Who to Believe?
Brian Leiter on social epistemology
In the half-century before the dominance of the internet in America (roughly from World War II until around 2000), the most prominent epistemological mechanisms in society generally helped ensure that a world of causal truths was the common currency of at least some parts of public policy and discourse in the relatively democratic societies…
The internet has upended this state of affairs: it is the epistemological catastrophe of our time, locking into place mechanisms that ensure that millions of people (perhaps hundreds of millions) will have false beliefs about the causal order of nature—about climate change, the effects of vaccines, the role of natural selection in the evolution of species, the biological facts about race—even when there is no controversy among experts.
Pointer from Rod Dreher.
This topic of social epistemology keeps coming up. I give Leiter credit for starting with the premise that we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. But his essay is pretty much a mess.
To clarify some jargon: an epistemic authority is someone who is trusted to give you the truth. Think of a scientist. A meta-epistemic authority is someone who is trusted to tell you who the epistemic authorities are and what they are saying. Think of a journalist. The NYT is the meta-epistemic authority that tells you to believe Fauci, the epistemic authority.
Between the time of Christ and about 1500, the Western world’s epistemic authorities were religious leaders. The Enlightenment undermined their epistemic authority, and the authority of scientists rose.
In the pre-Internet era that Leiter misses, mainstream media became the meta-epistemic authority. Unlike the Church, the media did not give orders telling you what to believe. But the media told you who the authorities were.
Leiter characterizes the Internet as undermining the authority of the mainstream media by injecting false rumors into the public conversation. But that is not how the mainstream media lost its perch.
In the Internet era, a random individual who went by the pseudonym “Buckhead” was able to discredit a report by famed mainstream reporter Dan Rather and CBS news. On Sixty Minutes, Rather had shown a damning letter about George W. Bush’s military service. “Buckhead” pointed out that the letter’s proportional spacing showed that it had been typed using Microsoft Word, which did not exist at the time it was purportedly written. Therefore, it was fake.
The Internet era has seen mainstream media’s flaws exposed again and again. And mainstream journalists have styled themselves as activists rather than truth-tellers. They have been unable and unwilling to try to earn back the public’s trust.
The Enlightenment eroded the epistemic authority of the Church, making beliefs contestable. The Internet has eroded the meta-epistemic authority of the mainstream media, making beliefs even more contestable.
Leiter longs for a new meta-epistemic authority to play the role formerly played by the mainstream media. That is not going to happen. We are not going back to letting the NYT tell people who to believe any more than we are going to go back to letting the Pope tell people what to believe.
In a world of contestable ideas and opinions, the solution is not to choose an authority, meta-epistemic or otherwise. The key is to have in place a process that gives higher status to people who pursue truth using careful reasoning.
What we have now in academia is a process that used to work but has become corrupted. It is gamed by recent generations of professors who have been taught to believe that power trumps truth and have proceeded to live by that belief.
Many people I know hope to see academia return to following the processes that prevailed before post-modern progressivism took over. Ideas like Heterodox Academy or Kanelos’ University of Austin.
I am pessimistic about squeezing toothpaste back into the university tube. My view instead is that we need to experiment with other ways of educating young people.
Outside of academia, meta-epistemic authority seems to be embodied in the algorithms and users of social media. “Followers,” “likes,” and “shares” are the coin of the meta-epistemic realm today. The results of that approach to meta-epistemic authority are not good.
I like my idea of an AI-powered “grader” that evaluates writing based on how well the author considers alternative points of view in arriving at his or her conclusions. But that would put the grader in the position of meta-epistemic authority, and one can imagine that its system could wind up very quickly gamed.
substacks referenced above:
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Thanks for a concise and insightful column. Reading the introductory paragraph, I had trouble deciding whether to be puzzled, amused, or outraged by Leiter's premise - that the problem with the internet era is that we no longer have authorities who are widely believed. To pick the topics he mentions, which supposedly have no controversy among experts:
Climate change: What, exactly, is the agreement among experts? I think that experts believe that the climate is changing (primarily warming), and that human activity is a major cause, if not the only significant cause. But if we can believe the meta-epistemic authorities in the media, the epistemic authorities also believe that we must immediately and drastically curtail all emissions of greenhouse gases, in order to prevent global catastrophe that threatens civilization itself. But the actual scientific publications of the actual experts recognized by the IPCC (supposedly the epistemic authority on the subject) don't support these beliefs.
Effects of vaccines: What, exactly, do the experts agree on? I assume that experts agree that many vaccines (polio, smallpox, rubella, pertussis, tetanus for example) are safe (meaning minimal risk of side effects) and effective (preventing recipients from getting the disease), and that high levels of immunization in the population produce "herd immunity" that essentially eradicates these diseases in the population. How much of this applies to other vaccines, like COVID? When the experts tell us that COVID vaccines are "98% effective," does that mean that 98% of recipients will not get COVID, or that 98% of recipients will get some benefit, or something else? Our meta-epistemic authorities in the media told us the former, but they were apparently wrong. Why were they wrong? Did they apply the smallpox model inappropriately because they didn't understand? Did the epistemic authorities try to correct them, or were the epistemic authorities also wrong?
The role of natural selection in the evolution of species: This topic seems different, at least for the Western world, because disagreement with the experts seems primarily driven by religious belief. But in that sense, there has always been a significant part of the population that didn't accept the experts, and the internet hardly caused that disagreement.
The biological facts about race: I'm not sure what the "experts" agree on here. I expect generalizations like "differences within racial groups are larger than any possible differences between groups," but so what? There was a time when "scientific racism" was adopted by the epistemic authorities, but has now been discredited, replaced by an axiomatic belief that there are no differences. How much of this agreement among experts is based on quantifiable evidence, and how much on politically imposed orthodoxy enforced by social and professional ostracism? It is generally accepted that all humans share approximately 99.9% of DNA, but we also share 98.8% of our DNA with chimpanzees, and 40-50% with cabbages. Do these numbers mean anything?
It may well be true that there was less disagreement and controversy in the halcyon years between World War II and the internet, but that doesn't mean there were more true beliefs and less ignorance.
Arnold - Thank you for defining the philosophical jargon in this piece. Much appreciated for those of us with engineering and economics backgrounds. I’m going to make my sermon short today. The problem that you’re now trying to solve is an engineering problem. I suggest that we use systems engineering processes to speed up development of solutions. This probably means meeting in person, using the white board, and doing presentations. It means being methodical, rigorous and in accordance with disciplined systems engineering protocols.
Let’s start by define the problem, list our assumptions and clearly state our goals. What are the knowns? What are the unknowns? What experiments do we need to perform? What test beds need to be developed?
You’re on the right track.
I want to also emphasize this very basic point from a previous comment.
Probably the biggest improvement that Substack offers is the direct payment from student to teacher, from reader to writer, from learner to educator. It is the closest model to Adam Smith’s vision for students paying professors directly. This promotes good teaching. This is one of the most important facts we have when it comes to understanding what’s wrong with higher education. Government and other third-party funding has messed it all up.