Mind Readings: Swimming in Idiotic Conspiracies

In today's episode, let's talk about why we are swimming in idiotic conspiracies. Like we are drowning in these things. There's so many to pick from, too. But some of the weirder ones are things, you know, traditional ones you've seen as almost as internet memes now, like people who believe the moon landing was faked, or people who believe the world is literally flat and not a obloid sphere. Why how did we get here?

How did this how did any of these things gain any kind of traction? This will be mildly political, but I would argue that the single biggest intellectual mistake of the last 50 years, particularly in the culture I live in, uh the United States of America, is this unfounded and I think frankly dangerous assumption that all opinions and points of view are equally valid and deserve attention. No. All opinions and points of view are not equally valid. All people have the right to express their opinions and points of view.

That is true. That is uh a freedom of expression, right? Uh many governments around the world guarantee that right. Whether or not you actually can or not is a different story, but at least it's on the paperwork. Expertise exists for a reason, right?

Someone who is expert in something, and somebody who just sits behind a desk making YouTube videos, but doesn't have any actual expertise, their opinions are not the same. Their opinions are not equally valid. And the way we get to drowning in stupid conspiracy theories is the belief that those two things are equal. It's false equivalency. I am not in any way, shape, or form a qualified medical practitioner.

I put together a COVID newsletter. I started doing it in January of 2020. Um now two and a half years into this adventure that I didn't ask for. And yes, can experts be wrong? Of course, that's part of expertise is learning and growing.

But in general, we have abdicated our responsibility for critical thinking as a society, and said, these two opinions are equally valid. No, this is this is Chris the marketer. Yes, he copies and pastes mostly from what actual experts say. So we'll give Chris the marketer some credit for at least recognizing who the actual experts are. But the actual expert, like Dr.

Iwasaki, her opinion is it just inherently more valid. Inherently more valid. When you see a news story on the news about top secret documents, I have never ever served in any official capacity in the United States government in law enforcement and things like that. Is my opinion about whether a document should be top secret or not as valid as someone, say at a law enforcement agency whose literal job is the enforcement of that, of those regulations. No, my opinion is not as valid.

I am still free to express it. But if there's a fairly good chance of what I'm going to express is wrong, or at least lack nuance. Right. Whether it's marketing automation, Google ads, Google Analytics, NFTs, you name it. Because we've lost the ability to discern actual expertise and think critically, the person who is loud tends to be seen as the expert.

So what's the remedy? How do we learn this? How do we teach ourselves this? How do we teach our kids this, our business partners? The first thing we have to dig into is understanding what expertise really is.

How much time and effort and focus has a person spent to understand a topic, not broadly but deeply, to study something for years and years and years until they know the ins and outs. One of the hallmarks of true expertise is not knowing, not just knowing the right answers, like knowing the right answers is important, knowing having good information is important. But knowing what's going to go wrong. An open reading frame is a part that has activation potential, can do stuff, and there's a whole big chunks of it that don't. So the likelihood of this being a problematic variant is lower than if it did occur on this open reading frame or on this part of the spike protein.

We, as lay people, should still be able, even if we don't know the details, we should still be able to listen to that and go, not only do you know what's right, you know what's likely to go wrong. Right. So if I listen to someone talking about virology and they're saying mutations, mutations and all these things, and they're not talking about whether it's on an open reading frame or not, I would say this person doesn't seem to have as much expertise as Dr. Iwasaki, who can tell you all about how different things occur. Or my friend Sarah, who's a PhD in in um biology, can talk about how RNA replicates and stuff.

I don't have a PhD in that. I just I just have smarter friends than me. The second thing, besides learning how to understand and respect expertise, is disposing of that point of view that all opinions are equally valid. Without disposing of the right for someone to express their opinion, you have or should have the right to express your opinion. But you should also have the right to be contradicted and to be told that you're operating with incorrect information.

And it is that we have to solve for. To reinforce that expertise exists for a reason, that reading the headlines or listening to our favorite commentator on YouTube is not the same as having domain expertise. And encouraging people, encouraging everyone to have domain expertise, to be really good at something. Maybe you're really good at plumbing, right? Maybe you're really, really good at electrical work.

Maybe you're really good at painting. But the more people have a true area of domain expertise, the easier it is to relate to those people and to say to them, and give examples to them, like someone who is a true expert farmer. They can look at a harvest of wheat very early on and say, there's a lot of potential issues with this crop. They know weeks before a layperson whether a crop's going to be any good or not. And so when you're talking to that person about, say, virology, to break that mindset that all opinions are valid, you can say, well, could you see a case where someone like me who's a lay person wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a good head of wheat and a bad head of weak of wheat, you know, 10 weeks into the season?

They probably say, oh yeah, for sure. I mean the color here or the uh you know the moisture content here is going to be a big differentiator. And I wouldn't know that as a layperson. I'm I still don't know that I'm making that up. But then you could say to them, and so could you see how Dr.

Iwasaki's opinion about the SARS CIV2 virus is much more valid than this other person on YouTube who doesn't have a PhD, who's not an expert in viruses, just like I'm not an expert in wheat. So if we encourage people to have domains of expertise and we respect their domains of expertise, it should be easier to get them to respect others' domains of expertise. Anyway, that's why I think we're swimming in idiotic conspiracies, because we've lost respect for each other's domains of expertise, and we've got this bizarre, unfortunate belief that all opinions are equally valid. We can unwind that as long as we try. Thanks for tuning in.

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