Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

For those interested in our epistemic convulsions, @jon_rauch has written quite a bit about this; here's the essay on which his book is based: nationalaffairs.com/publications/d…. He's more optimistic than I am. He thinks our institutions are holding up reasonably well against the onslaught,

and will ultimately prevail; I would argue that no, they can't be said to be holding up well at all. If anyone's interested, I'll go through the institutions he names, one by one, and explain why I think so; I don't see that any of our institutions really have the alacrity--

--or the sense of urgency--to respond to the attack on what he calls the constitution of knowledge. Like Rauch, they deep down believe that they've been around forever and they'll be around forever, so they don't have to treat this as an emergency.

Trolling, as he puts it, is only half the equation in considering the collapse of confidence in institutions; the other half is the filtering process that puts people in those institutions in the first place--

and results in the institutions being staffed by people who are quite unlike the rest of the public, and thus loathed by a significant number from the outset. If you add what he calls trolling to the mix, then add a series of spectacular and flamboyant institutional screwups,

you wind up with what we used to think of as something that only happened in very sad, pitiable countries somewhere very far away: large numbers of Americans dying of a now-preventable disease because the trolls have persuaded them that vaccines represent a dangerous plot.