Your asterisk condition is likely more important than it might appear at first. Overall views may be dominated by one issue of strong emotional value where compromise is impossible or extremely difficult. Abortion as an issue comes to mind. Or calls to the centre are extremely difficult to achieve in what are seen as binary decisions. Don’t recall where I read this example but in asking people whether they want pizza or a hamburger, very few would see the ideal result as a pizzaburger. So, if being on Team Pizza correlates with a set of beliefs and that this represents a crucial issue for me, I will not easily compromise on other issues, even if ultimately there should be no linkage.
Also, it is probably true that most of us overestimate our knowledge and understanding of issues. I seem to recall experiments showing that our estimates of our knowledge levels on an issue fall once we are asked to explain a process or an issue. Reflective as well, I suppose, of how few of us have an actively-open mind.
Linked to that is the probability that we close our minds once we have analyzed an issue with complexity because we don’t want to go through that process again. I remember being frustrated years ago trying to decide what TV cable/internet package to buy. None of the offerings ever allowed me to purchase the perfect mix that suited my needs. To get that mix cost became exorbitant and the default options always required purchasing things that were totally unnecessary. However, once the decision was made no amount of argument seemed likely to shift me off that position because I did not want to go through that process again and had no confidence that a better option was really available.
Personally, I don't find the Paris Nazi story at all extraordinary. Nazis were ordinary people in every respect, except for their hatred of Jews. You see the same thing in human nature the world over, throughout history. People who got along perfectly well and even intermarried in the former Yugoslavia suddenly turned on each other with an unimaginable ferocity and barbarism. Queers for Palestine defend atrocities against innocent Israelis that would have had themselves as targets had they been at that time and place. Civilization is a thin veneer over humanity's darker side, always ready to bust out - usually in very limited, focused directions (because it is too hard to hate everyone everywhere and live a normal life).
The mistake people make is to think that all bad things cluster together, and all good things cluster together, creating a binary. Good and bad impulses intertwine in human nature seemlessly.
A lot of people end up in the middle simply because the endpoints have moved. Disliking whoever has lied to you most recently, or most egregiously surely has a large effect, too.
Oh, boy. If you think the "science was settled in 1967," you really do know almost nothing about what the current debates are about. Even the IPCC admits that they can't model clouds - a pretty major problem. The current debates are largely about conjectured "feedbacks" in the system, and whether they are positive (tending to a tipping point) or negative (tending to mitigate the effects of increased CO2). These debates are not at all "settled." Nor are the effects of ocean currents well understood. Among scores of other climate-related phenomena. The devil is in the details. C-mon, Mike, you haven't learned the lesson our author has been trying to instill here.
For the record, I don't claim to know whether or not human activity is warming the planet, or by how much. Except locally: the growth of cities surely do create urban heat islands, for example. All of the evidence I have seen is at best ambiguous, consistent with human and natural causes. History at every time scale tends to indicate that CO2 is NOT a powerful driver of global mean temperature, if it is significant at all. Nor is there any solid evidence that warming is bad for human or other life; on the contrary. Before I'm willing to pay good money that has - as Lomborg has spent a career showing - many many more beneficial uses.
I just watched an animated piece by Gurwinder (who is on Substack) who says that curiosity and humility are the necessary components for combatting confirmation bias, which every human has. Aspects of your excellent piece echo this idea--I have to be CURIOUS to face and absorb counter-narratives to ones I have come to feel most comfortable with. And HUMILITY about my own certainty of being right is obviously required as well. My problem in trying to sort out "the narratives" out there is that I get overwhelmed. I have stopped trusting any media the way that I used to. But without that trust, it's even harder to sort. So for the sake of my mental health and attempt to not waste my one precious life, I end up withdrawing. I make a political decision, like who will get my vote for president, based on the best knowledge I can absorb, then pull away and make music, find joy in nature, just be the animal that I am muddling through and doing the best I can. I've also come to the conclusion that no human being is really all that smart. We are each SO very far from understanding the complexity of the universe let alone our place in it. That was my main takeaway from Oppenheimer, which I felt was over-rated but that message is the one that stood out. Ultimately, this genius guy was only so smart.
The charlatans in politics count on overwhelming people with endless bafflegab. They spend huge amounts of taxpayer money to promote their narrative. The objective isn't primarily to persuade, but to push people into submission - to force withdrawal. A functional constitution must put severe limits on what is within the ambit of politics, otherwise politics takes over life. It is a ratchet that goes in only one direction.
1. The adversarial legal system is often touted as a model for discovering the truth. You have two (teams of) advocates for diametrically opposite positions - extremists for their client - battling it out in front of an impartial judge, who is in the best position to discern the truth from the best arguments the lawyers can muster. To generalize: while extremism may be dysfunctional to the individual extremist, is it highly functional for society, which gets the benefit of the best arguments based on the most knowledge from both (or all) sides. You try to be the impartial judge; but don't begrudge the extremists who put in the time and effort to give you what you need to make a reasonable decision.
2. People who believe a counter-narrative - climate deniers, covid skeptics, free marketers in Canada will serve as example - tend to be better informed than people who go along with what is popular. This is because hearing the other side is inescapable for those defending a counter-narrative; most of what the counter-narrative folks do is rebut the narrative, for which task they must know and understand it. So when world-renowned experts in a field defend a counter-narrative, they deserve the utmost respect; they are much more likely to be right, or closer to the truth, than those who go with what is popular and career-enhancing.
I mostly agree with the first point, as is implicit in my saying that there is value to be found in almost any perspective. Seeing reality is hard. Contention and debate are good.
As to the second point, I'd say yes and no. The dynamic you highlight is real, but it's far from universal. And it's just not true, always, that you "must know and understand" the narrative in order to rebut it: It depends on the audience. When you are speaking mostly among the like-minded, you don't truly need to understand the full argument for the narrative, including its evidence; you need to understand what your fellow travellers make of the narrative and its evidence. The problem is precisely that we mostly stick to our fellow-travellers and so we don't get the pushback that forces us to better understand the opposite view. RFK Jr. is a perfect illustration: He's a big proponent of counter-narratives, he thinks he knows all about the narratives he is rebutting, but he is, in fact, in ideologue who spots almost all his time repeating himself among the like-minded and so his depiction of the claims he rebuts is cartoonish bullshit. That's a great way to boost confidence while knowledge stagnates.
I didn't claim that people who defend a counter-narrative are *always perfectly* informed; I said they *tend* to be *better* informed - for the very reason you give in the essay: they are practically forced to deal with the opponents' arguments because they are so prevalent. Your counter-example, RFK Jr., does not refute that generalization, not only because he is just one instance, but because no matter how poorly informed you might think RFK Jr. is on the topics he speaks about, I can point to dozens of high-profile folks on the other side who are even more misinformed. Fauci? Wallensky? Ventilators? Ivermectin is for horses? Close the beaches in summer and make everyone wear masks outside. It was racist to want to stop flights from China (until it was necessary to stop all flights everywhere)? Let's close the Ontario-Manitoba border to local commuters at the very same time as tens of thousands of travelers were pouring through Pearson Airport every day. "Vitamin D is fake news!" - Canada's Health Minister Patty Hajdu in Question Period.... The insanity of the accepted narrative was ubiquitous. The government geniuses got pretty much *everything* wrong on covid, from start to finish. Some of them are starting to admit some aspects of the errors. Time will tell. My money is on the covid counter-narrative-supporters, for all the reasons your essay implies they should be more reliable. (Discernment is required not to go to the opposite extreme and think that the jabs were a depopulation conspiracy. But there is something very fishy about the way these unsafe and ineffective treatments were rushed out all around the word in lock-step.)
Climate skeptics do not "deal with the opponents' arguments" because they do not understand them. They simply ask questions without providing their own model that explains the facts better. When asked I get "the sun". How so? Solar activity stopped rising in 1950 and most of warming has been after. Hand waving. Cosmic waves changing due to "galactic topology". Huh? More hand waving.
As for Covid, I see lots of folks in the last couple of years Monday morning quarterbacking. What were they saying in February-March 2020. When they said anything, it was Covid is a like a cold of maybe flu. Colds don't send people to the hospital and flu doesn't kill folks in the numbers covid did. Of the people we know personally who contracted Covid in 2020, about a fifth when to the hospital and one of them died. Nobody I know ever went to the hospital because of the flu.
He who asserts must prove, Mike. The onus is on those who would force others to spend untold trillions of dollars to "save the planet" to prove that the expenditure is necessary. Skeptics merely have to show that the alleged proofs are unsound. They do not have to produce their own better models - especially since most skeptics worth paying attention to realize that the climate system is too complicated and too poorly understood in this, the infancy of climate science, to model well enough. If this is an example of the quality of your thinking on climate, you have nothing to be confident about.
No Monday-morning quarterbacking on covid here. I published a handful of articles about covid during the covid period that have stood the test of time quite well. I sent out hundreds of emails to my correspondents over the years debunking the government narrative in real time. Most of the insanity was obvious, common sense. Like masking: if those flimsy, ill-fitting masks could stop tiny viruses, them cigarette filters that are 20 times as thick could block out smoke particles that are 10 times as big as viruses. We all know that smoking causes cancer, tho. It didn't take expertise in any of the relevant medical sciences to be skeptical of the rushed-out and badly tested jabs. It was obvious that the health authoritarians were lying about almost everything, in part because they had to use heavy-handed methods to silence critics rather than refute them with data and analysis. It was obvious by March 2020 that the seasonal flu was 5 to 10 times as lethal to prepubescent children as covid is, and that the jabs were *completely* unnecessary for children. Covid was mostly a risk to the aged and infirm, with multiple comorbidities. The average age of those dying from covid was higher than the life expectancy. The aged and infirm were about 10,000 times more at risk of death than the young and healthy, yet the health authoritarians prescribed the same "remedies" for the entire population. It was utter madness than any critical thinker could have known in real time. But fear clouds judgment probably better than anything else - so the government agencies did everything they could to pump up the irrational fears...
They are climate skeptics who post online whose stuff I have seen. As for the millions those mostly are people following what the sources they trust say, they don't have their own view.
Same for vaccine deniers, one guy here was writing that people who got vaxed died as a result (except of course me, my family and everyone I know who got vaxe, and millions of other folks who got the vax and yet did not die.
(Did you even skim the links I posted above before replying?)
> They are climate skeptics who post online whose stuff I have seen.
I see. For a minute there I thought you were talking about all climate skeptics.
Questions:
1. What percentage of the whole have you been exposed to?
2. Is your perception of them without flaw?
3. Might you have accidentally formed an opinion of the whole based on your phenomenological experience with a few?
4. What do you think of the theory that "Perception is Reality"?
> As for the millions those mostly are people following what the sources they trust say, they don't have their own view.
How do you know the thinking of people you've not met? Is this a new kind of science?
> Same for vaccine deniers....
I could post all the same questions about this.
> one guy here was writing that people who got vaxed died as a result (except of course me, my family and everyone I know who got vaxe, and millions of other folks who got the vax and yet did not die.
Do you believe yourself (or The Experts) to possess knowledge (as opposed to belief) about how many people have in fact (as opposed to in estimation) died as a consequence of vaccination?
> most of what the counter-narrative folks do is rebut the narrative, for which task they must know and understand it.
Unless they have adequate depth in epistemology, modal logic, linguistics/semiotics, etc, which can bypass the requirement for substantial domain specific knowledge.
The planet warming due to powerful toys being placed into the hands of naive adult children (the masses), by other naive adult children (scientists), all under the governance of incompetent and fake "democracy".
Widespread cheap automobiles, gadgets, air conditioning, cheap airfare, cheap cruises, harmful levels of global trade (especially unnecessary disposable crap), basically anything non-necessary....doing a delta between wealthy nations and underdeveloped countries would give a pretty decent list.
Have the big brained scientists have a plan, *that can work under real world constraints* (they tend to fail to mention that complex social issues are "not their department" until someone pushes back on their Just-So-Story plans)?
Ok, I see what you meant. Apparently, you think the planet is warming because of human activity. Is that correct? That is what I think too. So, what are you getting at?
Being better informed on one side of an issue is not very helpful for understanding reality. For example, on an issue like climate change most people do not have a good understanding of the mainstream view that is it is a real thing and human caused. Skeptics think they understand the scientific consensus and spend all their time-consuming skeptical arguments against what they think they already know.
When I first learned about global warming in 1988, I was aware that the temperature has risen in the early part of the century, then been flat in the middle and had started rising again in the previous decade and had been doing so for little over a decade. I also knew that CO2 would have steadily risen as industrialization progressed. I figured SOMETHING had overridden the CO2 signal mid-century and that might happen again so I resolved to wait until 2000 and if it were still going on, I'd buy it. Well 2000 came and went so I became a believer in the science.
Some years later, I noticed that a lot of the financial types I conversed with online were quite opposed to idea of global warming. Thinking a bit more on it, it occurred to me that since Mars has >15X more CO2 in its atmosphere than Earth does, it should have a pretty big greenhouse effect, eh? I checked on that and found Mars has a negligible greenhouse effect. Huh, what gives? So now I was curious and I spent six months in 2007 trying to get a handle on this (it's complicated). I started out with history, how did scientists come to believe that the Earth was warming from human activities. Much later I wrote up an account for my substack.
The model is not physically realistic, in actuality clouds are not "giant carports in the skies {but their function can be approximated by treating them as such). Physically realistic models that are beyond my competence explain stuff like stratospheric cooling (predicted in the granddaddy climate model from 1967 and since confirmed). My simple model gives average global temperature results that fall into the range of the sophisticated ones, and my back of the envelop calculations for sea level rise also comport with the advanced model results. These serve (me) as a confirmation of the validity of the official view.
Based on the above, I'd say your understanding of the climate debate is pretty simplistic. You only need two decades of rising temperatures - 1980 to 2000 - to be convinced of such a complex conjecture as cAGW? Oy vey. Do you realize that global mean temperature has been hotter than today for about 80% of the present interglacial, i.e. for 80% of the most recent 10 thousand years? Do you still believe in Mann's hockey stick reconstruction, too?
Most skeptics DO have a simplistic view of the science of climate; and most true believers are no better. They have no idea what is even in the IPCC report, other than that part written by activists not scientists. But I don't derive my skepticism from internet quarrels among these folks.
My skepticism is informed by the world-renowned climate scientists who are completely conversant with the science and tend to refute it. The onus isn't on them to prove anything, or to create a better model - climate is too complex a system to model remotely accurately, and the existing models fail miserably, even in the short run. No; the rule is, he who asserts must prove. Skeptics merely have to poke holes in the orthodoxy. And they have been spectacularly successful at it so far.
Worse than the orthodoxy in climate science are the "solutions" proposed to deal with the supposed problem. The "solutions" are pretty much universally worse than the imagined problems. In fact there has been no increase in any of the claimed natural disasters in the past 100 years: no more droughts, no more wildfires, no more tornadoes or heavy rains or anything. Life flourishes in warmer, more CO2-rich environments - witness the Cambrian "explosion" of life when atmospheric CO2 was 16 times as concentrated yet the oceans were neither acidic nor boiling...
The "solutions" are the opposite of "green." (You realize that CO2 is plant food, right? And that it is responsible for the planet greening by about 13% in the past 75 years - mostly in semi-arid regions. More CO2 in the atmosphere means that plants' stomata don't have to be open as much to draw in the plant food they need, which means they don't lose as much moisture, which means they grow better because they have more food and lose less water...) Wind turbines - really? Solar panels? Battery storage for base-load power for metropolises? That's crazy talk. There isn't enough child labour in Africa to mine all of the cobalt necessary...
On every level, the climate hysteria is under-supported nonsense.
The legal system is explicitly NOT a system for discovering truth. We have science for that. But science is limited. For example, in science there are THREE acceptable answers to a yes/no question, yes, no, and I don't know. There are many situations in life when this third answer is not acceptable.
For example, two individuals have a contractual dispute. Nobody knows the truth of the matter, nevertheless an answer is needed, so they can get on with their lives. So, they go to court, and it supplies them one. Obviously, society needs some way to resolve disputes and determine guilt or innocence that is seen as legitimate, avoiding the use of violence to settle the matter.
A legitimate legal system will try to have its judgments correspond to the truth *when possible*, but this is not always the case.
I wouldn't be so quick to draw a contrast between the practice of science and the law.
The most important aspect of the scientific method that leads us closer to truth is peer review. By peer review, I do NOT mean the two anonymous readers who help journal editors select publications. That's a silly concept of peer review. Peer review in science, properly understood, is the on-going critical examination, replication, refinement of research *after* it has been published. It is open-ended and can continue for centuries after publication.
I put it to you that when there are competing schools of thought on a scientific matter, competing paradigms, the peer review process can be just as adversarial, emotional, motivated, as any court battle. You just have to look at the debates in climate science to see what I mean. This was the seminal insight of Thomas Kuhn, among others.
> Peer review in science, properly understood, is the on-going critical examination, replication, refinement of research *after* it has been published. It is open-ended and can continue for centuries after publication.
You missed something: the distinction between intentions and ground level performance, and there is plenty of evidence demonstrating how flawed the performance is.
You missed something: Nobody ever claimed anyone was perfect. That's why peer review, properly understood, takes so long. Those who think that two anonymous readers giving a recommendation to an editor have the final say are the ones who are missing something.
> You missed something: Nobody ever claimed anyone was perfect.
You seem to have done the opposite: I made no claim that perfection was necessary. Sorry if my commentary interfered with your cheerleading for science.
> That's why peer review, properly understood, takes so long.
Do you realize you are speculating?
> Those who think that two anonymous readers giving a recommendation to an editor have the final say are the ones who are missing something.
a) Similarly, rapists are also terrible people, but so what?
b) They are not the only people missing something, scientists are also - yet, if one was to judge their quality by fanboy posts on the internet, one might form a very different conclusion.
I did, there WAS a long period of debate about climate science, years ago. That's what I talk about in my historical review. One of the early 1900's skeptics of the mainstream position on global warming (that it does not happen) was Guy Callendar, who was eventually proven right (directionally if not in magnitude).
> The legal system is explicitly NOT a system for discovering truth. We have science for that.
I lol'd.
> For example, in science there are THREE acceptable answers to a yes/no question, yes, no, and I don't know.
In scripture, sure, but when it comes to object level cognition of scientists (which I would say are a part of science, though most science fans I talk to disagree *when asked explicitly*), it is usually very different.
Great post, but I think the vast majority of political scientists would have similarly rejected the proposition that knowledge and extremism are correlated.
True, you'd think! Whatever some of the specific studies may have had to say (and I'm not surprised they were likely flawed), there's just too much related data on things like the relationship between education and voting patterns, or on susceptibility to 'far right' and 'far left' populism, etc. to buy that people on the extreme ends are generally more knowledgeable.
Having lived half my life in universities, I can assure you that there is considerable truth to the observation that the most knowledgeable tend to be extremists. To pick just one example: our universities these days are stuffed full of pro-Hamas idiots. It's the inverse of the Paris Nazi of Kahnaman's youth: the otherwise educated and cultured professoriate being morally deranged in this respect.
Very few university professors even believe in something as simple and well-established as the law of supply-and-demand, or evolutionary psychology...
These unsupported claims, and your claim in your other comment on this post that "climate deniers" and "covid skeptics" are "better informed" tells me all I need to know.
I'm sorry, but putting “complex” in the title, but then “complicated” in the subheading makes my inner sociologist scream (I apologize, he can be very mean). Which one is it?
Academics love to create terms of art and points of distinction which don't exist in quotidian English. For valid reasons. But when I write, I write for a general audience and therefore I write in plain old English. If I observe an academic distinction, I'll say so. Otherwise, no. Some academics get a little shirty about this, apparently in the belief that if their field observes a distinction, all the other users of the language must do likewise or they are "wrong." It ain't.
I imagine I'm preaching to the choir, and please don't take this as a dismissal of the overall excellent article, but a few comments....
> Donald Trump has repeatedly said the war in Ukraine is so simple and clear he could settle it “in a day” and a large portion of the American population does not take that statement to be the grotesque hubris of a delusional narcissistic conman. They hear confidence and they find it reassuring. Because they are not fascinated by complexity. They are frightened by it. And they want someone to sweep it away — which Trump does at every rally.
I smell irony.
> You will also continue to seek out new political information, but having drawn a conclusion about which side is more correct
What if one draws the conclusion that both sides are hilariously incorrect, and in easily predictable ways (if one has been at it for a while)?
> My synthesizing thousands of these unique perspectives, the dragonfly’s brain creates an astonishingly broad and accurate picture of reality
Picture of *the world* seems more appropriate - reality is very similar, but also very different.
> Humans can do something similar.
As a binary, sure, but how many can do it, and to what degree (with what level of skill, *on an absolute scale*)?
> An actively open-minded thinker is likely to be a well-informed thinker.
Don't forget you're measuring on a relative scale, and also that you aren't measuring (not really, and not the thing itself).
> What happens when we synthesize all those different views pointing in different directions? It’s likely — not certain, not universal, but likely — that we will land somewhere closer to the middle of the range of views than the extremes.
Or: somewhere that isn't even on the map, because the map is relative, and based on belief rather than knowledge, and people don't realize they're dealing with a map in the first place (perhaps because this fundamentally important matter is not included in Western school curriculum?).
> But I think this argument makes sense.
Could it be any other way?
> And that’s the best I can do.
I bet it isn't!
> Caveats aside, I do believe strongly — as in, willing to die on this hill — that there is at least some scrap of value in almost every perspective.
Me too. A way to approach it for those who do not: what if your guess (experienced as a fact) is wrong? (I don't expect this to work out of the box, but with some training I think it would, to some degree).
> People who dismiss whole political movements, or concepts, or thinkers on the assumption that literally everything within them is utterly and completely valueless are deeply misguided.
Alo, deeply guided ("trained", in LLM lingo) - this is largely how we are taught to think by media and often academics/experts.
> Or they’re the sort of people who are enraged when The New York Times interviews and tries to understand Trump voters.
Or accidentally believe that Trump supporters are as they are usually described, by people who are literally hallucinting (hallucination begets hallucination, welcome to Planet Earth, 2024).
Some skkeptics assert that temperature is not going up. Others acknowlege temperature is rising but that CO2 has nothing to do with it. Even informed skeptics like Nur Shaviv acknowledge the green house effect of CO2.
Skeptics are asserting many things with no evidence. Pointing to historical temperatures is just hand waving. Asserting that the data is fake is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. You have none.
> Skeptics are asserting many things with no evidence.
And science asserts many things as fact without adequate supporting evidence.
They are also missing at least half of the picture, at this point I would argue the very most important part: phenomenology. Meanwhile, they claim (at least implicitly) that they are THE authority humanity should turn to to solve this and all other problems (until someone calls on them, at which point they (unknowingly I presume) execute the Motte and Bailey psy op).
Interesting post. What I found surprising is that the level of political knowledge does not vary much over the whole political orientation spectrum. Whatever is the theory are we not here in the world of details instead of the general?
Recently read a course outline on ‘Thinking’ by Hanna Arendt that went into another orbit. This made me think more about my thinking, especially politically.
Your thoughtful and clear article needs to be a conversation starter in our tense times.
An historian once said to me, the best writing is making the most complex communicated simply ( not simplistic).
Your asterisk condition is likely more important than it might appear at first. Overall views may be dominated by one issue of strong emotional value where compromise is impossible or extremely difficult. Abortion as an issue comes to mind. Or calls to the centre are extremely difficult to achieve in what are seen as binary decisions. Don’t recall where I read this example but in asking people whether they want pizza or a hamburger, very few would see the ideal result as a pizzaburger. So, if being on Team Pizza correlates with a set of beliefs and that this represents a crucial issue for me, I will not easily compromise on other issues, even if ultimately there should be no linkage.
Also, it is probably true that most of us overestimate our knowledge and understanding of issues. I seem to recall experiments showing that our estimates of our knowledge levels on an issue fall once we are asked to explain a process or an issue. Reflective as well, I suppose, of how few of us have an actively-open mind.
Linked to that is the probability that we close our minds once we have analyzed an issue with complexity because we don’t want to go through that process again. I remember being frustrated years ago trying to decide what TV cable/internet package to buy. None of the offerings ever allowed me to purchase the perfect mix that suited my needs. To get that mix cost became exorbitant and the default options always required purchasing things that were totally unnecessary. However, once the decision was made no amount of argument seemed likely to shift me off that position because I did not want to go through that process again and had no confidence that a better option was really available.
Personally, I don't find the Paris Nazi story at all extraordinary. Nazis were ordinary people in every respect, except for their hatred of Jews. You see the same thing in human nature the world over, throughout history. People who got along perfectly well and even intermarried in the former Yugoslavia suddenly turned on each other with an unimaginable ferocity and barbarism. Queers for Palestine defend atrocities against innocent Israelis that would have had themselves as targets had they been at that time and place. Civilization is a thin veneer over humanity's darker side, always ready to bust out - usually in very limited, focused directions (because it is too hard to hate everyone everywhere and live a normal life).
The mistake people make is to think that all bad things cluster together, and all good things cluster together, creating a binary. Good and bad impulses intertwine in human nature seemlessly.
I am sure you have seen this cartoon: https://images.wsj.net/im-535576/social
A lot of people end up in the middle simply because the endpoints have moved. Disliking whoever has lied to you most recently, or most egregiously surely has a large effect, too.
Oh, boy. If you think the "science was settled in 1967," you really do know almost nothing about what the current debates are about. Even the IPCC admits that they can't model clouds - a pretty major problem. The current debates are largely about conjectured "feedbacks" in the system, and whether they are positive (tending to a tipping point) or negative (tending to mitigate the effects of increased CO2). These debates are not at all "settled." Nor are the effects of ocean currents well understood. Among scores of other climate-related phenomena. The devil is in the details. C-mon, Mike, you haven't learned the lesson our author has been trying to instill here.
For the record, I don't claim to know whether or not human activity is warming the planet, or by how much. Except locally: the growth of cities surely do create urban heat islands, for example. All of the evidence I have seen is at best ambiguous, consistent with human and natural causes. History at every time scale tends to indicate that CO2 is NOT a powerful driver of global mean temperature, if it is significant at all. Nor is there any solid evidence that warming is bad for human or other life; on the contrary. Before I'm willing to pay good money that has - as Lomborg has spent a career showing - many many more beneficial uses.
I just watched an animated piece by Gurwinder (who is on Substack) who says that curiosity and humility are the necessary components for combatting confirmation bias, which every human has. Aspects of your excellent piece echo this idea--I have to be CURIOUS to face and absorb counter-narratives to ones I have come to feel most comfortable with. And HUMILITY about my own certainty of being right is obviously required as well. My problem in trying to sort out "the narratives" out there is that I get overwhelmed. I have stopped trusting any media the way that I used to. But without that trust, it's even harder to sort. So for the sake of my mental health and attempt to not waste my one precious life, I end up withdrawing. I make a political decision, like who will get my vote for president, based on the best knowledge I can absorb, then pull away and make music, find joy in nature, just be the animal that I am muddling through and doing the best I can. I've also come to the conclusion that no human being is really all that smart. We are each SO very far from understanding the complexity of the universe let alone our place in it. That was my main takeaway from Oppenheimer, which I felt was over-rated but that message is the one that stood out. Ultimately, this genius guy was only so smart.
The charlatans in politics count on overwhelming people with endless bafflegab. They spend huge amounts of taxpayer money to promote their narrative. The objective isn't primarily to persuade, but to push people into submission - to force withdrawal. A functional constitution must put severe limits on what is within the ambit of politics, otherwise politics takes over life. It is a ratchet that goes in only one direction.
Perhaps someone should pour sand into the gears of this mechanism.
1. The adversarial legal system is often touted as a model for discovering the truth. You have two (teams of) advocates for diametrically opposite positions - extremists for their client - battling it out in front of an impartial judge, who is in the best position to discern the truth from the best arguments the lawyers can muster. To generalize: while extremism may be dysfunctional to the individual extremist, is it highly functional for society, which gets the benefit of the best arguments based on the most knowledge from both (or all) sides. You try to be the impartial judge; but don't begrudge the extremists who put in the time and effort to give you what you need to make a reasonable decision.
2. People who believe a counter-narrative - climate deniers, covid skeptics, free marketers in Canada will serve as example - tend to be better informed than people who go along with what is popular. This is because hearing the other side is inescapable for those defending a counter-narrative; most of what the counter-narrative folks do is rebut the narrative, for which task they must know and understand it. So when world-renowned experts in a field defend a counter-narrative, they deserve the utmost respect; they are much more likely to be right, or closer to the truth, than those who go with what is popular and career-enhancing.
Lesson in there.
I mostly agree with the first point, as is implicit in my saying that there is value to be found in almost any perspective. Seeing reality is hard. Contention and debate are good.
As to the second point, I'd say yes and no. The dynamic you highlight is real, but it's far from universal. And it's just not true, always, that you "must know and understand" the narrative in order to rebut it: It depends on the audience. When you are speaking mostly among the like-minded, you don't truly need to understand the full argument for the narrative, including its evidence; you need to understand what your fellow travellers make of the narrative and its evidence. The problem is precisely that we mostly stick to our fellow-travellers and so we don't get the pushback that forces us to better understand the opposite view. RFK Jr. is a perfect illustration: He's a big proponent of counter-narratives, he thinks he knows all about the narratives he is rebutting, but he is, in fact, in ideologue who spots almost all his time repeating himself among the like-minded and so his depiction of the claims he rebuts is cartoonish bullshit. That's a great way to boost confidence while knowledge stagnates.
I didn't claim that people who defend a counter-narrative are *always perfectly* informed; I said they *tend* to be *better* informed - for the very reason you give in the essay: they are practically forced to deal with the opponents' arguments because they are so prevalent. Your counter-example, RFK Jr., does not refute that generalization, not only because he is just one instance, but because no matter how poorly informed you might think RFK Jr. is on the topics he speaks about, I can point to dozens of high-profile folks on the other side who are even more misinformed. Fauci? Wallensky? Ventilators? Ivermectin is for horses? Close the beaches in summer and make everyone wear masks outside. It was racist to want to stop flights from China (until it was necessary to stop all flights everywhere)? Let's close the Ontario-Manitoba border to local commuters at the very same time as tens of thousands of travelers were pouring through Pearson Airport every day. "Vitamin D is fake news!" - Canada's Health Minister Patty Hajdu in Question Period.... The insanity of the accepted narrative was ubiquitous. The government geniuses got pretty much *everything* wrong on covid, from start to finish. Some of them are starting to admit some aspects of the errors. Time will tell. My money is on the covid counter-narrative-supporters, for all the reasons your essay implies they should be more reliable. (Discernment is required not to go to the opposite extreme and think that the jabs were a depopulation conspiracy. But there is something very fishy about the way these unsafe and ineffective treatments were rushed out all around the word in lock-step.)
Climate skeptics do not "deal with the opponents' arguments" because they do not understand them. They simply ask questions without providing their own model that explains the facts better. When asked I get "the sun". How so? Solar activity stopped rising in 1950 and most of warming has been after. Hand waving. Cosmic waves changing due to "galactic topology". Huh? More hand waving.
As for Covid, I see lots of folks in the last couple of years Monday morning quarterbacking. What were they saying in February-March 2020. When they said anything, it was Covid is a like a cold of maybe flu. Colds don't send people to the hospital and flu doesn't kill folks in the numbers covid did. Of the people we know personally who contracted Covid in 2020, about a fifth when to the hospital and one of them died. Nobody I know ever went to the hospital because of the flu.
He who asserts must prove, Mike. The onus is on those who would force others to spend untold trillions of dollars to "save the planet" to prove that the expenditure is necessary. Skeptics merely have to show that the alleged proofs are unsound. They do not have to produce their own better models - especially since most skeptics worth paying attention to realize that the climate system is too complicated and too poorly understood in this, the infancy of climate science, to model well enough. If this is an example of the quality of your thinking on climate, you have nothing to be confident about.
No Monday-morning quarterbacking on covid here. I published a handful of articles about covid during the covid period that have stood the test of time quite well. I sent out hundreds of emails to my correspondents over the years debunking the government narrative in real time. Most of the insanity was obvious, common sense. Like masking: if those flimsy, ill-fitting masks could stop tiny viruses, them cigarette filters that are 20 times as thick could block out smoke particles that are 10 times as big as viruses. We all know that smoking causes cancer, tho. It didn't take expertise in any of the relevant medical sciences to be skeptical of the rushed-out and badly tested jabs. It was obvious that the health authoritarians were lying about almost everything, in part because they had to use heavy-handed methods to silence critics rather than refute them with data and analysis. It was obvious by March 2020 that the seasonal flu was 5 to 10 times as lethal to prepubescent children as covid is, and that the jabs were *completely* unnecessary for children. Covid was mostly a risk to the aged and infirm, with multiple comorbidities. The average age of those dying from covid was higher than the life expectancy. The aged and infirm were about 10,000 times more at risk of death than the young and healthy, yet the health authoritarians prescribed the same "remedies" for the entire population. It was utter madness than any critical thinker could have known in real time. But fear clouds judgment probably better than anything else - so the government agencies did everything they could to pump up the irrational fears...
Careful!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism
> They simply ask questions without providing their own model that explains the facts better.
They equals whom, precisely? And: how did you come to know this about millions of people you've never met?
> Hand waving.
Indeed.
> As for Covid, I see lots of folks in the last couple of years Monday morning quarterbacking.
I encounter this "now and then" myself, on a variety of topics (like this one).
They are climate skeptics who post online whose stuff I have seen. As for the millions those mostly are people following what the sources they trust say, they don't have their own view.
Same for vaccine deniers, one guy here was writing that people who got vaxed died as a result (except of course me, my family and everyone I know who got vaxe, and millions of other folks who got the vax and yet did not die.
(Did you even skim the links I posted above before replying?)
> They are climate skeptics who post online whose stuff I have seen.
I see. For a minute there I thought you were talking about all climate skeptics.
Questions:
1. What percentage of the whole have you been exposed to?
2. Is your perception of them without flaw?
3. Might you have accidentally formed an opinion of the whole based on your phenomenological experience with a few?
4. What do you think of the theory that "Perception is Reality"?
> As for the millions those mostly are people following what the sources they trust say, they don't have their own view.
How do you know the thinking of people you've not met? Is this a new kind of science?
> Same for vaccine deniers....
I could post all the same questions about this.
> one guy here was writing that people who got vaxed died as a result (except of course me, my family and everyone I know who got vaxe, and millions of other folks who got the vax and yet did not die.
Do you believe yourself (or The Experts) to possess knowledge (as opposed to belief) about how many people have in fact (as opposed to in estimation) died as a consequence of vaccination?
> he thinks he knows all about the narratives he is rebutting
Careful!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
> most of what the counter-narrative folks do is rebut the narrative, for which task they must know and understand it.
Unless they have adequate depth in epistemology, modal logic, linguistics/semiotics, etc, which can bypass the requirement for substantial domain specific knowledge.
Well do you understand climate change? What do you think it is about??
> Well do you understand climate change?
I do not, but this ignores my claim above.
> What do you think it is about??
The planet warming due to powerful toys being placed into the hands of naive adult children (the masses), by other naive adult children (scientists), all under the governance of incompetent and fake "democracy".
How close am I do you think?
Toys? What are talking about?
Widespread cheap automobiles, gadgets, air conditioning, cheap airfare, cheap cruises, harmful levels of global trade (especially unnecessary disposable crap), basically anything non-necessary....doing a delta between wealthy nations and underdeveloped countries would give a pretty decent list.
Have the big brained scientists have a plan, *that can work under real world constraints* (they tend to fail to mention that complex social issues are "not their department" until someone pushes back on their Just-So-Story plans)?
Ok, I see what you meant. Apparently, you think the planet is warming because of human activity. Is that correct? That is what I think too. So, what are you getting at?
Being better informed on one side of an issue is not very helpful for understanding reality. For example, on an issue like climate change most people do not have a good understanding of the mainstream view that is it is a real thing and human caused. Skeptics think they understand the scientific consensus and spend all their time-consuming skeptical arguments against what they think they already know.
When I first learned about global warming in 1988, I was aware that the temperature has risen in the early part of the century, then been flat in the middle and had started rising again in the previous decade and had been doing so for little over a decade. I also knew that CO2 would have steadily risen as industrialization progressed. I figured SOMETHING had overridden the CO2 signal mid-century and that might happen again so I resolved to wait until 2000 and if it were still going on, I'd buy it. Well 2000 came and went so I became a believer in the science.
Some years later, I noticed that a lot of the financial types I conversed with online were quite opposed to idea of global warming. Thinking a bit more on it, it occurred to me that since Mars has >15X more CO2 in its atmosphere than Earth does, it should have a pretty big greenhouse effect, eh? I checked on that and found Mars has a negligible greenhouse effect. Huh, what gives? So now I was curious and I spent six months in 2007 trying to get a handle on this (it's complicated). I started out with history, how did scientists come to believe that the Earth was warming from human activities. Much later I wrote up an account for my substack.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-global-warming-became-scientific
I also developed a toy model to help explain how this works with one step more depth than the sort of explanations for the public.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/a-simple-math-model-for-global-warming
The model is not physically realistic, in actuality clouds are not "giant carports in the skies {but their function can be approximated by treating them as such). Physically realistic models that are beyond my competence explain stuff like stratospheric cooling (predicted in the granddaddy climate model from 1967 and since confirmed). My simple model gives average global temperature results that fall into the range of the sophisticated ones, and my back of the envelop calculations for sea level rise also comport with the advanced model results. These serve (me) as a confirmation of the validity of the official view.
Based on the above, I'd say your understanding of the climate debate is pretty simplistic. You only need two decades of rising temperatures - 1980 to 2000 - to be convinced of such a complex conjecture as cAGW? Oy vey. Do you realize that global mean temperature has been hotter than today for about 80% of the present interglacial, i.e. for 80% of the most recent 10 thousand years? Do you still believe in Mann's hockey stick reconstruction, too?
Most skeptics DO have a simplistic view of the science of climate; and most true believers are no better. They have no idea what is even in the IPCC report, other than that part written by activists not scientists. But I don't derive my skepticism from internet quarrels among these folks.
My skepticism is informed by the world-renowned climate scientists who are completely conversant with the science and tend to refute it. The onus isn't on them to prove anything, or to create a better model - climate is too complex a system to model remotely accurately, and the existing models fail miserably, even in the short run. No; the rule is, he who asserts must prove. Skeptics merely have to poke holes in the orthodoxy. And they have been spectacularly successful at it so far.
Worse than the orthodoxy in climate science are the "solutions" proposed to deal with the supposed problem. The "solutions" are pretty much universally worse than the imagined problems. In fact there has been no increase in any of the claimed natural disasters in the past 100 years: no more droughts, no more wildfires, no more tornadoes or heavy rains or anything. Life flourishes in warmer, more CO2-rich environments - witness the Cambrian "explosion" of life when atmospheric CO2 was 16 times as concentrated yet the oceans were neither acidic nor boiling...
The "solutions" are the opposite of "green." (You realize that CO2 is plant food, right? And that it is responsible for the planet greening by about 13% in the past 75 years - mostly in semi-arid regions. More CO2 in the atmosphere means that plants' stomata don't have to be open as much to draw in the plant food they need, which means they don't lose as much moisture, which means they grow better because they have more food and lose less water...) Wind turbines - really? Solar panels? Battery storage for base-load power for metropolises? That's crazy talk. There isn't enough child labour in Africa to mine all of the cobalt necessary...
On every level, the climate hysteria is under-supported nonsense.
> Skeptics think....
Similarly, Allists tend to think they can read minds at massive scale. Which affliction is sillier, and which objectively causes more harm?
> I also developed a toy model to help explain how this works with one step more depth than the sort of explanations for the public.
You should try the same with reality.
The legal system is explicitly NOT a system for discovering truth. We have science for that. But science is limited. For example, in science there are THREE acceptable answers to a yes/no question, yes, no, and I don't know. There are many situations in life when this third answer is not acceptable.
For example, two individuals have a contractual dispute. Nobody knows the truth of the matter, nevertheless an answer is needed, so they can get on with their lives. So, they go to court, and it supplies them one. Obviously, society needs some way to resolve disputes and determine guilt or innocence that is seen as legitimate, avoiding the use of violence to settle the matter.
A legitimate legal system will try to have its judgments correspond to the truth *when possible*, but this is not always the case.
I wouldn't be so quick to draw a contrast between the practice of science and the law.
The most important aspect of the scientific method that leads us closer to truth is peer review. By peer review, I do NOT mean the two anonymous readers who help journal editors select publications. That's a silly concept of peer review. Peer review in science, properly understood, is the on-going critical examination, replication, refinement of research *after* it has been published. It is open-ended and can continue for centuries after publication.
I put it to you that when there are competing schools of thought on a scientific matter, competing paradigms, the peer review process can be just as adversarial, emotional, motivated, as any court battle. You just have to look at the debates in climate science to see what I mean. This was the seminal insight of Thomas Kuhn, among others.
> Peer review in science, properly understood, is the on-going critical examination, replication, refinement of research *after* it has been published. It is open-ended and can continue for centuries after publication.
You missed something: the distinction between intentions and ground level performance, and there is plenty of evidence demonstrating how flawed the performance is.
You missed something: Nobody ever claimed anyone was perfect. That's why peer review, properly understood, takes so long. Those who think that two anonymous readers giving a recommendation to an editor have the final say are the ones who are missing something.
> You missed something: Nobody ever claimed anyone was perfect.
You seem to have done the opposite: I made no claim that perfection was necessary. Sorry if my commentary interfered with your cheerleading for science.
> That's why peer review, properly understood, takes so long.
Do you realize you are speculating?
> Those who think that two anonymous readers giving a recommendation to an editor have the final say are the ones who are missing something.
a) Similarly, rapists are also terrible people, but so what?
b) They are not the only people missing something, scientists are also - yet, if one was to judge their quality by fanboy posts on the internet, one might form a very different conclusion.
I did, there WAS a long period of debate about climate science, years ago. That's what I talk about in my historical review. One of the early 1900's skeptics of the mainstream position on global warming (that it does not happen) was Guy Callendar, who was eventually proven right (directionally if not in magnitude).
https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/guy-callendar-pioneer-of-climate-change
The basic science was settled in 1967.
> The legal system is explicitly NOT a system for discovering truth. We have science for that.
I lol'd.
> For example, in science there are THREE acceptable answers to a yes/no question, yes, no, and I don't know.
In scripture, sure, but when it comes to object level cognition of scientists (which I would say are a part of science, though most science fans I talk to disagree *when asked explicitly*), it is usually very different.
Great post, but I think the vast majority of political scientists would have similarly rejected the proposition that knowledge and extremism are correlated.
Yeah, I wasn't sure about that, but that's the way it's framed in that paper. I would have thought it would have been toned down in review.
True, you'd think! Whatever some of the specific studies may have had to say (and I'm not surprised they were likely flawed), there's just too much related data on things like the relationship between education and voting patterns, or on susceptibility to 'far right' and 'far left' populism, etc. to buy that people on the extreme ends are generally more knowledgeable.
Having lived half my life in universities, I can assure you that there is considerable truth to the observation that the most knowledgeable tend to be extremists. To pick just one example: our universities these days are stuffed full of pro-Hamas idiots. It's the inverse of the Paris Nazi of Kahnaman's youth: the otherwise educated and cultured professoriate being morally deranged in this respect.
Very few university professors even believe in something as simple and well-established as the law of supply-and-demand, or evolutionary psychology...
These unsupported claims, and your claim in your other comment on this post that "climate deniers" and "covid skeptics" are "better informed" tells me all I need to know.
Yup! Lesson of the essay not learned. You know too much. LOL
> To pick just one example: our universities these days are stuffed full of pro-Hamas idiots.
I smell irony.
Irony doesn't have an odour, so no you don't. Maybe you don't even know what irony is...
> Irony doesn't have an odour, so no you don't.
Very clever!
> Maybe you don't even know what irony is...
Maybe! Would you like to engage in an exploratory conversation to test our relative abilities?
I'm sorry, but putting “complex” in the title, but then “complicated” in the subheading makes my inner sociologist scream (I apologize, he can be very mean). Which one is it?
Academics love to create terms of art and points of distinction which don't exist in quotidian English. For valid reasons. But when I write, I write for a general audience and therefore I write in plain old English. If I observe an academic distinction, I'll say so. Otherwise, no. Some academics get a little shirty about this, apparently in the belief that if their field observes a distinction, all the other users of the language must do likewise or they are "wrong." It ain't.
I imagine I'm preaching to the choir, and please don't take this as a dismissal of the overall excellent article, but a few comments....
> Donald Trump has repeatedly said the war in Ukraine is so simple and clear he could settle it “in a day” and a large portion of the American population does not take that statement to be the grotesque hubris of a delusional narcissistic conman. They hear confidence and they find it reassuring. Because they are not fascinated by complexity. They are frightened by it. And they want someone to sweep it away — which Trump does at every rally.
I smell irony.
> You will also continue to seek out new political information, but having drawn a conclusion about which side is more correct
What if one draws the conclusion that both sides are hilariously incorrect, and in easily predictable ways (if one has been at it for a while)?
> My synthesizing thousands of these unique perspectives, the dragonfly’s brain creates an astonishingly broad and accurate picture of reality
Picture of *the world* seems more appropriate - reality is very similar, but also very different.
> Humans can do something similar.
As a binary, sure, but how many can do it, and to what degree (with what level of skill, *on an absolute scale*)?
> An actively open-minded thinker is likely to be a well-informed thinker.
Don't forget you're measuring on a relative scale, and also that you aren't measuring (not really, and not the thing itself).
> What happens when we synthesize all those different views pointing in different directions? It’s likely — not certain, not universal, but likely — that we will land somewhere closer to the middle of the range of views than the extremes.
Or: somewhere that isn't even on the map, because the map is relative, and based on belief rather than knowledge, and people don't realize they're dealing with a map in the first place (perhaps because this fundamentally important matter is not included in Western school curriculum?).
> But I think this argument makes sense.
Could it be any other way?
> And that’s the best I can do.
I bet it isn't!
> Caveats aside, I do believe strongly — as in, willing to die on this hill — that there is at least some scrap of value in almost every perspective.
Me too. A way to approach it for those who do not: what if your guess (experienced as a fact) is wrong? (I don't expect this to work out of the box, but with some training I think it would, to some degree).
> People who dismiss whole political movements, or concepts, or thinkers on the assumption that literally everything within them is utterly and completely valueless are deeply misguided.
Alo, deeply guided ("trained", in LLM lingo) - this is largely how we are taught to think by media and often academics/experts.
> Or they’re the sort of people who are enraged when The New York Times interviews and tries to understand Trump voters.
Or accidentally believe that Trump supporters are as they are usually described, by people who are literally hallucinting (hallucination begets hallucination, welcome to Planet Earth, 2024).
Loved the article, and subscribed!!
Some skkeptics assert that temperature is not going up. Others acknowlege temperature is rising but that CO2 has nothing to do with it. Even informed skeptics like Nur Shaviv acknowledge the green house effect of CO2.
Skeptics are asserting many things with no evidence. Pointing to historical temperatures is just hand waving. Asserting that the data is fake is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. You have none.
> Skeptics are asserting many things with no evidence.
And science asserts many things as fact without adequate supporting evidence.
They are also missing at least half of the picture, at this point I would argue the very most important part: phenomenology. Meanwhile, they claim (at least implicitly) that they are THE authority humanity should turn to to solve this and all other problems (until someone calls on them, at which point they (unknowingly I presume) execute the Motte and Bailey psy op).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
Interesting post. What I found surprising is that the level of political knowledge does not vary much over the whole political orientation spectrum. Whatever is the theory are we not here in the world of details instead of the general?
Recently read a course outline on ‘Thinking’ by Hanna Arendt that went into another orbit. This made me think more about my thinking, especially politically.
Your thoughtful and clear article needs to be a conversation starter in our tense times.
An historian once said to me, the best writing is making the most complex communicated simply ( not simplistic).
Very good piece.
Behold! A well-written essay, with excellent explanatory power
Whether intuition or self-critical analysis is better depends on the particular decision.