Why We Are Wrong About Everything All the Time
We are experiencing a crisis of both legitimacy and accuracy of information. Trust in media is at an all-time low, and increasingly people are turning to alternate sources of knowledge outside of official channels. In this piece, we will explore what this means and how this happened.
An information source’s legitimacy increases with a closer relationship with reality. More simply, being right about things gives you power. People will begin to trust you, and with this trust comes the ability to influence what they believe about the world and what they consider to be true.
We need trusted sources of knowledge, and issues arise where none exist. People today are overloaded with information, and the challenge is in differentiating signal from noise. If you or I were to attempt to make all our decisions – from what to eat, to appropriate home fire prevention – by working from available evidence, we would be overwhelmed. Trusted sources allow for action to occur at scale in a way that purely decentralised knowledge cannot. This is useful, as a purely hypothetical example, for coordinating a pandemic response with a high degree of public compliance.
The ability to coordinate people at scale is highly attractive to those who wish to use it for either benevolent or self-interested purposes. If you can get a credible, respected source to amplify your dogma, you will have influenced people’s opinion on the issue – you will have effectively implanted a lie, or at least doubt in their minds where the truth should be. The issue with using this power over information nefariously is that legitimacy does not come from the source of the information (no matter how trusted), but instead flows through the source – power in this instance is a function of truth. The more truthful your observations and predictions, the more legitimacy you have.
Therefore, when an information source’s legitimacy is used for political ends, this degrades the source’s relationship with truth. The more often truth is subverted by political narrative, the less the source can be trusted, and the less powerful it becomes over time. This is why use of the “noble lie”, while appearing useful in the short term, comes at the cost of dissent and distrust.
It bears repeating; no government or individual can command the power of truth. No amount of hard power, repression or propaganda can force someone to believe a lie, only act as though they do. Pravda was officially endorsed by the Politburo, but that did not make people believe the trash written in it. The government is not able to confer more legitimacy than it has itself, and the people can see reality with their own eyes.
Because of this, in our hypothetical utopia, government sources of information should have perfect accuracy to promote both trust and effective governance. In our current, dystopian case, the accuracy of state-approved information is at an all-time low, manipulated at every opportunity for political ends, with consequent loss of respect and legitimacy.
Take, for example, the erratic and contradictory responses to the coronavirus crisis. To give some examples: Border closures and quarantines were at first condemned as racist overreactions, and now prevailing wisdom is that they should have been enacted earlier. Masks were initially mocked as ineffective and too difficult to use and are now regarded as indispensable. The risk from coronavirus itself was even regarded as no more than the seasonal flu, while the damage from a combination of both the virus in terms of deaths and ill-health, and in the lockdowns and restrictions enacted in response to it, is unprecedented in scale.
It is particularly galling that the same institutions, and often even the same people, delivered these contradictory messages within a few weeks or months, without admission of failure, contrition, or accountability. Simply remembering comments from politicians and prominent public health figures made two or three months ago is a superpower. Our “elites” are hopeless at best and schizophrenic at worst.
The question arises: why should governments, supposedly staffed with the best and brightest minds, all working towards the common good, get things so wrong? There are two obvious explanations: either competence of government is so low that we are unable to respond to these challenges anymore (a scary thought), or the regime’s information filter is selecting for things other than pure truth.
I am an optimist, and while the quality of human capital has likely declined over previous decades for reasons which time does not permit me address now, I do not believe that we have become so incompetent as to be incapable of effective disease control. This leaves other factors, which we will explore in greater detail, coming between truth and good governance.
We can see where the regime’s aims conflicted with good governance by observing which aspects of effective pandemic management were initially opposed by the regime. Working back from the inconsistencies we noted earlier, firstly we saw that the risk from coronavirus was significantly downplayed; business as usual was the order of the day. When the risks became obvious, border closures were regarded as excessive and xenophobic by the system before the realities became too stark to maintain this position. Then, usage of masks was widely rejected – despite them being essential protective equipment for healthcare workers – before this position became indefensible. Now, with evidence swinging back against mass masking, they have since become a pseudo-religious symbol. Even the vaccine has become a lightning rod – delayed and opposed under Trump, but now vaccine hesitancy is to mark yourself as an apostate.
None of these positions initially held by media and public health officials needed to be held so strongly given that developing evidence could easily swing against it. The initial optimism that coronavirus was unlikely to be a significant threat, while understandable, delayed actions which would have been important for controlling the disease. Later reactions are less understandable: reactions against border shutdowns show that open borders and free trade are important to the regime – speech and action by its representatives at early stages showed this was more important than your health.
Most reprehensibly, the initial push against masks was made not in the interests of public safety, but was instead a “noble” lie designed to allow the healthcare system time to stockpile their own supplies. In a moment of crisis, government public health officials, through the media, lied to you about effective actions you could have taken to protect yourself because it covered up for their generations-long mistakes and lack of preparation. Why should any of us trust them again?
Indeed, despite the fog of uncertainty around the time of the coronavirus outbreak, the entire scientific and media apparatus was completely unified in their response, even as they contradicted themselves. How could this be? Under conditions of perfect information, you should trend towards everyone having the same (objectively true) opinion. However, in conditions of informational uncertainty, we should expect the opposite – different assumptions fill the gaps in knowledge, which leads to greater diversity of thought and a thriving marketplace of ideas.
To thrive, this marketplace of ideas should feature competition of ideas, but when all competitors share the same opinions, you only have the illusion of independent thought. Something is affecting our ostensibly decentralised, competitive ideas marketplace in a coordinated way. This means that the error in our truth-determining machine is pervasive and differential in the sense that it is total – no “official” source is untainted – and flows in the one direction, rather than being distributed randomly. In statistical language, this means that our truth sources are both precise and inaccurate; the inaccuracy is due to poor trueness rather than randomly distributed errors.
Our informational marketplace, then, is no longer selecting for truth, and this leads to colossal institutional failure and enormous consequences for everyday people as a result. This begs the question: what is our truth machine actually selecting for? We will first consider how the information market can be manipulated in the first place, and things will start to become clearer.
The most obvious vulnerability in an informational market, which instantly raises our index of suspicion, is a conflict of interest. If I read a research article on the effectiveness of a newly developed, extremely expensive, and patented coronavirus vaccine and find that the company responsible for its manufacture is also funding the research, I smell a rat. Now, if we found that same research was funded by the government, we are much relieved and far more confident in the results. Why doesn’t that seem strange?
Just because the incentive structures of private businesses (profit) are easier to map than government ones, does not mean that they do not exist. The regime has its own agenda which can be far more nefarious than private companies. Academics relying on government grants are just as loyal to their paycheck as those who are reliant on private business – and they do not become unbiased because the government pays them. Indeed, by simply reviewing the names of recently funded research divisions, or a quick scan of their mission statements, anyone with an ounce of cynicism will know exactly the perspective that their “independent” research will push.
So, we can be confident that academics funded by the regime will be loyal to the regime and echo its interests. However, it is equally relevant (if not more so) to evaluate the missing data, which in this case is what does not get funded. When consider both what is and what is not funded, we can begin to map out incentive structures which amplify some perspectives at the expense of others. By tracking where government money is allocated (and where it is not), we see signal telling us which way the regime wishes to move.
How does this relate to vaccines though? Well, consider our incentive structures. Everyone is hopeful that freshly developed coronavirus vaccines are safe and effective. Is there any demand for someone to find that a freshly developed coronavirus vaccine is ineffective or dangerous? Does anybody want this? There is no demand for dissent, and so it does not exist.
I make no judgement here as to the usefulness of the vaccines. I am saying that respected institutions are far, far more interested in finding evidence that it is effective and safe than the opposite. This extends beyond just the researchers and includes all involved in the informational gatekeeping structure – everyone from scientific journal editors down to pop science journalists at newspapers – who, in pursuing a particular agenda (however noble), prevent dissenting knowledge from undermining the consensus.
The idea that our entire academic and scientific structure is deeply conflicted has far-reaching ramifications. If we accept that these incentive structures exist, then we must also unfortunately accept that the scientific process itself no longer exists outside of a few outposts in mathematics and the extremely hard sciences. This is because science is meant to exist as a negative epistemology – it is built around falsification. Once you no longer have the capacity to falsify and change consensus, and instead defer to expert opinion as curated by government grant funding, journal editors and journalists, you exist in a credentialist epistemology. This leads to ideas that are both wrong and dangerous making it through our truth filter.
Furthermore, having the same elaborate incentive structure which exists behind every single one of our distributed sources of truth means that we have only an illusion of a competitive ideas marketplace. When the vast majority of academics are reliant on government funding, the power over them is monopolised by agencies which dispense government grants. Your decentralised, robust sources of truth have become corrupted in a centralised way, all victims of the same differential bias. It remains to be seen how this situation is superior to privately funded research, which, having funding from different and competing sources is innately far more heterogenous.
This crisis of legitimacy could be softened somewhat if non-regime sources of information were equally inaccurate; nobody would know any better. This is not the case though; non-government entities have accuracy which exceeds approved information sources. Simply crying out for people to “trust the experts” no longer has currency when I can get better advice from anonymous internet bodybuilders. It is worth underlining this point: random, anonymous people on the internet are better than our “legitimate” sources of truth across any field vulnerable to political bias, and the differential in inaccuracy increases with the level of vulnerability to politicisation.
This has some interesting implications: clearly, our vetting process no longer selects for truth either in the people who become “experts” or in the ideas which are promoted. Where the regime orthodoxy has conflict with reality, the regime can either co-opt the truth and pretend it has always been right (as with masks), reframe the truth as something undesirable for extraneous reasons (border closures are racist), or suppress the truth by punishing deviation from regime orthodoxy (“cancel culture”).
So where do we, as private citizens, go from here? We now know that parallel sources of truth - regime-approved and reality-approved – exist, but we have little ability to differentiate between them. This creates a problem for people and for the regime. For the regime, they lose respect and legitimacy as their inability to govern effectively and dislocation from reality becomes increasingly obvious. For the people, they no longer have a reliable, trusted source of truth and must navigate the challenges of dissent from ruling regime ideology and determining what is useful information and what is not. Increasingly, we are seeing citizens mouthing the platitudes of the regime world while living by the real world.
We will end by considering Curtis Yarvin’s long cycle of truth, power, and error at the end of his essay on pervasive error, which provided much of the inspiration for this piece. The issues described here are not new – this is hardly the first occasion that the ruling elite of a nation have become totally unhinged. The fundamental problem is the well of pure truth becoming poisoned with power. Decentralisation of knowledge attempts to remove conflict of interest from private funding sources; none of this has had any impact on the corruption of truth by power. Whenever and wherever sources of truth develop, it will become attractive to power which will corrupt it and ruin it, and new, pure wells of knowledge will spring forth to fill the void.
Well argued
Facts!!!!! 💯💯💯