Who do you trust? (pt. 1)

Tristero had a thoughtful post last week on “Intelligent Design Creationism and the Erosion of Trust.”

Reading this post on the evolution of HIV, tristero realized that, despite being a fairly clever layperson, the science of this particular debate was beyond him. The matter being discussed was so particular to the discipline of the experts in that field that:

… the rest of us have neither the time, the inclination, nor often the analytical talent to follow the details. … The knowledge and data needed are too specialized.

You see where this is going? ID creationists are deliberately forcing the question of who we laypeople will trust. Since we are not in any position to judge Smith vs Behe on the playing field of the data, we must rely on irrelevant social heuristics to decide who makes the better case. … Since I can’t understand the argument as an argument, how do I determine who I wish to trust?

That’s an excellent question and a keen insight into the way in which promoters of junk science deliberately seek to push the dispute away from questions of fact to questions of trust. Tristero thinks that tactic has to be confronted explicitly — that this is a game we should refuse to play. I think he’s right about that (go read the whole post in which he makes that case). That way lies madness — treating the world like a game of “Family Feud” in which there are no true or false answers, no actual facts, only the arbitrary opinions of “100 people surveyed, top five answers on the board.”

Yet tristero’s question remains vital: “How do I determine who I wish to trust?” Many of us are experts on one or two subjects. Some exceptional people even manage to be experts on half a dozen different things. But none of us is an expert on every subject, so we are all faced, at one time or another, with the dilemma of being a layperson forced to decide between competing experts.

Once upon a time, this was a key function of journalists, and particularly of political journalists. Faced with competing and contradictory claims, journalists’ job was to evaluate those claims to determine as best as possible which (or whether either) corresponded with objective reality. In the case of particularly complex and specialized disputes, it was the journalists’ job to find disinterested experts who could interpret the dispute and serve as a kind of referee. This task has been largely abandoned by journalists because: A) it’s hard work, involving lots of reading and research and thinking and stuff; and B) reporting the conclusion that one side or the other (or both) was arguing something not supported by reality often resulted in one side or the other (or both) being upset with this conclusion and saying mean things about you and not inviting you to all the cool cocktail parties and correspondents’ dinners and stuff, so who needs the grief?

So now journalists see their job differently. They no longer consider it their responsibility to try to evaluate the competing claims of the experts, only to report both sides of the dispute accurately (i.e., to reproduce the exact language, no matter how loaded, of each party in the dispute). Call it stenography, or he-said/she-said, this isn’t helpful. The result is pseudo-journalism that says, “Some scientists say X, others say Not X. It’s all very complicated.” Or, in the case of political journalism, you get something like this:

“The Ins say this legislation will create 20,000 new jobs in the city, reduce crime and improve test scores in our schools. The Outs say it will produce economic stagnation, lawlessness and chaos. Back to you, Bill.”

The unstated portion of all such reports would go something like this:

“For all I know, either side could be right. There’s some kind of policy study that claims to sort all of this out, but it’s really long and boring and I’m lazy and not too bright. So I don’t know … flip a coin, people.”

The inevitable result of this approach to political reporting is the obsessive coverage of what tristero describes as “irrelevant social heuristics” — discussions of candidates’ hair, dress, “gravitas” or personal appeal. Policy disputes, no less than elections, are treated as horse races — ignoring the substance of the competing claims and focusing exclusively on which side seems to be more persuasive, or to be “resonating with the voters.”

This is junk journalism in the service of junk politics and junk governance, and none of it is compatible with a healthy democracy.

Just as the proponents of junk science are deliberately trying to push the debate away from questions of fact and into the realm of trust, so too the proponents of junk politics are actively promoting junk journalism — moving away from questions of fact, policy and substance and into the realm of trust. Actually, “trust” isn’t quite right. Trustworthiness, after all, is a concrete, measurable, verifiable thing. The realm of “trust” advocated by the proponents of junk science, junk politics and junk journalism is none of those things. It substitutes an arbitrary array of surrogates for trustworthiness — personal appearance, charm, flattery and slander-by-proxy. Call it junk trust.

More on this tomorrow later.