Why We Can't Have Conversations Anymore and My Problems with Right Wing Epistemology
Thoughts on epistemic helplessness, how smart people end up in the MAGA pit, and the modern right's war on expertise
More politics. I'm concerned this may be a recurring part of this blog. I don't like writing about politics but I am having a lot of trouble just going about my day when I hear about things that are going on. Writing helps me through that, but of course you all have to deal with reading it. Apologies!
[EDIT: some people have interpreted this piece to mean that because right wing epistemology is flawed, I must be advocating for a return to the old style of ‘just trust the (left) experts’ as the only correct epistemology. That is NOT what I am arguing. I do not have a coherent alternative to propose, I just know that MAGA isn’t it.]
I.
Imagine you had a treasure chest filled to the brim with valuable gems and artifacts and other things that Indiana Jones would insist belong in a museum. And imagine that you were tasked with protecting this treasure chest.
There's a few ways you could go about it. The most obvious is to put the treasure chest behind some big vault, build a massive castle around said vault, and make sure the castle is guarded by trolls and people who ask tricky questions at all times. We could call this 'standard security', or as I like to say, 'security through security'.
Another approach is to hide the treasure chest. Steal away in the night in secret, and bury it somewhere no one will ever find it, and then maybe even forget where you put it yourself. This is colloquially known as 'security through obscurity' — anyone who finds the treasure chest can steal the riches, but they have to find it first, and that's hard to do.
Most people do some combination of these two things, but there is a rarer third option. You could create a bunch of identical fake treasure chests, exactly the same as the one you actually care about. And you fill each with similar gems and artifacts — all fake of course — that could easily pass for the real thing. If anyone manages to break into your castle or find your buried treasure, they would get stuck behind one more layer of security. This, I call 'security through ambiguity', though it is sometimes called 'misdirection security'.
Security through ambiguity is a sort of funny concept. Instead of trying to actually protect your data or secrets, you just kinda…make shit up. But it has to be realistic shit! It has to seem real! The more realistic the better. In fact, the core idea is that you can't tell the real from the fake apart. So in a real world context, you would create a bunch of fake treasure chests. And in a data context, if you were trying to protect a database of credit card information, you could fill your database with tons and tons of fake credit cards. And so on.
A few years ago, I was playing Smash Bros Melee with a friend and tossing around startup ideas, as a particular brand of college student is wont to do. And this was around the height of people getting cancelled for random things they had said or done — I think some group of kids had just gotten their college acceptances rescinded because of some edgy shitposting. In between rounds he turned to me and said "you know, there should be a service that you can sign up to, that automatically creates a bunch of fake edgy shitposts and puts them in your inbox. That way, if anyone ever leaks your data and tries to get you cancelled, you can reveal that you're using the service and then not get cancelled." He may have been a bit high while we were playing.
But the idea always stuck with me. You would have plausible deniability, especially if a lot of other people were using this service too. If someone managed to hack your phone and find your edgy-memelord text messages, you could claim that they weren't your edgy-memelord texts, but rather convincing fakes. In fact, you've never sent an edgy-memelord text in your whole life, it's all fakes. And, like, sure, the fact that you're using this bizarre strategy may hint to some people that not everything is above board to begin with. But you create an environment of epistemic helplessness, where people don't know how to even begin to evaluate what is correct and what is fake.
In a broader sense, security through ambiguity doesn't just make it harder to 'find the secret'. In some cases, it also devalues the original thing you were trying to hide. Which, I guess, is sorta the point. If you can't tell the difference between the real thing and the fake thing, it all kinda blurs together anyway. When faced with a bunch of identical treasure chests, most people may get confused and take the wrong chest, and others may throw up their hands and walk away in frustration. But an enterprising thief would just walk up whistling a tune, take any one of the chests, and later sell it on the black market as if it was real. After all, it looks real enough.
II.
How old were you when you gave up on mainstream news?
I stopped reading the NYT right around the extremely politicized Kavanaugh confirmation hearings in 2018. But if I'm being honest, it wasn't that particular moment that caused me to give up. It was a steady trickle of Gell-Mann amnesia moments.1 It was the adversarial reporting on Silicon Valley, the hypocritical framing of the Cambridge Analytica2, the terrible takes on encryption. It was the uncritical acceptance of far left social dogma — man-spreading, "Latinx", intersectionality, open racism against South and East Asian voices. It was Trump derangement syndrome, the willingness to pull things out of context and catastrophize things that were really just fine while simultaneously pushing insane conspiracies like the Russian ‘pee-tapes’.3 It was the eagerness to cannibalize anyone who didn't agree with them, with the righteous fury that is so common among religious zealots. Going after Bernie-bros? Really?
Maybe I’m factually wrong. Maybe the NYT et. al. were actually correct about all of this. But my perception was one of years of decay and institutional rot.
I was at Columbia at the time, so I was basically surrounded by *gestures broadly* all of that. And I got really tired of it, and disconnected from the supposedly impartial media ecosystem that was peddling politics in the place of news.
I didn't realize until much later that this was a very dangerous place to be. I had been reading mainstream news for at least a decade by that point; much of what I knew about the world came from the eyes and ears of reporters who I generally assumed to be truthful and unbiased. In other words, I had built up an epistemology, a way of acquiring knowledge and incorporating it into my model of the world. And in 2018, I basically threw it all out, leaving a vacuum in its place.
But nature hates a vacuum.
I didn't just, like, stop learning new things about the world. That's not how any of this works. Instead I turned to alternative news sources. There were some broader, more decentralized platforms — Reddit and Hackernews and LessWrong. But mostly I started following specific people much more closely. Matt Levine of Money Stuff. Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex (and later
). Ben Thompson at Stratechery. More recently, (now that he’s independent from the Times). These aren't impartial sources. Hell, the average comment on a hackernews post isn't even likely to be correct. But they don’t pretend to be unbiased, and so in a sense feel more honest than the average NYT reporter. In a very short period of time, I clumsily and unintentionally built a different epistemology.In retrospect, I got very lucky. I think the new information diet I ended up constructing for myself is pretty good, maybe even better than the original.4 But it's hard to see the ways in which it might have weaknesses. This is a meta problem with all epistemologies. There's a world where I start following Jordan Peterson or Milo Yiannapolis, where I start falling into a right wing conspiracy pit without realizing. In this hypothetical world, I'd be standing here defending the obvious goodness of that way of viewing things. In some sense, "correctness" doesn't matter. The conspiracy theorist and religious fundamentalist has as much conviction as the academic or scientist. The tricky thing about falling into a pit is that it's hard to get out.
This article is tagged "politics", so maybe you see where I'm going with all this.
I don't think my story is particularly unique. Over the last few months, I've had a lot of conversations with some very smart people who voted for Trump, often over my protests. And after each fruitless conversation, I would go back to try and understand how they ended up holding onto beliefs that were, frankly, insane to me. The pattern was pretty obvious. Every one of those brilliant people had a moment of disillusionment with the prevailing methods of knowledge seeking. Some straw-that-broke-the-camels-back of their own.5 And in their epistemic helplessness, in the mire of fake news and false agendas and political actors, they chose the wrong treasure chest.
Some may protest that this is maybe unfair to the right, and in particular to the MAGA right. No one tries to be a villain, everyone is the hero of their own story — the average MAGA probably thinks I am as wrong as I think they are.
But, jokes aside, I take the concern seriously. If I think there's something meaningfully different about Trump, and Musk, and the world they are trying to create, it's on me to explain why. Or at least, that feels more productive than screaming into the void.
III.
To a first approximation, epistemology asks "who or what should I trust for information?" This is a tough question to answer! You don't, like, come out of the womb knowing to trust Fox News, the local parish priest, or Neil DeGrasse Tyson. You're born trusting your eyes and ears and your parents, and that's more or less it.
You could imagine a world where the only way people gathered new information was directly through what they could experience themselves. I imagine primitive humans more or less did just that. But relying on yourself is extremely limiting. If you had to personally verify whether every plant was poisonous or every animal edible, you'd probably end up dying pretty quick. Much better to go ask a trusted friend in the village, maybe someone who spends a lot of time only thinking about flora and fauna, whether these new berries you found are going to be delicious or give you a horrible bout of dysentery. This is the basic idea behind credentials — the village gets together and agrees that Bob is the medicine guy, you go to Bob for any medicine questions, and anyone else who has opinions about medicine can take a hike. Bob's word carries weight, because he's spent a lot of time thinking about things related to medicine, or whatever, and you presumably haven't, so if Bob says don't eat the berries you don't eat the berries.
Credentials are the bedrock of civilization. Our ability to delegate trust is what separates us from animals.
We aren't born with credentialing systems. Much like banking, or political theory, or rule of law, humanity had to invent 'credentials' as a concept. Credentials are a social technology. And like other social technologies, credentials are held up by the social norms that govern the society you are born in. You learn which credentials to trust from the people around you. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, every society and culture that ever flourished had a lot of tradition and ritual around deciding who the trusted people in society were, whether it was shamans, priests, or university graduates.
In 2025, our credentialing system is complicated and thorough. There are all sorts of degrees — bachelor degrees! Masters degrees! PhD! JD! MD! — that confer status, and many many more certifications. We have institutions that rate institutions, layer upon layer of validation and accreditation. Sometimes these systems fail, of course. Some people get degrees who really shouldn't. And there is a ton of cruft and waste as smart people are forced to jump through hoops. But this system was built through generations of iteration by very smart people, with an underlying focus on truth seeking. At a meta level, smart people look for epistemological systems that do things like self-critique and hypothesis testing because they believe they get better long term gains, even at the cost of short term ones. For all of its imperfections, our existing credentialing systems have these good habits built in. Cards on the table, I hated college, and most of my education. But I wanted to reform it, not get rid of it entirely. Even I have to admit that there is a certain baseline amount of rigor that is institutionalized in our education system. That is a good thing! It means that our credentials have actual value!
But in 2025, it's also easier than ever to just claim expertise, even when you have none. Most of it isn't malicious — it's just that everyone in the entire world has a megaphone, all the time. "Well, my sister's boyfriend said he saw bigfoot", but times a billion.
People with credentials make mistakes. Every mistake is a blow to the underlying value of the credential and the credentialing institution. Whenever the NYT gets something wrong, one more person may throw their hands up and start seeking alternative sources of information. And there is a wealth of alternative sources of information, more than ever before. The vast majority of them are, frankly, total bullshit. But the temptation to confirmation bias is strong.
Bad epistemological habits are self reinforcing and self defending. What if those alternative sources start telling you that the credentialing system itself is corrupt? What if, idk, you decide that 4 year university programs are inherently suspect, or that anyone with a degree is biased in some way against you?
Sometimes I think about flat earthers. When I was growing up, these people basically didn't exist; or if they did, they were in such small numbers that they were easily relegated to the fringes of society. Now they're seemingly everywhere — Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of people all talking about how the Earth is actually a flat disc.6 It took millions of years of cultural evolution to get to the point where people would believe that the earth is round, millions of years to build up the social infrastructure for people to trust mathematicians and scientists without learning how to do the proofs themselves. And now, because people doubt the scientists, they don't believe the science. How do you convince someone of something that, to them, is so obvious they can see it with their own eyes?
The biggest problem with flat earthers is not a factual one. You can take any flat earther up in a plane and they can see the earth curve away into the distance. No, the issue is that flat earthers are in an epistemological pit. They don't trust anyone except their own senses, and anyone who tells them that their eyes are wrong is inherently suspect, and anyone who tells them their senses are right is immediately believable precisely because it goes against the grain and validates what they already believe. "How could I trust Anthony Fauci about COVID when he's telling me to disbelieve my own eyes about whether the earth is round?" To be fair, there is a certain twisted intuition here. We rail against people who tell us that 2 + 2 = 5 precisely because authoritarians have an incentive to manipulate and lie for their own agenda. There's a lot of nuance in knowing when to delegate trust to someone else, and who to delegate to. But if all you have is your eyes and your immediate experiences, the only way you learn is when you get fucked over yourself.
I think this is the foundation of so much of the conflict between the MAGA right and…everyone else. Like, think about the vaccine debate. The people in the pit are arguing from first principles — "Of course sticking foreign substances in me is bad! I know a lot of people who have gotten sick from eating/smoking/injecting something they really shouldn't have. And I've never gotten polio, I've never known anyone who got polio. So how bad could that be?" And that argument is all well and good until you get polio! But by then it is way too late. You need someone to tell you that polio is a risk precisely because you cannot evaluate the risk on your own without serious injury. And so on with raw milk, or unfluoridated water, or nuclear proliferation, or violating judicial review, or deporting dissidents, or whatever else. The world is filled with things that seem fine in the short term, that will really fuck you in the long term. Some berries look delicious even though they are deadly, and your senses and intuition only need to be wrong exactly once for you to die.
And more generally, society as a whole needs people who, either through their own experience or study or bad luck, can warn others so that the group as a whole can survive.
I'm reminded of Kotaku Wamura, late mayor of the Japanese fishing town of Fudai. As a child in 1933, he witnessed massive flooding caused by tsunamis that killed hundreds and destroyed the town. Forty years later, as mayor, he insisted that the town build a massive sea wall, nearly twice the size of those in neighboring towns. It cost millions. And a generation had passed; most of the people who were around for the previous tsunamis had died of old age or moved away. As a result Wamura was roundly criticized, and he died in shame with many thinking that he had misspent public funds.
During the 2011 Tohoku tsunami, neighboring towns were swept away. Fudai alone survived, with only a single casualty and almost no physical damage. It took almost 90 years for Wamura to be proven right, but his expertise ended up saving the entire town.
I have my own problems with so-called experts and the modern 'expert' industry. I was frustrated by the slow reaction of the expert class on COVID, and equally so by the FDA slow-rolling the vaccines.7 I have my doubts about the public and private education system. I really don't like how we do healthcare. But all of these problems with expertise are surface level — experts are way more right than wrong, and when I don't trust CNN I go and read nature articles and cell papers which are (surprise!) written by even-more-expert experts.
MAGA goes in the opposite direction.
Yes, MAGA wants to hurt immigrants and trans people and woke purple haired women and whatever other boogie man they can conjure up. But they are fundamentally and ideologically at war with credentialing and the concept of expertise. Arguably, this originated from the belief that our existing university system is irreparably ideologically captured, which is a position that is at least somewhat truthful.8 But as time has gone on, it has morphed into a circular loyalty litmus test — anything that is against MAGA must be broken, because only broken things would be against MAGA. So the default response to an expert telling them basically anything is to react with suspicion, and then to double down. And Trump and Musk aim to remove anything that is not explicitly in favor of the MAGA project, which means anything or anyone that is actually trying to do truth seeking has to go.
IV.
I did debate at both the high school and collegiate levels — 8 years in total. In every debate, arguments occur on three levels, in decreasing levels of granularity.
Values
Facts
Definitions
You have your values. These are things like "freedom", "security", "happiness". Values answer the question "what is good?" or "what does it mean for a thing/person/action to be good?". For the engineers in the crowd, you can frame this as "what are we optimizing for?"
Facts are statements about the world. These are observable, verifiable statements like "a dozen eggs cost $5". Often, arguments about factual matters occur because of a lack of precision — for example, "a dozen eggs cost $5 at the Wholefoods on Flatbush Avenue" is strictly more correct than "a dozen eggs cost $5".
And definitions are statements about words themselves. "An egg is a reproductive cell laid by a hen that is eaten in many cultures and cuisines."
In order to find consensus and 'truth', you have to eventually agree on all of these things.
I could be wrong about this, but I feel like most of our policy arguments used to be about values rather than about facts. Back in 2010, basically everyone agreed that the Iraq war cost US taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. And though there was some arguing about direct vs. indirect costs, the more substantive disagreement was about values — was the war a good thing or not?
We still do a lot of values debate, though the tenor is more intensely polarized than it was throughout 2000-2020. There are people who will look you squarely in the face today and say "I am a white supremacist, and I explicitly want to pursue policy that benefits white people to the expense of others." That sort of thinking is, of course, extremely dangerous, and is a failure of parenting and the education system more than anything else. But also there isn't much you can do about those people, at least not in an argumentative setting. Values are grounded in social construction; to change someone's values you need more emotional and personal intervention than logical reasoned debate.
But now we have a LOT more arguments about facts and definitions too. In fact, most of our debate isn't even about values anymore. It's about things that are seemingly trivially verifiable. "How much does the government spend on USAID vs. on subsidies to Elon Musk?" "How many immigrants commit violent crimes?" "What is a tariff and how does it work?" "How much Ukraine war spending comes back to US companies?" "Does the FDA get tax cuts for hiring minorities?" "What are transgenic mice?"
I used to think that factual disagreements could be resolved relatively easily. If one person says "I believe there are 10,000 people living in Brooklyn" and another person says "I believe there are 100,000 people living in Brooklyn", you both go look at the census and you can figure out the answer. That kind of interaction doesn't happen anymore. The reason we're having so many more factual disagreements these days is because the credentials of the fact finding institutions are in question. If someone thinks the census is fundamentally untrustworthy and ideologically captured, and instead prefers trumps-discount-census.ru, you're kinda fucked! You can't reach any kind of consensus because your epistemologies are fundamentally different. And neither of you have the ability to like, go out and actually do a census yourself — if you can agree on a common definition for what a census even is.
Some of this can be chalked up to a lack of education. I went to a fancy private school where we had classes that were explicitly about learning to learn. We were taught how to evaluate the accuracy of a given source, how to think about what we saw on the Internet, how to reason about information at a meta level. It's unreasonable to expect everyone to have this kind of training, and though it would be nice for people to be humble about what they don't know, we can't expect that as a general rule.
Still, more and more people — smart people, people who should know better — are simply digging or are stuck in epistemic pits. The number of people who trust randoms on Twitter more than a NYT journalist with a degree keeps going up. And, surprise, the random Twitter anon is much more likely to get basic things wrong!
Assuming, of course, the random person on Twitter is trying to be correct at all. Successful communities have to strictly gate keep credentials because the title is valuable, and a malicious person can do a lot of damage for personal gain. Well, there isn't any gate keeping on right wing conspiracy Twitter. There's a lot of money in selling fake treasure chests these days, and there's never been an easier time to be a grifter.
V.
A few folks have noticed that Trump seems to just repeat and amplify random things that circulate in fringe communities. The OG mainstream example of this was the Obama birth certificate nonsense.9 But a more recent and popular example may be the immigrants eating pets thing — which was, in my opinion, a historical lowlight of all presidential debates.
When Trump says something like "[Haitians] are eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people that live there", there's a part of me that wonders if he literally believes that this is true. He may actually be in an epistemic pit of his own, downstream of malicious fake news peddlers and Russian bot farms above him. But it almost doesn't matter what Trump himself thinks — because he said it, there are now a lot of people who have never been to Ohio, who have never met a Haitian or maybe any immigrant, who really literally do believe that for a moment there was an epidemic of pet eating on the streets of Columbus, and that Donald Trump is the man who saved all those poor pets! And when you point out that there's no evidence of this, they just come back and say they don't trust any of the sources that you're pointing to. "Of course the police wouldn't be a reliable source, they are captured by the Dems" (literal argument that I had with a MAGA supporter). Trump has become a core part of the MAGA epistemology. What he says, goes. Everything else is "the deep state", and no other credentials matter.
I keep hoping that smart Trumpers will eventually hear something so ridiculous that it will snap them to their senses. But what I've observed is the opposite. Even though smart people are less likely to fall in the pit, those who end up in the pit are much deeper than everyone else, and significantly less able to get out. This is because smart people are fantastic at creating and believing justifications that sound plausible.
Case in point, there were a lot of smart right-wing people who heard Trump's pet-eating-haitian-immigrants story and, after a lot of internet sleuthing, found bits and pieces of plausible evidence that a black man had caught and eaten a wild goose in a park.
That…just isn't the same thing. But it was close enough! With enough mental gymnastics ("listen to what Trump means, not what he says!" "The underlying point is about assimilation, which is still a problem!") they were able to build an unassailable position in their own heads. Those same people — who previously were up in arms about how pronouns infringe on speech rights — are currently doing backflips to justify why the detention of a non-violent activist green card holder is not a free speech risk, and also even if it is, it's all justified because terrorism, or something.
I disagree with
about a lot of things, but he had a fantastic article out the other day about how the GOP has completely given up on even pretending to be truth-seeking. There's so much I want to quote from here, but I'll limit myself to a few pull quotes.A liar under normal circumstances would try to hide the fact that he’s lying. Musk, in contrast, is something much worse. He’s a man who has contempt for the entire concept of truth, and doesn’t care if the world knows it, as he poisons the public square. Being caught lying doesn’t embarrass him, since he is not trying to win over anyone who is independent minded and honest. Similarly, Grok will cheerfully tell you, accurately, that Musk is the biggest source of misinformation on X. Presumably, Xi Jinping censors Chinese AI models because in CCP circles being known as a transparent liar reduces one’s status, but this is clearly not true on the American right. […]
The worst offense here is the deboosting of links. Under the old regime, liberals wanted you to only rely on what they considered credible sources of information. Musk doesn’t want you to read anything at all that is not in meme or tweet form. He constantly announces “you are the media now,” as he elevates the voices of anonymous fake news accounts over those of real journalists. On a daily basis, the right-wing echo chamber runs with completely fabricated narratives. Any reasonable person who has the least bit of familiarity with what X has become since 2022 should have increased their respect for normal journalists. I consider “Why the Media Is Honest and Good”, written in early 2023, to have held up extremely well in light of recent events.
The ultimate effect of this is the suppression of smart independent voices who base their analysis on facts. Musk has expanded the Overton Window by allowing open Nazis, Russian propagandists, and anti-vaxxers to spread their messages, while limiting the reach of most people worth listening to. […]
This must partly be an issue of control. As the owner of X, any independent source of news is now a threat to his ability to shape dominant narratives. Yet it’s deeper than that. One could imagine Musk strangling the reach of The New York Times and Substack writers because he had well considered ideas on public policy that he wanted to see implemented. One could even imagine him boosting some links to preferred sources of news and analysis that share a similar worldview. This would be akin to normal platform bias we have seen before. None of this has happened, however, as Musk does not appear to be a man who sees the value of having access to true and reliable sources of information, no matter what their ideological leanings, for himself or others. […]
The effect of [DOGE] is to not only end up with poor policy decisions, but to make reasoned discourse impossible. In a sane world, one party may want to increase taxes to balance the budget, and another may want to cut spending. But saying that the deficit is due to Ukraine or fraud simply shuts down any possibility of having productive conversations. Fifteen years ago, Republican leaders talked about cutting entitlements, because they had enough of a grounding in reality to know that is where the budget goes. Today, all discourse on the right is polluted by a stream of misinformation. No serious budget analyst can get anywhere close to the administration, or have influence over large numbers of conservative minds, since practically every project that Trump and Musk undertake is now built on a mountain of lies.
Musk’s world is one where it becomes difficult if not impossible for intelligent thinkers to see their status raised on the right. The marketplace of ideas he has created on X rewards a combative and pre-literate approach in style along with sharing false information and partisan cheerleading in substance. There are to be fewer Lemoines, more LibsofTikTok going forward.
I was going to say that Musk has made the entire discourse dumber, but that doesn’t appear to be completely correct, as it seems that liberals have gotten a lot saner over the last few years. This is partly a sorting effect. The right-wing clubhouse Musk has created is just repulsive to anyone who is independently minded. I wasn’t surprised when Musk unfollowed me, rather I wondered what had taken so long, as I knew that it was over as soon as I saw the Catturd follow. He is unable to maintain good relations with any writer who has a bare minimum of intellectual credibility or moral integrity. Long before he unfollowed me, Musk had ended up fighting with Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, journalists he had originally promoted. [...]
Recently, I had a friend close to the administration tell me that I shouldn’t care so much about Musk’s lies, because politically he’s a check on the protectionists and economic nationalists and therefore closer to me on policy than most other people in the Trump orbit. My response was that, even if we get a smaller and less intrusive government in the end, and that’s far from certain for reasons discussed above, I truly hate the thought of living in the kind of idiocracy that Musk is creating. People are usually involved in politics because they have an aesthetic preference for the world they would like to see, and I don’t want to live in a society where half the political spectrum operates in a constant haze of lies and misinformation, as the most shameless grifters and liars rise to the top. Liberals may in many cases want to censor certain ideas and not treat them fairly. This is a lot less horrifying than a new influencer-driven culture where no one cares to censor because truth has no hope of winning out against a constant avalanche of lies anyway.
Even though Hanania can't help but throw in a few digs at the woke-left, he's otherwise absolutely right. Every now and then you'll hear MAGA talking about some conspiracy that could plausibly sound correct, and maybe think "wow I should look into that". And then they will floor you with something absolutely insane, like "Democrats control the weather." It should trigger immediate suspicion on everything they say, but it seems Gell-Mann amnesia is in full effect for approximately half of the population.
It's this complete disconnect from even trying to be truthful or principled that makes Trumpism so dangerous. You can tell Trump exactly how tariffs work live on air, and he will stare you down with all the confidence in the world and say "You're wrong and you eat pudding with your fingers." And some significant number of people, people who can't evaluate the arguments about tariffs to begin with, will hear this and say "I guess you eat pudding with your fingers." What do you even say to that? Trump has an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the conspiracy theories he's pushed, and it does not seem to matter at all, even when he is contradicting his own words from earlier in the week.
When the old guard Republican Party set out on their project to lessen the leftward bias of academia, I don't think they expected to land here, so far from any semblance of truth seeking.10 But in attacking our society's credentialing systems they flung themselves into the pit, and they delved too greedily and too deep, and have awoken monsters that they cannot hope to control. Musk and Trump don't just have contempt for the concept of truth. They are trying to become the sole arbiters of truth. This is why they are going after universities and news sources and random, unimportant people who disagree with them, with such zest.
Shadow and flame.
So far I've mostly been describing the trajectory of people who are, in my opinion, generally conscientious even though they voted for Trump. They are well educated, ambitious, independent, reasonably high earners — the kind of person who might actually use the word "epistemology"correctly in a sentence. Many of them dislike Trump; they voted for him as the lesser of two evils. Those people are, in my opinion, making a terrible mistake.
There's another edge to the MAGA crowd. These are people who are primarily driven by the desire to hurt their enemies, regardless of the cost to themselves. They are vicious, throwing the political equivalent of a nation wide tantrum, all id and emotion without any long term thinking. These people are not making a mistake — they know exactly what they are doing, and are here for it.
The former group empowers the latter, providing a veneer of intellectual cover and what-about-ism that is just enough to create the specter of doubt. The latter group hates the former, and the former don't realize it. In a war against intellectuals, the "good ones" aren't spared.
For all the hate the MAGA crowd supposedly has for communists, they are busy enacting what is essentially a Maoist anti-intellectual revolt. "Send the professors and the scientists and the doctors to the gulag." The actually intelligent people who remain on the right (and these numbers are dwindling every day) have an impossible choice: give up on any pretense to care for truth, or be sent to the farms for reeducation.
V.
So given all of the above, what can be done?
On an individual level, some of this honestly probably looks like cult deprogramming. If you have a friend who is in the pit, you need to throw him a rope or find a ladder or something. That takes time and effort, and many people choose the simpler option of just leaving the guy in the pit.
But on a broader level, I'm not sure what else can be done. I think a lot of people are going to get really hurt (because they won't learn otherwise), and a lot of beautiful valuable things are going to get destroyed, and then this generation will forever have the scar tissue of these actions and will teach the next generation our mistakes. That's what WWII was, after all. "Never again."
Some people will laugh when Trump supporters get hurt. They will say things like "I didn't expect the leopards to eat my face!" They will look at the Trump supporter who got fired from her government job, or the religious nut who lost his daughter to measles, or the pro-tax-cut worker who's wife gets deported, and they will say "fuck you for bringing us all down, you made this bed now lie in it." And honestly, I get the impulse. It's easy to hate these people, to assume they are being malicious, to wryly laugh when their destruction brings them down with the rest of us.
But really, I just feel a lot of pity. There, but for the grace of god, go I. We live in a world where it is so easy to fall into epistemic helplessness, and every day we build technological marvels that somehow accidentally make the problem even worse. Thanks to my friends and my larger social network, I happened to land in a place that I think leads me closer to truth seeking,11 but I could imagine scenarios where that doesn't happen. It's a scary thought.
In the meantime, I'm buckling down and making my backup plans. I know of at least 10 friends and relatives who have backup plans for getting out of the country quickly if they need to. I know more who have been holding large cash positions since December. And I'm also just trying to be more vocal about what all I see that's going on right now. I emailed my house rep several times. I've started talking to folks in the startup world about ways to push back on encroaching authoritarianism in tech. I've been brainstorming low-effort high-impact projects like the PEPFAR death counter that I could pick up on my weekends. I've offered to volunteer for house rep special election campaigning. I've been trying to spread the word about canaries that represent serious threats to our Democracy, like how the Trump admin is:
ignoring court orders, explicitly saying they “don’t care what the judges think”;
inching ever closer to outright buying votes;
I don't have a large audience, so I don't have any illusions about making sweeping changes from my writing. Most of this is for my personal sanity. But narratives have real power, and right now the narrative is that people in the US support what's happening. I don’t support this. And if you've read this to the end, presumably you don't support this either. So my request is that you start being more vocal about things that bother you. Maybe it will make a difference.
Even though I’m calling out the New York Times specifically, they were actually one of the better outlets. There were tons of places that were outright manipulating stories, from NBC editing calls about Trayvon Martin to CNN framing calls for violence as calls for peace through selective editing. One interesting personal reflection in writing this article was the level to which all of these so-called ‘expert institutions’ blended together in my head. Their credibility lived and died as a class — if someone on CNN said something stupid, it would make the NYT look stupid by proxy.
Obama had done something similar in 2008, and this was hailed as a genius campaign strategy. But because Trump won using the same strategy, suddenly it became an obvious privacy violation.
Trump objectively said and did a lot of things that were absolutely heinous in his first run for presidency and his first term. But mainstream media reported on everything with the same breathless fear-mongering, and it became impossible to tell whether any given ‘crisis of the week’ was real or not. That’s epistemic helplessness in a nutshell. What’s worse is that truly terrible outlets like Brietbart or the Daily Caller were the only ones actually reporting on the skew. Those guys were obviously incredibly biased, but I think people are inclined to trust those who call out other liars.
After all, I still can and do read mainstream sources like the New York Times, even if it is not a regular cadence thing.
Much of this was grounded in COVID policies and politics — from January to July 2020, trusting experts was the exact wrong thing to do. Expert institutions were saying that taking COVID seriously was equivalent to being a racist, that masks do not work, and that it was an ethical obligation to march for racial inequality in the middle of a pandemic. This was all extremely, obviously political, and was being called out by alternative information sources that ended up gaining a lot of credibility as a result.
Why even a disc? Why not, like, a square? or a triangle?
I got some pushback on this point from friends who read the original draft, but I decided to leave the claim in. It’s true that Operation Warp Speed got COVID vaccines out way faster than ever before; but also, refusing to do challenge trials while insisting manufacturers do the standard three rounds of clinical trials and 2 months of data collection was silly given the circumstances. We had about 50 million doses ready to go by December of 2020. We could have plausibly started roll out as early as October, which would have saved ~100k lives (depending on how you count).
There is much that can be said about how much of the blame lies at the feet of the universities. Centrists were predicting this backlash at least as early as 2014.
If you think about this for even two seconds it is immediately ridiculous.
This is probably the reason almost all of the old guard have essentially exited stage left — Cheney, Ryan, Romney, Pence. Even McConnell, on his deathbed, expresses regrets.
I think! Maybe the white supremacist MAGA woman from earlier disagrees!
>And so on with raw milk, or unfluoridated water,
Propably in reaction to RFK, the american mainstream has recoiled and made fluoridation an unassailably consensus position. Most of the world does not fluoridate. Im from one of those countries, and over the last few months I keep seeing americans casually imply that were all total insano-hippies. Propably not on purpose, but still.
>Trump has become a core part of the MAGA epistemology.
I also think that a lot of this more kayfabe than actual belief. I dont see a lot of people making non-political mistakes based on it. Some did actually try to cure covid with bleach, but not enough to be relevant as anything but a sign- and this seems to hold generally.
There are anti-vaxxers, but Trump has been pro-vaccine when he does talk about it. Hes still proud of warpspeed afaict. MAGA is antivax, propably in part due to the general dynamics you explained before this, but despite rather than because of Trump.
(Im also a bit confused, because in the section after the balrog picture it sounds like you agree noones fooled - but that seems to contradict everything else)