- Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic on how things are much worse than a misinformation crisis;
- Meteorologists notice that ignorance is becoming socially acceptable — but this has always been true, as C.P. Snow noted;
- The Republican conspiracy theory that children who go to college are indoctrinated into liberal positions is belied by reality. It’s more that children who experience the world reject the ideologies of Republicans.
The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel, 10 Oct 2024: I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is, subtitled “What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis.”
The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!”
With examples of fake videos and harebrained theories.
Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.
And the lies repeated by Trump, Vance, and Fox News. And Musk. The victims are government officials, like FEMA. Republican politicians post obviously AI-generated images and excuse them as being “real on some deeper level.” And it’s not about persuading people.
But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
And
What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality. If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.
This of course aligns with David Brin’s theme of the right’s eternal assaults on every fact-based profession. (See my discussion of his book.)
What does this mean for the long-term future? Probably not the extinction of species, just its engagement with the real world. Humanity survived for a millennium as the Catholic Church discredited ancient knowledge and forbid new knowledge. In large part because not everyone in the world was a member of the Catholic Church.
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Along the same lines…
The Morning Heresy, Jeff Dellinger, 11 Oct 2024: “Ignorance is Becoming Socially Acceptable” – Meteorologists Under Siege, West Bank Settlements, and Raw Milk Ridiculousness
The quote in the title is a characterization of several items in this post. Perhaps this one in particular, from a feature in Rolling Stone the toll of hurricane misinformation on meteorologists.
Cappucci says that he’s noticed an enormous change on social media in the last three months: “Seemingly overnight, ideas that once would have been ridiculed as very fringe, outlandish viewpoints are suddenly becoming mainstream and it’s making my job much more difficult.”
What caught my eye about this is that it’s always been fashionable to display certain kinds of ignorance. This was the theme of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures essay (discussed here), in which, a century ago and still largely true to this day, scientists know much more about the humanities than the humanities folks know about science, and the latter are proud of it. (Science fiction bridges the gap, at its best.)
This attitude is becoming less and less tenable as the world is increasingly dominated by forces that can only be understood through science and technology.
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And so the problem with all these issues is that life in a fantasy-land will eventually bump up against reality.
NY Times, Opinion by Jamelle Bouie, 11 Oct 2024: The Problem With This Conspiracy Theory Is Reality”
Here the topic is the conservative fear that when young people go off to college they are “indoctrinated” into various liberal positions, in particular on the issue of abortion.
This idea that young voters have been indoctrinated — or even brainwashed — to reject Republicans and conservative ideas has significant purchase on the political right. Last month, responding to suggestions that institutions were controlled by left-wing ideologues, Dan Crenshaw, the pugilistic Republican congressman from Texas, declared that “the Left” had “turned higher education into a tool for indoctrination, rather than education,” and that “the Right needs to fight back” and “challenge the ideological chokehold on education” lest “woke elites” keep “pushing irrational leftist ideas.”
Now it’s long been noticed that “reality has a liberal bias,” that is, education challenges the verities of conservative ideologies, which as we saw yesterday, are built on the most basic, tribalistic motivations of primitive human nature. And human nature does not accurately perceive the world; human nature evolved to promote survival of the species. To preserve those survivalist ideologies, conservatives would prefer to avoid or suppress education. But the point of the essay here is that the conservative thesis must be false based on purely statistical grounds. (Needless to say, most people, including conservatives, do not understand statistics, or the role of chance in everyday life.) It begins with the fear many parents have that…
It is easy to understand the real fear among ordinary Americans that once your children are outside the home, they will take on ideas and identities that don’t fit with what you imagined for their lives. But that is not what we have here. What we have here, coming from these conservative and Republican voices, is the paranoid assertion that the nation’s institutions of higher education are engaged in a long-running effort to indoctrinate students and extinguish conservatism.
The problem with this conspiracy theory, of course, is reality.
Which is to say,
To start, a vast majority of young people attending institutions of higher education in the United States are not enrolled in elite colleges and universities. They are not even enrolled in competitive or selective institutions. Instead, most college kids attend less selective schools where the most popular degree programs are ones like business or nursing or communications — not the ever-shrinking number of humanities majors blamed for the supposed indoctrination of young people.
And if there were indoctrination, shouldn’t there be some sort of evidence? (Never mind for the moment that conservatives make assertions and don’t believe in evidence.)
And even if the nation’s college students were clamoring to study history, philosophy, sociology, literature and other similar disciplines, there are so many students and so many classes — and so many teachers — that one should expect some proof of indoctrination to emerge at some point, somewhere. But even those conservative organizations devoted to tracking and monitoring college professors struggle to find evidence of anything that looks like the Soviet-style brainwashing described by Musk and other MAGA conservatives.
Here’s the gist: young people who experience the world reject the ideologies of Republicans:
If, as the latest youth poll from the Harvard Institute of Politics suggests, most young people in the United States reject the Republican Party’s views on abortion or climate change or health care or gun regulation, it’s less because they’ve been indoctrinated to oppose ideological conservatism and more because, like all voters, they have come to certain conclusions about the world based on their experience of it.
And that’s why conservatives want to keep kids at home.
