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.
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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 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.