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)
I've written about water fluoridation as well, here (https://theahura.substack.com/p/societal-defaults). Fluoridation at recommended levels reduces cavities by ~60% depending which study you look at. You have to go more than double the recommended dosage of flouride before you start noticing any kind of developmental effects on children. That's a lot!
The decision to fluoridate or not is a social choice, but it is one with so few tradeoffs that one wonders what exactly the discussion is about. If you're not going to do low-hanging-fruit things that improve everyone's life, what is even the point of doing science or engineering?
---
re Trump: there are absolutely people who make mistakes based on Trump (and MAGA) in general. Arguably, voting for him is one such mistake. But even beyond that, in the realm of health alone, you have people who are actively not taking measles vaccines, and then dying from that choice. Or you have retail investors buying up TSLA stock or $Trump coin. These are concrete harms that are downstream of Trump saying bullshit and getting away with it. (I dont buy that Trump is meaningfully pro-vaccine, he still put RFK in his cabinet)
But the overall problem is more nuanced and subtle than 'here is a list of concrete harms'. It's about 'how close to an accurate representation of the world do you have'. You dismiss 'non-political mistakes', but those are important. If a bunch of people are misled to believe that, somehow, America has a legal claim on Greenland, they might legitimately go to war over that. This is how both the Iraq/Afghanistan wars started, and Vietnam. If Trump says "I am going to fix egg prices" while knowing full well that he cannot do so, he is in a meaningful sense defrauding the people who trust him.
It's not enough to say 'well smart people ignore trump about these really obvious dumb things but listen to him on these more marginal things'. The obvious dumb things should cast the marginal things into doubt, but they dont. If a schizo on a train was going on about chemtrails and 5g rotting your brain, it would be really weird if you were like "well, actually, he has a point when he says immigrants are evil".
And this gets to the last point, which maybe I didn't communicate clearly.
Smart people recognize that Trump and MAGA have no interest in truth seeking. But they don't recognize that choosing to be in that orbit _anyway_ is profoundly corrupting. This is most obvious in the leaked transcripts from the Atlantic. Those people -- Hegseth, Vance, whatever -- really believe the coolaid theyve been drinking. And more generally, if you keep spending time with people who are openly racist Nazis, you definitely become more of a racist nazi yourself. This is why smart people will say things like "well obviously Trump is wrong about injecting bleach, but he's definitely right to deport 200 Venezuelans to an El Salvadoran slave camp because they have tattoos, in order to stop immigration". No he's not! The source is inherently corrupt, trusting anything downstream of it is wild.
Im aware of the object level arguments (though I wonder, why do you think so few others do it?). Theres a difference between things we believe, and things all Reasonable people agree on. And its not necessarily that the latter are congruent to the things we really really believe. In insisting that all reasonable people agree with fluoridation, youre drastically shrinking the circle of reasonable people relative to ~all other beliefs for which the american mainstream holds this.
>there are absolutely people who make mistakes based on Trump (and MAGA) in general
Voting is a political mistake. I agree Trump isnt meaningfully pro-vaccine - my point is, given the history, it seems like him following his base, rather than the other way round. This is relevant to his role in MAGA epistemology. I felt for years that Tesla was overvalued, and I still feel that way, but I didnt bet that way and thank god. So Im not sure I want to derive further things from the assumption that the market is wrong about this. Buying $Trump is certainly a bad decision, but how many people actually did?
>The obvious dumb things should cast the marginal things into doubt, but they dont.
I think most MAGAs *already* agreed with the marginal things before Trump ever showed up. Anti-immigration has been popular for a long time, and its apprently a law of nature that everyone representing it politically anywhere in the world also has lots of other clashes with the establishment, including in apparently unrelated and really dumb ways. The trumpian politics of anti-respectability is essentially an offer: stop considering those things a problem, and you can have a candidate. Thats the *intended* way to support the movement. Thats why Trump has, from the beginning, done things like mock verterans. Its not that republicans agreed with that before or after, its about establishing you dont take this sort of thing seriously.
> Anti-immigration has been popular for a long time, and its apprently a law of nature that everyone representing it politically anywhere in the world also has lots of other clashes with the establishment...The trumpian politics of anti-respectability is essentially an offer: stop considering those things a problem, and you can have a candidate.
This is an interesting faustian interpretation of Trump.
But it also makes me think again about what I said earlier: "Smart people recognize that Trump and MAGA have no interest in truth seeking. But they don't recognize that choosing to be in that orbit _anyway_ is profoundly corrupting."
Smart MAGA people keep falling deeper into the pit. Maybe it starts with some rational distance -- "I'll let you get away with anti-respectability if you give me anti-immigration on a platter" -- but it ends with "legal residents have no rights, Ukraine started the war in Russia, we are going to spend gold to buy crypto".
On second thought, maybe this is more faustian than I thought at first glance. In the end, faust actually does lose his soul to the devil after all.
> Buying $Trump is certainly a bad decision, but how many people actually did?
re fluoridation: a lot of countries that do not fluoridate their water decided that the additional investment in resources isn't worth it, since a large part of the population gets their required fluoride from toothpaste (which, of course, is extremely high in fluoride content, and is kinda the entire point of toothpaste). It's worth reading up on how various countries get fluoride in their population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country For example, some places fluoridate milk or salt, others just have it naturally occurring in ground water. In places like the US where the infrastructure already exists, theres no reason to get rid of it because you get much more coverage of high risk groups (ie people who do not brush their teeth at all). This is also a societal trade off, but its a more reasonable one when the question is 'do we implement this very large resource investment for a small portion of our population'. Notably, no one, and I mean literally no one who knows what they are talking about, is advocating not to use any fluoride.
To answer your actual point, I am NOT saying 'all reasonable people believe ABC'. I am saying 'if you looked at the data, you would believe ABC'. The data is quite clear on this. The problem, of course, is that the vast majority of people will not take the time to read the data, if they can even understand it in the first place. And, to go back to epistemology, this means that they have to put their trust into someone to read the data for them. How do you decide who to trust?
(You can go a step farther: I think RFK is misrepresenting the data -- he either is lying, or he is downstream of someone else that he trusts because he hasnt read the data himself. But I think this because I trust that the data itself is accurate. I have reasons to believe this -- the data was collected by many different people and replicates across many different countries -- but if you believe that everyone is lying and they are all "in on it", well, maybe you really do only trust RFK)
>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)
I've written about water fluoridation as well, here (https://theahura.substack.com/p/societal-defaults). Fluoridation at recommended levels reduces cavities by ~60% depending which study you look at. You have to go more than double the recommended dosage of flouride before you start noticing any kind of developmental effects on children. That's a lot!
The decision to fluoridate or not is a social choice, but it is one with so few tradeoffs that one wonders what exactly the discussion is about. If you're not going to do low-hanging-fruit things that improve everyone's life, what is even the point of doing science or engineering?
---
re Trump: there are absolutely people who make mistakes based on Trump (and MAGA) in general. Arguably, voting for him is one such mistake. But even beyond that, in the realm of health alone, you have people who are actively not taking measles vaccines, and then dying from that choice. Or you have retail investors buying up TSLA stock or $Trump coin. These are concrete harms that are downstream of Trump saying bullshit and getting away with it. (I dont buy that Trump is meaningfully pro-vaccine, he still put RFK in his cabinet)
But the overall problem is more nuanced and subtle than 'here is a list of concrete harms'. It's about 'how close to an accurate representation of the world do you have'. You dismiss 'non-political mistakes', but those are important. If a bunch of people are misled to believe that, somehow, America has a legal claim on Greenland, they might legitimately go to war over that. This is how both the Iraq/Afghanistan wars started, and Vietnam. If Trump says "I am going to fix egg prices" while knowing full well that he cannot do so, he is in a meaningful sense defrauding the people who trust him.
It's not enough to say 'well smart people ignore trump about these really obvious dumb things but listen to him on these more marginal things'. The obvious dumb things should cast the marginal things into doubt, but they dont. If a schizo on a train was going on about chemtrails and 5g rotting your brain, it would be really weird if you were like "well, actually, he has a point when he says immigrants are evil".
And this gets to the last point, which maybe I didn't communicate clearly.
Smart people recognize that Trump and MAGA have no interest in truth seeking. But they don't recognize that choosing to be in that orbit _anyway_ is profoundly corrupting. This is most obvious in the leaked transcripts from the Atlantic. Those people -- Hegseth, Vance, whatever -- really believe the coolaid theyve been drinking. And more generally, if you keep spending time with people who are openly racist Nazis, you definitely become more of a racist nazi yourself. This is why smart people will say things like "well obviously Trump is wrong about injecting bleach, but he's definitely right to deport 200 Venezuelans to an El Salvadoran slave camp because they have tattoos, in order to stop immigration". No he's not! The source is inherently corrupt, trusting anything downstream of it is wild.
>I've written about water fluoridation as well
Im aware of the object level arguments (though I wonder, why do you think so few others do it?). Theres a difference between things we believe, and things all Reasonable people agree on. And its not necessarily that the latter are congruent to the things we really really believe. In insisting that all reasonable people agree with fluoridation, youre drastically shrinking the circle of reasonable people relative to ~all other beliefs for which the american mainstream holds this.
>there are absolutely people who make mistakes based on Trump (and MAGA) in general
Voting is a political mistake. I agree Trump isnt meaningfully pro-vaccine - my point is, given the history, it seems like him following his base, rather than the other way round. This is relevant to his role in MAGA epistemology. I felt for years that Tesla was overvalued, and I still feel that way, but I didnt bet that way and thank god. So Im not sure I want to derive further things from the assumption that the market is wrong about this. Buying $Trump is certainly a bad decision, but how many people actually did?
>The obvious dumb things should cast the marginal things into doubt, but they dont.
I think most MAGAs *already* agreed with the marginal things before Trump ever showed up. Anti-immigration has been popular for a long time, and its apprently a law of nature that everyone representing it politically anywhere in the world also has lots of other clashes with the establishment, including in apparently unrelated and really dumb ways. The trumpian politics of anti-respectability is essentially an offer: stop considering those things a problem, and you can have a candidate. Thats the *intended* way to support the movement. Thats why Trump has, from the beginning, done things like mock verterans. Its not that republicans agreed with that before or after, its about establishing you dont take this sort of thing seriously.
> Anti-immigration has been popular for a long time, and its apprently a law of nature that everyone representing it politically anywhere in the world also has lots of other clashes with the establishment...The trumpian politics of anti-respectability is essentially an offer: stop considering those things a problem, and you can have a candidate.
This is an interesting faustian interpretation of Trump.
But it also makes me think again about what I said earlier: "Smart people recognize that Trump and MAGA have no interest in truth seeking. But they don't recognize that choosing to be in that orbit _anyway_ is profoundly corrupting."
Smart MAGA people keep falling deeper into the pit. Maybe it starts with some rational distance -- "I'll let you get away with anti-respectability if you give me anti-immigration on a platter" -- but it ends with "legal residents have no rights, Ukraine started the war in Russia, we are going to spend gold to buy crypto".
On second thought, maybe this is more faustian than I thought at first glance. In the end, faust actually does lose his soul to the devil after all.
> Buying $Trump is certainly a bad decision, but how many people actually did?
Rolling stone says 810000 people bought in. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-meme-coin-2-billion-ls-1235261422/
re fluoridation: a lot of countries that do not fluoridate their water decided that the additional investment in resources isn't worth it, since a large part of the population gets their required fluoride from toothpaste (which, of course, is extremely high in fluoride content, and is kinda the entire point of toothpaste). It's worth reading up on how various countries get fluoride in their population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country For example, some places fluoridate milk or salt, others just have it naturally occurring in ground water. In places like the US where the infrastructure already exists, theres no reason to get rid of it because you get much more coverage of high risk groups (ie people who do not brush their teeth at all). This is also a societal trade off, but its a more reasonable one when the question is 'do we implement this very large resource investment for a small portion of our population'. Notably, no one, and I mean literally no one who knows what they are talking about, is advocating not to use any fluoride.
To answer your actual point, I am NOT saying 'all reasonable people believe ABC'. I am saying 'if you looked at the data, you would believe ABC'. The data is quite clear on this. The problem, of course, is that the vast majority of people will not take the time to read the data, if they can even understand it in the first place. And, to go back to epistemology, this means that they have to put their trust into someone to read the data for them. How do you decide who to trust?
(You can go a step farther: I think RFK is misrepresenting the data -- he either is lying, or he is downstream of someone else that he trusts because he hasnt read the data himself. But I think this because I trust that the data itself is accurate. I have reasons to believe this -- the data was collected by many different people and replicates across many different countries -- but if you believe that everyone is lying and they are all "in on it", well, maybe you really do only trust RFK)