You can’t know what you don’t know. You can’t know what you weren’t told. You can’t know what you didn’t notice.
A lot of people outraged about anti-vaxxers think they’re ignoring facts. But they aren’t. I’ve argued with them, and they have a lot of facts, and a lot of those facts are true. The problem isn’t in their facts, but in how they think about what makes a good argument. Anti-vaxxers are a great example of how not to think about having a good argument—one shared by a lot of people.
Their argument is: “We shouldn’t require that people get vaccines because [this vaccine] is bad because [fact].” And so they know that they’re right because they live in a world in which they are continually “shown” that they are right. They are given lots of facts (which might even be true) and lots of information about what their opponents believe (most of which is straw man). If you don’t drift into the world of anti-vaxxers, you don’t know that.
Just to be clear: I think anti-vaxxers are full of shit. I sincerely believe that anti-vaxxers believe they are truthful. And they also have a lot of facts, many of which are true. But their fullofshitness isn’t about whether they have facts, or whether they are truthful. It’s about their logic. It isn’t about whether they have facts, but about how they reason, and about the informational worlds they choose to inhabit.
Here’s an anti-vaxxer argument I’ve come across more than once. It’s something along the lines of, “If you look at the ingredients for this vaccine, you can see it has this ingredient, and, if you look up that ingredient on the internet, you can see that it’s really dangerous.”
That argument is a series of claims, each of which is factually true. It really does have that ingredient, and you really can look it up, and you really can see that it is harmful. The facts are true, but the logic is dumb.
If we step away from whether people have “facts” to how they’re arguing, then you can see that those claims don’t lead to each other.
Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is a notoriously dangerous chemical. It is responsible for thousands of deaths every year, and it’s in biological and chemical weapons. There’s a list here of its dangers, and they are many. So, if the logic of the argument above is good—this vaccine is dangerous because it has an ingredient that’s dangerous–, then the person making that argument has to support the claim that any medications containing DHMO are dangerous.
If it’s a bad way to argue in regard to DHMO, then it’s a bad way to argue about any of the chemicals in vaccines.
DHMO is water.
It’s a bad way to argue.
When I try to point this out to people, they often say something like, “But water is different. Water is okay—this stuff isn’t.” And they can’t understand that they’re arguing in a circle. They have an unfalsifiable belief. They believe what they believe because they believe it and can find supporting evidence. That’s motivated reasoning.
It doesn’t seem like a bad way to argue because people choose to live in worlds in which we only hear how great our beliefs are and how dumb the criticisms of our beliefs are. We don’t know that we’re getting a straw man. And we don’t know it because the most cunning (and damaging) versions of the straw man are something someone really said but edited, taken out of context, or not representative. So, for instance, a pro-vaccine article might point out that early vaccines were dangerous, and an anti-vaxxer could quote only that part, not making it clear that the comment was about the cowpox vaccine. Or, and I’ve had this argument, they quote someone associated with pharmaceuticals (such as Shkreli) and use that as proof that everyone involved with pharmaceuticals is a greedy villain who doesn’t really care about anyone’s health.
Once again, the claim (everyone involved with pharmaceuticals is a greedy villain who doesn’t really care about anyone’s health) is supported by facts I believe are true (I think most reasonable people would)—Shkreli really is a greedy villain, and he really was associated with pharmaceuticals. The facts are fine, but the logic is bad. If one person associated with pharmaceuticals can be taken to stand for everyone who advocates vaccines, then one person associated with anti-vax can be taken to stand for everyone opposed to vaccines.
And that should be the moment the person realizes it’s a bad way to argue, but they often don’t because their informational world is filled with dumb, hateful, and horrible things that “pro-vaxxers” have said. A person in the anti-vax world thinks it’s fair to take Shkreli to stand for everyone promoting pharmaceuticals because he is so much like all the other examples that slither through the anti-vax informational world. What that person wouldn’t know is that they are only seeing the most awful examples of the out-group, and they rarely (perhaps never) hear about bad behavior of in-group members.
They don’t know that they don’t know enough to have accurate stereotypes about the in- and out-groups. Because we can’t know what we don’t know (but that’s a different post).
Here I just want to point out that these two related problems (thinking we have a “good argument” just because it has true claims, and thinking it’s true because it confirms everything else we choose to hear) aren’t solved by looking for facts, or by asking ourselves if we’re reasoning rationally. And both of those ways of thinking about beliefs suck.
We can ask these questions:
• Am I open to persuasion on this issue, and, if so, what evidence would persuade me?
• If the out-group was right in an important way, or the in-group wrong in an important way, am I relying on sources of information that would tell me?
• Would I consider this an argument a good one if I flipped the identities in it? In other words, if the argument is “This thing [that I already believe is bad] is bad because [other claim]” would I be persuaded if the argument was “This thing [that I believe is good] is bad because [that same kind of claim]”?
That last one is hard for some people, so I’ll give some examples:
Let’s say that I, a fan of Hubert Sumlin, say, “Chester Burnette is a terrible President because he issues a lot of Executive Orders.” Would I be persuaded that “Hubert Sumlin is a terrible President because he issued a lot of executive orders”? If not, then I don’t really believe the logic of the argument I’m making.
If the answer to each of these questions is no, then regardless of how many facts I have, I have bad arguments.
[Edited to include the meme I’d seen elsewhere that I couldn’t find at the time I wrote this.]