The problem is community epistemics
A response to Cofnas.
Nathan Cofnas has an article attacking the alt-media for undervaluing expertise and arguing that the alt-media is often less truthful than the “experts” they criticise. It contains some reasonable points and the first half contains an admirable collection of outrageous “expert” behaviour that has led to the current backlash, so that any libtard trying to get gratification from RW infighting will have to wade through a large number of cases of their own side lying.
However I’d draw attention to a point absent from Cofnas’ post: that good epistemics is a community-level phenomenon. This is clear when one considers the impracticality of checking everything you read, and what this “checking” actually involves. Truth or falsity is not a perceptible quality that attaches itself to statements, like the colour of the letters; rather, you can only check truth or falsity by comparing the statements of many people against one another. The kind of “knowledge” you get from reading the news is mediated through long chains of people trusting one another. You are very far from being able to directly check the statement you read against “the fact” which it claims to represent. Just as Leonard Read in “I, Pencil” said that no one individual knows how to make a pencil, so no one individual could perceive a view as “dumb” without being embedded in an intellectual community that made that judgement possible. If Cofnas and Hanania think antivaxx is dumb, it’s not because they’ve “directly perceived” this fact, it’s because they’ve seen how the respective sides argue, and formed a judgement based on that. Such a judgement is merely the final link in a long chain of discourse in which the links involve mutual trust.
A common element to many of the examples of “expert” misbehaviour Cofnas lists is the premature formation of consensus. Unfortunately the exact same thing happens in RW internet communities. Even before the Trump tariff debacle I remember talking with RW internet people about tariffs and discovering that a weird consensus had formed that tariffs were good, and people seemed oblivious to the arguments against them. The problem was not so much the pro-tariff position itself but the overconfidence: I had a worrying sense that the arguments I was making against tariffs, classical arguments, were being heard for the first time. There is a basic argument for protectionism that David Ricardo refuted in the early 19th century, and sophisticated protectionists construct their arguments in a way that avoids falling into the fallacy Ricardo exposed; but most protectionist discourse seems to be unaware of this and continues to use military metaphors to describe trade, or imply that trade is driven by absolute rather than comparative advantage. I am concerned by people untrained in economics promoting the writings of Friedrich List being unable to evaluate what they’re reading.
Another example of this is religion.
“If God real, why bad thing happen 😏?”
“Ok so what is your solution to the Problem of Evil?”
“… Aquinas wrote about this.”
“And what was his solution?”
“…”
“…”
“I haven’t got round to reading Aquinas yet.”
I went through a militant atheist phase as a teenager and, like many people, got turned off by its excesses, such as philosophical ignorance and exaggerated claims to solve the world’s problems. But this understandable backlash to New Atheism led many religious people to think that fedora memes can be used to wave away all the intellectual difficulties of a religious worldview. This bravado implodes the moment you ask the most basic questions.1 The pro-religious contingent of the Online Right is like an African army: loud, numerous, but retreats the moment it is attacked, easily beaten by a small contingent of well-organised Europeans. Their attitudes are actually an amusing mirror image of how libtards think. Libtards imagine that somewhere in the universities, somewhere in some textbook, there is a knock-down “refutation of racism” that overturns everyone’s strong impression that biological race affects behaviour. And this Refutation of Racism, hidden somewhere in the academy, explains the uniform opposition to racism in the academy. Likewise many religious people imagine there is some theologian, past or present, who has resolved all these difficult questions so they don’t have to think about it. Somewhere in Summa Theologica this is all straightened out. Where exactly? It’s not my job to educate you.2
There are half a dozen issues like this. These are positions that have become ideologically decadent from being insulated from the natural selection of debate.
Cofnas makes a case for deferring to experts in certain contexts. Let me make a different proposal. If you have open debate, by which I mean a culture in which asking how someone knows something isn’t considered bad manners or a failure of loyalty, this will prevent the formation of premature consensus. If that happens then intelligent people will be attracted to participate in your community, both for the enjoyment of argument and to learn something new. Then you won’t need to “defer to experts” because your community will already contain experts from various fields.3 The problem with vaccine discourse isn’t that people refuse to defer to experts. I don’t want to participate in a community that simply defers to “experts” on vaccines. What I want is a discourse in which I can ask an antivaxxer how he knows something without receiving the “thousand-mile state of the fanatic” or accusations of disloyalty after failing to be convinced. In such an environment the embarrassment at failing to provide convincing evidence creates a selection pressure in favour of the truth. What I want is to see if such “fringe” views can actually survive in an environment of good discursive norms. The promise of the internet is to create such an environment. I am unsatisfied by the argument that “academia has its problems but it’s better than Joe Rogan,” because anonymous internet communities have advantages that academia can’t replicate: for example, the ability to see truth in “low status” views and falsity in “high status” views.
What makes the Online Right exciting for me is the possibility of a “neo-Protestantism” against the “neo-Catholicism” of expert-worship: an overcoming of the Authoritarian View of Knowledge; a rejection of priestly academic intermediaries; a desire to have direct acquaintance with The Text. “Trusting the experts” on a particular question is permissible so long as you are explicit about what you are doing, because the judgement of which experts are or are not trustworthy isn’t itself an expert judgement and so isn’t discursively privileged.
John Stuart Mill, in discussing the views of Auguste Comte, wrote the following in regards to Protestantism.
[A. Comte’s] failure consists chiefly in want of appreciation of Protestantism; which, like almost all thinkers, even unbelievers, who have lived and thought exclusively in a Catholic atmosphere, he sees and knows only on its negative side, regarding the Reformation as a mere destructive movement, stopped short in too early a stage. He does not seem to be aware that Protestantism has any positive influences, other than the general ones of Christianity; and misses one of the most important facts connected with it, its remarkable efficacy, as contrasted with Catholicism, in cultivating the intelligence and conscience of the individual believer. Protestantism, when not merely professed but actually taken into the mind, makes a demand on the intelligence; the mind is expected to be active, not passive, in the reception of it. The feeling of a direct responsibility of the individual immediately to God, is almost wholly a creation of Protestantism. Even when Protestants were nearly as persecuting as Catholics (quite as much so they never were); even when they held as firmly as Catholics that salvation depended on having the true belief, they still maintained that the belief was not to be accepted from a priest, but to be sought and found by the believer, at his eternal peril if he failed; and that no one could answer to God for him, but that he had to answer for himself. The avoidance of fatal error thus became in a great measure a question of culture; and there was the strongest inducement to every believer, however humble, to seek culture and to profit by it. In those Protestant countries, accordingly, whose Churches were not, as the Church of England always was, principally political institutions—in Scotland, for instance, and the New England States—an amount of education was carried down to the poorest of the people, of which there is no other example; every peasant expounded the Bible to his family (many to their neighbours), and had a mind practised in meditation and discussion on all the points of his religious creed. The food may not have been the most nourishing, but we cannot be blind to the sharpening and strengthening exercise which such great topics gave to the understanding—the discipline in abstraction and reasoning which such mental occupation brought down to the humblest layman, and one of the consequences of which was the privilege long enjoyed by Scotland of supplying the greater part of Europe with professors for its universities, and educated and skilled workmen for its practical arts.
Obviously there are religious people who take objections to their worldview seriously, but they are not predominant in discourse.
I am not interested in de-converting people who derive benefit from a religious way of life, and in fact I only care about the social effects of religion, but “Christian nationalist” discourse has totally disastrous social effects because of its intellectual overconfidence.
Silicon Valley “rationalists” are good at this.