Stumbling In The Dark for Knowledge [TE]
1986 words, reading time: 10 min
Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges! A newsletter about fringe ideas and the people who have them.
I’m your flakey host and Master of Ceremonies, Stephen.
Things have been delayed due to a combination of Who I Am As a Person, Grad School, and *waves hands at history stubbornly refusing to end*.
But this isn’t about that. Instead of continuing a feedback loop where I don’t write, I’ve found another option.
Write about something else.
“Hey, isn’t that why your original vision of this blog didn’t actually work out over 5 years? Like, you started writing something else and never really got back to Terence McKenna.”
Damn, sock puppet. You got me.
This hopefully won’t be that exactly, I still have a half-finished third Matrix movie to complete and to read the rest of the comics.
But not today!
Gatekeeping and Consensus
I’m once again thinking about how we argue against conspiracy theories.
One of the most common arguments against a wide slew of ideas is Scientific Consensus. This is a bad argument for a lot of reasons.
The biggest one is simply that consensus is a proxy for accuracy. And, like, maybe that’s fine for climate change where the consensus is stable and has only been gaining evidence for decades.
From the point of view of a “climate skeptic” that’s just an appeal to authority, easily dismissed as invalid.
Slogans like, “Trust the science” can easily be flipped around as proof those on the side of the consensus are uncritically repeating what they’ve heard. It becomes proof of your ignorance.
The controversy over the antiparasitic agent Ivermectin is a pretty good example. As I recall, there were a handful of studies that showed it might work against covid. As further experiments were done it became clear those earlier studies were not done well and oppositionally defiant people rallied behind it as a cure/preventative for covid.
As the evidence against it piled up, conflict between pro and anti Ivermectin-for-covid became less about the underlying effects of a possible treatment for a global pandemic and more about cheap shots between social groups.
I pick this because I took part in that because, frankly, jokes about horsedrugs are always funny.
Been making them since I found out about ketamine.
One of the things that got lost on a lot of people on my side during this is that, well, ivermectin is a pretty powerful drug if you have a parasite. It’s not snake oil, it just doesn’t treat covid.
Watching people act like a legitimate medicine is just a horse drug turned off a lot of people from listening to those they disagree with. This happens at all sorts of levels.
Does that make it any better at treating covid? No.
But it does push people further away from more effective treatments.
There’s a feedback loop here and telling people who don’t want to agree with authority purely because it’s authority isn’t going to bring them around.
The Consensus Problem
Effectiveness aside, there are lots of reasons to avoid this argument.
The biggest of them is, well, the scientific consensus is probably wrong. In fact, the assumption of scientific progress implies that the scientific consensus is currently wrong.
Were the consensus right, no progress would be possible. We’d know everything!
Various flavors of anti-science people will hold this up as proof we shouldn’t generally trust science, which is equally silly and pernicious.
The scientific consensus is, at any given time, a pretty good bet given the evidence that survives peer review. But since science is a process, this will tend to improve as more information and more techniques are available.
Science is also historically bound, with ideas built when we knew less propagating through later work. We can see this most clearly in psychometrics, a subfield of psychology dealing with measuring psychological conditions.
The most popular thing from this field is the Intelligence Quotient, a measure from 1905s from a French Psychologist and Psychiatrist trying to predict academic achievement. The core idea was dividing a person’s mental age as defined by the test by a person’s actual age.
IQ has gone through several major theoretical revisions since then and even still it’s a mess at best. You also couldn’t really separate the study of IQ from the eugenics movement and to this day, eugenics enthusiasts are thrilled to explain how real and important IQ is.
But the more we learn about intelligence the more complicated it becomes and the less the concept of general intelligence makes sense.
IQ has produced some very interesting correlations between test performance and academic achievement. But many of its most vocal advocates continue to hold beliefs that are unsupported by the current consensus.
And that kind of problem shows up everywhere in Science once you get into the details.
And with the eugenics movement having a resurgence, it’s going to be important to deny them the ability to reestablish a consensus position in academia.
Challenging a consensus is an important part of scientific progress. But, as we’ve discussed for years, most fringe positions today aren’t really new ideas. They’re ideas who have had their day in the sun and been found wanting. We’d still be acting like IQ is an actual quotient without it.
An easy example is Atlantis, which briefly had years of being openly debatable in the 1880s when Ignatius Donnelley released Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. While disputed, his notion of a precursor civilization influencing all modern ones was considered both publicly and in the academy until the findings of a slew of sciences made it impossible.
But it’s more than 100 years after that preclusions and people obviously don’t remember. There’s no more hard evidence for it now than then. Last year, its most high profile advocate Graham Hancock admitted as much on a Joe Rogan debate with archeologist Flint Dibble before walking it back after the interview.
To Hancock’s fans the idea can seem new and wonderous and if you don’t have any background on the concept, it can seem unfair that it’s being dismissed. I used to feel that way myself before digging into it.
Scientific experimentation works by testing various possibilities and ruling those out one by one until you’ve got a good approximation of what’s true. This works extremely well in physics and somewhat less so elsewhere.
So, what do you do with ideas science has ruled out? Well, sometimes they do need to be resurrected. The obvious example of that is plate tectonics and the 50 year gap between Alfred Wegener proposing continental drift and the theory being accepted.
But surely such ideas are vastly outnumbered by ideas that just aren’t accurate, good or useful.
I have no idea what the ratio is but it’s got to be real bad. The set of all possible ideas is really large and the ones that are within a stone’s throw of reality is… smaller.
Now, I’ve been assuming good faith. But there are large, organized lobbies that have pushed for certain ideas to be treated as scientific: young earth creationism and climate change denial are the first that come to mind.
I think there are always going to be powerful people who can throw around their influence to promote incoherent ideas.
The supply side is hard to beat because they often have an bottomless piggy bank. The demand side is a lot more tractable, if decentralized.
There are a slew of ways influencers use dishonest framing to nudge people into believing more bullshit.
But if championing consensus isn’t the way to go, what is?
The Underlying Problem
Under all of this is a thing I don’t know how to deal with.
There are real solutions to this problem, but all of them I’m aware of require someone to actually give a shit about the work of developing knowledge.
And especially in the US, we’re not interested in doing that. People often complain about Americans being dumbed down, but I don’t even think this is that. That criticism is almost always about the conclusions people reach being dumb, not the process they work with.
We’re dealing a lot more with *noise* than stupidity.
This isn’t any individual’s fault exactly. It’s just the result of big social processes impoverishing most people. Less money is less free time. And less access to education.
We’ve got a cultivation problem: People simply don’t have strong habits of thought. Social media and the like don’t help this, where content that examines things at real, practical depth is rare and not promoted.
You can’t force people to give a shit about the real world. Especially when it’s often the result of really boring effort. It’s not *stimulating*.
So we’ve got this cultural machine called media that vomits bullshit all over us and it can be the work of a lifetime to get it washed off. Worse, the media figured out that the media is part of the problem decades ago and have been pointing the finger at other parts of the media and now huge chunks of the population are siloed into brain rot loops.
I’m not just talking social media or 24 hour news here, but the whole multilevel structure. From web forums to radio to tv to social media. There are layers and layers of distortion and conflicting incentives at each level.
We’re comprehensively deranged.
And the only way out of that is to do a hard thing.
You need to build a working theory of knowledge for yourself.
This is hard. There are many ways to fail and it takes a lifetime to develop.
Nobody else can do it for you.
This is time consuming and energy expensive.
And you won’t ever find a way to have certain knowledge if you do it.
Why? Because every link in the chain of reasoning is a point of failure and most ideas just aren’t that well made.
It’s not about intelligence as much as it’s about thoughtfully asking, “How do I know _____?” over and over again until you have a good answer.
This is why I come into conflict with conspiracy theorists. I don’t think they have good answers there. At least not generalizable answers.
If you’re abducted by aliens, you know aliens are real. But you probably can’t prove it even if it did happen.
Some evidence just isn’t transferable.
A baseline part of learning to think for yourself is learning to understand and respect other people’s thinking. How did they reach their conclusions? Which patterns of thought are valid?
Philosophers have been trying to understand these questions since before writing and probably will struggle with them until the last person dies.
The point is you need to be in the struggle if you want to do more than just be moved with the currents of culture.
There are lots of benefits and drawbacks to this way of living. It’s a lot of uh homework for arguably negligible benefit. Someone with good instincts could probably pick up enough of what they need to know to be successful.
But what fun is that?
A creative life pushes you to the edges of knowledge and past them. And the main cost is time, particularly at the moment.
The sheer volume of propaganda out there makes this a rather urgent task.
I don’t have some magical set of resources to suggest here. You could study any number of fields to do this. Honestly, rather than any of that maybe just try a little experiment: Spend 10 minutes a day thinking about why something you believe is true. Find the links and nodes of your beliefs for yourself.
You’ll learn alot!
Wrapping up!
Alright, that’s a fork in me time.
Hope y’all enjoyed this.
See you soon.
-SF