Ideas Are Too Exciting; Arguments Are Too Hard

It is very pleasant to entertain a new idea, a new notion or concept to think about and to look at the world with. Indeed, it can have the exciting and intoxicating feel of discovering hidden treasure. 

Unfortunately, most ideas are bad - wrong, misleading, dangerous, or of very limited use or relevance. Even more unfortunately, that doesn't prevent them from gaining our interest and enthusiasm. The problem is that getting an idea is just a matter of understanding it (or thinking that you do) and this is just as easy in the case of bad ideas as it is for good ones. In contrast, checking the quality of ideas by interrogating the arguments for them is laborious and distinctly unrewarding - and so avoided as much as possible. The result is that the world is drowning in bad ideas and their dreadful consequences, from conspiracy theories to religions to academic bloopers like critical race theory. 

For The Sake Of Science - Let The Anti-Vaxxers Have Their Way

The authority of scientific experts is in decline. More and more people think they can figure things out just fine by themselves and reject the intellectual division of labour laboriously built up over the last few hundred years. This is foolish since expertise is a civilisational super power on which our modern prosperity is founded. It is also dangerous since expert advice is essential to addressing existential threats like epidemics and climate change. The fewer people believe scientists’ pronouncements, the more danger we are all in.

Fortunately I think there is a solution for this problem. Unfortunately, it looks like some people are going to have to die.

No One Actually Believes Fake News. So What's The Problem?

The statistics are shocking. A Russian troll farm created false anti-Clinton stories and distributed them on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. As many as 126 million Facebook users may have encountered at least one piece of Russian propaganda; Russian tweets received as many as 288 million views. The Russians, like Trump's campaign itself, leveraged the AdTech infrastructure developed by social media companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to identify and target those most receptive to their lies and provocations.

What is going on? Is this something new? Does it matter?

Bullshit vs Truthiness

In 2005 Harry Frankfurt re-published a wonderful philosophical essay, 'On Bullshit', which became a bestseller. Also in 2005 Stephen Colbert introduced a new word, 'Truthiness' -  "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true" - which became Merriam Webster's word of the year.

Both these terms are motivated by concern about the decline of public discourse in America, and their popularity suggests that many people share that concern. Yet they differ in their specific diagnoses of the problem. Bullshit is a form of artful deception of audiences by speakers; truthiness is a collaborative exercise in self-deception in which the audience is a willing participant. Bullshit denotes an abuse of a position of authority, such as by TV pseudo-scientists or politicians; truthiness is a radically democratic view of truth as a matter of personal opinion - whatever one finds it agreeable to believe. Bullshit is what the left thinks rightist politicians do to win votes; truthiness is how they actually succeed.