Sep 8, 2021 07:22 PM
https://unherd.com/2021/09/the-lefts-science-denial/
EXCERPTS (Tom Chivers): Cassie Jaye is the director of the documentary The Red Pill about the “men’s rights activism” (MRA) movement. She gave a TEDx talk a few years ago about her plan to expose the movement as a “misogynistic hate group actively working against women’s equality”.
She noticed something. When she interviewed the men’s rights activists, she was enraged by their sexism: but when she went back and transcribed the interviews, she found that the things she had been enraged by were not as clear as she had thought. “I would often hear an innocent and valid point that a MRA would make,” she says, “and in my head I would add on a sexist or anti-woman spin, assuming that was what he wanted to say but didn’t.”
If a man said that there are 2,000 domestic violence shelters for women in the US and only one for men, for instance, she would hear “and therefore we should defund the women’s ones”, rather than “so we should fund more men’s ones”. It’s an interesting watch.
The blogger John Nerst points out that, whether or not you agree with her, there’s something interesting going on here. Her brain was doing something incredibly sophisticated. The MRAs’ comments were being filtered, or spun, or edited, before they reached her conscious mind. They were given tags: untrustworthy, sexist, anti-woman.
As far as her consciousness was concerned, she wasn’t choosing to label them like that: they came to her pre-labelled, by some hidden subroutine in the brain. It was only when she watched it back later, and her own video diaries from the time, that she was able to spot the labels. And the labelling involves quite high-level ideas, things like “misogyny”, not just lizard-brain concepts like “danger, food, potential mate”.
I thought of Jaye, and the strange filtering that our brains do, when I read about the probably nonexistent wave of ivermectin overdoses filling Midwestern US hospitals and preventing medics from treating gunshot victims.
[...] To be clear, ivermectin almost certainly doesn’t help prevent or treat Covid and it can be bad for you. But it seems unlikely that there are so many people ingesting it that it’s affecting hospital capacity. [Oklahoma hospitals deluged by ivermectin overdoses, doctor says]
[...] data up to the end of August [...shows...] a marked rise in ivermectin cases — about ten times as many this August as there were in August 2019. But while a tenfold rise sounds impressive, it’s only up from about 40 cases a month in 2019 to 450 a month now, and most of those cases had either no effect or minor effects. [...] It’s silly to take ivermectin, but people doing it are not putting huge strain on the US health service.
The ivermectin story is far from the only one recently...
[...] As a bit of an aside, this isn’t supposed to happen. The Left views itself as the defender of truth and accuracy, not a purveyor of mistruth. [...] There is, I think, a fairly well-established idea that the Left is the “side” of science and evidence, and the Right is the “side” of science “denial”. I find that strange, because I can think of quite a few areas in which elite Left-wing or liberal opinion doesn’t sit well with mainstream scientific findings.
For instance: the UK Green Party wants to “phase out” nuclear power. Is that “science denial”? I don’t know, but I think the consensus scientific position is that nuclear power is extremely safe and carbon-efficient.
And the idea that human behaviour and society are in some important way the product of evolution has been so profoundly uncomfortable to people on the Left that as far back as 1978 people broke into a lecture the biologist Edward Wilson, shouting “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” and throwing water over him, after he had written a book, Sociobiology, which was mainly about the behaviour of insects but which speculated that future science could shed some light on human behaviour. Is that “science denial”? Well, again, that’s a question of definitions, but blank slatism is certainly not directly in line with modern scientific findings.
Or take IQ. Your score on an IQ test predicts your success in life pretty well; your career outcomes and earnings, your school results, even your lifespan. It’s also highly heritable. You can find people denying those facts on the Left much more easily than you can find them on the Right, just as you can find people claiming that biological sex isn’t real.
[...] I suspect that if you could find some reasonable way of defining terms like “science denial” or “misinformation” (and “Right-wing” and “Left-wing”), you’d probably end up finding that it’s more prevalent on the Right. But, at least in the largely Left-wing or centrist circles I inhabit, it’s almost axiomatic that misinformation is what the Right do. There’s a serious strain of thought that thinks we are the correct ones, and they are the wrong ones.
[...] But what interests me is the question of whether people (on the Left or Right) do this on purpose: are they consciously misrepresenting their opponents and ignoring inconvenient truths, or is it a subconscious, automatic thing?
I wrote some months ago about people switching between different definitions of words in highly charged culture-war debates, allowing them to make claims like “cancel culture is/isn’t real”. I’d assumed it was mainly unconscious, but something that people said to me was: this is entirely deliberate.
They define words in ways that gain them cultural power: so a Left-winger might very deliberately define “racism” to include “anything that leads to negative outcomes for non-white people”, and a Right-winger might define it as “only explicit acts of intentional racism by an individual”, so as to make the problem as big or as small as you can. Certainly it seems to happen too often for it to be accidental.
Under that model, people share the ivermectin story or the trans-woman-in-the-spa story to damage their political opponents [...] But the Cassie Jaye MRA thing, I think, reveals another angle. ... Nerst calls this process of only choosing from pre-screened options “semitentionality”: it’s neither an honest mistake nor a cynical misrepresentation, but some weird different third option... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS (Tom Chivers): Cassie Jaye is the director of the documentary The Red Pill about the “men’s rights activism” (MRA) movement. She gave a TEDx talk a few years ago about her plan to expose the movement as a “misogynistic hate group actively working against women’s equality”.
She noticed something. When she interviewed the men’s rights activists, she was enraged by their sexism: but when she went back and transcribed the interviews, she found that the things she had been enraged by were not as clear as she had thought. “I would often hear an innocent and valid point that a MRA would make,” she says, “and in my head I would add on a sexist or anti-woman spin, assuming that was what he wanted to say but didn’t.”
If a man said that there are 2,000 domestic violence shelters for women in the US and only one for men, for instance, she would hear “and therefore we should defund the women’s ones”, rather than “so we should fund more men’s ones”. It’s an interesting watch.
The blogger John Nerst points out that, whether or not you agree with her, there’s something interesting going on here. Her brain was doing something incredibly sophisticated. The MRAs’ comments were being filtered, or spun, or edited, before they reached her conscious mind. They were given tags: untrustworthy, sexist, anti-woman.
As far as her consciousness was concerned, she wasn’t choosing to label them like that: they came to her pre-labelled, by some hidden subroutine in the brain. It was only when she watched it back later, and her own video diaries from the time, that she was able to spot the labels. And the labelling involves quite high-level ideas, things like “misogyny”, not just lizard-brain concepts like “danger, food, potential mate”.
I thought of Jaye, and the strange filtering that our brains do, when I read about the probably nonexistent wave of ivermectin overdoses filling Midwestern US hospitals and preventing medics from treating gunshot victims.
[...] To be clear, ivermectin almost certainly doesn’t help prevent or treat Covid and it can be bad for you. But it seems unlikely that there are so many people ingesting it that it’s affecting hospital capacity. [Oklahoma hospitals deluged by ivermectin overdoses, doctor says]
[...] data up to the end of August [...shows...] a marked rise in ivermectin cases — about ten times as many this August as there were in August 2019. But while a tenfold rise sounds impressive, it’s only up from about 40 cases a month in 2019 to 450 a month now, and most of those cases had either no effect or minor effects. [...] It’s silly to take ivermectin, but people doing it are not putting huge strain on the US health service.
The ivermectin story is far from the only one recently...
[...] As a bit of an aside, this isn’t supposed to happen. The Left views itself as the defender of truth and accuracy, not a purveyor of mistruth. [...] There is, I think, a fairly well-established idea that the Left is the “side” of science and evidence, and the Right is the “side” of science “denial”. I find that strange, because I can think of quite a few areas in which elite Left-wing or liberal opinion doesn’t sit well with mainstream scientific findings.
For instance: the UK Green Party wants to “phase out” nuclear power. Is that “science denial”? I don’t know, but I think the consensus scientific position is that nuclear power is extremely safe and carbon-efficient.
And the idea that human behaviour and society are in some important way the product of evolution has been so profoundly uncomfortable to people on the Left that as far back as 1978 people broke into a lecture the biologist Edward Wilson, shouting “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” and throwing water over him, after he had written a book, Sociobiology, which was mainly about the behaviour of insects but which speculated that future science could shed some light on human behaviour. Is that “science denial”? Well, again, that’s a question of definitions, but blank slatism is certainly not directly in line with modern scientific findings.
Or take IQ. Your score on an IQ test predicts your success in life pretty well; your career outcomes and earnings, your school results, even your lifespan. It’s also highly heritable. You can find people denying those facts on the Left much more easily than you can find them on the Right, just as you can find people claiming that biological sex isn’t real.
[...] I suspect that if you could find some reasonable way of defining terms like “science denial” or “misinformation” (and “Right-wing” and “Left-wing”), you’d probably end up finding that it’s more prevalent on the Right. But, at least in the largely Left-wing or centrist circles I inhabit, it’s almost axiomatic that misinformation is what the Right do. There’s a serious strain of thought that thinks we are the correct ones, and they are the wrong ones.
[...] But what interests me is the question of whether people (on the Left or Right) do this on purpose: are they consciously misrepresenting their opponents and ignoring inconvenient truths, or is it a subconscious, automatic thing?
I wrote some months ago about people switching between different definitions of words in highly charged culture-war debates, allowing them to make claims like “cancel culture is/isn’t real”. I’d assumed it was mainly unconscious, but something that people said to me was: this is entirely deliberate.
They define words in ways that gain them cultural power: so a Left-winger might very deliberately define “racism” to include “anything that leads to negative outcomes for non-white people”, and a Right-winger might define it as “only explicit acts of intentional racism by an individual”, so as to make the problem as big or as small as you can. Certainly it seems to happen too often for it to be accidental.
Under that model, people share the ivermectin story or the trans-woman-in-the-spa story to damage their political opponents [...] But the Cassie Jaye MRA thing, I think, reveals another angle. ... Nerst calls this process of only choosing from pre-screened options “semitentionality”: it’s neither an honest mistake nor a cynical misrepresentation, but some weird different third option... (MORE - missing details)