There are some amongst us who worry about the blind acceptance of authoritative narratives, and then there are others who worry that such people exist. In fact, concerns regarding the existence of scepticism have risen to such levels recently that a crack team has been created to tackle the problem. Well, I say ‘crack team’ but the correct term, according to at least one particular member of this galaxy of talent, should be ‘all-star team’. This is evidenced by a recent tweet from the star concerned, Professor Sander van der Linden:

New paper in @Nature with all-star team! Ridiculous claims are made about how misinfo isn’t a problem, can’t be defined, & how fighting it = censorship. Nonsense. We know the playbook. Here’s why scientists need to stand up for truth & democracy!

So who is in this most recent assemblage of avengers, bravely helping the world to ‘stand up for truth and democracy’? Well, if I were to tell you that van der Linden has teamed up with Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook and Naomi Oreskes, you might just begin to understand the total absence of humility. You will probably also suspect that the article they have penned suffers from a total lack of self-awareness and logic, and of course you would be right.

The title of the article gives little hint as to the troubling logic it pursues: “Misinformation poses a bigger threat to democracy than you might think.” It is only when one takes on board the article’s basic premise for believing such a thing, and then sees the examples offered to illustrate the point, that one becomes aware that a circle is being squared. According to the self-proclaimed team of stars there are indeed irrefutable truths, and the threat to democracy does not lie in the fact that such claims are being made, but that there are people prepared to challenge them. The problem, as seen by the All-Stars, is easily stated. Apparently there are critics who have it all wrong:

Some critics, even in the scholarly community, have claimed that concerns related to the spread of misinformation reflect a type of ‘moral panic’. They think that the threat has been overblown; that classifying information as false is generally problematic because the truth is difficult to determine; and that countermeasures might violate democratic principles because people have a right to believe and express what they want.

What the authors thought needed to be done about such criticism was even easier to state:

This trend must be reversed.

To justify their position, the All-Stars were quick to provide examples that they believe demonstrate how the truth is actually quite often really easy to determine.

The Holocaust did happen. COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives. There was no widespread fraud in the 2020 US presidential election. The evidence for each of these facts has been established beyond reasonable doubt, but false beliefs on each of these topics remain widespread.

Using the assumption that the above are all irrefutable truths, they proceed to say that the “acquiescence in the face of widespread misinformation and dismissal of the prospect that information can ever be confidently classified as true or false are morally troubling choices.” The reality, however, is that the morally troubling choice lies in the concept of the irrefutable truth, particularly when one chooses an eminently challengeable statement as one of your examples. No, I’m not talking about the Holocaust, nor do I wish to embroil myself in American politics. But I will say that claiming vaccine safety and efficacy in the absence of a universally accepted definition of what it even means to have been vaccinated cannot avoid being legitimately challenged. It is simply nonsensical not to do so. That an ‘all-star team’ can fail to consider basic issues such as definitional imprecision, then use claims for vaccine efficacy as a good example of a ‘fact’, just goes to show how much moral trouble one can get into when hubris and ignorance are teamed up. To be fair to them, they are only stating that vaccines saved millions of lives because that is what they’ve heard experts say, but that isn’t how facts are supposed to be established.

However, the situation gets even worse when our celestial panel of experts move on to explain the power of ‘pre-bunking’. Once again, their choice of example proves painfully self-destructive:

To illustrate the former, the US administration led by President Joe Biden pre-empted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justification for invading Ukraine in February 2022. In a public communication, citizens in several countries were forewarned. The administration explained how Putin would seek to make misleading claims about Ukrainian aggression in the Donbas region to rationalize his decision to invade, which might have served to limit the international community’s willingness to believe Putin’s claims when they were subsequently made.

That’s not pre-bunking; that’s called getting your own version of events sorted out in good time. Of course Biden knew what pretext Putin would use, because the West had made sure that he had that pretext. For heaven’s sake, US and NATO troops had been training Ukrainian troops and holding annual wargames, both on Ukrainian soil and in the Black Sea, ever since 1997 – exercises that went by the name Operation Sea Breeze. A variety of scenarios would be played out, including the recapture of territory in the Donbas. Even someone as senile as Biden would have known this — but not, it seems, the BBC or the All-Stars.

It is examples such as the above that bring home just how morally troublesome the concept of the irrefutable truth can be, especially when established through the application of supposed pre-bunking (or as the All-Stars like to put it, ‘logic-based inoculation’). Once more our defenders of truth and democracy go on the attack:

Although some critics think that such interventions aim to “limit public discourse … without consent” and do so “paternalistically” and “stealthily”, this is a misrepresentation of the interventions, which seek merely to educate and empower people to make informed judgements free from manipulation.

Ah yes, let’s talk about paternalism, stealth and manipulation.

You’ve got to admire the sheer chutzpah of a group mainly comprised of behavioural scientists, whose avowed purpose is to explore methods of manipulation, most of which only work when done stealthily, and who like to refer to their approach as libertarian paternalism, to then bristle with righteous indignation at the very suggestion that they are guilty of any of the above. Can there be anything more disingenuous than behavioural scientists who bleat that they ‘seek merely to educate and empower people to make judgements free from manipulation’? But, let’s face it, portraying themselves as a misunderstood force for good suits their purpose, because, after all:

Unfounded criticism that is directed at misinformation researchers provides intellectual cover for disinformers and makes this work even harder.

Actually, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to make a bunch of Pecksniffian, self-regarding, paranoid psychologists’ work even harder. Quite frankly, their work deserves to be hampered. Better still, it would suit me fine if it were to be rendered impossible. Perhaps then we would be saved from their lectures on the importance of evidence when so many of their own conclusions in the past have been arrived at with so little in support. Yes, I’m talking about the Debunking Handbook, in which four of the six members of the All-stars are credited as co-authors (if ‘credit’ is the right term). The first version of the handbook stated quite clearly, ‘Hence the backfire effect is real’, only for the next version to state:

Early evidence was supportive of this idea, but more recently, exhaustive experimental attempts to induce a backfire effect through familiarity alone have come up empty.

So it would appear that they had been able to confirm the reality of an effect even before attempts had been made to replicate the relevant experiments! How is that supposed to work? All I can say is that individuals who could commit such a gaffe certainly wouldn’t be my first choice to join an all-star team. Or, at the very least, you would think that individuals who had to learn the hard way how easily an irrefutable truth can turn to garbage would be more circumspect when it came to dismissing concerns about the dangers of certitude.

But please don’t go away thinking this is just a story of a group of overbearing and self-promoting psychologists who can be safely ignored. Theirs is a narrative that has gained huge traction and lies behind much of the institutionalised vitriol that climate science sceptics have had to deal with for many years now. Or, to put it in the terms preferred by our beleaguered team of heroes:

Therefore academics, intellectuals and editors need to promote evidence-based information and stand firm against false or fraudulent claims, unafraid to call them out as such. We are aware, from first-hand experience, that this can be a frustrating experience — as climate scientists who have been actively countering climate disinformation for decades can confirm.

Yes, you got that right. It is the climate sceptic that has been giving them grief, not the other way round. Besides which, you should understand that we sceptics are all bad actors who have ulterior motives for encouraging dispute:

These actors will welcome academic disputes about the existence of ground truths and the ethical justification of interventions, as they pursue ideologically motivated goals.

That’s just weird. It’s almost as if they think it were a bad thing; because I would have thought any academic would welcome a healthy debate concerning ethics and epistemology. So who on Earth are these behavioural scientists to say what academic debates are, and are not, advisable? Oh but I forget, these are the views of an all-star team. We question them at our peril. Democracy and truth are at stake.