Experts and misinformation
I recently got around to finally reading Michael Lewis’s The Big Short (about 13 years too late), which I enjoyed tremendously.
The main thought haunting me after reading it is the utter failure of institutions (leading up to and through the subprime crisis) to behave appropriately when responsibility was entrusted in them. When it comes to the ratings agencies, the trading firms, the entities making the actual loans, the CNBC talking heads covering financial stories, and the regulators supposedly overseeing everything including the SEC, Treasury department, and the Fed: Either inept or corrupt or both would not be too strong of a descriptor.
From a political standpoint, it seems to me that you can draw a straight line from the failures of institutions and experts1 during the GFC — along with other historic failures that decade including the rationale for the Iraq War — all the way to the current political moment. Has there ever been a time in the past half century when the average person has less faith in the people in charge of things?
In day to day life this manifests itself in a sort of "well, who can you really trust?" attitude among the general public, and a skepticism of anything parroted by either the media or mainstream "expert" consensus.
Actually it's broader than that — it's a rejection of appeals to authority in general. It used to be that you could advance an argument by sending a link to a relevant paper in a high quality journal, or a talk from a renowned subject matter expert. Now instead of that being treated as potent evidence, half the time the response is an eyeroll paired with "oh, right, so I should 'trust the experts', just like the ones who lied to us about masking??"
I had a lot of interesting conversations following my post last week about Trump and Harris. One complaint I heard repeatedly was, "If the mainstream media is so full of misinformation from both sides, where can I go to learn about what's actually going on?"
To this question I am equal parts sympathetic and dismayed. Here is what I fear most: That our confusion about expertise and truth comes from our over-learning the lessons from the Global Financial Crisis2.
Yes, our leaders and our newsmakers have found ways to fail us in catastrophic fashion since pretty much forever. We should always remember that slant, bias, and hidden incentives can interfere from truthfulness when it comes to messages from our media and our leaders.
But having salient examples of institutional misbehavior is not the same thing as saying that our institutions always misbehave. As I wrote in a comment on another Substack a few weeks ago:
The cognitive error, IMO, is that some people confuse evidence of institutions behaving poorly (not hard to find because there are so many institutions) with evidence that institutions, on average, make worse decisions than laypeople operating off gut feel. These two things are completely different. With the benefit of hindsight I can point to mistakes that the CDC has made, for example, while retaining the prior that on any given topic related to infectious disease they are likely to be more correct than, well, me.
To expand on this point a bit more: Do I think that the CDC and other health authorities behaved perfectly during the coronavirus pandemic? No I certainly do not. I was living in Los Angeles when the beaches were closed, which even at the time seemed like one of the stupidest ideas to fight the virus you could possibly come up with. We've learned plenty about how school closures and small business lockdowns failed the retrospective cost-benefit analysis. We also collectively shamed and alienated the unvaccinated to a greater degree than was warranted. Leaders including Joe Biden lost credibility by overstating the efficacy of the vaccines, even when the arguments for getting vaccinated were strong enough without these exaggerations.
But let's go back to 2020 and 2021 and recall just what the CDC was advocating. They suggested social distancing and masking (not unreasonable during a highly contagious respiratory epidemic), handwashing (ultimately ineffective but not exactly a huge burden on society), and vaccinations (which had very significant reductions in mortality, particularly in the elderly, and ultimately saved tens of millions of lives worldwide). While I may have plenty to critique about their specific behaviors and tactics with the benefit of hindsight, I certainly don't believe that they are "completely discredited" or were acting in bad faith to tyrannically assert control over our individual rights. Yet some media and political figures make precisely this argument.
The big problem is that once we've been persuaded that "all of them are lying," rather than become more dubious and circumspect and fact-based, we actually become more easy to manipulate. To recycle a quote I used a few posts ago:
The "independent" demo actually has all the textbook characteristics of a group most susceptible to propaganda, more correctly "pre-propaganda", and by textbook I mean literally Propaganda.
Have a look at the following "media bias chart", which you've probably seen before. We could argue all day about the specific inaccuracies in here, but let's just agree for a second that this is directionally correct. (If you're a conservative preparing to interject, you should note that Special Report with Bret Baier on Fox is rated way up in the "highly credible" category whereas MSNBC is in the low end of "somewhat reliable").
The biggest thing that freaks me out about this chart is that the further you go into the bottom-left and the bottom-right, the more you're dealing with media entities who spend the most time railing against bias in media. Put another way: The biggest mis-informing propagandists spend the most effort making their audience fearful of propaganda and misinformation! All while flattering their audience that they're the only open-minded and free-thinking ones among a sea of rubes.
Maybe this is just me being a soulless MSM simp, but I believe that every time Bret Weinstein convinces a person that they shouldn't watch ABC because it's just misinformation, an angel bursts into flames.
Is the mainstream media biased against Donald Trump? You know what, I'll actually agree that they are. But now that we've agreed on that: What are you going to do next? If your response is "I'm going to discount anything that's reported by NBC, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal because they’re just out to get him" then guess what, that information vacuum is going to get filled by much worse actors (including left-wing ones) that care WAY less adhering about the actual truth.
This is essentially how conspiracy theorizing works: First comes the general distrust of official narratives, then in comes the conspiracy theory to fill the void3. Not the other way around.
As annoyed as we might get about our mainstream institutions, they exist because they perform a societal function. If the sitting President appears to be experiencing rapid cognitive decline or attempts to overturn election results, it is the job of the media to report on that. Just like it's the job of the CDC to do something to save lives during a pandemic (could you imagine how discredited they'd be if they didn't advocate for vaccinations?)
A world where everybody is too disgusted to trust experts is an extremely dark one. It's one where our kids contract measles, people die from drinking silver, and the financially illiterate lose their life savings to Ponzi schemes. It’s a world where our collective human knowledge adds up to far less than the sum of its parts.
I'm not saying that you should believe everything that the media tells you. I'm saying that believing nothing they tell you is a far worse mistake.
I switch between “institutions” and “experts” interchangeably in this piece. In both cases I am referring to the general idea that the leaders to whom society grants authority know what they are talking about and can be trusted. This is media, academia, government, et cetera.
And the Iraq War… and Vietnam… and Watergate… and…
Weirdly, in the current moment of widespread social media and rampant leaks from within institutions, we should actually predict that conspiracies and corruption are now less prevalent than they used to be, because it's harder than ever to keep a secret. Under these conditions we should expect that bureaucracy, waste, and general ineffectiveness and CYA behavior would exist much more broadly than true conspiracies. Which I think is what we actually see.