Assessing the truth when there are no videos: Look for the pattern of refutations (even if you can’t understand them)
A bit of simple epistemic reasoning that is broader than “record everything”
This is not a post about recent American civil violence. I have plenty of strong feelings, I try to play my small role in the struggle, and I engage in personal conversations on the topic, but I am sure that none of those mean that me writing about the general discourse on the topic would do anything other than waste people’s time. I have no revelations to offer. I am pretty confident that -- thanks to experience, education, voracious reading, and broad sciencey thinking skills -- my analysis would be pretty good. But it would not be remotely unique, and there is no reason to pile on (a “vote” by the count of good takes versus bad takes is not a thing). Those observations, generalized across topics and people, are my lesson for today.
No wait, I still have a few words about epistemic thinking that have bubbled up from recent events.
Those who follow current events in the streets have heard a thousand times that we need to record everything. Videos do indeed have an impact that no other source of evidence does. In particular, they make it particularly difficult for the unengaged to look away from what is happening or lazily say that they really don’t know what to conclude from the contradictory claims. I call that lazy because it is quite often really f***ing easy to figure out what to make of contradictory claims. There is a lot of space between “saw it with my own eyes” and “how am I supposed to know who is telling the truth”, and it is possible to move far into that space without actually being expert in the topic.
Consider an example of parenting one child who is prone to bouts of anti-sibling physical violence over minor slights (some real but mostly nothing unreasonable except in the mind of the “slighted”), always claiming attacks were fully justified, and the sibling who approximately never initiates violence. Even though you generally lack video, you generally have sufficient information to know who really “started it”. That is probably not all you would like to know, but it is a very good start. But this is not a post about parenting frustrations, so you should substitute people acting on behalf of the current US regime and their critics. But I promised this was not a post about the crisis of American democracy, so then go ahead and further substitute people who make outlandish health science claims about harms from vapes, vaccines, alcohol, or foodways, or similar departures from the evidence.
What these all have in common, epistemically, is that exactly one faction has a demonstrated history of (a) making claims that have been directly observed to be false; (b) reflexively making the same unsubstantiated accusations in response to every bit of resistance to their claims (violent leftist! industry shill!); (c) failing to ever demonstrate what should be the glaring, obvious harm that would have resulted if their claims were really true; and perhaps most useful, (d) never once offering a coherent reply to the debunking of their claims or conceding that any previous claim turned out to be wrong.
The first of these is obvious but not always possible -- that’s the case of things like videos or already being sufficiently expert in a topic that you are not likely to be misled. The middle two are useful, though not as easy to identify -- they require further research and some expertise about the topic. I hope to come back to them.
I highlight the last entry on the list because it is a particularly overlooked bit of definitive evidence about who to never trust, and it is particularly useful for cases of pseudo-scientific nonsense. Here is the simple research that anyone can perform, whatever their level of expertise: Find cogent-seeming rebuttals of concrete claims made by one faction or the other. You don’t even have to know where to look for them; if you have found the debate space, just ask someone who seems like a solid commentator to point you toward them. The key here is that you don’t need to have the expertise to know if the analysis is valid (if you have that, you already know who to believe because you already know what to believe).
Here is the test: Does faction X, on one side of the debate, offer what seem to be appropriately technical/factual, coherent rebuttals of some key claims from their opponents, Y? Does Y ever try to respond to those rebuttals in what appears to be appropriately technical/factual, coherent responses, or do they simply ignore the challenges or respond non-substantively, like with ad hominem attacks? (Keep in mind I am not suggesting you need to be able to judge the legitimacy of any of those arguments, just that you can see they exist.) At the same time, does Y fail to offer what might be coherent rebuttals of X’s claims, but rather just keeps repeating the same claims and reasoning/methods, as if they had never been challenged, simply trying to overwhelm the signal space? If the answers go in a particular direction (I trust you can sort that out), you have very good evidence that Y is lying to you and X is, at least in broad strokes, correct. You got there without ever having to know enough to evaluate the validity of any technical pint.
Obviously this has its limits. You cannot expect scientists or even enthusiastic hobbyists to spend much time rebutting every last “flat earther” type claim. But when something is a current hot-button policy issue, it will be happening. Consider the current rhetoric surrounding tariffs, which if you believe the claims of the US regime are paid to the US by foreigners and are a winning way to expert national power. Everyone with an understanding of basic economics knows that tariffs are almost entirely paid by the final consumer of the goods (so, American consumers in the present case). Those with knowledge of international trade will further observe that when tariffs are random, overly broad, or based on political pique (i.e., are not focused on one of a few very specific goals they can be good for, which generally require concurrent other policies to advance), they are lose-lose for the welfare of both populations involved via the loss of gains from comparative advantage and disruption of stable commerce. Despite the presumed frustration with having to explain the “obvious”, many economists have presented these points to the public. Have you seen anything that could be considered a response to these rebuttals? Have you seen any substantive criticisms arguing the standard economic theory and evidence is wrong? You don’t need any understanding of the substance for that to be a strong indicator of who is right. (Of course, it helps even more to acquire enough substantive knowledge to see that the main point about the ultimate consumers paying is true -- which is quite easy to understand -- but the point here is you don’t need even that.)
My touchstone for whether a particular bit of epistemic detective work is useful, as you might guess from half a career spent introducing the world to the concept of tobacco harm reduction, is whether an epistemic strategy would get people to the point of realizing that vaping or smokeless tobacco poses very little health risk. (Ideally I would like to get them clear to believing such consumption is plausibly health-beneficial, which even most proponents don’t realize, but I will save that for later.) I think this strategy succeeds there.
The tobacco control extremist faction, Y, just tries to flood the mindspace with claims. There have probably been a thousand or more careful rebuttals from faction X (those who care about good science, or real public health, or just this topic in particular); I have written a few hundred of them. I am not talking about the millions of quick-hit criticisms of claims by Y that are out there. I am focused on only the pieces of analysis that would cause even a completely non-expert non-informed reader to say “well, either some good technical points are being made here -- and in the comments from others that clarify and expand -- or someone is risking their professional reputation and is putting in enormous effort to write bullshit that is designed to trick someone like me into thinking it is legit.”
It turns out that a fair portion of those critiques are actually a bit weak, relying on inaccurate rules of thumb about how scientific inference and research methodologies work. But the point is that faction Y does not respond to them, nor does it produce a literature of seemingly-substantive attacks on the empiricism and analysis coming from X. That should be enough to know. (And a similar chain of reasoning can tell you that the people being attacked and/or arrested by ICE are not criminals, even if you don’t see any videos.) No, it is not “proof”, but the thing about reasoning in non-axiomatic systems (e.g., the real world/universe we live in) is that there is never proof. This is true both about technical scientific claims and assessments of who to believe. There is only varying degree of support for a belief, and I am arguing that what I have outlined is pretty overwhelming support. Yes, it might lead to the wrong conclusion sometimes, but I genuinely can’t think of an example (as I can with most every more simplistic rule about who to believe).