One of the best things I ever did to educate myself was learn about the mechanics of climate change denial.
Time and again, it’s helped me navigate science issues where the media can’t cope & where tribal instincts don’t help. Vaccines, radiation, COVID, trans issues.
Often people say“critical thinking” is key, as if someone without years of scientific training could easily navigate often tough scientific questions so long as they “question everything”.
But there is a reason why “question everything” is the slogan of conspiracy theorist.
You can’t question everything all the time. You’d cognitively fall apart. You wouldn’t get out of bed.
Instead, “question everything” is simply a formula for rejecting evidence you don’t like. “Question everything” conspiracy theorists are notoriously immune to evidence.
Instead, in difficult scientific disputes, ask - who to trust?
That sounds tough.
Except.
Except when scientific disputes become political, it’s highly unlikely it’s a genuine split among experts.
Typically, there are financial and ideological bad faith players.
What these bad faith players do is set up a façade of expertise - they astroturf, create grand-sounding institutes, often with names paradoxically opposed to their true goal.
With this façade they aim not to influence science, but instead politics and the media. They’re lobby groups often with lots of money from who knows where.
Some examples:
The Global Warming Policy Foundation is a climate change denying group.
The European Committee on Radiation Risk is a bunch of anti-nuclear cranks chaired by someone who once tried to market useless pills to the “children of Fukushima”.
The Society For Evidence-Based Gender Medicine is opposed to gender-affirming medicine.
The Alliance for Defending Freedom campaigns to make abortions, and being gay or transgender, as illegal as possible around the world.
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons opposes vaccines and claims abortion causes cancer.
Autism Speaks is a crank organisation that demonises people with autism and promotes fake cures.
America’s Frontline Doctors promoted fake COVID cures like Ivermectin and campaigns against vaccines.
None of these groups fools actual scientists.
But that’s not the point. The point is to fool you, and to influence politics. They simply bypass science. Their attempts at doing genuine peer-reviewed science (for PR) are typically sparse and bad.
They get help from the media: because these disputes are often tribal, right wing or left wing media are VERY happy to have an “expert” from a plausible-sounding organisation to back their narrative.
Yes, it’s mainly right wing media, but it happens on the left too.
Politicians too love to have “experts” to cover their ideological goals. That’s why there is, for example, a toxic triangle of dark-funded think tanks (eg the several housed together at 55 Tufton St), RW media, and the UK govt. Politicians can claim they have “consulted”.
And this is where the “critical thinking” approach that says “look at the evidence and decide for your inexpert self” has problems.
What if one “half” of the debate is not there in good faith?
How does “listening to both sides” work then?
Because it’s not a fair fight.
One side is trying to explain often complex scientific issues, with the risk that every simplification contains an error of omission that can be used in bad faith to undermine their credibility.
The other side is selling you a story.
For example: “The COVID vaccine will protect you”.
This is true, but it was contradicted by anti-vaxxers saying “it doesn’t stop the virus 100%. Then experts with little media training stutter out complex qualifications.
So they get to present the mainstream as liars.
If you’re telling a story that isn’t restricted by facts, you get to focus on what appeals. And what appeals is a simple enough story that evokes fear, and the idea of a cover-up.
A conspiracy theory.
At which point, you’re already into the rabbit hole.
What makes it a conspiracy theory is unavoidably claiming that vast numbers of experts with years of education and research experience are all in on the lie.
So what to do?
How do you avoid this happening?
Are there no real scientific disputes?
Before you listen to anyone, check their credentials. Are they
1. employed by a university or respectable scientific institute.
2. qualified and longtime researching in the appropriate area
3. with no story of bad practice or scandal attached to their name
How?
- sniff out the fake institutes. Check their funding, their support for other dodgy causes, their reception by experts. As Naomi Oreskes noted in her book on GW denialism, it’s often the same bad faith actors in dispute after dispute. eg tobacco, climate change, (& COVID)
- Be wary of people qualified in one area playing expert in another, no matter their status. Several professional climate change denialists had PhDs - but not in climate science. A physicist or evolutionary biologist has no expertise in trans health. Sorry, Prof Dawkins.
3. Finally, check for cranks. Patrick Minford is an economics professor. But he’s a crank dismissed by everyone except Brexiteers.
Check the journals they publish in are genuine quality and not predatory etc.
Check they’ve never had malpractice issues. Etc.
Do all that, and you’re left with people to listen to.
It’s highly likely that you’re left largely with only one side of the debate still standing.
Getting into the scientific details is good for rebuttals and tackling disinformation.
But you have to be informed first.
Climate change, radiation & health, vaccines, COVID, trans health. The same pattern.
Often the same professional networks of lobbyists.
And no, political tribal instincts will not help you. The difference between left and right is merely that the right has more money.
There are, of course, genuine scientific disputes between qualified experts.
But here’s the thing: they’ll be at a level beyond your formal education.
They’ll be difficult, and require a LOT of reading just to understand where both sides agree.
So a final rule of thumb:
If you find yourself believing vast swathes of experts around the world have been hoodwinked by something simple enough for you as a layperson to understand - you very likely already have at least one foot down the rabbit hole.
Stay safe.
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