Playing a skeptical maverick
I didn’t know until today that Bret Weinstein is an anti-vaxxer. When worlds collide, yeah? He’s one of those Intellectual Dark Web people, which surely ought to be enough to keep anyone busy, but no, he finds the time to tell people not to get vaccinated against Covid too.
Bret Weinstein is, simply, a right-wing media grifter in the vein of conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro and Canadian professor of psychology Dr. Jordan Peterson. Part of the “intellectual dark web,” (a term his brother Eric coined), Weinstein has risen in prominence over the last year as other members of the IDW have lost relevance.
Weinstein made his reactionary right wing guru bones after he left his evolutionary biologist teaching gig at Evergreen State College in Washington State.
Because of political correctness. (I’ve never really decided what I thought about that whole fuss. That’s ok, I don’t have to have an opinion on every single thing.)
After a confrontation with protestors, Weinstein and Heather Heying, a fellow biology professor and Weinstein’s wife, sued the college.
The couple resigned, and Weinstein began his career playing a skeptical maverick who was cast out by political correctness. His DarkHorse podcast is wildly popular, reaching Number 51 on the Podcast Insights chart. Weinstein, like a lot of IDW personalities, positions himself as a centrist intellectual just searching for answers, but it’s a thin veneer that is destroyed by even a cursory listen or look at his Twitter feed.
His job is [to] gussy up white nationalism and other alt-right talking points to make them palatable for the mainstream. You can see that in his thoughts on #BlackLivesMatter or the use of non-gendered pronouns.
I don’t think Special Pronouns are comparable to BLM though.
Weinstein is also a fervent believer in ivermectin (that horse dewormer I mentioned above) as a cure for COVID, which is one of the reason he keeps having social media posts taken down for spreading misinformation.
Has he considered the injecting bleach cure?
Posts are sharing the false statement that the spike protein in COVID-19 vaccines is cytotoxic, suggesting that it kills or damages cells. There is no evidence to support this.
…
One post (here) links to a YouTube video (here) with the caption: “Spike protein is very dangerous, it’s cytotoxic (Robert Malone, Steve Kirsch, Bret Weinstein).”
The 15-minute video shows three individuals discussing the COVID-19 vaccine and the spike protein is repeatedly described as “very dangerous” and “cytotoxic.”
What kind of damn fool puts out videos telling people a vaccine is very dangerous during a pandemic? What the hell is wrong with people?
Horse dewormer is better than suggesting people injest cow pies and urine as a cure. Vishnu forbid you question it, the rather nasty Modi budding theocracy will toss you in the slammer.
Oh, is the Secret Underground Cabal of Infinite Smartness still operating? Insofar as it ever actually did anything other than have its members stand around being photographed in bushes (if it did, they kept it quiet).
That was always the problem with the Skepticism movement, wasn’t it? It attracted conspiracy theorists like nobody’s business. People were celebrated simply for being able to see through (some) untruths which – with hindsight – was a recipe for disaster we should all have seen coming.
I don’t wish to disassociate myself with that movement; I was there, front and centre, as insufferable as everyone else. These days I find that the lower-case s fits a lot more comfortably, though.
latsot,
The thing that became increasingly clear to me over the years was that the grander claims of the skeptical movement were — ironically — unsupported by good evidence. By grander claims, I mean the notion that “we’re not about debunking the paranormal, we’re about promoting logical and critical thinking and reliance on evidence.”
There’s nothing wrong with debunking the paranormal! Sure, it’s not curing cancer or helping the homeless or whatever, but it’s a socially useful niche for some people to fill, and for others to support. But of course, swatting down psychics and homeopaths and Bigfoot hunters doesn’t feel as intellectually satisfying as proclaiming yourself as someone who just plain thinks better than other people, so the temptation was understandable. I fell into it, too. But the more time I spent in those circles, and the more I saw of the stubborn cluelessness on various subjects of both the rank-and-file supporters and the “leadership,” the harder it became to maintain.
(Ironically, I guess I’m saying that skeptical organizations had a problem with “mission creep,” though certainly not in the way that DJ Grothe meant! Treating people decently should be part of every organization’s mission.)
As I have said many times, I cut all ties to Movement Skepticism™ specifically because of the misogyny issue, but now I don’t even think the movement did very well on the science front. For example skeptics tended to let climate change denialists (some of whom were even considered “thought leaders” of the movement) off the hook far too easily, and enter false balance territory whenever the issue came up, while congratulating themselves on how clever they were for not believing in homeopathy or Bigfoot.
The Movement also include some of the most staggering examples of the Dunning Kruger Effect ever seen. Even the smartest, best educated, most knowledgeable person who ever lived, is only personally familiar with <<1% of all the scientific knowledge that's available, and of that very tiny fraction <<1% is first-hand knowledge, And yet it's quite common to hear skeptics talk as if they had personally done all the science (or even derived all of science, mathematics, epistemology, logic etc. from first principles without ever taking anything on trust) when all they’re really doing is repeating back half digested, half understood layman’s explanations from books, blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos etc. We see this whenever skeptics tell others (guilty as charged!) to just “follow the facts where they lead”, “let the evidence speak for itself” etc. which makes is sound like “following the facts where they lead” were a straightforward matter rather than something that requires vast amounts of experience and accumulated pre-knowledge in its own right. The truth of the matter is that the evidence never speaks for itself. As I have previously written, I could probably provide a decent layman’s explanation of the evidence for things like evolution or climate change based on books I have read, but I wouldn’t personally be able to derive any useful information about past climates from tree-rings or ice-cores.
I remember reading an article (I wish I could remember by whom) about skeptics debunking pseudoscience with bad science of their own. The author made the point that while self-identified “pro science” types may be more likely to reach a (somewhat) accurate conclusion than others, it doesn’t mean that their methods for arriving at those conclusions are that different from those of their opponents. It’s just that rooting for “Team Science” confirms their particular tribal identity. As much as movement skeptics like to think of themselves as Spock and elevated above all that touchy-feely “value” stuff, it seems to me that true critical thinking is at least as much about attitude as it is about skills. Without the proper self-questioning attitude acquiring the tools of critical thinking only gives you more excuses for rejecting any conclusion you happen to dislike for ideological, tribalistic or purely self-serving reasons.
Also, it now seems to me that skeptics have developed a few myths of their own. E.g. we’ve all heard how the system of (pre and post publication) peer review ensures that only those ideas that can withstand the most merciless criticism and attempts at falsification survive in the long run. My current understanding from reading about the replication crisis etc. is that the peer-review process often fails and in most cases no replication is ever even attempted. We have also heard how scientists like nothing more than having their pet theories disproved because it means there’s something new to learn, “it gives them something to do” etc. I think Max Planck was probably closer to the truth when he said 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”.
Another commonly heard trope is the idea that freeze peach guarantees that the best supported ideas will rise to the top in the marketplace of ideas. The unstated – sometimes even stated – premise being that those who have science and logic on their side always enjoy a decisive advantage in the battle for public opinion. This never seemed right to me, even in my movement skeptic days. If critical thinking should have taught us anything at all, it’s that the strongest indicators of truth vs. falsehood – objectively speaking – rarely coincide with what seems most subjectively persuasive to laypeople. Playing by the rules of science is nothing if not limiting, while the purveyors of bullshit are free to say whatever will impress people. Without the necessary pre-knowledge and critical thinking skills all your average layperson can be expected to get out of the exchange is that one side comes across as far more assertive, aggressive and confident while the other side is forced to use conservative language (“seems to indicate” etc.), acknowledge uncertainty, and introduce caveats, conditions and qualifiers at every turn. No need to specify which side is the scientific one.
Bjarte,
That’s well said. It’s especially damning that skeptical “leaders” not only got things wrong — we all make mistakes, after all — but often did so for astonishingly non-skeptical reasons. Consider Penn Jillette admitting that he got climate change wrong in large part because Al Gore rubbed him the wrong way. Credit to Jillette for admitting that, but yikes.
Anyway, this part:
reminded me of this recent post by Will Wilkinson. He starts by talking about how Q Anon devotees end up adopting such bizarre views, and argues that we all rely a lot more on trusting other people than on doing independent research or examining all the evidence ourselves, and that’s just a practical reality.
Wilkinson:
He then goes on to reference the “rationalist community” (which I think has a lot of overlap with skepticism):
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Playing a skeptical […]
Yes to all the above (especially what I wrote ;)
Personally, I’ve always felt that skepticism is a process of self-correction and if more people learned to think critically, we’d all be better off. Where I differed from many in movement skepticism was in the means of delivery, rather than the cure. I wanted more campaigns for teaching skeptical thinking in schools, for example, and when the JREF asked for opinions on whether it should scrap the million dollar prize, I was in favour of it; the JREF was supposed to be an educational foundation, after all, and I thought the money would be better spent promoting skeptical education. IIRC, they did actually do that…. but then changed their minds and brought the prize back again.
Many in the movement fell into the trap described by Bjarte and Screechy of believing that their skepticism made them better equipped to pass judgement on important issues than non-skeptics; that they were smarter and just plain better all round. And since they were smarter and better, their ethics and principles must be better, right?
This is where we parted company ideologically speaking, although I confess without caveat or shame that I was guilty of it too. It’s contagious! And it sneaks up on you!
I think Screechy is right about mission creep. I wish we’d stuck to educating people about critical thinking. That’s one hell of a worthy goal and it ought to have been enough.
Screechy’s mention of Jillette reminded me of a video I’ve mentioned here before of his partner, Teller. He’s speaking to a group of magicians about ways to fool people and demonstrating by making coins appear. He makes dozens of the damn things appear, with the absolute mastery you’d expect, and all the time he’s explaining the psychology rather than the mechanics. For example, he shows that he has lots of ways to do the trick, but people are expecting him to use the same one every time. So if someone has guessed how the trick is done, he can do it in a very obviously different way the next time, making the person assume she was wrong about how it’s done.
The video is great and the message reminds me of why I wanted to join up with other skeptics in the first place. We should have stuck to teaching people to think about how they can be fooled and how to correct for it, but also about how to enjoy working out how we’re being fooled.
There’s important work to be done righting a list of wrongs that isn’t noticeably getting any shorter. But it’s not up to skeptics to do that, it’s up to us to teach the next generation of experts how to do it.
Screechy Monkey #5
That’s very interesting, thank you! I’m a long-time advocate of the “go with the scientific consensus” approach myself, not because it’s infallible (duh!), but because I think every other approach is worse. Indeed another common “skeptical myth” might be the idea that people believe crazy shit because they are too trusty, or naive, or gullible, and that everyone just needs to “think for themselves”. There is some of that going on of course, but at least as often it seems to me that people hold crazy beliefs precisely because they trust their own thinking too much and vastly overrate the depth of their own understanding (practically the definition of the Dunning Kruger Effect).
An added complication arises when you factor in the logic of the post-truth era, i.e. how much of the popular support for things like QAnon is based on sincere belief, and to what extent are people willing to simply go along with it as long as it serves their cause and don’t care if it’s technically “true” or not? As people are quick to point out, it’s not as if we used to live in the “truth era”. There is almost certainly some merit to the idea that the internet, the decline of journalism, the weakening of traditional gatekeepers etc. has made it harder to distinguish good information from bad, but even that is not the defining feature of the post truth phenomenon as I see it. What really makes it a post-truth era is not so much the prevalence of ignorance, scientific illiteracy, popular delusions, or even outright lies, as an indifference to facts (“It may not be technically ‘true’, but I don’t care. I’m going to go with it anyway”). Much of this indifference in turn comes down to the idea that “everyone is always lying anyway, so I might as well go with the lies that favor my own tribe”. A pretty consistently recurring theme among scholars who have studied the post truth phenomenon and the (strongly correlated) rise of the new authoritarianism is that modern disinformation campaigns are not really meant to make you believe anything at all, but to make you doubt everything, and one of the reasons it works so well is that it’s not entirely wrong*: There really is a lot of dishonest and biased reporting going on in the mainstream media, and even when the facts themselves are technically accurate, they are often spun in misleading and disingenuous ways to make them seem to have implications that don’t really follow. And as the recent SBM fiasco has illustrated once again, even the supposed experts on distinguishing science from ideology, facts from opinions, truth from delusion, may not be that much more trustworthy than anyone else when it comes to their own sacred cows.
*Just like it’s not entirely wrong that Western democracy in its present form is a bit of a sham. E.g. even Yascha Mounk admits that the policies that are enacted often have a lot more to do with what lobbyists and wealthy donors want than the “will of the people”. Timothy Snyder has argued that Russian efforts to undermine the American’s trust in their own government were successful at least in part because America was already much more like a Russian-style oligarchy than most like to admit.
latsot #7
I am all for teaching critical thinking if it’s done right, but once again, we have to worry about who’s going to write the curriculum and who’s going to do the actual teaching (the “mission creep” problem again). I have read horror-stories of “critical thinking” classes that were hijacked by climate change deniers, and of course the JREF, including Randi himself, didn’t have the best track record on that particular issue. I would place a lot less emphasis than most movement skeptics on things like “fallacy naming” (which, more often than not in my view, is just a substitute for any real analysis) and a lot more on the things having to do with the “psychology of belief”, including heuristics and biases, cognitive dissonance and rationalization, motivated reasoning and wishful thinking, the fallibility of perception and memory, cognitive illusions, conformity and groupthink, the human tendency to find meaningful patterns and connections in random chaos etc.
I would also put more emphasis on things like “meta-cognition” and getting the students to ask themselves, not only “what do I think?” but “what are my reasons for thinking as I do?” and even “why do those kinds of reasons seem so convincing to me? E.g. why does a moving personal anecdote (an uncontrolled experiment with a sample of 1) seem so convincing, and why is it so easy to dismiss statistics? And am I right to think that way? Is the former really more reliable than the latter? What does the best available research suggest?” etc. etc.
A basic understanding of epistemology and philosophical thought in general would be desirable as well. When I was a student, universities still required us to take an introductory class in philosophy. Most of my fellow students agreed that this was a complete waste of time, but disagreed, and I still do. Of all the things I have read in my life, quite possibly the single most influential on my thinking has been the following quote from Plato’s Gorgias (my emphasis), and I’m not at all a Platoist:
Anyway, the other students had their way, and today it is possible to go all the way from freshman to PhD without having been exposed to any philosophy what so ever.
Bjarte,
I agree entirely, except to add that by “teaching”, I didn’t mean formal education alone. We non-teachers and non-curriculum-setters have a role to play, too. “Skepticism” is definitely the wrong word, though. I’m reminded of Feynman’s “The pleasure of finding things out”
We’ve certainly seen plenty of that in the reporting and framing of stories about males competing on girls’ and women’s sports teams. Any story that has framed it solely as a “trans rights” issue, is invariably, by necessity, being reported dishonestly. Honest reporting gives the game away.