How Not to Become a *CRAZY* Conspiracy Theorist: On Trusting Experts/Media/Government

Key excerpts:

Suppose you’re a liberal who doesn’t trust FOX News. One day you’re at the airport, waiting for a plane, ambiently watching the TV at the gate. It’s FOX News, and they’re saying that a mass shooter just shot twenty people in Yankee Stadium. There’s live footage from the stadium with lots of people running and screaming.

Do you believe this?

I’m a liberal who doesn’t trust FOX News, and sure, I believe it. The level on which FOX News is bad isn’t the level where they invent mass shootings that never happened. They wouldn’t use deepfakes or staged actors to fake something and then call it “live footage”. That would go way beyond anything FOX had done before. Liberals might say things like “You can’t trust FOX News on anything, they are 100% total liars”, but realistically we still trust them quite a lot on stuff like this.

Now suppose FOX says that police have apprehended a suspect, a Saudi immigrant named Abdullah Abdul. They show footage from a press conference where the police are talking about this. Do you believe them?

Again, yes. While I’ve heard rare stories of the media jumping in too early to identify a suspect, “the police have apprehended” seems like a pretty objective statement. And once again, faking a police conference – or even dubbing over a police conference so that when the police say some other name, the viewers hear “Abdullah Abdul” – is way worse than anything I’ve ever heard of FOX doing. Even if I learned of one case of them doing something like this once, I would think “wow that’s crazy” and still not update to believing they did it all the time.

It doesn’t matter at all that FOX is biased. You could argue that “FOX wants to fan fear of Islamic terrorism, so it’s in their self-interest to make up cases of Islamic terrorism that don’t exist”. Or “FOX is against gun control, so if it was a white gun owner who did this shooting they would want to change the identity so it sounded like a Saudi terrorist”. But those sound like crazy conspiracy theories. Even FOX’s worst enemies don’t accuse them of doing things like this.

It’s not quite that this would be *worse* than anything FOX has ever done. I assume FOX helped spread the story that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9-11 and had WMDs, just like everyone else. That’s probably a bigger lie (in some sense) than one extra mass shooting in a country with dozens of them, or changing the name and ethnicity of a perpetrator. Certainly it did more damage. But that’s not the point. The point is, there are rules to the “being a biased media source” game. There are lines you can cross, and all that will happen is a bunch of people who complain about you all the time anyway will complain about you more. And there are other lines you don’t cross, or else you’ll be the center of a giant scandal and maybe get shut down. I don’t want to claim those lines are objectively reasonable. But we all know where they are. And so we all trust a report on FOX about a mass shooting, even if we hate FOX in general.

In a world where FOX was the only news source available, this kind of thing would become really important. People would need to understand that FOX was biased while also basically being able to accept most things that it said. If people went too far overboard and stopped trusting FOX just because it was biased, they might end up in a state of total paralysis, unable to confirm really basic facts about the world.

…

I believe that in some sense, the academic establishment will work to cover up facts that go against their political leanings. But the experts in the field won’t lie directly. They don’t go on TV and say “The science has spoken, and there is strong evidence that immigrants in Sweden don’t commit more violent crime than natives”. They don’t talk about the “strong scientific consensus against immigrant criminality”. They occasionally try to punish people who bring this up, but they won’t call them “science deniers”.

This seems like another example of the “FOX won’t make up terrorist attacks” point. There are a lot of ways that experts and the academic establishment are biased and try to muddy the discussion in favor of their preferred political side. But this is a game with certain rules. There are lines they’ll cross, and other lines they won’t cross.

And that means you can trust the experts on some things, same as you can trust FOX on some things. The reason why there’s no giant petition signed by every respectable criminologist and criminological organization saying Swedish immigrants don’t commit more violent crime than natives is because experts aren’t quite biased enough to sign a transparently false statement – even when other elites will push that statement through other means.

…

Tt’s possible to extract non-zero useful information from the pronouncements of experts by knowing the rules of the lying-to-people game. There are times when experts and the establishment lie, but it’s not all the time. FOX will sometimes present news in a biased or misleading way, but they won’t make up news events that never happen. Experts will sometimes prevent studies they don’t like from happening, but they’re much less likely to flatly assert a clear specific fact which isn’t true.

…

The people who lack this skill entirely think it’s crazy to listen to experts about anything at all… Journalists and people in the upper echelons of politics have honed it so finely that they stop noticing it’s a skill at all. In the Soviet Union, the government would say “We had a good harvest this year!” and everyone would notice they had said good rather than glorious, and correctly interpret the statement to mean that everyone would starve and the living would envy the dead.

…

Imagine a government that for five years in a row, predicts good harvests. Or, each year, they deny tax increases, but do admit there will be “revenue enhancements”. Savvy people effortlessly understand what they mean, and prepare for bad harvests and high taxes. Clueless people prepare for good harvests and low taxes, lose everything when harvests are bad and taxes are high, and end up distrusting the government.

Then in the sixth year, the government says there will be a glorious harvest, and neither tax increases nor revenue enhancements. Savvy people breath a sigh of relief and prepare for a good year. Clueless people assume they’re lying a sixth time. But to savvy people, the clueless people seem paranoid. The government has said everything is okay! Why are they still panicking?

The savvy people need to realize that the clueless people aren’t always paranoid, just less experienced than they are at dealing with a hostile environment that lies to them all the time.

And the clueless people need to realize that the savvy people aren’t always gullible, just more optimistic about their ability to extract signal from same.