This, to me, is the key point: “In this essay, I argue that misinformation should often be understood not as a societal disease but as a symptom of deeper problems like institutional distrust, political sectarianism, and anti-establishment worldviews.” I would offer a friendly amendment to your statement “The simple fact is that many of these problems are downstream of collapsing trust in institutions among conservative Americans.” That is, collapsing trust is not confined to conservatives, and I would add that, particularly on the most contentious issues, we as liberals could stand to view sources we continue to trust with a much more skeptical eye.
Allied with that, this essay also seems to me to dovetail nicely with those where you examine the conundrum of making intelligent judgments in a complex society where we all, no matter how assiduous in assessing the available information, can only attain partial knowledge.
I am reminded, too, of recent exchanges I’ve observed on one contentious issue in which the two participants were equally credible, but each had personal experiences that were diametrically opposed. Neither was misinformed, rather the problems seemed to me to arise in efforts to generalize from those personal experiences.
I come back to what you have discussed in many essays here: we must take on board that none of us have full information, and that our personal experiences, while often valid, are not enough basis on which to generalize. We must therefore be vigilant about these possible pitfalls, be open to new or better information, and be ready to reassess. And it is OK to make mistakes!
I understand your frustration. To me, there is something uniquely annoying about the misinfo researchers. Since I was in grad school in the 90s, I've been listening to, -- and disagreeing with -- the pomo critique that objectivity is impossible and that all scholarly research is inevitably biased. In contrast, I believe that researchers/academics should strive for objectivity as much as possible, and that the institutions and norms of the academy are meant to assist with that.
Then, around 2016, after the Trump election and supported by a huge amount of US federal funding (see: https://liber-net.org/federal-awards-project/ ), misinfo studies comes along with a research program that obviously, almost comically, doubles as a partisan political campaign (for the Democrats or more broadly for the laptop class).
But, when someone calls them out on their contradictions, they whine that your pomo critique of objectivity undermines reason and truth. It's as if a 19th century scientist were to complain that you can't criticize phrenology b/c no one will believe in science anymore.
I appreciate your critique b/c I think that the misinfo researchers are not only especially annoying but also especially corrosive to the scientific project. Insiders who misappropriate the institutions of science often can do more damage than those who lob bombs from the outside.
My complaint with your writing is you don't have a theory of propaganda, and one could be forgiven for thinking you don't think anyone changes their mind about anything ever. I also think your opponents are just finding you, like, obtuse -- denying not just the existence of misinformation, but the existence of the bad effects assumed to be caused by misinformation. To be clear, van der Linden needs to be pissed off, and there's nothing like a good letter-penning fight between academics, but yeah I think you have gaps in your theory you paper over.
For instance, we should move toward disagreement as a starting point in persuasion conversations and as the primary object of academic research https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/disagreement-as-a-way-to-study-misinformation-and-its-effects/. This is consistent with your point that academics can't really classify misinformation accurately because the boundary between just disagreeing is too fuzzy. It also encompasses the thesis that resistance to reliable information is a bigger cause of disagreement than misinformation.
But you throw your hands up and say misinformation is dead as a concept. They say let's remodel how we study misinformation. I see how that might be interpreted as bad faith by a misinfo researcher.
Regarding gullibility in general, this is from your van der Linden review: "In general, people are highly skeptical of information they encounter: if a message conflicts with their preexisting beliefs, they demand arguments that they find persuasive from sources that they judge to be trustworthy. Otherwise, they typically reject the message."
OK so just find the 1% of the time people are not skeptical and do that thing a lot. That's what "right-wind standup comedy" (fka left-wing) and the Joe Rogan show are. People lower their guard during comedy that just "makes you think." Instead of say "when are people gullible?" you said "people are broadly not gullible and that's good enough for my purposes."
Also you're fully ignoring flood-the-zone propaganda. The mechanism of such misinformation is not that people believe it, it's that it makes truth-seeking harder, and that it produces the perception that other people are believing it. This even applies to narrow misinformation. Even narrow misinformation that I assume other people believe severely affects how I try to persuade other people. Like yeah propaganda is a thing, relies on misinfo and it works.
There's also the Steve Bannon quote that went something like, "just say outrageous shit and people will meet you 75% of the way there." For instance, "maybe vaccines don't have microchips in them, but other toxins sounds plausible." Your theory of narrow misinformation would just call the "microchips" thing failed misinfo only received by a narrow few conspiracy theorists. You wouldn't consider how it might fuel in a non-narrow-misinformation "vaccines are unsafe" disagreement.
BTW your writing has been extremely informative and helpful. The best thesis you've espoused is that trust in reliable info has fallen and that produces strong misinfo effects. I read a bunch of that Harvard misinfo review and I think the above paper on disagreement is extremely applicable in both research and normal-person persuasion. But all this stuff surrounding propaganda and hyper-gullibility has emerged as a gap in your writing and theory.
This was a great response, but these kinds of progressive-authoritarian “a liberal society with free debate is a tool of oppression” screeds don’t deserve it.
A shorter response would be “hey, did you miss the memo that about two or three years ago we decided that we can again handle open debate of ideas, and that accusing academics of supporting oppression doesn’t work to get them cancelled anymore?”
Even shorter would be “hey, 2018 Twitter called, they’re reporting you missing”.
It seems like this could have been easily avoided if they had bothered to hold a 30-minute Zoom call with you. Sadly, that would have prevented them from having an easy target to strawman. They would have had to make their piece more fair and reasonable, and thus less inflammatory and clickbaity.
Well, it's hard to be a somewhat centrist independent thinker, which means to be shunned by most "camps". Thanks for finding the patience to so thoroughly clarify your own position, it made me think as well.
You are as thorough as ever rehashing your usual lines of argument on this topic, and carefully responding to the latest criticisms with those familiar points. Which is all well and good, if repetitive (which I guess was your point, that they are beating the same dead horse and forcing you to rescue the same dead horse). But you guys have already been through this debate several times, and I don't see this going anywhere different.
What surprises me is that you haven't addressed the most central criticism, which in my opinion is key to all of this. Have your own writings and ideas in fact gotten lots of uptake from bad-faith actors and those with ideological agendas, who are exploiting your arguments to justify and perpetuate toxic or problematic narratives? Is there evidence these researchers can point to that influential people (or a critical mass of regular people) were specifically inspired by your words, and have taken this and run with it in questionable directions? If multiple people in the Trump administration are citing you approvingly and using your work to justify bad policies, or popular figures are spreading distorted versions of your ideas around in the service of things you would never endorse, or your stuff has gone viral on YouTube in a really awful context - then I would worry that maybe you're becoming a useful idiot for Trump etc., and you have a responsibility to counter that. But if all of this is based on hypothetical concerns and not in real developments on the ground, then I would say, the proof of harm is in the harm.
With all due respect, I just don't think most people are that interested in what some nerdy philosopher has to say. Let alone, fuel a right-wing movement with it. (And I suspect you're humble enough to agree). But focusing exclusively on the merits of the various arguments may be missing the point. If you want to rebut charges that you are enabling the bad guys, what ultimately matters is whether your words have actually enabled the bad guys. I really doubt it.
Wow — didn’t expect to see a defence of the “academics can’t pursue lines of research that might be used by ‘toxic’ actors” line here.
Academics do not have a responsibility to never enable ‘the bad guys’. They have a responsibility to seek the truth in whatever their line of research is. Sure, I’d say that they shouldn’t work directly for institutions they see as doing evil, but the research itself should be brought to light regardless. The loss of this guiding light is what’s currently destroying public trust in the academy!
I mean — you’re telling on yourself referring to ‘the bad guys’. That’s the whole problem with the field of misinformation research — it’s being used to ‘counter the bad guys’ implying that the misinformation researchers have a privileged understanding of right and wrong on any number of complex, widely-debated issues.
My intention certainly wasn't to defend "“academics can’t pursue lines of research that might be used by ‘toxic’ actors!" Quite the contrary. That's precisely why I specified, "But if all of this [criticism] is based on **hypothetical concerns** and not in real developments on the ground, then I would say, the proof of harm is in the harm." Which is to say, even if someone thinks that an academic's arguments lend themselves easily to misappropriation by cynical parties, "might be used" doesn't cut it - I would want to see proof that it's being abused at scale (and leading to downstream effects) to start worrying about it. And even then, this doesn't mean they must fall silent or that the problem was necessarily in the substance of what they said. But maybe it signals a concerning development that they ought to acknowledge, and address in whatever way they can. Anyway, in Dan's case I'm not concerned about this realistically happening, which was part of my point.
As for "bad guys" - this was intended with implicit scare quotes, as in: whomever a responsible citizen or reader of this blog, including yourself, might personally deem to be misappropriating problematically. No a priori assumptions (though I'm fine namechecking Trump here). Surely there are problematic agendas and narratives, even if we might disagree on which ones or which people.
But maybe my comment was worded too bluntly - I should have added that I mostly *agree* with Dan's broader arguments! And have always respected his work and personal character, and look forward to his posts even when I sometimes disagree. (I assume he knows that, which is why I didn't bother with niceties this time). And his arguments certainly aren't irrelevant. It's just that I'm not sure arguments based on substance alone are enough to get at the larger concern (however exaggerated) raised by people like van der Linden et. al - which has to do with supposed harms from someone like Dan. To which I'm saying: show me the proof, and then maybe we can talk.
I think it's less that "misinformation researchers have a privileged understanding of right and wrong", but more at the enormous right-wing lying machine has a morally monstrous misunderstanding of right and wrong. Yes, these are "bad guys". I have zero patience these days for anyone on this topic who will not full-throatedly denounce the anti-vaccine insanity, where we have an anti-vax nutcase as Secretary Of Health. This Is Bad! This badness should not be "debatable" any more than Holocaust Denial is "debatable". If right-wing propagandists ever embrace a post-1945 version of antisemitism, I fully expect we'd be inundated with flood-the-zone talking-points about how historians have lost the trust of the public by not respecting the questioning of Establishment narratives.
There is an old and tested way to battle misinformation, and it is called fostering critical thinking,skepticism and open-mindedness. The problem for people like van der Linden is they don't want to miss the ability to spread their messages without criticism. He doesn't like if people as questions such as :
Why black people do well in sports?
Why Koreans score high on SAT tests?
Why you can be transgender and not transracial? ( they had to fire a professor just for asking this ) What is a woman? etc.
So his solutions is that can highlight information as untrustworthy beforehand, while dismissing anything uncomfortable by quoting 'trust the experts' ( Who couldn't give a definition of the word woman without falling in logical fallacies despite having gender studies degrees, even amateur bloggers/youtubers still in college did better )
I was recenlty watching a debate between 4 women about sexism in academia. The pro male advocacy ladies gave some arguments citing data. The pro female advocacy tried to counter with accusing them (falsely at least in Hoff Sommer's case) that they voted for Trump
How is accusing someone of siding with a political side an argument supposed to persuade people? Is it scientific ? Appealing to the morality of the person making a claim doesn't any academic substance, it is purely optics used by populist politicians, such as the people your accusers blame.
Postmodernism is a quasi-religious cult. As a postmodernist you never have to argue your point because to the enlightened it's just self-evident truth and those who disagree with the cult are "N*zis". This is not a bug of postmodernism but a "feature" because they pride themselves that they're anti-rational because "rationality is a construct by the white supremacy". End of discussion! These people are pathetic. I'm a traditional leftist btw and I always try to argue my point but that concept is entirely alien to these cultists. And since you can simply denounce your opponents with no need to justify what you're reasoning is it's super popular with a lot of young people who are not particularly bright and conformists.
Sander v/d Linden is a panting intellectual midget. Follow his LinkedIn and see him post weekly and trump (pun intended) posts of his fellow prebunkers.
Producing headers like 'New study: bad news is shared faster and more often on social media than good news!' (he loves exclamation marks).
When you comment 'That's not really news, is it?' he gets irritated: 'Well, you're not a scientist, are you?'
I find myself less impressed by Van Der Linden with every encounter! The social sciences have really disgraced themselves in recent years and they don’t seem to be getting the memo.
"5. I agree that we should trust established scientific consensus (e.g., about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, the reality of human-driven climate change, etc.)." Because, when you drill down to where the actual scientists who are talking about the field they are working in,
you often don't find much in the way of consensus at all. -- including about the safety and efficacy of certain vaccines, and how much of perceived change in climate measurement are due to human activity. Scientific consensus is almost always a _political_ consensus. Poli tical consensuses are shaped by political goals, rather than disinterested truth-seeking. Once the science has become sufficiently politicised, it stops being science, no matter how many practicing scientists sign the manifesto.
One challenge is that you're engaging in a dialogue in a slightly broadened academic (Substack+) context with the general aim of exploring/discovering the elusive truth about a complicated, multi-layered issue. Yet your approach intersects with (or intrudes into, or is intruded upon by) a highly politicized world of political debate in which "winning the argument" is the primary goal. People with overtly polemic aims read you (or anyone) not to try to understand what you are saying, but rather to rebut what they believe or claim (for self-interested reasons) you have said. They sometimes do this by means of deliberate misrepresentation, other times in less willful ways.
Feels like a collision of worlds more than anything, and one I've quite familiar with.
For example, even I see how a highly nuanced and "objective" analysis and investigation of misinformation of the kind you conduct, might be used to buttress the perspective of those with a diametrically opposed aim--that is, not to discover the truth, but to propagate a given political position. Hence, echoing you, they argue that, in such a complicated world as ours where we really can't "know" anything and the truth is elusive and people believe what they believe for a host of complex and often contradictory reasons, so (and now parting ways with you without telling anyone) there really is no difference between true and false. BS and so-called reality are the same. And if you say they're different, that means you're lying.
Like so many aspects of modern psychology, the issue is absolutely what the authors think they can get away with implying from their data, and once those implications reach mainstream media, they become 'truth'.
What I think is bizarre is the implication in their work that there exists some group of malicious people crafting fake stories and infecting online spaces with them. That model just doesn't correlate with my version of reality. Yet if I say that, they show that they are following the scientific method. But they aren't!
For whatever it's worth but as a traditional Marxist that refuses to acknowledge postmodernism as "the only way to conceptualize the world and if you disagree you must be a N*zi" I very much reject the whole concept of "misinformation". Correcting factual errors is one thing but the whole "You need to go along with postmodernist-liberal ideology or else what you say is right-wing 'hate speech' or 'misinformation'" is positively outrageous.
The basic point of the article is that misinformation is a valid concept but it can be expanded to the point of meaninglessness. The strict definition of misinformation as untruth is not a big problem in the real world for a number of reasons mentioned in the article. But the expansion definition covers a lot of legitimate use cases in political dialogue and journalism. Both sides use it and I think it is helpful to be able to understand how to analyze it and debunk it if necessary.
Where do you find the patience to keep responding to these people?
Ha. I left this topic for a while but I felt pretty annoyed by this latest smear. But yes, there are significant diminishing returns here...
This, to me, is the key point: “In this essay, I argue that misinformation should often be understood not as a societal disease but as a symptom of deeper problems like institutional distrust, political sectarianism, and anti-establishment worldviews.” I would offer a friendly amendment to your statement “The simple fact is that many of these problems are downstream of collapsing trust in institutions among conservative Americans.” That is, collapsing trust is not confined to conservatives, and I would add that, particularly on the most contentious issues, we as liberals could stand to view sources we continue to trust with a much more skeptical eye.
Allied with that, this essay also seems to me to dovetail nicely with those where you examine the conundrum of making intelligent judgments in a complex society where we all, no matter how assiduous in assessing the available information, can only attain partial knowledge.
I am reminded, too, of recent exchanges I’ve observed on one contentious issue in which the two participants were equally credible, but each had personal experiences that were diametrically opposed. Neither was misinformed, rather the problems seemed to me to arise in efforts to generalize from those personal experiences.
I come back to what you have discussed in many essays here: we must take on board that none of us have full information, and that our personal experiences, while often valid, are not enough basis on which to generalize. We must therefore be vigilant about these possible pitfalls, be open to new or better information, and be ready to reassess. And it is OK to make mistakes!
Beautifully put
I understand your frustration. To me, there is something uniquely annoying about the misinfo researchers. Since I was in grad school in the 90s, I've been listening to, -- and disagreeing with -- the pomo critique that objectivity is impossible and that all scholarly research is inevitably biased. In contrast, I believe that researchers/academics should strive for objectivity as much as possible, and that the institutions and norms of the academy are meant to assist with that.
Then, around 2016, after the Trump election and supported by a huge amount of US federal funding (see: https://liber-net.org/federal-awards-project/ ), misinfo studies comes along with a research program that obviously, almost comically, doubles as a partisan political campaign (for the Democrats or more broadly for the laptop class).
But, when someone calls them out on their contradictions, they whine that your pomo critique of objectivity undermines reason and truth. It's as if a 19th century scientist were to complain that you can't criticize phrenology b/c no one will believe in science anymore.
I appreciate your critique b/c I think that the misinfo researchers are not only especially annoying but also especially corrosive to the scientific project. Insiders who misappropriate the institutions of science often can do more damage than those who lob bombs from the outside.
My complaint with your writing is you don't have a theory of propaganda, and one could be forgiven for thinking you don't think anyone changes their mind about anything ever. I also think your opponents are just finding you, like, obtuse -- denying not just the existence of misinformation, but the existence of the bad effects assumed to be caused by misinformation. To be clear, van der Linden needs to be pissed off, and there's nothing like a good letter-penning fight between academics, but yeah I think you have gaps in your theory you paper over.
For instance, we should move toward disagreement as a starting point in persuasion conversations and as the primary object of academic research https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/disagreement-as-a-way-to-study-misinformation-and-its-effects/. This is consistent with your point that academics can't really classify misinformation accurately because the boundary between just disagreeing is too fuzzy. It also encompasses the thesis that resistance to reliable information is a bigger cause of disagreement than misinformation.
But you throw your hands up and say misinformation is dead as a concept. They say let's remodel how we study misinformation. I see how that might be interpreted as bad faith by a misinfo researcher.
Regarding gullibility in general, this is from your van der Linden review: "In general, people are highly skeptical of information they encounter: if a message conflicts with their preexisting beliefs, they demand arguments that they find persuasive from sources that they judge to be trustworthy. Otherwise, they typically reject the message."
OK so just find the 1% of the time people are not skeptical and do that thing a lot. That's what "right-wind standup comedy" (fka left-wing) and the Joe Rogan show are. People lower their guard during comedy that just "makes you think." Instead of say "when are people gullible?" you said "people are broadly not gullible and that's good enough for my purposes."
Also you're fully ignoring flood-the-zone propaganda. The mechanism of such misinformation is not that people believe it, it's that it makes truth-seeking harder, and that it produces the perception that other people are believing it. This even applies to narrow misinformation. Even narrow misinformation that I assume other people believe severely affects how I try to persuade other people. Like yeah propaganda is a thing, relies on misinfo and it works.
There's also the Steve Bannon quote that went something like, "just say outrageous shit and people will meet you 75% of the way there." For instance, "maybe vaccines don't have microchips in them, but other toxins sounds plausible." Your theory of narrow misinformation would just call the "microchips" thing failed misinfo only received by a narrow few conspiracy theorists. You wouldn't consider how it might fuel in a non-narrow-misinformation "vaccines are unsafe" disagreement.
BTW your writing has been extremely informative and helpful. The best thesis you've espoused is that trust in reliable info has fallen and that produces strong misinfo effects. I read a bunch of that Harvard misinfo review and I think the above paper on disagreement is extremely applicable in both research and normal-person persuasion. But all this stuff surrounding propaganda and hyper-gullibility has emerged as a gap in your writing and theory.
Fair enough. Interesting thoughts. Thanks for the pushback.
This was a great response, but these kinds of progressive-authoritarian “a liberal society with free debate is a tool of oppression” screeds don’t deserve it.
A shorter response would be “hey, did you miss the memo that about two or three years ago we decided that we can again handle open debate of ideas, and that accusing academics of supporting oppression doesn’t work to get them cancelled anymore?”
Even shorter would be “hey, 2018 Twitter called, they’re reporting you missing”.
It seems like this could have been easily avoided if they had bothered to hold a 30-minute Zoom call with you. Sadly, that would have prevented them from having an easy target to strawman. They would have had to make their piece more fair and reasonable, and thus less inflammatory and clickbaity.
Well, it's hard to be a somewhat centrist independent thinker, which means to be shunned by most "camps". Thanks for finding the patience to so thoroughly clarify your own position, it made me think as well.
You are as thorough as ever rehashing your usual lines of argument on this topic, and carefully responding to the latest criticisms with those familiar points. Which is all well and good, if repetitive (which I guess was your point, that they are beating the same dead horse and forcing you to rescue the same dead horse). But you guys have already been through this debate several times, and I don't see this going anywhere different.
What surprises me is that you haven't addressed the most central criticism, which in my opinion is key to all of this. Have your own writings and ideas in fact gotten lots of uptake from bad-faith actors and those with ideological agendas, who are exploiting your arguments to justify and perpetuate toxic or problematic narratives? Is there evidence these researchers can point to that influential people (or a critical mass of regular people) were specifically inspired by your words, and have taken this and run with it in questionable directions? If multiple people in the Trump administration are citing you approvingly and using your work to justify bad policies, or popular figures are spreading distorted versions of your ideas around in the service of things you would never endorse, or your stuff has gone viral on YouTube in a really awful context - then I would worry that maybe you're becoming a useful idiot for Trump etc., and you have a responsibility to counter that. But if all of this is based on hypothetical concerns and not in real developments on the ground, then I would say, the proof of harm is in the harm.
With all due respect, I just don't think most people are that interested in what some nerdy philosopher has to say. Let alone, fuel a right-wing movement with it. (And I suspect you're humble enough to agree). But focusing exclusively on the merits of the various arguments may be missing the point. If you want to rebut charges that you are enabling the bad guys, what ultimately matters is whether your words have actually enabled the bad guys. I really doubt it.
Wow — didn’t expect to see a defence of the “academics can’t pursue lines of research that might be used by ‘toxic’ actors” line here.
Academics do not have a responsibility to never enable ‘the bad guys’. They have a responsibility to seek the truth in whatever their line of research is. Sure, I’d say that they shouldn’t work directly for institutions they see as doing evil, but the research itself should be brought to light regardless. The loss of this guiding light is what’s currently destroying public trust in the academy!
I mean — you’re telling on yourself referring to ‘the bad guys’. That’s the whole problem with the field of misinformation research — it’s being used to ‘counter the bad guys’ implying that the misinformation researchers have a privileged understanding of right and wrong on any number of complex, widely-debated issues.
My intention certainly wasn't to defend "“academics can’t pursue lines of research that might be used by ‘toxic’ actors!" Quite the contrary. That's precisely why I specified, "But if all of this [criticism] is based on **hypothetical concerns** and not in real developments on the ground, then I would say, the proof of harm is in the harm." Which is to say, even if someone thinks that an academic's arguments lend themselves easily to misappropriation by cynical parties, "might be used" doesn't cut it - I would want to see proof that it's being abused at scale (and leading to downstream effects) to start worrying about it. And even then, this doesn't mean they must fall silent or that the problem was necessarily in the substance of what they said. But maybe it signals a concerning development that they ought to acknowledge, and address in whatever way they can. Anyway, in Dan's case I'm not concerned about this realistically happening, which was part of my point.
As for "bad guys" - this was intended with implicit scare quotes, as in: whomever a responsible citizen or reader of this blog, including yourself, might personally deem to be misappropriating problematically. No a priori assumptions (though I'm fine namechecking Trump here). Surely there are problematic agendas and narratives, even if we might disagree on which ones or which people.
But maybe my comment was worded too bluntly - I should have added that I mostly *agree* with Dan's broader arguments! And have always respected his work and personal character, and look forward to his posts even when I sometimes disagree. (I assume he knows that, which is why I didn't bother with niceties this time). And his arguments certainly aren't irrelevant. It's just that I'm not sure arguments based on substance alone are enough to get at the larger concern (however exaggerated) raised by people like van der Linden et. al - which has to do with supposed harms from someone like Dan. To which I'm saying: show me the proof, and then maybe we can talk.
I think it's less that "misinformation researchers have a privileged understanding of right and wrong", but more at the enormous right-wing lying machine has a morally monstrous misunderstanding of right and wrong. Yes, these are "bad guys". I have zero patience these days for anyone on this topic who will not full-throatedly denounce the anti-vaccine insanity, where we have an anti-vax nutcase as Secretary Of Health. This Is Bad! This badness should not be "debatable" any more than Holocaust Denial is "debatable". If right-wing propagandists ever embrace a post-1945 version of antisemitism, I fully expect we'd be inundated with flood-the-zone talking-points about how historians have lost the trust of the public by not respecting the questioning of Establishment narratives.
There is an old and tested way to battle misinformation, and it is called fostering critical thinking,skepticism and open-mindedness. The problem for people like van der Linden is they don't want to miss the ability to spread their messages without criticism. He doesn't like if people as questions such as :
Why black people do well in sports?
Why Koreans score high on SAT tests?
Why you can be transgender and not transracial? ( they had to fire a professor just for asking this ) What is a woman? etc.
So his solutions is that can highlight information as untrustworthy beforehand, while dismissing anything uncomfortable by quoting 'trust the experts' ( Who couldn't give a definition of the word woman without falling in logical fallacies despite having gender studies degrees, even amateur bloggers/youtubers still in college did better )
I was recenlty watching a debate between 4 women about sexism in academia. The pro male advocacy ladies gave some arguments citing data. The pro female advocacy tried to counter with accusing them (falsely at least in Hoff Sommer's case) that they voted for Trump
How is accusing someone of siding with a political side an argument supposed to persuade people? Is it scientific ? Appealing to the morality of the person making a claim doesn't any academic substance, it is purely optics used by populist politicians, such as the people your accusers blame.
Postmodernism is a quasi-religious cult. As a postmodernist you never have to argue your point because to the enlightened it's just self-evident truth and those who disagree with the cult are "N*zis". This is not a bug of postmodernism but a "feature" because they pride themselves that they're anti-rational because "rationality is a construct by the white supremacy". End of discussion! These people are pathetic. I'm a traditional leftist btw and I always try to argue my point but that concept is entirely alien to these cultists. And since you can simply denounce your opponents with no need to justify what you're reasoning is it's super popular with a lot of young people who are not particularly bright and conformists.
Err, what do you think is the answer to such questions as:
"Why black people do well in sports?
Why Koreans score high on SAT tests? "
Sander v/d Linden is a panting intellectual midget. Follow his LinkedIn and see him post weekly and trump (pun intended) posts of his fellow prebunkers.
Producing headers like 'New study: bad news is shared faster and more often on social media than good news!' (he loves exclamation marks).
When you comment 'That's not really news, is it?' he gets irritated: 'Well, you're not a scientist, are you?'
I find myself less impressed by Van Der Linden with every encounter! The social sciences have really disgraced themselves in recent years and they don’t seem to be getting the memo.
I think that you may want to re-examine:
"5. I agree that we should trust established scientific consensus (e.g., about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, the reality of human-driven climate change, etc.)." Because, when you drill down to where the actual scientists who are talking about the field they are working in,
you often don't find much in the way of consensus at all. -- including about the safety and efficacy of certain vaccines, and how much of perceived change in climate measurement are due to human activity. Scientific consensus is almost always a _political_ consensus. Poli tical consensuses are shaped by political goals, rather than disinterested truth-seeking. Once the science has become sufficiently politicised, it stops being science, no matter how many practicing scientists sign the manifesto.
One challenge is that you're engaging in a dialogue in a slightly broadened academic (Substack+) context with the general aim of exploring/discovering the elusive truth about a complicated, multi-layered issue. Yet your approach intersects with (or intrudes into, or is intruded upon by) a highly politicized world of political debate in which "winning the argument" is the primary goal. People with overtly polemic aims read you (or anyone) not to try to understand what you are saying, but rather to rebut what they believe or claim (for self-interested reasons) you have said. They sometimes do this by means of deliberate misrepresentation, other times in less willful ways.
Feels like a collision of worlds more than anything, and one I've quite familiar with.
For example, even I see how a highly nuanced and "objective" analysis and investigation of misinformation of the kind you conduct, might be used to buttress the perspective of those with a diametrically opposed aim--that is, not to discover the truth, but to propagate a given political position. Hence, echoing you, they argue that, in such a complicated world as ours where we really can't "know" anything and the truth is elusive and people believe what they believe for a host of complex and often contradictory reasons, so (and now parting ways with you without telling anyone) there really is no difference between true and false. BS and so-called reality are the same. And if you say they're different, that means you're lying.
Keep up the good work.
They are just trying to change the subject because they now that they cannot defend their arguments with logic and facts.
Also, they can smell Dan's weakness, i.e., willingness to go along with the "misinformation experts" in every specific instance.
Like so many aspects of modern psychology, the issue is absolutely what the authors think they can get away with implying from their data, and once those implications reach mainstream media, they become 'truth'.
What I think is bizarre is the implication in their work that there exists some group of malicious people crafting fake stories and infecting online spaces with them. That model just doesn't correlate with my version of reality. Yet if I say that, they show that they are following the scientific method. But they aren't!
For whatever it's worth but as a traditional Marxist that refuses to acknowledge postmodernism as "the only way to conceptualize the world and if you disagree you must be a N*zi" I very much reject the whole concept of "misinformation". Correcting factual errors is one thing but the whole "You need to go along with postmodernist-liberal ideology or else what you say is right-wing 'hate speech' or 'misinformation'" is positively outrageous.
Sorry but postmodernist-liberal ideology is the only way to salvage anything resembling traditional Marxism.
The basic point of the article is that misinformation is a valid concept but it can be expanded to the point of meaninglessness. The strict definition of misinformation as untruth is not a big problem in the real world for a number of reasons mentioned in the article. But the expansion definition covers a lot of legitimate use cases in political dialogue and journalism. Both sides use it and I think it is helpful to be able to understand how to analyze it and debunk it if necessary.