Why People Believe Wrong Things
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How so many people can believe demonstrably false things, and persist in their beliefs for years despite mountains of contrary evidence, is a great problem. There are of course liars and grifters, some of them in positions of great authority; and there are many others who are simply deceived or misinformed. A far worse problem, though, are all those who espouse obviously wrong things, while being well-informed and perfectly sincere. A great part of the maskers, the lockdowners and even the vaccinators, are like this. There are some cynical and evil voices, and there are some stupid people, but then there are all the others, who simply believe ridiculous things despite it all. There are social, psychological and emotional explanations, but being wrong is above all an intellectual problem, and it is so pervasive, because of our intellectual limitations.
A pervasive feature of human perception and cognition, is that it depends on what you might call models. We do not directly act on the information provided by our senses. Instead, our brains first process this information to build a running, constantly updated model of our environment. It is within this model that we act, and this model that constitutes our subjective sensory experience. Our eyes, for example, supply high resolution imagery for only a very small part of the visual field – far smaller than you realise. Our brains construct from this limited, disjointed information a broader theory of our surroundings, thus painting in the gaps and granting us the internal sensation of rich visual experience. This explains why unexpected events seem to come out of nowhere; why we can search the same room twenty times for a missing object, which all the time is in plain sight; and why witnesses often disagree about such elementary things as the colour of an automobile or the height of perpetrator.
Our intellectual processes are much the same. Many years ago, Thomas Kuhn wrote a book on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he argued that science does not advance through the accumulation of new discoveries and information. Scientists are not always and forever refining their repository of facts about the universe. Rather, scientific views change in fits and starts, through a kind of punctuated equilibrium.
Researchers agree on a basic set of assumptions and theories about the nature of their subject and the purpose of their work. These assumptions and theories, taken together, constitute a paradigm. Paradigms are simply intellectual frameworks, comparable to the environmental models your brain constructs on the basis of sensory information. All paradigms are necessarily imperfect, because natural phenomena are of untold complexity and our knowledge is very incomplete. Nevertheless, reigning paradigms are favoured because of their explanatory power; they fit the evidence and the research well enough, and they guide what Kuhn calls “normal science” – everyday research and inquiry within the paradigm, which aims to refine reigning theories and fit them ever more closely to reality.
Here and there, there are anomalies which the paradigm cannot explain. Researchers engaged in normal science will ignore or downplay these anomalies as long as they can, because they cannot be understood or processed with the intellectual tools that their paradigm grants them. These anomalies require a new paradigm, a different set of fundamental assumptions, and this is inconceivable, until there are so many anomalies, that the reigning paradigm is discredited and the field enters a crisis. It is at this point that you end up abandoning the miasma theory for the germ theory of disease, or setting aside the geocentric solar system for a heliocentric one.
Paradigms, then, not only make interpretations and predictions. They also establish the kinds of questions it is appropriate to ask, and how these questions are to be answered. When you are inside of a paradigm, it does not seem so much true, as unquestionable, or even invisible. This accounts for the strange ability of theories almost to make reality, and to form closed, inviolable worlds of thought unto themselves. Any set of data and observations can support multiple hypotheses, but under the spell of a theory, you see in the data only confirmations of what you already believe. Contrary, falsifying proofs don’t even seem disqualifying, so much as boring or bizarre, and above all unimportant.
Kuhn elaborated his concept only in the context of the sciences, but it is plain that paradigms govern everything, from political discourse to the study of Shakespeare. The sustained study of natural, historical or literary phenomena, doesn’t make you smarter or better at understanding the world. As the sophistication of theory and interpretation increases, the scope of inquiry narrows, and the possibilities for self-deception and absurdity only multiply. Hence the familiar jokes, about the ridiculous ideas that only someone with a doctoral degree could propagate. It is the same with Corona, and political matters, and everything else. There are errors and mistaken interpretations to which low-information observers are subject, but high-information, critical thinkers also build intellectual worlds that are subject to deeper, harder errors, and these people will never be convinced they are wrong.
Kuhn and others have noted that scientific knowledge does not advance so much by discovery, as by the deaths of prior scientists:
Copernicanism made few converts for almost a century after Copernicus' death. Newton's work was not generally accepted … for more than half a century after the Principia appeared. Priestley never accepted the oxygen theory, nor Lord Kelvin the electromagnetic theory, and so on. … Darwin ... wrote: “Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume ... I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine ... ” And Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”1
One of the biggest problems here, is that the error and the source of the error are not the same. People are most demonstrably wrong in their conclusions, but they arrived at these wrong conclusions via a broader intellectual framework that they leave mostly unstated, and that isn’t even subject to ordinary falsification.
It doesn’t help, that academics tend to surround themselves and their intellectual production with a lot of credentialism and gate-keeping, which serves to protect the reigning theories of consensus scholarship from criticism, and which the right-thinking public accepts as prerequisites for being right. Shallow political demands to Follow the Science will just tether the whole world to the eccentric, careerist intellectual production of a bunch of unaccountable academics, who cannot afford to be wrong and will never alter their views, whatever the evidence.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 149–50.
Source: eugyppius: a plague journal
Why People Believe Wrong Things: A Response to Reader Critiques
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One of the things I try to do here, is explain how much the insanity of the past two years can be put down to the ordinary, routine shortcomings of our institutions, our culture and our psychology. This analysis routinely displeases some of my readers, but it is just unquestionably true. Of course I understand the impulse to characterise Corona as pathological, malevolent and conspiratorially arranged, and I would never deny that there have been bad actors at work throughout all that we have endured. None of this would have been possible, though, without legions of true believers inside our native institutions furthering this madness in autonomous good faith, in accordance with an array of very mundane incentives.
Equally obvious, is that a lot of highly placed, powerful people believe a lot of crazy stuff, and they vigorously support a whole array of counterproductive, ridiculous policies and programs. This did not start suddenly with Corona. As the West has entered a period of protracted decline, their numbers and the depth of their folly have only grown. There are many specific reasons for this, but driving the decline more than anything else is an intellectual and cultural disease of affluence, expressed in the overproduction of elites, the increasing emphasis on conscientiousness at the expense of ability and intelligence, and the diffusion of political power downwards, as a means of cementing consensus among disparate corporate, academic and government factions.
Before 2020, these people did and said all kinds of ridiculous things, but the consequences of their absurdity either unfolded too gradually to attract all that much attention, or they were confined to specific sub-populations and not felt all that widely. Corona was simply that moment, when the wages of the horrendous judgement of the people who govern us hit everyone all at once.
Even in optimal conditions humans aren’t rational creatures. With enormous effort, we can develop views and theories of the world that are semi-reliable. We can work within paradigms of medium resolution that have some probability of being approximately right. As the general ability of our establishment intelligentsia declines, the reigning theories in every field become more removed from the world, less likely to be useful, and subject to insane arbitrary swings.
People on the establishment side of the debate mainly argue that Corona is an unprecedented and unusual virus, and that the scientific response has been totally reasonable and justified. People on our side of the discussion tend to see Corona as nothing special, but the scientific and political response as something new and unusual. I suggest that it helps to see the virus, despite its laboratory origins, as a biological threat of the kind we’ve lived with for millennia; and that it likewise helps to see our unbalanced reaction to this virus as an expression of our own declining society and institutions. That’s a big reason why fixing this has proven to be so hard.
The problems we have go a lot deeper than the World Economic Forum and Bill Gates. In many ways, those guys are just the surface manifestations of this much deeper rot. I know a lot of you conceive of what happened in 2020 as a kind of mass hysteria or hypnosis, or compare our current policies to National Socialism in the 1930s. I think there can be polemical value in both points, but I also think the most important thing, is to recognise that containment is a characteristic policy not of Nazi Germany, but of western liberal democracies. These regimes have enthusiastically embraced lockdowns, compulsory vaccination, and widespread restrictions. For two years, our governments pursued containment as their highest and most central political goal; it became a kind of ideological system unto itself, and persists as one. These are western, liberal, democratic policies by definition, and they show that something is terribly wrong with our political order.
I think it is important to come to terms with these simple facts, because these dangerous crazy lunatics are still running everything. The pandemicists have come out of the past two years more entrenched and powerful than ever before. Our public health bureaucracies have learned what they can do now, and with what little pretence. SARS-2 research will receive tidal waves of funding for decades to come; even people who study elephants or soil fungi will now find incentives to make their work at least a little bit about Corona. The SARS-related virus research will also continue, there will be more lab leaks, and the vaccinators will show up every fall with their mRNA snake oil. It would be better, if all of this nonsense were directed, or the result of some unusual passing madness. It’s not; it is the way things are. This is the nature of the political and social institutions that govern us.
Source: eugyppius: a plague journal
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