No easy path to the truth: the foibles of the left and right. By Nathan Confas.
Compare and contrast:
On April 17, researchers led by Nikku Madhusudhan at the University of Cambridge announced that they had detected dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of K2-18b, an exoplanet 120 light-years from Earth. On our planet, dimethyl sulfide is only produced by living organisms. It is emitted in large quantities by certain species of algae, and gives the ocean its special smell. The presence of this chemical on K2-18b might be the strongest evidence ever recorded for alien life.
Candace Owens is one of the most popular podcasters in America. On April 17, she also had an announcement to make. She did her own research on astronomy and concluded that the moon landing was “fake and gay.” She told her millions of followers: “You need to learn the history of NASA, of the Apollo programs, which were a cult and satanic….They just wanted people to believe in scientific advancement.” Owens has come to similarly unorthodox conclusions on many topics including WWII, the history of communism, and, of course, Jews and Israel.
How much cultural influence should each viewpoint have? How will “the market” work it out? What can we do when the experts are often mediocrities appointed and paid to promote politically-correct narratives (as in, if they weren’t politically correct then they wouldn’t be given jobs as “experts”)?
Obviously, Candace Owens should have free speech to express her opinions. At the same time, a healthy society needs mechanisms to ensure that people like her don’t have an outsize cultural influence. When it comes to astronomy, for example, the voice of Madhusudhan, not Owens, is the one that should be amplified. In some ways it is. Madhusudhan is a professor at Cambridge, publishes his views in peer-reviewed astronomy journals, and gets covered in the New York Times. Twenty years ago, that’s all that would have mattered. But now, Owens, Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, or Russell Brand can go on Spotify, YouTube, or Twitter and reach a larger audience than the New York Times. They might even swing elections. Rogan & Co.’s support for Trump may have tipped the balance in his favor.
People who don’t trust “experts” now look to podcasters and other alt-media figures — many of whom (including Rogan and Brand) are comedians — to decide what to believe about everything from WWII to vaccines to Ukraine to tariffs. The result has been a proliferation of ignorance with disastrous consequences for our culture and public policy.
Uneducated podcast bros have not found a magic shortcut to knowledge. … However, it’s true that many so-called experts are fake and/or corrupt.
Blind obedience to credentialed authority (associated with the left) or trust in a “marketplace of ideas” that rewards brain-rotting infotainment (associated with the right) are both failed strategies. …
No easy path to the truth, but many paths to failure:
There’s a reason why people became tired of so-called experts. The “expert” class face planted about five times in a row. The podcast bros argue they have a better track record of sussing out the truth on controversial topics. …
At the height of our society’s “expert” worship, credentialed technocrats told a bunch of self-serving lies, imprisoned people in their apartments for two years, and then said that anyone who questioned them was a racist conspiracy theorist. Almost the entire academic and media establishment covered for them….
But the fact that some people with fancy credentials are corrupt, fallible, and/or frauds doesn’t mean that expertise isn’t real. Some people have knowledge and training that make their opinion more credible and worthy of attention than the opinion of a rando comedian with a microphone….
Foibles on the left (who own the bureaucracy and institutions, and so get to appoint “the experts” and anoint certain ideas as “the truth):
I get it, people are sick of hearing that there’s a “scientific consensus” and “experts agree” that leftists are correct about whatever they wish to be true. Journalists attribute every claim they make to an expert, where “expert” is defined as anyone vaguely connected to the subject who agrees with the journalist’s narrative, while anyone who disagrees is ipso facto a “non-expert.” …
However, the fact that the leftist establishment plays games like this doesn’t mean that we should just give up and listen to Candace Owens or Russell Brand. Sometimes we should listen to people who know what they are talking about—namely, experts. …
Many areas of “scholarship” are fake, existing only to promote left-wing activism. Sometimes it’s easy to figure out where a field falls on the fake-to-real spectrum. Experts in aeronautics have tangible accomplishments like airplanes that can fly, so you can be confident that aeronautics isn’t totally made up. On the other hand, critical theorists produce zero evidence that they have special insight into anything, and they make obviously wrong claims about observable reality (for example, about sex differences). Critical theory falls on the fake end of the spectrum. Most fields will occupy some intermediate position, perhaps closer to one end or the other. …
Foibles on the right (who must make do with podcasts, X, and talkback radio):
We now know who is rewarded in an unregulated marketplace of ideas — at least on the right. It’s people who appeal to the intuitions of the lowest common denominator in the most entertaining way. Winning ideas include anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, WWII revisionism, drinking unpasteurized milk, vaccine denial, moon landing conspiracy theories, fascism, the notion that Americans would be happier working in factories, and the theory that America is being “screwed” by Madagascar because we spend more on their vanilla beans than they spend on food and medicine from us. Some of these bad ideas are being implemented into policy by the Trump administration. …
Flattering the intelligence of the “common person” is a good way to get a big audience. But huge numbers of people are going to latch onto disastrously wrong ideas unless elites exercise some paternalistic control over their informational environment. …
Social status on the right is determined mainly by how much attention you can generate, regardless of the quality of that attention. People who appeal to the lowest common denominator rise to the top. The right won’t be able to attract large numbers of cognitive elites — and therefore won’t be successful — if it doesn’t create alternative tracks for people and ideas to gain influence. Nietzsche says: “Far from the marketplace and from fame happens all that is great.” I think there are occasional exceptions to that principle. But, when it comes to ideas, the marketplace rewards “space is fake and gay” a lot more than “there’s dimethyl sulfide on the exoplanet K2-18b.”