Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should

As states and cities waffle on pandemic restrictions, public health has become individuals’ responsibility.

It would feel so good to give up. To hug our friends, to visit our grandparents. To eat one meal, just one, at a restaurant table instead of on the couch, maybe even without the kids in tow. Even a mundane day of running errands—shopping, getting a haircut, going to the gym—would be glorious.

There’s no reward for abstaining from these things—just, hopefully, the absence of consequences. And lately, fewer rules are left to stop anyone, even as coronavirus case numbers in the United States surge. That means it’s on each of us to stop ourselves from doing unnecessary things that we know will put others at risk, even if those things are technically allowed. The fight to contain the coronavirus is far from over; it’s just entering a new phase in which individual choice matters more than ever.

The U.S. is in the swing of “reopening,” a word that can mean any number of things depending on where you live. Many states have allowed retail stores, restaurants, gyms, and salons to reopen for in-person service (many at reduced capacity), or are considering allowing them to do so in the near future. In some places, movie theaters and pools reopened to the public too.

In the pandemic’s early days in the U.S., health experts proclaimed the importance of social distancing, but individuals were largely on their own in figuring out how to apply that advice to their daily life. Then lawmakers began taking responsibility for shaping Americans’ behavior. The orders that many state and local governments started issuing in March and April—to just stay home, as much as you possibly could—may have been burdensome to follow, but at least they were simple.

Now knowing what’s allowed in your area requires looking up your state’s policies, and also your city’s or county’s policies. For example, Texas currently prohibits outdoor gatherings of more than 100 people, whereas the city of Austin has banned socializing in groups of more than 10 (with the exception of those who share a home). And because many places have divided their reopening plans into phases, those policies will shift over time. Some policies have dangerous wiggle room—for instance, Eater has reported that social-distancing measures are “recommended but not enforced” for dine-in service at restaurants in both South Carolina and South Dakota. Other states, such as Tennessee and Wisconsin, “strongly encourage” patrons to wear masks in businesses, but don’t require it.

Although what we can do has changed rapidly, what we should do hasn’t changed much. Public-health experts had warned that states were likely reopening too soon for safety. When my colleague Joe Pinsker asked experts in May what they deemed safe to do as economies reopen, they stressed the risks of indoor gatherings of any kind; meanwhile, some states had already allowed retail stores and restaurants to reopen at limited capacity. Now some of the states that are hardest hit, such as Arizona and Texas, are states that lifted restrictions early. Both Arizona and Texas, along with other states, have now paused or rolled back aspects of their reopening plans as a result of the new surge in cases.

Throughout the pandemic, many political leaders in the U.S. have made decisions and delivered messages that run contrary to what public-health experts say needs to be done to stop the virus. “This is an extraordinary failure of leadership in the United States,” Nancy Koehn, a historian at the Harvard Business School who studies crisis leadership, told me. “At the national level, there’s been a complete abdication by the government to help people make choices and adopt behaviors.”

Some state and local governments, along with their public-health officials, have shouldered the responsibility themselves. Koehn cited New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings as the kind of clear explanation, “brutal honesty,” and “credible hope” that leaders should provide in a crisis such as this. But in other places, residents aren’t getting reliable guidance, and that can have deadly results. Koehn sees the rise of COVID-19 cases in the Sun Belt as “all about a lack of leadership or inconsistent leadership.” Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, for example, banned local authorities from enacting rules requiring masks, only to later walk the ban back. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott recently said that his ban on mask ordinances does allow local governments to mandate that businesses require their patrons and employees to wear masks, a loophole that wasn’t apparent at first.

Reopening is shifting the responsibility for public safety from leaders and policy makers back onto individuals. Unlike in February, when individuals and governments alike were scrambling to figure out how to combat the pandemic, we now know what to do to limit the spread of the virus. Some governments are simply choosing not to do it. In a recent Washington Post interview, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, acknowledged the important role that citizens have to play under these circumstances. “What we do as individuals will have an impact on the success or not of getting this outbreak under control,” he said. In other words: Right now, every American has a duty to not take foolish risks.

Of course, people have little choice but to take some risks. Workers whose bosses require them to come in to work will come in. They may need to return their kids to day care to do so. People need to go to the doctor; they need to buy food. Everything else becomes a complex decision tree in which a person has to weigh the benefits of an activity, the state of the outbreak in her area, local regulations, and her own risk factors against—let’s be honest—what her peers think is okay, and what she really, really wants to do.

The longer businesses are open, and the more people see their loved ones partaking in activities that were forbidden a couple of months ago, the more normalized those things will become—even if public-health experts and the media emphasize the risks; even if people know, cognitively, that the risks of transmission haven’t changed much. Research has shown that our families and peers influence many of our health decisions; there’s no reason to think that this fundamental human tendency will change during a pandemic.

Most of the time, relying on information from authority figures and our peers is a pretty good way to make decisions. “It’s probably sensible most of the time to believe if the government says now is the time to open up, it might be safe,” says Robert H. Frank, the author of Under the Influence, a book about peer pressure, and a management professor at Cornell University. And peer pressure, he says, isn’t always a bad thing. Taking cues from those around you has cognitive advantages. “It’s a complicated world out there,” he told me. “Each one of us knows only a tiny fraction of what would be good to know. You don’t know much; I don’t know much. But together, people actually know quite a bit about the world.”

In the case of the pandemic, though, there’s a significant concern that people will emulate the risks they see their friends taking—risks that would be far harder to take if lawmakers kept restrictions in place. Koehn quoted David Foster Wallace’s definition of leadership to me: “A real leader is somebody who … can get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.” But now, when good leadership is absent, we have to try to do the better, harder things anyway.

Saying no to the ones you love is hard. No, let’s not hang out inside your house. No, I won’t see you at church this week. No, I won’t come to your wedding. No, we’re not having the family reunion this year. It’s harder when there isn’t a policy to blame, when there’s nothing legally stopping you. When other people are doing it, and look how happy they seem! It hurts to see smiling faces inside a restaurant as you walk by alone, breathing in your own hot breath under your mask.

It is probably too much to ask that everyone say no to everything indefinitely. A vaccine is likely months—at least—away. Activities that carry small (but not zero) risk, such as going on walks with friends, at a safe distance, will be important for people’s mental health and sense of social connection as the crisis drags on. But it’s vital that even as our states and cities reopen, we continue to use great care and consideration for others in deciding where to go, whom to see, and how close to get.

Frank thinks that if we bear the power of peer pressure in mind, it’ll help us resist that influence. “Know that you’re going to feel conflict when you confront that set of mixed pressures,” he said. “If it’s a conflict between what the epidemiologists are telling you to do and what your friends are doing, the cost of getting [the disease] is high enough that you ought to summon your courage and stick with what the epidemiologists are telling you to do.”

These are difficult times to live in. It isn’t fair that so many Americans have to navigate this crisis without clear leadership, with no end in sight. Knowing that life and death hang in the balance of seemingly mundane choices is a heavy weight to bear. It would be easy to give up. It would feel so good to give up. There is no reward for not giving up.

Don’t give up.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/06/reopening-makes-citizens-responsible-public-health/613666/

Moral Utilitarianism and Coronavirus Treatments

It is clear by now that the president's failed response to the pandemic has caused a painfully high human and economic toll. One might even call it a catastrophe. The longer it takes to develop and distribute an effective vaccine or drug, the greater the toll will be.

It usually takes 10-15 years to develop a new vaccine. New drugs tend to take 6-8 years to develop. One exception is the annual flu vaccine, which has to be developed for new strains each year. Producing the vaccine on that short timescale is greatly accelerated by decades of past experience with flu vaccines and the manufacturing infrastructure and methods that have been developed and built up over time. Despite some claims that a coronavirus vaccine will come sooner, it is reasonable to think that despite accelerated research and development efforts, it will take at least another year or two before an effective vaccine is found and begun to be produced in large quantities.

Could the process be sped up?

It is probably possible to significantly reduce the time needed to develop a coronavirus vaccine or drug if ethical concerns are addressable. Specifically, if people are allowed to volunteer to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, the process could be greatly accelerated, shaving months or even years off the process. At present it is unethical and illegal to allow people to be infected with such a deadly serious virus.

But from a utilitarian moral point of view, it is arguably immoral to not allow people to volunteer to be infected to test a vaccine or new drug candidate. Not only would a lot of time be saved, the number of people involved in clinical trials could probably be reduced by 10-fold or maybe more. Some of those people would die, but more people would die in the time it would take to develop a treatment under normal clinical ethical constraints. If that reasoning is correct, and I believe it is, the great human and economic toll could be reduced to the point that the anticipated deaths from clinical development would be morally justified.

A clinical trial that includes volunteers of 18 to about 50 years old could be set up. To minimize volunteer deaths the trial would require people who do not have any of the known or possible conditions that are correlated with increased SARS-CoV-2 deaths or uncertainty, e.g., pregnancy, obesity, lung conditions, high blood pressure or age above 50. Also, those people would be monitored and given the current standard of care when they become sick. The vaccine or drug would have to perform better than existing treatments to demonstrate a tangible clinical benefit.

A group of effective altruists (moral utilitarians) called One Day Sooner, points out that such human challenge trials have been used in the past to test vaccines. A 2016 WHO guidance document points out that in such challenge trials, humans were intentionally challenged or infected with an infectious disease organism, with or without vaccination. The challenge organism may be close to wild-type and pathogenic, adapted and/or attenuated from wild-type with less or no pathogenicity, or genetically modified in some manner. Some of the moral implications are discussed here.

The folks at One Day Sooner have recruited 30,108 volunteers from 140 countries who are willing to be infected with SARS-CoV-2.

Questions: Given the seriousness and toll that SARS-CoV-2 has caused and will continue to cause, should the US engage in SARS-CoV-2 human challenge trials to try to speed up vaccine and drug development? Should qualified prisoners be allowed to volunteer in return for a shortened sentence?

Some Erosion in Support for Trump

The New York Times reports on a poll that indicates that about 6% of the people who supported the president in 2016 say they will not vote for him again in 2020. Another 8% are unsure to some extent. The poll was focused on the six states most likely to be critical for his re-election. For some, they dropped their support shortly after the president was sworn into office in January of 2017. For others, (i) the botched federal coronavirus response, or (ii) the current social unrest, led to their loss of support.

On the flip side, about 2% of voters in battleground states who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 indicated that they will vote for the president in 2020.

Reasons for loss of support vary from coherent to incoherent. The NYT quoted one former supporter as coherently saying “He said he was going to, quote unquote, drain the swamp, and all he’s done is splashed around and rolled around in it.” Another incoherently said “I think if he weren’t such an appalling human being, he would make a great president, because I think what this country needs is somebody who isn’t a politician. But obviously with the coronavirus and the social unrest we’re dealing with, that’s where you need a politician, somebody with a little bit more couth.”

Another former supporter gave a combination of coherence and incoherence, “he was a great businessman, [incoherent]” but in the wake of the killing of Mr. Floyd he reasoned “It was kind of the last straw. It was like, this dude is just in it for himself.[coherent] I thought he was supposed to be for the people.[incoherent]”

Some who will not vote for the president again say they won't vote for Biden, which strikes me as incoherent. That attitude indicates that they see nothing exceptional about the president or his performance that would warrant voting for the only candidate with any chance of winning the election. Obviously, people will disagree over what is coherent here and what isn’t. 

Other than handling of the economy, most defectors disapprove of the president’s performance on every major issue.

As usual, there is a caveat to all of this. This is just one poll 4 months in advance of the election. Some people can and probably will change their minds before then. The fact that the defectors see the president as doing well with the economy indicates that the president can pound away on that issue, despite the fact that the perceptions of a good economy ignore increasing federal debt and an increased trickle up of wealth to wealthy people and business interests.

Religion Takes More From Taxpayers

The US Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision (on straight party lines) in Espinoza et al. v. Montana Department of Revenue. The court held that Montana’s Constitutional provision barring state government aid to any school “controlled in whole or in part by any church, sect, or denomination” is unconstitutional. The court reasoned that the ban of state aid to religious schools violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. In essence, Montana’s “no-aid” provision to a state program providing tuition assistance to parents who send their children to private schools discriminated against religious schools and the families whose children attend or hope to attend them because aid ban violates the free exercise clause.

One commentator discussed the decision and what it might mean:

“Once again, a Supreme Court majority has gone to the edge of the cliff, ready to push the concept of no aid to religion over the side but stopping short. Even though the concept still exists (barely) in the form of making a distinction based on the “use” of tax funds rather than on the “status” of the recipient of those funds, the rule prohibiting government financial support for religion is all but dead. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed in her dissent, even though the majority did not reach the ultimate conclusion, its opinion ‘seems to treat the [state’s] no aid provision itself as unconstitutional.’ 

It is not an overstatement to say that the U.S. Supreme Court’s holdings on public financial aid to religious institutions have not been a model of clarity or consistency over the past 75 years. In 1947, the court announced an apparent rule of “no aid” to religion: “No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions.” After declaring that rule, a majority then upheld the aid program in question, eliciting a torrent of criticism from the dissenters. Despite that statement’s absoluteness, the court has long allowed types of neutral and tangible assistance to flow to religious institutions, such as providing secular textbooks to religious schools. Over the past three decades, however, a majority of justices have slowly been dismantling the remaining vestiges of the no-aid principle to authorize forms of divertible aid (e.g., vouchers, tax credits), leaving the establishment clause a shell.”

In addition to Montana, 37 other states have constitutions that contain similar no-aid provisions prohibiting tax dollars being spent for religious institutions or education. It seems reasonable to think that the Espinoza decision casts at least some doubt on the validity of all those no-aid laws. Given the endless appetite of Christianity in America for public financial support, one can imagine that those laws will be challenged to nudge the court into total capitulation. 

Religion will aggressively pursue every tax dollar it can get. Once the tax dollar floodgates are opened, which is exactly what GOP supreme court judges want to do, the power of Christianity in government will increase with its increased revenue flows and accompanying wealth. America is drifting into some sort of a Christian theocracy-lite. From what I can tell, what is coming is not going to be a benign or forgiving form of Christianity that is willing to live and let live. It is going to impair our civil liberties as much as it can in the name of sacred Christian moral values. 

In reporting on the decision, the AP commented:

“Roughly three-dozen states have similar no-aid provisions in their constitutions. Courts in some states have relied on those provisions to strike down religious-school funding. Two states with existing private education programs, Maine and Vermont, could see quick efforts to force them to allow religious schools to participate.”

Tax subsidies for religion

In 2013, Ryan T. Cragun, a sociologist, and two of his students tried to analyze the value of tax subsidies that all of the American people are required by tax laws to provide to religion in America. Cragun estimated the subsidies were worth about $82.5 billion/year. I wrote to Cragun and asked him how accurate he thought that estimate was. He indicated it was very conservative because many churches and religious organizations refused to disclose their financial details. My guess is that tax breaks for religion in America were probably worth closer to ~$110 billion/year and possibly a lot more.

Cragun’s analysis of tax benefits 

Churches are public charities, called Section 501(c)(3) organizations in the tax code. They are generally exempt from federal, state, and local income and property taxes under the law. Unlike most other Section 501(c)(3) organizations, federal law allows religious groups to keep their finances secret. In 2018, the Freedom From Religion Foundation sued the Treasury Department to get its hands on religious financial documents. I don't know how that lawsuit has played out so far. I suspect the court will protect religion from public financial disclosure.

On occasion, religious groups have been caught hiding sleaze and corruption behind the secrecy shield. Forbes wrote this about the 2108 FFRF lawsuit:

“Form 990 is a required filing that creates significant transparency for exempt organizations. In 1971, it was harder to get your hands on a Form 990, but a team of reporters working for Warren Buffet's Omaha Sun took the trouble which allowed them to expose the extent to which fundraising had outstripped service delivery at the venerable Boys Town.

But, in contrast to other not-for profits, the Internal Revenue Code does not require reporting for churches. Reverend Frank Benson Jones in Stop The Prosperity Preachers argues that a 990 requirement would help root out church financial abuse.”

The Mormon Church has used the secrecy shield to allegedly cheat on taxes. A December 2019 article in the Washington Post commented:  

“A former investment manager alleges in a whistleblower complaint to the Internal Revenue Service that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has amassed about $100 billion in accounts intended for charitable purposes, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by The Washington Post.

The confidential document, received by the IRS on Nov. 21, accuses church leaders of misleading members — and possibly breaching federal tax rules — by stockpiling their surplus donations instead of using them for charitable works. It also accuses church leaders of using the tax-exempt donations to prop up a pair of businesses.”

Given the aggressiveness of religion in clawing tax dollars from taxpayers and its now powerful influence at all levels of the federal government, it is reasonable to demand at least transparency in their finances. It is also reasonable to demand the end of all tax subsidies at least for all religious groups that participate in politics and policy making. The Espinoza decision fits my definition of religion making policy in service to its own interests at the expense of both the public interest and honest, transparent governance.

White Person's Burden: the Cost of Meaningful Change

Kelsey Smoot writes at The Guardian about the nature of "allyship" - of being more than a mere sympathizer - and of the costs one must bear to do so.  The lead poses a striking question:

If the White people in my life could hit a button and instantly remove the privileges afforded to them along racial lines, would they hit that button?

Now here is a powerful question, and one that gets right to the heart of the true extent of inequality in the United States.  Reparations are relatively easy for us to support, since any reparations will necessarily be paid for through tax revenue and, I think, is likely to be relatively insubstantial on a family's bottom line.  Smoot's question, however, dispenses with any theoretical considerations of reparations and straightforwardly demands that Whites should return to Blacks the value they inherited through centuries of slavery and generations of systematic exclusion of Blacks from the opportunities that the parents, grandparents, great grandparents and great great grandparents of Whites benefited from.

What's more, Smoot argues that the donations, the expressions of support, the flag waving and social solidarity afforded the BLM movement by Whites is a way of buying forgiveness of the sin of racism, an exculpatory expression simultaneously of guilt and superiority, an indulgence of the secular church of progressivism.  She writes:

In my direct circle, it has become obvious to me that many of my White peers are at a loss for what to do in this critical moment to prove themselves different from the ones they have come to view as the true agents of White supremacy. I imagine them, phone in hand, scrolling on social media and seeing messages of disdain and moral indictment pointed at them directly. They think to themselves: “I am not the type of White person who would murder someone in the street. I don’t use racial slurs. I voted for Obama. I have Black friends.” Unable to reconcile the dissonance of their allyship being broadly called into question in the digital sphere, these White individuals turn to me, to us, the proverbial “Black friend”, as a cathartic release of such inner turmoil. They want us to vindicate their longstanding inaction – their culpability in White supremacy – by accepting their monetary donations, their well-wishes and genuine feelings of sympathy at what is only now crystalizing in their minds as another sort of pandemic; one which has only ever kept racially marginalized individuals quarantined away from enjoying the liberties promised to all Americans in the governing documents of the nation.

The word "afforded" in this context should ring with dissonance.  It suggests that support for BLM by Whites is as much a form of privilege as any other.  It is a way of Whites saying "my conscience is worth this much, and this much only," to which Smoot rightly responds by questioning how much they've gained through generations of tacit ( at best ) support of White superiority.  She goes on to say:

The truth is, genuine allyship is not kindness, it is not a charitable act, nor is it even a personal commitment to hold anti-racist ideals – it is a fall from grace. Real allyship enacted by White Americans, with a clear objective to make equitable the lived experiences of individuals across racial lines, means a willingness to lose things. Not just the extra $50 in one’s monthly budget by way of donating to an organization working towards racial justice. I mean palpable, incalculable loss. The loss of the charmed life associated with being a White person in America. Refusing a pay raise at one’s job and insisting that it be reallocated to co-workers of color who are undoubtedly being underpaid. The loss of potentially every close relationship with other White friends and family members who refuse to acknowledge or amend their behaviors that reinforce systemic oppression. The loss of bodily safety, by way of physically intervening when violence is being inflicted on to Black bodies.

A "fall from grace," now that is a powerful description.  It denotes a state of being in which one has been gifted a reprieve from the consequences of one's own sins, a reprieve which is moreover unmerited.  For Whites, being a true ally to Blacks means sacrificing all the entitlements and privileges they have - often without thinking of it.  That pay rise which is not shared with people of color, regardless of performance.  ( One might also say so of gender. )  Access to loans, housing, education.  The "charmed" life did not come to be by accident, nor even by one's own hard work.  It came as a result of violence, violence which is still being inflicted on black bodies and brown.

If the benefits of a culture which prizes whiteness often go unnoticed by them, while at the same time prises those benefits from people of color, then the beneficiaries share responsibility for that violence.  As difficult as it is to wake from this ignorance into the uncomfortable knowledge of one's own complicity in these crimes, it is more difficult still to appreciate the vastness of them, and of the true scale the benefits of these crimes has afforded the United States.

One of the key works attempting to understand the value of slavery and its contribution the US economy is The Economics of the Civil War by Roger Ransom.  One way of looking at the problem is to evaluate the value of all slaves in the US at the height of slavery, in 1860.  Ransom presents data suggesting a valuation of nearly $3.5 billion in 1860 dollars.

Normalizing values across this distance of time is difficult, and there are a variety of ways of doing so.  Samuel Williamson and Louis Cain take Ransom and Sutch's data to estimate that the 1860 value of slaves in 2015 dollars comes to between six and thirteen trillion US$.

Wealth in Slaves in Trillions of 2016 dollars
As Measured by the Share of the GDP

Ian Webster at Officialdata.org uses BLS statistics to derive the aggregate increase in inflation from 1860 to 2020, which he puts at 2,989 percent.  Measured this way, the 1860 value of slaves in the US comes to roughly ten and a half trillion, about half of US GDP in 2019.  But this is just a representation of the purchase price for all slaves in 1860.  The real value of slaves was the labor they produced over their working lives.  Williamson and Cain offer a sense of what that value actually was:

While some slaves were rented out for farm and other types of work, most slaves worked on the farms and plantations of their owners. In both cases, the work they did was mostly unskilled, so a comparable measure of the value of these services is reflected in the unskilled wage. In other words, we can assume that to hire a free employee to do the work of a slave would cost the unskilled wage of that day. Thus, a measure of the average value of a slave would be the present value of the net rental cost over the life expectancy of the average slave...Unlike hired hands, slaves were responsible in large part for producing their own room, board, and clothing. Given that the work week today is significantly shorter than in 1850 and that slaves were made to work harder during the same amount of time as free workers, it would take more than one hired hand today to replace the labor supplied by a slave then.

According to Salary.com, the average wage for a general laborer today comes to $16 an hour.  Non-slave industrial work ran between 60 and 70 hours per week by 1860, and had been steadily decreasing since 1840.  In 1860 slaves certainly worked more hours per day than non-slaves, and agricultural work generally demanded more hours than industrial work.  An 80 hour work week is probably a very conservative estimate, then - and that's not counting the work slaves were required to do to maintain their own living standards.  Today that brings the cost of such labor to roughly $66,500 per year.  Williamson and Cain suggest the average working lives of slaves ran to 20 years.  There were one million slaves in the US by 1860, bringing the value of their productive work in 2020 to 66,500,000,000, a value which slaveholders could expect to get twenty times over.  Thus the purchase price of all 1860 slaves today comes to ten and a half trillion $US, and the value over their working lives to roughly twelve trillion.

Now the net value slaveholders actually saw from slavery is hard to evaluate, and the headline numbers here are not representative of that.  Those numbers do represent the gross value generated by those slaves, however, and therefore the value lost to them.  If we consider the potential of interest gained in the intervening 180 years, the total lost revenue to slaves and their families could well be much higher.  There is nevertheless value in simply using these numbers to provide a first approximation of the total value of the labor stolen from Blacks in 2020.  There are 40 million or so blacks, and we estimate some $23 trillion worth of stolen labor, which comes to roughly half a million dollars for every Black person in the US today.

So yeah, giving up that raise doesn't begin to address the problem.

Chapter Review: What is Truth?

“In this book we argue that social factors are essential to the understanding the spread of beliefs, including--especially--false beliefs. We discuss important mechanisms by which false beliefs spread and discuss why, perhaps counterintuitively, these very same mechanisms are often invaluable to us in our attempts to reach truth. .... the spread of ideas from scientists and other experts to the public and to politicians is deeply influenced by social factors--and for this reason is readily manipulated.” -- Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, pages 11, 17, 2019


This is a review of chapter 1, What is Truth, of the 2019 book, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread by Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall. My review of the whole book is here. This review describes the tactics that modern propagandists use to deceive scientists, policy makers, politicians, social influencers and the public generally.

In this review, I used ‘propaganda’ to mean a tool to deceive one or more people by any means. The book focuses on using social networks to plant, spread and reinforce false beliefs. Inherent in social manipulation, humans are also susceptible to propaganda due to various inherited psychological traits, e.g., a usually weak ability to think rationally in terms of statistics.

Propagandist tactics generally

Four points stand out. First, propagandist deceit usually does not need to be complete among relevant people for it to be effective. Deceiving targeted people and groups can effectively serve the propagandists goal. Second, it is not necessary for propagandists to hold back the spread of belief in actual fact-based truth forever. Instead, by sufficiently blocking belief in truth, propagandists can delay social action for decades. Examples of propagandist-inspired social inaction that was, or still is, effectively maintained for years include social paralysis about the bad health effects of cigarette smoking and the bad environmental effects of our continuing unregulated release of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, including ozone-destroying CFCs.

Since the book was published in 2019, it predated the COVID-19 pandemic. I would add to the propaganda list, the propaganda about COVID-19 and related truths, e.g., anti-facemask propaganda, that the president, conservatives, right wing populists and GOP politicians are spewing on the American people right now, sometimes with lethal consequences.

Third, the authors argue that both political and industrial propaganda are important and can be personally and socially damaging. That scientists, journalists and policy makers can be deceived and used just like everyone else is an important point to keep in mind. Effective propagandists are acutely aware of human social and cognitive traits, flaws and biases that can be used to lead to the spread of false beliefs. For example, humans did not evolve to think in terms of statistics and most (but not all) people don't think that way. Propagandists know this very well and they use it relentlessly and ruthlessly to deceive. The tactic is simple, effective and often very low cost.

A corollary of that relentless ruthlessness is the sheer lack of morality in the propaganda industry. And, it is a very big industry that is called by various names, e.g, public relations firms, marketing firms, etc. There are usually no moral overt qualms about deceiving people or harming them, including killing them. Cigarettes, climate science denial and COVID-19 deceit are good examples. The main propagandist defense is a liability shift to people, society and government under the irrational but incredibly effective rubric called caveat emptor.

 Finally, some of most effective propaganda includes some truth. Some is even based entirely on truth, or what appears to be truth when viewed as the propagandist presents it. Here, information is often manipulated in how it is presented to make anomalies look like the rule or real truth, not the exception or an illusion. This tactic has been and still is used to effectively fool all kinds people, including scientists, policy makers and social influencers. That scientists can still fall for this tactic is disturbing. Among people, they are the ones who are in theory trained to be more rational about statistics and differentiating truth from illusion.

Sometimes humans just cannot help being human and propagandists know this full well. They are also expert at spotting the susceptible minds in the herd. In essence, they are predators expertly trained to look carefully and painstakingly for and find the minds that are susceptible to their message. The predator plies their poison using subtle charms, e.g., intelligent flattery, and not so subtle charms, e.g., funding for research or outright bribery and fraud. Even self-aware and honest scientists have been tricked and used. Dishonest scientists are even better if they are subtle and smart about their dishonesty.

What is Truth?

Fraud: wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain; a person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities

One of the most effective and often low cost tactics the propagandist uses is to fight science with more science. The goals are to create the appearance of controversy and/or doubt about established science showing that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer and other serious diseases. The tobacco industry was extremely successful in creating enough doubt about this that it was able to block meaningful regulations for decades. Big tobacco was absolutely ruthless about this. Not only did the industry create false doubts, they also sometimes flat out lied in their propaganda. To make their propaganda look scientifically sound, they paid ‘experts’ to create an appearance of much more uncertainty and controversy than actually existed in the consensus mainstream. Big tobacco also funded its own research and published data that created doubt about the toxicity of cigarettes while not publishing their studies that confirmed what most scientists already knew and believed. The authors call that tactic selective sharing. I call it at least immoral, evil at worst and in any case, fraud.

Similarly, the chemical industry led by DuPont, mounted a ferocious attack on truth when evidence began to show that the ozone layer in the atmosphere over the south pole developed a hole with hardly any ozone in it. Without ozone, cancer-causing ultraviolet rays from the sun reach the ground. The initial discovery in 1985 was shocking. Many honest scientists did  not believe the data or the analysis, because (1) scientists simply could not believe that ozone levels could fall that far and (2) previous 1970s satellite data detected no loss of ozone in that area. Two experts in satellite data analysis decided to recheck the prior data and discovered that it did show a loss of ozone. The discovery was overlooked because the data analysis software ignored low ozone measurements as anomalies. In the 1970's scientists did not believe that ozone levels could drop as far as they had dropped, so such low measurements were tossed out as being impossible and thus errors in those measurements.

Other 1970's research had shown that CFCs, a common class of widely compounds with over million tons having been made. CFCs could get into the atmosphere and lead to depletion of ozone. Once the meaning of all the data together became clear, the science community was convinced that ozone depletion was real and that CFCs needed to be regulated. That's when DuPont launched its propaganda effort. The major CFC manufacturer, DuPont, bought nationwide ads arguing that it was too soon to regulate CFCs, there was still too much uncertainty in the science and the outright lie that “there is no persuasive evidence” that CFCs can cause ozone depletion. One editorial in an influential chemistry industry publication, Chemical Week, commented: “.... we’re talking about a basically unknown effect on a little-understood phenomenon brought on by a debatable cause. .... One fact is clear: We don’t have the facts. We don’t even know for sure whether there is a problem.”

All of that was blatant lies. There was solid evidence showing the existence of a problem. DuPont was so intent on protecting its revenue stream from making and selling tons of CFCs that it did not hesitate to risk destruction of the ozone layer and attendant bad effects on life on the entire planet. In defending its revenue stream, DuPont propagandists directly attacked the idea of truth itself. In DuPont’s version of reality, there is never enough data to warrant regulation. Knowledge is always uncertain to some extent, and that is true. Nonetheless, when there is enough certainty to act, the propagandists keep attacking truth on the basis of whatever uncertainty there is.

This anti-truth tactic has been used repeatedly by industrial and political propagandists to protect their economic position and/or political power. It is easy to inject uncertainty and doubt in complicated situations, which are common. Therein lies the power of propaganda to block socially useful action. Therein lies some seeds of human self-annihilation.