Who are you going to believe?

The key question in epistemology

“Bentham” (“I’m an undergraduate studying philosophy, with opinions on many things.” writes,¹

If you watch the recent Hunter interview, he comes off as a thoughtful, decent, and articulate guy who’s faced a decades-long struggle with addiction—nothing like the criminal mastermind he’s been painted as. He is a man who did not deserve to be reduced to a national punchline surrounded by a vague penumbra of scandal.

This is far from his main point, which I will get to. But I disagree with it. I have not watched the entire Hunter Biden interview, but two things struck me in what I did see.

1. Hunter Biden’s profuse use of the F-word. This is an intellectual turn-off for me. It is a major reason that Joe Rogan is not to my taste. If you put the use of the F-word in the numerator and the total number of words that a person has put on the Internet in the denominator, that ratio is extremely low for everyone that I follow. If Scott Alexander does not need a ratio of more than one in ten thousand, then why should you?

2. Hunter Biden makes the claim that his father’s debate faceplant was a one-off. Given all of the stories that have come out about other incidents, Hunter is not reliable. I cannot go along with “thoughtful, decent.”

Bentham’s main point, as I see it, is

If you get your news from alternative media, odds are you’ll come to believe many false things. This is because alternative media will assert things that are simply false, in a way the mainstream media doesn’t do. Heterodox bloggers rise to the top by being good writers—whether what they say is true or not has little bearing on their success. Over the years, I’ve been surprised by the degree to which so much of alternative media’s claims collapse under even basic fact-checking. Lots of articles contain more than 50% claims that can be disproven by five minutes of googling.

I agree that it is wrong to be automatically credulous with alternative media and automatically skeptical of mainstream media. But the optimal amount of alternative media to consume is not zero. And the optimal amount of skepticism of mainstream media is not zero, either. You have to be somewhat skeptical of each.

As you know, my catch-phrase is that we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. We really do not have the ability to research every claim that someone makes. Deciding who to believe is the best (only?) heuristic available.

Unfortunately, deciding who to believe is heavily influenced by emotion. A while back I looked at the Substack leaderboard in politics, and I found that 9 out of the top 10 newsletters (Yglesias was the exception) were written with a combative tone. Their implicit promise was to help you fight the evil that is inherent in your political enemies.

I find it interesting that my post attacking the “anointed” received a lot of attention—and a wave of unsubscribes. My “brand” is not to be so combative. I hope to keep it that way.

An important combative tactic is to attribute evil motives to the other side. Years ago, I noticed that Paul Krugman and Rush Limbaugh were mirror images of one another in this regard. If you look at Krugman’s columns in the New York Times, it is remarkable the high percentage that had no substantive point to make; instead, they purported to expose the bad intentions of conservatives. I called these “type M” arguments. They were not consequentialist; instead, they were claims about the other side’s motives. Years later, I learned the term asymmetric insight.

A subset of type M arguments are conspiracy theories. “Bentham” points out that Bret Weinstein dwells in the realm of conspiracy theory, and I am afraid that I have come to a similar conclusion. This is unfortunate, because Weinstein is right about some things. For example, early in the pandemic, he correctly predicted that the virus would mutate to a more contagious but less deadly form. And I gave a mostly positive review of the book he co-wrote with his wife, Heather Heying.

When we decide who to believe, what role should we assign to motives? This is a difficult issue. We cannot ignore motives altogether. For example, when we read about the conflict in Gaza, at least 99 percent of what we read is written by people who strongly sympathize with one side or the other. This includes reporters for major news outlets. We cannot completely trust anyone to cleanly distinguish truth from propaganda. My advice is to read stories on both sides and try to look for on-the-ground confirmation of claims (which is hard to come by).

Or consider the Current Thing in which the DOJ and FBI are releasing documents that are purported to show that Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton pushed agencies to promulgate a false narrative concerning Trump, Putin, and the 2016 election. Do you believe mainstream media telling us that this is a nothingburger, or do you believe alternative media telling us that this is at least a major scandal and at most a crime? I do not consider either to be reliably objective.

I also find myself suspicious of provocateurs. The provocateur, like the combative crusader, is seeking attention. That is how Richard Hanania strikes me. Bryan Caplan is another provocateur. I trust his most well-researched views, but on other topics (such as psychiatry) he has not shown me enough work to be convincing. I do not fault Tyler Cowen for being a provocateur, since he strikes me as doing it to challenge people to think, not to show off.

I continue to be a big fan of intellectual humility, which to me means allowing for the possibility that you could be wrong. That is what I am so offended by the “anointed.” I mean to criticize their intellectual style, not their motives, but that is a distinction that I suspect gets lost.

My indicators of intellectual humility are captured by what I call the Fantasy Intellectual Teams (FITS) criteria: playing Devil’s Advocate, thinking in bets, articulating caveats to one’s viewpoint, adhering to the rules of formal debate, articulating conditions for changing your mind, being as skeptical of studies that support your viewpoint as you are of those that contradict it, and criticizing the strongest arguments for the other side rather than the weakest.

Now that I have more experience working with Claude, I think I could over-ride its default criterion for evaluating punditry (“balance,” especially making certain that the progressive point of view is given voice) and get it to use the FITS criteria instead. Maybe I should get on that project.

1. A hazard of undergraduate students of philosophy is valuing their own thoughts higher than other people’s experience. Beware the moral philosopher whose implicit assumption is that he possesses sufficient understanding to make social decisions. Hayek’s phrase “the pretense of knowledge” applies to more than just economists.