Will this scientist's Instragram account be censored next? Credit: Josh Edelson/AFP/ Getty
Cassie Jaye is the director of the documentary The Red Pill about the “men’s rights activism” (MRA) movement. She gave a TEDx talk a few years ago about her plan to expose the movement as a “misogynistic hate group actively working against women’s equality”.
She noticed something. When she interviewed the men’s rights activists, she was enraged by their sexism: but when she went back and transcribed the interviews, she found that the things she had been enraged by were not as clear as she had thought. “I would often hear an innocent and valid point that a MRA would make,” she says, “and in my head I would add on a sexist or anti-woman spin, assuming that was what he wanted to say but didn’t.”
If a man said that there are 2,000 domestic violence shelters for women in the US and only one for men, for instance, she would hear “and therefore we should defund the women’s ones”, rather than “so we should fund more men’s ones”. It’s an interesting watch.
The blogger John Nerst points out that, whether or not you agree with her, there’s something interesting going on here. Her brain was doing something incredibly sophisticated. The MRAs’ comments were being filtered, or spun, or edited, before they reached her conscious mind. They were given tags: untrustworthy, sexist, anti-woman.
As far as her consciousness was concerned, she wasn’t choosing to label them like that: they came to her pre-labelled, by some hidden subroutine in the brain. It was only when she watched it back later, and her own video diaries from the time, that she was able to spot the labels. And the labelling involves quite high-level ideas, things like “misogyny”, not just lizard-brain concepts like “danger, food, potential mate”.
I thought of Jaye, and the strange filtering that our brains do, when I read about the probably nonexistent wave of ivermectin overdoses filling Midwestern US hospitals and preventing medics from treating gunshot victims.
This purported wave got a lot of coverage. Rolling Stone “Gunshot Victims Left Waiting as Horse Dewormer Overdoses Overwhelm Oklahoma Hospitals, Doctor Says.” The Guardian: “Oklahoma hospitals deluged by ivermectin overdoses, doctor says”. The Independent: “Doctor says gunshot victims forced to wait for treatment as Oklahoma hospitals overwhelmed by coronavirus patients.” It’s taken from a report from a local TV channel, which interviewed a rural Oklahoman emergency-room doctor.
As far as I can tell, it’s not true at all. Dr Jason McElyea, the doctor in question, appears to have been saying two things: 1) that he’s seen some ivermectin overdoses and 2) that emergency rooms are overwhelmed, presumably by Covid. The original news video splices these two points together, but I don’t think it’s what McElyea meant; in a follow-up interview with the BBC, he clarified that there was only a “handful” of overdoses, and that the strain on hospital staff was mainly from a surge in Covid cases. One Oklahoman hospital said it hadn’t seen any cases; others may have, but it makes it less likely that there’s a plague of the stuff. (It’s worth noting that Right-wing outlets didn’t cover themselves in glory either: they reported the hospital saying it hadn’t had any cases as disproving the whole story, even though McElyea had never mentioned that hospital and it was in a different bit of Oklahoma.)
To be clear, ivermectin almost certainly doesn’t help prevent or treat Covid and it can be bad for you. But it seems unlikely that there are so many people ingesting it that it’s affecting hospital capacity.
The American Association of Poison Control Centers has released data up to the end of August, showing a marked rise in ivermectin cases — about ten times as many this August as there were in August 2019. But while a tenfold rise sounds impressive, it’s only up from about 40 cases a month in 2019 to 450 a month now, and most of those cases had either no effect or minor effects. For context, about 1,600 people are being hospitalised with Covid every day in Oklahoma alone. It’s silly to take ivermectin, but people doing it are not putting huge strain on the US health service.
The ivermectin story is far from the only one recently. The Guardian among other places, recently reported a story of an “anti-trans Instagram post”, which made “unsubstantiated allegations” about a male-bodied person in a spa exposing themself to women and girls at an LA spa. The piece said experts called it “a case study in how viral misinformation can result in violence”, linking “anti-trans and far-right movements, including QAnon conspiracy theorists, who believe that a cabal of elite pedophiles is manipulating the American government”.
There was a kind of inevitability about the follow-up story last week which found that, in fact, a registered sex offender named Darren Merager had been charged with indecent exposure at the spa. Merager, a trans woman, denies the charges; but at the very least, it’s not a clear-cut example of “viral misinformation” or a conspiracy theory worthy of being linked to QAnon.
As a bit of an aside, this isn’t supposed to happen. The Left views itself as the defender of truth and accuracy, not a purveyor of mistruth. Recently, I reviewed a book, How to Talk to a Science Denier. It was not, I felt, particularly useful. But one thing that I found revealing was the author’s long discussion of whether “left-wing science denial” existed. He chose one example — Left-wing opposition to genetically modified organisms, specifically on safety grounds — and concluded that it sort of did but not really. He based a lot of his thinking on the research of Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol. There is, I think, a fairly well-established idea that the Left is the “side” of science and evidence, and the Right is the “side” of science “denial”.
I find that strange, because I can think of quite a few areas in which elite Left-wing or liberal opinion doesn’t sit well with mainstream scientific findings.
For instance: the UK Green Party wants to “phase out” nuclear power. Is that “science denial”? I don’t know, but I think the consensus scientific position is that nuclear power is extremely safe and carbon-efficient.
And the idea that human behaviour and society are in some important way the product of evolution has been so profoundly uncomfortable to people on the Left that as far back as 1978 people broke into a lecture the biologist Edward Wilson, shouting “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” and throwing water over him, after he had written a book, Sociobiology, which was mainly about the behaviour of insects but which speculated that future science could shed some light on human behaviour. Is that “science denial”? Well, again, that’s a question of definitions, but blank slatism is certainly not directly in line with modern scientific findings.
Or take IQ. Your score on an IQ test predicts your success in life pretty well; your career outcomes and earnings, your school results, even your lifespan. It’s also highly heritable. You can find people denying those facts on the Left much more easily than you can find them on the Right, just as you can find people claiming that biological sex isn’t real.
My point isn’t that Left-wing people do this more than Right-wing people, or even that they’re equivalent: I suspect that if you could find some reasonable way of defining terms like “science denial” or “misinformation” (and “Right-wing” and “Left-wing”), you’d probably end up finding that it’s more prevalent on the Right. But, at least in the largely Left-wing or centrist circles I inhabit, it’s almost axiomatic that misinformation is what the Right do. There’s a serious strain of thought that thinks we are the correct ones, and they are the wrong ones.
But the desire to show your political opponents in the worst possible light, or to believe things that are politically convenient rather than things that aren’t, is entirely bipartisan. It’s just easier to spot when the enemy is doing it.
But what interests me is the question of whether people (on the Left or Right) do this on purpose: are they consciously misrepresenting their opponents and ignoring inconvenient truths, or is it a subconscious, automatic thing?
I wrote some months ago about people switching between different definitions of words in highly charged culture-war debates, allowing them to make claims like “cancel culture is/isn’t real”. I’d assumed it was mainly unconscious, but something that people said to me was: this is entirely deliberate. They define words in ways that gain them cultural power: so a Left-winger might very deliberately define “racism” to include “anything that leads to negative outcomes for non-white people”, and a Right-winger might define it as “only explicit acts of intentional racism by an individual”, so as to make the problem as big or as small as you can. Certainly it seems to happen too often for it to be accidental.
Under that model, people share the ivermectin story or the trans-woman-in-the-spa story to damage their political opponents, knowing or not caring that it’s not true. Ivermectin is a Right-coded thing, so showing that Trump-voting rural Oklahomans are taking it in their thousands and gumming up emergency wards shows just how stupid they are.
But the Cassie Jaye MRA thing, I think, reveals another angle. As Nerst describes it, Jaye’s conscious brain wasn’t choosing the most uncharitable interpretations of what the MRAs were saying: her subconscious brain only presented her with uncharitable options. Her conscious, reasoning mind, the bit of us that we consider ourselves, thought it was simply reporting reality, but in fact the version of reality that arrived in front of it had already been screened, and only the politically convenient bits were available to her. Nerst calls this process of only choosing from pre-screened options “semitentionality”: it’s neither an honest mistake nor a cynical misrepresentation, but some weird different third option.
I think that’s what’s going on when people read stories about ivermectin or trans women in spas. It’s not that they deliberately choose the interpretation most convenient to their pre-existing beliefs, or that they’re accidentally choosing the most convenient interpretation time and time again. It’s that the world our brains present to us is brilliantly constructed so that our friends are right and good and the enemy is bad and wrong. It’s not clear how we can improve the situation — but being wary of sharing any politically convenient stories on social media might be a good start.
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SubscribeMichael Saylor, the world’s greatest pusher of Bit Coin, is the one who really needs a look. He is the ultimate ‘Whale’, tells people to put every penny into it, borrow and invest in it.
Bit Coin is the ultimate sign of the economic times are surpassing ‘Irrational Exuberance’ to become Irrational Psychosis.
Think about money – basically someone produces more than they consume, and the result is wealth. You cut hair, make bicycles, do law or be a doctor… You produce valuable goods and services, and the excess profits you make are ‘Growth’ and wealth. But this is not how the economy works now – it is all finance, smoke and mirrors and insider knowledge and manipulation.
An administrator makes $50,000 p/a, as does his wife. In California (or London, Melbourne) In 2008 they bought a house for $250,000 – now it is worth $2.25 Million. They created nothing – they have 19 times their annual wage, and made no goods and services – this is not prosperity, this is not healthy economy, it is bad money, economically speaking. This is the entire premise of Bit Coin and crypto.
That no goods and services are made, nothing created, improved, Just speculation has driven the price of this thing higher and higher. This is not an economy, this in fact devalues all the money in the system. Crypto is now $$ 3 Trillion! That three Trillion made no goods, instead it enabled 3 $ Trillion to be created in valuation, out of air. These whales bought bit coin at $10. each , fourteen years ago, and it has risen to $56,000 a coin. And still it is NOTHING, it is a Fagazi, smoke…. but the 3 $ Trillion additional devalues the rest of money as it increased money supply wile not increasing goods.
this is Ponzie, ” South Sea Bubble”, the speculation mania that ruined many British investors in 1720″., Tulip Mania…. but has not popped yet…. it is bad money, and that is not good….
Musk, Saylor, Martin Lewis et al will inevitably become prey, mainly because they’ve been such successful predators. They will hunt him with thinbles, they will hunt him with care, they’ll threaten his life with a Tesla share. As far as blockchain and crypto goes i think it has a future – but only as fiat money. It’ll be interesting to see how the e-Krona fares, also Ozzy Osborne’s NFT bat coin is a classic naked Emporer moment which i think Ozzy himself realises, the Bat Coin could well be the source of crypto- covid which brings the whole thing down.
I think you’ll find the Martin Lewis reference is unfair. His name is being used by Bitcoin scammers because he has a justifiably trusted brand.
Bitcoin bad. blockchain good ?
IMHO
Blockchain math has many good uses and will survive. Coin trust relies on that math, would not be possible without the math. Fortunes embedded in a tangible crypto-key? Lose that and the fortune with it.
Add to that the sum of borrowing against the $3T in “assets” and bubble grows even larger.
The bad man made me do it….
Now I’m a Mum and the patriarchy is coming for me, solely because I’m a woman and a mum.
EH had no new technology–it was ALL fraud from the beginning. The formula for Coke is a trade secret, but if Pepsi buys Coke by the lorryload and puts it in Pepsi cans and bottles, that is not a competitive product, that is fraud!
The press found the media darling, the GirlBoss too good to check. Epic failure! Come on Liz, let’s hear your real voice–and I mean that literally!
She SAYS she has produced a miniaturised version of herself .Any proof ?
Noticeably, it is women who are being taken in to a greater extent than men. Why is that? It often seems like every middle class home contains its gullible matron, taken in by the most transparent rubbish, and trying to enforce it on the rest of the family.
And leaving aside some muscle building pundits, the whole influencer business seems to be largely inhabited by females, in some sort of circular conspiracy to dupe each other.
What is going on?
I do think women have more of a natural instinct to be sociable and fit in with the crowd. So when something seems to be the “it” thing/person/activity/whatever, there will be more women who flock to it simply because it’s popular. Not that men are totally immune or anything, I just think the instinct is stronger in women.
I think music is one of the best examples. How many women listen to a pop star simply because the industry and media are pushing them as a star? How many of these pop stars have songs that are memorable or, for that matter, distinguishable from what a dozen others are putting out? (seriously, my gym for some reason plays them most days. If they didn’t put the names on the TV screen I wouldn’t realize they were changing artists nor songs) And once the star is no longer an “it” star, a lot of women will no longer listen to their stuff, not even the songs they used to claim to love.
It was never the music, it was the identity and sense of belonging.
It’s interesting. Unless we have an axe to grind, I think most of us would say that there is a distinct female psychology (or at least tendency) with its own risks and pitfalls. And yet, at the same time we are in denial about the negative aspects of this – while asserting positive aspects and emphasising negative aspects of male psychology.
Anecdotal, but I would say that conformity, gullibility and some particularly vicious forms of intrasexual competition are aspects. Women are more sociable – but that sociability seems to be cut through with a fair bit of selective meanness.
I tend to agree, but surely music is an exception to your thesis, not the best example. It seems to me it’s mainly young men who both perpetrate and fall for the tribal music obsession. I offer High Fidelity in evidence.
The same thing as in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
Now do Elon Musk, who’s scammed the world into believing Tesla cars are his invention, that it’s been a viable business without taxpayer money and that it’s a green solution (the real green solution to ICE cars is no cars). Let’s not forget his solar roof tile, car tunnel and vacuum tunnel snake oil either.
X.com and those reusable rockets were pure fiction too.
X.com wasn’t a fiction, though it didn’t amount to much.
Elon Musk being responsible for Paypal’s success is of course Tolkeinesque level of mythopoeia.
Reusable rockets… nice trick paid for by government contracts. Although McDonnell Douglas had already done that in the 90s so… the least he could have done is used the last 10 years to make it a feasible commercial technology, unless of course, the physics and economics don’t stack up and he’s bilking investors.
Elon Musk will certainly hope he’ll be on Mars when he becomes the face of the economic crash.
I’m sorry things haven’t worked out for you.
Amen, Elon Musk is the next Elizabeth Holmes. I’ve got my popcorn out for when that plane goes down from engine failure, pilot error and fire on board.
“We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” — Ayn Rand
I feels to me these days Western society is in a state of mass hysteria in denying reality because it’d be a more equitable world that way.
If an individual denies reality, say, goes mad, then others around them can help such a person, sustain them if needed.
If an entire population goes mad, what happens then?
Great article – and reflects exactly the thoughts I had about Holmes when I watched a documentary about her a while back: people will believe what they want to believe and fling the doors wide open to the con artists who will ride the wave of whatever narrative is on the wish list.
With regard to Gwyneth Paltrow, I have to repost Julie Burchill’s brilliant article “Put it away, love” – just so funny: https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/03/02/put-it-away-love/
Thanks for the link to the Julie Burchill article| just priceless!
There are so many gems in that article, but I thought the black and white minstrels one stood out
Thanks
I enjoyed this irreverent link immensely. Interestingly I followed the link to the ‘Vagina Museum’ only to be notified that the vagina museum is temporarily closed while they move to a new location. Maybe the liquor licence hasn’t worked out for them.
I think I remember a male US talk show host ordering one of Gwynnie’s ‘This Smells Like My Vagina’ candles last year. I don’t think he was convinced, but then again, he is gay.
Yes, I am seeing this on multipe fronts. People hyping and scaremongering with little understanding. Whether virtual reality, blockchain, AI, EVs, hyperloop, few people are asking basical questions about feasibility. I think in certain business areas has become socially unacceptable to be pessimistic.
A fine piece. I would add only that Theranos reacted with fury and rottweiler lawyers to anyone who dared to ask an awkward question. That’s a flapping red flag.
As did Robert Maxwell, infamously.
Those who put Kamala Harris into office were also buying a dream.
As an engineer, I’m surprised how gulllible people are when presented with supposed ‘Gee Wizz’ technology. Asking the critical questions perhaps gets ignored when someone else is paying.
A good example is the couple here who sold their fake bomb detectors around the world: Married couple guilty of making fake bomb detectors in garden shed they claimed ‘could find Madeline McCann’
They made £80m from that scam, selling plastic boxes with telescopic ariels.
Recall that Holmes erected huge legal barriers to anyone discovering the scam, including her workers. The promising beginning failing as research stalled. Her crime was never being truthful as the scheme collapsed. She was a victim (maybe) of her own hubris and press.
There is a general collapse of accounting visibility that is a part of the new ‘startup’ economy. I suspect it is going to come back after a disaster.
I am a software engineer and at least part of this stems from the fact people don’t understand the basic technology around them. It isn’t that hard to understand how a car works, how the electricty is wired in one’s house, how basic electronic works or with some more effort even the basics of how a computer works. It doesn’t require that much effort or education – probably only a good secondary eduction and/or appreticeship – would provide in order to understand how these things work.
Instead I have had to endure managers and other people throughout my career babbling on about buzzwords and technologies they have no idea about and seem to believe are the solutions to their problems, when it reality they are nothing of the sort. Some basic level of technical and scientfiic knowhow would make these scams less likely.
Note how in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centiry investment scams in the UK were all about houses in Flordia, mysterious South Sea Islands, recently discovered colonial territory like the Mississippi bubble or (in the London stock market) railways being constructed in South America. These scams thrive on ignorance.
The latest snake oil is the ‘NoCode’ fad peddled to the clueless managerial class i.e. mostly arts graduates with no managerial qualifications. What they don’t realise is that the coding bit is simple, deciding what you want to do with the code is the tricky bit!
Great article thanks
Maybe a little mercy and sympathy for a great inspiring lady is warranted. I mean that. Elizabeth Holmes, I pray you get no time in jail. As for the people who may have lost money, they were buying a dream and they go it. I am sure their attorneys and accountants will help all of them even Henry so they come out all right.
This is truly a despicable comment! A “great inspiring lady?” Did you think Bernie Madoff a great inspiring investor?
You claim to be an attorney, yet show profound ignorance of the law. It’s OK to be a complete fraudster and lie to investors over and over and over because people were “buying a dream?” How will these investors come out all right? Hundreds of millions of investors $ were fleeced–is there a magic wand that you can wave and make them “come out all right?” Pathetic, especially for an attorney.
EH is not a great lady, a horrible person, and I hope she rots in prison for a very long time. Let’s hope the prosecutors are “lawyers for life” and EH gets life!
As the article so truly says, con artists have been with us forever. If only Elizabeth had stuck to hawking something like Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir she wouldn’t be facing years in the slammer.
https://youtu.be/4jAvUNwaXyE
Or candles that smell like her punani!
“If Elizabeth Holmes hadn’t existed, we would have had to invent her — and in some ways, we did.” Unlike Spanx, Holmes high tech wonder failed despite an awful lot of other people’s money (not hers). Her stellar ability to act makes her one of the best conwomen in history. As a sociopath she ranks well with the train of money death behind her, at least not people except for bruised egos.
Vanity Fair for the Digital Age.
Do not pass go, go directly to jail.
Several years ago I was asked by investors for the opinion about her technology. My answer was: this technology is badly needed but we don’t know if it exists. Without independent side by side comparison etc this is just writing on the paper and paper is very patient.
Entertaining, but the same kind pf hustle that Elizabeth Holmes represents. Nearly all grifters have beauty, charm and lying skills. Hilary lacked beauty and charm, but was a consummate liar. Her husband could lie with the best but only had the looks and charm to attract women and men who were attracted to men. Nixon was like Hilary, all liar and no looks or charm. The successful liar is one who can fool nearly everyone. That was Holmes lacked, she could only convince other liars and manipulators.
The one great weakness of grifters is their gullibility, especially towards their own lies. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Chaves, Castro, both Roosevelts, virtually all politicians and great men and women in every field, especially in acting, have that weakness in abundance. Another is deep-seated pathology particularly toward their victims.
She has invented a patent jail avoidance device , a miniaturised version of herself . Allegedly