It appears that this didn’t make it to my Gmail subscribers today. My apologies if you’re seeing this twice.
I reached a breaking point this week.
I’ve been working on a piece about some of the terrible research studies that have been publicized within the last week. And every time I felt like I got a handle on it, a new one came out.
There was the CDC case study about the classroom in California in May, where the unvaccinated unmasked teacher passed on COVID to half of her class, who were all masked. There was the study in Nature where they plugged 95% mask effectiveness into a computer model to prove that without masks the spread would be exponential. There was the AP story about the computer model showing that unless all of their favored interventions were implemented, there would be 100,000 more deaths in the US this year. There was the study from Washington University that if the enforced social distancing and lockdowns in March 2020 had been done six weeks later, there would have been six times as many deaths, based on - again - a computer model. And then there was the mask study in Bangladesh that was horribly confounded, the error boundaries were so wide they showed no results, and at BEST it shows that cloth masks don’t work, but surgical masks do, but only if you’re over 50.
Then I realized that I’m at a point where I have to engage my critical analysis brain every time I read something. Whether it’s an AP story, or a CNN clip, or a study from a reputable journal, or a podcast, or a tweet, I can’t take anything at face value any more. I have to ask myself, “Is this true? What would it mean for this to be true? How can I fact-check this myself?”
Let me share why I’m pretty sure I’m losing my mind.
There’s been a simmering controversy online that I got sucked into for a time (as my beautiful and ever-patient wife will attest). Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist who I deeply respect and have for many years, had two podcast episodes. One was with an ICU doctor who’s developed a protocol for the use of ivermectin, which is a medication that won the Nobel Prize in 2015 and is on the WHO’s list of essential medicines. It’s cured a countless number of people of river blindness, a parasitic disease that has afflicted 15.5 million people. It does reportedly have some antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties, which may mean something for COVID. However, any discussion of it online has been censored, taken down, flagged for medical disinformation.
I don’t think the evidence is very good that it does much. The main studies that did show an effect were staggering, with 100% success. That doesn’t happen in studies. Now we know that at least one of these studies was fraudulent. But doctors I’ve heard talk about it say that at the LEAST they should be allowed to discuss it, because that’s how science is done — people talk to each other, discuss what they see, and figure out ways they can test their hypotheses.
Meanwhile, Joe Rogan announced this week that he came down with COVID and took ivermectin for it, and every news article about it refers to ivermectin as a “horse dewormer”. Yes, that’s a function of it, since it’s an antiparasitic, but there is a human form and dosage of it, and to not even acknowledge that seems like arguing in bad faith.
But the media refers to it as such because, as the discussion about ivermectin has been driven underground, people who are prone to believe in conspiracies have been taking the veterinary form of ivermectin because doctors have been instructed not to prescribe it. This led the FDA to effectively denounce ivermectin in all forms, which is peculiar for a drug that’s, again, on the WHO’s list of essential medications.
Back to Weinstein. The next guests he had on his podcast made the case that the vaccine is more injurious than the FDA or the manufacturers will admit, that it’s clearly unsafe for women of fertility age, that it leads to variants that would not have existed save for the vaccines putting evolutionary pressures on the virus to evade. There are parts of this argument that make some sense, but Weinstein never put the serious questions to his guests. But I got absolutely hoodwinked for about a week until I regained my senses.
(Quick aside: Let me make this clear. I am vaccinated, and I believe people should be vaccinated to give them the best odds to stay out of the hospital or worse. But it should be your own personal risk calculation, not dictated by some newsletter writer.)
Meanwhile, people like Eric Feigl-Ding and Leana Wen are appearing on news channels as experts and spinning everything to be as scary as possible, effectively arguing for masks forever or forced isolation of the unvaccinated. Companies around the US are beginning to require vaccination as a condition of employment, although the evidence now shows that COVID vaccination doesn’t prevent spread any more than flu vaccination does. Australia is locking down the entire nation and is now pushing a face recognition app to residents’ phones requiring them to periodically scan their face and verify their position.
I hit my breaking point. I gave up. I thought that I must be the crazy one, that I should stop thinking critically about what I read, take it all at face value, assume that I must be wrong and that everything I read and am told must be right.
This is what it’s like to live in the alt-middle in 2021. For someone who lives for nuance and understanding, who wants to understand the why as well as the what, how do you make any sense of all of the conflicting bits of information in the world around us?
This is why I believe that we are in a sensemaking crisis.
Our current information environment is garbage. The media outlets aren’t incentivized to report the truth, but instead what gains readership and clicks. Newsrooms are awash with groupthink, so taken with their own narratives that they can’t see the obvious contradictions. And, as Mark Twain reportedly said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes.”
There’s also a significant problem of “audience capture”. Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson aren’t going to put the tough questions to their guests, because they don’t want to lose their viewership or bring the Very Online down on their heads. So they will stick to their preferred narrative, spotlighting all the information that hews closely to it and ignoring everything else.
Then, social media gets involved. Social media doesn’t reward truth, only dopamine hits. A user wants to write something that will get engagement because they want the dopamine reward of seeing someone liked it. So they will step up the emotion, write something more inflammatory, stretch the truth. And they will get rewarded for it, so they’ll do it again. And again. And again.
Politicians aren’t immune. Because McCain-Feingold empowered the small dollar donor, it disempowered the parties where they no longer have the ability to police their own ranks. So the most outrageous, most performative people on both sides get the attention, get their live hits on the nightly news opinion shows, and rake in thousands of $3 donations.
It’s exhausting to remain on guard against the constant barrage of bad information around us, to sort fact from fiction, reality from fantasy, good from bad. It also requires training to read through studies, to be able to spot the problem areas, to see where their claimed results aren’t backed up by their cited data.
Without trying to sound overdramatic, this is what it must have been like in Soviet Russia, constantly told not to believe your lying eyes and only believe what the Party tells you.
Masks work. Even though Oregon has had a mask mandate including outdoors since August 13, and their hospitalizations are still skyrocketing.
Lockdowns work. Just don’t look at Australia.
Vaccinating a high percentage of the population is the way out. Just don’t pay attention to Israel’s skyrocketing case counts after vaccinating 77% of their population.
I have a suspicion that people are slowly being driven mad by being asked to maintain their cognitive dissonance, by being told things that they know can’t be true. So they double down, indignantly sticking to their priors in the face of all of the countervailing evidence. I don’t believe people can hold in this position for long.
What do we do? How can we possibly keep going under all of this? Where does this all lead?
I have a few suggestions.
Take no-news days. It requires more energy than you think to think critically, and those batteries wear out. You need a chance to reset. Put your phone away. Go for a walk amongst the trees. Get some sun on your skin. Listen to the birds. Reconnect.
Stay confident in your ability to smell a rat. It takes practice to listen to your inner skeptic, but your intuition will guide you once you’re aware of the dots that don’t connect, the disparate pieces of information that contradict. Trust in that. Eventually you will be able to read a headline and opening paragraph and say, “That can’t possibly be true,” based on common sense.
Don’t be anonymous on social media. I write under my own name to keep me accountable. I don’t write anything here or on any social media account that I don’t stand behind, and because of that it causes me to think very carefully about what I put out into the world. I want to be honest to a fault, I want to be fastidious with how I conduct myself, and I want to be the same person I am online that I am in real life. Putting my own name on that facilitates that and keeps me from getting carried away.
I don’t know where all of this will lead. I would suspect we will all reach a breaking point over the winter when we realize that cases in the Northeast are spiking just as they did last winter and just as we were promised they wouldn’t. We will have some sort of reckoning as some countries have, where they realize counting cases is a fool’s errand with an endemic virus and will give up trying. The media will continue to fear every new variant as The Big One, and people will eventually stop listening. The boy can only cry wolf so many times.
Meanwhile, I’m going to continue to use my critical thinking skills to make sense of the world around me, as difficult as that may be.
I can do that, for today.
(I do need to credit Rebel Wisdom for the ideas around sensemaking. His content is wonderful, please go subscribe.)
We Are In the Middle of a Sensemaking Crisis
Bingo. Just one no news day? 😁