
I would also suggest that the history of Islamic tolerance is something of a myth – dimmitude was not like what we’d call tolerance, and like a much worse version of Jim Crow. Basically, when people talk about the Islamic Golden Age they are saying that, at the best it ever was, Islam was slightly better than Christianity at its most godawful worst.
I don’t think that is even close to correct. The only part of medieval Christian Europe I can think of that was as tolerant of Jews and Muslims as Muslim Spain was of Christians and Jews is Southern Italy under Norman rule. Spain after the Reconquista was a particularly bad case, but expulsions of Jews were not uncommon elsewhere in the Christian world, and the only tolerated Muslim communities I can think of were in Southern Italy and Outremer, although there might be other examples I don’t know of.
The relevance to the present situation I pointed out and you ignored. You are claiming that Muslims have to be intolerant unless they stop being Muslims. People who were tolerant and remained Muslims provide evidence against that.
The only part of what you are objecting to, so far as I can see, that is implied by well established Islamic law is the separate legal category for non-Muslim Peoples of the Book, and that only applies in Muslim ruled countries. Nothing in Islamic law requires honor killings. Circumcision is required for Muslims, both male and female, as for male Jews under Jewish law, but interpretations of what that means vary across Muslim cultures, including purely symbolic female circumcision.
Toleration for Christians and Jews was built into Islamic law. Toleration for other non-Muslim groups wasn’t, but at the end of the Mughal Empire most of India was still Hindu.
David,
Let me just touch on a few of these points:
That is not what I wrote. I wrote that Muslims couldn’t be reformist without challenging the central texts, including the Koran – and if they challenge the Koran, how are they still Muslim?
There’s a difference between challenging and ignoring. Sure, many Muslims are tolerant people, because they ignore the violence of the core texts. That’s good. However, it is insufficient, because it means that they do not successfully oppose the fanatics who have chapter-and-verse of the texts on their side. Challenging those texts takes someone on the path to apostasy, not reform. There’s a little known anarchist pamphlet Against the God Emperor which discusses the state of affairs in Imperial Japan. Soclalists and other radicals were constantly frustrated for while their programs were wildly popular at first, the people always dropped them when it was pointed out that those programs were contrary to the Divine Will of the Emperor. I submit something similar is happening now – hundreds of millions of Muslims are tolerant human beings, but they dare not speak out against the Divine Word.
All I’m going to write on the rest of this is that your view of what Islamic tolerance was is a little too optimistic. At best, it was oppression leavened with pogroms; at worst it was exterminationism. You mention India. India remained Hindu because of the sheer numbers of Hindus. That didn’t stop the Mughals from giving it the old college try. Some estimates place the numbers murdered at eighty million. Here I can only recommend looking at Andrew Bostom’s Legacy of Jihad and Bat Ye’or’s works on dhimmitude. All are full of primary source materials – eyewitness accounts, contemporary histories etc.
ANYWAY, this is getting away from point. My argument was that the reason that New Atheism failed and you don’t hear anything about creationism is that both were only supported when they could be used by the Blue Tribe as a stick to beat the Red. When that changed, the stick was thrown away. It was never about actual principled rejection of religion or fanaticism; it was always about tribalism.
This being so, the only logical course for people like me – who really, truly do think that secularism matters, that religion is wicked nonsense, and that Reason should be the standard – is to try and sell the Red Tribe on these values.
I think you vastly exaggerate “the violence of the core texts.” The source material for Islamic law, the Koran and Hadith, represent a large body of doctrine heavily dependent on interpretation. The Koran mentions wine three times, and only the third time says or implies that it is forbidden. The Koran has material from the period when the Muslims of Medina were fighting with either the pagans of Mecca or the Jews in villages near Medina, which sounds very violent, but also the statement that there should be no compulsion in religion and that if Allah had wanted all people to be of one faith he would have made them that way. Islamic law specifies the penalty for killing Christian or Jew as well as for killing a Muslim — lower, if I remember correctly, according to three schools but not the fourth.
How do you feel about the essential violence of Judaism? Lots of sanctioned killing in the Old Testament. According to Maimonides, the Law permits Jewish warriors fighting non-Jews to rape captive women. He doesn’t like it, seems to regard it as God’s compromise with the faults of men, and he reads a bunch of restrictions into the text, but that’s what the law says and Maimonides is an honest man. Do you conclude that Jews have to behave that way unless they are willing to ignore the violence of the texts?
I’m not arguing with your interpretation of the left — I suspect it is exaggerated but has a good deal of truth in it. But I think your view of Islam and Islamic history is badly distorted.
You refer to “the central texts, including the Koran.” What do you consider to be the other “central texts”? Challenging hadith is a dispute over scholarship, not religion.
David, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree here. The amount of evidence and argument needed just won’t fit into this thread. If you’re interested, you can find an extremely lengthy post here.
If you think my views are badly distorted, well, I only hope you’re right. I would be ecstatic to find out I am wrong. Could I ask you to put three or four books that you can recommend on this subject? I’ll add them to my ‘to read’ list.
For my part, I very strongly suggest Andrew Bostom’s trilogy, The Legacy of Jihad, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism and The Legacy of Shariah. They are full of primary source material.
@LadyJane
I wasn’t criticizing the response, but the defense of the response. What I notice is that people on the left seem to invoke this, in itself reasonable argument (for certain situations), more often and broadly than people on the right seem to do.
When it is applied so broadly that it starts to encompass low effort acts, people who act against a cause, etc; it doesn’t appear credible to me.
Ultimately, this then comes across as being very similar as having people answering the question about their weaknesses during job interviews, with a very ambiguous answer that could as well describe a strength. Saying: ‘I care about more things than I can act on, so I may look biased, but I’m merely prioritizing,’ actually merely pushes the question one level further, to the question of whether the priorities have a substantial bias.
Note that issues typically compete, so assigning a sufficiently low priority to something typically means that people will try to sacrifice that issue when it competes with one they care more about.
So I think that your narrative is a denial of how those on your side can and do harm competing causes and a denial of how a priority bias in practice will often result in (minor or more major) forms of oppression.
@LadyJane:
Were you online during RaceFail ’09, when genre author Patricia Wrede (who until then thought she was progressive enough) discovered that she was unforgivably racist for writing a novel in the “Alternate History” genre where Siberians never crossed the Bering land bridge and became Native Americans? One of the arguments against her when the genre fiction fandom rose up as one to smite her was that such a Point of Departure is out of bounds, categorically wrong… because many Native Americans believe they were created in the Americas. (link is about academics, not RaceFail).
David, a misunderstanding. I refer to the post linked first in my original post. You can see it here. I’d appreciate your views on that also.
As regards honor killings in the United States, I leave that to google for the moment.
If course. If you are liberal, you should accept everything except illiberalism.
This is what I mean by persecution pareidolia – 3/4 of the country is Christian! Literally every President has been a believing Christian, and the President from 2021-2025 will be one also.
(Trump is the most questionable on that front. IIRC Obama, in addition to being a secret Muslim and a liberal atheist, was also a radical Christian, cf. Jeremiah Wright-ghazi.)
How can you possibly know that?
Would you describe Jefferson as a “believing Christian?”
(Wiki)
I thought about Jefferson but didn’t want to get dragged into the deism thing because I’m not theologically savvy enough to know whether that counts as “Christian”. Too late, and apparently you don’t, and that’s fine, you would know better.
So we’re up to 1/45 who was religious but not Christian (nor anti-Christian AFAIK). Are there any others? Has a President professed some other faith, or no faith, or even been silent on the issue?
You might be able to make an argument that they were faking, but that’s totally unknowable for anyone. In politicians, the public persona is what matters anyway. If they (including modern Democrats) had to fake Christian belief to be electable, does that say “in danger of persecution” to you?
If the claim is that no President is anything but a believing Christian, the number is unknowable but probably greater than one.
@John Schilling: Even if every single American President was secretly a die-hard secular atheist who held nothing but contempt for religious beliefs, it wouldn’t make Corey’s underlying point any less true. The fact that almost every President has felt the need to profess Christianity is compelling evidence against the idea that Christians are being oppressed; whether or not their professions of faith are genuine has no bearing on that fact.
Surely a definition of “believing” that doesn’t require mind-reading is acceptable when responding to OP’s claim that someone other than OP is a “believing Christian”? Obviously we can’t know what was in W’s heart either.
The spectrum runs (minus Jefferson) from “can credibly claim to be Christian” to “believes with probability ~1” (W, Carter, …)
Then what’s the point of including “believing” in the claim at all?
If there’s a de facto requirement that US Presidents even pretend to be Christians, that’s problematic and worth discussing. Why are you all short-circuiting that discussion by including the probably-false “…and they all believe it!” claim, and why do you think the lame-ass “it depends what you believe ‘believe’ means” evasion is any help?
That was my main point. You made a factual assertion about something you could not possibly know. If you had said “professing Christian” I wouldn’t have made the same response.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think it’s useful to distinguish two different attitudes a president might have:
1. He believes in Christianity, believes that preventing church services is a bad thing, perhaps that each week services are prevented means fewer souls saved.
2. He believes it is in his political interest to appear to think that preventing church services is a bad thing, because many voters are Christians.
Given the large gap between reality and public perception, those lead to different actions. I’m pretty sure Romney would be case 1, would not be surprised if Obama was case 2.
@Schilling, Friedman OP used “believing Christian” to refer to W, making the relatively safe assumption that he’s not George W. Bush’s SSC-trolling alt, he could not have possibly known either.
My point, if anyone cares, is that there’s no way you can say W was a “believing Christian” but not every other President as well (except Jefferson depending on who you ask).
@scott – isn’t this just a broader application of the Streisand Effect?
This is really starting to piss me off.
Never mind that six percentage points is often a lot. It matters that creationism was publicly refuted. Yes, it matters if you show that a claim is wrong before simply dismissing it as low-status. Yes, it matters if there is a wealth of arguments still available online, that anyone who remembers this can just point to. Any rationalist, never mind an aficionado of LessWrong, should already understand this incredibly basic point.
Most people are probably rationally ignorant about creationism vs. evolution.
Neither has much, if any, affect on their actual lives, or the choices they make.
So if you poll them, they will choose the option which they were told by an authority figure, or the one which best signals their affiliation.
Most probably don’t have any strong opinion one way or the other. Certainly not one based on much firsthand evidence.
This is true, and it goes beyond this for certain questions that have become attached to identities. This paper did a big analysis of some Pew scientific literacy data and found that people’s answers to questions about evolution and Creationism were predicted almost entirely by their religiosity, not their number of other correct scientific answers. And it went both ways: highly scientifically literate respondents gave the more Creationist answers when they were high religiosity and low religiosity respondents gave the more anti-Creationist answer even when they showed low scientific literacy on the other questions.
By some process this question has become one where people give you an answer that tells you about their religiosity rather than their scientific knowledge.
@sharper13:
In support of your point, note that a lot of leftists took it for granted that the default assumption is that there are no intellectual differences between men and women. That is the opposite of the assumption that would be made by someone who took Darwinian evolution seriously, since it implies that we are optimized for reproductive success and the essential difference between men and women is their role in reproduction. Evolution doesn’t tell us what the differences are, but it would be a surprising coincidence if they didn’t exist.
Well, yes and no. That’s a wholly materialist way of framing it (so yes, it logically follows that atheists should believe in scientific sexism), but dualists or idealists are free to make both ontological and normative claims about how much brain evolution matters to the intellect.
Creationism got big in the late ’70s and early ’80s at a time when discussion of atheism was declining. The surge in creationism in the mid-2000s patterns with an increase in discussion of atheism, so it looks like the New Atheists flogged a dead horse to make a lot of hay.
@Scott Alexander, interesting counterpoint to the ID = creationism trope.
https://evolutionnews.org/2020/06/confessions-of-a-liberal-darwinian-skeptic/