“Seeing where we are now, I have to admit that many of those who characterised Trump in what struck me as extremely alarmist ways had better judgement than me.” This is a bitter pill to swallow, but I’ve begun to feel the same way. I thought Trump’s first term was a big nothing sandwich with no really serious policy disasters, but this time things seem much worse.
Funny, I felt the same way about Trump's first term. I also thought Trump was an ignorant blowhard, and before his first election was posting pictures of Berlin in 1945 as my expectation of what the results of a Trump presidency will be.
His first term turned out to be a lot of ... nothing. Some good Supreme Court picks, a lot of incompetence and disorganization.
But in his second term I've changed my mind. I think he actually "gets" it, used the 4 years in the wilderness to actually plan out what needs to be done and find people ready to do it, and is now doing wonderful, necessary stuff. Esp. DOGE, which I think is the best thing that has happened to the federal government since World War 2. (Of course there have been and will be more bumps in that road - a staff of less than 50 people reforming the entire government cannot hope to get everything right on the first try).
Too bad about the tariffs, tho. But you can't have everything.
I was guardedly optimistic about DOGE. I was thrilled when I heard Musk talking about it, but I didn’t think they would be able to accomplish what they set out to do. At this point however, I have the impression they are doing a terrible, terrible job and are actually hindering the government from ALLOWING more private business action to take place. Firing the regulators that are supposed to approve plans and, say, drug development does not make the economy more free, because the default in many such situations is disapproval. His immigration crackdown and tariffs both strike me as absolutely horrible as well. I just hope DOGE will be able to turn it around.
Welcome to the journey of enlightenment, grasshopper. I've commented a lot on this blog (perhaps too much), because the whole topic has frustrated me for a long time. A key point: A professional liar is going to claim to be a sincere truth-seeker, *because they are liars*, that's what they do, they lie for a living. They will always say, "How can you be sure you're right and I'm wrong?". Any practical theory must be able to deal with this. Many intellectual-types get upset when I discuss this, it's taken as impolite. But unfortunately I've found it to be true.
It's necessary to be able to come out of the philosophical fog at some point, to take some action, otherwise the liars can stop any opposition by deploying an ink-cloud. Of course the other side of this is fanaticism. But the reverse is the old joke that a liberal is someone who won't take their own side in an argument.
I do believe, for example, that there's been a severely mistaken type of punditry (not sure what's the best word - centrist? both-sides? triangulation?) that's very harsh on every judgment call of public health officials while ignoring the surrounding context, particularly the right-wing insanity. And it's all fun and games finger-wagging, until the measles comes back.
Now, I've been an utter failure at solving this myself. But there's a big difference between finding what will work, and "We tried it that way, and it doesn't work"
Thanks for another great post Dan. I'm very happy to see you discuss this issue, if only because one of the strategies of the far right is to overload our critical thinking by "flooding the zone with shit". The "everyone is biased" meme is often used as a way to legitimize unbounded bullshitting and nihilism.
I hope you will one day devote an entire post to what you aptly call "a right-wing ecosystem in America which has wholly abandoned even the pretence of caring about truth, reality, or objectivity." Because esp. in the long run, I think this is a far more dangerous development than the spreading of misinformation.
Very kind of you to reference my earlier comment here! Your self-scrutiny and honesty is commendable. I don't doubt that you've had your share of blind spots, maybe even arguments you would make differently the second time around. But keep in mind that you're working with a couple disadvantages.
First, you are a public intellectual, which implies your level of responsibility to "get it right" may be especially high - but at the same time, means pressure to present a very coherent, digestible argument staking out a clear position. So even when you harbor doubts or ambivalence, in order to publish something with assertive force that readers can agree or disagree with, you have to either set most doubts aside, or double down on the doubting with a skeptical, (small-c) cynical position. Where you do miss the mark, some of that is bias - but maybe some is an artifact of over-crafting your arguments, and thus writing yourself into a corner? Let's call this "perfectionist bias".
Second, the particular theoretical explanatory framework you're wedded to for all these arguments (evolutionary psych, naturalistic) makes it much harder to take strong normative positions, aside from the one where you're the skeptic refusing to drink the Kool-Aid. If your guiding assumption is that morality is functional, adaptive and social, with truth an extremely difficult and partial achievement - and thus, that lofty principles and raising of alarms about evil agendas should not be taken at face value - then your threshold for getting freaked out enough to hold forth about Truth and Justice be very high.
But I think you underestimate the power of sustained good-faith efforts like the kind you regularly demonstrate on this Substack. We are not biased about everything in equal amounts, to hopeless degrees. Your commitment to understanding these complex issues, and figuring out where you've gotten it wrong, outweighs the oversights. So I'm not so concerned about these biases you're noticing. If anything, I'm more concerned about the limits of an exclusively epistemic focus, which cannot really account for the dynamics of power, and institutional inertia, and the reality of malicious agendas, and infrastructures and so forth. It was never about Trump himself or even just Musk, but rather the entire apparatus of sycophants and reactionaries he enables, the new precedents being set, all that authoritarian machinery being set in motion. Much political epistemology tends to ignore all that stuff while focusing narrowly on beliefs, evidence, reasoning, etc. Oh well, gotta start somewhere!
"Looking at how most people approach politics, the problem of intellectual arrogance seems much more widespread than misplaced humility."
That feels true, but I find it hard to judge that without survey data. Intellectually arrogant people are probably much louder in the discourse; people with misplaced humility are much less likely to voice their opinions.
Really entertaining writing, as well as important. Thank you. Some biases are clearly more biasey than others - a fact that malefactors strive to gloss over. One of the many examples of stygian genius at RT is the slogan 'Question More', which purports to encourage enquiry, but is actually designed to encourage the audience to question absolutely everything, at ever faster rpm; before burned out and broken, throwing in the towel on the whole question-asking game altogether. Properly flattened.
I appreciate the self-reflection. I agree that "flattening" and "defeatism" are problematic, and perhaps you have been guilty of them. Although I greatly enjoy your blog, the title of your pending book bothers me b/c I don't think "cynical" is exactly what you are, or what you argue for. It's obviously a catchy title, but sometimes a catchy title is a siren song ...
However, I don't believe that your self-criticism undermines your critique of anti-misinformation research. In fact, I believe that the underlyingly flaw of the misinformation researchers that you have criticized is their own cynicism and defeatism. They claim to be defending truth, reason, and the scientific method against demagogues like Trump and Musk, but they don't really trust the average person to be persuaded by reason and logic. They think that social discourse has to be managed by an epistemic elite b/c most people are cynical, selfish, and easily duped by con men like Trump.
You do an excellent job of explaining the logical and empirical flaws with their efforts, but, at heart, I think that they are motivated by a kind of democratic despair. Because they no longer believe that they can defeat Trump in a fair fight in the democratic marketplace of ideas, they undermine the values that the seek to defend.
I would also point out that it is important to commit ourselves to certain ways of looking at the world, we can call these ways: "models" which we try to enlarge and improve over time, otherwise we end up in the hellish Trump-world, where whatever we hear that sounds good right now is the truth, until the next dominating thing we hear chases away our previous thoughts. As a guide, I like to contrast forms of fundamentalism with open society - fundamentalists such as Creationists and Free Market Fundamentalists will pretend to argue with you, but they will never accept any evidence that refutes their case, so they are never arguing in good faith. To argue in good faith you have to be open to acceding to another's points if they effectively refute yours. Ask a fundamentalist what will convince them that they are wrong, and they will not be able to answer you honestly, because on principle, no evidence will ever convince them otherwise. This is completely different from having a strong view about something, such that it is not easily changed. It may be that in the case of a strong view your experience has shown you over and over again how the opposite view failed to explain things adequately.
3) Trump has been accumulating political capital to become an autocrat for more than 10 years. We know constitutional mechanisms are simply one kind of political capital that can be annihilated by other types of political capital:
But reasonable people resist extreme opinions. I am not as reasonable, and that is why i have been terrified for al least two years. In any case, given that you could affect nothing, there is no point in feeling any remorse.
Another excellent piece – though I am biased, because I enjoy much of your work. I think the paragraph under the header “And yet, …” is particularly revealing of the tensions you seek to describe. I’d like to pick up on one sentence, steering the discussion slightly away from bias and the two kinds of errors you introduce: “And, of course, the only reason he [Musk] can do this is that he inhabits a right-wing ecosystem in America which has wholly abandoned even the pretence of caring about truth, reality, or objectivity.”
I think that this ecosystem embodies precisely these tensions that you describe. There are, on the one hand, “bullshitters” in Frankfurt’s sense – they do not care about reality, not even their own: “For example, President Trump is reported to have told his butler, Anthony Senecal, that the tiles in the nursery of his Mar-a-Lago residence had been personally made by Walt Disney. When Senecal questioned the truth of this claim, Trump’s response was: ‘Who cares?’” (Cassam, “Bullshit, Post-truth, and Propaganda” in Political Epistemology, edited by Edenberg & Hannon).
Yet, on the other hand, there seems to be, at least discursively, a concern for the truth, reality and objectivity (understood as neutrality, where non-epistemic values should and do not play a role). Such concerns might be more genuine “on the ground” (i.e., among citizens/the electorate), as (some) political leaders might engage more in expedient ways in their appeals to “experts”. Nevertheless, there seem to be appeals made to scientific data and experts by political leaders. Take Trump, for instance. During his campaign he said: ‘Take a look at that chart […]. So, that’s when I left office, that was the lowest point [of the amount of illegal immigration ever in recorded history into the U.S.], and that comes right from the government services, comes right out of border patrol’. Trump, here, not only uses scientific data (sure, we can dispute the quality of it) but he appeals to data from U.S. border patrol, denoting the true-state of things (i.e., high levels of immigration but not under his reign).
I guess what I want to say is that having given up on the pretence of truth, reality or objectivity goes hand in hand with (at least a discursive – i.e., expedient, or call it biased) appeals to scientific experts and data. I make a similar point in my PhD thesis, along with the aforementioned example of Trump and various other examples of (right-wing) populists invoking science and scientific experts. Ultimately, the supposed divide between “post-truth” narratives (i.e., outright disregard for truth) and professed concerns for truth may be difficult to distinguish analytically. Although there are behavioural and discursive indicators, how can academics and journalists reliably assess whether political leaders genuinely care about truth?
Thanks Lucas - great comment, and I agree with what you say here, including about the deep analytical challenges of distinguishing "post-truth"narratives and professed concerns for truth
How about these two things as indicators of concern for the truth:
1) Some critical reflection on how and why your opinions changed? What have you gotten wrong? I tend to get very irritated when I hear politicians say "when the facts changed, I changed my mind". The whole problem is that we don't just passively accept all new information as relevant facts. Furthermore, if you were wrong about some important fact, how should that affect your larger worldview?
2) Acknowledging the existence of tradeoffs. It's one thing to say "I want tariffs because I want to raise the relative wages of autoworkers, even if it hurts the economy as a whole". Or you could say "I want to raise income taxes as a more equitable way to reduce the budget deficit, but I know this will discourage work and investment". Whether your values are right, or whether your predictions are right or not, at least you are trying to think through things. I view the denial of tradeoffs as kind of dishonesty that is as damaging as straight-up misinformation.
The book Winners Take All does a great job capturing your second point. One of the main theses of the book is that elites almost always present their solutions as win-win situations. This is a strong rhetorical strategy because when no one loses out, how can anyone oppose the change? What the author shows however, is how almost always those solutions entrench the wealth and power of the already wealthy and often don't bring any benefit to others, or only small improvements.
"For example, I’ve spent much more time scrutinising biases in prominent discourse about “misinformation” than directly condemning misinformation itself. Although I’d like to believe this scrutiny has had value, in the current political climate—and perhaps in all political climates—this disproportionate focus itself reveals a problematic bias."
I mildly disagree with the implicit final judgment; intellectual activities happen in a context and the context that your articles are discussed in was and probably still is the circles that are mostly highly educated, intellectual types of 2020s. In this context, the overwhelming bias is toward epistemic arrogance than the flattening effect you mentioned, although extreme cynicism has its own place. But, I am not sure how much of the extreme cynicism is downstream intellectual reflections, compared to more experiential frustrations.
Finally, the current political climate is not impacting all people the same. Your audience, most probably are not going to be a far right, MAGA, Musk fan. The probability of your audience to see Musk and become more rigid in their naive realism seems higher to me than coming to the conclusion that since everyone is biased, Musk's claims are as valid as any reliable source.
The work you're doing is so valuable. I also have shifted my perception about MAGA and truth in the same direction, from greater epistemological relativism to something closer to my friends' anger and shock.
In being good epistemologists, we have to simultaneously uphold truth as we understand it, and remain open to the many complex ways people connect to knowledge - the ways we and those we disagree with have symmetrical "biases," and the ways we are different. We need something like epistemological ethnography, to see (for instance) how the people like my brother who agree with everything Trump and Musk say process the question of factuality. But it's hard to have that conversation sometimes!
Musk does appear pretty biased, and it looks like there is little variance to stray him away from his biases. But to what extent does approaching his and Trump's behaviour with the lense of sportsmanship - thinking that the game being play relies on truthful signals - is useful?
I'd bet the percentage of the population gullible enough and buying the bait is far from 50%. Propaganda rarely succeeds in changing people's beliefs, thanks to what some call the epistemic vigilance mechanisms. News, discussions and public interventions seem to signal that there is a wide consensus on the belief that the current political state is hellish and bullish.
Still nobody can pin the reason of Trump's and Musk's choices. Plus they keep escaping the punishments by denying the existence of their failures, lies and biases.
I'd argue it's rather a matter of gamesmanship. The problem with the gamesmanship being played is, as pointed, that institutions get weakened. Quality reports on truthful events, such as quality journalism, are of utmost value but accountability for dishonest behaviour is crucial. What I find worrying is the possibility that as institutions get weakened, polarization increases, groups reach out less to outgroups and institutions further weaken in the process.
We need to hold subjectivity and objectivity in tension. Individuals are necessarily subjective in their outlook, but ultimate subjectivity is degenerate (there must be a common object to moor and connect the many subjects). As an individual, I can't claim access to the objective, but assuming society/culture/humanity exist there are ideals to the order of society/culture/humanity that act as moral objectives for individuals. By this I want to be inclusive of both empirical findings like value of trust culture and traditional notions of the common good. There are several failure types if the tension breaks: manipulative obfuscation, naive realism, nihilism etc.
Some people are recognizably better than others despite our imperfect lens on the moral order. We need saints and savants as moral touchstones. We can recognize villains because our mythology reflects a moral order. Elon is an archtypical supervillain: he is Sauruman. We've been conditioned as a culture to recognize fallen wizards as very dangerous. Society also responds intuitively to policy: The trans normalization created enough dissonance between subjectivity and objectivity, it broke things; Stalinists communism deteriorated etc.
I think thoughtful people are at a disadvantage even if they aren't humble to a fault, because to be thoughtful is to see evidence, reflection, debate and discussion as prerequisites to taking strong positions, whereas ideologues and philistines are happy to take strong positions immediately when it serves them. Even perfect rational policymakers stand little rhetorical chance in the face of left or right wing fascism. I'm not sure what we do with this though, or what lessons we can take from the long 19th or short 20th centuries. It seems like classical liberalism has often won only after other more violent and pernicious programmes have exhausted themselves.
“Seeing where we are now, I have to admit that many of those who characterised Trump in what struck me as extremely alarmist ways had better judgement than me.” This is a bitter pill to swallow, but I’ve begun to feel the same way. I thought Trump’s first term was a big nothing sandwich with no really serious policy disasters, but this time things seem much worse.
Yep - concerning!
Funny, I felt the same way about Trump's first term. I also thought Trump was an ignorant blowhard, and before his first election was posting pictures of Berlin in 1945 as my expectation of what the results of a Trump presidency will be.
His first term turned out to be a lot of ... nothing. Some good Supreme Court picks, a lot of incompetence and disorganization.
But in his second term I've changed my mind. I think he actually "gets" it, used the 4 years in the wilderness to actually plan out what needs to be done and find people ready to do it, and is now doing wonderful, necessary stuff. Esp. DOGE, which I think is the best thing that has happened to the federal government since World War 2. (Of course there have been and will be more bumps in that road - a staff of less than 50 people reforming the entire government cannot hope to get everything right on the first try).
Too bad about the tariffs, tho. But you can't have everything.
Viewpoints differ.
I was guardedly optimistic about DOGE. I was thrilled when I heard Musk talking about it, but I didn’t think they would be able to accomplish what they set out to do. At this point however, I have the impression they are doing a terrible, terrible job and are actually hindering the government from ALLOWING more private business action to take place. Firing the regulators that are supposed to approve plans and, say, drug development does not make the economy more free, because the default in many such situations is disapproval. His immigration crackdown and tariffs both strike me as absolutely horrible as well. I just hope DOGE will be able to turn it around.
Welcome to the journey of enlightenment, grasshopper. I've commented a lot on this blog (perhaps too much), because the whole topic has frustrated me for a long time. A key point: A professional liar is going to claim to be a sincere truth-seeker, *because they are liars*, that's what they do, they lie for a living. They will always say, "How can you be sure you're right and I'm wrong?". Any practical theory must be able to deal with this. Many intellectual-types get upset when I discuss this, it's taken as impolite. But unfortunately I've found it to be true.
It's necessary to be able to come out of the philosophical fog at some point, to take some action, otherwise the liars can stop any opposition by deploying an ink-cloud. Of course the other side of this is fanaticism. But the reverse is the old joke that a liberal is someone who won't take their own side in an argument.
I do believe, for example, that there's been a severely mistaken type of punditry (not sure what's the best word - centrist? both-sides? triangulation?) that's very harsh on every judgment call of public health officials while ignoring the surrounding context, particularly the right-wing insanity. And it's all fun and games finger-wagging, until the measles comes back.
Now, I've been an utter failure at solving this myself. But there's a big difference between finding what will work, and "We tried it that way, and it doesn't work"
Thanks Seth - and thanks for the helpful pushback on previous posts of mine.
Thanks for another great post Dan. I'm very happy to see you discuss this issue, if only because one of the strategies of the far right is to overload our critical thinking by "flooding the zone with shit". The "everyone is biased" meme is often used as a way to legitimize unbounded bullshitting and nihilism.
I hope you will one day devote an entire post to what you aptly call "a right-wing ecosystem in America which has wholly abandoned even the pretence of caring about truth, reality, or objectivity." Because esp. in the long run, I think this is a far more dangerous development than the spreading of misinformation.
Thanks, JP - and yes, I agree
Very kind of you to reference my earlier comment here! Your self-scrutiny and honesty is commendable. I don't doubt that you've had your share of blind spots, maybe even arguments you would make differently the second time around. But keep in mind that you're working with a couple disadvantages.
First, you are a public intellectual, which implies your level of responsibility to "get it right" may be especially high - but at the same time, means pressure to present a very coherent, digestible argument staking out a clear position. So even when you harbor doubts or ambivalence, in order to publish something with assertive force that readers can agree or disagree with, you have to either set most doubts aside, or double down on the doubting with a skeptical, (small-c) cynical position. Where you do miss the mark, some of that is bias - but maybe some is an artifact of over-crafting your arguments, and thus writing yourself into a corner? Let's call this "perfectionist bias".
Second, the particular theoretical explanatory framework you're wedded to for all these arguments (evolutionary psych, naturalistic) makes it much harder to take strong normative positions, aside from the one where you're the skeptic refusing to drink the Kool-Aid. If your guiding assumption is that morality is functional, adaptive and social, with truth an extremely difficult and partial achievement - and thus, that lofty principles and raising of alarms about evil agendas should not be taken at face value - then your threshold for getting freaked out enough to hold forth about Truth and Justice be very high.
But I think you underestimate the power of sustained good-faith efforts like the kind you regularly demonstrate on this Substack. We are not biased about everything in equal amounts, to hopeless degrees. Your commitment to understanding these complex issues, and figuring out where you've gotten it wrong, outweighs the oversights. So I'm not so concerned about these biases you're noticing. If anything, I'm more concerned about the limits of an exclusively epistemic focus, which cannot really account for the dynamics of power, and institutional inertia, and the reality of malicious agendas, and infrastructures and so forth. It was never about Trump himself or even just Musk, but rather the entire apparatus of sycophants and reactionaries he enables, the new precedents being set, all that authoritarian machinery being set in motion. Much political epistemology tends to ignore all that stuff while focusing narrowly on beliefs, evidence, reasoning, etc. Oh well, gotta start somewhere!
Thanks, Chris - fantastic comment as always. The point about issues with an exclusively epistemic focus is especially insightful.
"Looking at how most people approach politics, the problem of intellectual arrogance seems much more widespread than misplaced humility."
That feels true, but I find it hard to judge that without survey data. Intellectually arrogant people are probably much louder in the discourse; people with misplaced humility are much less likely to voice their opinions.
Political apathy—misplaced humility—might be the bigger issue here.
Yes, good point
Really entertaining writing, as well as important. Thank you. Some biases are clearly more biasey than others - a fact that malefactors strive to gloss over. One of the many examples of stygian genius at RT is the slogan 'Question More', which purports to encourage enquiry, but is actually designed to encourage the audience to question absolutely everything, at ever faster rpm; before burned out and broken, throwing in the towel on the whole question-asking game altogether. Properly flattened.
Yes, great point
I appreciate the self-reflection. I agree that "flattening" and "defeatism" are problematic, and perhaps you have been guilty of them. Although I greatly enjoy your blog, the title of your pending book bothers me b/c I don't think "cynical" is exactly what you are, or what you argue for. It's obviously a catchy title, but sometimes a catchy title is a siren song ...
However, I don't believe that your self-criticism undermines your critique of anti-misinformation research. In fact, I believe that the underlyingly flaw of the misinformation researchers that you have criticized is their own cynicism and defeatism. They claim to be defending truth, reason, and the scientific method against demagogues like Trump and Musk, but they don't really trust the average person to be persuaded by reason and logic. They think that social discourse has to be managed by an epistemic elite b/c most people are cynical, selfish, and easily duped by con men like Trump.
You do an excellent job of explaining the logical and empirical flaws with their efforts, but, at heart, I think that they are motivated by a kind of democratic despair. Because they no longer believe that they can defeat Trump in a fair fight in the democratic marketplace of ideas, they undermine the values that the seek to defend.
Bravo
I've thought about this problem a lot too. In a sense we are all subjects to the Dunning - Kreuger effect. I've written about it here: https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/6517185847678849122/3462229225140594706
I would also point out that it is important to commit ourselves to certain ways of looking at the world, we can call these ways: "models" which we try to enlarge and improve over time, otherwise we end up in the hellish Trump-world, where whatever we hear that sounds good right now is the truth, until the next dominating thing we hear chases away our previous thoughts. As a guide, I like to contrast forms of fundamentalism with open society - fundamentalists such as Creationists and Free Market Fundamentalists will pretend to argue with you, but they will never accept any evidence that refutes their case, so they are never arguing in good faith. To argue in good faith you have to be open to acceding to another's points if they effectively refute yours. Ask a fundamentalist what will convince them that they are wrong, and they will not be able to answer you honestly, because on principle, no evidence will ever convince them otherwise. This is completely different from having a strong view about something, such that it is not easily changed. It may be that in the case of a strong view your experience has shown you over and over again how the opposite view failed to explain things adequately.
Why are you surprised? Only because one single bias: normality bias.
1) Trump did not concede the election:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ekM9jQqXq8D8qa2fP/united-states-2024-presidential-election-so-help-you-god
2) American presidential system is prone to self coups:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uW77FSphM6yiMZTGg/why-not-parliamentarianism-book-by-tiago-ribeiro-dos-santos
3) Trump has been accumulating political capital to become an autocrat for more than 10 years. We know constitutional mechanisms are simply one kind of political capital that can be annihilated by other types of political capital:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kBLJgARsfXW5xYLtj/the-dictator-s-handbook-book-by-bruce-bueno-de-mesquita-and
But reasonable people resist extreme opinions. I am not as reasonable, and that is why i have been terrified for al least two years. In any case, given that you could affect nothing, there is no point in feeling any remorse.
Another excellent piece – though I am biased, because I enjoy much of your work. I think the paragraph under the header “And yet, …” is particularly revealing of the tensions you seek to describe. I’d like to pick up on one sentence, steering the discussion slightly away from bias and the two kinds of errors you introduce: “And, of course, the only reason he [Musk] can do this is that he inhabits a right-wing ecosystem in America which has wholly abandoned even the pretence of caring about truth, reality, or objectivity.”
I think that this ecosystem embodies precisely these tensions that you describe. There are, on the one hand, “bullshitters” in Frankfurt’s sense – they do not care about reality, not even their own: “For example, President Trump is reported to have told his butler, Anthony Senecal, that the tiles in the nursery of his Mar-a-Lago residence had been personally made by Walt Disney. When Senecal questioned the truth of this claim, Trump’s response was: ‘Who cares?’” (Cassam, “Bullshit, Post-truth, and Propaganda” in Political Epistemology, edited by Edenberg & Hannon).
Yet, on the other hand, there seems to be, at least discursively, a concern for the truth, reality and objectivity (understood as neutrality, where non-epistemic values should and do not play a role). Such concerns might be more genuine “on the ground” (i.e., among citizens/the electorate), as (some) political leaders might engage more in expedient ways in their appeals to “experts”. Nevertheless, there seem to be appeals made to scientific data and experts by political leaders. Take Trump, for instance. During his campaign he said: ‘Take a look at that chart […]. So, that’s when I left office, that was the lowest point [of the amount of illegal immigration ever in recorded history into the U.S.], and that comes right from the government services, comes right out of border patrol’. Trump, here, not only uses scientific data (sure, we can dispute the quality of it) but he appeals to data from U.S. border patrol, denoting the true-state of things (i.e., high levels of immigration but not under his reign).
I guess what I want to say is that having given up on the pretence of truth, reality or objectivity goes hand in hand with (at least a discursive – i.e., expedient, or call it biased) appeals to scientific experts and data. I make a similar point in my PhD thesis, along with the aforementioned example of Trump and various other examples of (right-wing) populists invoking science and scientific experts. Ultimately, the supposed divide between “post-truth” narratives (i.e., outright disregard for truth) and professed concerns for truth may be difficult to distinguish analytically. Although there are behavioural and discursive indicators, how can academics and journalists reliably assess whether political leaders genuinely care about truth?
I'd love to hear what others think of this.
Thanks Lucas - great comment, and I agree with what you say here, including about the deep analytical challenges of distinguishing "post-truth"narratives and professed concerns for truth
How about these two things as indicators of concern for the truth:
1) Some critical reflection on how and why your opinions changed? What have you gotten wrong? I tend to get very irritated when I hear politicians say "when the facts changed, I changed my mind". The whole problem is that we don't just passively accept all new information as relevant facts. Furthermore, if you were wrong about some important fact, how should that affect your larger worldview?
2) Acknowledging the existence of tradeoffs. It's one thing to say "I want tariffs because I want to raise the relative wages of autoworkers, even if it hurts the economy as a whole". Or you could say "I want to raise income taxes as a more equitable way to reduce the budget deficit, but I know this will discourage work and investment". Whether your values are right, or whether your predictions are right or not, at least you are trying to think through things. I view the denial of tradeoffs as kind of dishonesty that is as damaging as straight-up misinformation.
The book Winners Take All does a great job capturing your second point. One of the main theses of the book is that elites almost always present their solutions as win-win situations. This is a strong rhetorical strategy because when no one loses out, how can anyone oppose the change? What the author shows however, is how almost always those solutions entrench the wealth and power of the already wealthy and often don't bring any benefit to others, or only small improvements.
Thanks. Yes, that point about the denial of tradeoffs as a kind of dishonesty (in some cases self-deception as well, I think) is exactly right.
"For example, I’ve spent much more time scrutinising biases in prominent discourse about “misinformation” than directly condemning misinformation itself. Although I’d like to believe this scrutiny has had value, in the current political climate—and perhaps in all political climates—this disproportionate focus itself reveals a problematic bias."
I mildly disagree with the implicit final judgment; intellectual activities happen in a context and the context that your articles are discussed in was and probably still is the circles that are mostly highly educated, intellectual types of 2020s. In this context, the overwhelming bias is toward epistemic arrogance than the flattening effect you mentioned, although extreme cynicism has its own place. But, I am not sure how much of the extreme cynicism is downstream intellectual reflections, compared to more experiential frustrations.
Finally, the current political climate is not impacting all people the same. Your audience, most probably are not going to be a far right, MAGA, Musk fan. The probability of your audience to see Musk and become more rigid in their naive realism seems higher to me than coming to the conclusion that since everyone is biased, Musk's claims are as valid as any reliable source.
The work you're doing is so valuable. I also have shifted my perception about MAGA and truth in the same direction, from greater epistemological relativism to something closer to my friends' anger and shock.
In being good epistemologists, we have to simultaneously uphold truth as we understand it, and remain open to the many complex ways people connect to knowledge - the ways we and those we disagree with have symmetrical "biases," and the ways we are different. We need something like epistemological ethnography, to see (for instance) how the people like my brother who agree with everything Trump and Musk say process the question of factuality. But it's hard to have that conversation sometimes!
Musk does appear pretty biased, and it looks like there is little variance to stray him away from his biases. But to what extent does approaching his and Trump's behaviour with the lense of sportsmanship - thinking that the game being play relies on truthful signals - is useful?
I'd bet the percentage of the population gullible enough and buying the bait is far from 50%. Propaganda rarely succeeds in changing people's beliefs, thanks to what some call the epistemic vigilance mechanisms. News, discussions and public interventions seem to signal that there is a wide consensus on the belief that the current political state is hellish and bullish.
Still nobody can pin the reason of Trump's and Musk's choices. Plus they keep escaping the punishments by denying the existence of their failures, lies and biases.
I'd argue it's rather a matter of gamesmanship. The problem with the gamesmanship being played is, as pointed, that institutions get weakened. Quality reports on truthful events, such as quality journalism, are of utmost value but accountability for dishonest behaviour is crucial. What I find worrying is the possibility that as institutions get weakened, polarization increases, groups reach out less to outgroups and institutions further weaken in the process.
We need to hold subjectivity and objectivity in tension. Individuals are necessarily subjective in their outlook, but ultimate subjectivity is degenerate (there must be a common object to moor and connect the many subjects). As an individual, I can't claim access to the objective, but assuming society/culture/humanity exist there are ideals to the order of society/culture/humanity that act as moral objectives for individuals. By this I want to be inclusive of both empirical findings like value of trust culture and traditional notions of the common good. There are several failure types if the tension breaks: manipulative obfuscation, naive realism, nihilism etc.
Some people are recognizably better than others despite our imperfect lens on the moral order. We need saints and savants as moral touchstones. We can recognize villains because our mythology reflects a moral order. Elon is an archtypical supervillain: he is Sauruman. We've been conditioned as a culture to recognize fallen wizards as very dangerous. Society also responds intuitively to policy: The trans normalization created enough dissonance between subjectivity and objectivity, it broke things; Stalinists communism deteriorated etc.
I think thoughtful people are at a disadvantage even if they aren't humble to a fault, because to be thoughtful is to see evidence, reflection, debate and discussion as prerequisites to taking strong positions, whereas ideologues and philistines are happy to take strong positions immediately when it serves them. Even perfect rational policymakers stand little rhetorical chance in the face of left or right wing fascism. I'm not sure what we do with this though, or what lessons we can take from the long 19th or short 20th centuries. It seems like classical liberalism has often won only after other more violent and pernicious programmes have exhausted themselves.