Why more academic philosophers should engage with public discourse despite professional risks. I am skeptical of this claim, substack is working well for you but I doubt there is room for everyone sadly. Philosophy is a niche topic already. I do think academics I general should engage with the public tho, so bad actors and populists have a harder time spreading seeds of distrust
Speaking from my years of social media experience, it's important not to get fooled by the phenomena of survivorship bias. That is, the person who benefits from having a large social media presence, gets to say to many people how great it is to have a large social media presence. The person who e.g. loses their jobs from it, or get driven off by endless harassment, or just labors in complete obscurity wasting huge amounts of time - in general, that person doesn't get heard nearly as much.
I looked over part of the transcript. It's extensive and thoughtful as always. It's the sort of material I wish I could engage with at length, but I'm not going to start a Substack blog of my own, not worth it on many levels.
Just one highlight, regarding "what you disagree with" - I'd say there's a mistaken path right around here: "They don't trust public health officials. They don't trust mainstream media, and so on. So the main thing is to try to regain trust or to increase trust in those institutions."
It is my empirical belief that it's utterly, completely, impossible, to do anything like this without directly combating somehow the right-wing lie machine. Otherwise, it's like taking the saying "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.", and proclaiming the solution is to always be so careful that even the most dishonest and uncharitable won't be able to find anything in it. And jumping all over any attacked phrasing to "help" explain why there's a desire to hang the writer.
This stuff "And if it's perceived that these institutions are politicized, ..." will trap you in an endless loop of blaming-the-victim, morally repugnant yet completely ineffective. It's a "centrist/moderate" pundit myth that all that is necessary is to go just up to the approved line of the "centrist/moderate" pundit. Because that's their peer-group, not the fetid fever swamp of right-wing lunacy. You will end up sanewashing insanity in a futile quest for "credibility", which will never come. It effectively turns into fellow-traveling with the anti-intellectualism campaigns of the worst, most malicious, liars against the advances of civilization.
I rant. I know how it sounds. It's probably a futile expression of frustration. But these are bad times. It's not as bad as WWII Germany, but that's a very low bar.
But even so, isn't it worth distinguishing between the elite-driven, right-wing lie machine and many ordinary conservative citizens? I agree the Trumps and Musks and Carlsons of the world are beyond reason, but I'm sceptical this generalises to many ordinary voters. And I think it's also difficult to know how to directly combat the lie machine. Clearly merely pointing out the lies doesn't seem to be very effective.
Of course there's a distinction. Isn't it clear that the force of my denunciation is against the professional liars, those who set out, with malice aforethought, to enrage and mislead people? But it's not a reasonable solution to propose that everyone-would-just not believe the liars. Over and over I see, lies work (e.g. anti-vaccine) ! To take an extreme example, when countries have real genocides, a large part of the population has been convinced to kill another significant part of the population.
I don't think ordinary voters are "beyond reason" in the abstract. I know, some progressives will say that all Republicans are just evil, and that's scary. However, there's an enormous system of propaganda, and several commenters have urged that this should be considered more extensively (it's too often dismissed with strawman caricature, in a rush to get to denouncing mistakes of progressives).
Indeed, I have no idea how to counter the lie machine. It's a source of great frustration to me, and causes me to question my faith in free-speech. I keep reading various pundits hoping one will have something workable. The anti-free-speechers at least have an answer, everyone-would-just is not an answer. But blaming the victim (e.g. health professionals) is both not an answer and actively harmful.
In this interview, I want to note particularly that your points about misinformation, which you've also written about to good effect, are well taken.
What keeps striking me is that what one person calls misinformation is all too often another person's fact, and no one on the totality of the political spectrum has a lock on which is which. Allied to that, when we center our efforts on combatting misinformation, are we not targeting a symptom, rather than the cause, and would not our time be better spent understanding what has broken down in society that prevents us from arriving at common truths?
I'm very much affected lately, when thinking about this, by Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism," which I am in the midst of reading. In her chapter, "The Totalitarian Movement," she makes a number of resonant observations about totalitarian propaganda. For example, she writes:
"The chief disability of totalitarian propaganda is that it cannot fulfill this longing of the masses for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense. . . . Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity."
While I don’t want to make an over-neat crosswalk, Arendt's observations do seem to have resonance today. I believe this to be true both on the left and on the right, just with different manifestations of profound displacement/alienation. To the extent this is true, what aspects of contemporary society are foundational to producing this, and what efforts would be most effective to counter them?
A crucial aspect of winning public trust is to demonstrate competence, honesty and professionalism. Conversely, if a professional community has a high-profile failure and refuses to accept that they failed, but instead makes excuses and blames the public, then the public will be sceptical. Public health today needs to earn back trust, not demand trust.
I started estimating pandemic risk in late January 2020, as a matter of both personal interest and professional work. I was disappointed by the low quality of reasoning and forecasting from (some, not all) high-profile persons and public health organisations, who were treated as authorities or even as heroes by the English-language media. A repeated pattern, which continued into 2021, was a failure to recognise risks in a timely manner. Often, this seems to have been due to placing too much weight on scientific opinion rather than on-the-ground clinical reporting or wider evidence.
In later years, excuses were made on the basis that it was an uncertain situation. As someone doing real-time estimation back in 2020, I don’t accept that excuse. You have to be clear about uncertainty at the time of the forecast, not afterwards when you are proven wrong.
Furthermore, this wasn’t just about overconfidence: public health seemed to use a flawed reasoning model, failing to understand that for a novel, high-uncertainty risk it is necessary to seek a wide range of opinions from many disciplines, not to rely heavily on prior beliefs or personal experience. And certainly not to shut down debate. Clinical reports and statistics often provided clear evidence of risk well before the public health consensus accepted it. (US public health seemed to have an additional problem, of overweighting their own expertise and underweight international evidence e.g. understanding Delta and breakthrough infections in a timely manner. My criticism of public health does not apply to all national authorities.)
My impression is that officials tended to have a simplistic and incorrect belief that understanding the pandemic was a matter of science. Science was totally the wrong discipline for that – scientific expertise is only one input into real-world estimation, albeit an important one. Scientists are not, in general, experts in real-world probability estimation, risk, forecasting, crisis-management, etc. (Subjectively, it appears that this basic ignorance continues to be widespread today. Science is a powerful tool, but it is not the right tool for every intellectual task.)
There are many mundane, day-to-day matters on which the public really should trust public health. And in a crisis, facing novel or highly uncertain risks, public health should be more humble, put less weight on the opinions of scientists, and demand less trust from the public.
Why more academic philosophers should engage with public discourse despite professional risks. I am skeptical of this claim, substack is working well for you but I doubt there is room for everyone sadly. Philosophy is a niche topic already. I do think academics I general should engage with the public tho, so bad actors and populists have a harder time spreading seeds of distrust
Speaking from my years of social media experience, it's important not to get fooled by the phenomena of survivorship bias. That is, the person who benefits from having a large social media presence, gets to say to many people how great it is to have a large social media presence. The person who e.g. loses their jobs from it, or get driven off by endless harassment, or just labors in complete obscurity wasting huge amounts of time - in general, that person doesn't get heard nearly as much.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1827:_Survivorship_Bias
Fair points. And I can certainly think of many philosophers where I'm glad they don't engage more with public discourse...
I looked over part of the transcript. It's extensive and thoughtful as always. It's the sort of material I wish I could engage with at length, but I'm not going to start a Substack blog of my own, not worth it on many levels.
Just one highlight, regarding "what you disagree with" - I'd say there's a mistaken path right around here: "They don't trust public health officials. They don't trust mainstream media, and so on. So the main thing is to try to regain trust or to increase trust in those institutions."
It is my empirical belief that it's utterly, completely, impossible, to do anything like this without directly combating somehow the right-wing lie machine. Otherwise, it's like taking the saying "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.", and proclaiming the solution is to always be so careful that even the most dishonest and uncharitable won't be able to find anything in it. And jumping all over any attacked phrasing to "help" explain why there's a desire to hang the writer.
This stuff "And if it's perceived that these institutions are politicized, ..." will trap you in an endless loop of blaming-the-victim, morally repugnant yet completely ineffective. It's a "centrist/moderate" pundit myth that all that is necessary is to go just up to the approved line of the "centrist/moderate" pundit. Because that's their peer-group, not the fetid fever swamp of right-wing lunacy. You will end up sanewashing insanity in a futile quest for "credibility", which will never come. It effectively turns into fellow-traveling with the anti-intellectualism campaigns of the worst, most malicious, liars against the advances of civilization.
I rant. I know how it sounds. It's probably a futile expression of frustration. But these are bad times. It's not as bad as WWII Germany, but that's a very low bar.
But even so, isn't it worth distinguishing between the elite-driven, right-wing lie machine and many ordinary conservative citizens? I agree the Trumps and Musks and Carlsons of the world are beyond reason, but I'm sceptical this generalises to many ordinary voters. And I think it's also difficult to know how to directly combat the lie machine. Clearly merely pointing out the lies doesn't seem to be very effective.
Of course there's a distinction. Isn't it clear that the force of my denunciation is against the professional liars, those who set out, with malice aforethought, to enrage and mislead people? But it's not a reasonable solution to propose that everyone-would-just not believe the liars. Over and over I see, lies work (e.g. anti-vaccine) ! To take an extreme example, when countries have real genocides, a large part of the population has been convinced to kill another significant part of the population.
I don't think ordinary voters are "beyond reason" in the abstract. I know, some progressives will say that all Republicans are just evil, and that's scary. However, there's an enormous system of propaganda, and several commenters have urged that this should be considered more extensively (it's too often dismissed with strawman caricature, in a rush to get to denouncing mistakes of progressives).
Indeed, I have no idea how to counter the lie machine. It's a source of great frustration to me, and causes me to question my faith in free-speech. I keep reading various pundits hoping one will have something workable. The anti-free-speechers at least have an answer, everyone-would-just is not an answer. But blaming the victim (e.g. health professionals) is both not an answer and actively harmful.
In this interview, I want to note particularly that your points about misinformation, which you've also written about to good effect, are well taken.
What keeps striking me is that what one person calls misinformation is all too often another person's fact, and no one on the totality of the political spectrum has a lock on which is which. Allied to that, when we center our efforts on combatting misinformation, are we not targeting a symptom, rather than the cause, and would not our time be better spent understanding what has broken down in society that prevents us from arriving at common truths?
I'm very much affected lately, when thinking about this, by Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism," which I am in the midst of reading. In her chapter, "The Totalitarian Movement," she makes a number of resonant observations about totalitarian propaganda. For example, she writes:
"The chief disability of totalitarian propaganda is that it cannot fulfill this longing of the masses for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense. . . . Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity."
While I don’t want to make an over-neat crosswalk, Arendt's observations do seem to have resonance today. I believe this to be true both on the left and on the right, just with different manifestations of profound displacement/alienation. To the extent this is true, what aspects of contemporary society are foundational to producing this, and what efforts would be most effective to counter them?
Just write a popular science book, Dan.
Good interview. I had just listened to it and found it outlined your views on this topic well.
Thanks John!
“They don’t trust public health officials.”
A crucial aspect of winning public trust is to demonstrate competence, honesty and professionalism. Conversely, if a professional community has a high-profile failure and refuses to accept that they failed, but instead makes excuses and blames the public, then the public will be sceptical. Public health today needs to earn back trust, not demand trust.
I started estimating pandemic risk in late January 2020, as a matter of both personal interest and professional work. I was disappointed by the low quality of reasoning and forecasting from (some, not all) high-profile persons and public health organisations, who were treated as authorities or even as heroes by the English-language media. A repeated pattern, which continued into 2021, was a failure to recognise risks in a timely manner. Often, this seems to have been due to placing too much weight on scientific opinion rather than on-the-ground clinical reporting or wider evidence.
In later years, excuses were made on the basis that it was an uncertain situation. As someone doing real-time estimation back in 2020, I don’t accept that excuse. You have to be clear about uncertainty at the time of the forecast, not afterwards when you are proven wrong.
Furthermore, this wasn’t just about overconfidence: public health seemed to use a flawed reasoning model, failing to understand that for a novel, high-uncertainty risk it is necessary to seek a wide range of opinions from many disciplines, not to rely heavily on prior beliefs or personal experience. And certainly not to shut down debate. Clinical reports and statistics often provided clear evidence of risk well before the public health consensus accepted it. (US public health seemed to have an additional problem, of overweighting their own expertise and underweight international evidence e.g. understanding Delta and breakthrough infections in a timely manner. My criticism of public health does not apply to all national authorities.)
My impression is that officials tended to have a simplistic and incorrect belief that understanding the pandemic was a matter of science. Science was totally the wrong discipline for that – scientific expertise is only one input into real-world estimation, albeit an important one. Scientists are not, in general, experts in real-world probability estimation, risk, forecasting, crisis-management, etc. (Subjectively, it appears that this basic ignorance continues to be widespread today. Science is a powerful tool, but it is not the right tool for every intellectual task.)
There are many mundane, day-to-day matters on which the public really should trust public health. And in a crisis, facing novel or highly uncertain risks, public health should be more humble, put less weight on the opinions of scientists, and demand less trust from the public.