Consensus Troubles [TE]

Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges!

It’s a newsletter thing about fringe culture and the people who make it.

It’s finals week and I’m your procrastinating host Stephen!

There’s a hopefully little thing I’d like to discuss.

“What the shit is that?”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the rhetoric of science communication and how things often framed as “fighting disinformation” can reinforce fringe suspicions of mainstream authority.

Let’s start:

Good Faith Disagreements

Let’s start by setting aside frauds and propagandists.

The likes of Tucker Carlson, the Krassenstein brothers, or Giorgio Tsoukalos have predictable opinions based on their personal economic interests and goals.

They’re… bland.

We want to talk about people acting in good faith because that's where the interesting conversations happen.

I want to start with a painful video that’s stuck in my head for a while. But to do that I have to reference something I don’t really want to discuss but can’t really ignore. So I’m just going to say it and you can look shit up for yourself if you care to.

Accused sexual abuser Neil DeGrasse Tyson released a video last year sharing his response to actor turned would be Galileo, Terence Howard’s theories on math.

Tyson did something very cruel here. And he did not recognize that it was cruel.

Preface: I have not delved deeply into Howard’s ideas. My impression of him is that he’s more or less operating in good faith, but is hyper sensitive to criticism… because of all the criticism he’s received and the damage to his career and so on. Most of what I know about the guy is snippets from interviews.

He seems sincere and intelligent but working on a map of the world so idiosyncratic it’s not really compatible with consensus reality anymore.

He seems to deeply believe he’s solved significant problems but nobody cares to understand what he means.

So he once sent Tyson his theories.

And Tyson did something I really empathize with: He treated the work seriously and gave honest criticism as an academic with significant mathematic training.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of an academic in their field tearing an idea apart, you probably can imagine what happened next.

Howard felt like those criticisms, apparently offered in good faith, were personal attacks and… didn’t react well to it.

I didn’t detect malice on either side.

Yet, all Tyson succeeded in doing is wasting some of his own time and devastating a guy he said he wanted to help. I’ve seen clips of Howard talking about it and he feels quite betrayed.

This is a common experience and something I think is the foundation of the anti-science movement: The disconnect between the methods and motivations of lay people and academics.

And any science communication worth doing is going to start with that in mind.

Really, any communication has to start with understanding where the audience is coming from and aiming one’s message at translation between yourself and that audience. This is of course extremely difficult.

Tyson tried to do something he thought of as kind: Showing Howard respect by treating his ideas the way Tyson would treat a peer’s ideas.

But because those ideas are incoherent relative to the consensus of mathematics, well, instead of making Howard feel respect he just felt insulted.

As maybe the most prominent science communicator in the US, Tyson should have known better. But failing on this front isn’t anything new.

Despite the accusations against Tyson and Howard’s apparent incoherence, I wanted to use this example because I feel quite a bit of empathy towards both positions in this situation.

I suspect all Howard really needed was validation of his efforts and someone to spend the requisite hours exploring the structure of his own ideas and maybe a book on how to do proofs.

Instead, he’s been radicalized against the establishment.

Academics don’t like to hear this fact but every time that happens someone makes it way easier for frauds and propagandists to sell their bullshit. And while it rarely happens with someone so prominent it is pretty common that some academic will be a dismissive dick to someone who tried thinking for themselves and didn’t do a very good job.

Many of them get justifiably bitter about this. Then if they run into a line like, “Colleges are indoctrination centers” or “Professors are the real elites of society and must be stopped” they’re far more likely to buy in.

Until the second Trump administration this has been mostly a vibes problem, but it’s now a matter of life or death for the academy itself. Academic freedom and the sheer possibility of having an academic career are now on the firing line. Editor's note: While finishing this the NSF halted grants, which will be devastating to research.

And the resentment pushing people to cheer for that has roots in academics own behavior.

It’s not the main driver of this problem, of course. That would be the religious right and their corporate think tanks wanting to discredit academia and spending decades lying about it.

But those lies are only believable to people some of the time. And what I’m talking about here makes that problems worse.

Trust The Science

What exactly is consensus reality good for?

Well, quite a lot actually.

Let’s start by teasing apart some terms: Consensus, Scientific Consensus and Consensual Reality.

The former means a kind of general agreement, the middle one is a more formal within a specific scientific discipline, and the last one is a way to talk about what social groups think is true separate from the underlying reality.

There’s another kind of consensus in group decision making where a facilitated process creates a decision everyone agrees to. Or more or less everyone depending on the rules agreed to. We’re not going to go down that rabbit hole now.

We’re starting here because I think this is another common way people trying to fight pseudoscience or disinformation alienate people.

I see it more in debates around evolution, climate change, and vaccines than anywhere else: An appeal to the authority of science.

To people who agree with the authority of science, this feels compelling. “Well, if most scientists agree, it’s probably true”

But to anyone already primed to dislike science it sounds like, “The CIA investigated themselves and found no wrongdoing.”.

Sure, of course your team says they’re good.

Why? Because most of us work primarily in our social groups. We trade memes among ourselves and treat information from our group very different from outside information.

To get out of that you have to commit to looking at reality. Which is difficult, time consuming, and messy. Academia is a machine built to try and force people to do this but they still fail regularly. Academic culture is just as janky as anyone else’s culture.

Max Planck didn’t say this for no reason:

“An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.”

Now, the thing with that quote is while it’s often true it’s not some kind of natural law for scientists. There are plenty of examples of major switches in a field that took place along other lines.

Those include breakthrough discoveries or new technologies that forced an immediate reevaluation of evidence such as the discovery of germs, how X-rays helped identify DNA, or ice core sampling helped prove manmade climate change.

People can be resistant to change but enough reason to change can spur them on anyway.

Just before I started writing this I was sent a report about a paper arguing there's strong evidence for a 9th planet sized object the size of Neptune out in the deep Kupier belt where it takes 10,000 to 20,000 years to complete an orbit of the sub..

I say that because, well uh, I've argued that if there was another earth sized planet in the solar system we'd know because of exactly the kind of gravitational disruption evidence they rely on. So I may be eating some crow on that issue, depending on how the paper does with peer review and future observations.

The practice of empiricism demands I revise my opinions as new information is understood.

And sometimes that happens at scale. It's not necessarily easy or pleasant. But it does happen and building a culture where it's encouraged is a great achievement.

Ironically, scientific literacy has given many who do not want empiricism new attack surfaces to work against. You can push science on itself to create conclusions you like if you just have enough money and lies to throw at the problem.

What's in a Consensus?

So where does that leave us with our old friend the scientific consensus?

Well, I think Archeologist and science communicator Flint Dibble stresses a really important point: Science moves from Known to Unknown.

You build on the facts you can identify and move from there. Scientific credibility requires being able to fit the known facts well enough to not be precluded.

It takes about 10 to 20 years to teach a human how to do that decently well if you count all formal education and that's what I'm doing. Somewhere in that ballpark.

And that process involves a significant retooling of a person's understanding of what evidence is, how to build arguments, and how to collect data.

Hopefully it's a refinement.

But, of course, the Scientific consensus isn't true exactly. It's just a pretty good bet all other things being equal, depending on history and uh power. Like, we can't pretend that money from industry and the military aren't a huge influence on scientific research. It's messy and often difficult to cut through to see the mechanism bare.

Yet, pseudoscience enthusiasts often try to muddy the waters on those mechanisms. Like, the existence of Big Pharma corruption is undeniable. But it doesn't mean that everything the industry does is ontologically evil, as many act. And those who loudly declare themselves opponents of Big Pharma are often even more motivated by profit.

So often it turns out to be a false choice.

This is how people try to rig the game: Consensus isn't inherently true or false. The consensus is often wrong, but it's typically much more resilient than speculation.

Why? Because there’s a ton of work-checking being done. Now, every step of the process can have fraud or bias or corrupt influence, but over time those become more obvious and are regularly challenged.

How much and why depend on the history and specifics of the field in question.

It can be very uneven, often depending on personal relationships or animosity, how a field actually plays out. There’s a lot of conflicting variables.

Institutional science is structure to pit those conflicts against each other in such a way that higher quality research is produced. And on a long enough timeline I think that’s a safe bet. It gets complicated when funding sources are analyzed, but as best I can tell, while scientific fraud happens, most researchers in any given field are sincerely trying to expand the reliable knowledge available to their field.

But all that takes time.

And it’s supposed to take time.

Science can be quite conservative about its findings and while this frustrates many people, I think it’s actually a good thing much of the time. Like, it’s not really helpful if the basis of institutional knowledge is completely rewritten every couple years.

There will always be people who take the refusal of institutions to immediately embrace their brilliance and drench them with praise for their genius personally. Intellectual rejections hurts!

I don’t begrudge people feeling upset at that. I do get pretty tired of them hiding their failures to build up enough evidence behind a facade of conspiracism.

I kind of have to bring up Graham Hancock here because he’s one of the highest profile examples of this. A place where he had something of a point was with Göbekli Tepe, which did contradict the narrative about who could build megalithic sites when it was first uncovered but has in the decades since become a crown jewel of archeology.

Why? Because it passed muster. The evidence checked out, not once or twice but dozens and dozens of times.

A Note On Evidence

The fundamental mismatch between a lot of institutional scholarship and fringe thinkers (myself included) is found with what the standard of evidence is.

I’m not proving anything in these essays. Hell, I’m usually not even making a rigorous argument. These are more explorations of ideas than anything so formal.

I may use evidence or logic to make a point, but they’re not strong enough to argue they’re a level of formal proof.

To stick with Hancock, I’d respect him a ton more if he was clear about what he was speculating about and how. He simply does not have hard evidence for his main claims. Some of his arguments are quite bad and in quite bad faith because he’s trying to make his case sound stronger than it is.

That’s why he needs archeologists to be a boogieman.

Without that rhetorical flourish his ideas just aren’t very interesting beyond talking about with your friends while high. And we do need that kind of imagination.

But by overselling his ideas and blaming his critics for not agreeing with him, he makes his own ideas that much more fragile.

Motivated reasoning is a bane to each of us and a decent chunk of the reasons the standards for evidence in academia are so high is to try and counterbalance the way what we want to be true changes what we see.

We’ll come back to Hancock, I think. While I’d say he’s much more sincere and much less deceptive and harmful than the Ancient Aliens crowd, he’s still a masterclass in dishonest rhetoric.

Point is, he needs the consensus to be malicious to sell his books. But I think that’s a childish approach that does disservice to both Hancock and his ideas.

Consensus Troubles

Like many autodidacts, I love Descartes idea of doubting all knowledge and trying to build a fresh foundation on certainty.

It took me a long time to realize that Rene Descartes’ failure to achieve this wasn’t a personal failing, but a flaw in the approach. You can doubt everything, but you’re still likely to recreate your own biases when you do it.

For Descartes, God’s existence didn’t need doubted. When I did it, I recreated a bunch of my trauma within a quasi-gnostic frame.

In his debate with Graham Hancock, Archeologist Flint Dibble described the work of science as moving from the Known to the Unknown. Hancock has describe himself as skipping the known part and delving into the unknown directly, without a framework to understand what he finds there.

He tries to mean that he’s not prejudiced by his expectations. But the sheer fact that he always finds evidence for the same thesis since the 90s, namely a globe spanning Atlantean empire, demonstrates this isn’t true.

There are lots of unknowns and Atlantis is surely only one of a great many possible things to find there.

I’d suggest that Graham’s approach to all this fails to live up to its hype.

That’s not to say we should grant any scientific consensus unchallengeable authority.

In fact, we must challenge the consensus to advance understanding. That’s part of what scientific progress means.

I think of it as an invitation to bring your A-Game.

Here’s one of the many places where I disagree with the scientific consensus: Autism research conducted by neurotypical researchers is abysmally bad and a ton of it imposes so many assumptions about what Autism is that it’s worse than useless.

But it would be exactly as wrong of me to demand they change without providing comparable evidence. And at least for now I’m not willing to do the work to develop that evidence.

So I have to admit that they owe me nothing. Not even to acknowledge that my opinions may have merit.

It takes a ton of work to know enough about a field to challenge its core assumptions. Work most people don’t want to do. And that’s fine.

As with many things my approach takes inspiration from statistics: The scientific consensus is the most likely conclusion given the body of accepted evidence and theories at the present time.

Any part of that is open to challenge.

But challenge must be substantive.

One of the most successful theories in the history of Science is Einstein’s general relativity. You would not be reading this if its predictions weren’t accurate, as satellites wouldn’t be able to accurately function.

Published in 1915, General relativity took 4 years before it got its first hard confirmation about how light would behave during an eclipse. It’d gain general acceptance over the following decade but wouldn’t reach full maturity for decades as our ability to observe deep space greatly expanded.

And maybe more significantly, it wasn’t accepted without modification. Einstein did a hell of a job, but he didn’t get everything right. Most notably fudging a term in his equation to make the universe static because that was the cosmological consensus at the time.

Consensus is a helpful tool to get your bearings on a subject. The best shot researchers have put together for people who don’t want to go deeper and find out more.

Developing new knowledge requires an understanding of what other knowledge is available so you can know what work needs done to challenge it.

It’s hard and time consuming.

Like, where would we be if Graham Hancock had decided to use his public relations skills to identify sites for more formal exploration and getting that research funded 20 years ago?

Seems like it’d probably be a better place.

Note: I’m not using him as an example here because I think he’s a villain but because I think he’s chosen to approach the work in a way that seems like a dead end to me. I think of him as a cautionary tale.

The vast majority of people in Graham’s position don’t get netflix deals or to go on the biggest podcast in the world to share their theories. Mostly they seethe in silence, often after alienating their friends and family. And that fucking sucks.

And it doesn’t have to. We literally don’t have to play that game.

It just means doing more work or at least being more honest with the limitations of what we know or believe.

Wrapping up.

Whew.

Yeah, I don’t really have anything to say here. Lunch is waiting for me.

Hope y’all are having a good time despite all the shit going on.

See you soon.

-SF