How You are manipulated by Pseudo Math, Science & Logic

Tactics for identifying and defeating attempts to improperly influence you

In the social media age, the art of the con is hardly artistic any longer. Perpetrators need only persuade a small handful of the least critically thinking people, sit back, and let social media do the rest. This has power because one need not be a thoughtful person to procure a large following. Indeed, some who demonstrate with persistence their lack of intelligence or wisdom still count followers in the millions. Right now, this contagion has no end in sight.

If societies wish to progress—nay, survive—without imposing draconian regulations on speech, then it is incumbent upon the citizenry to better situate themselves to discern what is real and what is not. Sometimes, this feels like an impossible battle. So many matters are so complicated. No one can become expert in everything.

Nonetheless, there are plenty of measures to defend against the onslaught of lies and attempted manipulations without spending thousands of hours in interdisciplinary studies. There are two key starting points to this: healthy skepticism, and choice of battles.

The pathways

Healthy Skepticism

For any assertion made by anyone, you would be best served by holding a degree of healthy skepticism. Generally, skepticism refers to evaluating the relative plausibility of any contention starting from a place of caution.

For instance, if someone claims gravity does not exist, a normal person should express immediate skepticism. The concept of gravity has been known for a very long time, and we can see its effects everywhere. Thus, one might want to think over any counterclaim very carefully before stepping off a cliff no matter who makes the assertion.

The underlined example links to a report about a study that could be used by someone who wishes to announce “scientists say there is no gravity.” But a closer analysis of the research shows that the author theorizes that what we call gravity works rather differently than what the Theory of Relativity predicted, and thus calls into question whether scientists should recharacterize the entire phenomenon. Nevertheless, you will still fall off the cliff. Healthy skepticism in this case would involve avoiding the known effects of whatever gravity is while further exploring the claim.

While possessing healthy skepticism is a good thing, uncritical skepticism is not. Uncritical skepticism is essentially the same as uncritical acceptance. For example, someone who immediately comes to believe that all vaccines do not work because one allegedly shows lower efficacy than another is exhibiting uncritical skepticism. Such a person is uncritically rejecting (or being skeptical of) thousands of scientific studies that prove that vaccines help prevent or mitigate disease, solely on fallacious logic. Put the other way, it is the uncritical acceptance of the claim that vaccines do not work following the same erroneous reasoning.

Healthy skepticism is the core of the scientific process. Even principles that have long been shown to be correct are analyzed and reanalyzed to uncover frailties in any portion of them. The idea posited in the article linked above exemplifies exactly this concept. Arguably no scientific revelation that informs people or directs society at large stands alone; all have been built over centuries by many scientists and experts of various disciplines who have explored them with abundant healthy skepticism.

Dismissing centuries of scholarship uncritically—as some have done related to vaccines, evolution, and other scientific principles—is an expression of ignorance of how human progress works. It is the reason why the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ has become a pejorative.

The phrase describes an assertion that lacks any substantive evidence; it does not describe those derived from healthy skepticism. The two are fundamentally different. A conspiracy theorist is someone who proposes a counter-narrative to an existing idea that lacks credible evidence or logic. A skeptic is one who is hesitant to accept an idea absent further corroboration.

Choosing battles

The second pathway to avoiding manipulation is choosing one’s battles. There are plenty of topics in the world that might provoke your emotions. The problem is that a person cannot become well-informed on all or most of them without committing substantial amounts of time and energy. Understanding this limitation is critical toward shaping an opinion. Many people express strong opinions on issues such as climate change, immigration, wars, economics, and so forth. All of these topics, however, are too complicated to distill into a few memes.

When evaluating matters that provoke strong opinions, you should first decide which of them are worthy of further analysis. To illustrate, is your wellbeing equally affected by immigration and climate change? Careful consideration of that question will, for many people, lead to prioritizing one over the other. For example, if you live in a city with relatively low numbers of immigrants, climate change would in most cases probably comprise the more relevant issue.

In other instances, you can recognize both as serious problems, but your life circumstances require focusing on one over the other. Wherever this kind of prioritization leads involving whichever issues, the key is to narrow the weight to which you apply a viewpoint, a rating that should directly correlate with your knowledge of the issues. In other words, the stronger the opinion you hold is, the more knowledge you should have about the subject.

It is in this way that you can make decisions, whether at the voting booth or in how you conduct your life, that actually benefit you (and, probably most of the time, society at large). This will also help you avoid becoming the spreader of misinformation.

What are facts?

We have discussed this in an article before, but it is important enough to briefly address again (this section restates much from the previous article).

The concept of Facts is straightforward:

A fact is verifiable through some means that carries the hallmarks of credibility. In other words it is reproducible, logical, provable, or usually some combination thereof. Two different people can analyze a fact and unflinchingly agree on its qualities.

You cannot “disagree on the facts.” There can be disagreement on what facts mean or how they can be interpreted, but these disagreements are not about the substance of the facts themselves.

As an example, it is a fact that a building is a certain size. Any number of measurers can independently confirm each dimension (height, length, square footage, etc.). We can disagree about whether the building is too big or too small, but we cannot disagree on its length in meters or feet. Without agreeing upon the baseline facts, there can be no debate or progress on anything.

Some facts are confirmed through examinations of other information, but do not completely explain a spectacle. To demonstrate this, for a long stretch of human history people believed lightning was a supernatural phenomenon. Over time, however, scientists began to understand concepts like charge separation and field generation. Today, while it is not known precisely what generates a lightning strike, it is a fact that lightning constitutes an electric discharge created through requisite atmospheric conditions.

Present dialogue about climate change confuses this concept in some circles. It is a fact that the earth is warming, that carbon dioxide concentration is increasing faster than it has over most of the previous several millennia, or that humans are pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at rates not seen in human history. These are indisputable facts.

The interpretation of these facts is that humans’ rampant emissions of greenhouse gases are a direct cause of the observed radical changes to the environment, such as surface warming or altering concentrations of carbon dioxide. Experts who study the matter are in virtually complete consensus on this interpretation.

If you are inclined to agree with someone who proffers an alternative to a consensus view on an issue, it is necessary to know enough about the subject to determine whether the counterclaim possesses any validity, specifically the facts that underlie both the consensus and disputation.

On the matter of climate change, for example, to rationally agree with someone who proclaims that current temperature changes reflect part of a “natural cycle” and not human influence, then you must be knowledgeable of what constitutes a natural cycle, when and how they occur, and how they relate to or conflict with the presently accepted interpretation.

Without this knowledge, forming an opinion based on the oppositional view is rather foolhardy. After all, you would not take advice on the best computer to buy from a person who knows little more than how to turn one on. Agreeing with someone who is arguing against expert consensus without viable evidentiary support—or the ability to properly examine what evidence they purport to have—is effectively the same thing.

While it is typically preferable to possess reasonable knowledge on a matter before formulating a strong opinion, it is not unreasonable to defer to experts, especially when they hold an overwhelmingly consistent position on the issue. On this, it is key to know who in fact are the experts.

Manipulations

There are various methods by which politicians, pundits, and others attempt to confuse you and lead you astray from the two basic pathways through which you can most easily and effectively navigate reality. Below, we will examine a number of them. By becoming acquainted with these tactics, it will be easier to recognize attempts to manipulate you for any untoward gain, whether political, financial, or otherwise.

Mistaken about bias

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about manipulation is bias. Many who offer extreme claims with no (or bad) evidence will contend that they are being ignored or ‘cancelled’ out of some institutional or ‘establishment’ bias. In other cases, people who emotionally cling to certain views will assert that evidence that disproves their views is nothing more than an indicator of bias. Both are incorrect. Bias means:

a particular tendency, trend, inclination, feeling, or opinion, especially one that is preconceived or unreasoned

A reasoned dismantling of an argument is not bias. Holding onto a conclusion in the face of overwhelming controverting evidence, on the other hand, is the definition of bias.

Responding to a carefully crafted, evidence-based argument with emotional or personal attacks is another hallmark of bias. Examples include accusing someone of being “pro” or “anti” something, often a political party or ideology as a means to discredit the person and, thereby, the argument (you are just “anti-Republican” or “pro-socialist,” etc.). Restating a defeated argument in a different way without addressing the evidence offered against it is another indication of bias.

Scary statistics

Many people openly profess their dislike for mathematics. In the United States, students score below the global average, and have remained stagnant for decades. Even the previous sentence required knowing something about math—an average (used here as the mathematical or arithmetic mean) is “the expression of the central value of a set of data.” To find it, one adds the sum of a set, then divides by the number of entries comprising the set.

The set: 6, 8, 10, 2, 5, 10, 9, 6

Sum of the set: 6 + 8 + 10 + 2 + 5 + 10 + 9 + 6 = 56

Average: divide 56 by the number of entries in the set, 56 ÷ 8 = 7.

The average is 7.

Below average in this set is anything less than 7 (6.9, 2.5, 1, etc.). Like averages, statistics are simply a way of analyzing and presenting data.

The problem with statistics is that they are frequently misused to make something sound better or (usually) worse than it really is. For example, to say that murders are up by 200% over the previous year sounds quite bad. But, without knowing what the rate was in the previous year, 200% means very little. If there were only 2 murders in a city in 2021, and in 2022 there were 6, then the increase in the murder rate was 200%. A 200% increase in one sample could be trivial compared to a 10% increase in another.

As you can see, the sample size used for a statistical comparison greatly influences the utility of the result. In some examples, it is obvious. Let’s say someone were to measure the timing of 10 athletes—five males and five females—in completing the 40-yard dash. The females in this analysis finished, on average, a half second faster. From this, no rational person would conclude that all females everywhere are “on average” a half second faster than males.

Similarly, some will misuse statistics by ignoring the normal distribution. The normal distribution is the expected range of reasonable attributes of a set. If you study wealth correlations of people to certain categories, such as race, age, geographic location, etc., you can make a reasonable estimate of the range of values in the set from contextual clues (values that can change with further information). You will not get reliable results if you include massive outliers from the normal distribution.

To illustrate, if your sample set in this examination is 100 people, including a single billionaire will radically alter the results because (as we saw in a previous article) billions are several orders of magnitude above the income rates of most of the people that will comprise the normal distribution.

Your sample set of 100 people will have a normal distribution of, say, $65,000 to $85,000. This means the majority of the entries will fall within these boundaries. The average should land between the two as well. Your sample set includes 10 each of:

65k + 67k + 69k + 71k + 73k + 77k + 79k + 81k + 83k + 85k

Resulting in an average of 75,000

If 99 entries of the sample fall within the normal distribution, but just one includes Jeff Bezos with wealth at $200 billion, here are the results:

65k (9 entries) + 67k + 69k + 71k + 73k + 77k + 79k + 81k + 83k + 85k + 200,000,000,000 (1 entry) = 20,000,127,000 (average).

By replacing one entry of 65,000 with Bezos’s wealth of 200,000,000,000 the average is 266.6 thousand times larger. Thus, significant deviations from the normal distribution will give wildly skewed and basically unusable results. This applies to an evaluation of any kind of set.

An easy way to identify sets that disregard the normal distribution is if the average falls well outside of it, or if the average does not reflect reality. In the above example, obviously the average income of 100 regular people will not hover anywhere near $20 billion. But this could be harder to identify if the deviations from the normal distribution are smaller, such as including a couple millionaires or people with no income at all. Take statistical results with a grain of salt that do not provide information about the analyzed set.

Context matters to statistics in other ways as well. Many have probably heard some version of the assertion that people die in traffic accidents at the highest rates within one mile of their home. One conclusion a person might draw is that driving closer to home is more dangerous than elsewhere, and this could be true.

But a likelier reason is that people drive within one mile from their home at extraordinarily higher frequencies than anywhere else, leading to higher numbers of traffic accidents and, thus, increased odds that some of those will include fatalities.

Thus, a more useful analysis would measure this statistic on a distance-driven-per-incident metric or something similar. Without accounting for the context, the statistical result can be meaningless or misleading.

American politicians recently used this type of deceptive tactic. Former president Donald Trump posted on social media:

[Vice President] Kamala [Harris] should immediately cancel her News Conference because it was just revealed that 13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during her three and a half year period as Border Czar.

Trump appeared to be pulling figures from this tweet:

The tweet is deceptive because those numbers represent the sum of non-citizens over forty years, a critical piece of context.

Furthermore, if one reads the letter from the US immigration department that was attached to this tweet, it divides the total number (662,566) by those with criminal convictions 435,719, versus those facing criminal charges, 226,847. So here, even the phrase “with criminal histories” is deceiving because it differs in meaning from how it is typically used in the common vernacular. One is not typically considered to have a ‘criminal history’ based solely on an accusation (i.e. a criminal charge without a conviction).

Without diving even deeper, these statistics might still seem alarming. According to the attached letter, of those facing criminal charges only 24% of them are for violent crimes (robbery, assault, rape, murder, etc.), or 54,443 across the entire US. In other words, they are responsible (if all those facing charges are ultimately convicted) for 0.3% or less of all violent crime in the US using crime numbers from 2022. How one decides the importance of these values depends first upon understanding their context within the broader issue.

Related to context, some apparent correlations have nothing to do with causation. When dealing with large sets of numbers, coincidences will inevitably happen. With enough hunting, one might find that on nights with full moons people overdose more frequently in some specific locality. Does one have anything to do with the other? Probably not. Is it worth further investigation? Perhaps. Regardless, one should draw no definitive conclusion from this apparent relationship.

When statistics strongly indicate correlation supported by relevant context, you should examine both directions of causality to see if either or both is logical. For example, during COVID lockdowns alcohol-related deaths rose significantly. One can reasonably conclude from this that people drank (and died) more because they had nowhere to go during lockdowns. The reverse, that the rise in people dying from alcohol-related incidents caused COVID lockdowns, simply would not make sense.

Causation is not always so clear, however. If, for instance, alcoholism rates rise at the same time and along a similar trajectory as unemployment, one cannot readily determine the direction of causation. More people could be getting fired for being drunk on the job. Or, people getting fired more often could cause them to engage in alcoholism as a means to deal with the stress.

Without more data both are valid assumptions, but neither provide definitive conclusions. When a person asserts causation through statistics, it is important to evaluate it from both directions to determine if only one can possibly be reasonable.

Finally, be wary of statistical visualizations. The same dataset can be made to look dramatically different if the scale of the depiction is purposely manipulated.

The exemplary projection

Related to statistical manipulation is the concept of the exemplary projection. This means using a single or few instances of an occurrence to imply a widespread phenomenon. This is dangerous because it leads, in effect, to a search for a solution to a largely non-existent problem.

In the US this recently occurred after a remark made by the former president at an electoral debate. There, he proclaimed that Haitian immigrants were “eating the pets” of (presumably) citizens. He said:

They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame.

The implication nestled in this statement is that immigrants to the US routinely eat people’s pets everywhere.

To defend the statement, Trump’s defenders pointed to “reports” indicating that this supposedly happened. His vice presidential candidate stated, “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” Notwithstanding that no one would want their pet eaten by someone whether that person “belongs” in the country or not, city authorities responded:

In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city, we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.

The entire claim seems to have been based off of a single Facebook post that was picked up and spread by supporters of the former president on other social media, especially Twitter (X). After people began inspecting the claim, however, the woman who created the post that started it all apologized and admitted it was false, or at least highly misleading.

The problem here is that even if there was a hint of truth to Trump’s pronouncement that could be supported by pointing to one or more arrests for just such an occurrence, it would still be meaningless. There are about 340 million people in the United States; one can likely find an incident of almost any bizarre criminal act conducted by someone who fits the necessary narrative.

Using a single or few cases to justify denigrating an entire population of people is not only morally wrong, but it is objectively foolish. By adopting this logic, one would be within their rights to say that every white man is a rapist. Certainly the purveyor of such a claim could support it by showing tens of thousands of rape arrests and convictions of white men.

Anyone who is a white male or has one who is a relative or friend would rightly take umbrage with such a labeling. The entire philosophy behind teaching diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles is to dispel this type of thinking for what it is—inappropriate and illogical discrimination.

But the fallaciousness of the logic extends to any instance that someone leaps to a broad conclusion based on a comparatively miniscule sampling. Other examples of this include:

• I myself have seen a thing, so it must be happening just about everywhere;

• One particular brand of product sucks, so all products of that type must suck;

• A few people I know believe a thing, so many people must believe it, etc.

The lone genius defying the “establishment”

In line with protestations of bias explained above, there are those who proclaim that their ideas are so world-changing that the undefined “establishment” is simply oppressing their voice. An example of this recently is the case of actor Terrence Howard, who apparently describes himself as a mathematical genius.

Howard claims to have “revolutionized” mathematics and physics, but complains that people do not take his hypotheses seriously because they buck the established view. In a sense, he seems to think of himself as a figure like those of the past who were imprisoned or otherwise punished for their scientific discoveries that upended contemporary religious or societal beliefs.

The problem with Howard, and others like him who have made the “genius” claim to describe themselves, is that their ideas often do not withstand even an elementary analysis. Howard, for instance, predicates his entire epistemology that he calls “Terryology” on the foundation that 1 X 1 = 2. He went on Joe Rogan and confidently declared this only to walk it back when later, on another episode, a mathematician challenged the proclamation and asked him to explain it.

Many have adopted an approach like Howard’s, leading to all kinds of nonsense. Flat earthers are one of the best known examples, with creationists perhaps a close second. Manipulators who engage in this rely on two pillars to trick you.

First, they learn just enough terminology to make their ideas sound smart. Howard likes to promote his “wave conjugation” principle, for example, which is eminently absurd. He once announced, “I was able to open up the flower of life properly and find the real wave conjugations we’ve been looking for for 10,000 years.” To support the notion, Howard simply repeated several long-debunked ideas or terms from “sacred geometry” (which is about as credible as astrology) while exhibiting his complete misunderstanding of fundamental mathematical and scientific principles.

Second, manipulators of this sort depend upon their audience lacking sufficient knowledge about the concepts they invoke that would allow the audience to see through their misinformation. Creationists like Kent Hovind or James Tour are notorious for engaging in this tactic in their challenges to evolution. Typically, they will bring up real concepts and then simply make stuff up about them, then use their fictions to purport to discredit the entire theory. See here for a detailed dismantling of these kinds of efforts.

To avoid falling prey to these sorts of charlatans, exhibit immediate caution when a person proclaims to have discovered a “new way” or understanding of a fundamental or widely accepted principle. While experts tend to hold considerable skepticism for extraordinary claims, they still take them seriously insofar as is necessary to determine whether they hold any viability. Neil de Grasse Tyson’s careful analysis and critique of Terrence Howard’s paper, he described in the video embedded above, provides just such an illustration. Rejection usually means an idea lacks any reasoned supporting evidence or sense.

Strawman

The strawman argument is a very common one because people seem decreasingly likely to notice it. In short, the strawman argument is one in which a person incorrectly or falsely characterizes the opposition’s views, then argues against their incorrect characterization, not the opposition’s actual position. This is easily identified and defeated, but it demands just a little bit of work. Like the lone genius, this tactic preys upon the audience’s ignorance.

If a person attests that some notion is wrong, the chief red flag is if the accuser does not provide the full argument of the allegedly wrong idea. Short clips of quotes or mere restatements of arguments by the critic are not sufficient because they can easily be manipulated to misrepresent the meaning or context.

At the least, the claimant should provide citations to the fuller quote or writing if brevity is necessary. Understandably, this is harder to do in conversation, such as in an interview, but in those cases it is incumbent upon the recipient of the information to determine whether the speaker is fairly representing the opposing position.

Be especially wary of the use of “-isms” by a critic. When a person is making a critique and adopts terms like “socialism” or “atheism,” for example, one should be immediately skeptical. These types of terms have for so long been abused that they all but lack any descriptive value. Oftentimes, the arguer actually uses tenets of the philosophy to argue against that very same philosophy! In other cases, the idea argued against lacks specificity such that a narrow argument against it makes little sense.

G.D.H. Cole explained it well in History of Socialist Thought:

The impossibility of defining Socialism has often been emphasized, and sometimes regarded as reproach. But neither in Politics nor in Morals is any important idea or system ever capable of being exactly defined. Who can satisfactorily define democracy, or liberty, or virtue, or happiness, or the State, or, for that matter, individualism any more than Socialism?

One way that people try to hammer home their critiques while arguing against the philosophies represented by -isms is to point to what they proclaim are destructive examples. Returning to socialism again, critics will say things like “look at the USSR!” (or wherever). Nathan J. Robinson illustrated why these types of examples only work if the recipient of the argument knows little about the subject:

Socialism means worker control, and there was not even the barest effort to institute worker control in the Soviet Union. The harshest critics of the Soviet government were socialists themselves, and it’s worth reading Bertrand Russell’s book on Bolshevism and the travelogues of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman to understand why we can only call the country “socialist” if the word is drained of all substantive meaning.

While you need not summarily dismiss arguments employing -isms, you should pay close attention to any instance of their invocation. In modern politics especially, the chances that a strawman argument is on the way is very near one hundred percent.

Likewise, when a critic is speaking against someone else’s argument, your hackles should rise. If you cannot ascertain the fundamentals of the thing being criticized—the substance of what a person said or wrote—then it is not only safe, but probably necessary to reject the criticism of it.

Echo chambers, epistemic bubbles, and "Knowingness"

Brian Klaas once wrote:

In the past, we needed to worry about uninformed voters, those who didn’t know much about politics. These days, we need to worry about the much more dangerous misinformed voters who are often wrong, [yet] never uncertain…

Knowingness is a term coined by… the philosopher Jonathan Lear. It’s defined by a relationship to knowledge in which we always believe that we already know the answer—even before the question is asked. It’s a lack of intellectual curiosity, in which the purpose of knowledge is to reaffirm prior beliefs rather than to be a journey of discovery and awe.

Lear’s framing of Knowingness can be partly explained by the Dunning-Krueger effect:

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area. This tends to occur because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills.

Jonathan Lear; Source: University of Chicago

A study in 2018 showed that partisanship—the adherence to a political party or philosophy—exacerbates this kind of cognitive bias. In particular, it found that people with the lowest levels of political knowledge tend to exhibit the strongest inclination to believe false assertions, especially when bolstered by “party cues,” or suggestive influences by their chosen political party.

The study also noted that the accuracy of self-assessment lacks most in those with strong partisan ties coupled with elementary to modest political knowledge. In other words, people who know just a little about politics showed the least ability to evaluate the accuracy of their understanding of political issues, followed closely by those possessing practically no amount of political knowledge. Both groups, however, exhibited the strongest opinions on specific political subjects.

This leads to Knowingness in voters who hold their political views with certitude no matter the absurdity of their foundations. The concept is intensified by what are referred to as epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. C. Thi Nguyen offered among the most expansive definitions of these terms, here.

In short, an epistemic bubble is a “social [cognitive] structure in which some relevant voices have been excluded through omission.” An echo chamber is more nefarious because it is the same concept but includes the active discrediting of opposing voices. On the latter, the discrediting is not built on any intellectual argumentation, rather on attacks against the supposed malevolence of those proffering the oppositional arguments. It is an attack on the outsider simply for being an outsider.

A relatable example of this is in the joining of a social media group such as the deceptively named “National Vaccine Information Center.” This group (and millions like it) comprises an echo chamber in which only the prevailing ideology is presented. In instances where counter-views appear, this is typically allowed only to denigrate their proponents, not to address the substance of the arguments.

Perhaps worse than this is the tendency of people to “friend” those with politically similar views. Pre-social media social circles almost always consisted of people we knew personally—typically family, friends, coworkers, or neighbors. Under that construction, many maintained the same views—whether misinformed or not—but the communicability of those views outside of the immediate circle was significantly limited. People could not easily influence others because it typically required physically encountering those people.

Social media acquaintances, however, are far different. While some will still include people close to you, many others may be those whom you have never met or do not really know. Moreover, the sizes of such circles can be far greater. A single malicious or erroneous post has the capacity to reach thousands or even millions of people.

It will usually be reshared or reposted only by those who agree with it, thereby exacerbating the epistemic bubble and ultimately creating a full-blown echo chamber. Indeed, most reading this likely have close friends or relatives with whom their relationship has been strained by existing within ideologically different chambers. Epistemic bubbles and echo chambers are not limited to politics. They are also prevalent among conspiracy theorists.

Unfortunately, only individuals themselves can defeat this problem. You must willfully leave your intellectually and ideologically confined spaces. The pathways articulated throughout this article are a powerful way to do so.

Ridiculous comparisons and feelings

Some people use ridiculous comparisons to justify equally ridiculous assertions. Andrew Tate, a widely recognized YouTuber known for conspiracy theories (and alleged crimes, as he is facing numerous charges of rape and human trafficking in Romania), often engages in this misguided effort to refute scientific principles. In this clip (starting at around 8:20), he pronounces that he will disprove the notion that sea levels rise from melting ice caps:

There's ice in my water right now. I'm going to leave the water unattended until the ice melts. Will the water overflow out of the cup? No.

He later says he knows this because he has “just been around.”

Andrew Tate is in the black shirt (Credit: Vadim Ghirda/AP)

Candace Owens, also featured in the video hyperlinked above, explains how she comes to believe this and other incorrect or misleading claims:

Honestly that is so relatable to me. I can't even explain it. I just know things because I've been around, because there are so many scenarios that I find myself in where I'm unable to articulate the point. I'm unable to articulate the natural reaction that I have when somebody tries to sell me garbage.

Owen’s exposition precisely illustrates why it is foolish to dismiss scientific or logical reasoning based on feelings. Assuming one’s superior knowledge based on nebulous ideas such as having “been around” is a sign of the Dunning-Kreuger effect. It presupposes that one’s intuition is keener than centuries’ worth of careful analysis or basic logic and shuts the door to any further learning.

This leads her to proclaiming further absurdities, such as:

Andrew [Tate] claims that the establishment is trying to keep you in The Matrix, “the data” is from The Matrix and you are the Matrix and the Matrix is full alive.

She then repeats a popular claim proffered by people with poor or no understanding of scientific or mathematical concepts—that science is the “new god.”

The Science “God”

I've realized that I've been thinking deeply about this, this Pagan cult that we exist in. It is backed by a false science deity. That is what it is. It is the science… oh this is this… is the new God and it is incredible to see the ways in which people worship this deity.

Owens’ statement reflects one method by which people try to denigrate scientific findings they don’t like. This is a version of the strawman argument. In one of my other pieces, I discuss this in detail, but it can be summarized as follows:

To avoid the obvious pitfalls with conflating faith and scientific pursuit, it is necessary for them to invoke rhetorical strawmen. This is a common tactic used in political debate: take a complex issue, distill it into a hopelessly abstract characterization, apply an artificial meaning to the terms used to describe it, then dismantle the fabrication as if doing so thoroughly debunks all of the requisite — but unacknowledged — complexity…

Ascribing the notion of faith to science does precisely this. It asserts, basically, that scientists share the same blind belief in the ‘rightness’ of their findings as religionists do in their version of faith. What it necessarily ignores is that the so-called belief of scientists can be established and confirmed by a wholly independent other by following the first scientist’s own methodologies. Any number of scientists can analyze identical datasets, employ the same processes for testing them, and thereby consistently reach the same conclusions.

Comparisons of science to religion or rejections of scientific principles based on feelings are mere emotional responses to aspects of reality that the people who do this do not like. Regardless, this does not in any way obviate the reality. Even if one is a vociferous opponent of the Law of Gravity, no matter the rambunctiousness of their criticisms, they will still plummet to the earth should they step off a ledge.

Such comparisons are destructive because they allow the person to abandon any effort to think or learn and thereby pursue real solutions to problems. We may not want the world to continue warming, for instance, but to pretend that it is not because we allege that scientists comprise a cult will in no way curtail that warming.

The easiest way to avoid falling into this trap is to ignore the person making a claim and objectively review the content of the claim itself. While a claimant’s background carries some weight in certain circumstances, this ultimately does not change the validity (or lack thereof) of what they are proposing (though it may increase our initial skepticism). Indeed, the ideas of one of the greatest mathematicians that ever lived—Srinivasa Ramanujan—would never have come to light if they were judged by the background of the mathematician himself (he was a poor, uneducated young man from rural India).

Relatedly, you can avoid sounding like Candace Owens or Andrew Tate by foregoing emotional responses to ideas. If an idea makes you upset, take a moment and consider what about it angers you. Oftentimes, you will find that your emotional response is unwarranted or irrelevant. Self-reflection can also help you decide whether it is a subject for which you wish to spend more time studying. Forming an opinion without going further, though, is not productive for you or anyone else.

Conclusion

By now you can probably see an underlying theorem tucked into this essay. Critical to preventing you from becoming the victim of manipulation is avoiding succumbing to emotional inclinations. This requires starting from the position that the world is extraordinarily complex and what’s real within it is entirely unaffected by how you feel about it.

Emotions do not lack value, but they serve better as a motivational tool, not an evaluative one. Put differently, the benefit of your emotions is in how you use them to incite you to work to resolve problems. But this is a step that is necessarily secondary to properly identifying the problems. When a person makes a claim of some sort or another, a way to avoid emotional and irrational responses is to ask yourself what the speaker’s agenda is, what are they actually arguing, and does it have any relevance or credibility.

In politics, this is challenging because almost all politicians are self-serving, trying to achieve sufficient popularity to maintain or acquire public office. They are equally as inclined to lie as they are to tell the truth. Nevertheless, what they say can be impartially evaluated if you shed partisan loyalty and simply home in on what they do.

If you do not know the voting record of a legislator, for instance, how can you possibly know whether a politician has or will represent at least some of your interests? Why then would what they say carry any weight whatsoever? These are not friends of yours who actually care about you, the individual.

It becomes a little easier when political discussions address scientific or mathematical concepts. Scary statistics or rosy economic proclamations carry limited value if you do not know the objective context (not necessarily the one offered by the person relaying the information), but these are eminently findable. In the 21st century, nearly everything is documented. The trick is learning where to look.

A smart strategy is to give deference to sources where lying or misleading carries the greatest consequences. In 2020, for example, much was said about a supposedly “stolen” election in the public sphere in the US. These claims broke down completely in courts, however, because there a liar can be punished by fines or imprisonment.

The same goes for assertions about science. Contrived scientific findings always fall apart (if not immediately, then before long) if published in scientific journals because others with expertise will objectively evaluate such claims. Being caught propagating lies or contrived scientific results almost always destroys careers (and in a few cases, led to criminal charges). Thus in both courts and journals, the information leans strongly toward reliable. When examining sources, it is important to make these kinds of considerations.

My advice to you based on how I examine information and make decisions is this:

I use social and mainstream media as a means to learn about what is being discussed. Here I am not referring to specific content or the veracity of it; rather, what are the topics that people seem interested in at any given time. From there, I decide which issues matter to me. These might include real-world concerns, such as policy proposals or economic decisions. But they can also include matters of intellectual curiosity (many that form these essays you read here, for instance).

Once I decide what to examine further, I explore what the people who spend their days studying this stuff—the experts—have to say about it. Unlike people who just say things on political stages or in TikTok videos, experts typically provide detailed descriptions of their theses and the methodologies for how they arrived at their results. Upon reviewing many of them, only then do I begin to form an opinion.

If I cannot discern how something works or affects me, I am left with two choices. One choice (the usual for me) is to work to learn more. While I do not always have time for this, the primary factor in moving forward is deciding how important this is to my life or present concerns.

As an example, immigration is very important to me because I know many people who have come to the US from other countries in pursuit of a better life. Therefore, I have spent a lot of time studying how it works here and what politicians have to say and have done about it.

The other option is to let go of a specific subject, or at least maintain a relatively tepid opinion on it. To illustrate this, I admit to not knowing enough about how transgenderism works, how common it is, or how it should be handled in certain contexts. As a result, my opinion is limited to that we should not leap to mistreating people over it. What I have observed, however, is that most commentators who hold visceral views on it seem to know even less than I.

All of this is to say that your own interests are not served by political dogmatism, partisan loyalty, or emotionally uncritical acceptance or rejection. The world is full of problems, some that will precipitously worsen. Solving them will not happen by clinging to fantasies driven solely by what you want to believe. The human species has great potential that is being derailed by a small lot of people whose agenda is to manipulate you into believing bullshit that only serves to further their interests, not yours. Don’t give them what they want at your (and society’s) expense.

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