Finishing up the series

Okay, I'm going to cut to the chase with Gioioa. Here is his last point, and then I'll tell you why I think he's just missing the mark.

 

Have you heard the complaints about “fake science”?

Of course you have. This phrase is everywhere. Here’s a measure of its use in print, courtesy of Google.

Source: Google Ngram

Democrats accuse Republicans of fake science. But Republicans also make the same charge at Democrats. I’m not sure anybody really wins in these arguments, but I can tell you who loses—namely science itself.

But, as you can see from the chart, the term “fake science” hardly existed during the 20th century. In those days, science was considered emblematic of truth. If it was fake, it wasn’t science.

But when the knowledge structure collapses, science loses its privileged access to truth. At the final stage, it gets harder and harder to distinguish science from propaganda. We are now living in that nightmare scenario.

 

Okay, so what's really going on? I was going to tell you myself, but then Andrew Gelman came out with this, which pretty much does the job for me. What we're facing is an epidemic of lying, but it's only by a certain faction, if you will, of society, that benefits from an enabling institution. I'll chop Gelman up in fine enough pieces to fit in a blog post, but enough to get the idea across:

 

4a. Why do they do it?

One reason to lie is that you don’t have good arguments on your side. Or, maybe you have ok arguments on your side, but not good enough. So if you add some fake evidence, it makes your case stronger.  . .

Saying you did a 3-day study of video games, that’s not so impressive. “Long term” sounds much better. Sure, you have to mislead, but it makes your case stronger! . . .

Saying that you sent masked officers to arrest some opposition-party politicians who were at no point posing a threat to anybody . . . ummm, that sounds pretty bad, kind of authoritarian even! But if they were committing “assault” and “lunging” at the officers, that’s another story. It’s a false story, but that’s the point! The motivation for lying is that it makes your case sound stronger.

4b. How does it work?

OK, fine, but the above reasoning is not enough. After all, if you lie and nobody believes you, it doesn’t do the trick. So the next thing you need is a medium of communication that will propagate your lies. . . .

The government statements falsely accusing Lander of “assaulting law enforcement” and Padilla of “lunging” . . . these lies get spread on social media, in the partisan news media, and even in the nonpartisan media when they repeat the official statements.

4c. Standard operating procedure

Again, a key way that this “reckless disregard for the truth” thing” works is that it’s accepted. I don’t even think the people saying these false statements recognize them as lies. They function as terms of art. In social psychology, “long term” can mean whatever you want it to mean, and “instantly become more powerful” is just something you get to say, even if you have no measures of power. In legal consulting, you can just say something you don’t believe. And when the cops say “assaulting” or “lunging,” what that really means is that they don’t like you, that’s all. Yes, some people like me and those news reporters quoted above will object, but we’re outsiders and we don’t really count.

 

So it's not that we are entering a post-enlightenment epistemology in which there is no longer such a thing as legitimate scientific inquiry, or intersubjective reality. It's that Rupert Murdoch has shown the way to getting rich and powerful using the ever more powerful media of mass communication to propagate lies, and that he and others who have caught on to the trick have allied themselves with psychopaths who will trade what Murdoch and his friends want -- not having to pay taxes or be constrained by the rule of law -- with what the psychos want, which is also unlimited wealth along with unlimited power and gratification of their narcissism. 

 

It isn't actually anything new -- it worked for Hitler and Goebbels.  But we need to call it what it is.

 

 

 

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