What is true? (Part 1)

Between experts and epistemic bubbles: navigating a broken information landscape

Photo by Niklas Hamann on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, an episode of the Joe Rogan podcast featuring British writer Douglas Murray and American comedian Dave Smith sparked an online debate that is still ongoing. The debate, which continues to stir emotions, essentially revolves around whether podcasters should invite guests to discuss certain topics, even if they lack the academic credentials that would typically qualify them as experts in a given field. Alternatively, should podcasters adhere to higher standards and avoid giving a platform to individuals without such credentials? 

Clearly, the debate reflects the deep knowledge crisis we are experiencing.

Douglas Murray revealed his elitist worldview. He believes that public conversations should be restricted mainly to members of the academic elite who have the right credentials, superior knowledge (according to him), and can therefore be trusted. He claims that Rogan has opened the door to many dubious individuals who have been sharing dangerous, counter-historical ideas. Murray was particularly concerned about 'revisionist' ideas about World War II that, according to him, two guests had expressed on Rogan's podcast. He argued that Rogan should invite real experts who could easily debunk people spreading 'fringe' ideas.

Rogan and Smith did not agree with this perspective at all, focusing instead on the many instances in which the expert elite has been wrong and cannot therefore be trusted. Paradoxically, Murray agreed with many of these examples but argued that just because some experts were wrong about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, for example, does not mean that the entire expert class is discredited.

I find myself siding much more with Rogan and Smith. Our elite institutions have failed us utterly and continue to do so daily. During the pandemic, for example, podcasts offered a more accurate portrayal of reality than the scientific establishment in the mainstream media did.

However, this doesn't mean that I agree with everything that Rogan's guests say, nor does it mean that I underestimate the power of his podcast to spread misinformation to an audience of over 10 million people who trust what they hear. I do believe that some of the discussions on podcasts and social media hinder our understanding of the world rather than helping us to grasp it better. The internet is the Wild West of ideas.

Podcasts cannot replace functioning academic institutions and a functioning academic elite, both of which are currently lacking.

Mary Harrington argues that podcasts are taking us back to an oral culture — 'a polity of spoken rather than written debate' — which, according to studies, is making our societies less intelligent.

Those who distrust the institutions that traditionally produce our knowledge often find themselves drawn into epistemic bubbles that seem to offer a better understanding of the world. However, these bubbles only reinforce existing viewpoints.

In this two-part essay, I reflect on the knowledge crisis, my own journey towards distrusting experts and the mainstream media, and my efforts to understand the world in this confusing information landscape without becoming trapped in new epistemic bubbles.

Science and journalism are both failing us

Murray is wrong to think that our universities and the legacy media have failed us a few times but can be trusted more generally. Anyone paying close attention will know that these institutions are all too often pursuing something other than the truth and cannot be trusted. This doesn’t mean that everything these institutions publish is necessarily misleading. However, it is clear that, when these other objectives conflict with the truth, the truth loses out.

I might not have the complete picture of the other objectives that often get in the way of truth, but as Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying often point out on their podcast, many of these distorting factors are not new, even if they have been made worse in recent years.

Universities have long received large amounts of funding from large corporations, and increasingly so. This inevitably means that much of their research is pursued in the interest of business rather than the common good. Consequently, for example, medical research often does not focus on the most effective ways to keep people healthy, but rather on those that increase the long-term profits of pharmaceutical companies.

The peer review process tends to protect the interests of established scientists in a field of research. Papers from outsiders that challenge the academic consensus are often rejected not on the basis of academic rigour, but to protect the vested interests of an entire field. As Eric Weinstein once said, "peer review is peer injunction. It is the ability for your peers to keep the world from learning about your work."

This was bad enough, but over the last 15 years or so, things have got much worse. Now, all our elite institutions have largely abandoned the pursuit of truth in favour of predetermined moral narratives. I believe these dynamics are strongly related to the fact that journalists and academics now spend much of their time on social media (as I argued here a while ago), but they are also partly due to online subscription models and paywalls, with most online media now being captured by their audience and their reporting becoming much more biased.

During the pandemic, lockdowns, masks and vaccines were deemed the morally correct way to deal with the virus, and any disagreement with these policies was dismissed as immoral. All elite institutions became propaganda instruments and suppressed all facts and arguments that contradicted the predetermined moral narrative and false consensus on Covid policies (as I explained in more detail here).

Around a year ago, climate scientist Patrick Brown went public with his experience of how it is very common among climate scientists to cherry-pick data in order to fit the predetermined narrative of scientific journals and get published. In his article, he writes:

It is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society. 

To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.

Similarly, most mainstream media outlets favour presenting the views of climate scientists who issue particularly apocalyptic warnings about climate change, rather than those who offer more sober observations. Any scientific uncertainties surrounding climate models and their predictions are dismissed, as these would presumably interfere with their activist journalism and preconceived narratives.

What is even more shocking is how transgender ideology has infiltrated much of our medical establishment, with disastrous consequences for people's health. According to many scientists, sex is no longer binary, and writing research papers about the feasibility of uterus transplantation in transgender women has apparently become normal.

In recent years, I have seen countless experts talking about the war in Ukraine. Almost none of them mention what happened in Ukraine before 2022. The dominant narrative among our expert class is that Putin invaded Ukraine solely because of his imperial ambitions, which is, of course, why we are now supposed to fear that he might attack many other European countries. However, if these experts were to discuss the events in Ukraine between 2014 and 2022, it would introduce too much nuance to the situation, much of which would contradict the neat narrative that our elites prefer to promote. Important facts are being omitted, and we are being lied to.

I could list many more issues about which we are systematically not being told the truth, and provide hundreds more examples demonstrating that the institutions that are supposed to generate the most objective knowledge possible and help us to understand the world are failing us utterly. The problem with these institutions is systemic, and the experts who make their careers there cannot be trusted to pursue the truth because they are corrupted by the dynamics and incentives that point them away from it.

The value of podcasts and independent media

I started to realise that something was going badly wrong with our mainstream media in early January 2016. On New Year's Eve 2015/16, around 1,200 women were reportedly sexually assaulted by men of North African origin in the square next to Cologne Cathedral. German public broadcasters and other mainstream media outlets did not report on this terrible event for two days, for fear of stoking racism or anti-immigrant sentiment. From then on, I started to approach the mainstream media with much greater scepticism. So, when the Spanish newspaper El País announced that all their journalism would be done through a feminist lens about two years later, I already knew what was going to happen. Promoting the feminist cause became more important than reporting the truth.

In early 2017, I came across a YouTube video featuring a speech by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, which introduced me to the crazy dynamics of American campuses, where ideas such as 'speech is violence' and 'micro-aggressions' had become commonplace, and where the concept of 'cancel culture' and 'safe spaces' had taken hold. In the following years, these ideas spread across Europe.

Around the same time, I started listening to fascinating conversations on Joe Rogan's podcast. The more I realised that the mainstream media was feeding us propaganda, the more my appetite for alternative media grew, as I wanted to hear perspectives that were increasingly being banned by the mainstream media.

When the Covid lockdown and mask regime hit us in March 2020, I was well prepared to see that the mainstream media were actively suppressing any substantial debate about what was going on and what policies were right to confront the pandemic.

Looking back on the pandemic five years later, it is clear to anyone who has conducted a fair evaluation that the experts touted by the media and politicians as trustworthy have, in reality, been largely deceptive. By contrast, alternative experts who might not have the "right" credentials, such as those featured on podcasts like Joe Rogan's and Bret Weinstein's Darkhorse, had often been expelled and branded dangerous by the medical establishment, but have turned out to be more right than wrong. 

Very early on, Bret Weinstein himself used the available evidence to argue that the virus had most likely escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It took the establishment four years to effectively acknowledge that he was right. Similarly, he and others raised concerns early on about the potentially deadly side effects of mRNA vaccines, while also praising the potential of established medicines such as ivermectin to treat Covid-19. Due to his large audience and his ability to influence people not to get vaccinated, he was considered a danger to public health and was permanently excluded from polite society by people on both the right and the left. The strong, and often deadly, side effects of the mRNA vaccines are now widely acknowledged.

In the countless discussions on Rogan, Darkhorse, and many other podcasts during the pandemic, many things were undoubtedly said that turned out to be wrong. Ultimately, however, these conversations were much more informative and productive than the discourse in the mainstream media. The biggest difference was that, unlike the accepted experts, the alternative experts actually tried to find out the truth. To this day, the medical establishment refuses to acknowledge the serious mistakes it has made in needlessly making people's lives miserable for two years or more.

Apart from the lack of any real journalism about how our governments have handled the pandemic, Donald Trump is the other major issue that the European mainstream media has completely failed to report accurately over the past decade. After portraying him as the new Hitler, it is no wonder that 85% of Germans and 96% of Danes wanted Kamala Harris as president last November.

The vast majority of Europeans still do not understand how anyone could support such a despicable person; they must believe that at least half of Americans are either stupid or bigoted.

Having listened to and read the work of independent American journalists for years, I have no difficulty understanding the appeal that Donald Trump has for the American working class. For those who doubt it, I can assure you that most of his voters are neither stupid nor bigoted. In the run-up to the US election, I regularly listened to two excellent independent US journalists and their guests. Mark Halperin is known for inviting people with nuanced views from both sides on his 2Way show, and Emily Jashinsky, whose Undercurrents show is also very refreshing and focused on telling the truth. I would recommend listening to these shows to anyone interested in really understanding what is going on in the US.

New and alternative media organisations, as well as podcasts, may be subject to the same pressures and biases as more established outlets, including audience capture. In my experience, however, independent and heterodox journalists and podcasters who are fully dedicated to seeking the truth are much more common than large, well-established media organisations that are.

Perhaps I could have finished my essay here. It would have had a neat, simple storyline. However, I don't think it's that simple. Our knowledge crisis runs much deeper. I haven’t discussed conspiracies and conspiracy theories yet. I will save these for the second part of the essay.