I'm not ashamed to admit that I've dismissed plenty of people in my life.
I don't have time to argue with and debunk Holocaust deniers and Neo-Nazis, nor do I think it would be productive, because in my experience almost all such people are way beyond reasoning with.
Also, when such people "debate", they're often just trying to spread their propaganda to bystanders, and not engaging in any kind of good-faith argument with you.
Finally, I recognize that if these people ever get power they will crush, in a very literal way, using violence, anyone who doesn't agree with them, who is not "pure" enough for them, or who stands in their way.
You're at a restaurant on the ocean and some fairly educated dude wants to go all flat earth. I'm like, "let me go get some binoculars and you can tell me why the bottom of the container ship falls below the horizon first. We can even estimate the distance based on size of ship and magnification factor to get a radius for the earth".... "No, it doesn't work that way".
Huh? Why are all the other planets round? Why does the earth cast a round shadow on the moon (vice versa for eclipse)? Why can you fly to India in either direction in the same amount of time? It's conspiracy theories all the way down.
Stupid, angry, or willfully ignorant, they're painful to talk to.
Your discomfort is the point for them.
Quickly figuring out that you're in such an interaction and bailing before your day is ruined is the best you can hope for in the short term.
What do they gain from causing such discomfort to others?
They might not believe so very seriously in their own ideas? (I never met a flat earther)
Most people play some kinds of irrational games to generate emotions they are addicted to. The difference is what kind of emotions they want, and what kind of scenarios they use to obtain it. There is a popular book on this topic called "Games People Play", strongly recommended.
From the psychoanalytical perspective, all these games ultimately are sick attempts to indirectly extract symbols of love, when people are too afraid of a more direct approach (aren't we all sometimes?).
The recipe for this specific game is that I cause you discomfort, and if you continue interacting with me anyway, it means that you have forgiven me (for causing you the discomfort), which means that you care about me (otherwise why would you keep interacting with me). So I frustrate you in order to extract a costly signal of caring from you, so that I can feel loved for a moment.
Why not a more direct approach? First, I am afraid to ask whether you care about me, because you might say no. Even worse, if you said yes, I would still be suspect that you are lying; maybe you are just being polite. But when I cleverly extract forgiveness from you, if you stay with me regardless of the discomfort I cause, then I can be sure that you genuinely care.
Of course, the damage caused to both sides by this approach is obvious. But sometimes people just don't know how to do it better, and any symbol of love is better than nothing.
You have a lot of control over your own mind and emotions, so don't relinquish it to malevolent tricksters. And if you can't do that quit social media. but really everyone should quit social media probably.
Yes, was trolling with my cat sometimes, as a child, she got angry, it was fun (but I stopped when I grew up)
> these feelings can follow you around for days vexing you and bringing you back to that negative state of mind. and that is hilarious to [the trolls]
Good point, I've felt those feelings indeed (and maybe the cat too)
Agreed that social media can be like that, and also, it steals time
I think that is the intention behind their social discourse, to be painful. To disagree. To prove that they are superior.
>Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in shapes of your own choosing.
Well, “round” can be an attribute of a plane; its typically referred to as a circle. A more descriptive term is “spheroid” but outside of a small set of long-distance navigation tasks the flat earth mental model is perfectly sufficient and computationally less expensive.
Flat Earthers are never talking about a "holographic universe," though. They're always talking about the Earth being like a board whose edges you could fall off from.
Nazis lie, is the way I frame it to myself. I try to recognize the tells, the techniques that are being used, the pivoting and debating attitude, the historical precedents, if possible the escalation as masks are dropped and the ideological payload is hinted at or delivered. There's always a payload. Everything else is the game.
Nazis lie. I'm interested in identifying them, not debating them. If I can identify them, I can identify their payload and odds are it's something I'm going to want to walk away from, and I'll do just that.
I've actually experienced something like that. I once found myself peripheral to some internet controversy where there was this guy who seemed like he was on "my side" but prolifically posting in a really counterproductive way. In good faith, I spend a lot of time trying to get him to realize that, only for him to eventually to throw random slurs at me. I'm pretty sure he was just an alt-right type who didn't actually care much about the specific controversy, but was just trying to exploit the drama.
True. Nazis are ready to use violence to gain dominion over others. Lying is a form of violence, so it just makes sense for them to use it. It is easier for them to lie than use physical violence and preferably they don't get caught. Just use their power to influence.
But I wonder if the paper perhaps did not consider this:: Even though correcting someone can make them defensive, the correction might be very helpful to all the other readers of the same discussion, so they don't get mislead.
It is interesting you bring in Flat Earthers. What do they have in common with Nazis? Anything? I think there is something. It is the message "Don't use your brain to come up with answers just adopt our doctrine as faith".
Sadly yes to 1 and 3. Live in person.
Online? Tons.
I realized just how low quality most debunkings are last year when I started wondering what happens if an uncertain person specifically searches for [$idea debunking] on Google. I chose "5G causes Coronavirus" as the idea in question. Sure enough, a whole pile of articles claiming to be debunkings came up in the results. The problems became apparent when reading them. Some of these debunkings were barely more coherent than the idea they were trying to debunk and would be very unconvincing. Almost always these were written by professional journalists. I did eventually find one that actually took the reader seriously and was free of obvious contradictions and errors but it was written by a physicist.
Common problems are:
- A belief that simply repeating the words of the journalist's chosen academic or corporate spokesperson is the same thing as a debunking. If someone is finding your article in the first place, it means they already have doubt about the establishment's view of something so simply repeating it can't convince them. This tactic is especially useless because basically any idea no matter how crazy it sounds will have academics and credentialed people who openly support it and campaign for it, so it turns into "my experts are more expert than your experts", which is less convincing still.
- An extremely off-putting and arrogant tone of the form "I can't believe I have to write about this, but ..."
- Articles that contain internal contradictions or are written in a manner implying the debunker doesn't understand the topic themselves. One debunking I read started by asserting that although 5G uses millimeter waves, such waves are completely harmless and only crazy deluded people could possibly think they were dangerous. Half way through the article it started talking about military experiments that beamed mm wave at enemy soldiers to cripple them with pain. No mention of strength or energy consumption was made anywhere, apparently without noticing that "used in weapons" and "harmless" are mutually exclusive without much more detailed information about why some are harmless and others aren't.
- Debunkings that aren't actually debunkings but rather, explanations of why $idea is true but good. One example of this is the (no longer available) section of the EU Commission website that claimed to be a database of debunkings of "myths" about the EU in the British press. When I spot checked some one day it turned out a large chunk were like this, maybe the majority, i.e. "Newspaper X reported Y. This is true but is justified by our policy goals". Well, that's a retort in a debate but not a debunking of a myth, and when that happens it makes people lower the perceived weight of the word "debunk".
These kinds of problem are so common it left me with a much greater understanding of why even some ideas seem to grow faster and further than you would intuitively expect.
No amount of truth will ever convince someone who is predisposed to not believe you.
This is something I strongly believe and I wish more people thought about. Do you happen to know if we have a lot of scientific evidence for it?
Omniscience has become extremely popular in the last few years as well, and I'm pretty sure there's no evidence for that at all (but I'm speculating about that, perhaps there is something out there).
The problem I’ve seen is that people want others to disprove their crazy theories. Disproving anything takes substantially more time and work than just saying any old nonsense in the first place.
This is made worse by the hordes of crazy/stupid people on the internet who demand (in bad faith) that everyone who disagrees with their obvious falsehoods takes the time required to provide evidence (that they’ll never accept anyway) is the biggest part of the problem.
tldr; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Unfortunately most of the people spreading this kind of thing online don’t understand what actual evidence is.
Try debating a flat-earther, and then explaining that we knew the Earth was round for thousands of years prior to NASA. It will not compute.
For this we have to stop pointing the finger at the others—their ridiculous beliefs, their preposterous disregard of evidence—and face that we ourselves are the same way. It's not that the other side does it more; it is simply that it is easier—much easier—to see it in them. If you think you don't do it, or (an easier self-deception) you don't do it as much, this is because you are lacking in self-awareness. (I don't mean you personally, of course, I mean all of us.) And let's be honest: we all feel that we don't do it as much. I feel that myself even as I write this.
A timeless essay on this is Orwell's "Looking Back at the Spanish War" (https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel..., discussed last year at [1]). The depth of consciousness that Orwell reached in that essay is profound, but its profundity is obscured by how simply he states it, and no doubt also by the fact that we all think we already know it and are the exception to what he describes.
Atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.
---
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.
[1] Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24961407 - Nov 2020 (128 comments)
> Anyone who wants seriously to look at this problem needs to grapple with the following: preferring one's beliefs to counterevidence is not just a property of "crazy/stupid people", but of humans in general, including oneself and everyone on one's own side. This is a difficult fact to face, and to the extent one can face it, I think it changes everything. Even if one makes the smallest beginning at doing so, it already starts to change everything.
I wonder if this isn't just thermodynamic in a sense. It might take a lot more energy to change a belief or network of them than not doing so.
What an interesting thought. Say a belief, a set of brain neuro-electrical structures of impression memories coupled with theory framework, could be quantified so the effort required to change the belief could be established. Like to lose belief in gravity and naturally think relativistically would cost X energy.
To your point though, I don’t think it’s accurate to suggest everyone is as consistently wrong as everyone else when there are groups of people suggesting that the entire concept of science itself is propaganda.
I will read what you’ve linked though, as it seems genuinely really interesting.
I think we should all practice simply seeing it for a while (I'm tempted to say 20 years might be a good minimum), and then maybe we'll be in a position to accurately derive consequences in a way that doesn't just re-establish the original self-deception.
p.s. I took out this bit of my comment above: "Or, if you prefer, we're all crazy/stupid in this way." because after reading your comment I realized it was too baity. Mentioning it that here because I don't want to deprive your post of that context.
When you wrote:
> If you think you don't do it, or (an easier self-deception) you don't do it as much, this is because you are lacking in self-awareness.
It sounded to me as if you said everyone was equally wrong as everyone else. Thanks for clarifying that that wasn't what you meant
I think this is incorrect: "[or if] you don't do it as much" -- some people indeed does it less (you'd be one of them I think)
> it was too baity
I agree (I think the section I quoted still is :-))
I think there are groups of people claiming that the scientific consensus on particular topics (climate change, COVID-19, etc) is based on ideological bias, vested interests, conspiracies, etc, rather than on good quality scientific evidence. However, most of those people have no problem with accepting the scientific consensus on unrelated topics. Few people are going to deny the scientific consensus on the citric acid cycle, for instance.
I think if you bet against the current scientific consensus, most of the time you are going to lose – but maybe not always. If we look back over the history of science, we can see areas in which what was once considered the evidence-based scientific consensus was later decided to be actually based on ideological bias. For example, a lot of 19th and early 20th century science on biological differences between different human descent groups was believed at the time to be based on good scientific evidence but is now in hindsight viewed as corrupted by racial prejudice. How can we be sure that a century from now, people might not look back on some elements of today's scientific consensus as also corrupted by bias/prejudice/ideology/etc?
But we don't know whether that will happen, and if it happens we don't know which parts of the contemporary consensus will be viewed as corrupted, nor what will be seen as having corrupted it.
A venn diagram would show a significant overlap between these groups, there's a lot of overlap between young earth creationists and climate change "skeptics", the same is true for flat earthers and other conspiracy groups. It's rare for people to believe in just one conspiracy and the other conspiracies they believe throw out just about every branch of science we have.
When you add the two party system super groups to the venn diagram you'll see most of these grouped to a specific side, which indicates a strong degree of ideological bias is at play.
Most YECs are "climate change skeptics", but only a minority of "climate change skeptics" are YECs. Indeed, many of the leaders of the "climate change sceptic" movement, even if they might be occasionally willing to share a stage with YECs, do not endorse YECism themselves – for example, Lord Monckton or Bjørn Lomborg. I think that's especially true outside of the US – European conservatives are far more likely to take "climate change scepticism" seriously than to take YECism seriously.
YECism is much more popular in the US than elsewhere because of the distinctive US religious history which produced an emphasis on hyper-literal interpretations of the Bible. Catholics, Orthodox, and the more traditional Protestants (Anglicans, Lutherans, Reformed) never had the same emphasis, because they had the historical memory to know that YECism had been considered in the first few centuries of Christianity and judged to be optional (see St Augustine's 5th century book The Literal Meaning of Genesis). Many Americans forgot that history, Europeans remembered it, which is why some European conservatives will believe in "climate change scepticism" but very few of them have time for YECism.
> the same is true for flat earthers and other conspiracy groups
The vast majority of conspiracy theorists don't want to have anything to do with "flat earthism". People who seriously believe in "flat earthism" are a minuscule (and irrelevant) minority.
> When you add the two party system super groups to the venn diagram you'll see most of these grouped to a specific side, which indicates a strong degree of ideological bias is at play.
I'm not an American, I come from a country (Australia) with a two-party system but a weaker one than America's. But I don't think any one side of politics has a monopoly on conspiracy theories. Historically, certain kinds of conspiracy theories have been popular on the left as well – such as conspiracy theories about the CIA or Mossad. (Some CIA or Mossad conspiracy theories are probably true, but a lot of them surely aren't.) Here in Australia, traditional left-wing conspiracy theories include that the 1954 Petrov affair was a setup by Australian intelligence agencies, and that Australia's 1975 constitutional crisis was secretly engineered by London and Washington.
My anecdotal experience is that the majority of people who believe in UFO conspiracy theories are left-leaning. And people who believe in UFO conspiracy theories are often inclined to believe lots of other conspiracy theories too.
If the story is horrible, you've got to understand what in that is so desirable for the person to believe. Why do they cling to that particular narrative? Something about it, works, for them.
I think there's a lot of people out there absolutely terrified and right on the edge of un-survival. They are genuinely in continuous, ongoing danger, and need a narrative that will give them a target for their terror, one that could maybe be attacked and fought back against.
It is not terribly difficult to take panicked people and persuade them to run away from the exits, or attack the doctors, or otherwise direct their energy and panic towards some goal. The reason to do that is not arbitrary, rather it is to gain power through controlling those people, and it's always worked very well.
You take away that power and control not by arguing with the angry, panicky people, but by persistently removing the threats that generate their panic. The worst enemy of an ousted demagogue is a boring, reasonably trustworthy rival that does things to remedy the material distress of the panicky and angry people. You don't have to argue them into submission, you defuse them by making them comfortable, and that's why we see desperate attempts to maintain the panic and terror.
You're talking about Biden, right?
They're aging suburbanites whose TV came with a youtube app.
Parent’s post is an exercise in imagination. It might be accurate for some, it might not be for others. It certainly doesn’t match my experience, which is summed up pretty concisely in my post. It may not be kind, but it’s also not wrong.
The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle:
When you want to convince someone and win them over to your way of thinking, never ever lie, make your position out to be stronger than it really is, or treat them as anything less than an intelligent human being.
If you can't do that it is better to stay silent, because speaking is likely to have the exact opposite of the intended effect.
This applies to everything from parenting to political discussions.
The core essence of a conspiracy theory, the thing that demands it be debunked, is that it's unfounded. It's an attractive idea without evidence, and one of the tools used in propagating it is to flip the script and point out that the absence of evidence is in fact "absence of disproof", and thus... evidence.
So what are you doing? You're taking an assertion without support (that covid is a lab leak) and then framing it as a legitimate argument by pointing out (1) that it is "not that clear cut" (by which I assume you mean that there's no evidence but not disproof either) and (2) that people who say that it doesn't have support were somehow arguing in bad faith with "poorly constructed" arguments.
This isn't a legitimate fact under dispute. It's just not. There's no evidence, literally, beyond the mailing address of the lab.
> In my opinion, when something is debunked, it should be done in the most rigorous manner and stay as politically neutral as possible.
In my opinion an argument debunking something should be done with simple facts, irrespective of political concomity. Being wrong isn't a political opinion.
The hypothesis that Covid-19 escaped from a laboratory already has strong circumstantial evidence behind it. Lab escapes do happen, have happened, and the WIV is full of corona viruses under study. In fact it contains the closest relatives to Covid-19 known.
Now all of that doesn’t prove anything. It’s just a reasonable hypothesis that’s not yet proven. To characterize it, though, as a “conspiracy theory”, seems disingenuous.
Circumstantial evidence would be if you had a source from inside the lab -- a memo, maybe, or a leak from an intelligence agency that interviewed a whistleblower -- that told you they believed covid was a lab leak. Or maybe that they were working on something with features that match covid better than that bat virus does, etc...
Absent that, sorry, you're engaged in a "conspiracy theory" in the vernacular. Hiding behind the dictionary definition of "conspiracy" isn't really helping your case.
The WIV is in the exact place where the outbreak began, and houses the same strain of viruses, and researches them by breeding new variants. And, viruses have escaped from laboratories before. It occurs fairly regularly.
This is far from a "conspiracy theory", not to mention that it doesn't even involve a conspiracy.
Imagine instead that you pointed to the squashed cat and demanded that I debate the Very Important Possibility that the cat was in fact killed by an illegal Chinese helicopter.
"Uh, dude..." I reply. "That cat was clearly run over by a car."
"But no!", you say. "There have been helicopter slayings in the past, right? And there are no track marks! And the Chinese are known to be developing helicopters that could totally do this to a poor cat. There is an airport just miles away! Look at all these other people who believe in the helicopter theory! YOU ARE SUPPRESSING THIS IMPORTANT EVIDENCE!"
Get the point?
[1] In fact recognized newly evolved strains of existing viruses outnumber "lab leaks" by a factor of something like tens of thousands. Pick any one disease and it's basically guaranteed that it's not a lab leak.
They're referring to a post made here the other day suggesting that there may actually be evidence that is was a lab leak.
But to the conspiracist mind, any statement other than an unambiguous "THIS IS UNCONTROVERTABLY FALSE" becomes twisted into something that sounds like evidence for the conspiracy.
Which is why debunkings need to be firm and clear. Admitting that something is possible in theory is just nodding to people who want to hear something very different.
I don't remember it well enough to say whether I consider it evidence or not. If you haven't seen what I'm referring to then I think you're just being dismissive. In any case, there was a post here many considered credible that claimed to have evidence that it could have come from a lab. Do with that what you will. In the mean time, I don't know whether it came from a lab or not and I don't need to.
And that's how we get conspiracy theories. No one did the homework. There is no completed homework. You're all just cribbing from a faked assignment.
That's not what's happening here at all. I responded to you originally to tell you what someone was referring to.
> Because you want to believe it, you're willing to cede logic and decisionmaking to the internet crowd, figure that someone must have done the homework
No I don't want to believe it and you need to stop. I never knew, never cared, I still don't know and still don't care. You're tilting at windmills here.
Does that help? You're doing the same thing here that a lot of failed debunkers do:
1. Citing establishment authority as if it's the last word. By definition anyone who believes in a "conspiracy theory" has reached that point by concluding the authorities aren't being truthful. That's rather inherent in the nature of what a conspiracy theory is.
2. You aren't taking it seriously. If you were, you would have done a quick bit of Googling and encountered the articles in question that go into a lot of depth on the evidence of the lab leak hypothesis, including a lot of micro-biological evidence.
3. You're making statements that are clearly false. There is evidence, quite a lot of it. Perhaps you won't agree that it's strong enough, but to claim there is no evidence is false. When a debunker makes a statement like this and people know it's false, it degrades the credibility of the whole anti-theory-position, because now people start to suspect that the people denying there's a conspiracy don't really know what they're talking about.
None of that is evidence. Bring evidence.
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
The real problem is that appeal to authority works so well. Japan has a 99% conviction rate, because their culture is so differential to Authority. The state brings on an expert witness, and the jurors accept it as fact. Its how humans work. You would think people are critical thinkers. Sadly, more often than not, people will defer their thinking to someone with higher status.
But since I don't have any hope that all debunking be rigorous as you describe, I'd prefer that a context-free, objective "debunked" not every be claimed. Rather they should say "x debunked it, you can see here" sort of thing. It's just an argument like any other. But maybe there was a time when such things really were just about as good as objective?
With regard to your example here, it does not fit your original situation of a claim being being corrected - and it is a remarkably small issue to ge worked up about.
As far as I can tell, nothing in your latest post has anything to do with the claim in the post you are nominally replying to.
If you frame your goal as "stop the spread of disinformation" rather than "convince people to return to the fold," is this result even perverse?
If you can make all the people who believe in crazy conspiracies act in a toxic and obviously partisan way, does it limit their ability to spread their ideas? I.e. does debunking push people outside the overton window?
I'll give a personal example, a few months ago, a leading French newspaper (Le Monde) published a debunk about the coronavirus origins, mostly trying to debunk that it originated from a lab in Wuhan.
The problem is that what was presented as undeniable facts was in practice very poorly constructed, and we know today that things are not that clear cut.
In my opinion, when something is debunked, it should be done in the most rigorous manner and stay as politically neutral as possible.
Unfortunately, this is not what I am seeing.