Thread by @normative

Because I like exterminating any residual shreds of faith in humanity, I looked through the overwhelmingly hostile comments on a YouTube video by a doctor debunking some covid misinformation tonight. I noticed an interesting parallel to some “election theft” disinfo.

Here’s what I note in both cases: The cranks typically have the superficial trappings of real science. Links to journal articles on the one hand, or on the other, impressively hackery looking hex dumps & spreadsheets full of IP addresses. “See, I’m giving you the evidence…”

Now in both cases, this evidence is absolutely useless to the target audience. They have neither the training nor the context to evaluate the quality or relevance of technical articles in medical journals—or even to understand what the article is claiming in many cases.

Ditto on the “election fraud” side: The target audience has no idea what a real packet capture looks like, or whether it makes any sense that someone would have the kind of information claimed in that spreadsheet full of numbers.

They are, however, being flattered by the INVITATION to assess the evidence for themselves—do your own research, make up your own mind!

So what do the responses from acutal experts look like? Well, generally pretty dismissive—understandably so—because they can tell the evidence is nonsense, and typically aren’t super interested spending hours going into granular detail about why…

…or throwing around citations to technical material they know full well a lay audience isn’t remotely equipped to understand. (The people who ARE equipped to understand the technical material don’t need a pop debunking.)

So they’ll do a quickie explainer of why some particular claim is wrong in lay terms, but they’re typically not going to bother with a bunch of citations that might be relevant to a peer specialist. To a lot of the audience, this comes across as “arrogant.”

The crank is flattering me with a display of technical jargon and a mountain of citations to “evidence.” I’m not equipped to evaluate that “evidence,” but I can nod along and say “oh yes, I see,” and feel like I’ve been treated as a peer.

The actual experts understands that this would be a performative and pointless. So past a fairly superficial point they go with some version of “99% of us who spent years studying this are on the same page, and you sort of have to trust us.” Which can feel patronizing.

What the crank is doing is ultimately a lot more condescending—the equivalent of giving a child a fake cell phone so they can “make calls” just like mom & dad. They’re pretending not to ultimately rely on trust, and so they get trust.

The actual expert is honest about this part of it: I can’t take you through med school or a CS degree in a YouTube video. I could give you some papers, but even if you’re extremely smart, you wouldn’t understand them without that training. And to the insecure, that feels bad.

It’s the byproduct of a culture that valorizes (at least nominally) the ideal of being an independent thinker who questions the received wisdom rather than just accepting things on authority. Which is healthy in lots of ways! And yet…

…the vast majority of human knowledge is beyond anyone’s capability to personally verify. Past a fairly superficial point, we have to take most things “on authority” in some sense. And the folks who trust the crank are too, of course!

What the crank is giving people is the *illusion* of not trusting an authority—unlike all those sheep who trust the *mainstream* authorities. A bit like the media elites who win large followings by telling you not to trust media elites.

The expert who’s treating you like an adult is the one who, at some point, is willing to say “I’m sorry, you don’t have the math” rather than pretending common sense conquers every domain of knowledge.

https://twitter.com/KurtRexCooper/status/1424960541743730689