(Checkout Part 1 if you haven’t already.)
I can no longer tell the difference between most public discourse and culture wars.
I’m not sure if this is a product of our time or simply the themes and focuses in my personal life.
There are two truly devastating rhetorical patterns that I see repeating in these discussions. They are SO SIMPLE, so misled, and many bright people are following them into infinite hearsay.
I haven’t seen anyone else point them out in the terms that I would, so here it goes:
- True/False representations of gradient/probability scales.
- Inappropriate demand that scientific simplifications/analogies hold up to scrutiny and defend science from pseudoscience and heretics.
If you remove these rhetorical tricks from the conversation, everything becomes very clear very fast.
Some examples:
Regarding #1: “Vaccines no longer keep the vaccinated from transmitting Covid.”
This statement is pedantically accurate, but it begs us to think in false dichotomies while avoiding the actual issue at hand. This statement is true of all vaccines.
It intentionally avoids the point: even as vaccines become less effective, they still decrease the PROBABILITY of severe illness and transmission, and this reduction in odds, when implemented broadly, can still help achieve herd immunity.
None of these is true/false:
- Ability to get Covid
- Severity if caught
- Ability to transmit
I see these three represented as true/false dozens of times a day.
Regarding #2: “Do your own research.” OR “it’s the information presented that matters, not the source that presents it.”
Richard Feynman famously said, “If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it.”
This is a brilliant quote that carries a lot of wisdom in just a few words. However, people seem to have convinced themselves that these simple explanations ARE the actual representations of science (or at least equal to), a catastrophic conflation. Simple explanations and analogies will not stand up to scrutiny, and they are not intended to. Simplified explanations are meant to confer understanding, not to assign authority.
The result is that folks who have abandoned epistemic systems of authority end up picking the simplification that is most intuitive to them. They have decided that the logical conclusion is that results that make the most intuitive sense must come from the people who understand the issue best, which is false (and absolutely does not follow from Feynman’s quote). The problem with this is that science is often not intuitive, so this is not a good metric.
The bottom line: sources do not get their authority based on how neatly/intuitively they can explain something. On the contrary, simple, intuitive explanations get their authority from their source. Fabricated/pseudoscientific accounts are much easier to make intuitive than actual scientific accounts, which have to accommodate the messiness of real-world science (which is why Feynman’s requirement is meaningful and difficult to achieve).
I see these patterns everywhere I look. I see them devastating the logic of usually brilliant, knowledgeable people. I don’t understand it.
