(2022-01-26) Alexander Bounded Distrust

Scott Alexander on Bounded Distrust. (Deciding what you can believe from an untrustworthy source.)

One day you're at the airport, waiting for a plane, ambiently watching the TV at the gate. It's FOX News, and they're saying that a mass shooter just shot twenty people in Yankee Stadium.

Do you believe this?

I'm a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News, and sure, I believe it. The level on which FOX News is bad isn't the level where they invent mass shootings that never happened

Now suppose FOX says that police have apprehended a suspect, a Saudi immigrant named Abdullah Abdul. They show footage from a press conference where the police are talking about this. Do you believe them?

Again, yes

The point is, there are rules to the "being a biased media source" game. There are lines you can cross, and all that will happen is a bunch of people who complain about you all the time anyway will complain about you more. And there are other lines you don't cross, or else you'll be the center of a giant scandal and maybe get shut down

In a world where FOX was the only news source available, this kind of thing would become really important

What’s the flipped version of this scenario for the other political tribe?

Here’s a Washington Post article saying that Abraham Lincoln was friends with Karl Marx and admired his socialist theories. It suggests that because of this, modern attacks on socialism are un-American... Here is a counterargument that there’s no evidence Abraham Lincoln had the slightest idea who Karl Marx was

A conservative might end up in the same position vis-a-vis the Washington Post as our hypothetical liberal and FOX News. They know it’s a biased source that often lies to them, but how often?

All of this is a lot more complicated than “of course you can trust the news” or “how dare you entertain deranged conspiracy theories!” There are lots of cases where you can’t trust the news! It sucks! It’s completely understandable that large swathes of people can’t differentiate the many many cases where the news lies to them from the other set of cases where the news is not, at this moment, actively lying. But that differentiation is possible, most people learn how to do it, and it’s the main way we know anything at all.

As in journalism, so in science:

According to this news site, some Swedish researchers were trying to gather crime statistics.

They collated a bunch of things about different crimes and - without it being a particular focus of their study - one of the pieces of information was immigration status, and they found that immigrants were responsible for a disproportionately high amount of some crimes in Sweden.

The Swedish establishment brought scientific misconduct cases against the researchers

While these accusations are probably true on their own terms, I think any researcher who found that immigrants were great would not have the technicalities of their research subjected to this level of scrutiny, and that the permissioning system evolved partly out of a desire to be able to crush researchers in exactly these kinds of situations

So I think the outrage is justified, this is exactly what people mean when they accuse experts of being biased, and those accusations are completely true.

But: have you ever heard an expert say, in so many words, that immigrants to Sweden definitely don't commit more crime than natives?

I believe that in some sense, the academic establishment will work to cover up facts that go against their political leanings. But the experts in the field won't lie directly

There are a lot of ways that experts and the academic establishment are biased and try to muddy the discussion in favor of their preferred political side. But this is a game with certain rules. There are lines they'll cross, and other lines they won't cross.

The reason why there’s no giant petition signed by every respectable criminologist and criminological organization saying Swedish immigrants don’t commit more violent crime than natives is because experts aren’t quite biased enough to sign a transparently false statement - even when other elites will push that statement through other means. And that suggests to me that the fact that there is a petition like that signed by climatologists on anthropogenic global warming suggests that this position is actually true.

Last year I explained why I didn't believe ivermectin worked for COVID. In a subsequent discussion with Alexandros Marinos, I think we agreed on something like:...

In the end, I stuck with my believe that ivermectin probably didn’t work, and Alexandros stuck with his belief that it probably did

I think some people are able to figure out these rules and feel comfortable with them, and other people can’t and end up as conspiracy theorists

Obviously the good solution is that people stop lying and presenting misleading information.

But I think it’s important for these two types of people to understand each other.

The people who lack this skill entirely think it’s crazy to listen to experts about anything at all

My answer - which I don’t think is an obvious or easy answer, it’s a bold claim that could be wrong, is “I think I have a good sense of the dynamics here, how far people will bend the truth, and what it looks like when they do”. I realize this is playing with fire. But listening to experts is a powerful enough hack for finding the truth that it’s worth going pretty far to try to rescue it.

The clueless people need to realize that the savvy people aren’t always gullible, just more optimistic about their ability to extract signal from same.