deperplex

The purpose of this post is to distinguish two uses of "true", one functional, implicit and necessary for communication, and another use that isn't necessary, the ordinary and commonly discussed, albeit metaphysical or theoretical, use of "true".

A friend, arguing that theories have value beyond their truth, asks me to set truth aside when evaluating a theory. He likes to entertain post modernist ideas.

I ask, in a Pinker mood, do you think it's true that theories have value beyond their truth? You said so, but if we are to set truth aside, what am I supposed to think you believe when you say, "theories have value beyond their truth"? If I'm not to believe that you think this is true, then what am I supposed to conclude about what you're saying? Why should I even try to understand or credit it? Why are you even talking to me? Why should I listen?? To enjoy the sound of your voice???

Stephen Pinker makes much of this basic universal necessity of truth to criticize the post modernists and the Nietzsche-chic. He's partly right. Partly.

The notion of truth in the little conversation above is playing two different roles accomplishing two different kinds of work. One is communicative, functional and procedural. In order to converse, there must be an assumption of truth to the assertions intended by the conversants. Assuming otherwise defeats the purpose of conversational exchange of information. Abandoning that assumption of truth-intention also lands the conversants in a liar paradox from which conversation can go nowhere.

That process-functional use of truth is usually not spoken, since it's a prior assumption of any meaningful conversation. H. Paul Grice called this conversational cooperation. If you're looking for a beautiful, powerful and revelatory theory, read his two papers on the logic of conversation or the sections of Larry Horn's Natural History of Negation dealing with implicature. Although Grice does not discuss them, even greetings have an assumption of cooperativeness, since they carry a meaning of agreeableness or friendliness or at least politeness. All cooperative. But even when we get into a heated argument, we still do it in a shared language! And because? Because we want agreement or respect or submission -- something from the other. That's a social species. Even our bickering is cooperative in this needy way. When social scientists describe our species as a cooperative one, language use is not always their first example, but it should be.

So there's this practical, functional, process use of truth -- to oil the gears of information exchange, really the catalyst without which conversational information exchange wouldn't work. Without it language would never have evolved. Assuming everyone talking to you is lying, what survival benefit would you gain from listening to idle, useless noise? Language could only evolve if the exchange of information were useful and believed.

This practical use of truth is not generally expressed. " 'My name is jones', is true." Those last two words are a waste of breath. "My name is 'jones' " would suffice. Its assertion of truth is part of the conversational function itself.

This communicative use of truth is a mere convenience with no grand metaphysical or scientific import, but a necessary convenience nonetheless.

The other use of "true" is the one we most often talk about when we talk about truth and truths. It gets a lot of attention because it's louder than the tacit assumed one. It's a logical or philosophical notion, not just a practical one, and it's not a function of a process. It pops up not only when you want to talk philosophy and logic, but also in disputes over facts and disputes over the content of other people's assertions. You could call this the evaluative use of "true" or explicit use. A Wittgensteinian might call this philosophical truth, abusing language outside the practical game for which it is useful.

The explicit use though familiar, is metaphysical. "That's true" implies 'that's real', 'that exists', 'I agree that's real' or 'yes, that exists'. It's essential to how we perceive and understand. It's not only metaphysical, defining reality and existence, but it's also epistemic, defining what we think we know and agree to. You can see how different this is from the tacit conversational use. This philosophical use of "true" to indicate "reality" or "existence" -- all very metaphysical. The functional use belongs very much in the interactive world, not of metaphysics or the assessment of facts, but of pursuing the process of informational exchange.

It's worth pointing out, as an aside, that "Truth" is widely taken as a mystery. This appears to be yet another mix up. Facts, what's actually true of the world, is a mystery -- science approaches it but never quite perfectly or completely. Look at the immense lure of quantum physics. That's full of mystery. The world is full of mystery from its start, from its base to its top and in every direction. Maybe for that reason people, especially in religions ("I am the Truth" and "What is truth?), truth itself is viewed as a mystery. Actually truth itself is quite a simple and boring property. It's a property of assertions and that's it. "The Empire State Building is on 14th Street" is false; "The Empire State Building is on 34th Street" is true. Is the Empire State Building true? That's a confused question. Things are not true or false and even words alone are not true or false. Only assertions get to be true or false. "I am the Truth" is a figure of speech, intended to mystify. "'I am the son of God' is true" is an assertion, and it could be true or false. "I am the Truth" taken literally, is just incoherent, albeit poetic and mysteriously impressive as well as conveniently ambiguous. Does it mean, believe that I'm god? Or, you should follow what I do? Or something even more abstract about the universe and all of experience? All of the above, probably. It's the beautiful poetry of religion. My favorite poetry is the poetry that I can grasp sort of but can't entirely understand. Mystery is the intellectual gift that keeps on giving. Never grasped, never spent. Ever luring.

The two uses emerge from different motives and sources. They belong to different human processes. One is necessary for communication, although the tacit assumption can be questioned: "you don't really believe that, do you?" And because it is a kind of interactive game, as with game rules, it's not up to the individual whether to use it while playing. On the other hand, the metaphysical truth isn't necessary at all. It's a contention of the individual who asserts it.

Steven Pinker vociferously objects to the popular post modernist, Nietzschean rejection of truth. He wrote a book about it. But it seems to me that he doesn't give enough credibility (a word essentially tied to truth) to falsehoods.

Going back to the top, my friend and I were discussing what makes a theory good. His answer was "It's good if it works. A theory can have value beyond truth." For example, a sociologist or a Straussian might assert that a community's religion promotes social cohesion and individual psychological health. The truth of the religion plays no role there.

Or the Pope might say "God is good" whether he believes it or not, whether it's true or not or even if there's a god or not. And he may assert that it is true, again even if it's not and he knows it's not. Does his audience assume that he believes what he says? Not necessarily. I often think he doesn't really believe any of the hocus pocus and he knows that many of his followers don't either. The conversational cooperative assumption of truth has been slightly shifted to a pretense of truthfulness. It's all a communal dance of mutual convenience, not metaphysical truth. The priority is the community, not its truth. Similarly, Donald Trump often doesn't seem to expect anyone to believe some of his patent falsehoods. It's more cheer-leading his supporters than arguing over facts. Who cares about facts? It's about the Us.

The Pope example may seem a stretch, but as AI spreads along with conspiracy theories, such deceitful conveniences may become the rule. Does anyone believe propaganda? Does anyone believe the alternative conspiracy theories? There was a time when information about health, for example, was univocal (saturated fat and cholesterol are bad) and everyone believed it. Now there is so much contradictory information about health that no one knows what to think or do. So what should people believe, or how should they decide? Whatever my friends believe. And what do they believe? The YouTube influencer who seems coolest to them. It's not about truth but identity, trend and social fashion signals.

Here's where my friend has a point, a qualified point. Our sophisticated Pope thinks the theory he publicly espouses is a good one even if it's false. And that's true even if he assumes that his sophisticated audience likewise thinks the theory is good but false.

The answer to "what makes a theory a good theory?" is yet another question "good for what?" And it's this qualification that brings us back to truth. How do you assess what is good without a notion of truth? You say "faith" is good. How do you defend that? "It's good for the community" is a sound answer only if that answer is true. Whatever the defense, it'll depend on truth, or something close to truth like high probability. All kinds of lies may be good, but if they are good, then "they are good" must be true in the metaphysical sense about them, or at least, in a world where there are no absolute certainties, most likely to be true.

It seems to me that the only way around this moral necessity of "true" is another process, the process of ignoring it. Humans believe all sorts of things with little defense or question. And we still function individually and socially. Sometimes, maybe even often, ignoring truth (or high probability) is essential and necessary in the process of functioning. Those who have an accurate assessment of themselves tend to be unhappier and less successful than those who hold unwarranted, false confidence in themselves.

This feeds a question discussed in another post "academicism versus activism". There is an essential value of truth-seeking for any academic. But that ivory tower is an isolated place of observation. The rest of the world we actually live in is a world of choices and actions. What's more, it's overrun with others' competing choices and actions, their interests, movements, forces, militaries, power plays in a social context of inequalities of influence, and within those inequalities classes that are served by those militaries local or national, and classes that are not so served, those that "the law protects but does not bind" and those that "the law binds but does not protect".

In such a world, expressing truth is not always the priority choice. Propaganda holds an institutional microphone with big speakers to defend and justify itself. On the socio-political stage, the oppressed must state their interests as loudly as they can, otherwise their side of the truth won't be heard and the only means of getting any play will be forceful actions alone. And there are multiple interpretations to any event or any circumstance (see "true but wrong" and "the questions you ask determine the answers you get"). Deciding which is true can't even depend on the inhabitants of the ivory tower, since science is an ongoing investigation, not a body of truths, and scientists have no crystal ball. The players in the world of unequal influence promote interests, the truths they promote serve those interests, not the truth-for-truth's-sake of the academic.

So there are two very different roles of "true". One works in the game of communication and is an indispensable rule of that game. The other is essential for the academic process of research (though it should be probability, not truth, see the "entropy and truth" post), but not everywhere outside the ivory tower where wealth and influence rule regardless of truth.

These two common uses of "truth" or "true" are often not clearly distinguished by users or even by philosophers interested in truth or even Stephen Pinker who uses the necessity of one to try to prove the necessity of the other. Usually the focus is on the one or the other, not both, so one is forgotten in favor of the other. All uses of "truth" are linguistic -- it's a word and it applies to linguistic assertions, not to non linguistic things -- but one of the uses involves as well a lot of metaphysics and ontology. The conversational use is not metaphysical, it's practical. The metaphysical one might not be necessary; the conversational one is. It's one of the rules of the game, the sine qua non of the game.

Monday, June 30, 2025

information faster than light: emergence, symbol and the representation of nothing

"I'm telling you, information can in fact move faster than light."

"No way."

"Way. Here's a thought experiment. You have a bat signal, a super-powerful spotlight. Super-super powerful, like made of lasers. You cast the signal to the west. The light flies out into space. Then, with the light still on, you smoothly pivot your spotlight to the east. This motion takes you, say, three seconds. All the while the bat signal is spreading across the night sky until you stop at the east. Now suppose there's a planet many light years away directly west of your bat signal and another planet equidistant from your spotlight but directly east. In three seconds, the bat signal has traversed light years of space in three seconds."

"Something's wrong. The light of the bat signal takes years to get to each planet -- at the speed of light, not faster."

"The light, yes, but the bat signal does not consist of just the light that travels at one moment. It's the symbol alone that remains stable across the skies. The symbol and its meaning don't even depend on any light. You could transcribe it with a pencil or a stencil or draw it on sand or an arrangement of cheer-leaders. What has traveled across the sky is not one particular arrangement of light, but the shape signifier holding the interpretable meaning of Batman."

"Why should I take that as one bat signal traveling across the sky rather than a series of distinct bat signals?"

"Because the recipient on the distant planets interprets the signal as the same, coming from the same source from the relatively same time."

"But how do they know it's from the same source?"

"Suppose in this thought experiment, they'd been told year ahead that they'll get a bat signal on a certain day. And they get it that day. They then report back and some years later the report arrives and indeed they both got the signal the same day but one three seconds later than the other."

"Okay, it's a thought experiment, so let's suppose all that. It's still a kind of a fiction that they got the same signal, since they didn't get the same one -- they got a similar signal from a different set of configured light rays."

"Sure, but you can see that which lights don't matter, it's the symbol and, importantly, its information, that is the same, and that it's from the same source. Right?"

"But so what? No light has traveled faster than light."

"Well exactly!! No light or light information has violated any reductionist law of physics, but the symbol and its information has."

"How can the laws of physics not apply to something physical."

"Symbols are not just physical. They carry meanings, and meanings are not physical."

"Don't get all Platonic on me. I don't have to buy that other-worldly realism, Aristotle crushed that one two thousand years ago."

"You tell me what a thought is or what a meaning is. Look, here's a simpler example. Suppose the moon is casting a shadow out in space. What's creating the shadow? No trick question, just simple."

"The moon. It's in the way of the sunlight."

"Okay. Suppose you're traveling away from the moon in its shadow . As you go through space you'll see the shadow gets wider, the diameter gets wider because the rays of light from the sun are not parallel, they are radiating from the sun each at a light angle, like a flashlight."

"The moon is obstructing the sun's light cone. Okay. I think I see where this is going."

"As the moon moves, the shadow moves faster further from the moon. Eventually it will be moving faster than light."

"I get it, but I don't understand how it can be since it doesn't accord with the law of physics, the limit of the speed of light."

"Nothing has been violated. Literally. A shadow is not a thing. It's an absence of a thing, namely the absence of light. And the sun's light is not traveling faster than the speed of light. It's the absence that is traveling. Nothing is traveling faster than light in this example. Literally, a nothing is traveling faster than light.

Take the bat signal again. The light is not traveling faster than light, and the symbol is not traveling from one planet to the other. It's only the cognitive information of the symbol -- our perception of meaning tied to the symbol -- that is traveling faster than light. It's a kind of fiction ranging over the light rays. That fiction is what is meant by emergence. The shadow of the moon doesn't physically, reductively move faster than light, and that's because a shadow is, reductively, a nothing, an absence of light, not a physical thing. What then is a shadow if not a physical thing? It's a pattern that we perceive that we give a name. Even the physical effects of the shadow, any cooling of what's in its path, are only traveling faster than light in the sense that we perceive those aggregate effects are integrated -- by our interpretation! -- as the effects of a unity we identify as the shadow. It's a fiction of your symbolic representation, like a zero -- "0" -- the symbol that denotes what? Nothing! And it's not the symbol that moves, it's the interpretive information attached to it, not of itself, but by virtue of our collective meaning-association.

Zero is a symbol, and a symbol token -- any particular use or application of it at some place and time -- has a physical shape. But as a symbol it also has a meaning. It means nothing, an absence of all things. Zero represents our concept of nothing. But notice that a meaning is itself not a physical thing. Symbols are mostly like this -- they are at a remove from things because they represent some kind of meaning or idea, for example, a shadow. There is no such physical thing as a shadow. There's just absence of light and our interpretation -- meaning again -- of that aggregate of absences. It's a pattern, and we can represent that pattern as a nothing thing called a shadow. It's just a name and a perception that we can talk about, locate, explain and use in our science. And it's that pattern of nothingness that can move faster than light because it's not any physical thing, it's a cognized pattern, in this case, a pattern of nothing. But any symbolic pattern could conceivably travel faster than light."

"You mean, because the bat signal is interpreted as the same symbol with the same meaning, the same information from the same source that thought it and intended it and directed it intentionally..."

"Yessss. Symbolism is a paragon of emergent properties. And it is characteristic of emergent properties that they have their own laws and don't have to follow the reductive laws of physics. Their constituent parts may have to follow reductionist laws of physics if those parts are physical, but the emergent properties or entities don't have to and often don't. That's what emergence is all about."

"I see. No physical thing has been violated. Physics has not been breached in this interpretive information travel. It seems like physics information and symbolic cognitive information belong to different...I don't want to say worlds or realms, but to different sciences."

"Yep, But they may as well inhabit different realms or worlds. You could show the physical consequences of a meaning -- here are all the chairs denoted by "chair" -- but those consequences do not exhaust the meaning, since "chair" applies to the possible chairs as well as the actual ones you can display."

"A definition of the word "chair" would imply the possible chairs..."

"But the definition is just another expression of the meaning, and you'd have to ask, what do the words of that definition mean. There is something beyond the physical about meanings."

"So this really is Platonic after all."

"Maybe. Depends on what you mean by Platonic. I'll tell you this: pretty much no one thinks consciousness is a physical phenomenon. But no one thinks it's Platonic. It's somehow tied to the physical, only physical beings have it, and only that thing can have its own consciousness. But meanings aren't tied to things at all. They don't even have a location. Or even words, since they can be translated from language to language."

"So what are they?"

"Elusive."

Tuesday, March 25, 2025

propaganda vs censorship: asymmetrical effects in escalation bias and polarization

You can resist a force, but not an absence.

Which is worse, censorship or propaganda? Hugo Mercier observes in Not Born Yesterday, a wonderful and important book, that Hitler and Goebbels were disappointed that their propaganda had no effect on non Nazis. The propaganda was useful for rallying the choir and goading Nazi enthusiasts to act decisively, transgressively and violently, but didn't persuade non Nazis.

This should not be surprising. We are all inundated with propaganda from many different sides, but given all the options, we choose the propaganda that we already want to believe. The NYTimes propagates anti-Trump views, but it has no effect on Trump supporters, and Fox has no effect on NYTimes readers.

Here's the challenge for those who believe that propaganda is dangerous:

on what basis do some citizens read the NYTimes and others watch Fox? If they are choosing one and not the other, then they must already know the poison they desire; they already know what to expect; they already know the outlines of the content.

The reason propaganda seems so effective with its audience is because the audience already believes it. Persuasion is superfluous. It has no role in propaganda.

Why, then are they reading or listening to their preferred resource?

To confirm their bias. To get more bullet points to defend their bias. To get aroused and enraged by what they already are angry about. To feel triumphant in how right they are. To revel in the flood of evidence that arouses and excites and justifies their views and strokes them as right and good and better than their opponents and more insightful and in all ways superior. It's an orgasm of self-righteousness.

That's the purpose of news media, folks. That's why it sells. It's all spin and propaganda, and its effect is not to inform and change minds, but to justify and arouse the already formed, closed mind.

[In case you object that you favor your chosen news venue because it is reliable, accurate and insightful, and not because you're biased towards it, look at the news venue you dislike. To evaluate one's own bias, looking at one's preferences won't help, since you're already biased towards it. Bias is invisible to its owner. On the other hand, if the oppositional news venue repels you, just imagine what its audience thinks of your preferences and why yours repel them. Then you can get a glimpse of your bias. After all, when we're most biased we don't think "I'm biased". We think, "I'm not biased! I'm right." True of everyone on every side.]

And what happens when propaganda is presented to the opposed mind? Resistance, rejection, dispute, disgust, dismissal, outrage and anger -- a leveling up of one's bias to 11, an increase in emotional commitment to that bias stirred into a wild frenzy of anger, and a joyous sharpening of critical thinking against the propaganda.

Propaganda not only fails to persuade, it enrages its opponents. In social interactions, for every antagonistic push there is a greater and opposite pushback.

What about censorship, the absence of information, whether propaganda or fact? Where there is no information, where there is no push, there is no resistance. Where there is no resistance there is no incentive to find contrary evidence. Nothing comes of nothing.

The virtue of censorship is complacency. But ignorance is not always bliss. It can also provoke distrust, just as propaganda can, though not as perspicuously, more an uneasy suspicion. The virtue of propaganda is the relentless seeking for evidence in favor or against. The danger of propaganda is not fooling the public, but polarizing the public, arousing it, and the mutual demonization of the polar teams.

So which is worse? Falsehoods, fights, and targeted distrust or silent ignorance and vague suspicion? Which would you regret most?

PS: There are bottom-up, non coercive solutions to polarization & misinformation, solutions that emerge from a surprising incentive. I'll be posting on these soon.

The Great Reset deception and fake

Maybe the most remarkable instance of conspiracy theory hype is The Great Reset and Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum. For years I heard about this Great Reset program to control the world -- the super-rich meeting in secret deciding on how to parcel out the future of surveillance and control.

It didn't seem to matter to this conspiracy theory that the Davos WEF meetings weren't actually secret, that they were often broadcast. I even received videos from the WEF in my email box every couple of weeks. Far from conducting closed meetings to concoct nefarious plots, the WEF and Davos crowd seem to be proud of what they are doing. They want everyone to know as much as possible about it. They seem to want people to engage with their debates and concerns.

What shocked me the most, though, was reading Schwab's own book COVID-19: The Great Reset. To my utter surprise I learned that the Great Reset was not a program or plot at all or even a set of proposals. There isn't a single proposal in it. And that's because The Great Reset refers to the current economy rebounding from the pandemic. That's it. That's all it refers to. Not a plan. Not a proposal. Not a program. It's the economy rebounding however it happens. That's The Great Reset.

Naming the post-Covid economy a great reset was Schwab's prediction or expectation that the post-Covid economy would rebound from the pandemic with novel technologies of unprecedented power growing and spreading with unprecedented speed. His view of this rebound is that society and gov'ts and ordinary people are not prepared. Given the history of economic growth, he expects that unless we all prepare, the rich will get much richer and more powerful, and the little gal and guy are going to be left on the wayside. The Great Reset, far from a program or a set of proposals, it's the expectation that the economy will rebound out of control -- without any plan. And, without any prep, it'll be business as usual, with ordinary people left with the short end of the stick. He thinks we can do better to protect ordinary folk, prevent further environmental degradation, and rebalance inequalities in favor of the 99%.

His book doesn't contain a single proposal. It's all conditionals to consider: if people are afraid of future pandemics, they will very likely want to work remotely. More remote work will change the character of cities, of real estate and the fabric of social relations. A lot more zoom. But if people are tired of zoom and want to risk the dangers of socializing in person, they'll want to return to dense cities and offices. Is there a proposal here? No, it's just thinking about what the future may hold and how we might want to prepare for it so we don't find ourselves with our pants down while Elon Musk steals those pants and sell them back to us at a monopoly price from Mars.

Notice that the conspiracy theory has got the entire thing all upside down. There is no such program called "The Great Reset". The belief that there is such a program is a fiction invented entirely by the conspiracy theorist. The Great Reset itself is a very real, nonfictional thing: it's the economy that we're currently in, the rebound from the pandemic. But it's not a program. It's the absence of any program!

Were Schwab's expectations borne out? Well, Musk is wealthier than ever and LLMs have been widely embraced. But they haven't made all that much of a difference so far. Overall, no, The Great Reset wasn't very great. President Mump is probably more of a game-changer than the economic rebound from the pandemic, which meant inflation for a while and interest rate disruption and that's about it.

So, yes, Schwab hyped the dangers of the Great Reset. I imagine he was hoping the public would take a greater interest in thinking about how to create a better society for the future. Maybe he got some attention for that program of thinking about prep. His efforts to publicize the debate certainly did fuel a lot of conspiracy theories. Every good deed shall be punished.

It's worth asking who is deceiving whom, what is fake here and what is real. The conspiracy theory is a fiction. It takes a description of what's really happening in society and renames it as a plan, a nefarious plan devised by a cabal. The fakery, the deception and the nefarious conspiracy is the conspiracy theory -- the conspiracy is the deception. The Great Reset itself isn't even a plan and there aren't even any proposals in it.

It's very much a piece with the Gates-Musk paradox, which you may read about here.

In public affairs and in mainstream news media, the focus is on danger. Danger sells, and each news medium peddles its fears to its particular market share of political bias. The Republicans are dangerous to the NYTimes' readers, the Democrats are a national danger to the Fox watchers. Philanthropy, on the other hand, isn't a big seller although it purports to fix a danger. Conspiracy theory does a run around all of it.

Engagement with politics in the news assumes some kind of investment in political affairs -- that voting, for example, for one party or person and not another will actually matter. Suppose you are convinced that it doesn't matter, that the world is not only beyond your control but also in the control of a remote elite. On such a view, philanthropy can only be a deception, since solutions are impossible. It makes no sense to invest in political affairs since you can make no difference. That's the conspiracy theory mindset. And there's a lot of truth to it. Does the NYTimes reader's vote actually make a difference? Who is the fool here?

Well, both. The conspiracy theorists are wise to their own political impotence, but have fabricated theories to confirm their own distrust and powerlessness.

The conspiracy theory is the perfect convergence of distrust and fictionalization, Tom Gilovich’s source of bias – must I believe the benign story I’ve been told, can I believe a fiction of fear? Can I make up a story that at once confirms my fear and distrust of information? A conspiracy theory will not only confirm my fear, but because it is contrary to the mainstream story, the fiction will also confirm my distrust of mainstream information. Foolproof!: self-proving reflexive feedback. It’s the perfect, perfect, story.

Monday, March 24, 2025

how the Big Pharma conspiracy theory doesn't get the medical establishment's flaws

Go to any hospital or medical advice website and you'll find this prominent advice on health (the order may differ): exercise; eat lots of fresh fruits, vegetables, legumes, olive oil -- the "Mediterranean diet" -- and fish; don't smoke; avoid drinking alcohol; restrict red meat; don't eat processed meats. Nowhere will you find pharmaceuticals on their list of health recommendations.

I've written elsewhere about the role of the oblivious obvious -- the tendency to ignore the normal, the frequent, the common and the benign in favor of attending only to the harmful and dangerous, to the unusual that is also unusually scary. The Big Pharma-Medical Establishment conspiracy is a case in point.

The conspiracy has a rational principle: "Follow the money". Big Pharma is making big bucks, it colludes with a gov't agency, the FDA, doctors prescribe these pharmaceuticals every day, and the insurance companies and the retail pharmacies are all taking their share. So there's a lot of evidence in support confirming the conspiracy theory.

But there's this disconfirmatory evidence and it's in your face -- the oblivious obvious. No medical website promotes pharmaceuticals for overall health. It's all almost exactly what you'd find among New Agey, down home, no-money-to-follow advice: eat well, exercise, avoid unhealthy addictions.

[I've written elsewhere on how misleading and cheap confirmatory evidence is, and how much more information disconfirmatory evidence provides, so I'm not going into it here.]

It's also true that doctors only prescribe pharmaceuticals and not herbal remedies or life-style prevention. That's very much consistent with the conspiracy theory.

So what's going on? Is there a conspiracy or not?

Consider why people go to the doctor -- the doctor-visit market. Is it to get life-style prevention advice? While some small percent of people go to get regular check-ups, almost everyone who is in a health crisis and needs immediate intervention goes to a doctor, close to 100% of them. The doctor-visit market is filled with exigent cases. And those who go for a regular check-up, if there's no exigency, they are not prescribed anything except possibly the healthy advice listed above.

A friend goes for a check-up, gets a CT scan which finds that his arteries are 90% occluded. Without immediate intervention, he's likely to die any moment, in fact, it's a wonder that he's alive. Should the doctor advise him to exercise and eat lots of fruits and veggies and send him on his way?

Why not? Well, for one reason, he'd be sued way up his ass for malpractice. And rightly: the patient needs intervention. The preventative advice is too late. The Mediterranean diet might be prescribed after recovery from the intervention -- in this case minor surgery to insert stents -- but there is an obvious ethical and legal requirement to intervene, not just provide friendly health tips.

The doctor-visit market is determined by these two phenomena: patients visit doctors for intervention, and the intervention must cover the doctor's legal liability. This is also why the doctor can't prescribe herbs rather than pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceuticals are tested and approved by the FDA, so if they fail, it's not the doctor's fault and the doctor cannot be successfully sued for prescribing the pharmaceutical appropriate to the symptoms presented.

And why are the herbs not tested and FDA approved? Because the pharmaceutical -- as the conspiracy theorists accurately explain -- makes money for the pharmaceutical industry, the herb doesn't. So there's little funding for herb testing. Of course that's not a conspiracy, it's just what economists euphemistically call a market failure. It's a big failure.

But it's not the only failure of the medical vocation. As a vocation, doctors have to follow the limits or restrictions of these two phenomena of their market -- patients are there for either testing or intervention and the intervention is either surgery or pharmaceutical. That's all they can offer you. Don't be asking why they don't prescribe herbs or life-style advice or why they don't know about nutrition. It's not their job because they're not in that market. They are in the health exigency market regulated by the FDA and law suits and research funded by Big Pharma.

It's not a conspiracy, and viewing it as a conspiracy doesn't help understanding it. What helps is to understand that when you go to a doctor, don't expect instant, immediate natural cures. Expect either a pharmaceutical that is legally covered, or surgery that, done by someone with experience, is likely to help, provided that the doctor in question isn't just banking on unnecessary interventions.

And there are quacks too. As the joke goes, what do you call a C student in med school? "Doctor."

A friend points out that doctors don't know much about their patients. They don't know the life circumstances that might be causing anxiety or stress. But this is equally true of your acupuncturist who will prescribe based on pulse and a quick look at the tongue. So this criticism of western medicine seems to me to be evidence of an anti-mainstream distrust bias.

What's the source of the bias? Is it that western medicine refuses to acknowledge traditional methods? This might be an overreaction to the constraints on the doctor-visit market. Doctors can't be recommending methods that aren't legally covered. Now some doctors may be unwarrantedly skeptical of traditional medicine, but without the necessary research, that skepticism can't be faulted even if it can be ignorantly biased: the outcome of skepticism and legal cover are the same. So patients have to learn to fend for themselves, research for themselves, assess the risks and take their chances.

the two types of conspiracy theories

We're all familiar with conspiracy theories, but not so familiar with their history and development. Their changes over time should tell us something about either society, politics, or social psychology or all of these.

In 1964, shortly after JFK was assassinated, the historian Richard Hofstadter published a piece called "The paranoid style in American politics" about the history of conspiracy theories running through U.S. politics from the inception of the republic to the 1950's McCarthy era. He finds a continuity and development from the 19th century fears that Catholics are coming to take over our gov't and society, and the urgent calls for action before it's too late, to the 20th century fear that the communists are not just coming to take over our gov't and society, but are already infiltrating gov't, and the urgent calls to root them out before it's too late.

The common trait of these conspiracy theories are the paranoid "they're coming for us" and "we must act now before it's too late". The conspiracy theories are a call to action.

In 2014, thirteen years after 9/11, Lance deHaven-Smith published a short book titled Conspiracy Theory in America, in which he identifies the conspiracies that have become familiar in our political discourse, what he calls state crimes against democracy (SCADs), focusing on events perpetrated by gov't itself, not by some group infiltrating the gov't or society. Those conspiracy theories are not about "they are coming to infiltrate our gov't". That alarm is already too late. The agent perpetrating these SCADs is the gov't itself. They control our gov't; they are our gov't.

Setting aside whether any of these conspiracies are true or not, SCAD theory is a radical departure from the older conspiracy style. For one thing, you can't really do much about SCADs, so the alarmism isn't a call to action so much as a call to understanding, drawing aside the veil of truth. It's a confirming of distrust of the gov't but also of any media that endorse gov't propaganda. It's not just a distrust of a particular immigrant population or political ideology or a particular interest. It's a world of paranoia, with distrust of information at its heart. AI arrives at the worst moment in this trajectory towards distrust of information. The prognosis is dark.

In 2023, Naomi Klein published Doppleganger, shortly after the Covid pandemic mania subsided. Although she doesn't mention deHaven-Smith, she finds the deHaven-Smith style of conspiracy thinking rampant in the AltRight in its response to Covid: the AltRight sees a gov't lying to us about masks, about vaccines, about the origin of the virus. (Klein assumes and accepts the Democratic-NYTimes/Atlantic/NPR-blue Covid policies, recommendations and propaganda without question and without any scientific support or citation or any support or citation. Almost all of her citations are of fictional accounts -- novels -- about doppelgangers. Lots of those.) Her criticism of these AltRight SCAD theories is that they are missing the real danger which is not Bill Gates plotting to control the world, but capitalism; not a nefarious cabal that run us, but a profiteering system that is out of control. The immediate fear portrayed in the book is the fear of the AltRight appropriating all activism and criticism of gov't and its capitalist system. The AltRight is replacing the Left's Marxist criticism with fringe deHaven-Smith style conspiracy theories. IOW, the purpose of the book is to call the alarm that the AltRight, full of false fringe SCAD conspiracy theories, is coming for us, is infiltrating our politics and social discourse and we must wake up to their threat before it is too late!!

Full circle. Need I mention that the vaccines, though they seem to have prevented many, many deaths, did not prevent infection or contagion, the virus posed little threat to the younger generation, mask mandates did not work, and the lab leak theory is more probable than the wet market theory. And all of these facts were well-known from the beginning. When the vaccine was first rolled out, those who first got it knew that it would not prevent infection or contagion but would ameliorate symptoms, lowering the likelihood of death by Covid, not saving others from Covid. (I asked the old guys who were the first to be vacccinated, and they were quite clear and candid about it.) Anyone looking at people's masking behaviors, restaurant allowances, flight dinners in crowded plane cabins, use of cloth masks and wearing masks under the nose etc. -- any rational being knew that mask mandates could not possibly work even if masks themselves worked. Contact tracing and forcible quarantining might have worked, but this was not asked of us.

These facts do not, of course validate the AltRight SCAD theories. It doesn't validate any anti-capitalist theory either. The system to blame is not capitalism, but two-party democracy and a body politic divided between rural and urban, progressive and traditional, professional-prestige-class and disparaged-disrespected class, the educated elite privileged NYTimes readers, who reap the many benefits of the society and its gov't, and the non elites who know they are not respected by those elites; a two party system divided between red team and blue team, Us vs Them, distrust of in-group for the out-group. The structure to blame is the polarization within our society, and the politicization of pandemic response very much aligned with MAGA on one side and Trump Derangement Syndrome on the other.

To be fair, the facts do validate the AltRight's distrust of mainstream information, and that's the essence of the deHaven-Smith style conspiracy cultivated on the Right. And the facts do something else as well. They show that Klein's unquestioning acceptance of the Democratic-NYTimes/Atlantic/NPR-blue propaganda was wrong. What she gets right is her Hofstadter paranoid conspiracy "they are taking over". Distrust of information is spreading widely. COVID killed trust for many.

We're living now in a society of conspiracy theories on every side. Social capital -- the trust of one another and of gov't and of gov't for its people -- is waning. Polarization feeds distrust, and liberal democracy -- the engagement of voters in governance and the engagement of government officers in its voter base -- feeds polarization. The erosion of social trust and trust in information may be the great weakness of liberal democracy, its danger and downfall.

PS after the Trump inauguration: the autocratic means of administration may in the long run be healthy for our divided public.

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

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