3 ms·

I appreciate your input. I think that listening to the experts who aren't politically motivated is one of my main goals, but it is very difficult (for me at lea

I appreciate your input. I think that listening to the experts who aren't politically motivated is one of my main goals, but it is very difficult (for me at least) to figure out who those people are. I understand that government and private industry are not two clearly distinguishable Lego bricks, I understand that regulators need some industry people to know what they're regulating even at the risk of some revolving-door stuff, and I understand that some profit motive is necessary to get smart people to work on something in large numbers. But the waters seem very muddy (and there seem to be a lot of axes to grind all around) as to who is acting in good faith and who is seeking to push some agenda or to guard some rice bowel even among people with excellent credentials. Historically I've kind of leaned on credentials in deciding who to listen to on topics outside my field (which may or may not have been a good idea), but on this one there seem to be people with multiple advanced degrees from prestigious universities ranging from "being in charge of the CDC" to "banned from Twitter for promoting vaccine hesitancy". How do you personally go about figuring out what the closest thing to a dispassionate group of experts is? I somehow doubt that either A) Fauci is a crook putting a microchip in my arm or B) all the signatures on the Barrington Declaration are all from nutjobs: I imagine there is some balanced debate in the middle but I'm not sure how to find it.

kstenerud 5y ago
For me personally, only studying human psychology has proven to be a reliable barometer of peoples motivations. Being an expert doesn't insulate someone from the vagrancies of the human psyche (despite much effort to do so!), so you must study the ways in which the human psyche errs. Very few people are actually intentionally attempting to mislead. More often than not they are deluded themselves. But this is not helped by the other human tendency to demonize wrongdoers and assume the worst of motives. Fauci is an interesting case because he's been in charge of a largely bureaucratic and invisible organization for so long, and was unprepared for being thrust into the spotlight. He wants to do good, but it's getting harder and harder to do that because every mistake he makes is amplified and used against him in the public sphere, and he's not used to reputation management like someone in a more public-facing organization would be (nor do I think he's up to the task - he's too nerdy and will probably be replaced eventually). The waters are muddy because the topic has been politicized. The ebola vaccine was not controversial in the Americans eyes, but it WAS controversial in some African countries, where conspiracy theories ran rampant and hampered the vaccination drive (the biggest one being that it was an American plot to sterilize African women and render them barren). Once counter-campaigns start, it gets progressively harder and harder to push a policy, because everyone will say "there's no smoke without a fire somewhere". At the end of the day, you only have psychology to use as a heuristic, because the people lying and the people telling the truth are almost ALL convinced that they're honest and truthful. The exceptions are the propagandists who actively want to damage another society to influence their politics, gain an objective, or diminish their world reputation - or local propagandists who cynically want to bring in a new policy or enforce an existing one (example: Reefer Madness or the tobacco lobby). And these people work with intention, so they're generally pretty good at covering themselves against blowback. But they usually work via the mainstream media, so you can often (but not always) see the telltale signs of a hard shift in reporting. Iraqi WMDs would be a good example since it was so clumsily done. Last point: The truth is rarely in the middle. The middle is just what lazy people go for because then they don't have to think. We humans like quick and easy rules that yield simple answers, but the world just doesn't work that way.
- benreesman 5y ago
  I think you make a lot of good points, and when I say the “middle” I should be more clear that I don’t mean like the arithmetic mean or something. I meant to say: “at neither of these rather extreme places”. In a weirdly meta way I think vaccination itself is a useful metaphor: personally the pro-vaccination/anti-vaxx dichotomy is itself extreme to me. Vaccination is some combination of pharmaceutical and medical procedure. It’s almost certainly the right thing at some times for some people, and almost certainly the wrong thing for other people at other times. It’s not a 1-bit problem (there are few 1-bit problems). But it seems to be something that we can’t collectively approach with as much nuance as e.g. prescription medications, which especially recently is not a decision-making process known for its demonstrable subtlety. I personally get skittish around all-or-nothing anything.

kstenerud 5y ago

For me personally, only studying human psychology has proven to be a reliable barometer of peoples motivations. Being an expert doesn't insulate someone from the vagrancies of the human psyche (despite much effort to do so!), so you must study the ways in which the human psyche errs. Very few people are actually intentionally attempting to mislead. More often than not they are deluded themselves. But this is not helped by the other human tendency to demonize wrongdoers and assume the worst of motives. Fauci is an interesting case because he's been in charge of a largely bureaucratic and invisible organization for so long, and was unprepared for being thrust into the spotlight. He wants to do good, but it's getting harder and harder to do that because every mistake he makes is amplified and used against him in the public sphere, and he's not used to reputation management like someone in a more public-facing organization would be (nor do I think he's up to the task - he's too nerdy and will probably be replaced eventually). The waters are muddy because the topic has been politicized. The ebola vaccine was not controversial in the Americans eyes, but it WAS controversial in some African countries, where conspiracy theories ran rampant and hampered the vaccination drive (the biggest one being that it was an American plot to sterilize African women and render them barren). Once counter-campaigns start, it gets progressively harder and harder to push a policy, because everyone will say "there's no smoke without a fire somewhere". At the end of the day, you only have psychology to use as a heuristic, because the people lying and the people telling the truth are almost ALL convinced that they're honest and truthful. The exceptions are the propagandists who actively want to damage another society to influence their politics, gain an objective, or diminish their world reputation - or local propagandists who cynically want to bring in a new policy or enforce an existing one (example: Reefer Madness or the tobacco lobby). And these people work with intention, so they're generally pretty good at covering themselves against blowback. But they usually work via the mainstream media, so you can often (but not always) see the telltale signs of a hard shift in reporting. Iraqi WMDs would be a good example since it was so clumsily done. Last point: The truth is rarely in the middle. The middle is just what lazy people go for because then they don't have to think. We humans like quick and easy rules that yield simple answers, but the world just doesn't work that way.

benreesman 5y ago
I think you make a lot of good points, and when I say the “middle” I should be more clear that I don’t mean like the arithmetic mean or something. I meant to say: “at neither of these rather extreme places”. In a weirdly meta way I think vaccination itself is a useful metaphor: personally the pro-vaccination/anti-vaxx dichotomy is itself extreme to me. Vaccination is some combination of pharmaceutical and medical procedure. It’s almost certainly the right thing at some times for some people, and almost certainly the wrong thing for other people at other times. It’s not a 1-bit problem (there are few 1-bit problems). But it seems to be something that we can’t collectively approach with as much nuance as e.g. prescription medications, which especially recently is not a decision-making process known for its demonstrable subtlety. I personally get skittish around all-or-nothing anything.