Don't Do Your Own Research

[music]

0:00:07.2 Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:09.3 Paul Matzko: And I’m Paul Matzko.

0:00:10.5 Aaron Ross Powell: Our guest today is Julian Sanchez, he’s a senior fellow at the Cato Institute where he studies technology, privacy and civil liberties. And He’s also a frequent guest on libertarianism.org’s, Pop & Locke podcast. Welcome back to the show Julian.

0:00:21.7 Julian Sanchez: Thanks for having me.

0:00:23.5 Aaron Ross Powell: Lots of Americans don’t trust the government or the national media to tell them the truth, and many of those Adopt a ‘do your own research’ ethic, which even pretty critical of on grounds that it leads to believing a lot of misinformation, but just generally, what’s wrong with the idea of doing your own research.

0:00:47.0 Julian Sanchez: So in principle, nothing, as long as you… But one, as long as you’re doing a legitimate research, I think… I would just say, I hear a lot of people talking about how proud they are that they do their own research, and what they mean is they watched a YouTube or read something on a website and they gathered information, but this is, I think, not what most of us recognizes as doing research as people who do research full-​time, but also I think it’s important to recognize what kind of research you are well positioned to do. I think what we’ve seen in the last few months, really the last year that I think is somewhat more dangerous, is where you have folks with, for example, very little technical background trying to do research on claims about voting machine hacking and election rigging, and you will find things like some of the affidavits that were submitted in the various lawsuits that Sidney Powell and others, attempted to bring that every technical person I talked to looked at and I looked at it as well and said, “Well, this is absurd, this is incoherent and amateurish.”

0:02:15.2 Julian Sanchez: “And the claims that are being made here are not remotely supported by the evidences being adduced,” I mean, it was a joke. But for a non-​technical person, that might not be obvious and indeed many people apparently did find it compelling, and in part at least because in the case of the affidavit, I’m thinking of, they claimed that it had been submitted by a pseudonymous military intelligence expert, turned out this is someone who had washed out of a trainee program and was basically an IT guy, but not any kind of intelligence specialist as any technical person looking at that affidavit would have gleaned very quickly. Or on the other hand, looking at medical research and looking at forums online, I see a lot of people pointing to academic research or documents that are really written for an audience of physicians and clinicians and lab technologists, and drawing conclusions from it that are not necessarily unreasonable from the text, but a lack of the context to make sense of what they’re reading. And especially if you’re going in with the mindset of finding evidence for a position that you are already inclined to hold.

0:03:45.3 Julian Sanchez: Doing your own research, if you do it half-​way is a very easy way to just convince yourself of your priors or convince yourself of whatever you were tempted to believe in the first instance, and so sometimes that’s because you can find an outlier study in medicine, for example, that shows one result, but if you don’t know the context of how credible is the journal this it was published in or is this just a pre-​print so how much weight should this be given, what’s the context of the other research that’s being done is this one study pointing in one direction when there are 50 pointing the other way, but often, in some cases, you see claims that are made with some documentary evidence held up as proof where it’s a question of failing to actually read what the document is saying. So I’ll give you an example here. There was a claim that was making the rounds on social media that was promoted by folks like Mike Huckabee a lot of prominent figures and pundits on the right, that the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control had announced it would be withdrawing its authorization for a particular COVID test called PCR for polymerase chain reaction.

0:05:12.6 Julian Sanchez: And this document for CDC, again, with the audience of lab technicians and clinicians said, “What instead you should be using now is multiplex assays that can diagnose and differentiate COVID and flu.” And the way this was interpreted by a lot of people, you still see people to this day still, making this claim was was, “Aha my gosh, the test that they’ve been using for COVID all along, can’t even tell the difference between COVID and the flu.” All of these positive COVID tests, I bet they are really just flu and we’ve been conned this has been blown totally out of proportion. Now, that’s not what the CDC document was saying. What it was saying was, there are now what are called multiplex assays, meaning tests that can look for multiple different genetic signatures, multiple different pathogens, so instead of having a test that will only tell you, do you have COVID yes or no, you have a test that will tell you, do you have COVID? And also, maybe you don’t have COVID, but do you have the flu instead, which is a very sensible thing, you wanna… Ideally, you would wanna be able to have a test that you can take once and you don’t have to wonder what you do have if you don’t have COVID that you can get an answer about what you do have.

0:06:42.9 Julian Sanchez: The way it was written, because it wasn’t written for a general audience, this was written for the use of physicians was not necessarily obvious, and so you have people looking at this document on the CDC website and thinking, “Well, I’ve done my own research and yeah, it seems to confirm the interpretation that was placed on this when I found this link somewhere.” And there’s a dangerous bit of slight of hand that happens because when you read something in the newspaper, you’re conscious that you’re getting something through the lens of the reporter and they may have biases and you can try and adjust for those. But what I see happening in a lot of these cases is there’s this sort of primary source document that is not written for a general audience, someone links it or forwards it along with an interpretation of what the document is saying, in this case, the false interpretation that the CDC was admitting the primary COVID test couldn’t even tell the difference between COVID and flu. And then reading the document with that in mind, primes to think of that as the interpretation, they think they find confirmation in the document.

0:08:00.6 Julian Sanchez: You could I suppose reasonably misunderstand it in that way, especially if someone had just suggested it to you in advance, but people feel like they’ve done their own research, they don’t feel like this is a claim someone made where they’re trusting a contentious interpretation, but as though they’ve gone straight to the horse’s mouth. And in a way, I think this is a process of gamifying misinformation, that is to say, engages for the pleasure that human beings take in connecting dots and finding things out and learning things and feeling like, “Hey, I’m an independent thinker who’s educated myself by going straight to these primary documents.” And so one, it has the effect of obscuring the element of trust. In general, there’s an element of trust in all of the information we take in, we mostly are not doing experiments ourselves, or doing scientific original research ourselves, we’re to some extent trusting in the credibility of the source of information.

0:09:17.6 Julian Sanchez: And by obscuring that, it creates a false sense that you’re not relying on trust because you’ve gone to the original source, you’ve done your own research, when in fact what you’re doing is trusting the interpretation of whoever surfaced the document for you in a way that is just as more unreliable in this case, than trusting the interpretation of a journalist, who may have biases. But also, I think it creates a level of investment in the misinformation that makes it much more encourageable, that is to say if I read a news report and it turns out the facts in that report were right, I repeat the story and someone says, “Yeah, that report turned out… It was false, it was debunked.” “Ah, okay. Oops, I fell for a misleading report, but who can blame me?” Whereas if you’ve… As we say, done your own research, you’ve effectively been made complicit in misinforming yourself.

0:10:27.9 Julian Sanchez: Alright, you feel like you’ve achieved something by ferreting out this information, and that makes it a lot more resistant to correction, which is why I think you find claims like the one about the PCR test surviving long after it was perfectly clear that the interpretation that had been circulating was not true. I’ll give you one other similar example, actually, a couple of weeks ago, Candace Owens the conservative pundit circulated another document from CDC, which she claimed was a plan to put unvaccinated Americans in camps, like internment. And I went and read the actual document, and it was of course, not that at all. First of all, it was a year old, so she had surfaced this thing that had been written during the Trump administration and before there was a vaccine. And what it was discussing was in refugee camps that already exists, so this is A, you have refugees living in close quarters, so it was discussing proposals for, “Well, how do you protect the most vulnerable people within these crowded refugee camps from contracting COVID?”

0:11:53.5 Julian Sanchez: And so it was discussing a proposal where the elderly and the immunocompromised would be separated within refugee camps from other refugees to reduce the risk of contagion for the people who are at the highest risk of dying. It doesn’t say anything about putting people into camps, which is obviously not what the document was about, but if you read it primed to think that that’s what it’s saying. Well, it’s talking about camps, and again, it is written for an audience that presumes to understand the context of what proposals the document’s discussing, so it doesn’t go out of its way to say, “By the way, we’re not talking about rounding people up and put them in camps.” It’s written for people who understand that this is about refugee camps and other kinds of… What it calls humanitarian context where you have people temporarily housed in close quarters. I don’t know if that one went quite as far as the false PCR claim, but it was a similar dynamic in both cases where you would see people online, one convinced by the interpretation that they’ve been primed to come to the document with, but then second, just very resistant to entertaining the possibility that this was an incorrect interpretation because they had done the work themselves.

0:13:19.2 Julian Sanchez: And so, it was no longer, well, some other person has misled you and here’s the correct information, but you’ve misled yourself, and that is, I think, naturally, a little bit more embarrassing to sort of own up to. And so, there’s a fair amount of resistance to that.

0:13:36.4 Paul Matzko: So you we have these two interesting cases, right? Where the, on one hand, the CDC, on the other hand, the government agency talking about camps, they’re producing documents not meant for the general public. Once upon of time, there would have been layers of gatekeepers between the CDC’s pronunciation and medical associations, hospital authorities, etcetera, between the CDC and the public. So, I guess I’m wondering, to what extent is this a story about the internet exacerbating human… Natural human instincts about disintermediation, the removal of gatekeepers? How does the internet enhance this role?

0:14:18.0 Julian Sanchez: In part, it makes it feasible for people to do their own research in a way that previously would have probably… If it was possible at all, it would have required you to go to a library and go laboriously hunting through books, and in many cases, the kind of documents we’re talking about might not be easily available pre-​internet to an ordinary citizen at all. It would be available in principle, but it might not be anywhere you could access it without a fair amount of trouble. So yeah, I think it accelerates the speed with which sort of false claims can circulate. None of these are claims that a decent newspaper would have run with. Although, actually, Fox ran a bizarre story about the PCR test where they didn’t quite claim that, “Oh, this means the old test couldn’t tell the difference between flu and COVID.”

0:15:25.5 Julian Sanchez: But, they certainly… Certainly left that impression. It quoted selectively from the CDC document, and then there was a long section discussing how flu cases had declined precipitously in the past year while we’re on lockdown and masking and distancing. So the way the article was structured, it didn’t explicitly make the false claim, but it also sort of included a bunch of information that makes no sense, unless they are expecting you to interpret it in that way. So I’m not sure in that case whether that it was a reporter who themselves didn’t quite understand the document that they’d looked at or I don’t know, maybe sort of a cynical, “Can we get away with something that’s gonna be clickbaity without technically saying anything verifiably false?” But it’s not just a question of… You know you do find real, real publications or real news outlets sometimes running with this stuff, although, usually that gets corrected relatively quickly.

0:16:40.8 Julian Sanchez: So yeah, I think the internet certainly accelerates a lot of this. Although, it’s worth saying that there’s been a fair amount of research on modern misinformation, and the internet, I think, has taken a lot of flak for a problem that is really an issue with our larger media ecosystem. A couple of years back, we did an [0:17:08.1] ____ with Yochai Benkler from Harvard Law School, who, along with some other scholars from the Berkman Klein Center there, had done a study called Network Propaganda, where they found… They looked at some specific cases of misinformation and found that, really, for the most part, it was things like cable news and talk radio that were as much a vector for this stuff spreading as social media. It’s just that journalists are paying more attention to social media than talk radio or other channels of transmission, so it gets a disproportionate amount of the blame.

0:17:43.7 Julian Sanchez: But, to the extent we’re talking specifically about the sort of ‘do your own research’ gamification dynamic, that is, I think, very much a function of the internet, in so far as just doing your own research was pretty labor-​intensive. Yeah, so it makes it… It makes it a lot easier to feel as though you’ve done your own research and to hunt down all sorts of primary documents fairly easily that can then be bent to the narrative that someone wants to peddle.

0:18:19.7 Paul Matzko: Well, there’s that… The historian in me just automatically thinks of past dissemination that works. It’s pre-​digital, so maybe it’s slower, maybe the barrier to entry, the cost of access, the transaction costs are higher. But it’s like, it’s ideas about Marie Antoinette spreading pre-​French Revolution, the ideas about her being a traitor or being spend-​thrift, etcetera, all of which would be classified as misinformation if we plug that in today, more or less, but, spread rapidly by word of mouth and by, well, pornography, by newsletters that were classified by pornography as the authorities. And so it still happened, it just was slower, longer. People were relying on first-​hand accounts, at least supposed primary sources about the Queen’s behavior, but it wasn’t reliable. So, but I think there’s something there.

0:19:12.1 Aaron Ross Powell: I do think though, that there is potentially a mechanism that’s unique to the internet, that isn’t just the internet has made information more accessible in a way that it didn’t used to be, or make the spread of information faster than it used to be, and that’s… The internet enables community formation in a way that prior mechanisms of communication didn’t. And so, one of the things that I’ve talked about on the show before is this, the way that especially social media tricks us into thinking that some cultures are the dominant culture, or tiny communities are bigger than they actually are, because you pick and choose who you follow and so if you based on my Twitter feed, you’d think that several years ago, 95% of the country was suddenly getting hired by Fusion, because my Twitter feed was all journalists congratulating each other on their new job at Fusion.

0:20:12.5 Aaron Ross Powell: But that was a misperception based on the focused audience, and I think this also plays out in the spread of language that sub-​communities adopt jargon terminology for referring to different things and then, because they think that their community is bigger than it really is and that everyone’s aware of it, because it’s all they see on the internet, they assume everyone is aware of the proper use of that jargon and they get mad when people misuse it, or have never heard of it. But in the context of this, I think one thing that, that does as well is it allows for the rapid formation of new communities around mistakes. That if you get this piece of information and you misinterpret it, in the old world you could carry on your life with that misinterpretation and you might run across… You might tell someone else about it and they might accept it or not, or you might run into someone who corrects you on it. But in the new world where there’s Facebook groups and various sub-​influencers on Twitter and whatnot, you can punch that misinterpretation into Google and you can find two or three other people who have the same misinterpretation and now you found someone else who agrees with you, and then that forms the basis of a community.

0:21:30.1 Aaron Ross Powell: And then the community starts spinning out theories and sub-​cultures based on this fundamental misinterpretation, and then it digs in and then our identity becomes wrapped up in it, and we give it a name, and suddenly you have these huge Facebook groups dedicated to taking livestock de-​wormer or around the CDC, putting people in camps. And that community formation, I think is new, that didn’t exist before. That mistakes can turn into sub-​cultures, can turn into cultures, can turn into personal identities.

0:22:12.3 Julian Sanchez: You remind me of the late author, Robert Anton Wilson coined what he called the Law of Snark. Not snark in the sense of acerbic witticisms, but derived from the Lewis Carroll poem, The Hunting of the Snark. Which contains the line, “I have said it thrice, what I tell you three times is true.” And the Law of Snark was essentially that the human heuristic is, if you’ve heard a claim three times, it’s probably true, which is somewhat kind of comic oversimplification. But I think it’s very much the case that part of this dynamic is sensational claims become much more easy to share quickly, and one effect of that is that depending on your particular information bubble or community, you may go online and see half a dozen people who you have some sort of social connection to and regard as trustworthy, sharing the same piece of information, and maybe this is all being essentially copied from one source that then maybe gets re-​fashioned and repurposed and re-​appears in a couple of different sites, but it seems as though what you’re seeing is a lot of independent confirmation of the claim, to the point where it seems like common knowledge. “Well, everyone knows that… ” Whatever it is. And surely it can’t be that everyone is wrong, but if everyone is just passing along something that crossed their inbox, very easily everyone could be wrong.

0:23:54.2 Paul Matzko: It’s kind of telling to… I think what both of y’all are saying that how Ryan Burge, political scientist, he’s noted that evangelicalism positively correlates with opposition to vaccination. Now sussing that out from the extent to which white evangelicals are more Republican, and being Republican also positively correlates with COVID denialism is complicated. But it’s that sense of, you have this… Not all these communities have to be formed on the fly, you have these pre-​existing communities that can be activated, and when they’re activated, especially if it’s a religious community, think of how powerful the effect of sacralizing that position is. So it’s to Julian’s point about the interactivity of this process the difference between sharing an article and actually making that your own point of view and tying yourself to it, interacting with it. Well, then layer on top of that, you’re the pastor of a church, and you’ve said that from the pulpit, thus resting some kind of pastoral authority on that pronunciation, and there’s a lot to lose from backing off that position, which is why I think you get all these stories.

0:25:05.3 Paul Matzko: Just as much as you have stories of talk radio hosts who are on their death bed saying, “I wish I had gotten the vax.” Of pastors doing the same like, “I wish I’d take this more seriously.” But it takes nearly dying or dying to get that point across, to shake that process free, so it really is quite a sticky belief once it’s rooted in community like that. Well, I guess my question then is, how do you address this? Right now… So, we have a misinformation problem, I think that’s true. I worry a little bit, but that the measures to fight misinformation, there’s all these big dis-​info organizations sponsored by a who’s who of like I don’t know, the Aspen Institute or you name it. Who are creating… They’re trying to create like a third party fact checkers and I sometimes worry that the attempted cure is worse than the disease. Do you have thoughts about that, Julian?

0:26:07.7 Julian Sanchez: Yeah, I’m not sure some of those counter measures are ultimately that effective. I think when things that are regarded as misinformation get removed, that is itself visible. That itself becomes sort of a point of contention, and so the reaction from a lot of folks is, well, why are these big tech companies, for example, trying to suppress the truth or at least suppress discussion? What’s wrong with letting people make up their own minds about this stuff? And I think that’s a fair response. And I look, I see the perspective of the platforms when it comes in particular to health’s misinformation, because here we’re talking about the kind of misinformation that doesn’t maybe just lead you to have a false political or policy view, but that might indeed prove harmful or injurious to someone who believes it and takes an untested medication or doesn’t take precautions that are in fact appropriate. And so I don’t blame them for saying, “Well, we don’t wanna be responsible for someone getting killed or seriously injuring their health because they… We hosted something that told them to do something unwise.” At the same time, it’s obviously created a backlash where folks feel as though this is an attempt to suppress discussion. And frankly, because the platforms themselves are not always expert at distinguishing misinformation from, let’s say, legitimate minority position.

0:28:00.8 Julian Sanchez: There are differences of opinion among physicians about certain aspects of COVID, I think the other issue we were talking about with the election stuff, I think, basically every qualified information security person who’s looked at this kind of agrees that those claims don’t make any sense, but there are genuine disagreements. And the experts, these are official experts, have certainly not covered themselves in glory. I think one reason you get some backlash here is people saying, “Well, look, the CDC or Fauci, or other sort of official expert sources have either changed their consensus over time, which is how science works, or been wrong or misleading about things where they expressed seeming certainty. And so why should we now assume that they don’t make mistakes anymore, and that we can trust them so much, not just that we give some weight to their current view, but that we assume they’re so infallible that we suppress discussion of the alternatives?” So I think for some portion of the population, policies on platforms about removing misinformation may stop people from being exposed in the first instance, but for people who are already a little bit inclined to this, it feels like some kind of cover up and may make them more inclined to seek it out.

0:29:30.1 Julian Sanchez: And it also ensures that the context in which that misinformation is now encountered is, in effect, in a community that is all in on it, right? So if you imagine either these kinds of misinformation showing up in a YouTube video, well, that at least is a place where probably there will be other people making responses to the video and saying, “No, that’s not true. If you look at this document and I can cite other sources that show why this is misleading,” whereas if you’re saying, “Well, this isn’t gonna be on YouTube, you’re gonna have to go to a Q board or something to find this kind of information,” you’re gonna now encounter it in a context where there’s no push back and I’m not sure if that’s any better.

0:30:22.0 Aaron Ross Powell: But what about… A lot of this is, it’s not that they get it wrong. It is like mistrust of these sources in the sense of lying. So, much of this is skepticism directed at the government and mainstream media sources, and we know that the government lies to us all the time and has a long history of doing so. And we know, like the New York Times say the archenemy of conservatives has a long history of lying on behalf of the government at the government’s request or changing stories, hiding information.

0:31:08.2 Julian Sanchez: Of suppressing stories, certainly. I know, my kind of area of expertise is national security surveillance, and the story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau back in 2005 that first exposed sort of a piece of the NSA warrantless wiretapping program, is something that the New York Times had been sitting on for, I think the better part of a year and finally went to press with when one of the reporters said, “Well, I’m gonna put it in my book, if the paper’s not willing to run it.”

0:31:42.6 Aaron Ross Powell: Sure, but I mean, going back earlier, like you know…

0:31:46.0 Julian Sanchez: I do think… I will say I think… In the modern era at least, mainstream journalists and newspapers being willing to not just sort of sit on a story, but actively lie for the government, I think that’s fairly rare.

0:32:01.9 Aaron Ross Powell: But it’s historically happened?

0:32:03.3 Julian Sanchez: Sure, sure.

0:32:04.8 Aaron Ross Powell: And so you can… And I think part of a lot of this too, is it feels like a lot of people don’t really understand how journalists operate, and so thinking, you know, like what looks like mistakes gets turned into nefarious, but there has been a history of say the US press working on behalf of the government. And so it seems like a level of skepticism, especially from things coming from actual members of the government, is warranted, and as libertarians, we frequently don’t… Like the government doesn’t necessarily have your best interests in mind and all of that, and so how do we thread that needle? Because you don’t want just absolute credulity for any story coming from like… You don’t wanna listen to the President’s press secretary and just say, “Everything she told me is correct,” but on the other end, you don’t wanna run down into the Q message boards, but it seems like it’s hard to thread that needle because threading that needle demands a level of expertise in knowing whether the information you’re hearing is good or not.

0:33:15.2 Julian Sanchez: Yeah, no I mean that’s right. I think the solution there is in a sense being sort of brutally honest with yourself about which categories of information you are well equipped to directly assess. And there’s just no shame in saying, “I’m not a physician,” and if I try to read a technical medical paper published in JAMA or some other medical journal written for physicians the odds are I will not well understand what I have read or at least there’s a significant risk that I will believe if I’ve understood what I’m reading. But will lack the necessary background and context to interpret it correctly. And then there are other topics where indeed I have the background and am perfectly capable of doing my own research. And then once you’ve done that triage saying, “Alright. Well, some measure of trust is gonna be involved here.” And I think part of the danger is people are skeptical in one direction. They say, “Well, sometimes the government lies, sometimes the New York Times gets things wrong. Sometimes the CDC is confused or misleading about things or acts as though they have greater certainty about something than they do because they want the public to act on their advice, and therefore I’m gonna look for other sources.”

0:34:58.2 Julian Sanchez: And then this sort of the same level of skepticism is not applied even though in many cases, well you don’t have to say that CDC is totally trustworthy, to say, “Well, but I don’t have any more reason to believe Mike Huckabee than I do the CDC,” or whatever the other source is. I think a mistake that sometimes made is, I know skepticism is warranted about this source but then the same level is not applied to the alternatives, often because maybe the alternatives don’t have the same kind of track record. So if you’re looking at a source that has not been around for very long maybe they haven’t had time to have made it clear that they occasionally also get things wrong. So I think that’s one way but then so the question is look at some level, trust is part of this. That we should not fool ourselves that any of us are really capable of researching everything… Every possible domain of topics under the sun with sufficient quality to form our own opinion, full born from the head of Zeus like Athena without at some level relying on trusting the interpretation of someone else with more domain knowledge than we might have.

0:36:28.1 Julian Sanchez: And so then the question is, “Okay well then how do I assess which alternative sources are suitably credible?” And so if the process is, “This is what I think is likely to be true and so anyone with an MD behind their name who’s saying the thing I suspect might be true is credible.” That’s I think a backwards process. You wanna try and say, “Okay. Well, if I don’t just trust the CDC what are other voices that seem like they would be worth paying attention to,” and sort of pick them in advance in a sense and say, “Okay, these are gonna be the alternative sources that I have some reason to give weight to,” as opposed to the sort of process where I mean it sort of seems like the approach is more along the lines of, “Is this a claim that I am inclined to accept?” And then, “Is there someone vaguely credible standing behind it?” But really the credibility is coming from my enthusiasm to accept the conclusion.

0:37:45.2 Paul Matzko: It does feel like we’ve been whip lashing throughout the pandemic between the kind of naive progressive faith in government that… Which has led us astray…

0:37:53.4 Julian Sanchez: I don’t know if I’ve been whip lashing that way, but…

0:37:55.4 Paul Matzko: Well, I mean, earlier on there was this sense of, “Well, the CDC says it’s fomite transmission, there was a reluctance to acknowledge that masking could help until April, May. So there was a big early failure with the CDC guidelines. But it’s a whiplash between… I mean, or maybe not whiplash is right word. A war between kind of naive progressive faith in government institutions and there was the kind of vulgar libertarianism which is to decide whether or not something is true. I guess our mood affiliation or confirmation bias simply because a government agency recommends something it must be untrustworthy or wrong, leading to degrees of COVID denialism. And it… I don’t know I guess I feel tugged between these two very loud obnoxious reactions while being aware like that’s… I’ve fallen prey to that too. Is there anything during the pandemic like looking back mistakes you made, I can think of some I made along the way, my views evolved on things. Are there any mistakes that you made that you then with new information change your point of view and how did you like tweak your heuristic? How did you tweak the way you thought about the pandemic, or information gathering process, or the like.

0:39:18.4 Julian Sanchez: Well, obviously the example you mentioned certainly, there were cases where the CDC said some of the things you mentioned about masks for example, and fomite transmission, and having no particular reason to think that was likely to be false. Like well, alright, I accept that that’s the current consensus, and then over time as the position evolved on that I probably look at… It probably the original analysis had been wrong. But that’s just I think to some extent to be expected in the context of a kind of novel pathogen that people are still learning about. One thing people point to sometimes is the original dismissal of the lab leak hypothesis as a potential origin for COVID, which I think is still largely considered the less likely alternative, but I think there is consensus now that it was maybe ruled out more forcefully than the evidence merited that it remains a live possibility, even if not, the most likely alternative. And although I think part of the backlash problem we see is I think I see a lot of people who seem to think that the back peddling on whether that was sort of impossible, it means now it has been proven, which is also not the case.

0:40:50.6 Julian Sanchez: So one heuristic tweak, I suppose it’s just the kind of consciousness that findings are tentative and you should assume that all of these conclusions are revisable but also I think looking at that particular example, I think part of what happened there part of the reason there was this kind of over-​correction in favor of saying, no, this is out in la la land, theory of where COVID might have come from is the reasonable version of this hypothesis which is alright that there is work being done, at a lab in Wuhan and it’s conceivable that a strain that had been modified might have escaped from the lab was being conflated with a much more conspiratorial version, which is, this is a Chinese bio-​weapon that has been released as some kind of attack, which I don’t think made a lot of sense. Usually you don’t release bio-​weapons on your own population, so it is hard to imagine what the motive there could be, maybe they were expecting a huge demand in the market for N95 so that they could profit… I don’t know what story you’re gonna tell where that makes sense, but the rejection of the conspiracy version bled over into in a sense kind of debunking or rejecting everything in that sort of ballpark, even though there was a version of it that was a reasonable hypothesis.

0:42:34.8 Aaron Ross Powell: We began this conversation talking about the potential problems that arise when people do their own research, when basically, if they are not qualified expertise-​wise to do that well, and I wonder, so we are all three scholars of the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian organization, which is a edges of the Overton Window political theory within Washington, like there is most of Washington disagrees with us on most of the stuff that we say. And so we are essentially three researchers whose job is to say that the consensus or majority views are often mistaken, and we do that by doing our own research, and so I wonder if this is… Is this basically just elitism is it essentially saying like critical thinking is good for us, we can do it, but the rest of you probably shouldn’t bother, which doesn’t sound like… It is not convincing. It is kind of insulting. And yeah, sounds elitist. Is there a way to make this argument or is this argument not just research credential elitism?

0:43:53.6 Julian Sanchez: I don’t think so, because I apply this fully to myself, there is a narrow domain of topics where I would say I’m an expert that I’m capable of looking at a new opinion from the FISA court and having a decent understanding of what is going on there and what the legal and technological and operational context for that is. But I also routinely have the experience or used to when everyone was in the office more regularly of discussing a topic outside my wheelhouse with a colleague who was expert in that area and thinking I understood reasonably well, from some sort of superficial reading, I had done and realizing after about 15 minutes of conversation with someone who really knew it well, that I was missing a whole lot, that I lacked a lot of context, and I had fallen prey to the danger of a little knowledge. So no, I think no one really is an expert to core, no one is an expert across the board, most people are expert in something and not expert in everything else.

0:45:19.5 Julian Sanchez: So this is not… Certainly, it’s not me saying, Oh, it’s a bad thing to do your own research, that’s certainly it would be awfully hypocritical for me to say that, but rather that and this is again, advice I give to myself, it is very tempting to regard yourself as omni-​competent as opposed to recognizing when something is sufficiently technical topic that you should be looking for guidance rather than assuming you can diffuse the bomb yourself.

[music]

0:46:13.5 Aaron Ross Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.