Scott Alexander wrote yet more words defending his decision to write two posts totaling 25,000 words about Ivermectin. Then he wrote a second post trying again.
More centrally, his first post, of which I very much approve, is defending the most important idea of all: Think for yourself, shmuck!
I want to make clear my violent agreement with all of the following.
- Think for yourself, shmuck!
- When it seems worthwhile, do your own research.
- The ones telling you not to ‘do your own research’ are probably the baddies.
- Also applies to the ones telling you to ‘trust us and Trust the Science™’ and calling you an idiot or racist or calling for you to be censored if you disagree.
- Baddies or not, those people still are more likely to be more right about any given point than those saying they are wrong or lying to you, unless you have seen them lying or being wrong a lot about closely related things previously. And your own research will often not seem worthwhile if you consider opportunity costs.
- When people draw wrong conclusions like Ivermectin being effective or that Atlantis used to exist or whatever, telling people that they are idiots or racists for drawing that conclusion is not going to be super effective.
- Pointing out ‘the other side are conspiracy theorists’ or ‘the people who believe this also believe these other terrible things’ does not prove the other side is wrong, nor is it going to convince anyone on the other side that they are wrong.
- If you instead explain and work through the evidence, there is a chance someone might be convinced, that is God’s work, you are providing a public service.
- There are not ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ places to Do Science. You can virtuously Do Science to It, for all values of It and of You.
- No, we cannot assume that the medical establishment, or any other establishment, will always get such questions right. That is not how any of this works. Even the best possible version of the medical (or other) establishment will sometimes get it wrong, if no one points it out without being dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or racist then the establishment will keep getting it wrong and so will you, and criticism is the only known antidote to error in such situations.
I would also add, from Kavanagh’s response to Scott in a comment, my disagreement with this particular thing, regarding scuba diving to purported Atlantean ruins:
I also don’t think I would have the same intuition you have that personally exploring the ruins would be informative. I think that would actually be likely to skew my perspective as it feels like it would deliver potentially inaccurate intuitions and that it would require already having the expertise to properly assess what you are seeing.
Actually getting the skills, running experiments, seeing the evidence for yourself? That’s all great stuff in my book. It’s not cheap to do, but if you care enough to learn to scuba dive, by all means scuba dive and see the primary evidence with your own eyes. It seems crazy to me to think this would not be a helpful thing to do – to me it is the most virtuous thing to do, if you care a lot.
Alas, Scott then backtracks a bunch in this second post.
He is afraid others will see him saying not to ‘trust the experts’ so he wants to reiterate to trust the experts, that reasoning is hard and you probably shouldn’t try doing it yourself. Then he says this:
To a first approximation, trust experts over your own judgment. If people are trying to confuse you about who the experts are, then to a second approximation trust prestigious people and big institutions, including professors at top colleges, journalists at major newspapers, professional groups with names like the American ______ Association, and the government.
…
If none of this rings true, figure out whether you really need to have an opinion.
…
To a first approximation, you should never suspend the first approximation.
At its best this behavior is free riding. It will not often be at its best.
That whole speech, to me, is a Lovecraftian horror. If we tell young people to (almost) always trust the American [X] Association on X, and journalists about the news, dismiss anything that the authorities call a conspiracy theory, and never get any practice thinking for themselves on such matters, we deserve what we get.
I love that this is the top comment on the post, note inside the parenthesis:
Another objection I don’t buy is the idea that if you are seen giving too much credibility to conspiracy theories, you risk making people generally more vulnerable to conspiracy theories, by increasing their priors on conspiracy theories.
I have several objections to this objection.
- You’re saying we should engage in a conspiracy to discredit conspiracy theories?
- It is a very bad principle to avoid providing Bayesian evidence if you think this would move someone’s posterior in the wrong direction due to other mistakes.
- This is a lot like (at least self-) censoring information that goes against things you believe to be true, on the theory that it is true and therefore it would be bad if people got evidence that made them believe it less.
- What do you think about a field if every time they find evidence of X they publish and shout from the rooftops, and every time they find evidence against X they put it in a drawer? What do you believe about X? Does X being true make this better?
- I am not convinced that ACX readers tend to give too much credence to conspiracy theories, or puts too little trust in the establishment’s claims.
- I am not convinced that considering and then robustly dismissing well-known conspiracy theories will give more credence to such theories.
- It lowered my credence for such theories, since I now have a clear data point on one of them. I expect many people, especially those who had previously had doubts about the particular theory in question, would react the same way.
Scott’s discussion of characterization of the three ways to view conspiracy theories – Idiocy (dumb things people fall for), Intellect (same as other theories, only worse, which is mostly the way I see them) and Infohazard (deadly traps that lie in wait) has this same assumption that the goal is to have fewer people believe things in the category ‘conspiracy theory.’ Which is why them being low status would seem good. That… doesn’t seem like the right goal, unless you think all conspiracy theory shaped theories are always false?
The objection of Kavanagh that I do buy, that I think is important, is that you need to read the contextual clues in a situation to know whether sources are worth treating as credible and worthy of your time. Otherwise, you’re going to waste a lot of time on questions where you already know the answer.
Was the full analysis of Ivermectin a good use of Scott’s readers’ time? If everyone who reads some of Scott read the whole thing, then no. If everyone made a reasonable personal decision on whether they found such an analysis of value before reading, then yes. The output was quite valuable to the right people, especially those who could be convinced. I also found it of value.
Was it a good use of Scott’s time? Less clear to me. My guess it the first analysis plausibly was, the second one probably wasn’t.
I was given the same test, here. In addition to Scott Alexander, Alexandros (who I am in no way saying is a ‘conspiracy theorist’ or any other label) talked extensively to me. His initial claims were thoughtful and interesting, and I engaged. It became clear1 that he was applying asymmetric standards to evidence. A bunch of his claims weren’t checking out when I looked further. It then became clear he was also bringing other Covid-authority-skeptical standard takes, in particular questioning Pfizer and the vaccine, in ways I had looked into and knew were not good mistakes to be making.
I was confident he would have continued to talk to me and raise additional questions on this, and on vaccinations, and on other things, for as long as I was willing to listen. And I was convinced that he was not about to quit, or be convinced, no matter the response.
So after spending several hours on this, I concluded continued engagement was not a good use of my time, and I stopped doing it. I think that was a good decision process.
Initially I said quickly clear, but when I looked back it seemed it wasn’t all that quick.
Don't Worry About the Vase 
What if there were a truth market where participants could buy and sell belief contracts to settle these types of information disputes? See: https://priorprobability.com/2022/11/04/truth-markets-part-2-belief-contracts/
See also https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4323607
or https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3876710
Such markets would be good if they existed and people used them. I am pessimistic on adaption.
From a year ago, what “do your own research” sounds like to actual research scientists.
Summary:
(a) The CDC director in Maine satirizes the situation with “blizzards are a conspiracy” and “gloves don’t work”. In Maine. In January.
(b) Plus, bonus video of a snow diver in Brooksville, Maine. Approximately as crazy as it sounds.
I love this on many levels. Thing is, yes, if you want to know if it’s a blizzard you should look out your window, and see how much snow there is. You should trust your experience and those around you, mostly, on how much gloves help. And so on. Not ‘well some people used the words of reason to do bad reasoning, so let’s abandon all reason.’
#10 unironically? At some point during this calendar day X, therefore right now X.
(b) The “crazy” is the point, it should be exhibited together with the popular Leidenfrost effect demonstration (“washing hands” with liquid nitrogen) and some experiments on kinetic inertia. Most people’s physics intuitions (as also shown by the history of physics) tend to ignore any kind of inertia. Dropping some anvils on that intuition is probably beneficial. (Yes, equilibria are way easier to reason about than trajectories.)
No doubt like many circus acts, snow diving looks a great deal more outrageous than it really is. But also, like many circus acts, there’s a degree of good craftsmanship in making it look as outrageous as possible.
At least, it made me laugh out loud.
Which was on point with the rest of it.
I haven’t read Alexandros extensively, but yeah, seems like a back and forth with him would be like wrestling with a hog: the only thing that comes of it is you’re both dirty, and you discover the hog is enjoying it.
I’ve taken in more of Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying on these topics because I found (for a while until ivermectin totally deranged them) they had a novel and enlightening perspective on some of the culture war things that I hadn’t considered before.
To me, it’s really interesting how this initial apolitical inquiry into repurposing medicine in a pandemic resulted in these elaborate siloed information worlds with their respective status hierarchies (Bret the high priest, and those like Alexandros the foot soldiers). The pattern doesn’t bode well for our civilization to meet whatever challenges await.
Scott-2 is the epistemological analog of negative utilitarianism?
It would be appropriate to channel the spirit of Chesterton. “One should seek respectability before seeking truth, not because truth is unimportant, but precisely because truth is the important one, and respectability is merely a shortcut to it.”
By complete coincidence, this round falls on the anniversary of “Rock is Strong”.
In the first essay Alexander lets slip this dog of war: “When experts have strong opinions on something, this is a good opportunity to practice your opinion-forming skills, see whether you get the same result as the experts, and, if not, figure out where you went wrong.” In the second essay he reverses this particular descent into dogmatism and admits that sometimes the experts are wrong. Then he goes on to write things that justify this response: “That whole speech, to me, is a Lovecraftian horror.” One may hope that this was the antithesis in his sequence of essays illustrating thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Perhaps this sharp, concise response will provoke a final ACX statement.
My perspective is that conspiracies are not rare, are often successful when pursued by the Powers, and should mostly be viewed through a Machiavellian lens. Alexander takes no account of the most effective species of conspiracy employed by the ruling class: the conspiracy of silence. This is a conspiracy to do a lie of omission. Consider how the MSM is treating the Twitter Files: mostly with silence. How did they treat the few voices that were skeptical of the WMD claims by the ruling class (bipartisan claims, be it remembered) in 2002-3? At that time I read the NY Times. I do not recall any such skepticism in its pages or in the pages of my former weekly read, The Economist. The conspiracy of silence, provided one has sufficient gleichschaltung, works beautifully in a society that thinks it has a free press, since it tends to be deeply complacent about the quality of its information environment, as though that problem is solved by calling the press free. At important junctures the only effectual press is the official press. One might even suspect that these are the only times when the press really matters. At these times, the few who openly doubt the official press are treated as noise or information pollution or low status or treasonous–or they are universally blanketed in official silence.
Maybe this dynamic has changed in America. Conservatives have very little power and, unlike the situation during most of the 90 years that they have had very little power, many of them are finally aware of their position as outsiders to the power game. Many are skeptical of the Ukraine war narrative pushed by official media. In contrast, I am highly confident that they would have felt little skepticism in 2003 had President Al Gore been the leader taking us into the Iraq war. Their faith in the false WMD story was essentially apolitical. Note that the word conspiracy has not generally been used to describe the Big Lie about WMDs. (A conspiracy of the ruling class is called mainstream thinking and, if found out due to its failure, it’s called a mistake or stupidity or something other than a conspiracy. A conspiracy that is unsupported by the elite is called a conspiracy, regardless of its truth value.) Today, no Democrat President has any default trust among conservatives, and a uniparty Republican like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio wouldn’t be much more trusted. There is now a more consistent and far reaching structural skepticism of government and its official press on the Right. This state of affairs seems to produce a reaction that shores up support for these same institutions on the Left, who confer almost automatic belief, obedience, and, when needed, forgiveness.
On the whole, Alexander takes the easy way out by focusing on a conspiracy by the outer party on a scientific question. The most dangerous and difficult to discover conspiracies are those of the ruling class and, at a smaller scale, its distributed elements among the leaders of particular fields, industries, movements operating under cover of its implicit protection. Many of these distributed conspiracies were evident during the pandemic. I suppose the argument against thinking this way is that it’s an intractable approach. A man does not alter the process of plate tectonics with a sledgehammer. For those of us who perceive rapid civilizational decline, driven by coordinated elite plans/conspiracies, the Ivermectin debate looks more tractable and far less worthwhile. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the wisdom to resist petty conspiracies, and lose his civilization?