I just finished listening to the Trojan Horse Affair podcast, and . . . ok, you might have heard about it already, it’s the story of a ridiculous hoax leading to a horrible miscarriage of justice . . . I agree with Brian Reed, the co-host of the show, when he says this near the end of the final episode:
Rarely is there one big revelation that undoes years of misinformation and untruth. Most decent journalism is an exercise in incremental understanding. The Trojan Horse letter though, even with my [Reed’s] tempered expectations, I was surprised by how willing people have been to let it stand unchallenged. People are depressingly unbothered that this harmful myth about Muslims persists.
This reminds me of something we’ve discussed before, that an important aspect of being a scientist is the capacity for being upset. We learn so much through the recognition and resolution of anomalies.
Like Reed, I’m upset by people not getting upset by clear anomalies. This annoyed me when New York Times columnist David Brooks promoted anti-Jewish propaganda and nobody seemed to care. (I wasn’t saying Brooks should be fired or fined or anything like that, just that the newspaper should run a goddam correction notice.) And it annoys me when the British national and local government promotes anti-Muslim propaganda and nobody in charge seems to care. I guess I can also say that I’m also bothered when Fox News pushes lies, but that’s a little different because they’re just in the propaganda business. We get worked up in a different way about Brooks and the U.K. government because it doesn’t seem like their original goal is to lie; rather, they act as a sort of flypaper, attracting stories that fit their preconceptions and then sticking with them even after they’ve been refuted.
Anyway, to return to the title of this post: in addition to being bothered by lies, I’m bothered by how unbothered people are about them.
I have ever felt that there is merely one great cultural foundation of such upset: that not private-regarding speech (or writing) is not fiction [never mind the letter]. Frankly, science comes on top as it overtly toys with abstract stuffs. This is not a complaint – poetry is fundamental.
Andrew –
Thanks for the heads up. I’m surprised that you didn’t mention the links s to the post downstairs.
Only part way through the first episode, but so far I can’t stop being concerned about how the woke are canceling people.
“Woke” and “cancel culture” aren’t real. They are, like so many other fakes in our political discourse, excuses for reactionaries to feel morally superior for being terrible, awful, horrible people.
Just so you know, I was being ironic (although I don’t quite share the view that they’re completely fake).
Poe’s law rears its ugly head once again.
Apologies to Joshua, recent years have severely damaged my composure.
Ha. Not a problem. These last few years of the anti-woke police around every social media corner is enough to make anyone a bit jumpy.
I’m generally pro-woke, and I’m totally pro-cancelling people who are deserving of cancellation. Also pro-shaming when someone has done something that truly is shame-worthy.
That said, I think “woke” and “cancel culture” are indeed real and that they can be damaging.
this is the first i heard about the case, but here’s another take on it:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/20/the-trojan-horse-affair-how-serial-podcast-got-it-so-wrong
it does seem that everyone agrees the letter was a forgery, but debate remains over what the implications of that are.
Your write: “… in addition to being bothered by lies, I’m bothered by how unbothered people are about them.”
As a person on the autistic spectrum, I’ve spent my whole life with the challenge of distinguishing which false statements may be legitimately treated as “lies”. There’s also the related challenge of determining which statements are not especially likely to be true, whether or not they can legitimately be complained about as “lies”. (Legitimacy is, of course, in the eyes of people not on the autistic spectrum, particularly those with power over me.)
My heuristics for identifying these cases would doubtless seem extremely cynical, except perhaps to others on the autistic spectrum.
I don’t like it. But I try hard not to waste emotional energy being bothered by it. I have to live in a world full of normal people, who routinely make all kinds of false claims, and sometimes even believe them.
Meanwhile, I wish I could emigrate to Vulcan.
You’d be welcome to join me there. Perhaps we could even do some decent science, or honest politics.
Dino:
All I can say is that non-autistic people are bothered by lies too, as you can see by the way that they will deny lying. For example, in the Trojan Horse story, you don’t hear anyone saying, “Yeah, I knew that letter was a hoax but I didn’t care because it advanced my political interests.” So it’s not that non-autistic people think lying is ok, exactly.
You write: ” So it’s not that non-autistic people think lying is ok, exactly.”
The cynic in me says they tend to double down; first they knowingly state a falsehood, and then they insist that it wasn’t a lie. But observing this behaviour closely, they often appear to me to believe their own claims. Often it’s a failure of logic. E.g. “lying is something bad people do. I am a good person. Therefore I am not a liar, and that statement was not a lie”. Sometimes they have explanations for what it was instead, that admit that the statement was false. Sometimes they don’t.
Note however that I’m not saying that autistics don’t do this. I very carefully learned how to present myself in a resume, which requires a level of exaggeration that makes most statements not literally true. I know what answers are acceptable when someone asks “how this dress looks on them” and similar. Eventually some of these things became so natural, you’d think I’d absorbed them unconsciously, as neurotypicals can – and no longer notice I’m (ahem) speaking a foreign language.
The place where lying really bugs me, is in science. I’m pretty sure (some?) neurotypicals can learn to be just as rigorous about truth as comes naturally to (some?) autistics, and the scientific method is one result of doing this. But many of the conditions for scientific career success incentivize borderline behaviours, and resorting to outright fabrication often works even better, for some individuals, for relatively long periods.
In politics, the more I learn, the more convinced I am that the lies we see and notice are only the tip of a giant iceberg of falsehoods. Worse, many of those falsehoods are the more or less direct result of the inadequacy of the human though process – we have to generalize to function, but then we tend to treat the generalizations as true of all examples. (e.g. I’ve met proportionately more lying neurotypicals, and painfully honest autistics. Therefore NTs are liars, and autistics are honest (sic). Therefore this person who is autistic must be telling the truth in this instance (sic), and that person who is lying must be neurotypical (sic). And by the way, we need some policy to protect society from neurotypicals and their habitual lying (eek!))
Investigating issues like this requires a team of people who are
1. experienced, level-headed, and dispassionate,
2. can manage complex investigations that usually involve in thousands of pages of written documents,
3. have legal powers to obtain answers, either from the relevant documents or questioning suspects and witnesses who have an obligation to tell the truth.
This is a highly specialized area of expertise, rarely ever found outside the (criminal) justice system. Of course the latter is only invoked in case there is a suspicion of a crime.
Consequently, such matters should be turned over to the relevant authorities (the police, the public prosecutor, or whatever it is called in the local jurisdiction) immediately. They can either conclude that there is no crime and leave it at that, or investigate and accuse people, who then get a lawyer and a fair hearing.
Trying to replicate this mechanism outside the criminal justice system without the relevant institutions is just bound to fail. It is quite surprising how many people went along with this though, which lead to the various “reports”.