Let me tell you how I became a proud science denier, and how it saved my life.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2025/03/12/epi…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It was about 15 years ago. I was living in London, and my wife's job came with a private health insurance buff that let us use private doctors instead of the NHS. I've had worsening chronic pain my whole life, and I've never found anything that made it better, so I thought, fine, I'll see a fancy specialist. So I started calling around to the quacks of Harley Street, London's elite medical precinct.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Soon, I found myself at the very posh offices of a psychopharmacologist who had good news for me: Opioids are safe! Far safer than we'd ever thought. So safe, in fact, that I should get on opioids right away, and take them every day for the rest of my life. I didn't have to worry about addiction. I'd be fine. He had a whole pile of peer-reviewed journal articles that supported this advice.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I didn't trust the science. I suspected that billionaire-owned pharma companies were engaged in a conspiracy to cook the evidence on the safety and efficacy of their products. I thought that the regulators who were supposed to prevent them from murdering me for money were in on the game - on the take, swapping favors for these companies for a promise of cushy industry jobs after they left the public sector.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I did my own research. I found people online who were citing other research from outside the establishment that confirmed my conspiracy theory. I decided that these strangers on the internet were more trustworthy than the respected, high-impact factor, peer-reviewed, tier-one scientific journals whose pages were full of claims about the safety and efficacy of daily opioid use for chronic pain sufferers like me. I took control over my own health.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I didn't fill the Rx for the medicine my doctor had prescribed for me and advised me to start taking immediately. I fired my doctor.
I took these steps despite having *no* background in pharmacology, addiction studies, or medicine. I was totally unqualified to make that call. I was a science denier - but I was also *right*.
It probably saved my life.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
A decade later, I faced another medical question: should I get a new kind of vaccine, which was claimed to be effective against the covid-19 pandemic? The companies that manufactured that vaccines were part of the same industry that falsified the research on opioids. The regulators that signed off on those vaccines were the same regulators that signed off on opioid safety claims. Neither had ever been forced to reckon with the failures that led to the opioid epidemic.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The procedures that allowed that shameful episode were the same, and the structures that allowed the perversion of those procedures were likewise the same. And once again, there was a clamor of dissenting voices from people who distrusted the official medical position on these new pharma products, insisting that they were the creations of pharma billionaires who didn't care if I lived or died, overseen by regulators who were utterly in their pockets.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I got the vaccine, and then several more. But I tell you what: I had no more rational basis to trust vaccines than I had for mistrusting opioids. I am not qualified to evaluate the scientific claims related to either question, and I know it.
This is an objectively very frightening situation to be in.
We navigate *so many* of these life-or-death technical questions *every single day*:
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Anne Ominous
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
ugh... this portion of the thread is reminding me of listening to Colin Powell make wild claims about WMDs that most people swallowed unquestioningly, while me... a scientist with no military training who had never been to Iraq felt pretty confident the whole thing was bullshit.
spolier alert! it was!
the weirdest thing too, was that Powell himself seemed to actually believe the lies he was peddling. so surreal.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
* Is my Boeing plane airworthy?
* Are the air traffic controllers adequately trained, staffed and rested?
* Is the firmware for my antilock brakes of high quality?
* Are the hygiene procedures at this restaurant robust enough to prevent the introduction of life-threatening pathogens and contaminants?
* Are the pedagogical theories at my kid's school well-founded, or are do they produce ignoramuses whose only skill is satisfying standardized testing rubrics?
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
* Are the safety standards that specify the joists in my ceiling any good, or am I about to die, buried under tons of rubble?
Every one of these questions is the sort of thing that even highly skilled researchers and experts can - and do - disagree on. Definitively answering just *one* of these questions might require the equivalent of *several* PhDs.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Realistically, you're not going to be able to personally arrive at a trustworthy answer to all of these, and it's very likely you won't even be able to answer *any* of them.
That's what experts are for. But that just raises another problem: how do you know which experts you should listen to?
You don't.
You can't. Even experts who mean well and are well-versed in their fields can make mistakes.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
For every big, consequential technical question, there are conflicts, both minor and major, among experts who seem to be qualified and honest. Figuring out which expert to trust is essentially the same problem as answering the question for yourself.
But despite all these problems, you are almost certainly alive as you read these words. How did that happen?
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's all down to referees. In our public policy forums, we entrust publicly accountable bureaucrats to hear all the claims of all the experts, sift through them, and then publish a (provisional) official truth. These public servants are procedurally bound to operate in the open, soliciting comments and countercomments to a public docket, holding public hearings, publishing readouts of private meetings with interested parties.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Having gathered all the claims and counterclaims, these public servants reason in public, publishing not just a ruling, but the rationale for the ruling - why they chose to believe some experts over others.
The transparency obligations on these public servants - whom we call "regulators" - don't stop there, either. Regulators are required to both disclose their conflicts of interest, and to recuse themselves where those conflicts arise.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Finally, the whole process has multiple error-correction systems. Rules can be challenged in court on the grounds that they were set without following the rules, and the expert agencies that employ these regulators have their own internal procedures for re-opening an inquiry when new evidence comes to light.
The point of all this is to create something that you, me, and everyone we know can inspect, understand and verify.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I may not have the cell biology chops to evaluate claims about MRNA vaccine safety, but I *am* equipped to look at the *process* by which the vaccines were approved and satisfy myself that they were robust. I can't evaluate the contents of most regulations, but I can certainly tell you whether the box the regulation shipped in was made of square cornered, stiff cardboard:
pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/bla…
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Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism and the epistemological crisis (25 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That's why the vaccine question was so tough. The opioid crisis had shown the procedure to be badly flawed, and the fact that neither the FDA nor Congress cleaned house *after* that crisis meant that the procedure was demonstrably faulty. Same goes for getting in a 737 MAX. The issue isn't that Boeing made some mistakes - it's that the FAA lets Boeing mark its own homework, even after Boeing was caught cheating:
pluralistic.net/2024/05/01/boe…
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Pluralistic: Boeing’s deliberately defective fleet of flying sky-wreckage (01 May 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I'm not qualified to tell you how many rivets a jet plane's door-plug should have, but I can confidently say that Boeing has demonstrated that it doesn't know either, and the FAA has demonstrated that it has no interest in making Boeing any better at resolving this question.
It's no coincidence that our political process has been poisoned by conspiratorialism.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
America's ruling party is dominated by conspiracy fantasists who believe in all kinds of demonstrably untrue things about health, public safety, international politics, economics and more. They were voted in by an electorate that is similarly in the grips of conspiratorial beliefs.
It's natural to focus on these beliefs, but that focus hasn't gotten us anywhere.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Far more important than *what* the Republican base believes is *how* they arrive at those beliefs. The Republican establishment - politicians, think-tankies, pundits, newscasters - have spent decades slandering expert agencies and also corrupting them, making them worse at their jobs and therefore easier to slander.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Market fundamentalism insists that "truth" is to be found in markets: if everyone is inserting radium suppositories, the government's has no business forcing you to stop stuffing radioactive waste up your asshole:
pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/jus…
Rather than telling restaurants how often their chefs should wash their hands, we can let markets decide - merely require restaurants to display their handwashing procedures, and then diners can vote with their alimentary canals.
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Pluralistic: Thinking the unthinkable (19 Sep 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
To the septic goes the spoils! Of course, the government also has no business deciding whether their disclosures are truthful - isn't that why we have a First Amendment? So while we might require restaurants to display their handwashing procedures, we're not going to send the signage cops down to the diner to bust a restaurant for lying about those procedures.
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Jo-stands on guard, elbows up.
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The twin assault on both the credibility and reliability of expert agencies came to a head with the *Loper Bright* decision, in which the Supreme Court gutted expert agencies' rulemaking ability, seemingly in the expectation that Congress - overwhelming populated by very old people who trained as lawyers in the previous century - would make fine-grained safety rules covering everything from water to aerospace:
pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/pol…
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Pluralistic: Expert agencies and elected legislatures (21 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Conspiratorialism is the inevitable outcome of a world where:
a) You must resolve complex, life-or-death technical issues which;
b) You are not qualified to answer; and
c) Cannot trust the referees who are supposed to navigate these questions on your behalf.
Conpsiratorialism is only secondarily about *what* you believe. Mostly, conspiratorialism is about *how you arrive at those beliefs.* Conspiratorialism isn't a problem of bad facts - it's a problem of bad epistemology.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
We live in a true epistemological void, in which the truth is increasingly for sale.
That's the backdrop against which Doge is doing its dirty business. Doge's assault on expert agencies enjoys a depressing degree of popular support, but it's not hard to understand why: so many of our expert agencies have staged high-profile demonstrations of their unfitness, without any consequences, that it's easy to sell the story that these referees were *all* on the take.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
They weren't, of course. Most expert regulators - career civil servants - really care about their jobs. They want to make sure you can survive a trip to the grocery story rather than shitting your guts out with listeria or giardia, that your plane doesn't collide with a military chopper, that your kids graduate school knowing more than how to pass a standardized test.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The tragedy is that these honorable, skilled regulators' commitment to your wellbeing isn't enough to produce policies that actually safeguard your wellbeing.
Musk doesn't want to fix the real, urgent problems with America's administrative state: he wants to destroy it. He wants to fire the refs, because once you fire the refs, the game goes on - minus the rules.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That's a great way to win support for authoritarian projects: "The state won't take care of you anymore (if it ever did, amirite?), but *I* will."
So they're firing the refs, and they're transforming the game of "survive until tomorrow" into Calvinball, a "nomic" in which the rules are whatever someone insists they are:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
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Game
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Musk and Trump are in for a surprise. They have the mistaken impression that the rules only reined in their billionaire pals and the corporations that produce their wealth. But one of the most consequential effects of these rules is to limit labor activism. The National Labor Relations Act put very strict limits on union organizing and union militancy.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Now that Trump has effectively shut down the National Labor Relations Board (by illegally firing a Democratic board member, leaving the board without a quorum), all bets are off:
pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/whi…
Trump won office in part by insisting that America's institutions were not fit for purpose. He wasn't lying about that (for a change). The thing he was lying about was his desire to fix them.
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Pluralistic: All bets are off (29 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Trump doesn't want honest refs - he wants *no* refs. To defeat Trumpism, we need to stop pretending that our institutions are just fine - we need to confront their failings head on and articulate a plan to fix them, rather than claiming "America was already great":
pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/tha…
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Pluralistic: Conservatives are fringe outliers – and leftists could learn from them (16 June 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.
Catch me in BURBANK TOMORROW (Mar 13) with WIL WHEATON:
thethirdplace.is/event/cory-do…
And in SAN DIEGO on Mar 24:
mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow
More tour dates here:
martinhench.com
eof/
The Third Place | Software for Local Businesses to Build a Sense of Home and Community
thethirdplace.isbe3n
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
here is one:
darkdel.com/#/
Dark Delicacies
Dark DelicaciesCory Doctorow
in reply to be3n • • •Sensitive content
tom jennings
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Cory Doctorow
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Evan Prodromou
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Sensitive content
frank87
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
(And "they are stupid" or "payed off" isn't an expert explanation)
Les capsules du prof Lutz
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Petra van Cronenburg
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Oh, that was a wonderfully cheeky "over-clickbait". I clicked. I wanted to know: What, this person? Should I have misjudged him?
And then I had a huge pleasure as the article chased me through the polarities to present its finely differentiated findings. It got exciting.
It's been a long time since I've enjoyed reading something so serious so much! 👏
#mustread #science #conspiratorialism
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Petra van Cronenburg • • •Bjørn Stærk
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •an older example of the same thing: to be gay in the 1970s, in many countries you had to think you knew better than the health authorities, who believed this was an illness you should try to cure.
and then, a couple of years later, the same health authorities ask you to believe that there's a dangerous illness going around that somehow mysteriously requires gay people to limit their sex lives.
knowing which scientific claims to trust is _very hard_.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
LonM
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •I don't think this science denial. A big part of science is rigorous debate of the evidence. If you have evidence to the contrary, whether it's "anecdotal" lived experience or published data, then not blindly trusting established narrative *is* science. Dissenting views and contradictions are more valuable to the scientific process than confirmations* because it's evidence of some misunderstanding that can be used to push science as a whole forward.
*Of course you need some confirmations, and the replication crisis is a whole separate issue that leads to mistrust in science