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Expertise from the Can!
30 Plays3 years ago
Due to timetabling issues, Josh and M reach into the can to fetch a pre-recorded, emergency broadcast on... Expertise and conspiracy theories! Funnily enough, it was recorded in a previous lockdown in Aotearoa!
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Don't Trust the Experts?
00:00:00
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy has the following to say on experts. Don't trust them! This entry is cross-referenced with the following items. Academics, comedians, journalists, lemurs, politicians, priests, snakes, snake-like lifeforms, sports referees, tea, and vicars. See also, whoops!
00:00:19
Speaker
Much has been made of this curious list, to the point that many commentators on the guides expect it reflects the personal tastes of one of the editors, a certain Dr. M.R.X dentist, then it does an exhaustive list of things which cannot be trusted. When asked about this, said editor responded, They then gesticulated rudely, got into a baboon costume, and ran away singing. As such recent editions of the guide have included in the non-exhaustive list of people who should not be trusted editors of the guide itself,
00:00:45
Speaker
Whether or not this renders much of the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy tautological depends very much on whether you accept the para-consistent logics are a thing. However the guide entry on logics, semicolon classes of, is currently just a picture of a baboon's bottom, and the meaning of this remains murky at best. The podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy starring Dr. M.R. Extenteth and featuring Josh Addison as the interlocutor.
00:01:16
Speaker
Hello, you're listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison, and sitting next to me in Spirit of Naught and Body, I set certified freak seven days a week. It's Dr. M. Irex Denteth. Classic. I was not going to go any further into those lyrics, for this is a family show.
00:01:33
Speaker
Is it though? No, it's not. Not even a little bit. No, no, not
What is Expertise in Conspiracy Theories?
00:01:38
Speaker
even slightly. So welcome to an exciting spare episode from the can, as we say in the trade and don't we say it in the trade. What are we talking about this week Joshua? Well, we're talking about expertise. Expertise in conspiracy theories. Who has it? What is it? Do we like it? Can I get some? Are you carrying right now?
00:02:00
Speaker
Well, of course, I'm carrying. I always carry a bit of expertise in my back pocket. Now, part of this discussion is actually due to the fact that this episode is being recorded during a COVID-19 outbreak in Aotearoa, New Zealand. And this is our second outbreak. So we had 103 days of no community transmission. And then suddenly, boom, COVID-19 is back and in a big way.
00:02:25
Speaker
And I've been asked to comment on COVID-19 conspiracy theories which have emerged both actually before the outbreak and in the aftermath of the revelation that we have clusters in Tamaki Mikado again. So I thought it'd be quite interesting to talk about the role of expertise and how expertise in conspiracy theories or of conspiracy theories might actually work. So after we play a chime,
00:02:53
Speaker
I think we'll get straight into that. So when we're talking about expertise, are we talking about appeals to experts in terms of supporting a particular conspiracy theory or another, or are we talking about being an expert on conspiracy theories themselves, or both? That is the golden question. Because we can talk quite happily philosophically about
00:03:22
Speaker
who is an expert, and often we talk about expertise. We're going, well, look, someone is an expert if they've got some kind of appropriate background, which traditionally tends to be coded as having the right kind of qualification. And then we tend to also think that experts have to be in agreement with other people with the appropriate kinds of qualification if we're going to appeal to them as experts in a particular topic, because often if you've got
00:03:51
Speaker
an issue which is the subject of contentious debate, you might find that there are certain people who believe X and certain people who believe Y, but there are more people who believe X than Y because the consensus in the community is X is a better view than Y. So having the right qualification often, but not necessarily, requires you to be in consensus with other people in your field
00:04:17
Speaker
And then, of course, we have to actually make sure that people are being sincere in their endorsement of x, because it turns out that everyone agrees that x is right, but everyone's being paid off by the illuminati, then we've got a bit of a problem. So that kind of gives us a philosophical conception of what an appealed x to expertise is. It's a very different question
00:04:42
Speaker
to ask whether there's anyone who has appropriate subject expertise with respect to either particular conspiracy theories or the genre of conspiracy theory generally. And of course the latter part, even more confusing,
00:05:00
Speaker
and that you might have expertise with respect to conspiracy theories as a phenomena you find in the world, or you might be someone like me who talks about the theory of conspiracy theory and whether I have expertise. So where should we start?
Evaluating Expertise in a Digital Age
00:05:18
Speaker
Well, I think actually maybe we should start by going back, going way, way back to either three weeks ago or about 10 years ago when we talked about your bitter with Jose Barbosa for media seven many years ago, which I talked about about three weeks ago because it came up when
00:05:38
Speaker
when John Oliver did a bit on conspiracy theories and it sounded familiar. Because way back then, that was you talking about, basically, experts or so-called experts showing up in the media waving their expertise in our faces.
00:05:55
Speaker
And some questions you came up with when it came to regarding whether or not an expert is an expert who you should be listening to were, is the authority being quoted an appropriate expert in a field relevant to the discussion? If the so-called expert is presenting an argument, is the argument any good? And is there an agenda on the part of the particular expert to get their theory or view out there? And I think certainly in the context, that works in just about any context, but in the context of conspiracy theories, I suppose,
00:06:23
Speaker
if we go for the looking at expertise as it shows up in conspiracy theories themselves, before we look at expertise about conspiracy theories as a thing, you do get lots of people claiming to be experts. You get people who certainly are experts, but sometimes not necessarily in the area that they're talking about. And then you get people like you're
00:06:48
Speaker
I don't know. I'm thinking of the 9-11 type conspiracy theories. You get these sort of self-taught experts, I suppose. They'd certainly consider themselves experts because they've, quote-unquote, done the research.
00:07:01
Speaker
But what do we really need to look at when someone is touting a conspiracy theory on the back of their expertise? So let's focus on that last point first, because one of the issues you might have with the philosophical discussion of expertise is the idea that there's a kind of institutional accreditation part to who qualifies as being an expert.
00:07:26
Speaker
which you might think is actually quite ahistorical. So the kind of expertise that we tend to talk about in the university sector is based upon specialization. Now, specialization within the university sector is actually a relatively new phenomenon that occurred during the 20th century.
00:07:44
Speaker
with the development of disciplines and individual departments within those disciplines. You go back slightly further and degree pathways are very much a bachelor's, a master's and a PhD, where you might focus on a particular topic, but you're drawing from a general academic discipline.
00:08:04
Speaker
The rise of people who say only do psychology at university or only do history is something which is relatively modern and actually might skew our idea that expertise has to come from within a particular sector, given that many of the great minds in the Enlightenment, for example, were, to use a sexist term, self-educated and self-made men.
00:08:32
Speaker
So there's a worry here that maybe the focus is unduly on institutional accreditation and denying the possibility that a layperson who spends enough time and effort will be denied expertise.
00:08:49
Speaker
Now it's hard to know what to make of that because the problem we have in the 21st century is that actually a lot of topics require an awful lot of theoretical backgrounding to be able to understand them. It is technically possible, if you want to be a quantum physicist, to go to a library, read all the books on quantum physics,
00:09:14
Speaker
and then write a groundbreaking paper proving a new theorem. But it's a lot easier to do that within the university sector because a certain amount of guidance is required to make sure you read the right material, the most up-to-date material, and now sound like President Trump, the best and biggest material to get you to a point where you can understand the kind of topics which are salient for modern quantum physics.
00:09:42
Speaker
So there are a whole bunch of issues in that particular domain. But then what about when it comes to, I guess, things that are unprecedented in terms of like
00:09:57
Speaker
say again thinking of 9-11, one of the things we tend to say about it is that it was kind of an unprecedented event and when you get people talking about how the building collapsed or whether or not it did and so on and all this sort of stuff, part of it is around the fact that we'd never actually had just from an engineering standpoint a situation like that before.
00:10:21
Speaker
But even then I suppose you still do have experts in a general field who can say, well, although we've never seen something like this before from the principles of what we know, you should see this and so on and so forth. So I guess maybe I've just answered my own question. You can...
00:10:36
Speaker
You don't necessarily have to have direct expertise, I suppose, if it can be, if you have expertise in an area that can be applied. But then, of course, that widens out to people always wanting to bring in their favourite thing. Would you say David Eich is an expert on these situations and structures that possibly exist only inside his head?
00:11:00
Speaker
Yes, I was about to say, I think David Icke is the expert on David Icke's views. Although, then again, you might actually go, that can't be right, because often we take it that people can't study their own discipline particularly well. That's why you have interdisciplinary studies where, you know, sociologists will study what philosophers do.
00:11:18
Speaker
anthropologists will study what sociologists do because it's often hard to describe your own discipline because you're so enmeshed within it. It's much easier for an outsider to describe what's going on there. So actually maybe there are people who know better than David Icke as to what David Icke believes and actually that does seem plausible given that David Icke
00:11:39
Speaker
either seems to be misled about his own past or lies about things he said in the past, which indicates that maybe we shouldn't take him at his word. But certainly what we start talking about, Ike, and we talk about a quite novel discipline, the study of alien shape-shifting reptiles who drink human blood, eat human babies, come from beyond the stars and beyond the dimensions who control the Earth.
00:12:08
Speaker
There are that many people, other than David Icke and a few of his acolytes, who seem to have any ability to say, yep, that's an example of a theory of that type. And no, that's actually just a slavish copy or inaccurate in some sense.
00:12:24
Speaker
So I suppose there is a kind of weird expertise there in a topic which many people might take to be a pseudo-theory, but the people within that pseudo-theoretical framework are able to say what belongs to it and what belongs outside of it.
00:12:42
Speaker
And I guess a problem that's become more of an issue in the modern age, in the internet age, is whenever these sort of conspiracy theories start coming around, you'll get people popping up who will just say, I'm an expert, essentially, and then start rattling off their conspiracy theory based on their supposed expertise. But when this is happening on Twitter or what have you, the possibility to actually evaluate this person's expertise and seeing whether or not it is actually relevant
00:13:12
Speaker
isn't necessarily possible. I'm thinking now of the big explosion at the port in Beirut, as we're recording happened just over a week ago now, I think. And that was immediately on the likes of Twitter
Experts vs. Authorities: Who to Believe?
00:13:26
Speaker
all over the internet. You had lots of opinions from people insisting that, oh, it was this sort of an explosion. It was that sort of an explosion. People claiming that they know what they're talking about and look at the kind of smoke, the sort of thing, the so and so forth.
00:13:39
Speaker
shows that I'm telling you, based on my expertise, that this was the case. And yet certainly in those instances, I mean, some of these people, it seems, have been proved fairly conclusively wrong, for starters. So what does it do to the concept of expertise, I guess, when discourse happens at the rate it does in this internet-enabled age?
00:14:02
Speaker
I mean, it does raise a question as to who the appropriate experts are to appeal to in a given situation. And I think that actually gets us in quite nicely to talk between expertise versus, say, authorities, because I think sometimes we get the two confused. So an expert is someone who has the right epistemic credentials, an authority is someone who belongs to an influential institution and is often appealed to.
00:14:32
Speaker
But of course, being an authority doesn't mean you've got the epistemic credentials to opine on something in an epistemically sound way. It simply means you are the kind of person who is listened to. And this is something which I sometimes grapple with.
00:14:50
Speaker
On occasion, and at the moment actually quite frequently, members of the media will ask, can we get your opinion on conspiracy theory X or Y, say about 5G or COVID-19?
00:15:04
Speaker
And generally I can give a kind of appraisal as to whether I think those conspiracy theories are warranted or unwarranted because that is my particular field of expertise. The theory of conspiracy theory and whether they are good inferences to the best explanation or bad inferences, so inferences to the worst explanation or just a bad explanation.
00:15:27
Speaker
And then occasionally people asked also, why do people believe these conspiracy theories? And that's something where I have authority and that people ask me about it all the time. And I also belong to an influential institution. I belong to the academic sector, but I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a sociologist.
00:15:47
Speaker
So I have to qualify everything I say there with, this isn't my field of expertise, but people have claimed the following and then I'll give an account of what I've read in the literature. And at that particular moment in time, I transition from discussion of my expertise to something which I can authoritatively opine on
00:16:12
Speaker
but I'm not actually the expert in that field. You should actually go and find a psychologist or a sociologist to talk to. Possibly that brings us then to the other sort of expertise that we were looking at. Expertise when it comes to talking about conspiracy theories, not necessarily expertise being invoked by any particular theory. And yes, as you say, there are a number of disciplines that look at
00:16:36
Speaker
the phenomena of conspiracy theories in a bunch of different ways. You have the philosophical epistemological viewpoint, but you have the psychological, you have the sociological. I'm assuming the anthropology must get in there somewhere a little bit. They do. There are papers in the anthropology of belief in conspiracy theories.
00:16:55
Speaker
And then suddenly there's this straight sort of, I don't know, like taxonomic categorical type, just people who would list and categorize all the varieties of conspiracy theories that are out there and that need not even be
00:17:11
Speaker
an attempt to say anything about them, just an attempt to get some idea of the conspiracy theories that exist in the world. And I think possibly a little bit of that is involved in all of those disciplines. I'd say you and I have a fairly broad knowledge after six years of this of the kinds of conspiracy theories and a great number of them that are out there.
00:17:30
Speaker
In fact, I sometimes worry about what things I've pushed out of my memory banks by learning so much about the nitty-gritty of a whole bunch of different conspiracy theories. How much of my childhood Josh have I lost memorizing this stuff?
00:17:47
Speaker
Probably all of it, I assume. What can you remember? What school did you go to? Describe the house you grew up in. Was it a blank void? It was white and cuboid-esque and time flowed differently and differently. Actually, no, I'm describing the events of cube to hypercube. I see. Well, that's not so much conspiracy theories pushing stuff out of your brain. I think that's just good old-fashioned brain parasites. So you'll be fine. Yay!
00:18:16
Speaker
So, where were we? Expertise about conspiracy theory.
Academic Perspectives on Conspiracy Theories
00:18:22
Speaker
So, I mean, yes, you are definitely an expert when it comes to epistemological issues around conspiracy theories. You have the likes of Joe Eskinsi. What's his discipline? He's a political scientist.
00:18:36
Speaker
Right, but the sort of survey work he does would certainly seem to give him a fair amount of expertise in issues like the spread of conspiracy theories and the popularity. And also the prevalence of belief in them. So as a philosopher, I can talk about what belief in conspiracy theories looks like.
00:18:55
Speaker
what it's constituted by, I can make claims about whether I think some belief is strong or weak with respect to how committed the theorist is towards their particular conspiracy theories. What Joe does is actually do surveys to find out what people believe and the prevalence of that belief. It is the way we have this rather interesting phenomenon at the moment.
00:19:18
Speaker
whereby people talk about QAnon a lot. And hopefully by the time this episode comes out, people are going, cure what? But at the moment, QAnon is an apparent major force. The media goes on about QAnon all the time. We're being told that QAnon Facebook groups and social media groups are proliferating. The membership keeps growing. It's a grave threat to the police.
00:19:42
Speaker
Joe keeps on doing surveys that go, actually, when I poll the general population, i.e. people who aren't on social media all the time, it turns out that actually virtually no one knows what QAnon is, and there's not much belief in it. There's no belief in it. But it turns out it's a really, really minor conspiracy theory by polling standards.
00:20:06
Speaker
which means that the phenomenon of QAnon being really big may be an artifact of the media and the media alone. And so you need people like that with that kind of expertise in polling to be able to go actually let's look at who believes these things so that we can then judge whether it's something we actually need to be worried about. Have you talked to David Farrier about this because he seems very worried about QAnon?
00:20:34
Speaker
I mean, I have had some correspondence with him and I have pointed out that it might not be as big an issue as he thinks it is, but no, he is he is very concerned by it. I think in part, I think there are two rationales. One, he is a journalist, so he's looking at what people are reporting online and noticing there are some fairly extreme things being said online. I think also there's a slight
00:20:59
Speaker
aspect of the anecdotal fallacy going on there. I also had this conversation with Russell Brown, another journalist in this country. People like Russell and David know people who have gone down the QAnon or QAnon adjacent rabbit hole and are very concerned about what has happened to their friends or former friends. And so that becomes a big motivating factor. I don't want people to go down that rabbit hole as well.
00:21:28
Speaker
It's a big issue, we've got to fight against it. And of course, it's unfortunate that people know people who have gone down the QAnon rabbit hole. But that still doesn't mean it's as big an issue as maybe it's being presented as being. Although one worries then that you get sort of the feedback thing where the more it's talked about in the news, the bigger it becomes until it eventually is a story. But getting a little off topic there.
00:21:51
Speaker
What more is there to say about expertise then? Well one of the worries you find in the philosophical discussion of expertise with respect to conspiracy theories is that certain conspiracy theorists, so not all conspiracy theorists, keep on feeling we should we should have a hashtag not all conspiracy theorists on the show. Certain conspiracy theorists
00:22:15
Speaker
we'll go look there is a conspiracy by the academic literature that isn't actually a conspiracy by the academic literature, a conspiracy by the people who contribute to the academic literature on conspiracy theory to make conspiracy theorists look bad. And it's one of those things where I can kind of see it
00:22:39
Speaker
If you look at the general philosophical literature outside of say philosophy and sociology, it predominantly casts conspiracy theorists as mad, bad and dangerous. And it does look as if there's an awful lot of collusion of people agreeing with one another
00:22:57
Speaker
and ignoring any work coming out of other disciplines like philosophy and sociology which questions that particular view. So it almost looks as if these people are employed by the establishment to make conspiracy theorists look bad to keep the status quo.
00:23:16
Speaker
Now, I think the more reasonable explanation of this isn't a conspiracy. It's just the way that the academic sector works. People tend to, in a discipline, agree with other members in their discipline. They cite one another. You develop research profiles and programs based upon that research work.
00:23:34
Speaker
which tends to go in one direction. It's unfortunate but theory change tends to occur more by people dying and being replaced by younger researchers. But I can see that some people say look there's a conspiracy by the experts to make conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists look bad.
00:23:54
Speaker
Mm, certainly that is a conspiracy theory you hear. It's usually, I suppose, more directed at the mainstream media and so on and so forth, wanting you to believe that these conspiracy theorists are all just a bunch of whackjobs and the media and X-Files and the... what was the Stargate one?
00:24:13
Speaker
the show within a show. Oh, Wormhole Extreme. Yeah. Wormhole Extreme, yes, that sort of thing. People say it is. But yeah, I mean, we've certainly seen plenty of people insisting that academia is in on it. I think usually when we've looked at it, it's more been more sort of political, the academia's cultural Marxism and so on, putting forward their ideologies. But yeah, the talk of
00:24:40
Speaker
mainstream media versus alternative media and so on. Mainstream in general does include academia when it comes to the suppression of conspiracy theories, so I can certainly understand why a person would say that. I had a bit of a moment on Twitter earlier today where someone had mentioned Richard Hofstadter and the paranoid style in American politics.
00:25:04
Speaker
Okay, so people please stop referencing Hofstadter when talking about conspiracy theories. A, we're looking at work from the 1960s. B, there's more recent work. C, in this country, you could be referring to more recent work by people actually writing in this country. And D,
00:25:25
Speaker
Hofstadter is actually not a touchstone for the modern work on conspiracy theory anyway. So even if you think Hofstadter's work is good, the modern work on conspiracy theory doesn't cite Hofstadter, or if they do, it's very much a footnote. This guy believed this back in the 60s. This is our research program now.
00:25:45
Speaker
And that's not a case of a conspiracy. I don't think journalists are going, oh, you must keep on citing Hofstadter to keep those conspiracy theorists down. It's because they read one book when they were younger and that suddenly becomes the only thing they ever feel they need to have read on this particular topic because they lack the curiosity to go, is this stuff still current? Yes, you get a reference that just sticks around for decades.
00:26:11
Speaker
just because it always does. The one on a tangent, it reminds me of, it was a cliche even back in the 90s, that any time there would be a report in the news about comic books in some way, there would always be, pow, bam, comic books are doing this. And it's like, you're referring to the Batman TV show from the 60s. The
00:26:33
Speaker
that that's where the big pow biff whack comes from and yet it's 30 years later in the 1990s and that's still your touchstone for talking about comic books which would frustrate comic book fans at the time because this was post Alan Moore and you know there'd be lots of really sensible serious adult stuff happening these days i guess since marvel kind of took over the blockbuster movie industry maybe it's not a thing anymore but yeah so you can certainly see how um
00:26:58
Speaker
something like journalism say that only brushes up against a certain area every now and then would sort of get a single reference and then just stick with it because it's easier than finding out what's actually going on these days. See that has reminded me of one of the most embarrassing moments I ever had in London.
00:27:18
Speaker
So when I first went to London to spend six months there, I joined a Doctor Who group. And they used to meet in a pub on Sunday afternoons every fortnight or so. And the first time I turned up, I didn't know any member of the organisation. So I wander into a pub and I'm going, I need to find a bunch of Doctor Who fans. And lo and behold, in a corner of the pub, there were people in Anarax
00:27:48
Speaker
reading paperback books and so I walked up to them and said sorry are you Doctor Who fans and then they gave me the most filthy look and I walked away because it turned out I was resting on a cliche of what I think science section fans should look like.
00:28:03
Speaker
Well, so it actually turned out the actual Doctor Who fans, which I then found because they were swapping Doctor Who DVDs, I walked up to them and said, I'm sorry, you Doctor Who fans? Well, then turned around and said, no, we prefer Blake 7 and we all became firm friends almost immediately. Well, that's nice.
00:28:20
Speaker
Well, we've moved on into discussions of pop culture, so that usually means this episode is coming to an end. Is there anything you want to finish off before we finish up?
Expertise in Times of Crisis
00:28:29
Speaker
Well, I suppose the reason why this was a topic I wanted to broach and out in McCann episode is, as I said, I've been asked a lot of questions about COVID-19 conspiracy theories in the last few weeks. And in the last few days, I've actually been approached by not one, but two groups.
00:28:46
Speaker
who are doing research into disinformation around the coming election in Aotearoa, New Zealand, which at this stage is still going to be sometime in September, but who knows what it will look like when the lockdown announcement is made on Friday.
00:29:01
Speaker
Both groups are doing research into how disinformation about particular things like COVID-19 are being manipulated in social media and by political parties to try and change the electoral landscape. And I'm being brought in as an expert both on fake news, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. And it's one of those things which is a case of, hmm,
00:29:27
Speaker
I'm now being called to serve my government in this time of need. It's all kind of curious and it has got me thinking about what exactly is my expertise? How does it get applied? And also, consequently, what does it mean to start doing work like this with respect to my ability to talk about the theory of conspiracy theory?
00:29:52
Speaker
without it being affected by the judgement calls I might be making about individual conspiracy theories in briefing papers that might go to the government. I assume the end point is that one day you will be sneaking up behind Jerry Brownlee and silently slipping a stiletto between his ribs and then disappearing into the night.
00:30:10
Speaker
I was thinking more than I might throw a dildo at a politician's face. Yeah, it's been done. Because as people have pointed out, that famous video of a dildo being thrown at Stephen Joyce's face, Jerry Brownlee is not in shock. Now, I'm not saying anything, but it sure is interesting that you can't see Jerry Brownlee all the way his arms were moving before the dildo was thrown.
00:30:38
Speaker
I've never seen Jerry Brownlee and that dildo in the same shot. No. Food for thought, Joshua. Food for thought. Food for thought. Well, we'll leave you with that thought. Which is dildos. It is. And basically, this is an episode for the can, so we have no idea what state the world will be in when it gets broadcast, if it ever does. And it's going to be very embarrassing if Jerry Brownlee's just been killed by a dildo.
00:31:06
Speaker
Yeah. So we at the moment, as we record this, are in a period of great uncertainty in terms of how the whole COVID business is going to happen, is going to carry on here in New Zealand. Hopefully things have settled down a little bit at the time you are listening to this.
00:31:23
Speaker
However, this episode finds you. I hope you go, I hope you're doing well. And all we can really say is goodbye. And no, no, no, no, no, no, Batman! You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Addison and Emdentist. If you'd like to help support us, please find details of our pledge drive at either Patreon or Podben. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.