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- [00:01]
Dan Williams
It's probably not a great thing that people with highly conspiratorial worldviews or really strong hostility towards establishment institutions are consuming lots of incredibly weird, low quality content. It's not a great thing. But the idea that this is behind, for example, Trump's election victory or Brexit, it's just not a credible theory of public opinion information.
- [00:24]
Jasia Monk
And now the good fight with Jasia Monk. One of the things I really like about Substack is that it sometimes leads you to discover new voices, new writers who really have a special set of insights about the world. One of the people who I've been reading with particular pleasure for the last year or so is Dan Williams. He is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex and he has written about subjects which we discuss in detail today, particularly about misinformation. He is very skeptical that the way in which we tend to talk about misinformation in our political discourse today is actually sensible, even though he worries, as he says clearly in this conversation, very deeply about the kind of lies and falsehoods and conspiracy theories spread by people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens on the populist right. He thinks that this term of misinformation is is far too imprecise to be useful and that often we invoke it in order to make it harder to ask critical questions. We invoke it in order to cloak some ways in which lead institutions themselves might end up engaging in quote unquote misinformation. In other parts of this conversation we also talked about other issues, like what he calls the everyone is biased bias. How should we recognize that we don't just naively understand the world, that when we're tempted to think if you disagree with me, you must be a bad person or you must be a stupid person, we are probably wrong. We're probably not appreciating how hard it is to think through certain issues, how easy it is for smart, well meaning people to come to different conclusions. And yet we don't want to overstate that. We don't want to become so cynical about what world where we think that everybody is just solipsistically arguing for the random thing that happened to believe for no good reason. How do we balance between those different things? And finally, in the paywall part of this conversation, we talked about standpoint epistemology, about what is wrong with the idea that some people, because of their oppression in society, have special privileged access to the truth and that the rest of us need to defer to those groups. Why is that view philosophically incoherent and politically counterproductive. We also chat a little bit about how philosophers can actually make a useful contribution to public debate. To listen to those parts of the conversation, please go to jasamunk.substack.com and become a paying subscriber. One of the benefits of that is that we have started to sometimes do these podcast recordings as Substack lives. So if you want to make sure that you can have a front row seat to some of these conversations, see us record that in the moment, feel like you're really part of the conversation, please go to yashamonk.substack.com that is what we did for this episode with Dan, and we hope to do that much more often in future as well. Dan Williams, welcome to this episode of a podcast, which is also live on Substack.
- [03:53]
Dan Williams
It's great to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
- [03:56]
Jasia Monk
So you've written a bunch from a deeply informed philosophical perspective, but about some of the big controversial topics of our political scene as well on Substack. And perhaps the article that first got you to my notice in the notice of a lot of people was one about misinformation. I'm struck about how mainstream a conversation about misinformation has become. I was recently at the World Expression Forum in Norway, which claims to be a forum fighting for free speech, but so far as I could tell, every second speech was just about how the way to really serve democracy and freedom is to censor anything that anybody might consider misinformation. So this idea that we need to not just be concerned about misinformation, but take very proactive political steps in order to rein in political misinformation, steps that I would call by the name of censorship has become incredibly mainstream. What do you think is the problem with the discourse about misinformation? What do people often get wrong when they talk about this?
- [04:55]
Dan Williams
I think it's difficult to know where to begin. In a way, I think there are so many issues with the way in which this topic of misinformation has been framed. And I think it's probably worth saying something about the history behind the emergence of this narrative concerning misinformation, much of which dates back to, and this is very well documented, 2016, when you had these two surprising populist revolts. You had Brexit in the United Kingdom here, and then the first election of Donald Trump. And these events surprised and distressed many people, myself included. And so people wanted to explain what's going on with this sort of populist backlash against what is perceived as the establishment and the elites and so on. And I think one of the narratives that emerged really quite quickly around that time was that it had something to do with misinformation. Right? The idea being something like false, misleading communication propagated by populist politicians, by pundits and also on social media networks has manipulated large numbers of people into believing false things, into believing conspiracy theories, into supporting demagogues, which is in some way behind this sort of populist backlash. And I think the first thing to say about that as a narrative, and this is a sort of annoying thing for a philosopher to say, but I think it's important, is what exactly do we even mean by this term misinformation? This is omnipresent now in political discourse, and it has been for the past 10 years. There are all of these research centers and sort of social scientific papers which are studying misinformation. It's routinely listed as one of these top global threats. What exactly is this term supposed to refer to?
- [06:41]
Jasia Monk
And the concern here, right, is that a. It's a term that's used incredibly broadly for all kinds of different things. And I sometimes say, perhaps a little bit provocatively, that it falls into two kinds of categories. One is that we often now say misinformation for what traditionally would have called a lie. Right? Somebody just says something that is clearly untrue. We can prove that it is untrue, but. And we should just call it either a lie or perhaps if there's some suspicion that the politician may not be aware of speaking the untruth, something that's just a falsehood that's very clear and unambiguous. Then I think there's this category of things where just people making arguments we don't like, they have a narrative that we think perhaps in some ways overstates the importance of something, calls our attention to something that the person accusing it of being misinformation feels isn't as important as other kinds of things. But that very quickly becomes a way of just saying, I don't like your point, disagree with it. And so there's this kind of like, huge range of things. And so I sometimes wonder whether we should just dispense with the term misinformation and either say it's a lie or it's an untruth. When we can prove that, when there's good reason to think that, or say, hey, I disagree with you on this. I don't think this is as important as you're saying, I think you're oversimplifying a little bit what the world actually looks like, but it's not clear to me. I think some of the utility of a term misinformation seems to come exactly from the fact that it seems to imply it's a lie. But you can use it sometimes to just apply to things where you have a disagreement.
- [08:06]
Dan Williams
Completely agree. I think you're right. The way that this sort of term bundles together lots of things that we've actually already got a vocabulary for. Lies, bullshit, misleading, falsehood, et cetera. I mean, the way that I put it in my writings is I think in this misinformation discourse you confront a kind of dilemma very quickly, which is you can understand misinformation very narrowly, so that it refers to something like very clear cut falsehoods and fabrications. And actually lots of the focus on misinformation around about 2016, 2017 focused on a very specific thing which was fake news in the sort of literal sense of that term. Disreputable websites, online publishing, just made up news stories, breaking news, the Pope endorses Donald Trump. It's sort of fake news in the literal sense of that term. And if you understand misinformation very narrowly in that kind of way, definitely does exist. And I think it can be harmful in some consequences. But overwhelmingly the social science suggests now it's not that widespread, certainly not as widespread as many people think it is, and it's not that impactful because for the most part that kind of really fringe content which gets discredited by fact checking organizations and so on, tends to preach to the choir. You've got people with strong sort of pre existing conspiratorial views, anti establishment views. They don't trust institutions, so they're seeking out content that's in line with what they already believe. So if you define it very narrowly, I think it does exist, but it's nowhere near as widespread or as impactful as many people think it is.
- [09:36]
Jasia Monk
And just to double click for a very brief moment about why you're arguing that it's not as impactful as it seems one is, again, it's not that common and so on. But the other, and that's very plausible to me psychologically, is who consumes this sort of stuff, right? I mean, if it's Brigitte Macron used to be a man, or Hillary Clinton, like some young child found in the basement of Hillary Clinton or something like that, that's like ridiculous fake news stories going around like that. I think it's very hard to think about the sort of reasonable person who's a swing voter, who's undecided which way to vote. And when they hear a story like that and say, well, I mean, now that I've learned this shocking truth on going to vote for Hillary Clinton, right, What's much, much more likely is that there are some people who are political nuts who have a consuming hatred of some political figure, in this case a left wing political figure, but obviously the same might be true the other way around, and who then come across a story like that and either as a troll or perhaps because they really do believe it, they share that. But you know, this is not somebody whose mind was open early on who had a potentially positive view of his politician and then sees a story like that and says, oh, now suddenly I realize this is an evil person, right? This is somebody who probably had pretty distorted political cognition to begin with, was pretty consumed by rage and hatred against some part of the political spectrum to begin with. And that's why they, in earnest, or perhaps in a trolling way, then share that kind of news story.
- [10:59]
Dan Williams
Exactly. This is not a cross section of the population engaging with that kind of content. And actually in many of these cases, as you say, it's not even clear that they really believe it. And it can even be to their sort of perceived political advantage when fact checking organizations come out and discredit that information because they're so hostile to these institutions anyway that it, it doesn't make much of a difference. I mean, that's not to say that this kind of content never has any harmful consequences. Like, it's probably not a great thing that people with highly conspiratorial worldviews or really strong hostility towards establishment institutions are consuming lots of incredibly weird low quality content. It's not a great thing. But the idea that this is behind, for example, Trump's election victory or Brexit, it's just not a credible theory of public opinion information. And then, and I think in response to the sort of recognition of that, what's happened is this really substantial concept creep where now the idea is, okay, if you focus on these really clear cut cases of bizarre fake news stories and so on, that kind of content might not be that widespread, it might not be that impactful. But if you broaden the definition of terms like misinformation so that they include things like, as you say, people being wrong about things or having biased opinions or at the limit, and there's a real sort of push here in misinformation research to go in this direction to capture communication that might be true but is nevertheless misleading because it's cherry picked or it's selective or something like that. So a canonical example of that would be accurate reporting on vaccine related deaths, for example. I mean, it could be totally accurate as a report, but nevertheless misleadingly convey the impression that vaccines are much more dangerous than they actually are. So there the idea is, well, why don't we take this term misinformation and stretch it so that it encompasses all of these different ways in which communication can be misleading. And of course, if you do that, then I think it's true. I'd say it's trivial. That misinformation so defined is not rare and it's not purely preaching to the choir. I think it's quite widespread and I think it's quite impactful. But of course, as you say, that's firstly so subjective. Determining whether or not a true rapport is missing relevant context, determining whether an argument is biased or not, but also that kind of content in a broad sense that's also pervasive within the very institutions that sort of sanctimoniously pontificate about misinformation, that claim that they can detect misinformation with ease and objectivity. So I think the dilemma is either you define it really narrowly, in which case it does exist, but it's not that widespread and it's not that impactful, or you define it really broadly, in which case it plausibly is quite widespread and it is quite impactful, but then it becomes subjective and it's not so clear why fact checking organizations or the New York Times or whatever are in a perfectly objective position to detect it.
- [13:46]
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- [13:55]
Jasia Monk
side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com so we've talked a little bit about the narrow definition which is coherent and cohesive, but just doesn't end up carrying the weight that people want to put on this idea of misinformation in our politics. So let's talk a little bit more about this kind of broader conception of it. One problem with that is that it's just become becomes nearly a synonym for something like a partisan point of view or partial point of view and an engager point of view. Right? If you are arguing that something is a giant problem because you are very motivated by it, because it is some general injustice in the world etc. People could then say that that's misinformation because actually this other set of problems is much bigger than that, right? I mean, plausibly, to take a sensitive and somewhat provocative example, police shootings of unarmed people in the United States in general, of unarmed black people in particular, right? I think a very serious and shocking injustice when that happens. You could say, well, but this is such a partial focus now. What about all the people who die in other kinds of ways, right? Like compared to the number of deaths in the United States, compared to the number of violent deaths in the United States, this is a very small percentage. And so is it sort of misinformation to focus on this to the exclusion of the other kind of things? I think we would have a very strong instinct that calling that misinformation is wrong, right? That there can be reasons to focus on something out of your set of moral coordinates that put particular emphasis on something because we feel it's particularly salient, even if the numbers involved aren't particularly large. But on a sort of broad enough definition of misinformation, we could then start to dismiss a lot of those concerns as misinformation. I think that does happen. It happened obsolete on this particular issue, but it does happen in other issues, I think, right? Where really this charge of misinformation just becomes the charge of you're over emphasizing this, right? I mean, let's say something both very different that in some ways has a similar structure, right? Crime committed by immigrants. Immigrants commit crime, some very shocking and violent pieces of crime on average, at least in the United States, it appears to be the case that immigrants aren't more likely to commit crime than others. But if you say, hey, there's an injustice that some people are in the country even though they shouldn't have a right to do so because they're not documented, right. They don't have a legal right to be here. Look at these particular crimes that are committed. We think it's a terrible normative problem that these particular crimes somehow can't move because they're committed by people who shouldn't even be in the country. And if we'd really applied the law in the right way, we wouldn't have been there. And so we saw these particular kind of avoidable deaths. And so we're going to really blast sort of the focus on these kinds of things. I think a lot of people on the left would say, well, that's misinformation because look, actually immigrants don't commit more crime than others and that is true. That is an important way of putting those kind of concerns into context and of helping somebody understand some important piece of reality. But again, to say, oh, so therefore that's misinformation seems like not a very helpful. It's not very clarifying about how public discourse actually works.
- [16:57]
Dan Williams
Exactly. It's not clarifying. And as I think those examples suggest, what you're going to view as misinformative as misinformation is going to be shaped by a whole range of complex considerations. Your values, your pre existing beliefs, your sort of broader ideology and so on. The idea that's just going to be a technical judgment that we can delegate to professional fact checking organizations or misinformation experts. I think is very strange. I mean, another example would be fake news. I would argue fake news is not a significant part of the informational environment. And yet how much mainstream media reporting has there been on fake news? I would argue that's been very misleading. Does that mean that we should classify that as misinformation? And there are so many examples like that where it's clearly going to be highly contentious and it's going to be highly context sensitive. And if you start getting into the area where you're applying these sorts of very expansive definitions of misinformation, it's just going to strike many people, I think many people accurately, as incredibly subjective and biased.
- [18:01]
Jasia Monk
What about this idea of elite misinformation? I think it's a very nice phrase that I believe Matt Iglesias first came up with. At least he wrote one of the first big articles about that. How common is that? Again, obviously you're skeptical about how useful term misinformation is in general. But if we take this broader definition of misinformation that perhaps is not very coherent, but that ended with political lexicon, do you think it's obvious that political elites, social elites more broadly, are systematically better at avoiding that kind of misinformation than others? Or is this problem of elite misinformation, which Matt posited a very serious way one?
- [18:37]
Dan Williams
Yeah, I mean, just to say one thing on that terminological issue, I mean, I don't have any issue with ordinary democratic citizens or journalists or pundits and their capacity as democratic citizens, applying a term like misinformation with a kind of expansive meaning, like Iglesias does in that article. My issue is when it comes to misinformation, experts and policymakers who are applying this classification either to establish objective scientific findings about it or to enforce certain kinds of anti misinformation policies, that's where I think it's very, very important to have a strict clear cut definition. But on that point of elite misinformation, I mean, I think it's just obviously true that within our sort of mainstream knowledge producing institutions, whether it's science, whether it's academia, more broadly, whether it's elite legacy media outlets, there is a lot of false and misleading communication. If you take a topic like climate change, for example, almost all of the focus on climate misinformation has focused on, in the broadest possible sense, climate denial. And that's almost exclusively associated with the political right, where people have called into question the existence of human driven climate change or the risks that it poses. And I completely agree that phenomenon exists and I think it is dangerous and I think it's important that people think carefully about why that exists and ways to address it. But there's also a lot of what you might call elite progressive misinformation. So the philosopher Joseph Heath has a really fantastic article on his substack recently. I think he calls it highbrow misinformation. Looking at the ways in which there's lots of what you might call alarmist climate viewpoints on the sort of mainstream progressive side of the aisle, which are simply not well supported by empirical evidence, or they involve forms of communication that are not supported by empirical evidence that almost never get called out as misinformation.
- [20:34]
Jasia Monk
I believe one example from that article, it may be from someone else, but I think it's from that article and Joseph Heath is a wonderful writer who subscribers should also check out, is from a study which shows that climate change is going to reduce the world food supply by something like 10%. And most people take in something like 10% of their calories from breakfast. And therefore there was all of these screaming newspaper headlines saying we're going to have to forego breakfast because of climate change. Now, when you look at the actual study, what it shows is that the supply of the world's food is projected to keep increasing quite rapidly over the next 50 or 60 years and is going to be something like four times as high as it is today by, let's say, Century center, maybe getting these dates slightly wrong, but because of climate change, it's going to be 10% less than it would have been otherwise. Which is to say, not that it's going to be 10% less than the food we have available to us today, but rather that. Rather that instead of being sort of 400% more than it is today, it is merely going to be 360% more than it is today. But by the time that this makes it from the paper, that sort of acknowledges that if you read it carefully. But it's a little bit coy about that fact to the university press release, which plays up the sort of dramatic effects to this, to a science journalist writing this up for the Times of London or the New York Times or the Guardian or whatever, to the headline writer, it becomes, you're going to be unable to eat breakfast because of climate change. I remember a similar case from a number of years back where there was a study which suggested that something like perhaps 10%, again, I may be off on the precise figure of the territory of New York City might become uninhabitable because of climate change by century's end. Now, when you look at the actual study, this obviously a serious problem, and climate change more broadly, I believe is a very serious problem. But you know, it was areas, some of which were not inhabited at all today because they're so close to the sea and so on, some of which were inhabited but with quite low population density. Again, not trying to underplay this problem, this obviously is a serious challenge. But by the time that it made it to, I believe, a cover illustration at New York Magazine, what the illustration showed was the Empire State Building underwater. And this is like nothing like that suggested in the study. And so that's an interesting way in which broadly well meaning people through this chain of transmission take something which is a serious research finding which I have no particular reason to doubt, but present it to the public in a way that is very clearly misleading.
- [23:02]
Dan Williams
I think that's exactly right. Yeah, there are lots of examples like that. I mean, I would say even the idea that climate change is likely to pose an existential threat, that you get that view all of the time from mainstream progressive politicians, including Joe Biden famously said that. And I mean, my understanding of the empirical literature is it doesn't really support that view. I mean, it could be that there are tail risks, that low probability events where it would be catastrophic. But the sort of standard forecasts aren't that climate change is a significant threat to the continued existence of humanity. And there are just many examples like this across lots of different domains, whether it's climate change, whether it's the economy, whether it's issues to do with youth, gender, medicine, whether it's reporting around sort of race and immigration, as you say, whenever things align with sacred values or connect to taboos among highly educated, liberal, progressive professionals, you get a lot of false or misleading or biased communication within these institutions. And I think that kind of biased communication is especially legible to those people who are very hostile to these institutions in a way that it's often not so obvious to people that exist within them. And I think that to then connect that back to this misinformation discourse, it makes these institutions seem very hypocritical. So when they say we're going to police misinformation, and what that often means is really we're going to be highly select, collective, in which examples of misinformation we're going to focus on ends up, I think, just exacerbating issues of institutional mistrust, especially on the political right, which are the very sort of communities you want to reach if you care about dealing with misinformation in that part of the political spectrum. Having said all of that, I think it's also a bit of important context that even though there are problems within these sort of elite knowledge generating institutions, I think the problems there, at least in my estimation, really pale in comparison comparison to the problems that you find in the kind of information environment of the populist right. Especially, it has to be said, in the U.S. i think when you're dealing with figures like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and figures like this, really the scale, the brazenness, the kind of egregious character of the falsehoods and the lies and the conspiracy theory, conspiracy theorizing, it's so much more extreme, I think, than what you find within these elite institutions. So I think you need to be able to acknowledge that there are these sort of deep problems within these institutions, whilst also retaining the capacity to see the broader forest, as it were, that these problems are not as severe as what you're seeing on the populist right, especially in the US.
- [25:43]
Jasia Monk
I strongly agree with you on that point. And I think it's the difficulty this poses, the difficulty of how to think intelligently about political questions, particularly ones that are polarized in this information environment. There's this meme saying I'm for the current thing and it depicts whatever collection of 20 causes, some people call it the Unicause, where all of these different ideas get lumped together. And if you're on the right side of history, you have to believe in all of them uncritically. And a lot of them are quite stupid, or a lot of them are worthy causes, but the action that is supposedly demanded by these worthy causes are counterproductive or morally bad and so on. Now there's a different meme that I think is also quite apt, which is I'm against current thing, which captures the fact that because some people perhaps have been mugged by reality, have recognized that some of the unthinking support for these causes turns out to be misplaced, they then flip to the opposite conclusion and say if the New York Times and the Guardian and NPR want me to believe X, I'm just going to believe non X. And I've always worried that outsourcing your views in this way is really bad. I mean, you can call it 180 ISM, where like whatever you've decided is set by something you mistrust, you're just going to believe the opposite. That unfortunately is going to lead you at least into the same amount of epistemological murkiness and probably into even greater problems. And I think that's true about how to think about these knowledge generating institutions. I certainly am much more naively trustful of them than I have been in the past. I think that on some very important issues, my considered judgment is that those opinions are wrong. I have started to understand in a way that perhaps I did not in 2016, this idea that people are sick of experts and more broadly sick of the demand to defer to experts blindly. But the solution certainly is not to say therefore all of the experts are wrong, all the consensus is wrong. The way to get closer to truth is just A to listen to whatever work job has an interesting story to tell and B to assume that the opposite of whatever the institutions say must be right. That's going to get you into even deeper epistemological trouble. What's the upshot of all of that, do you think? I mean, one upshot, presumably, is that we should be very skeptical about political institutions that want to claim the right to tell us what information we can share and consume. But how should we think about these subjects? I mean, how should we think about the genuine problems of falsehoods in our politics, of people who are spreading very clearly untrue narratives for their political or sometimes financial gain without reverting back to this overly loose use of terms like misinformation?
- [28:24]
Dan Williams
I think that's a really difficult and complicated question. I think, as you say, in a complex modern society there's simply no alternative to expertise, or there's no way of getting around the fact, rather that we need experts and expertise. And the sorts of knowledge which is associated with can only exist within sort of complex institutions like modern science, like modern universities more broadly. But also, if you're thinking about, about knowledge production as a whole. You also need established, trustworthy media outlets. So how to think about the broad kind of information environment given the constraint that there's no alternative to that? This idea that you can just do your own research and pursue knowledge in complete independence of those institutions being a sort of silly and, I think, not very fruitful idea. The overarching lesson I think is, is it's so important to, on the one hand, improve these institutions as best we can. And partly that's an issue of norms. I think at the moment, my sense is you often get punished more for calling out elite misinformation than for propagating it. And that's a kind of norm which I think is utterly dysfunctional, because if you call it out in the manner that we've been doing in our conversation, people will often treat that as, oh, maybe you're on the other side, or maybe you're attacking the institution in a particular way that's completely dysfunctional.
- [29:49]
Jasia Monk
So a brief side note done. But I fully agree with that. And it's one of my deep frustrations with journalism that I think you can be wrong all of the time. But if you're always wrong the same way as the kind of prevailing view at that moment, there's never negative professional consequences for it. You can have said the stupidest thing unthinkingly for 20 years, but as long as you always move with the crowd, there's no punishment for it. That's perhaps unsurprising because you're not easy to distinguish, right? I mean, you're just part of a blob of other people who say similar things. What I think is more surprising and even more depressing, even more concerning, is that if you break with a consensus, if you break with where most people in journalism, for example, are at any one time, not only do you then sustain extreme attacks which disincentivize having the courage to disintegrate degree, but the really striking thing is that you're not readmitted to the community of the rightful. In retrospect, even if what you argue turned out to be right, even if the mainstream view moves to join what you were saying at that time, you still are going to be marked as the kind of strange, conspiratorial, politically dubious malcontent who deviated from the mainstream view at a moment when that was the wrong thing to do. So that, I think, is what concerns me even more, because that really thoroughly disincentivizes the kind of scrutiny that these institutions need to work. And why is it that we believe in science, for example? Because they're supposed to be an open conversation. There's supposed to be mechanisms that encourage that kind of disagreement. If our social dynamics are set up in such a way, those dynamics don't work, then that actually undermines the reasons why we're supposed to trust things like science in the first place.
- [31:41]
Dan Williams
Exactly. I couldn't agree more. And it's so I think that sort of that culture where if you dissent from groupthink that's prevailing within these institutions, it can be really harmful to your reputation. It's dysfunctional on so many different levels all at once. I think it hurts the performance of these institutions in all sorts of ways. It undermines their ability to perform their function. I think it's also the kind of thing that often results and people getting radicalized against these institutions and as you say, doing this sort of 180 thing where then they just develop an entire kind of anti establishment worldview, which is much worse actually than the thing that they're rejecting. But connected to that, it also undermines public trust in these institutions. And ultimately if you do care about addressing the misinformation problem, where even if you're understanding that in a quite narrow sense, people, people looking at bizarre conspiracy theory content online, people engaging with anti vax content online, many causes of that, but I think the kind of overarching explanation of that is that they don't trust institutions, they don't trust science, they don't trust medical authorities, they don't trust public health officials, they don't trust mainstream media and so on. And so the main thing is to try to regain trust or to increase trust in those institutions. And if it's perceived that these institutions are politicized, if it's perceived sometimes accurately, I would say that they are susceptible to forms of groupthink. It's devastating for that issue of trust. And then a symptom of that mistrust among large segments of the population is people start seeking out counter establishment content. They start seeking out people who are in no way constrained by mainstream scientific knowledge, no way constrained by established expertise. And that's where you get the sort of market for Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens. That's where you get this situation where somebody like Elon Musk can just post falsehood after falsehood and not get called out on it within that environment, because so many people within that environment have completely lost trust in these mainstream institutions.
- [33:53]
Jasia Monk
So I think that relates to another interesting article that you wrote and we published a version of that in persuasion called the everyone is biased. Biased. The idea here, I guess, is that it's easy to fall into a form of cynicism about the world when you come to recognize that some of these elite institutions, for example, have these very deep forms of groupthink, that they punish people who dissent, that they've gotten some important things right. When we think about various pieces of public health advice that we got during the pandemic, for example, it's attempting to say, you know what? We can't trust any of these institutions and we can't trust any particular person. Any particular person probably has a bias, and so we should mistrust everything, basically. How do we protect ourselves against that kind of cynicism? And what more specifically do you mean by this everyone is biased bias?
- [34:43]
Dan Williams
Yeah. So the everyone is biased bias is not the belief that everyone is biased. I actually think that belief is true. And I think it's very important for how we think about politics and how we think about the challenges of figuring out what's true in politics. I mean, maybe if I could just take a moment to. To expand on that sense in which everyone is biased, because I think it's not so obvious to people exactly what that means. And I think there are really two respects in which everyone is biased. There's a sort of psychological aspect to it, and there's what philosophers would call an epistemological aspect to it. The psychological aspect is just that human beings are not disinterested truth seekers. So when it comes to thinking about politics, we tend to engage in what psychologists call motivated reasoning. We've got many practical motivations, practical goals that are distinct from and come into conflict with the pursuit of truth in an everyday sense. That can be things like self interest and self aggrandizement. But in politics, that often means things like tribalism. It means the ways in which advocating for a particular cause or a political coalition can bias how we seek out and process information, for the most part, unconsciously in ways that we're not aware of. That's the psychological component to political bias. But there's also, I think, a more kind of complex and interesting component to it, which has to do with the fact that even if we were disinterested truth seekers, even if we were perfectly rational, the world that we're forming beliefs about in politics is so complex and the truth about it is so uncertain, and we access that political universe in ways that are so indirect, we're so reliant upon testimony that we get second hand, third hand, fourth hand, fifth hand, and so on, from reporters, from journalists, from pundits and so on, that even if we were perfectly rational as individuals, we should still expect us to be in error and to have partial perspectives on reality in all sorts of different ways. And of course, if you combine those two things, the fact that reality is complex and the truth is uncertain, with the fact that we're not disinterested truth seekers, your default assumptions should, should be everyone is in some sense viewing the political universe in ways that are selective, partial and subject to various sorts of errors. And at the same time, I think it's also true that most people don't instinctively appreciate that about their own situation and about their own political tribe. It feels to most people like the truth is just kind of self evident, it's just obvious what the truth is, such that anyone who disagrees with them must be either delusional or they're lying, or they're crazy, etc. This is what psychologists naive realism. And I think that's really destructive at the sort of individual level because I think it encourages a kind of arrogance and intellectual complacency. I think it's also really terrible when it comes to political polarization because we end up thinking the other tribe simply won't recognize the truths which are completely self evident to us, so they must be nefarious or they must be very stupid. So that's the sense in which I think everyone is biased and I think it's an important truth which most people don't instinctively appreciate. And I, and I think our political culture will be better if we did appreciate it.
- [37:48]
Jasia Monk
Just to make clear the move you're making here, there's a kind of conventional wisdom and there's a counter conventional wisdom or something like that, right? I mean, a lot of people in the really naive thing just think, look, I got everything right, Anybody who disagrees with me must be a bad person or they must be being paid. I mean, I think one really obvious illustration of this in social media is always accusing people of being a grifter, right? Like the only reason why you might be arguing this position that disagrees with mine must be that you're doing it for money. Because obviously if you were a good and smart person, you couldn't possibly believe something so stupid. And obviously there are lots of grifters online. That's true of certain kinds of people, but it's just not acknowledging the possibility of good faith disagreement. Now what you're saying is, all right, so this is an important insight, we should take that seriously. We should always check ourselves with that. Because even by your point, 100% intellectually, and I thought about it a lot in my life, life. And yet in certain situations it's tempting to say how can you possibly believe this, right, like what's wrong with you? And to check tendency. But you then worry that if we run too far with that assumption, if we somehow become too obsessed with this important insight that you just spent a good few minutes formulating, that itself is a danger as well. Why is that the case? Why is it that this important point which is formulated itself can become a source of arrogance, error if we focus on it too uncritically?
- [39:11]
Dan Williams
I think the basic reason is because everything that I've just described applies to everyone, really. And what that means is I think you can become so fixated on that universality of bias and also on exposing cases where people who present themselves as objective are actually hypocritical or they're engaged in motivated reasoning and so on, so fixated on that that you end up missing the fact that actually there are these profound differences in the degree to which individuals, institutions are committed to truth. And I think you need to be able to keep both of those ideas in your head at the same time. Everyone is biased. Everyone is fallible in how they view the world and that influences even our most sort of prestigious elite, knowledge producing institutions. At the same time, there's bias and there's bias, right? There's ordinary run of the mill human bias and then there's, as I've already mentioned, someone like Elon Musk, and honestly, it was viewing Elon Musk's behavior on X over the past sort of year or two, the sheer scale and brazenness of his lying, where it falls way outside the scope of ordinary bias. And I think there's a risk that if you're too focused on the generality, if you're too focused on the kind of universality of bias, that you become blind to those really important differences. And that's the everyone is bias. Focusing too much on this sort of general claim about human psychology and an epistemic situation, as philosophers would put it, that you don't acknowledge that actually there are are really profound differences in the degree to which certain individuals and certain institutions are committed to truth.
- [40:51]
Jasia Monk
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of a Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, Dan and I talk about one of the subjects I wrote about in the Identity Trap that is of particularly interest to me. And it is standpoint theory, standpoint epistemology, it is probably true that there are certain experiences, experiences that you're only likely to have if you're a member of a particular group, and that might give you certain kinds of insight about how the world works. And yet I worry that a lot of the ideas that have been built on that assumption go a little bit too far. But we're now tempted to say that you have to be a member of a particular group to really understand what's going on in the world, and everybody else should therefore defer to your political judgment. Then, and I explore what this view gets right and what this view gets importantly, wrong. We also talk briefly about how philosophers can actually make a useful contribution to public discourse. To listen to that part of the conversation, please go to yashamonk.substack.com and become a paying subscriber of this podcast. This is going to help us do this work, keep the show and the road, and it's also going to give you access to each full conversation. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about this show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like them, Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [42:38]
Dan Williams
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.
- [42:57]
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