Gatekeeping and the Cultic Milieu
Welcome back!
I’m your host Stephen and this is the Trenchant Edges. A newsletter thing about fringe culture, weird ideas, and the people who make them happen.
I’ve been watching a lot of Milo Rossi content on youtube over the last few weeks and it’s gotten me thinking. Milo is an environment scientist and archeologist who debunks conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.
He’s fun and likable and I enjoy his content.
But I think his efforts at science communication reveal a deeper problem that happens to sit smack down in our wheelhouse.
It’s gonna be a bit loose today, but I think it’ll pay off.
Explaining the Gap
As a longtime denizen of The Weird Fringe, I always feel like an alien when I hear people talk about academic arrogance and how dismissive experts are.
Why?
Because I’ve talked with hundreds of PhDs in a huge swath of fields. Some of them have let me just kind of show up to their graduate courses. I’ve spoken with many about very taboo subjects.
Almost none of them have treated me with contempt. And remember, prior to this past May, I was a college drop out.
But you can’t spend 30 minutes looking around fringe history or archeology spaces without someone talking shit on academics.
So, how can we account for this difference?
I want to suggest three interlinking causes:
Getting people to reflexively dismiss expertise for being expertise is very useful for anyone running a grift in this field.
Few fans of fringe culture seek out professional expertise and so their reference sample for who academics are comes from the media, where they’re largely trying to debunk or dismiss ideas or presenting some novel research.
Many people don’t have the time, inclination, or education to develop either a functional theory of knowledge or an understanding of how to talk with academics on their own terms.
#1 just means that there are a lot of people who have good reasons to want people to be suspicious when anyone presents expertise to them. Former Fox News host and Swanson frozen food heir Tucker Carlson is good example. Tucker frames his criticisms of expertise as skepticism of government and technocrats, but that rings hollow because he’s absolutely fine with both state tyranny and technocrats that support his political views.
He’s a propagandist and he wants his audience to be unwilling to listen to alternative views.
Why? Because a ton of his views don’t hold up to serious scrutiny. He’s cultivated a milieu that advances his political interests.
And the fringe has no shortage of people with similar views. If I didn’t want you to read other people, I’d even be one of them. My political project requires you all being like, kind of good at dealing with information. Doomed, maybe, but worthwhile.
That said, while I think #1 is the most common for leaders, I think it’s mostly #2 for followers. Most people who listen to Joe Rogan are curious, busy-ish, and kinda lazy. They like being able to get interesting new ideas spoonfed to them. And that’s cool enough in theory.
So when someone tells you that someone of a higher social class than you thinks less of you and you don’t have any knowledge that contradicts them, like, why would you disagree? Especially if you only see them in adversarial contexts?
This justified presumption of arrogance is some of the most profound harm that rationalist jackasses like Richard Dawkins do, btw. He is looking to gatekeep rationalism and push out any alternative view.
Nevermind that most academics are just as annoyed by him as anyone else, lol.
And then we have #3.
This is where I think the crux of the issues is: Gatekeeping a list of approved “scientific” beliefs isn’t the goal here. I don’t think I know any academic who’d say it is.
The goal is a society made up of people who can tell the difference between what’s true, false, messy, and contested reasonably well.
You know, a society of people who can fully think for themselves.
Most of why I can is I’ve privileged lots of time to think over pretty much any other consideration so I’ve had time to call bullshit on myself. I ask, “how do I know that?” multiple times a day.
And in doing that I’ve surveyed a lot of attempts to answer that question and have ended up with a lot of pretty good answers… for my purposes.
Your tools define what’s possible to build and what you want to build defines what tools you need, so I’m aware that my views are themselves not generalizable. I don’t know a fucking thing about an awful lot and I’m constantly trying to keep an eye on my horizon of ignorance.
It isn’t easy. We’re built to act on beliefs, not to test them regularly.
And the most important parts are actively understanding and working against the constant possibility of error.
But that’s a little about what it’s like after you’ve got tools to work on knowledge.
How do you even know you need to learn more about it?
For me the answer was I started examining my beliefs and asking myself, “Why do I believe this? Is is true? What are its effects on my life?”
It takes real work and there’s no way to avoid that except signing up for some flavor of ignorance to simplify things to a manageable level.
Contrary to that Alan Moore quotes about people being uncomfortable at the world being rudderless, I think the bigger issue is complexity. Many people have deep seated suspicion and contempt for structural explanations of how society works.
It’s impossible to say and probably far more complex than this but I think part of that resistance is sheer complexity.
Conspiracy theories are very handy for reducing the infinite complexity of the world into a comfortable good vs evil narrative where ontologically bad others scheme to destroy us, the ontologically good.
And if we just rid ourselves of the ontologically bad, we’ll have a golden age of prosperity and righteousness.
It’s garbage, of course, but emotionally resonant to a lot of people. Especially if you dress it up with real crimes. Like, if you take the fact there are rich pedophiles and say, “My political enemies are all rich pedophiles and they’re all part of the opposing party.” you’ve got a story that can catch on.
That won’t ever really work but working isn’t the promise. It all goes back to Blair Warren’s One Sentence Persuasion course:
People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions and help them throw rocks at their enemies.
Gatekeeping and Pseudo-Authority
In science there's a question called the demarcation problem.
It's about what is and isn't science.
Since Covid, we’ve seen a ton of attention brought to disinformation, misinformation, pseudoscience, pseudolaw, and so on.
They’re decidedly on the “isn’t” sign of the line.
These terms are, well, adequate for professionals in their fields who have a deep knowledge of the mechanics of how their field produces, tests, refines, and dismisses knowledge.
But if you're not dealing with those processes yourself, well, how can you verify them?
How can you know what's true or not?
Science as an institution suggests there are a slew of useful processes you should go through to know. Broadly called the scientific method, they’re broadly about doing stuff to try out different models of the world and ruling out the ones that evidence doesn’t support.
But where do those methods end?
We’re not going to answer that question because it doesn’t have a singular answer. And frankly, I haven’t studied the question recently enough to give a good account of it anyway.
Many fringe figures point to academic credentials and say those exist to keep regular people away from the good stuff. And this isn’t entirely wrong.
Academia started off as medieval religious education that gradually morphed into a way of reproducing upper class education, that eventually was turned into mass education for the middle class.
You only need to look at the upper tier of education in the US and UK to see this at work. Over a quarter of US presidents went to either Harvard or Yale and I’m not even going to open up a list for how many prime ministers in the UK went to Oxbridge or Eton.
Education very much is an institution rooted in reproducing class power as the Marxists would say.
But within Science, credentials are just an invitation to the conversation. After that you have to, you know, do something. Perform an experiment, collect some data, do some of the real work. Only once you have claims and data to assess can you start making public assertions.
Even a PhD isn’t some magic paper that makes your ideas be taken seriously.
What does that is a combination of good work and let’s say ornery social systems gatekeeping what’s in. It’s funny, science is just as prone to hype as any other social system but you rarely hear fringe people throwing that in their face.
In the short term it’s just as petty as any other social scene. It’s time and the accumulation of evidence on the scale of decades that outs frauds and corrects bad ideas.
And that scale kinda sucks when you need to know what’s going wrong now, but there it is.
Point of all of this is, gatekeeping is an important and healthy part of the scientific process. But you know what it doesn’t help?
Anyone outside that process.
Like, if you’re not going to events, publishing and presenting papers, and engaging with the work of others you’re not going to be able to really understand the nuts and bolts of how each field works.
And working scientists who are usually teaching in institutions increasingly run by real estate hedge funds looking for assets to strip value from are too busy keeping all their plates spinning to teach the public for free.
So let’s step back from our falsely-anthromorphized Science here and look at it from everyone else’s point of view: The most popular academics you see are at least partially frauds selling you some shit on daytime TV.
Dr Oz is a fun example here because he really is a phenomenal heart surgeon with a genuine body of research under his belt and… he still ended up pitching diet pills on daytime TV. From everything I’ve read he’s actually a brilliant surgeon. A legitimate expert.
And he still ended up lying to the public.
He’s not an isolated case. We could do an entire episode on various flavors of TV expert who take advantage of the public’s trust in them.
And it’s guys like Dr Oz who form people’s perception of who scientists are. I’ve heard dozens of psychology PhDs talk about Dr Phil. Know how many had something good to say about him?
None.
Small wonder then that academia has a credibility problem.
This isn’t entirely science’s fault: Science communication is hard and throwing out an appeal to authority like “Trust the science” is way easier than explaining all the crap that goes into validating a vaccine is safe enough for human use.
But that kind of shortcut makes for a fertile public for whatever counterfactual fraud you want to point to.
Which brings us back to dis/mis-information, Pseudoscience, pseudoarcheology, pseudolaw, and pseudomedicine.
Rhetorically, in an argument these terms are an attack on ethos, the character of an idea and the person promoting it. You’re not even worth criticizing. You’re not even wrong.
You’re just doing something completely unrelated to reality as defined by academia.
These terms lend themselves to appeals to authority because they’re so extreme. And it’s understandable why Scientists would want to do that. After all, most of these things have been tested and found wanting.
Remember: Science works by disproving claims that aren’t true, to narrow down theories about what is true.
And a ton of the, uh, intellectual waste is produces ends up in the cultic milieu.
And it may not be clear at all to a lay person why one theory is accepted and one rejected. Harsh.
A story, after watching Graham Hancock’s ancient apocalypse miniseries, I went to a message board where I knew there were some academics with relevant knowledge and asked them about the lesser dryas comet theory he had and found a guy who’d published papers on it who appeared to show that the physics of what a comet would do just kind of couldn’t do what Graham needed it to.
Did I understand the physics he used? Not really.
Did I read his paper about it and attempt to understand it? Yup! But I just didn’t have the math or physics to parse his claims.
What do you do in that situation?
I marked it down as, “Probably no, this paper seems legit”. Maybe he was wrong or maybe his calculations of the physics of the problem overlooked some possibility or factor.
His issue, as I recall, was that there was no mechanism to get the comet to explode the way Hancock needed it to.
I’m not as categorical a no as the author of the paper I tried to read because I don’t understand the physics of it. But since it passed the sniff check in a field I have to defer to experts on, I assume it’s probably right until I see a reason to revisit it.
That’s hard to parse, even in retrospect. I can see why so many people are frustrated with the cult of expertise in the US, particularly because there’s a wide gap between what people develop authentic expertise and what people are held up as experts in the media.
As I said: Gatekeeping makes a ton of sense for people within institutional science. It’s about keeping noise out of your precious signal.
And the many pressures on academics just seem to be piling up more every year as the MBAs continue to run the show, it’s harder and hard to do good science communication.
Now multiply all that behind a media environment where the only business models are begging billionaires for money, hate clicks, or tabloid bullshit.
Why *would* the cultic milieu even want to be on the other side of the gate?
The Cultic Future
The hardest thing for lots of academics to understand is that many people’s distrust for them are built on sincere experiences with very confident people held up as experts who turned out to be wrong or frauds.
Nothing about our current situation in politics or media makes that likely to change or improve.
We’re years deep into what Terence McKenna called, in his very 90s way, the Balkanization of Epistemology. His argument was that the marketplace of ideas on the fringe had created a level playing field where all ideas where more or less accepted on equal terms and this kind of everyone gets to set their own reality ideology had created a culture with a great many traps in it.
His answer was the only alternative to being bounced around from one con to the next is to take on the responsibility to understand the world as it is for yourself.
Culture exists to close off possibilities, to simplify, to turn living potential into scripts so you’re easier to control.
You must become an artist and create your own culture because that’s the only way it’ll really be your’s.
And while I think that' works decently well on the individual level, I’ve been working in that direction myself for 20 years now, I’m not sure it produces a functional culture or a better milieu.
For one thing, McKenna’s plan more or less demands a commitment to alienation. That’s worked fine for me but recent years have shown me how much, uh, worse lots of people react to isolation than I do.
As I hope he’d expect, his views are just another cultural trap now.
For myself, I suspect that even trying to build out a fringe culture as a fringe culture is kind of doomed. That’s why I went back to school last year and why I’m going to grad school next year.
I don’t want my foundation to be weird ideas. I want to be able to play with weird ideas without my life depending on them. Much more honest that way.
Anyway, I don’t have hard answers here. What I’ve got are a lot of questions about the nature of how all this is supposed to work and what can come out of it.
I doubt social trust is coming back any time soon and, frankly, it kind of sucked when it was around.
We clearly will transform into something else.
Lots of the signs point to disaster, but I doubt that’s the only option even now.
Wrapping Up
Alright, well then, that was a fun dip into a new/old topic.
Let me know what you think.
And, uh, don’t be surprised if you see me a few more times this month.
Believe it or not, I’ve been writing drafts the whole time and they’re going to be, well, let’s say concentrated.
Hopefully less wordy than this one :-D
Alright, we’ll be in touch.
Really good, as always. It's something I've been thinking about a lot, also. How do I know what I know? Is that a credible way to know things? If so, how do I get others to know what I know?
Of course, you've put that in much more intelligible terms