Comment by zahlman
2 days ago
My experience has been that people who trust some form of alternative news over the NYT are not preferring "some random TikToker".
And a lot of the time, that trust is specific to a topic, one which matters to them personally. If they cannot directly verify claims, they can at least observe ways in which their source resonates with personal experience.
Yes, but their choice of whom to trust is wildly inconsistent. There is no consistent test of how they judge some claim more or less trustworthy against an opposite claim. Of course, none of us are fully consistent, but some are just extremely so.
Call me naive, but I think education can help.
> There is no consistent test of how they judge some claim more or less trustworthy against an opposite claim.
From my experience, there absolutely is. It just isn't legible to you.
Ok, so what is a consistent epistemology that would lead someone to (probably an American) to believe the following things: planes are safe, atoms and viruses are real, the world is a globe, vaccines cause autism, Tylenol causes autism, vitamins are helpful, mobile phones do not cause cancer, weather forecasts are usually more-or-less right, man-made climate change is not real, the government can control the weather, GPS is reliable, stimulus causes inflation but tariffs do not, immigration harms my personal economic opportunities but natural population growth does not, the Roman Empire was real but descriptions of its ethnic makeup or the reasons for its collapse are not, etc. etc.? (the content of each individual belief is less important than the composite whole where the scholarship of strangers is sometimes accepted and sometimes rejected in a way that isn't explained by, say, reputation or replication)
The only thing I can come up with is that they do believe rigorous scholarship can arrive at answers, but sometimes those who do have the "real answers", lie to us for nefarious reasons. The problem with that is that this just moves the question elsewhere: how do you decide, in a non-arbitrary way, whether what you're being told is an intentional lie? (Never mind how you explain the mechanism of lying on a massive scale.) For example, an epistemology could say that if you can think of some motivation for a lie then it's probably a lie, except that this, too, is not applied consistently. Why would doctors lie to us more than mechanics or pilots?
Anohter option could be, "I believe things I'm told by people who care about me." I can understand why someone who cares about me may not want to lie to me, but what is the mechanism by which caring about someone makes you know the truth? I'm sure that everyone has had the personal experience of caring about someone else, and still advising them incorrectly, so this, too, quickly runs into contradictions.
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