An Epistemic Crisis?

How do you know who to believe?

Nate Silver writes,

Here’s the scandal. In March 2020, a group of scientists. . .published a paper in Nature Medicine that seemingly contradicted their true beliefs about COVID’s origins and which they knew to be misleading. The paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”, has been cited more than 5,900 times and was enormously influential in shaping the debate about the origins of COVID-19.

…But the message — natural origin good, lab leak bad — was received clearly enough by mainstream news outlets. “No, the new coronavirus wasn't created in a lab, scientists say”, reported the CBC in covering the paper. “COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic has a natural origin” was the headline at Science Daily.

He points out that the scientists who wrote the paper were not themselves convinced that the virus was of natural origin. They were motivated by something other than plain truth-telling.

Silver’s concern is with journalists who gave credence to these scientists. My concern is with the scientists’ brazen willingness to lie.

There is a similar story concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop. Recall the headline Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, former intelligence officials say. Yet those officials almost surely knew differently.

I would argue that the defense of race-based admissions put forth by Harvard, and apparently accepted by the three liberal justices on the Supreme Court, was also a lie. Nobody really believes that admitting under-qualified black students was necessary or sufficient to provide diversity on campus.

I believe that the true motive for affirmative action in admissions was to assuage white guilt over past treatment of blacks. Let’s stipulate that such guilt is legitimate, and then we can argue over whether race-based admissions are an effective means to deal with it.

Getting back to my main point, we have scientists, intelligence officials, college administrators, and Supreme Court justices promulgating falsehoods. The disinformation is coming from inside the house, so to speak.

For me growing up, the most formative political event was the Vietnam War. The entire pretext for that war was a lie. The overall lie was that we had to win the war in order to halt the relentless march of Communism. The immediate pretext for the war, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, was also a lie, as President Johnson seemed to admit to aides at the time.

I would say that the main political story of the 1960s was that the lies that got us into Vietnam were exposed. This produced division and distrust from which our culture has never recovered.

When elites lie, this puts us in an epistemic crisis. I say that as human beings, in order to decide what to believe, we have to decide who to believe. I cannot work out the principles of physics or the right way to respond to a COVID outbreak all by myself. I cannot investigate every news item I come across to uncover the facts of the matter. I need to find folks I can trust to help me.

If elite opinion is just wrong, so be it. Anyone can make a mistake. But when elites are telling lies, we are in trouble. If the people who are in high-status positions are willing to lie, then the rest of us have a much harder job sorting out the truth.

I suggest that elite lies are a particularly bad problem for the Blue team, which styles itself as cognitively and morally superior. You may legitimately call out lies from the Red team, but whataboutism won’t solve the epistemic crisis. “What about Trump’s lies?” is a rhetorical race to the bottom.

The Blue team claims to be the good guys. But if you have to lie, then you are not the good guys. You cannot get on your high horse about “threats to democracy” and “misinformation” without facing up to the reputational damage caused by suppressing the lab leak hypothesis, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and the impact of race-based admissions to Harvard.

For the rest of us, the answer isn’t to shut our ears to elite voices and rally around right-wing media. I hope that we remain skeptical of voices on our own side.

My advice to everyone who consumes news and opinion is to take up the cry of “Show your work!” Do not assign automatic, unquestioning credibility to anyone. Make everyone justify their positions. Nate Silver is right that journalists have a particular responsibility to be skeptical. But so do the rest of us.