Thread by @Jabaluck

Academics need to engage with people spreading dangerous misinformation, especially under the guise of technical jargon.

If you do not respond, no one will and the world will be less informed.

The kind of engagement @jhausdorfer wants is *not possible* on the needed scale.

https://twitter.com/jhaushofer/status/1434095995403575298

The idea that we should patiently educate the aggressively ignorant sounds laudable, but it practically means disengagement. How many who liked the above post consistently attempt to do this? They might try once, but they'll give up because it's too time-consuming.

Here is the thread:

https://twitter.com/federicolois/status/1433123776208777227

Here is my response:

https://twitter.com/Jabaluck/status/1433791771289571365

Note that the original post received a fair amount of attention. This is not a case where signal-boosting is a concern.

I agree completely with @jhausdorfer that you should give people the benefit of the doubt (and generally think @jhausdorfer is great). There is a skeptical view commonplace on Twitter and elsewhere that no one can ever be convinced of anything.

The obviously correct observation that many beliefs are not formed rationally has been transformed into the wildly incorrect view that people are not swayed by careful, rational discussion.

I know from vast experience that many people are willing to revise their views if you patiently explain to them what they got wrong. And even if they never say, "I was wrong", they will often moderate their tone in the future and internalize your points.

But there are types of people for whom the goal is surely not persuasion but containment. Some red flags:
a) Confident claims combined with elementary errors
b) Use of rhetorical techniques like the Gish gallop (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gall…)
c) Condescension and insults on their part

In these cases, the goal is to convince onlookers not to listen to the person in question. One approach is to patiently respond to every claim, spending the next several weeks of your life educating them about statistics so onlookers marvel at your patience and tenacity.

This appears to be what Johannes is calling for. I may have spent as much time talking to strangers on Twitter about econometrics as any person in history. But this is time-consuming and I don't recommend engaging with the aggressively ignorant unless you get consumption value.

An alternative is to put up a sign-post. Say to bystanders: DANGER, do not trust this person. I don't think it's wrong to call my response "ridicule” in the sense of trying to make the person look ridiculous, but “ridicule” has additional connotations.

I was not simply insulting the person -- I was explaining to on-lookers exactly what was going on, exactly why it might appear as a technical discussion when it was in fact nothing of the sort.

If you insult and do nothing else, you achieve nothing. You must establish credibility with onlookers and try to explain why the person is incorrect. But if the person replies, don't make it look like "he said / she said". Leave a sign that says, “DANGER” to keep others informed.

You might say, "Of course this won't influence anyone, everyone has already picked sides, etc..." I would bet money that an experiment would show a treatment effect where bystanders reading my response updated negatively their beliefs about the original poster.

And while Johannes worries this will turn people away from the field, I think it will attract just as many. People want to informed, they want to be educated, and it is invigorating to see people who care about the truth stand up for themselves.

It is also acceptable to be funny at the expense of people who deserve it. You just have to be careful that someone really deserves it. In this case, engaging in dangerous misrepresentation, they did. The humor served a social purpose, to lower their status.

If you see an informed person arguing with someone like this, don’t just watch. Press like or retweet or comment. Make the warning sign bigger. You have credentials and information that you can use to influence people.

Fight back against the aggressively ignorant. Don't let them dominate the conversation. Lower their status in the eyes of on-lookers and reduce their influence. If you ignore them, their ideas will spread. Do your part to contain dangerous viruses, whether physical or memetic.

(@jhaushofer of course, I don't know why I am so bad at tagging people on Twitter)