Yesterday I spent several hours trying to debunk false beliefs about two different things that two different commenters raised, belief in alternative medicine and rejection of vaccine safety and efficacy data. Both are heavily grounded in false beliefs. I found and laid out the evidence needed to support my beliefs, and that's about the best one can do. To me it is very discouraging that so many people hold science and expertise in such deep distrust.
In my opinion, irrational distrust like that is part of an healthy authoritarian mindset. I'm not alone in that belief. Apparently, Joseph Stalin was also aware of the very useful anti-democratic power of irrational distrust of expertise and science generally. In a NYT opinion (not paywalled), former Russian journalist Masha Gessen raises this issue as it relates to oral arguments in a transgender-related lawsuit the US supreme court is considering:
The only moments of obvious moral searching came when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she was dismayed by the similarities between the case before the court and Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case in which the court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violated the Constitution. Back then, the plaintiffs argued that, if a white woman could marry a white man and a Black woman could not, then this constituted discrimination on the basis of race. Jackson noted that in that case, too, proponents of the discriminatory law cited what they considered scientific evidence of the harm of interracial marriage.
Tennessee also claims that science is on its side, and that is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this case. Dozens of mainstream medical societies, including the leading associations of pediatricians, filed amici briefs arguing against S.B.1. Apparently trying to find their footing, conservative justices asked about new regulations in the United Kingdom and Sweden. But those regulations were written by medical — not legislative — authorities, and they come nowhere near a total ban.
Every time they posed questions about specific treatments, the justices seemed to get lost in the medical weeds. Which is forgivable: They are justices, not doctors. And they probably shouldn’t be trying to make a ruling based on medical evidence.
The ease with which legislators overrule doctors, and the relatively small amount of attention this overreach received during the Supreme Court hearing, are symptoms of our times. Just in the last few years, more than half the states have passed legislation that limits access to gender-affirming care. Many of the laws are at least as restrictive as S.B.1 — despite the medical profession’s opposition to total bans.
Rejection of genuine expertise is both a precondition and a function of autocracy. Joseph Stalin’s regime outlawed genetics as “pseudoscience,” while he himself was declared an expert in all fields, from linguistics to biology. [Perplexity says that is basically true -- does it sound familiar?]
Contempt for expertise is not the only autocratic force at work in the case of S.B.1 and in similar laws. Another is the government’s intrusion into private lives — in this case, the shameless assumption that legislators can make decisions that rightfully belong with families and their physicians. The Federal District Court cited this issue as one of its reasons for overturning S.B.1. Parents have a “fundamental right to direct the medical care of their children,” the court wrote. That, however, is the part of the case the Supreme Court decided not even to consider. [In it's blatant, unprincipled radical right partisanship the Republican supreme court punted on the hard "due process" part, making it easier to rationalize upholding the state ban]
A third force is the growing intolerance of minorities and, in particular, people who dare to challenge tradition. It’s a cliché to point out that the totalitarian governments of the 20th century jailed and killed freethinkers and outliers of every kind. But it’s a cliché that seems to need repeating, since contemporary autocrats do the same thing — and many of them start by targeting L.G.B.T.Q. people.
Poor experts and scientists. Lot of people think most of them are self-serving liars or crackpots. Unfortunately some of them really are self-serving liars or crackpots. The person whose anti-COVID vaccine crackpottery I debunked yesterday is a medical doctor who spouts shockingly horrendous lies about COVID vaccines killing tens of thousands in the UK. When I finally tracked down the real data, the number of deaths associated with millions of vaccinations in the UK wasn't tens of thousands or even tens of hundreds. It was 5, single digit territory.
Political sludge: Sigh. Our society is poisoned by an endless deluge of dark free speech oozing out of toxic social media like X, mainstream media like Faux News, podcasts by non-professional blowhards pretending but not knowing what they are talking about and dozens or hundreds of online politics sites pretending but usually knowing exactly what they are doing by claiming false information is truth.
In the wastewater treatment industry, they call partially treated wastewater sludge. It need to be further treated to clean it up, which is the norm.
Sludge like that is where I got my samples for
studying bacterial sex in the sewer for my MS degree
I suppose in politics, one can refer to dark free speech as political sludge. At least for wastewater treatment there are ways to deal with it.
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But in politics, there is no way to deal with political sludge. It is legal and untouchable by the government. Political sludge is like a forever chemical. It accumulates in the environment and doesn't go away very fast. For better or worse, federal courts defend political sludge at least as much as honest speech, always calling it free speech. Courts never once mention that some political dishonest speech can be harmful and can even kill some people, e.g., when they follow the advice of anti-vaccine crackpots.
