When The Shit Goes Down.

"When the shit goes down you better be ready" rapped Cypress Hill back in 1993 but when the shit, the real undiluted bullshit, started to go down heavier than ever in the last five or six years were we ready?

Evidence suggests we were not. There was just too much of it and there were ways of spreading it, primarily social media platforms, that were more effective at doing so than we could have ever imagined. More powerful too.

It was another Thursday night with Skeptics in the Pub - Online and it proved to be both a very interesting and a worthwhile one. It even had me questioning some of my own behaviours - both in real life, in the sphere of social media, and even in the writing of these blogs. Something I am always keen to improve upon.

Presented more as a chat than a lecture, the evening saw the reliably excellent Michael Marshall of Merseyside Skeptics interview Cognitive Dissonance podcasters (six hundred and counting) Tom Curry and Cecil Cicirello about their new book The Grand Unified Theory of Bullshit. A book based in the theory that all bullshit (be it of the paranormal, supernatural, conspiracy theory, or alternative medicine flavour) ultimately smells the same.

As well as being, despite how wacky or harmless it may appear, equally harmful. People who believe bullshit (and that's everyone to more or less a degree, including you and me) tend to become very emotionally involved in whatever it is they have chosen to believe but to have faith without evidence, in any instance, is destructive, directly or indirectly, to the whole information ecosystem.

Believing in Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, of course, seems a bit silly but it doesn't seem dangerous. But to believe in anything without evidence proves you are susceptible to grifters and bad actors who may use their knowledge of your susceptibility to either sell you shit you don't need or, just one example, raid the Capitol Building in Washington DC during an insurrection.

Where once bullshit believers stayed in their silos and hardly ever met people who shared their crazy beliefs, we now live in a world dominated by algorithms which direct us towards those that think in the same ways as us. They link various groups too. Flat Earthers can meet with QAnon people and share their belief systems and that can only erode trust and, as we've seen in recent years, civility.

The social media platforms were more or less built to create communities with niche interests and that's fine if your niche interest is knitting, Esperanto, ham radio, or the music of Bogshed but it's more problematic when you create an online community of anti-vaxxers, Incels, or holocaust deniers.

With Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter that's likely to get much worse as he allows one of the greatest disseminators of misinformation in history back on the platform as soon as he can. As soon as he can find the big Twitter unblocking tool!

Brakes will resolutely not be applied but the amplification will get louder and the theories, likely, become more ridiculous (though there is hope that as the older generation die off and a generation of digital natives come of age, they'll be less susceptible to lies on the Internet, that they can use the 'sniff test' effectively).

Take, for example, QAnon. It started off as quite a narrow conspiracy theory but its success has been in being open to ever more wild and outlandish claims. 5G masts spread Covid, reptile people, huge underground dens of children being preyed on by paedophiles across the United States. None of those has been considered too ludicrous to stop QAnon growing.

The Adrenachrome theory of blood harvesting posited by QAnon claims that the elite, that vague collection of people they don't like who have a public profile, feed off the adrenaline of babies so have to keep hundreds, thousands, even millions, of babies permanently imprisoned and permanently in fear to survive.

It's patently batshit but when your sole aim is to demonise your opposition the best way to do that is to invent the deepest, darkest, most horrible lie your brain can dredge up. 'Frazzle drip' (nothing to do with the crisps) is what that's called and it comes from a conspiracy theory that says when disgraced former American politician Anthony Weiner was arrested for sex offences the police took his computer and found images of his wife, now ex-wife, Huma Abedin and her boss Hillary Clinton cutting the face off a baby.

While what Wiener did was wrong, and he was punished for it, it's about a million miles from cutting the face off a baby! Yet over 20% of Americans surveyed said they believe it, or something very close to it, to be true.

It doesn't even matter if the person inventing the conspiracy theory is doing so to spoof conspiracy theories or to make some kind of artistic prank about it. On a whim, Peter McIndoe decided to posit the ludicrous idea that 'Birds Aren't Real' and that every bird in America has been replaced by drones operated by the US government to spy on its people.

 

He always said it was a spoof but that hasn't stopped people buying into it. Another, older, example would be when the guys who made the crop circles came forward to say it was nothing to do with aliens and even show how they did it. Plenty decided, despite evidence to the contrary, that they were liars and it was the work of aliens.

Often bullshit beliefs are backed up on cable TV channels where the 'illusion of rigour' is used to present things untrue as if they are true, as if the science is decided. A programme about Bigfoot may begin with no question as to Bigfoot's existence but simply to discuss what Bigfoot may eat and what Bigfoot may sound like.

There may be scientists with fake titles ("spiritologist") and fake scientific equipment but they're wearing suits and sat in studios so they give the veneer of authority and, for some - see the Stanford prison experiment for a scary example, that's enough.

But while we're constantly told to fact check and to do our research it's not actually that easy. Many of us don't have the knowledge, or the training, to do this and certainly not on such a vast array of subjects. Many of us, most of us I'd wager, don't have the humility to admit that's the case.

Even though there's no shame in not being an expert on everything. Nobody is. Nobody can be. If somebody smugly pretends they are that should be a huge red flag. If somebody hasn't tried to rationally interrogate their own beliefs and reacts with aggressive surety to any doubts and questions, denies any attempt at self-examination, that's not just a red flag. That's a whole fucking parade of red flags.

We are all emotional, we are all fallible, and we are all susceptible but we should all at least aim to reduce the amount of lies we believe and the amount of mistakes we make because of believing these lies. The main way of doing this is, yes, to question others but also, far more importantly, to always question ourselves.

Curry & Cicirello suggested a few ways to do that starting with one that ought to be pretty obvious. Don't get your news from Facebook, don't get your news from memes, and definitely don't get your news from Facebook memes.

Vet your sources for trustworthiness. What is the business model for this purported news provider? How do they generate revenue? The supposedly left-wing website The Canary paid its contributors based on the number of clicks which led to, and always was going to lead to, people writing incendiary and divisive headlines that attracted traffic.

Clickbait. It's also worth looking at what sort of ads certain websites carry. If all the adverts appear to be for bullshit products (say Goop) it's probably a website full of bullshit because people who like reading bullshit news tend to like buying bullshit goods.

Is there a named journalist? If not, why read it? If somebody can't even put their name to it you need to ask why that might be. If the language of an article is extremely evocative, partial, or incendiary then what you're reading is an opinion piece (like, for instance, Curry & Cicirello's podcast or this blog) rather than a news article.

It was such a fascinating talk that as soon as it finished (and following a Q&A that was surprisingly jovial considering it touched on Covid, Putin's war in Ukraine, the climate crisis, and the rollback of the Roe vs Wade abortion law in the US) I boshed this blog out in a matter of minutes. If I was submitting a news article I'd have spent a bit longer.

Thanks to Tom Curry & Cecil Cicirello (and Michael Marshall) for a fascinating evening and thanks, as so many times before, to Skeptics in the Pub for another informative and enjoyable Thursday evening. Now, where's Bigfoot gone?