A nice article Helen. I was thinking recently that many hellbent on using "shame" as a tool online or irl (all stripes/epistemic persuasions) seem to miss that for it to work there has to be some preexisting respect... no one is going care about the thoughts of someone they disrespect.
I suspect that gap will always exist, but shared epistemic standards have to be one path through the mountains.
I completely agree with the stated goal, but wonder how you see social media (and news media) fit into the equation.
In the current incentive structure only the distribution of your viewpoint is valued (more clicks, views, and monetization), not the truthfulness of this viewpoint. The more extreme you make your position the more likely it is to spread — this is true on both the Left and the Right.
So given these dynamics, you get "popular" views that are based on fictitious narratives and "elite" views that are more grounded in reality but ultimately play an increasingly marginal role in a democracy.
It seems to me then that the way to fix it is by designing a social media environment where the incentives align with truth seeking.
But other than that I’m curious what is your theory of change to move toward this “Second Enlightenment”?
I am focused as usual on addressing culture. I want to address the issue where people are more likely to click on the extreme views and urge them to think carefully about doing this and instead to try to amplify careful, evidence-based and consistent thinkers.
Very thoughtful, thank you.. I just want to highlight that it's easier to tell when politicians are lying than to identify when they are cherry-picking expertise to fit a narrative. People are 'fed up of experts' mainly because they're exposed to a curated selection, and sometimes (e.g Covid epidemiology modelling) the demand for expertise and certainty is greater than the supply.
Yes, it is telling that we are now at a stage where I wish they would go back to the usual level of ‘spin’. What’s truly alarming is the willingness to tell utter lies in the confidence that as long as they fit the narrative, this won’t lose them their base of support.
Yes! Have you ever come across the writing of Howard Schwartz? I very much recommend his book Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay. In particular, he examines the case of the Challenger Disaster, whereby a "ritual of science" replaced actual scientific scrutiny. And this happened because the goodness of the Teacher in Space program elevated spaceflight, the space shuttle, and the astronauts into a position of instant symbolism. Unlike Apollo, which did not get to mythologize its greatness until mission success, the Teacher in Space program mythologized its greatness from the very outset. NASA came to perform a feel-good sideshow psychodrama of organizational limitlessness in which actual primary task feel-bad scientific constraint was experienced as hostile to the goodness of the symbols. If Apollo was based on “management by information,” Challenger-era NASA was oriented toward “management by ideology.” Schwartz goes onto analogize this self-destructive feel-good institutional psychodrama bullshit to that of alcoholism/addiction. I appreciate this analogy, because one of my favorite pithy AA sayings is, “Working hard without doing the hard work.” I find the Challenger Disaster a clarifying case study, because it highlights how even highly localized and proprietary goodness ideology can become psychodramatized bullshit and catastrophically destructive, even among brilliant individuals who should know better. So, I couldn’t agree more with you about the life-or-death stakes of making bullshit embarrassing. Even really good and poetic sounding bullshit. Because another favorite pithy saying I love is, “You can’t save your face and your ass at the same time.”
Fascinating article! I’ll have to read it more than once, because there’s a lot in there to digest.
I’ve been intrigued by the use of terms like expert, academic, advocate, activist, etc., particularly in media discussions of controversial topics. People who have very definite, sometimes extreme, sometimes falsifiable beliefs about “what should be done” in a given situation are described as “experts”, for any of a number of reasons (academic credentials, work experience, lived experience, family history, etc.). It comes back to the passive acceptance of multiple ways of knowing. Unfortunately, people defer to expertise, without thinking about what it requires.
You’ve touched on the idea that academics should pursue truth, present hypotheses, and be open to having their hypotheses disproven. They can and should have expertise in their field of study, but it seems to me that their opinions should be supported by the evidence and open to debate. The moment they land on a firm opinion that they won’t debate, they’ve become an advocate. When they start waving placards, they’ve become activists. As advocates and activists, their academic work ceases to be unbiased. Their choices of what to read and how to interpret it, what to study and how to measure it, and what to publish and how to frame it, etc., are all influenced by their ideology. When they stop following the rules of academia and scholarship, they’ve become intellectual anarchists.
I’m not sure how to get around it, but it’s a problem that most academics declare themselves to be left or right (and yes, more are left than right, these days) and so few claim to be centrist or unbiased. By all means, the physicist can prefer socialism to capitalism, where politics and economics aren’t her fields of expertise, but, when it comes to physics, she needs to strive for objectivity. With the profusion of social “sciences” these days, objectivity easily goes out the window. It’s hard enough to find the truth about whether socialism is better than capitalism, and pretty well impossible if you hold a bias one way or the other. The ideal political scientist is probably someone who doesn’t vote!
You should add a buy me a coffee option. For those of us retired on fixed income those subscriptions quickly add up, and we like to at least put something your way in support . I'll have to do the subscribe for a month and then cancel thing.
OK, so I presently have no choice but to subscribe for a month and then cancel. Don't take it personal when that happens. Will show up as E.W. as payee and should have just gone through.
At a time of so much scarcity there appears to be a never ending supply of loonies. I think they are proselytizing. Too many village idiots , too few dragons.
I hold that bullshitters can only get away with bullshit if those who know better stay silent.
The problem is that the method by which one separates bullshiting from good sense is under attack in our education institutions for way too long.
This attack made possible for bullshitters gather hordes of followers, and those who know better be portrayed as irrelevant simply because they are very very few.
Knowing better today is in itself a rebellious act. It requires a good amount of courage, because once you do that, you find yourself in empty trenches.
The good news is that knowing better means you have a clear and righteous mind, ready to make a compelling invite to those who matter, so they join you in the intellectual fight against those who in more rational times would be in the ranks of the marginalized insane.
A fine essay, Helen. I’d like to recommend it for reading by my university’s Psychology classes, in which I teach, among other things, the value of scientific thinking and the Mertonian norms.
This clichéd account of Galileo's persecution is untrue. Copernicus had proposed the heliocentric model a hundred years before. The Pope at the time though Galileo was mocking him, and the revenge exacted was personal.
This ties in nicely with my note earlier today about the contrast between authority and authoritarianism. Authoritarianism opposes legitimate authority precisely for its power to discern bullshit.
Here, the author discusses the problem of the right to be wrong, which is a core liberal value. But liberal epistemology understands that what you believe is less important than the process that led you to believe it. “Steve on the internet said so,” is not the same as a randomized clinical trial of 1000 people conducted by qualified people who show their work and follow high standards of scientific conduct.
It is important to say that credentials are not the source of legitimate authority. It is the work done in consistently adhering to high standards of data collection and methodology, and the training in those practices. This is what, in another context, might be called “proof-of-work” as a less corruptible source of authority.
The recognition that some people speak with more legitimate authority than others is not an endorsement of an unaccountable “ruling elite” or a perpetuation of structurally racist power narratives. It is not a statement that anyone is better than anyone else. It is a recognition that some people have used objectively better methods, done more work, and demonstrated better judgment repeatedly over time, than others. This is something that a healthy culture values and rewards.
Our ability to make bullshit embarrassing again (MBEA!), is directly linked to legitimizing authoritative institutions again.
"The ideological bias of academia, especially during Covid, when public health rules bent for political protest, has badly damaged trust."
May I request a retelling of what happened behind the statement above? My apologies because I am from Southeast Asia and we dealt with Covid simply as a disease and not as an ideological/political thing as the West (the USA in particular) appears to have done; so I'm not quite sure what the statement refers to.
Excellently thoughtful article as always, I very much enjoyed it, though the challenge of championing for truth is daunting!
There was a lot of anger when health officials and politicians on the left, who had said lockdowns were extremely important for infection control and people had been unable to see family members even when they were dying, then seemed to be OK with the Black Lives Matter protests. They were perceived as seeing that political movement as important enough to break the distancing rules but not people’s closest relationships and bonds.
In hindsight it is incredible how American doctors believed in 2020 that racism was deadlier than Covid -- In the USA, where, I understand, one cannot even openly criticize black gangsta rap, without being cancelled in some way.
"the standards to determine that someone lacks the mental capacity to make their own health decisions have to remain very high."
Agreed, but it made me wonder how such a standard should be set. When is someone unfit to make their own decisions? I wouldn't deny the right to make health decisions for people in assisted living arrangements, but I would deny it for people suffering with dementia. Is that a reasonable line?
I happen to have given this quite a lot of thought and be familiar with the law in the UK due to working with people with learning disability, disease and brain injury. It really has to be very specific. Someone with dementia would only be considered to lack mental capacity if you could demonstrate that they did not understand the situation they were being asked to make a decision about or the ramifications of that decision.
For example, my mother had the onset of dementia when she signed Power of Attorney over to me, but, while she might forget whether she'd taken her pills and call me six times about it, she could read and understand the form and say that she wanted me to have power of attorney to make health and financial decisions for her if she became unable to do so.
But it gets really fine-grained. Someone could have the mental capacity to manage their own finances but not to decide how to dress to go out in the cold, for example. The assumption must always be that they do have mental capacity and the burden on the people who say they have not to demonstrate this
I love this.
A nice article Helen. I was thinking recently that many hellbent on using "shame" as a tool online or irl (all stripes/epistemic persuasions) seem to miss that for it to work there has to be some preexisting respect... no one is going care about the thoughts of someone they disrespect.
I suspect that gap will always exist, but shared epistemic standards have to be one path through the mountains.
Nice slogan!. Helen, we need some bright critical thinkers like you in universities!!
Beautifully written!
So refreshing to learn that there are still people who belive in the enlightenmen values.
Modern society is regressing in a sense that our tribal and flawed epistemology is leading us astray.
Thank you so much for writing this!
Cool, great title! I’ll check it out properly in the next few days…
I completely agree with the stated goal, but wonder how you see social media (and news media) fit into the equation.
In the current incentive structure only the distribution of your viewpoint is valued (more clicks, views, and monetization), not the truthfulness of this viewpoint. The more extreme you make your position the more likely it is to spread — this is true on both the Left and the Right.
So given these dynamics, you get "popular" views that are based on fictitious narratives and "elite" views that are more grounded in reality but ultimately play an increasingly marginal role in a democracy.
It seems to me then that the way to fix it is by designing a social media environment where the incentives align with truth seeking.
But other than that I’m curious what is your theory of change to move toward this “Second Enlightenment”?
I am focused as usual on addressing culture. I want to address the issue where people are more likely to click on the extreme views and urge them to think carefully about doing this and instead to try to amplify careful, evidence-based and consistent thinkers.
Very thoughtful, thank you.. I just want to highlight that it's easier to tell when politicians are lying than to identify when they are cherry-picking expertise to fit a narrative. People are 'fed up of experts' mainly because they're exposed to a curated selection, and sometimes (e.g Covid epidemiology modelling) the demand for expertise and certainty is greater than the supply.
Yes, it is telling that we are now at a stage where I wish they would go back to the usual level of ‘spin’. What’s truly alarming is the willingness to tell utter lies in the confidence that as long as they fit the narrative, this won’t lose them their base of support.
Yes! Have you ever come across the writing of Howard Schwartz? I very much recommend his book Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay. In particular, he examines the case of the Challenger Disaster, whereby a "ritual of science" replaced actual scientific scrutiny. And this happened because the goodness of the Teacher in Space program elevated spaceflight, the space shuttle, and the astronauts into a position of instant symbolism. Unlike Apollo, which did not get to mythologize its greatness until mission success, the Teacher in Space program mythologized its greatness from the very outset. NASA came to perform a feel-good sideshow psychodrama of organizational limitlessness in which actual primary task feel-bad scientific constraint was experienced as hostile to the goodness of the symbols. If Apollo was based on “management by information,” Challenger-era NASA was oriented toward “management by ideology.” Schwartz goes onto analogize this self-destructive feel-good institutional psychodrama bullshit to that of alcoholism/addiction. I appreciate this analogy, because one of my favorite pithy AA sayings is, “Working hard without doing the hard work.” I find the Challenger Disaster a clarifying case study, because it highlights how even highly localized and proprietary goodness ideology can become psychodramatized bullshit and catastrophically destructive, even among brilliant individuals who should know better. So, I couldn’t agree more with you about the life-or-death stakes of making bullshit embarrassing. Even really good and poetic sounding bullshit. Because another favorite pithy saying I love is, “You can’t save your face and your ass at the same time.”
Fascinating article! I’ll have to read it more than once, because there’s a lot in there to digest.
I’ve been intrigued by the use of terms like expert, academic, advocate, activist, etc., particularly in media discussions of controversial topics. People who have very definite, sometimes extreme, sometimes falsifiable beliefs about “what should be done” in a given situation are described as “experts”, for any of a number of reasons (academic credentials, work experience, lived experience, family history, etc.). It comes back to the passive acceptance of multiple ways of knowing. Unfortunately, people defer to expertise, without thinking about what it requires.
You’ve touched on the idea that academics should pursue truth, present hypotheses, and be open to having their hypotheses disproven. They can and should have expertise in their field of study, but it seems to me that their opinions should be supported by the evidence and open to debate. The moment they land on a firm opinion that they won’t debate, they’ve become an advocate. When they start waving placards, they’ve become activists. As advocates and activists, their academic work ceases to be unbiased. Their choices of what to read and how to interpret it, what to study and how to measure it, and what to publish and how to frame it, etc., are all influenced by their ideology. When they stop following the rules of academia and scholarship, they’ve become intellectual anarchists.
I’m not sure how to get around it, but it’s a problem that most academics declare themselves to be left or right (and yes, more are left than right, these days) and so few claim to be centrist or unbiased. By all means, the physicist can prefer socialism to capitalism, where politics and economics aren’t her fields of expertise, but, when it comes to physics, she needs to strive for objectivity. With the profusion of social “sciences” these days, objectivity easily goes out the window. It’s hard enough to find the truth about whether socialism is better than capitalism, and pretty well impossible if you hold a bias one way or the other. The ideal political scientist is probably someone who doesn’t vote!
You should add a buy me a coffee option. For those of us retired on fixed income those subscriptions quickly add up, and we like to at least put something your way in support . I'll have to do the subscribe for a month and then cancel thing.
Sorry, missed the bit where you said you'd like to put something my way. I will consider the 'buy me a coffee' option!
OK, so I presently have no choice but to subscribe for a month and then cancel. Don't take it personal when that happens. Will show up as E.W. as payee and should have just gone through.
Thank you! I shall endeavour not to be captured by loonies!
At a time of so much scarcity there appears to be a never ending supply of loonies. I think they are proselytizing. Too many village idiots , too few dragons.
All my writing is free!
I hold that bullshitters can only get away with bullshit if those who know better stay silent.
The problem is that the method by which one separates bullshiting from good sense is under attack in our education institutions for way too long.
This attack made possible for bullshitters gather hordes of followers, and those who know better be portrayed as irrelevant simply because they are very very few.
Knowing better today is in itself a rebellious act. It requires a good amount of courage, because once you do that, you find yourself in empty trenches.
The good news is that knowing better means you have a clear and righteous mind, ready to make a compelling invite to those who matter, so they join you in the intellectual fight against those who in more rational times would be in the ranks of the marginalized insane.
A fine essay, Helen. I’d like to recommend it for reading by my university’s Psychology classes, in which I teach, among other things, the value of scientific thinking and the Mertonian norms.
This clichéd account of Galileo's persecution is untrue. Copernicus had proposed the heliocentric model a hundred years before. The Pope at the time though Galileo was mocking him, and the revenge exacted was personal.
This ties in nicely with my note earlier today about the contrast between authority and authoritarianism. Authoritarianism opposes legitimate authority precisely for its power to discern bullshit.
Here, the author discusses the problem of the right to be wrong, which is a core liberal value. But liberal epistemology understands that what you believe is less important than the process that led you to believe it. “Steve on the internet said so,” is not the same as a randomized clinical trial of 1000 people conducted by qualified people who show their work and follow high standards of scientific conduct.
It is important to say that credentials are not the source of legitimate authority. It is the work done in consistently adhering to high standards of data collection and methodology, and the training in those practices. This is what, in another context, might be called “proof-of-work” as a less corruptible source of authority.
The recognition that some people speak with more legitimate authority than others is not an endorsement of an unaccountable “ruling elite” or a perpetuation of structurally racist power narratives. It is not a statement that anyone is better than anyone else. It is a recognition that some people have used objectively better methods, done more work, and demonstrated better judgment repeatedly over time, than others. This is something that a healthy culture values and rewards.
Our ability to make bullshit embarrassing again (MBEA!), is directly linked to legitimizing authoritative institutions again.
https://substack.com/@peterceverett/note/c-180150485?r=12miu2&utm_medium=ios
"The ideological bias of academia, especially during Covid, when public health rules bent for political protest, has badly damaged trust."
May I request a retelling of what happened behind the statement above? My apologies because I am from Southeast Asia and we dealt with Covid simply as a disease and not as an ideological/political thing as the West (the USA in particular) appears to have done; so I'm not quite sure what the statement refers to.
Excellently thoughtful article as always, I very much enjoyed it, though the challenge of championing for truth is daunting!
There was a lot of anger when health officials and politicians on the left, who had said lockdowns were extremely important for infection control and people had been unable to see family members even when they were dying, then seemed to be OK with the Black Lives Matter protests. They were perceived as seeing that political movement as important enough to break the distancing rules but not people’s closest relationships and bonds.
Thanks for the explanation, Helen. I did a search and indeed I found this:
https://time.com/5848212/doctors-supporting-protests/
In hindsight it is incredible how American doctors believed in 2020 that racism was deadlier than Covid -- In the USA, where, I understand, one cannot even openly criticize black gangsta rap, without being cancelled in some way.
"the standards to determine that someone lacks the mental capacity to make their own health decisions have to remain very high."
Agreed, but it made me wonder how such a standard should be set. When is someone unfit to make their own decisions? I wouldn't deny the right to make health decisions for people in assisted living arrangements, but I would deny it for people suffering with dementia. Is that a reasonable line?
I happen to have given this quite a lot of thought and be familiar with the law in the UK due to working with people with learning disability, disease and brain injury. It really has to be very specific. Someone with dementia would only be considered to lack mental capacity if you could demonstrate that they did not understand the situation they were being asked to make a decision about or the ramifications of that decision.
For example, my mother had the onset of dementia when she signed Power of Attorney over to me, but, while she might forget whether she'd taken her pills and call me six times about it, she could read and understand the form and say that she wanted me to have power of attorney to make health and financial decisions for her if she became unable to do so.
But it gets really fine-grained. Someone could have the mental capacity to manage their own finances but not to decide how to dress to go out in the cold, for example. The assumption must always be that they do have mental capacity and the burden on the people who say they have not to demonstrate this