It's so great to welcome back to the program today, Lee MacIntyre, who's a research fellow
at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, also author
of the book Post Truth, which we are linking to today from the YouTube video for this interview.
Lee, it's so great to have you back. Great. Thank you so much for having me back.
So a lot of what is in your book. Post Truth relates so significantly to what we've seen
in media and heard from the federal government led by Donald Trump about Corona virus. Over
the last several months, we've seen everything from denial to disinformation to cloudy data
about what is going on. Test results that can't really be relied upon because we're
not really testing. So let's let's sort of to open the conversation. How does your sort
of analysis that you do in the book apply to what we're living through right now?
Well, unfortunately, it applies directly. I wrote the book. The book is published two
years ago. I had no clue about coronavirus. But at the end of the book, I predicted that
we were in for a hard correction from reality if we stayed on the route that we were on.
Trump has been running this playbook for a very long time. If you look at the things
that he was initially lying about the size of his inauguration crowd, whether he had
whether there were illegal voters and he'd actually won the popular vote, those are things
that are important, but he wasn't held accountable for them. And there you might say that in
a way, you know, they were life and death matters. Well, we're now to a life and death
matter. And I think what happened is he got away with those kind of lies. What are they
up to now? Fifteen thousand. Counted through The Washington Post. He he got so used to
it. And, you know, the little boy who cried wolf. And here we are. And we're now getting
that hard check from reality where he's just learned that he can get away with lying and
distracting and all the other things. But we're now all undergoing the consequences
of that. And we're about to get within the next 10 days of very hard check from reality.
One of the things that is sometimes debated now is, is it that facts don't matter? Or
is it that it's very easy to get whatever facts you sort of want with the widespread
availability of both, you know, liars in government and actual propaganda news and so on? With
the Corona virus thing, it doesn't seem that it's that facts don't matter. It's that it's
very easy to find a set of facts or supposed facts that say this isn't really serious.
It's sort of like the flu. Keep going to the beach, keep going to concerts, all of this
sort of stuff. It's it's going to pass. It's all under control. So my my instinct is it's
not that facts don't matter is that there's facts available for whoever wants to find
somebody asserting one thing or the other thing as is convenient. What's your sense
of that? No, I think you're right. I mean, the facts
didn't matter. They wouldn't be trying so hard to spin the narrative or look for alternative
facts. In in my book, I defined post truth as the political subordination of reality.
So it's not that truth doesn't matter. Or that when you say you're in a post truth era,
that's not to say that truth doesn't matter, that nobody cares about truth anymore. It
means we're living in an era in which truth is endangered. And the thing that's endangering
it is that post truth is really a tactic that's used by authoritarians and their wannabes
to control the narrative. Because if you can control the narrative and the information
flow, maybe you can control the population. And so it's a it's a very dangerous thing
that we can read out in many different examples. There are a number of different examples.
We're now living through a moment when I think that post truth is particularly visible just
because so many people are paying attention, so many people are threatened by lies and
denial. You know, all of a sudden we're all in the same boat. And we're not just. It's
not just that we're getting our information from different sources. We're all seeing the
same things happening in our neighborhood. What are some of the strategies you suggest
people adopt to find out the truth and to cut the risk of maybe signal boosting disinformation?
I mean, a great example is every couple of days I read or someone writes to me, hey,
they're testing chloroquine as a possible corona virus treat. And before I say that
to my audience, I want to figure out a type of I doing the equivalent of spreading anti-vax
stuff or am I reporting on something that's really going on? What's the right process
that you recommend people go through to figure out what's what's real?
It's it's tough because the minute you report on a lie, you've amplified the lie, and cognitive
scientists have shown that people will remember the lie. They won't remember whether it was
true, they won't remember the source, but just remember that they heard it. And so the
thing that's very important to do for anybody in the media is when you're going to report
on false information, say say the false information is a story because a prominent person said
it. I recommend that what people do is follow the advice of the psychologist, George Lakoff,
who said that what we need is a truth sandwich. You start off by telling the truth. Then you
report on the lie as a lie and then you fact check it. You show why maybe the person was
motivated to do it and what's wrong with it. So it's very important for folks not to, as
you said, amplify false information because that just puts it out there.
And then it goes and goes, where are some of the centers of propagating so-called alternative
facts or disinformation? Outside of politics and politics, we're so familiar with it. An
ideal deal with every day, coronaviruses, exposing that in medicine. And of course,
quack medicine, sham medicine. I think we may understand that one, but what are other
sort of centers of disinformation? Well, I look at it this way. Disinformation
is created for a purpose. This information is not an accident. So disinformation is created
when somebody has a financial interest or a political interest or an ideological interest
in getting people to believe something that isn't true. So when you say outside politics,
I don't know if you're including Russia in that. Because one thing that I found very
interesting for the last few days is if you look at the Twitter handles that are trending
for the last several days, new Twitter handles in American politics start to trend at around
three o'clock in the morning, which is amazingly well, that's wake up time over in Moscow.
So they're messing with their politics. They're messing with our Twitter handles as we knew.
No examples out saying you also mentioned science denial. I mean, if you think about
what are the fossil fuel industries, what the big tobacco, you know, those sorts of
people with financial interests, what are they have to gain by creating disinformation?
I mean, I'm sure there are other examples that I could give. But, you know, you think
of if you think of the political and ideological examples, you think of the economic examples,
those are really the big ones these days. But I think that anytime somebody is telling
you something that you kind of wonder, does that person have a stake in that being true?
It should make you skeptical when we are thinking now about what needs to happen from here until
whenever we start to see a change in the trends with what's going on with Corona virus, it
seems to me that when, for example, Fox and Friends says this is actually a great time
to fly, the planes are empty. The airports are empty. This is fantastic. There is actually
a real human risk, particularly when Fox News audience skews disproportionately old to perpetuating
this stuff. Yeah, I would. What do we do? I mean, what can we do that the old folks
aren't watching my show. So I have no access to them. Right. So. So how do we manage this
stuff? It's it's difficult. I I heard tell that last
night on Fox News. All of a sudden started to wake up a little bit. Yes. Tucker Carlson
and a few other people started to say, no, you really have to get serious about this.
And then Trump started to take it more seriously, talked about not congregating in groups of
more than 10, et cetera. So, you know, we've known for some time that there's a little
bit of a feedback loop between Trump and Fox News. I mean, one thing that I've advocated
for a long time, which is particularly hard now that we're helping lockdown. I mean, we're
all sheltering in place. But the thing that I've advocated is engagement.
People get information from people that they trust. And so maybe they turn on the news
and, you know, do they trust what's coming from the news or from political figures that
they trust? Maybe they do, but they also trust their friends and neighbors. They also trust
their family. And so I think it's really important that we have those conversations. And there's
a lot of anecdotal information which shows that that works in science. And I'll say that's
how you get somebody to change their mind about climate change. That's how you get somebody
to change their mind about anti-vax trusting relationship is the place to share that information.
So, you know, we can't give up giving that the truth out there is really important.
Is there any particular set of. Is there a profile of the types of folks that are more
likely to open mindedly, reassess their beliefs in the sense that you might say? Well, it's
intuitive that older folks are less likely to reassess their beliefs because they've
held their beliefs for a longer period of time. That may be completely false right up.
Are there some of those characteristics that let us build a profile of who is most likely
to be open to changing their mind? There is some empirical work right now going
on. That is, I'm a philosopher, I'm not a social scientist, so I'm not sure I'm the
best messenger for this. But there is some empirical work going on where they're trying
to measure whether or not belief and say conspiracy theories correlates with liberal versus conservative
worldview. And the trouble with this kind of research is, I mean, you can always think
of exceptions. You can always think of examples where, you know, well, well, what about this?
What about that? In my own research, you know, in the work that I've done on science and
I'll post truth, I haven't really noticed that, you know, the old versus young, rich
versus poor. I guess what I've I guess I'm accepting this as a as a fact. We all have
cognitive bias. The book by Daniel Kahneman called Thinking Fast and Slow shows the cognitive
biases are built into all of us. And so I think it's dangerous to just say, you know,
well, you know, everybody who believes in conspiracy theory skews right or everybody
who believes in denial. Rotavirus skews older or something like that. For one, it may not
be true. For another, I think it overlooks the reality, which is that we all have to
be on our guard against these mind bugs. If you want to think of it that way, this ability
to believe something, because we want to believe it. That's really the danger. So, you know,
I I can get something of an answer to this to say look at the literature on this, because
there is even with people working with him, our eyes on this, which is really interesting
work, but I don't want people just to dismiss this as somebody else's problem, because post
truth is everybody's problem. Well, medical stuff and in particular, anti-vax
very interestingly caught crosses party lines. So when you look at anti-vax, you have people
on the right who are anti-vax because they think that it's a government conspiracy, government
trying to control them. They're distrustful of government. People on the left say it's
for profit, big pharma trying, you know, pump heavy metals into us or whatever. Very different
political views. But they end up in some kind of strange, strange bedfellows sort of situation.
You're absolutely right. And the other thing to notice about anti-vax is that they tend
to skew more educated as well, which is a really interesting thing, because, you know,
you think somebody's going, you know, baby being skeptical, maybe they're scared. And
then they go to the Internet and they start to do their research and they maybe they find
that reliable information. Then they do more research. And, you know, we in the trade deal
going down the rabbit hole. Right. Think of it that way. But that's the same way that
flat earthers are created. Right. They get on YouTube, they start to look at the videos.
Next thing you know, they they end up there. So, you know, it's it's really fascinating
to me that somebody can be very well educated and still believe some of these things. And
I think some of what it has to do in the literature bears me out here. Is that some? Times what
happens is somebody is better educated, they're more able to defend and their views. You know,
you talk to some people who deny climate change and, you know, they can be really up on some
of the later's literature. What they don't know how to do is to reason like a scientist.
They don't know how to use that evidence. And that literature, you know, to make the
important point, not to cherry pick, not to expect zero uncertainty before they have a
belief. That's the problem that they're really missing is not some particular data point
that they can use to shove down your throat. But how science is reason about data.
Very, very well said, we've been speaking with Lee MacIntyre, research fellow at the
Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. The book Post Truth
is Out. And you can check it out using the link in
the description to the YouTube video for this discussion. Lee, always a pleasure having
you on. Oh, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.