Many of you will already have heard of Nate Silver. He is an “American statistician, writer and poker player who analyses baseball, basketball and elections. He is the founder of FiveThirtyEight and held the position of Editor-in-Chief there, along with being a special correspondent for ABC News, until May 2023.
According to Wikipedia, “Silver was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time in 2009… Much of Silver’s approach can be characterised by using probabilistic and statistical modelling to try and understand complex social systems, such as professional sports, the popularity of political platforms and elections”.
However, you probably haven’t heard of Sander van der Linden. He is introduced on Wikipedia as “a Dutch social psychologist and author who is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He studies the psychology of social influence, risk, human judgment and decision-making. He is particularly known for his research on the psychology of social issues, such as fake news, COVID-19 and climate change”.
I started following Van der Linden after reading about a couple of his lectures at Cambridge University. Not only does Van der Linden want to stop misinformation (which I’m sure we all want), he wants to go further and actually ‘protect’ people from it via ‘inoculation’. Inoculating people to misinformation involves exposing them to weakened doses of fake news and then telling them which bits were fake. This apparently produces future psychological resistance.
The duo’s X/Twitter spat began when Van der Linden excitedly tweeted that the World Economic Forum ranks misinformation and disinformation as the number one societal risk in the next two years.
Even Elon Musk laughed at this, saying “by ‘misinformation’, WEF means anything that conflicts with its agenda”. To this, Van der Linden called Musk the “Chief Conspiracy Theorist”.
Nate Silver responded to Van der Linden’s post and I present their argument to you below:
Van der Linden then turned his attention to Professor Jay Bhattacharya from the Stanford School of Medicine and co-founder of the Great Barrington Declaration, after Bhattacharya tweeted the following:
Unsurprisingly, after the reaction Van der Linden received to his ‘fight’ with Silver, he has turned comments off on his response to Bhattacharya.
This piece was originally published on the Naked Emperor’s Substack. You can subscribe here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
“Not only does Van der Linden want to stop misinformation (which I’m sure we all want)”
I want no such thing. I want there to be a completely free exchange of ideas, and speech to be protected by the law, and for “common carriers” to be forced not to censor content.
I am not even sure I want people to agree with me about everything (perhaps beyond my core beliefs in freedom of speech, individual liberty, private property) because I may well be wrong about a lot of things and the more speech we have the more likely we are to arrive at helpful conclusions.
Dis and Mis information are just fancy terms that used to mean accidental and deliberate errors of fact (the latter of which used to be referred to as a “lie”). Now they just mean anything that powerful people want to smear and silence.
There’s also ‘Mal’ aka truth inconvenient to the official narrative.
And who is to be the arbiter of mis- or dis- and based on what criteria, and how will their decision be enforced? Well we already know who and how.
The only way is for all information to be in the public domain where it can be tested, debated, refuted, supported.
As for science, there are no facts in science, just hypotheses and temporary theories.
With respect to Newtonian motion of planets, Einstein’s theory of relativity was ‘misinformation’ as was Galileo’s theories that the Earth was round, orbited the Sun and wasn’t the centre of the Universe.
100%
“As for science, there are no facts in science, just hypotheses and temporary theories”. Isn’t it Newton’s LAW of gravity?
The trouble is this creep van der Linden through a complex network of grants and ‘donations’ is paid to lie and his MO is to wear the opposition down with his lies. So engaging him is probably futile.
Although it is quite useful to have debates out in the open with these shills so everyone else can see how they slither.
At least Cambridge has produced Prof. Ahmed who saw off the appalling Toope by the brilliant one word substitution of ‘tolerate’ for ‘respect’ in Toope’s Orwellian BS. Toope stormed off in a huff, quite a victory. God save us from woke Canadians. More Mark Steyns please!
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/july-2023/profile-professor-arif-ahmed/
https://www.cam.ac.uk/news/statement-about-the-vice-chancellor
Tolerate means to endure, and endurance is not infinite nor mandatory.
Nail on the head PS. Why is activist type academics, generally ‘working’ on nebulous and subjective subjects, have so much time available to malign and denounce anyone with whom they disagree? Sheltered from the commercial imperative they can indulge their ego at others expense.
All van Der linden ever does is argue from authority. Anything that disagrees with authority is therefore classed as misinformation.
The dis-, mal- and mis-information comes from the vested interests of corporations, governments and NGOs, trying to control, influence and earn fortunes from enslaved populations, whom they regard as “lesser” and “other”. Controlled speech aims to prevent normal intelligent and educated people countering the bu!!carp nonsense claims from these charlatans.
Wealth and power to be had from promoting and engaging in the Dis, Mis and Mal industrial complex attracting the some very nasty, twisted individuals.
Facts are slippery things. The word did not come into common use until the 17th century. The word “truth” is much older and has a different meaning.
Scientific consensus is only valid until a Black Swan appears. The principal tenet of research is the concept of the null hypothesis. A hypothesis cannot usually be proven to be true forever, as it requires only one disproving fact to render it false. To say that one should blindly follow scientific consensus is foolish. Galileo didn’t. And there are numerous examples in medicine where consensus has been overturned by a single properly conducted trial.
Anyone who cites Lewandowsky & co in support is automatically suspect imo. Retracted papers, dodgy statistics and ethics etc.
<https://wattsupwiththat.com/?s=lewandowsky> Page 3 in particular has some zingers.
The merry-go-round of sophistry. We really should be closing higher education universities and degrees as all they seem to achieve is a complete annihilation of common sense.