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Fake News, Real Stoicism with Justin McBrayer (Episode 7)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
Stoicism is a philosophy that is ultimately geared towards attaining knowledge. Because of that it is crucial to know what kind of media environment we live in and how to navigate it.
In this episode, Caleb speaks with philosophy professor Justin McBrayer. They discuss his most recent book Beyond Fake News: Finding the Truth in a World of Misinformation.
Caleb and Justin talk about how to think about the problem and strategies for individuals who want to see the world as it is.
Learn more about Justin McBrayer at his website: https://www.justinmcbrayer.com/
(2:05) The Problem of Fake News
(4:20) Why is there Fake News?
(12:41) Impact of the Internet
(16:10) is it our fault?
(21:50) Proximity kills our heroes
(24:19) Becoming better believers
(32:46) Relying on Experts
(38:31) Expert incentives
(43:29) Problems with media scoring
(46:15) Long covid
(48:52) Rules for dealing with experts
(50:00) Does intelligence matter?
***
Stoa Conversations is Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay’s podcast on Stoic theory and practice.
Caleb and Michael work together on the Stoa app. Stoa is designed to help you build resilience and focus on what matters. It combines the practical philosophy of Stoicism with modern techniques and meditation.
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com
Caleb Ontiveros has a background in academic philosophy (MA) and startups. His favorite Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/calebmontiveros
Michael Tremblay also has a background in academic philosophy (PhD) where he focused on Epictetus. He is also a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His favorite Stoic is Epictetus. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/_MikeTremblay
Thank you to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
The Battle for Attention in Media
00:00:00
Speaker
The problem is that all of these companies are competing against one another for our attention. And our attention is valuable and limited. And given that, they have an incentive to build their audience, even if that requires them to tell half-truths, partial truths, or outright falsehoods.
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
00:00:37
Speaker
This conversation is between myself, Kayla Monteverros and Justin McBrayer.
Stoicism and the Challenge of Fake News
00:00:43
Speaker
Justin is a philosophy professor at Fort Lewis College and the author of Beyond Fake News, Finding the Truth in a World of Misinformation. We talk about how to think about the problem of fake news both on the social and personal level.
00:00:58
Speaker
Stoicism is a philosophy that's ultimately geared towards attaining knowledge. Because of that, it's crucial to know what kind of media environment we live in and how to navigate it. Because of that, it's crucial to know what kind of media environment we live in and how to navigate it.
00:01:14
Speaker
Justin is sharp, approaches the issue rigorously, and offers a useful model for thinking about this question. And that's what you'll hear in this conversation. Many years ago, I had the fortune of taking several classes with Justin, and it was a good chance to reconnect and talk about how he thinks about this important issue. Without any further words of introduction, here is Justin McRae.
00:01:40
Speaker
Today I'm here with my friend, Justin McBrayer. He is a philosophy professor at Fort Lewis College, and his most recent book is Beyond Fake News, and that's what we're gonna be mostly talking about today. Thanks for joining. Happy to be here. So what's the general problem this book is concerned about?
Navigating a Polluted Information Environment
00:02:04
Speaker
The general problem is that
00:02:07
Speaker
the epistemic environment we live in, the informational environment that we live in, is more polluted now than it has been at any point in human history. And by polluted, I mean that there are more claims circulating that are false than there have been at any time in human history.
00:02:26
Speaker
And that's a problem because all of us care about at least some truths. And insofar as the environment is making it difficult for us to figure out what's true and what's false, it's hindering our plans. It's hindering our personal lives. It's hindering our collective lives and it's hindering our political lives and political futures.
00:02:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's generally important to talk about from the Stoic perspective, especially because the Stoics are and were concerned about knowledge. And there's one way of understanding their view, which is that the virtues are ultimately geared towards knowledge. And if we live in an environment where knowledge is especially tricky to get at, whether that's in the personal sphere, the political sphere, or otherwise, we should have a good account of
00:03:17
Speaker
why the environment is the way it is and what we can do about it. Yeah, that seems right to me too. And if you think about knowledge as something like unlucky true belief, you've latched onto the truth, you've latched onto the way the world really is, and you're doing so with not a fluke, it wasn't by accident.
00:03:39
Speaker
then I think that makes this idea of a polluted informational environment even more pressing. It might be possible for you to go out and do a Google search and figure out the truth about some particular matter, but if you're doing so with an accident, if you could have just as easily have ended up on this other website or whatever, then it makes your getting to the truth look accidental.
00:04:02
Speaker
And it seems like that's the kind of thing that would
Understanding Disinformation and Misinformation
00:04:04
Speaker
take away knowledge. So even if there's good information out there, if it's hard for us to get it in a reliable way, that seems to count against us getting knowledge in this kind of environment.
00:04:15
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. So let's start by coming up with an account of the environment then, and then we can move on and think about maybe more practical implications of the pick. What are the, just from the broadest sort of perspective, if you will, what are the sort of the players and why do we find ourselves in this mess?
00:04:35
Speaker
OK, good. So there's really two parts to this story, Caleb. One part is about the product, what's out there in the environment. And the second part of the story is about the producers. How does stuff get there in the environment? So let's start with the product itself. The term fake news is obviously not
00:04:52
Speaker
a very careful concept or a precise concept. It's the kind of thing that's bandied about by journalists and politicians in fairly sloppy way. So let's try to be more clear about that product first. What are the things that are in our informational environment? And I think fate should capture a wider range of products than most people. So I want to draw some distinctions first.
00:05:15
Speaker
So the first distinction I want to draw is between curate information and deceiving information or misleading information. Accurate information is a true proposition, a true bit of information, such that when you take it on, when you come to believe it, your view of the world becomes more accurate. And contrast that with misleading information, not all true statement,
00:05:42
Speaker
leave you with an accurate impression of the world. Sometimes statements can be true and misleading. Politicians are experts at doing this. They say things that are technically true, but give a misleading impression as to what
Media's Profit-Driven Truths
00:05:56
Speaker
the world is like. So in other words, there's two different species of truth, accurate truth and what you might think of as misleading truth.
00:06:03
Speaker
Similarly, there's two different species of falsehoods. There are falsehoods that are propagated on purpose and falsehoods that are propagated accidentally. The ones that are propagated on purpose we can call disinformation. So this is when we think of a Russian troll farm that's trying to stir up animosity in an American election. The product that they're producing is disinformation with a D.
00:06:28
Speaker
But on the other hand, when your well-intentioned next door neighbor publishes a screed about the COVID vaccine being a cover for some government conspiracy theory, she might genuinely believe that even though it's false. And in that case, we want to make a distinction between what the Russians are doing and what your next door neighbor is doing. What she's doing is misinformation.
00:06:51
Speaker
She's sharing information or misinformation, something that's false, but she's doing it on accident. She's not lying to you, even though what she's saying is false. So that gives us four categories, accurate information, misleading information, disinformation, and misinformation. And from my point of view,
00:07:08
Speaker
Those last three are all different forms of fake news. Misleading information is a problem, misinformation is a problem, and disinformation is a problem. And I think we need to have all three of those in our scope as we think about our informational environment, because it prevents us from having this kind of myopic focus on just one species of fake news, say disinformation from Russian trolls, because in certain contexts, it turns out that those other products are far more harmful.
00:07:40
Speaker
Yeah, I think when many people hear the term fake news, they'll immediately think of disinformation where either there's some foreign agent or maybe a local political party or political agent who's trying to pursue their own agenda by spreading false information. And it's certainly true that sometimes just getting things wrong in an honest way or perhaps getting things right in a misleading way can be just as
00:08:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. And in fact, it's probably true, though this is a big question and I can't answer it with any high degree of confidence, but it's probably true that misleading information is the most problematic of the three cases. If you think about what just happened with Alex Jones, when a media company or a blogger or a website propagates information that they know is false,
00:08:27
Speaker
and it harms someone else, they're subject to different kind of remediation within the law. So libel or slander or something like that. So that reigns in actors at MSNBC and Fox News and whatever. So they're more careful to tell you things that are true, but they are free to tell you those things in a way that's misleading or pushes a particular narrative or whatever. So it might end up
00:08:52
Speaker
being true that the misleading information is the most damaging of those three different species of fake news.
00:09:00
Speaker
Yeah, do you have any examples that come to mind for the misleading side or just standard misinformation that really highlight the extent of the problem? You can, the fact of the matter is you can open any two websites from a more right leaning media outlet and a more left leaning media outlet and you can just go down their headlines and you can see how headlines skew perceptions one way or the other. So let's just take a standard kind of example.
00:09:27
Speaker
Biden's the president. Suppose the economy doesn't at particular quarters. Suppose the federal government releases its numbers and economic growth is unchanged from the quarter before. Here are two different ways to report that very same fact.
00:09:41
Speaker
A left-leaning newspaper could say, economic progress keeps on its steady pace. The economy held strong in this quarter unchanged from the previous quarter. And a right-leaning media site that wants to push a narrative that's negative about the Biden administration could say, yet again, another quarter where economic growth, there was no economic growth, no change. Things are no better now than they were last quarter. It's the same bit of information.
00:10:08
Speaker
that your economy held steady across two quarters. But there's two different ways of looking at that information and two different ways of pitching it to your audience. And it's no surprise that media companies that are trying to cultivate audiences on different sides of the political spectrum would have an interest then in shading the information in one direction or another.
Fragmentation of the Media Landscape
00:10:32
Speaker
So one picture of the media is just that it's beholden to particular corporate interests or to elites, and that's what causes them to promote misleading information. To what extent do you think that picture gets at what's going on?
00:10:50
Speaker
I think that picture is right as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far at all. So I think there's a more robust way of understanding the incentives that are at play there. And this is a nice segue then into the other half of the story behind our polluted informational environment. One half of that story is about the product, what counts as fake news. And the other half is about the producer. So let's think about that for just a minute.
00:11:13
Speaker
People that produce content, whether it's accurate information, misleading information, misinformation, disinformation, they all have goals. Not very many people go to work or sit down at a computer or write an article and don't have some particular goal in mind. For any kind of for-profit news company,
00:11:34
Speaker
Their goal is ultimately to make a profit. This is going to be true if it's a blogger who's trying to sell ad subscriptions. It doesn't matter if we're talking about the Wall Street Journal or whether you're talking about Fox News. All of them are trying to make a profit. That's why they're in this game.
00:11:50
Speaker
And to make a profit, you have to have an audience. Readers, viewers, you have to have an audience. Without an audience to either pay subscription dues or to watch advertisements, you're not going to make any money. The fact of the matter is, there are lots of different strategies for building an audience.
00:12:08
Speaker
And not all of them require you to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So it's maybe too fast to say the problem is that companies, news companies have corporate owners or whatever. The problem is that all of these companies are competing against one another for our
00:12:25
Speaker
you know, for our attention. And our attention is valuable and limited. And given that, they have an incentive to build their audience, even if that requires them to tell half truths, partial truths, or outright falsehoods.
00:12:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. So my rough impression of the media landscape, at least in the States, is that if you think about mainstream media institutions, initially they were products. You could almost describe them as elite style products.
00:13:02
Speaker
perhaps a narrower band of citizens, especially earlier in the 20th century, that they'd be targeted towards, and the employees of the institutions would come from a narrower range of society. This sort of expanded quite a bit until the end of the 20th century, and now you have, as you say, all these products competing for different people's attention, and it's a wide range of the populace now.
00:13:23
Speaker
And now there's almost a move away from just competing to attention to sell basically eyeballs to advertisers to getting subscribers and having a narrower range of people who you sell to and you really capture that person's worldview or what they're interested in. Do you think that in broad strokes that picture is correct or how would you update it or add to it?
00:13:44
Speaker
No, I think that's exactly right. So one way of capturing that shift, Caleb, is to talk about media choice. What's really happened is there's been an explosion in the media marketplace that has allowed a level of media choice that is unprecedented in human history. So think about the American world in 1950, for example.
00:14:07
Speaker
People had local radio stations that they could tune into, and there were the three big network TV stations, ABC, NBC, CBS. That was it, Legacy Broadcasters.
00:14:18
Speaker
While the legacy broadcasters were trying to reach an audience all across the country, they couldn't afford to target a niche market. They needed to have programs that appeal to conservatives and liberals and libertarians and people who didn't care about politics. And so those three main TV stations all had an incentive to be mainstream
00:14:43
Speaker
fair-minded, capture a broad audience, pretty vanilla. They couldn't afford to turn anyone off because they were being sold to a mass population. If you didn't like your options in Omaha, Nebraska, you're out of luck. There are only three TV stations, ABC, NBC, CBS, that was it.
00:15:00
Speaker
Look at how different the world is today. Not only are you not confined to those main three when it comes to TV because you've got cable news stations and all of these other TV stations that are now competing against the legacies, but you've got everything under the sun on the internet.
00:15:16
Speaker
So you've got podcasts and all kind of internet-based shows. The media marketplace has just exploded with choices. And what that means is that market has fragmented in such a way that companies have cropped up to occupy or take advantage of those little niche markets. There's a market for people who are interested in stoic philosophy. Never could have done that in 1950. There's a market for people who want
00:15:45
Speaker
right wing, proud boy, America first kind of content. If ABC had tried that in 1950, it would have lost too many of its viewers and not been able to compete. So this fragmentation of the market has incentivized producers to capture these kind of small niche markets where they can make a living. And that has just multiplied the problems vis-a-vis our relationship with
00:16:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. To what extent do you lay the blame on this to producers of media as opposed to consumers? One reading of the story is just that consumers like fake news. They like being fed whatever they like to hear, and there are going to be suppliers for what consumers like. That's it.
00:16:31
Speaker
I think there's a lot of truth to that criticism. Our information and misinformation exists in a marketplace. This is different than what happens in, say, North Korea or China, or to some extent, even a place like Russia. There, the information doesn't exist exactly in a free market. But in a place like the United States, information and disinformation lives in a free market, and markets respond to consumers.
00:16:55
Speaker
So there's a very straightforward sense in which producers are doing what they do. They're making the kind of shows that they make because that's what we as consumers want.
Technology's Role in Information Dynamics
00:17:06
Speaker
So there's a very straightforward sense in which the blame laid at our feet. We want the racy story about Bill Cosby. We don't want the boring story about a gun control policy, the nuance of some bit of Washington insider.
00:17:24
Speaker
gossip. What we care about are these racy stories and we want to hear our side look good and we want to hear the other side getting trashed. And insofar as those are the incentives that we have, when we come to the media producers, it's no surprise at all that our media landscape looks the way it does.
00:17:44
Speaker
And what's the role of the internet done in this picture? Basically that the internet amplifies what already exists, right? It amplifies the speed of information, it amplifies the degree to which the media landscape is fragmented.
00:17:57
Speaker
What else would you add to that? Yeah, good question. Good question. It's not, I wouldn't say that it's the internet per se, but it's just electronic media more generally, whether that's being able to send information over the data stream of your smartphone or digital cameras or whatever. So what happens is the incentives of news consumers hasn't shifted.
00:18:22
Speaker
In 1920, people liked racy stories and stories that made their side look good and the other side look bad and whatever. So the incentives of those of us who are consuming information, they haven't changed. The incentives of the producers haven't changed. Radio stations in 1950 were trying to make a living, like radio stations in 2022 were trying to make a living. So their incentives haven't changed.
00:18:44
Speaker
What's changed is the technology that links those two ends of the market, the producers and the consumers. The advent of electronic media is like this catalyst that sets a chemical relation on fire.
00:18:59
Speaker
And it's allowed us to do all kinds of things that we couldn't have done 50 years ago. So let me just name a few. First, we produce far more information than we have at any point in time in human history. And the amount of information that we're producing day in and day out is astounding. The number of new websites that come on, for example, every day.
00:19:19
Speaker
Electronic media allows us to create fakes at a rate that we've never been able to do so today. If you think about some of the great hoaxes of the 19th century or the early 20th century and how elaborate they were and how difficult it was to get a camera to fake a photo or whatever, they were very elaborate. Look, my 14-year-old can create a really persuasive deep fake or photoshopped image in about half an hour. So electronic media has made it really easy for us to fake things.
00:19:46
Speaker
Electronic media has forced us to outsource the curation of information. In the old days, I could get a phone book and I could flip through it and I was the one curating what I saw. What I saw was up to me. But there's so much information out there now that we're outsourcing curation of what we see to algorithms.
00:20:08
Speaker
and other companies that maybe we don't know or shouldn't trust. For example, when you Google something, Caleb, from your home and your computer, and I Google the same thing from my computer and my home, we're exceptionally likely to get different results because since about 2009,
00:20:27
Speaker
search engines like Google have been tailoring results to individual people. So when a climate change denier types in, is climate change real? And a scientist, one of my colleagues in the biology department types in, is climate change real? They're going to get very different returns in a search engine.
00:20:46
Speaker
So that's the third way in which this advent of electronic media is making this problem harder. And then one last one I'll mention, electronic media makes it really easy to share stories across individuals, not just from producers to consumers, but consumer to consumer in a way that wasn't available before.
00:21:06
Speaker
As a kid, I remember my grandmother cutting newspaper stories out, folding them up in a card, mailing them to me when she read a story that she thought I would find interesting. It took time. It took effort. There was a cost involved because she had to put a stamp on it. Think of how easy it is now to pick up your smartphone and read a story that makes you mad or makes you sad or whatever. And you can click share and you can immediately share that story with thousands of people in your network.
00:21:35
Speaker
And that's the kind of thing we could never have done before. And so I think there's a number of different ways in which adding electronic media to the mix of producer and consumer incentives has made for a really toxic environment.
Trust and Transparency in Media
00:21:50
Speaker
What do you think about the thought that one potential source of unrest is that our
00:22:01
Speaker
elites, mainstream media types, academics, politicians are so much more transparent than they were. They're so much more easy to access. And in a sense, it's much more difficult to see them as a role model. We almost know too much about them than we did in the past.
00:22:23
Speaker
That's an interesting thought and one that I haven't engaged directly with, but there was this idea at one point that the media types that we would see on TV were these perfectly objective, perfectly reasonable voice of America types. Think like Walter Cronkite, one of the most respected individuals in all of the media ecosystem, if you will, during the middle of the 20th century.
00:22:51
Speaker
And he was seen as being above the fray and perfectly reasonable and virtuous and whatever. And it is very hard to maintain that illusion, that facade of objectivity in a world where you're following someone's Twitter stream and you get to see their emotional reactions to things that happen all across the day. So I think you raise this really interesting point that there's a sense in which we personalize media personalities.
00:23:22
Speaker
to a point that we see them as having foibles and a kind of fallible grasp on the world, and they're less easy to trust, given how much we know about them. It's a really interesting thought. Practice Stoicism with Stoa. Stoa combines the ancient philosophy of Stoicism with meditation in a practical meditation app. It includes hundreds of hours of exercises, lessons, and conversations to help you live a happier life. Here's what our users are saying.
00:23:52
Speaker
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Strategies Against Fake News
00:24:19
Speaker
There's the issue of how do I make others fall less for fake news? And then of course there's the issue, how do I make myself fall less for fake news? And both of these are related to how do I make others have better beliefs and how do I myself navigate in this environment? I think I'm more interested in the latter of those. How do I come to correct beliefs?
00:24:46
Speaker
Not so much in these political discussions, though they are important. So given that we are in this mess, how do I figure out the correct belief about concrete issues, whether it is how safe is it to travel on a plane during the pandemic or how should I vote for in my local elections?
00:25:08
Speaker
Yeah, good. Okay, so let's focus in on what individuals can do to be better believers. As a philosopher, that's how I would put it, better believers, to believe more in line with your evidence, to believe in ways that are reasonable given the other commitments, intellectual commitments that you have and so forth. I want to outline three different things that you could do.
00:25:30
Speaker
The first thing that you could do is you could do a good job of disambiguating what I call big questions versus little questions. Big questions are questions that you cannot answer reliably given your own cognitive equipment. Little questions, on the other hand, are ones that you can answer reliably just given your kind of natural training, natural talents.
00:25:56
Speaker
It's a small question whether it's snowing outside right now. I can look outside and take a look around and I can reliably tell you whether it's snowing right now. It's a big question whether last year's snowfall was an average snowfall or not. That's the kind of thing that I can't just intuitively reflect on and then give you an accurate answer on. I would need the help of some experts to answer that.
00:26:20
Speaker
If we can do a good job in our own life of separating big questions from little questions, that helps us to know what to look for when we go out into our informational environment.
00:26:31
Speaker
It's a big question whether a vaccine is effective. Given that, you shouldn't trust anybody's gut reaction or intuition that a vaccine is not effective or causes side effects or whatever. That's just not the kind of thing that we can answer reliably on our own. We would need some kind of team of experts or equipment or whatever to answer that kind of question. And if we can calibrate ourselves to know what kind of answers
00:26:57
Speaker
count as good answers for a question that we're trying to answer, that would be a really good first start. So that's one thing we can do. Be clear about what kind of question we're asking.
00:27:08
Speaker
The second thing we can do is we can have, at least in the back of our minds, a kind of snapshot of where different media producers lie on a kind of third or continuum of reliability. We should know, for example, that Fox News tends to be less accurate than NPR, that MSNBC tends to be less accurate than
00:27:33
Speaker
The Wall Street Journal, we should have a kind of sense of what each of these producers are trying to do and how it is that they are making money. If we know that Fox News has a particular kind of angle and they're making money by telling a story that appeals to a certain segment of the population, then we can take those stories with a grain of salt or even better expose ourselves less to those particular sources of information.
00:28:00
Speaker
And if some of your readers are interested in this, you can just do a Google search for media calibration or media bias or whatever. And there are lots of researchers who can give you a nice, crisp picture of where different media sources lie on a kind of standard of political bias or accuracy.
00:28:17
Speaker
And the third thing I think we can do is when we start engaging with information, whether it's on the TV, social media, and internet site or whatever, you might appreciate this because this feels very stoic to me. We should pay attention to what's happening in us. We should pay attention to the emotional reaction that we're having to what we read. If what you're reading or what you're listening to or what you're watching on the TV is making you angry,
00:28:47
Speaker
If it's making you feel disgusted, if it's making you exuberant, you should pay attention. Those are good signs that you're being manipulated by the people who are producing that information. Now that's not to say it's infallible.
00:29:04
Speaker
Sometimes there's accurate information stuff that's perfectly true that will make you angry, that will make you whatever. So it's not like this is an infallible guide. But when you feel your hackles rising, when you feel yourself getting emotionally invested in a story or a TV program, that's a sign that your non-rational faculties are being engaged and that you ought to sit up and pay attention.
00:29:28
Speaker
Yeah, so how do you think then about this bridge issue moving from small questions to big questions in the context of something like evaluating whether I should get the vaccine, as you mentioned earlier.
00:29:45
Speaker
the sort of sketched out, maybe I would look at what experts say, but of course there's these questions about, okay, who are the experts? How can I link up that judgment to places where I know I have some sense of reliability to questions about that eventually lead me to a reasonable answer about whether I should take the vaccine or not.
00:30:08
Speaker
That's a concrete example that will help to illustrate this more general advice if you're wondering whether you should get the COVID vaccine. First step, you should realize that's a big question.
00:30:21
Speaker
You shouldn't trust Jenny McCarthy's intuition on whether the COVID vaccine is effective or whether it has side effects. You shouldn't trust anyone's intuition or gut thinking or their own kind of initial starting point. Why? Because that's just not the kind of question that beings like us with our cognitive equipment can answer reliably. So this is the kind of thing that we're going to need
00:30:46
Speaker
outside help. We're going to need in my terminology, we're going to need to try to build a kind of intellectual bridge that connects our local, natural, reliable faculties with this big, with this answer to this bigger question. How can we figure that kind of thing out?
00:31:02
Speaker
And in this case, what we need to do is we need to turn to experts and in particular, a body of experts. So let me say two things about that. First, not anyone who just has a medical degree is an expert on epidemiology or an expert on vaccines. So if the idea is I went to my checkup, my annual checkup with my MD, and she's really nervous about the vaccine, so I'm not gonna get it, that does not count as appealing to a relevant expert to answer this big question.
00:31:31
Speaker
because your local MD that works in a dock in a box and treats sniffles most of the year is not in a good position to tell you whether or not the vaccine is effective or has these negative side effects.
00:31:44
Speaker
Instead, we need a broader group of experts that's focused on this question of vaccine efficacy. And we need more than one of them. We need a body of experts. And that's because with big questions, it's really hard to get a reliable answer to them. And if you have 20 people measure something, it might turn out three of them are wrong. Three of them just have a bad methodology or had a bad data set or whatever. The world is just messy.
00:32:10
Speaker
So what we want to do is we want to look for a group of people who are truly experts in that field and see whether there's a consensus across them. If there is, that's a safe way for you to answer a big question. If there's not, then it's not. So when you're thinking about the COVID vaccine,
00:32:26
Speaker
I think what you ought to do is find relevant groups of experts like people at the CDC and find out what that group of experts recommends. Don't trust your local doctor and don't trust your gut. Those are not reliable ways of answering a big question like whether the vaccine would help you or whether it would have negative side effects.
00:32:48
Speaker
Makes sense. I think when people hear that sort of thing, they might latch on to, oh wait, the CDC said all these false things or something like this. If they have, or maybe dispose to not want to take the vaccine, that might be their initial hesitation because they may have heard about all these false things that the CDC said at one point and then updated or changed. Which sort of brings the question to the fore of how do you evaluate an institution over time as something that is reliably producing information.
00:33:18
Speaker
It seems to me that at least just to put some of my own cars on the table, the CDC is largely reliable, but probably runs about six months to two years too late on the correct view. So it's maybe closer to people who are close to a relevant body of experts, but I wouldn't consider this the CDC experts particularly, except as more a mix of PR and medical professionals.
00:33:43
Speaker
That seems like a reasonable view to me too. And with the case of the CDC and COVID in particular, there's no doubt that they made mistakes. So this would have been a cleaner way for them to have dealt with this issue.
00:33:58
Speaker
And on the one hand, they should just acknowledge when they've made a mistake. Instead of just updating things and sweeping it under the rug, they should just say, we thought this on the basis of this data, it turns out that was wrong. We now have better data and the better data shows this other thing. You know, anyone who has, anyone who is a STEM major in college at least, hopefully most college graduates
00:34:21
Speaker
have this sense of the scientific method and have this sense of science being this reliable but imperfect grasp of the natural world. And as we get more information, we go through this kind of Bayesian updating and we get better theories. Good science teachers are always telling their students, we only have theories and we try to fit our theories to the facts. And when the data changes, our theories change. And places like the CDC ought to be honest about that.
00:34:48
Speaker
rather than trying to give this air of infallibility, which then I think to your point, Caleb, caused some consternation during the early days of the pandemic. It seemed like the CDC didn't know what was going on. They were updating their advice without saying why they were doing it. And I think they should just be honest that their guidance is reliable, but fallible. And the fact that they update things over time is exactly what you would expect
00:35:16
Speaker
rather than that being some kind of strike against them. Yeah, I think it is a matter of setting one's expectations in a way that, especially for these larger questions, one should expect even our best thinkers to get quite a lot wrong. A lot of these matters are very confusing, whether it has to do with evaluating the efficacy of lockdowns or evaluating the efficacy of some economic intervention. These are the sorts of things that
00:35:45
Speaker
even you might it might be reasonable to think the best experts have about a 60% chance of getting right maybe even slightly less and I think that's a useful shift for thinking about these issues is you're not trying to find
00:36:00
Speaker
the group of person who is always correct and said you're trying to find a almost a portfolio of people who are, will get you better or else at least as close as you can to the right view. But that seems right. Yeah. And let me say two things. If you're worried about the CDC, you know, that's one group of experts.
00:36:17
Speaker
But what you can do is you can contrast their advice with other groups of experts who are truly experts in their field as well. So if you are worried, for example, about COVID advice from the CDC, you can look at COVID advice from the World Health Organization, right? So you can triangulate, for lack of a better way of putting it, where you're getting these groups of people who are truly experts in the field, not like
00:36:39
Speaker
know, osteologists or people, you know, who have no business telling you about vaccine efficacy, but get groups of experts and triangulate on the truth across those different groups. This is a trivial example, but I live in Colorado as we're skiing is big business and
00:36:54
Speaker
The people who want to catch the powder and find out where the snow is going to be, what they do is they look at the German forecast. They're going to have the German model, or it's really the European model of snowfall, and they have this model of snowfall. And what they try to do is they take these experts and they try to triangulate and say, look, when the groups of experts are all telling us
00:37:13
Speaker
there's going to be this big snowfall next weekend in this particular area, then you should raise your confidence on that sort of thing. When one group says it, that's fine. When another group says it, that's even better. When three different forecasts using different input all triangulate on the same thing, then you can have even more confidence in that judgment. So I think that's one useful way of thinking about bodies of experts. And then the second thing I want to say, given your point about experts getting it right,
00:37:42
Speaker
Expertise is domain limited and often experts make predictions or statements that are outside of their domain. In particular, experts make predictions about what will happen in the future, what's going to happen in an election, for example. And expertise in one local domain doesn't somehow automatically confer expertise over predicting the future. And it turns out experts have a pretty lousy track record.
00:38:09
Speaker
of predicting future events. So there are discrete domains, like weather forecasting, where they're pretty good. But if you're asking a political expert to tell us what's going to happen in 2024, or if you're asking someone at the CDC whether there's going to be a third wave, those are really the kind of things that lie outside of their expertise.
Truth-Seeking in Markets and Media
00:38:27
Speaker
And we shouldn't trust experts in cases like that.
00:38:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think, although this might be somewhat controversial, I think there's a case where thinking that the most reliable epistemic institutions in the States are on Wall Street, just because you would expect people who have a lot of
00:38:47
Speaker
incentives to get the correct views about the price of some assets to be closer to the truth than someone maybe who has some belief about some political or cultural matter that isn't going to affect whether they get a raise or not in their next evaluation. So I think there's
00:39:05
Speaker
a case for thinking that at least some financial institutions are the most epistemically reliable bodies that exist. And even so, they get so many things wrong, right, or most many do, which I think just generally suggests that the world is a very complicated and random place. Yeah, that seems fair to me. And you could expand that point, Caleb, it's not just
00:39:29
Speaker
investment bankers or Wall Street that has money on the line, but just think of betting markets more generally or where people are betting on sports games or people are betting on elections or whatever. Once people start putting money down,
00:39:42
Speaker
have a pretty clear incentive, as you pointed out, to try to get things right or be careful with their evidence or update or whatever. So I think it's interesting to follow betting markets on all sorts of things, not just in matters of stocks and bonds, say by elections or football games or whatever, because betting markets have a clear incentive to get things right. Whereas, as you pointed out, lots of people don't. Take James Carville or some other talking head on TV.
00:40:09
Speaker
They don't have an incentive to get things right. They have incentive to say things that make their side look good or motivate people to go to the polls or say something outrageous that gets them invited to the next talk show or they get a stipend. Their incentives are obviously misaligned with the truth. And so I think that that's a smart move to look at places where people have a material cost of error. That's the case where they're most likely to believe in accord with their efforts.
00:40:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. Of course, there's a work by Philip Tetlock, who I'm sure you are familiar with, an expert political judgment. He catalogs experts judgments over time and finds that the most popular political analysts are much more often to be mistaken than groups who are less popular, just because you'd expect them to be more charismatic, more entertaining. And those sorts of things are not aligned with having correct views.
00:41:06
Speaker
Yeah, I was just going to say his work is amazing just on expert failure in general. And it really elucidates this point that the news is doing multiple things. It is trying to inform you, but it's also trying to entertain you. So sometimes people talk about the entertainment industry versus the news industry, and there's a clear sense
00:41:27
Speaker
in the kind of market in which we live in, that every news organization is both. They're trying to inform you. They're also trying to entertain you. And if it turns out that the entertaining political analyst is the one that builds the biggest readership or viewership, then that's the person who's going to get invited back more often.
00:41:47
Speaker
Yes, which connects to your last point in a way, which is not only is a news media trying to entertain you, you want to be entertained typically. When I go to listen to a particular podcast, often it's useful for me to bucket even many apparently serious political or philosophical podcast.
00:42:06
Speaker
as entertainment. I listen to this for entertainment reasons, not because I think it's going to be giving a special insight into the world. If I wanted an insight, I'd probably be listening to something that's a lot more boring and much less fun. That's a fair point. I know on your podcast, you've had Julia Galif on, and this is a point that she makes in her book, The Scout Mindset. Our beliefs
00:42:33
Speaker
serve a variety of different roles for us. Yes, they're part of our map of the world. So we're trying to figure out what the world is like so that we can maneuver through it and execute our plan. But our beliefs do all kinds of things, all kinds of other more soldiery things for us too. Our beliefs about the world bring us comfort.
00:42:50
Speaker
Our beliefs about the world give us courage to do sorts of things. Our beliefs about the world signal to other people, whether we're in this group rather than that group. And so we're complicated creatures who aren't just in the world trying to develop beliefs that are perfectly accurate or perfectly true. Our beliefs are serving all of these other kinds of functions too. And the media organizations have picked up on the fact that those are the kinds of beings we are, and they're delivering what we want.
00:43:16
Speaker
They're delivering us ways of preserving our identities, signaling our identities, feeling good about ourselves, feeling disgust at the others and the outsiders or whatever. And it turns out that's a lucrative market.
00:43:30
Speaker
Your second bit of advice was around looking at how different media scoring, media transparency groups score different forms of media, whether it's Fox News or the New York Times, NPR, and so on. I think those are useful, but to some extent, I think I am
00:43:52
Speaker
skeptical of such projects because they are good at labeling how often a group might make a particular claim that is correct or incorrect, but don't have good measurements for the value of what they get right or wrong. So if you connect us to a financial metaphor, you can have some firm that bets on correct beliefs that are not very valuable.
00:44:20
Speaker
versus some other firm that happens to get most things wrong, but gets a few things exceptionally right, and will outperform firms who might be, say, more accurate, but more accurate, or less valuable, and some questions. How do you think about this sort of issue of thinking not just about truth, but the value of particular claims being right? That's a nice point. It's one thing to be deluded about
00:44:50
Speaker
you know, what the weather will be like next week. It's another thing to be diluted about whether there's a war in Ukraine right now. And the third thing to be diluted about whether pandemic is.
00:45:02
Speaker
real and the virus is threatening or whatever. So those are all very different things. So I think the point you raise is a good one. There's no media researcher that I know of that is trying to connect some kind of valence to a proposition and then measure whether some outlet or media producer is doing better on the more important ones than on the worst ones. I think that's a legitimate and fair criticism
00:45:30
Speaker
of the kind of snapshots that you do see online. And that's not to say that what's online or the research that people are doing is not valuable. I still think it has some valuable, some sort of valuable end, even if it misses out on the point that you're making right now. It's not as if, for example, there's some absolute measure of being to the left or being to the right. Those are just relative measurement. But still, insofar as
00:46:00
Speaker
a graph or a depiction or a data set could tell you that this source is other things being equal, framing things to the left of this
The Complexity of Expert Judgments
00:46:09
Speaker
other one. That still strikes me as useful information, even though it leaves out something that I think you point out is very important.
00:46:16
Speaker
So just to move to another concrete issue, there's a question over issues like, is long COVID real? And if it is, how bad is it to have long COVID? And that matters because a number of people, their behavior might change if they thought it was especially harmful to have long COVID, even if the chances of getting COVID might have gone down significantly at this point.
00:46:44
Speaker
And they might also believe that it's worse to get it more than one time. And there's some additive or other property. How would you think about a concrete issue like this? Good question. I don't know that much about this particular issue. So the question of long COVID. So what I'm going to try to do is sketch a strategy.
00:47:06
Speaker
that makes sense for trying to figure out how to answer these questions about the serious nature of long COVID. So first step, we should realize that this is a big question.
00:47:18
Speaker
Some people might just have this deep gut intuition that COVID is going to have these terrible long-term ramifications. Other people may not have that at all, or they may even have what you might think of it, the opposite intuition that, no, this is nothing more than a cold. I don't think we should trust any of that. Humans are just not well put together. We're not wired. We don't have the cognitive equipment to answer that kind of forecasting type question on the basis of our gut. So that's step one. We're going to need experts.
00:47:46
Speaker
Step two, turns out that the experts are going to have a pretty limited data set in this case, right? If we're going to measure the impact of COVID over the course of years, and it's only just started, then the kind of data set that the experts could have is by its very nature going to be limited. So what that means, epidemiologists and those who really are the experts are going to have to look at similar kind of diseases to try to draw an argument from analogy, or they're going to have to make predictions based on the limited data that they have now.
00:48:16
Speaker
In both of those cases, there might be plausible things that they could say, but I think that we're warranted in taking them with more than a grain of salt, given the paucity of data, or given the fact that we're making an analog to a different kind of disease, just because that happens in that case.
00:48:34
Speaker
obviously isn't a fail-safe guide that is going to happen in this case. So I think that we should be skeptical of any kind of robust judgment about the long-term effects of COVID for exactly that reason. We can't answer it on our own, and the experts are in some sense hobbled at this point in history. Very fair.
00:48:53
Speaker
Are there any other things you'd like to add to the issue of thinking about how to come to view on how reliable a given expert is in the either political or practical landscape of things? The general rules, just to reiterate them, are one, don't trust individuals. Trust groups when you can, just because the likelihood that a group gets it wrong is less than the likelihood of an individual getting it wrong.
00:49:19
Speaker
And two, look at the experts incentives. James Carville might be an expert in a whole lot of things, but his expertise does not extend to predicting the future and he's got a clear interest in behaving in ways that are
00:49:35
Speaker
reckless, epistemically reckless. Whereas, for example, a researcher at an R1 institution has a really strong incentive to get to the truth because if he doesn't, his career will suffer and so forth. So look for bodies of experts instead of individuals and see what's at stake for them. Is there a material cost of error for them being wrong? Try to go with people who do have that cost of error rather than those who are error
00:50:00
Speaker
Yep. Makes sense. What do you think about the view that there's an exceptionally high return to intelligence? So you should expect that people who are really smart, even if they're not, in some sense, an expert in the field, to be able to do much better than a typical person of that field in a typically relatively short amount of time. So an example of this would be, I think it was Indiana University where they had the people who did
00:50:27
Speaker
their initial COVID policy ended up being physicists rather than their local epidemiologists, probably because physicists happen to be suited to about that are especially numerical. And just whoever probably forcing contingent reasons, the physicists at that school had maybe a little bit more initiative than the epidemiologists to
00:50:53
Speaker
start proposing their ideas. So what do you think about this? That's a great question. And the short answer is, I don't know. I don't know because that's a big question and we would have to find experts and run tests and develop data. I shouldn't trust my gut intuition on whether smart people have this kind of edge or are more likely to arrive at the truth. It genuinely is a big question. And I'll just mention one thing that gives me pause.
00:51:19
Speaker
There have been studies showing that measures of intelligent quotient or other measures of education actually correlate with people being more mistaken on certain kinds of issues, namely issues that have to do with their identity. When your identity gets wrapped up in something,
00:51:38
Speaker
Then you can, someone who's really smart can marshal all of their intellectual resources to shoot down objections and to reframe data to make their side look good, even when that's not really thinking like a scout or following the evidence. So that's a clear example.
00:51:55
Speaker
of where being smart is actually not an asset, but it's a kind of liability. Smart plus identity belief gets you trouble. And I'll just mention one concrete example of this has to do with climate change. And you map out people's belief with climate change and their some measure of intelligence or education. I don't remember exactly what it was. And people's, you know,
00:52:16
Speaker
Commitments to climate change seem to track their identities rather than track their level of intelligence or education. So that gives me pause about this idea that being smart is somehow more generally or always more likely to land you on the truth. Well, he's less smart. It might just depend on the context.
00:52:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. I suppose in other contexts, I've noticed that some people just are exceptionally more talented than others and can do much better than in a much shorter amount of time. So in startups, for example, some people are just insanely good at what they do and can outperform people who have been in the relevant field for a decade or more. You certainly do see that change, but of course you also see
00:52:58
Speaker
the effect where someone, especially intelligent, just doesn't give up their view on some pet issue and ends up becoming a bit of a crank. So it's always a judgment call about which world are we in. And it might turn out, my suggestion had to do with identity. And maybe it turns out that's right, where it's some project that doesn't absorb your entire identity. Maybe you can get enough critical distance that your intelligence helps you to parse the world in an accurate way. And then sometimes when you just see yourself as
00:53:28
Speaker
a liberal, a conservative, a believer, or whatever. And even if you're really smart, you can't get enough critical distance from that set of ideas to evaluate them in light of the evidence that you have.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:53:41
Speaker
There's this idea that one should keep one's identity small, the thought being that if you don't identify so much with being a conservative or being a libertarian, being a liberal, then when that group of people or beliefs associated with that people are criticized, you'll be less likely to just immediately respond with defensive posture or reactive. Great advice. Excellent. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
00:54:12
Speaker
No, this was really fun. All right. Perfect. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for listening to Stole Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
00:54:32
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.