A few years ago I wrote a post, Junk Science Then and Now discussing the movement of junk science from the periphery of elite culture to the core:
The junk science (by which I mean work that has some of the forms of scientific research but is missing key elements such as valid and reliable measurements, transparency, and openness to criticism) of the mid-twentieth century came from cranks and outsiders, often self-educated people with no academic positions, and even those who were in academia were peripheral figures, for example, the ESP researcher J. B. Rhine at Duke University, who according to Wikipedia was trained as a botanist and was not a central figure in the psychology profession. Immanuel “Worlds in Collision” Velikovsky had lots of scientist friends, but he was an outsider to the scientific community. And those guys from the 1970s who wrote books about ancient astronauts and the Bermuda triangle, I don’t think they even claimed to have any scientific backing. Yes, there were some missteps within academic science from N-rays to cold fusion, but these were minor storms that blew up and went away.
Nowadays, though, the pseudoscientists are well ensconced in the academy, they play power games in the field of psychology, and they get to publish in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (air rage, himmicanes, ages ending in 9, etc etc) whenever they want. The call is coming from inside the house, as it were. Many of them are still considered by the news media to be the legitimate representatives of the scientific community. Even absolutely ridiculous ideas like the $100,000 citations. There’s also the related phenomenon of . . . not “junk science” exactly, but bad science: scientific errors that then persist because the scientific community refuses to come to terms with corrections. An example is the contagion-of-obesity story.
When discussing this, I wrote that the above-described shift represents a sort of gentrification of scientific error, mirroring the professionalism that has come into so many other aspects of our intellectual life. Instead of some wacky guy somewhere claiming to have developed a perpetual motion machine or whatever, you’ve got a Stanford professor promoting junk science on cold showers.
I thought about all this recently when reading a post by political journalist Matthew Yglesias on what he calls “the crank realignment”:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s transition from semi-prominent Democrat to third party spoiler to Donald Trump endorser is emblematic of a broader, decade-long “crank realignment” in American politics.
Trump himself, of course, used to be a Democrat. He switched parties in a blaze of birther conspiracy theories, and only then came to embrace conservative views on topics like gun control and abortion. And RFK Jr. was into election fraud conspiracy theories long before January 6, but his version was about George W. Bush stealing the 2004 election in Ohio. That wasn’t a mainstream Democratic Party view (there’s a reason there was no Kerry-led insurrection), but it was mainstream enough to be published in Rolling Stone and for Kennedy to continue to be a player in progressive politics.
Twenty years later, that’s no longer the case. Democrats are much more buttoned-up, and the GOP is much more accepting of cranks and know-nothings like Kennedy.
The partisan shifts of both Trump and RFK Jr. are part of a long term cycle in which educated professionals have gravitated toward the Democratic Party coalition and a generic suspicion of institutions and the people who run them has come to be associated with conservative politics.
I think Yglesias is on to something here. I agree with him that from a logical point of view, there’s no reason why conspiracy theories should be concentrated on the right half of the political spectrum. Indeed, from a logical perspective you might expect conspiracy theories to be more popular on the left, as this would be consistent with a general leftist anti-powerful-people, anti-big-business take.
One thing I’ve noticed in the past is that commentators have been tied to the idea of anti-science leftists even when the data don’t bear that out. Here’s an example from a couple years ago, where political scientist Chris Blattman made the offhanded remark that opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) was “mostly left,” even though actually opposition was about the same on the left and right. It’s a convenient story to pair anti-vaccine attitudes on the right to anti-GMO attitudes on the left and ask why can’t we all get along, but that’s not what public opinion happens to look like. I agree with Yglesias that this is kinda too bad, as it makes it harder to have a bipartisan push against anti-science.
It’s still hard for me to put all this together in my head. One challenge is that I have the impression that most of the prominent purveyors of junk science and bad science in academia are on the left, or the center-left. OK, not Dr. Oz, and maybe not that cold-shower dude at Stanford. And not those covid-minimizers. Or the climate-change denialists being promoted by Freakonomics. But the mainstream NPR/Ted/PNAS world . . . they’re mostly on the left, right? We do hear about right-wing people in science, but they get some attention because they are exceptions.
So the professionalization of bullshit—as exemplified by Gladwell’s prominence at the New Yorker, the UFO’s-as-space-aliens theories promoted by elite journalists, the Association for Psychological Science promotion of superstition, and various wacky stuff coming out of Harvard, Stanford, etc.—runs counter to the movement of conspiracy theorizing from the political fringes to the core of the political right.
I don’t know where this will all lead. It seems kind of unstable.
Nothing really new about any of this. There is a long tradition in America of cranks and con artists. The great political scientist and historian, Richard Hofstadter (long time Columbia U faculty member who died way to young), wrote about this in several books and essays. Good place to start is “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” and “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” All fevers break eventually but the capacity for new ones to come in into society remains.
Alan:
I think there is something new here, in that the political conspiracy theories are happening in the context of the professionalization of bullshit. See the last paragraph of the above post.
” there’s no reason why conspiracy theories should be concentrated on the right half of the political spectrum”
I wouldn’t describe RFJ jr and Trump’s shift as a move to the right. It’s more of a shift to populism and the co-opting of the Republican party as a vehicle for that. Hence the phenomenon of life-long republicans becoming never trumpers and minority life-long democrats (often former Bernie supporters) voting for Trump.
But the conspiracy theories concentrating on the Republican side is easy to explain.
Take the “Biden doesn’t have dementia coverup” for example. A significant chunk of the American population can rattle off, at a moments notice, two dozen similar examples where the media and/or academia were adamant that some XYZ was true and it turned out to be false. Often deliberately so.
These falsehoods were advocated by institutions that are ~ 98% Democrat. Substituting one bad source for another bad source may not be a good idea, but their distrust of such institutions didn’t come out of nowhere.
“Many of [the pseudoscientists] are still considered by the news media to be the legitimate representatives of the scientific community.”
In breaking news, NBC launched the second season of “The Irrational” yesterday, based upon the work of Dan Ariely.
I can’t even.
One challenge is that I have the impression that most of the prominent purveyors of junk science and bad science in academia are on the left, or the center-left. OK, not Dr. Oz, and maybe not that cold-shower dude at Stanford.
Base rate bias?
Personally, I think there’s a random aspect to this. Broad support for conspiracy ideation is largely on association with cultural cognition, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, etc. We’re all subject to those cognitive biases, on the left, on the right, and in the middle. I don’t think the current knlabwmxd has anything to do with anything intrinsic to the “left” or the “right” per se.
But I do think that the conspiracy ideation can have a dose-effect from the degree of ideological orientation. As strong commitment to “right” leaning ideology has become more pervasive, more people with that strong commitment are vulnerable to conspiracy ideation.
I remember seeing data that showed a breakdown of “skeptical” views on climate change. “Skepticism” about climate change was directionally associated with “conservative” ideology. Tea Parties were more more likely to be confident in their belief that there’s no risk to aco2 emissions as well as in their belief that they didn’t need more information to assess the issue (even though in surveys they displayed more ignorance on the issues). Moderate “conservatives” were relatively more concerned about the risks and less confident in their handle in the science, respectively. And so on.
Yikes – “knlabwmxd” was supposed to be something like “balance”
And it is something like balance…. in an unbalanced sort of way.
Joshua:
Yes, I think it’s the base rate here. Most of academic scientists are left or center-left; academic science has been invaded by crap (what I call above “the professionalization of bullshit”), so no surprise that most of the crap science is done by people on the left or center-left.
I was nodding my head in agreement with Andrew until he once again slammed Malcolm Gladwell. I, perhaps naively, have found, maybe out of ignorance, some of Gladwell’s videos engrossing, So, I asked ChatGPT, “why do people such as Andrew Gelman criticize Malcolm Gladwell?”
It replied, Andrew Gelman “has criticized Malcolm Gladwell primarily for how he handles evidence and statistical reasoning in his books and essays. Gladwell is a popular writer who excels at storytelling and synthesizing ideas, but his approach often prioritizes compelling narratives over rigorous evidence.”
ChatGPT ends with, “that writers like Gladwell can inadvertently mislead the public by simplifying complex issues, which can perpetuate misunderstandings or overly deterministic narratives.”
“Despite these criticisms, Gladwell has also been praised for bringing social science and complex ideas to a wider audience. The tension lies in balancing accessibility with accuracy, a challenge for any writer in this genre.”
All in all, the ChatGPT assessment of the situation seems reasonable to me, but I wonder how others in addition to Andrew feel about it. So, I asked ChatGPT “are there criticisms of Gladwell by statisticians other than Andrew Gelman?” It names 6 others, some of whom are very familiar to readers of this blog. I next asked
“Who are the defenders of Gladwell and his ideas?” As you might imagine, this kind of interrogation can go on for quite a while, especially on a cold day in January.
Cool story bro. Maybe you can tell it to ChatGPT and ask what it thinks of that too.
In fact, right after ChatGPT delivers something such as a poem or a commentary, I often ask it to criticize its own creation. According to a friend who is a retired college professor of English, the critique delivered is very much in line with his own feedback to student submissions. There is, of course, a natural temptation to ask ChatGPT for a critique of its critique and so on to sort of engender a continual back and forth of some length but I resisted that.
However, because I do encourage people to have the courage of my convictions, I hope others try it when it comes to more sensitive topics which can land one in trouble. For example, annexing Greenland or renaming the Gulf of Mexico.
People’s political opinions are far too complicated to be reduced to a single axis. I see a problem of assumed symmetry: The ‘left’ takes position A, therefore the ‘right’ takes position not-A. This is a false conclusion; they are not opposites and there is no symmetry. Just because the cranks on the left want A does not mean that the cranks on the right want not-A. Unfortunately, the left-right dichotomy encourages the false assumption of symmetry.
Look at it more like the competing explanations of incompetence vs malice.
People do not want to believe the secret service could fail to put someone at a prime sniper location just because the roof was sloped, it was more than X feet from the stage, and etc. Instead they come up with conspiracy theories.
Same as they do not want to believe that if you peel back the jargon, etc of medical research you find:
“Group A is different/higher/lower than group B, therefore my theory is correct.”
Which is guaranteed to generate all sorts of misinformation.
Instead they guess doctors are getting paid off, the cancer cure is being hidden, and so on. No, it just really is that void of critical thinking. This is a scarier world to live in:
Fisher, R N (1958). “The Nature of Probability”. Centennial Review. 2: 261–274. https://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/fisher272.pdf
IIRC, Obama had a good quote along those same lines. Something like “the scariest thing you realize as president is that there really is no one in control”. I’m not finding it at the moment though.
If you mean RA Fisher, there is an earlier quote which I take to suggest that it is at least a noble goal to suppose that one day statistical training may be available to more than a tiny elite which would allow a larger number of people to make solid arguments from data without being discredited because they did not use the very latest methods and tools, or because their judgement was said to be at fault, for reasons not completely provided. A modern source is https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Experiments and I take it to criticize the then current state of affairs:
This type of criticism is usually made by what 1 might call a heavyweight authority. Prolonged experience, or at least the long possession of a scientific reputation, is almost a prerequisite for developing successfully this line of attack. Technical details are seldom in evidence. The authoritative assertion “His controls are totally inadequate” must have temporarily discredited many a promising line of work; and such an authoritarian method of judgement must surely continue, human nature being what it is, so long as theoretical notions of the principles of experimental design are lacking – notions just as clear and explicit as we are accustomed to apply to technical details.
When threads collide…
You could have featured Robin Hanson in this post as well (frozen heads, alien invaders). He’s more than just a rape apologist.
He never made any apology for rape. His argument was entirely about something else also being bad and requiring policy intervention.
My recollection is that he assigns a low probability to any UFO sightings actually being extraterrestrials (he also assigns a low probability to cryonics working, but high enough for the expected value to be positive). But his wild idea is that we can estimate when we will actually encounter extraterrestrials, with his estimation being a huge number of human generations in the future (assuming we don’t achieve immortality, which he’s become more skeptical of for currently living people).
I also think this is base rates: academics and old media such as NPR/Ted/PNAS definitely align D in the USA today, which is not really the same as left (Obama would have been happy as a parliamentarian in the CDU or Conservative Party of Canada). So an academic quack embraced by old media is likely to align D.
Dr. Oz feels more like a TV figure who happened to have a day job at a medical school than an academic figure but I never watched his show.
Sean:
I’m not sure, but I think Dr. Oz’s trajectory is the opposite of what you say. He started out as a successful surgeon and then moved to becoming a TV doctor, seller of dubious medical supplements, and politician. I don’t think he was ever an “academic figure” in the sense that we usually mean–yes, he had a job at the university, but I don’t think he did research.
Andrew, I think we agree: Dr. Oz seems like a surgeon who happened to teach at a medical school not a research academic like Dan Ariely or Kenneth Rogoff. So he went odd because of the incentives of a TV personality, not the incentives of a hotshot research academic.
Maybe an analogy would be Jordan Peterson, whose position at the University of Toronto gave him *dignitas* but whose life coaching and Jungian analysis are presented as teachings for the public, not as science for other scientists.
This is an interesting post. I think there’s an important difference between the bad, questionable, or fraudulent science that you point to (his NPR/Ted/PNAS group), growing out of perverse (academic) incentives, and conspiracy theorists. Fringe/pseudoscience is yet a distinct category. Shifts in the conspiracy theories getting attention may link to who is in or out of power. Covid scrambled things to an extent. It also provides a good example of leading scientists labeling the most plausible theory a conspiracy.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html
I agree that “classic” pseudoscience (UFOs, creationism, psychokinesis, Velikovskianism, remote viewing, etc.) differs in notable ways from NPR/Ted/PNAS type stuff, and that both differ from conspiracy theorizing. It’s not that they’re not related, and perhaps could be arrayed along axes of quality (akin to Lakatos’ notion of a continuum from good science to bad science to pseudoscience), but they are different enough to have distinct features, not the least of which is the socio-politico-economic situations of their advocates.
Actually not the most plausible hypothesis at all:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-new-york-times-promotes-lab-leak-conspiracy-theories/
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-lab-leak-theory-and-the-complicit-media/
https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile%2Fkgandersen.bsky.social%2Fpost%2F3ku7aov4pvd23&viewtype=unroll
The problem is that “crankism” depends less on who’s talking than on what they’re talking about. When, for example, Adam Frank, astrophycisist and former NPR 13.7 blogger, talks about astrophysics, I have confidence in his statements; when he talked about peak oil, as he once did often, IMO he was a crank.
Which brings up another interesting point: whether one is a “crank” or not depends much more on how many people align with or back them than on what they think or believe. In his statements on peak oil, Frank was aligned with many, many academics, and thus among his peers his statements on peak oil were treated as credible. However among many energy industry people, the “peak oil” concept was ridiculous from the very beginning, both times – and there was substantial academic work to back them. Nonetheless, because his peers were aligned with him, Frank was not viewed as a crank.
Despite being lauded as a hero who speaks truth to power, James Hansen is actualy one of the biggest cranks in the recent history of science. Whatever his competence in physics or even earth climatology, he has made patently ridiculous claims. He claims that fossil fuel executives should be jailed for “crimes against humanity” due to CO2 impact on climate. This claim reflects such startling and fundamental ignorance it’s hard to take him seriously on anything. After all, the rise in human life expectancy over the last 150 years is almost entirely due to fossil fuel energy! It would be interesting to know how many human life years have been lived that would not have been lived without fossil fuels. Trillions??? :) Hansen, can you answer? Is that a “crime against humanity”? What kind of person could make that claim in anything but contemptible ignorance? What kind of community lauds such a blatantly ignorant “professional”?
So I think talk of “cranks” coming from the science community is worth about as much as the Population Bomb. The science community doesn’t know a crank from an automatically refilling soup bowl.
Anonymous –
He claims that fossil fuel executives should be jailed for “crimes against humanity” due to CO2 impact on climate.
It should be noted that’s not a scientific claim. It’s an opinion.
After all, the rise in human life expectancy over the last 150 years is almost entirely due to fossil fuel energy!
This is something more akin to a scientific claim, but seems like a gross exaggeration, imo.
Certainly access to energy is a factor in in the development of antibiotics or other factors that have reduced infant mortality, or advances in the treatment of heart disease, or huge improvements in sanitation and public health, etc. But your singular attribution of causality there seems simplistic to the point of actually being wrong.
There is probably something important to say about intention and wonky science in service of ideology vs wonky science being correlated with ideology (because you happen to work in the kinds of institutions that conduct science and some of that science will be wonky).
“there’s no reason why conspiracy theories should be concentrated on the right half of the political spectrum.”
Institutions that are ~98% left leaning keep pulling stunts such as 4 year coverups/gaslighting of Biden’s advance dementia. That would seem to be enough of an explanation.
Here’s how easy it is to become a conspiracy theorist. Suppose you’re a regular person mildly paying attention to the news. The ~98% left wing media constantly advance the idea of “frat boy rape culture” on campus. Rolling Stone does a big expose on it. All the big channels cover an atrocious Duke sports related rape incident.
Meanwhile, you’re hearing from your crazy conspiracy theory loving uncle about how Hollywood and the elites are running sex trafficking rings and whatnot.
Then one day you learn the Rolling Stones article was pure fiction, as was the Duke lacrosse case. Meanwhile you start hearing about Epstein Island, Diddy parties, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, ….
Journalists and academics squandered their credibility. Conspiracy theories thrive in the truth vacuum left behind. And the fact that those institutions are overwhelming left wing, made the problem more pronounced on the right.
Anon:
Your argument does not make to me. Joe Biden was avoiding public appearances (something that was already much discussed in the news media way back in 2020) and Donald Trump was friends with Jeffrey Epstein . . . and therefore there’s a vacuum of trust and people should start believing in vaccine conspiracy theories?? I’m not saying this isn’t happening; I just don’t think it’s as logical as you seem to make it out to be.
There have been conspiracy theories for a long time, also lots of news stories that have been misrepresented by the press and the government and other major institutions, from the Japanese internment in the 1940s through the sexual affairs of presidents Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, etc., interventions in Guatemala and Iran, child sex abuse scandals in many different religious denominations, etc etc etc., and, yeah, it seemed to take a long time but eventually there was a loss of trust in various institutions. I guess what I’m saying is that your explanation is too general. The idea that there are sex scandals in Hollywood, and that naturally leads people on the center-right to start believing outlandish conspiracy theories about vaccines, UFOs, election fraud, etc.–that doesn’t quite make sense, given that scandals and coverups have been happening for a long time. What’s new is the asymmetric politicization.
My goal wasn’t to justify conspiracy theories, but rather to explain why at this time they’re more a phenomenon of the right.
The basic explanation is the institutions which have lost credibility (in some cases wrongly, but often enough justifiably) such as Journalism, Academia, Hollywood, … are nearly 100% left dominated.
In the 60’s the reverse was closer to being true, hence a lot left conspiracy theories. All they had to do was take real events like MK Ultra add in their inherent distrust of the right or right-of-center institutions and extrapolate.
P.s. your dismissal of the effects of the Biden coverup are telling. It may have been a nothing burger to you, but to many Americans it serves as proof of something much more sinister.
That the democrat party wanted to cover this up isn’t much of an issue. It was the wholesale coordinated denial and gaslighting by “respectable” major journalistic entities that drives many on the right to not believe a word they say about anything. Obviously someone on the left doesn’t have as strong of such concerns.
Or put it this way. Say you’re on the right and you’ve caught ‘respectable’ left institutions in a bunch untruths in the past.
Then during covid those same left institutions have a coordinated campaign to ridicule anyone taking Ivermectin, like Joe Rogan, as crazed lunatics taking horse-dewormer pills.
Then you find out Ivermectin is a respected anti-viral drug and Rogan was prescribed it by his doctor.
Later those same left institutions say “we’ve got this new experimental type of vaccine and trust us bro, you should take it, we know better”.
You’re going to see noticeably more on the right not trusting them. Which is the same reaction those on the left had whenever, for example, Kissinger would say “trust us bro, we know better” circa 1970s.
And the less people anchor their beliefs to respectable mainstream institutions the more likely they become to jump on some conspiracy theory bandwagon.
Anon:
I don’t know what you’re talking about when you refer to my purported “dismissal of the effects of the Biden coverup are telling.” Biden’s mental and physical capacities were never a “nothingburger,” nor did I ever say that they were. What I said was, “Joe Biden was avoiding public appearances (something that was already much discussed in the news media way back in 2020).” It was my understanding back in 2020, and also in 2024 before Biden withdrew from the race, that his supporters saw his avoidance of public appearances and, more generally, signs of mental and physical incapacity, were a minus, but that they thought that, on the whole, Trump was worse. Similarly to how many Republican voters thought of Trump’s lawbreaking as a minus, but not enough to convince them to vote for Biden.
There’s also a funny thing for both Biden and Trump that their “senior moments” might not have seemed so bad (for their supporters) as they would otherwise had seemed, given each man’s track record. Biden had been making goofy and inappropriate statements for decades and often seemed clueless, so his behavior in 2020 could be interpreted as just more of the same. For his part, Trump’s been telling easily checkable lies for decades, so when he does that now, it’s easy to see it as more of the same.
Speaking generally, the story here does not seem to be so much left vs. right but rather the way that news is supposed to be new, so you don’t always get much reporting on something that’s already known.
Ivermectin is an antiparasitic medication not an antiviral. In a petri dish it has antiviral properties but at a concentration impossible to dose safely in a human. That Joe Rogan’s doc prescribed it for him doesn’t say much good about his doctor.
Anonymous –
Or put it this way. Say you’re on the right and you’ve caught ‘respectable’ left institutions in a bunch untruths in the
See my comment above. That you break this down to a left vs. right issue is a reflection of your own identity-aggression and identity-defensive cognition (ala cultural cognition), that “motivates” how you do filter these issues to justify conspiracy ideation, and you absolutely are justifying it.
Rogan may have been unfairly attacked for his Ivermectin advocacy. People can figure thst out for themselves (I’d say his influence has prolly resulted in increases in COVID morbidity and MORTALITY). But even if he were treated unfairly, that doesn’t change the vapidness of his conspiracy ideation be it on COVID or ancient advanced alien civilizations or the moon landing or most recently, the “Telepathy Tapes.”
Anonymous,
Joe Biden does not have “advanced dementia.” He has lost a lot of energy and some cognitive function, unsurprisingly, but that’s not the same at all. I have seen “advanced dementia” and he doesn’t have it. If he has dementia at all, it is very mild…so far.
But you’re right that one shouldn’t dismiss every conspiracy theory as being false, because sometimes there are cover-conspiracies.
Jaron Harambam, a sociologist at the University of Amsterdam, studies conspiracy theories. In this linked video, he points out:
* A conspiracy theory is defined as by those in power to label a theory as a conspiracy
* There have been many conspiracy theories that have been proven to be factual
* One primary reason that those who believe a conspiracy theory and are unconvinced by evidence that disproves it is that truth is often defined by the group that one wants to belong to, not simply the evidence itself
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BN-mDoElQY
The last point, maybe, is contradictory. (I can explain, if anyone cares.) Also, the last point is most likely to address the point of this point: the relevancy of conspiracy theories with only one spectrum of politics.
I meant “the point of this post” — not “the point of this point”.