A novel aspect of our present political moment is that the more credentials a person has, the more likely he or she is to be a Democrat. This wasn’t true 50 years ago; on the contrary. But creeping credentialism has become a key feature of our culture. I think we are in the midst of a coup being carried out by people who are dumb, but have credentials, usually half-baked.
These thoughts are prompted by Matt Taibbi’s current Racket News post. I am not sure whether that link will work if you are not a Racket News subscriber. If not, you might consider signing up. Meanwhile, I will try to do justice to the post with a few excerpts.
Briefly, Taibbi has obtained documents in response to a FOIA request. His post focuses on an alleged “misinformation” expert named Michael Caulfield, of the University of Washington. Early in the covid fiasco, Caulfield wrote an email in which he ridiculed people who were trying to understand the actual lethality of the virus:
Caulfield dismissed efforts to analyze data to figure out what was happening, on the ground that most people lack credentials. (Not that he himself had any relevant expertise, by the way.) Instead, the average person–pretty much everyone–should just figure out “who [sic] to trust.” And that would be the government.
Caulfield unveiled some of this thinking in December 2018, in a blog post called “Recalibrating our Approach to Misinformation,” while writers like Martin Gurri argued that audiences lost trust because the tools are now available for audiences to see authorities aren’t trustworthy. Caulfield’s take, consistent with what most “anti-disinformationists” believe, is the mere fact of mistrust is a net negative, because it raises risks of “totalitarianism” (read: Trump). Therefore, student “orientation towards truth” is “far more ominous than mere gullibility.” Rather than teach kids to evaluate information, the idea is to teach “trust.”
So, teach young people to trust the government.
Taibbi addresses the broader issue of the “misinformation” movement and its political orientation:
The new FOIA production repeatedly shows academics or professional fact-checkers choosing which “false narratives” to study merely by reading news and guessing what the rabble might obsess over next, perhaps while stroking a chin. “As more people are infected, expect to see new false narratives about how the virus started,” a Newsguard circular read, adding that “many of which will seize on…xenophobic themes.”
Most revealing: while researchers constantly scan for misinformation/disinformation spread by ordinary consumers, they never (literally not once that I’ve found, across years of reading these communications) look at government officials or credentialed experts as possible sources of bad information. The hundreds of millions spent on “anti-disinformation” initiatives can be boiled down to one principle, repeated endlessly: trust your betters. Forget critical thinking, locate authoritative voices, and stick with them.
Of course, as to the covid epidemic, the oft-censored independent voices generally turned out to be right, and the government was wrong.
Finally, I note that Caulfield described thinking for oneself as “a lousy epistemology.” As a one-time student of epistemology, I say with confidence that no philosopher has ever advanced such a theory. The idea that one should always believe the government and follow its dictates has a name, not in epistemology but in politics. It starts with an F. That is where today’s Democratic Party lives.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.