The basic idea: an average person can easily be intellectually overwhelmed by a clever person (maybe the person is smarter, or more educated, or maybe they just studied up on a subject a lot). They basically know this... and also know that it's not because the clever person is always right. Because there's lots of these people, and not every clever person thinks the same thing, so they obviously can't all be right. But the average person (average with respect to whatever subject) is still rational and isn't going to let their beliefs bounce around. So they develop a defensive stance, a resistance to being convinced. And it's right that they do!

If someone confronts you with the PERFECT ARGUMENT, is it because the argument is true and revelatory? Or does it involve some slight of hand? The latter is much more likely

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...

Take anti-vaxxers. If you try to argue with the science, you've already lost, because anti-vaxxers have been propagandised into believing they're protecting their kids.

How? By being told that vaccinations are promoted by people who are trying to harm their kids and exploit the public for cash.

And who tells them? People like them. Not scientists. Not those smart people who look down on you for being stupid.

No, it's influencers who are just like them, part of the same tribe. Someone you could socialise with. Someone like you.

Someone who only has your best interests at heart.

And that's how it works. That's why the anti-vax and climate denial campaigns run huge bot farms with vast social media holdings which insert, amplify, and reinforce the "These people are evil and not like us and want to make you poor and harm your kids" messaging, combined with "But believe this and you will keep your kids safe".

Far-right messaging doesn't argue rationally at all. It's deliberate and cynically calculated to trigger fear, disgust, outrage, and protectiveness.

Consider how many far-right hot button topics centre on protecting kids from "weird, different, not like us" people - foreigners, intellectuals, scientists, unorthodox creatives and entertainers, people with unusual sexualities, outgroup politicians. And so on.

So when someone tries to argue with it rationally, they get nowhere. The "argument" is over before it starts.

It's not even about rhetoric or cleverness - both of which are overrated. It's about emotional conditioning using emotional triggers, tribal framing, and simple moral narratives, embedded with constant repetition and aggressive reinforcement.

Neither is a rational argument, and still trigger the same disgust and fear, but tend to have different implications for outgroups.

What does this refer to? I assume it has nothing to do with Flint, Michigan ;-)

You are saying this with sarcasm, but it is a tautology.

If I am factually correct, by definition, everyone who disagrees with me is irrational and can't be reasoned with.

Anti-vax is a great example of this. We have loads and loads and loads of evidence of the harm that not being vaccinated can do (now including dead children thanks to measles) and very scant evidence to the contrary (there is some for specific vaccines for specific diseases like Polio). However, until it hits an anti-vaxxer personally, they simply will refuse to believe it.

Of course, once an anti-vaxxer personally gets a disease, NOW the anti-vaxxers want the vaccine. Thus, demonstrating simultaneously that they actually don't understand a single damn thing about vaccines and that their "anti-vaxx belief" was irrational as well.

Anti-vax is actually a horrible example of this because it can never be proven that vaccines don't harm us. Any non-infinite evidence will never reduce the probability to zero. You even allude to this point. If there is a single case of a harmful vaccine, or even a reasonable probability of one, then it isn't irrational to be cautious of vaccines. Just because the evidence is enough for you doesnt make anyone who disagrees irrational. That line of thinking just makes you irrational.

I say this as a fully vaccinated (including COVID) vaccine enjoyer.

Oh, no. You don't get to ignore my actual experience with people and Covid vaccines. I watched 3 different anti-vaxxers in my family die begging for a vaccine while doctors struggled to save their dumb asses (yeah, mass spreading event).

> it can never be proven that vaccines don't harm us.

That's your job to prove, Mr. Skeptical. Not mine.

I very much can prove that not getting a vaccine does harm you. I've got a handful of measles deaths to point to right now. We've got step function decreases in reproductive cancers due to HPV vaccination. We've got shingles vaccines showing decreases in dementia and Alzheimers. I can go on and on.

It's up to YOU to show the contrary that the harm a vaccine does outweighs it's benefits.

People don't seem to get that "being skeptical" is simply the first step. After that, you are required to begin the hard work of massing factual evidence as well as cause/effect relationships for your argument.

Otherwise you are simply "obviously irrational and can't be reasoned with".

> I say this as a fully vaccinated (including COVID) vaccine enjoyer.

"I'm not racist, but ..."

Sorry. Statement gives you no credibility or authority.

Anyway, for everyone else, the J&J COVID vaccine is known to cause heart problems in certain men and boys. Here’s an article about the issue from the pre-RFK HHS era:

https://health.mountsinai.org/blog/wynk-heart-inflammation-m...

And what is the risk if you get COVID and are unvaccinated? I can't say there is no risk to drinking water, but I can say that there is a huge risk of dying of dehydration from not drinking water.

The problem is that humans are really unsuited to statistical thinking, especially about risk, and what it means to "be cautious" about something. In this context, "being cautious" about vaccines means "being reckless" about disease, because you're rejecting the mitigation measures. It is not a good bet to roll the dice for your children against measles.

We have to recognize that there have been both incidents of vaccine contamination and of individuals who have had unexpected negative reactions to vaccines. You get advised about this every time you have one!

Perhaps the diagrams should include "one sided scale" as an argument.

There's a difference between "(ir)rational" and "(ab)normal human thinking". What you describe is both irrational and also very normal for humans.

To illustrate what I mean, I'll put the probabilities into terms of dice rolls:

Before vaccines:

Roll a normal, fair, six-sided dice, once. If it's even, you died. (Pre-industrial society, half of us died young of what are now easily preventable illnesses).

With vaccines, at current safety thresholds for fatal reactions:

Roll a normal, fair, six-sided dice, seven times. Even for borderline cases where the vaccines are covering serious illnesses, you'd need to roll 1-2-3-4-5-6-1 in that order to see a fatal adverse reaction, otherwise the vaccine is withdrawn from the market. (~1 per quarter million cases).

But, just like people don't really have a rational intuition for how a "billionaire" is a thousand times richer than a "millionaire", people don't really have rational intuition for probabilities like these. I suspect our intuition on probability is more like "here's 8 bushes, a deer is hiding behind one, which one?", because of how often people act as though being unlucky for long enough means they're due for a win. And I really do mean eight bushes, because of how badly we handle probabilities even in the 5% range.

No, that doesn’t follow at all. Your arguments could be bad or irrational in themselves (right for the wrong reasons), and other people could hold beliefs logically follow from plausible, but wrong, premises.

Some people are crippled by anxiety and fear of the unknown or fear of their neighbors. It's sad, but it's not unique to political alignment.

That they would see themselves as part of the rational group opposed to a campaign of weaponized social levers which turn people against evidence in order to further the goals of a different group which is not actually aligned with those they are manipulating is not insightful or provocative. It seems to reason they would.

The implication that it means there is some sort of political 'both sides'ism that degrades their point is incredibly weak.

I didn't intend to imply that, I interpreted their comment in roughly the same way you did and just think it's the same high level kind of messaging being leveraged regardless of which one you align with, and that issue specifically isn't inherently a right or left dividing line.

If you're inclined to be anti-vaxx, the messaging that the right will try to deliver to you will certainly capitalize on whatever they think will compound those feelings. The government is trying to control you, take your job away, your freedoms, and you should be wary of the others who say yes. It's easy to manipulate people if you're chipping away at their sense of reality.

If you're inclined to be pro-vaxx, the messaging was similarly delivered to compound a feeling of paranoia, and people who felt differently were worth considering an enemy, because they didn't care about your kids, or your grandma, or public health in general (is what messaging at the time seemed to indicate).

Regardless of this discussion not being specifically about the pandemic, my actual perception of either group of people, (the ones that absorbed as much as they could and fell down their respective doom holes) was that they were rather annoying and just avoided the topic at all costs. I wore a mask in situations that seemed to call for it, got some of the vaccinations, kept a reasonable distance, etc.. It didn't need to be more than that. I concluded that there were shreds of truth, scientific and otherwise among the feelings that everyone had, but if I accidentally found myself in conversation that had any strong opinion, it wasn't going to go well; that person was just living out their personal hellscape of paranoia that they were vulnerable to and became targets because of.

It was a very divisive and tribal moment that I hope we've learned something from.

With this explanation as context, I don't think the commenter was attributing it as a left vs right issue except that the targeting was being done by right-wing groups.

I think a paranoid world view, broad rejection of evidence, and othering of groups based on existential fear are hallmarks of the right-wing and regardless of initial beliefs can only manifest themselves as such. Thus it is natural that such messaging, once internalized, would lead anyone to be clearly viewed as no longer aligned with anything except a right wing view.

I think the real problem is that zero friction global communication and social media has dramatically decreased the incentive to be thoughtful about anything. The winning strategy for anyone in the public eye is just to use narratives that resonate with people's existing worldview, because there is so much information out there and our civilization has become so complex that it's overwhelming to think about anything from first principles. Combine that with the dilution of local power as more and more things have gone online and global, a lot of the incentives for people to be truthful and have integrity are gone or at least dramatically diminished compared to the entirety of human history prior to the internet.

Rational in the sense that it flows from what emotional choices resonate ? That’s more in terms of faithful to their beliefs. I wouldn’t call that rational per se.

And being scared of tribalism is not necessary, because tribalism is what is currently being highly effective at creating political power.

So some degree of tribalism, is simply matching the competition.

That was largely the case until these most recent electoral cycle, where the Great Crank Realignment, driven by the COVID response, pushed conspiracy theorists, health and wellness grifters, supplement hawkers, and many others to the right.

If the harsh response to COVID had been necessary, the places that didn't do it should have died out. They did not. You simply don't hear about the Great Depopulation of Africa.

And yet you will read the above, label me a crank, and downvote this. Meaning that you are just as tribal as the people you look down upon.

Rogan got really worried about masks and health and at the same time was for instance having a guy on who does underwater weight lifting for training NBA players and gave him the highest praise and started advertising his tumeric coffee. Were masks during that kind of activity really harmful to people but underwater weight lifting and extreme in-sauna exercize good?

If California had held their restrictions a month or two longer until the vaccine they would have had many less deaths.

The other half is driven by fear, disgust, paranoia, etc.. That second group is much easier to trigger / convince - just play on their fears about their kids, their friends, their church ("will ban Bibles and churches"), etc.. (I was raised in this kind of environment).

Authoritarians WANT a "strong leader" to tell them what to think, how to act, etc. That's how they show they belong to the tribe: they believe everything that is said, they give the most $$ to their church, etc.

"Young adults who scored higher on right-wing authoritarianism had less gray matter volume in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in social reasoning. Meanwhile, those who endorsed more extreme forms of left-wing authoritarianism showed reduced cortical thickness in the right anterior insula, a brain area tied to empathy and emotion regulation."

Not only is it tribalism, it's also individuals fundamental anatomy. This seems like a very challenging problem if the people you are hoping to convince are hardwired against your message.

https://www.psypost.org/authoritarian-attitudes-linked-to-al... (layperson's summary)

https://www.ibroneuroscience.org/article/S0306-4522(25)00304... (actual study)

What do you think causes vaccine injury?

Do you believe in these zoonotic origin theory of Covid, rather than the Wuhan coronavirus Institute accidentally releasing a coronavirus in Wuhan? Why do you think that is?

Why do you think vaccine manufacturers asked governments for blanket immunity from prosecution?

Why does the United States require children to get so many more vaccines than other developed western countries?

Do you think you are assuming which side is rational?

Also, unvaccinated people die from diseases that vaccines prevent. That happens too.

The problem with the anti-vaxxers is their assessment of the balance of risks is distorted.

The problem with the "vaccine establishment" is that it's so certain that the balance of risks are in favor of vaccines that it's willing to hide the actual risks in order to get more people to take the vaccines. That's not only morally wrong, it also may do more harm than good in the end. (Which is the same thing if you take a consequentialist view of morals.)

it's how the brain works. the more cognitive and perceptive angles agree on the observed, the more likely it is, that the observed is really / actually observed.

polysemous language (ambiguity) makes it easy to manipulate the observed. reinterpretation, mere exposure and thus coopted, portfolio communist media and journalism, optimize, while using AI for everything will make it as efficient as it gets.

keep adding new real angles and they'll start to sweat or throw towels and tantrums and aim for the weak.

And they usually have so many of those because they were convinced to pay disproportionate attention to it and don't see the need to check anything or reject bad sources.

Edit: This thread is amazing. 12 years of pre-uni schooling and no mention of any of this stuff... Also fair criticism of IRA too in the article. Still, seems a little ironic that the people crying foul benefited from the status quo of an uneducated populace.

There is no such thing as "objective" because it would include all things, which means it could not be perceived by anyone.

It's for indicating what's in scope for debate, and what's settled. No need to invoke "Truth". Being too stringent about objectivity means that everything is always in scope for debate, which is a terrible place to be if you want to get anything done.

Although your wider point is sound that specific example should undermine your belief quite significantly if you're a rational person.

1. It's a group of scientists and their work was reviewed, so they are probably all dishonest.

2. They did it because they expected it to work.

3. If they expected it to work it's likely that they did it before and got away with it, or saw others getting away with it, or both.

4. If there's a culture of people falsifying data and getting away with it, that means there's very likely to be more than one paper with falsified data. Possibly many such papers. After all, the authors have probably authored papers previously and those are all now in doubt too, even if fraud can't be trivially proven in every case.

5. Scientists often take data found in papers at face value. That's why so many claims are only found to not replicate years or decades after they were published. Scientists also build on each other's data. Therefore, there are likely to not only be undetected fraudulent papers, but also many papers that aren't directly fraudulent but build on them without the problem being detected.

6. Therefore, it's likely the evidence base is not as robust as previously believed.

7. Therefore, your belief in the likelihood of their claims being true should be lowered.

In reality how much you should update your belief will depend on things like how the fraud was discovered, whether there were any penalties, and whether the scientists showed contrition. If the fraud was discovered by people outside of the field, nothing happened to the miscreants and the scientists didn't care that they got caught, the amount you should update your belief should be much larger than if they were swiftly detected by robust systems, punished severely and showed genuine regret afterwards.

You also make throw away assertions line "That's why so many claims are only found to not replicate years or decades after they were published." What is "so many claims?" The majority? 10%? 0.5%?

I totally agree with you that the nuances of the situation are very important to consider, and the things you mention are possibilities, but you are too eager to reject things if you think "that specific example should undermine your belief quite significantly if you're a rational person." You made lots of assumptions in these statements and I think a rational person with humility would not make those assumptions so quickly.

Wikipedia has a good intro to the topic. Some quick stats: "only 36% of the replications [in psychology] yielded significant findings", "Overall, 50% of the 28 findings failed to replicate despite massive sample sizes", "only 11% of 53 pre-clinical cancer studies had replications that could confirm conclusions from the original studies", "A survey of cancer researchers found that half of them had been unable to reproduce a published result".

The example is hypothetical and each step is probabilistic, so we can't say anything is necessarily true. But which parts of the reasoning do you think are wrong?

Your first step is "It's a group of scientists and their work was reviewed, so they are probably all dishonest."

Even that is an unreasonable step. It is very possible for a single person to deceive their peers.

Deductive reasoning like this works so much better for Sherlock Holmes, in fiction. In reality, deductive reasoning tends to re-enforce your biases and ignore the vast possibility space of alternatives.

It is possible for a single person to deceive all their peers if you assume unlimited incompetence and naiveity, but that should reduce your faith in what they say just as much!

The argument uses logical induction, not deduction. Induction works fine and is the sort of ordinary reasoning used by people every day. It's normal to trust a group of people less after they were caught lying. If you don't do this, you're the one being irrational, not other people.

Peer review is a very basic check, more or less asking someone else in the field "Does this paper, as presented, make any sense?". It's often overvalued by people outside the field, but it's table stakes to the scientific conversation, not a seal of approval by the field as a whole.

>Scientists often take data found in papers at face value. That's why so many claims are only found to not replicate years or decades after they were published. Scientists also build on each other's data. Therefore, there are likely to not only be undetected fraudulent papers, but also many papers that aren't directly fraudulent but build on them without the problem being detected.

I think it's rare that scientists take things completely at face value. Even without fraud, it's easy for people to make mistakes and it's rare that everyone in a field actually agrees on all the details, so if someone is relying on a paper for something, they will generally examine things quite closely, talk to the original authors, and to whatever extent practical attempt to verify it themselves. The publishing process doesn't tend to reward this behavior, though, unfortunately (And also as a result, an external observer does not generally see the results of this: if someone concludes that a result is BS as a result of this process, they're much more likely to drop it than try to publish a rebuttal, unless it's something that is particularly important)

There's way too many cases of bogus papers being cited hundreds or thousands of times for me to believe scientists check papers they are building on. It probably depends on a lot on the field, though, this stuff always does.

There has actually been a pretty monumental shift in Russian election meddling tactics in the last 8 years. Previously we had the troll army, in which the primary operating tactic of their bot farms were to pose as Americans (as well as Poles, Czechs, Moldovans, Ukrainians, Brits, etc.) but push Russian propaganda. Those bot farms were fairly easy to spot and ban, and there was a ton of focus on it after the 2016 election, so that strategy was short lived.

Since then, Russia has shifted a lot closer to Chinese style tactics, and now have a "goblin" army (contrasted with their troll army). This group no longer pushes the narratives themselves, but rather uses seemingly mindless engagement interactions like scrolling, upvoting, clicking on comments, replying to comments with LLMs, etc., in order to game what the social media algorithms show people. They merely push the narratives of actual Americans (not easily bannable bots) who happen to push views that are either in line with Russian propaganda, or rhetoric that Russian intelligence views as being harmful to the US. These techniques work spectacularly well for two reasons: the dopamine boost to users who say abominable shit as a way of encouraging them to do more, and as a morale-killer to people who might oppose such abominable shit but see how "popular" it is.

https://www.bruegel.org/first-glance/russian-internet-outage...

Do they work spectacularly well, though? E.g. the article you link shows that Twitter accounts holding anti-Ukrainian views received 49 reposts less on average during a 2-hour internet outage in Russia. Even granting that all those reposts were part of an organized campaign (its hardly surprising that people reposting anti-Ukrainian content are primarily to be found in Russia) and that 49 reposts massively boosted the visibility of this content, its effect is still upper bounded by the effect of propaganda exposure on people's opinions, which is generally low. https://www.persuasion.community/p/propaganda-almost-never-w...

1 - They boost dopamine reward systems in people who get "social" validation of their opinions/persona as an influencer. This isn't something specific to propaganda...this is a well-observed phenomenon of social media behavior. This not only gives false validation to the person spreading the misinformation/opinions, but it influences other people who desire that sort of influence by giving them an example of something successful to replicate.

2 - In aggregate, it demoralizes those who disagree with the opinions by demonstrating a false popularity. Imagine, for example, going to the comments of an instagram post of something and you see a blatant neo-nazi holocaust denial comment with 50,000 upvotes. It hasn't changed your mind, but it absolutely will demoralize you from thinking you have any sort of democratic power to overcome it.

No opinions have changed, but more people are willing to do things that are destructive to social discourse, and fewer people are willing to exercise democratic methods to curb it.

This is a wild claim.

I read the early article, it claimed that most of the pro trump russian propaganda was consumed by republicans so it didn't change any viewpoints.

Ignoring the idea that it might have prevented a change, it's a pretty small sample size compared to, you know, all of human history.

The Russian state's hack and leak of Podesta's emails caused Pizzagate and QAnon. Russian propagandists also fanned the flames of both. It's not quite clear if this was a propaganda victory (it could be that it was propaganda from other sources commenting on the hacked emails which bears almost all responsibility for Pizzagate and what followed) or simply an offensive cybercapabilities victory, but this is an example of the complex chains of actions which can affect societal opinions and attitudes.

I am skeptical random LLM nonsense from Russian farms is shifting sentiment. But I think it's prudent to remain open to the possibility that the aggregate effect of all propaganda, intelligence, and interference efforts by the Russian state in the past decade could have created the impetus for several significant things which otherwise would likely not have occurred.

Another example: the old Russian KGB propaganda about America inventing AIDS as a bioweapon was extremely effective and damaging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Denver

More recent Russian propaganda about America running a bioweapon lab in Ukraine has been quite effective and is still believed by many.

Hah, a "monkey amplifier" army! Look at garbage coming out of infinite monkeys keyboards and boost what fits. Sigh

...or USA

Silicon valley is already fully compliant.

If you think this reduced bias, you couldn't be more wrong - it only made the bias harder to debunk. Deciding which facts are "relevant" is one easy way to bias reporting, but the much easier, much more effective way is deciding which stories are "relevant". Journalists have their own convictions and causes, motivating which incidents they cast as isolated and random, and get buried in the news, and which are part of a wider trend, a "conversation that we as a nation must have", etc., getting front-page treatment.

A typical example: And third, the failure of its findings to attract much notice, at least so far, suggests that scholars, medical institutions and members of the media are applying double standards to such studies. - https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/10/27/the-data-... (unpaywalled: https://archive.md/Mwjb4)

Evolution directly challenges the idea that humans are very special creatures in a universe where mighty mystic forces care about them a lot.

Climate changes, and the weight of human industry in it, challenges directly the life style expectations of the wealthiests.

Some of neurology/psychology gets a bit closer, but science of the brain doesn't have major theories that are taught on the same level nor have much impact on public policy. The closest I can think of is how much public awareness of what constitutes a mental disorder lags behind science, but that area is still constantly contested even among the researchers themselves and thus prevents a unified message being given to the public that they must then respond to (choosing to believe the science or not).

Hey, weren't we just talking about propaganda?

... But that algorithm is still corporate controlled.

Even if only 0.1% of Chinese people engaged in theft, and that would be a much lower rate than in any developed country, you'd still get a million Chinese thieves. You could show a new one every day, bombarding people with images and news reports of how untrustworthy Chinese people are. The news reports themselves wouldn't even be misinformation, as all the people shown would actually be guilty of the crimes they were accused of. Nevertheless, people would draw the wrong conclusion.