Dan Williams on Misinformation

It's probably not a great thing that people with highly conspiratorial worldviews or really strong hostility towards establishment institutions are consuming lots of incredibly weird low-quality content. It's not a great thing. But the idea that this is behind, for example, Trump's election victory or Brexit, it's just not a credible theory of public opinion formation. And now the good fight. with Yasha Monk.

One of the things I really like about Substack is that it sometimes leads you to discover new voices, new writers who really have a special set of insights about the world. One of the people who I've been reading with particular pleasure for the last year or so is Dan Williams. He is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, and he has written about subjects which we discussed in detail today, particularly about misinformation. He is very sceptical that the way in which we tend to talk about misinformation in our political discourse today is actually sensible, even though he worries, as he says clearly in this conversation very deeply, about the kind of lies and falsehoods and conspiracy theories spread by people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.

on the populist right, he thinks that this term of misinformation is far too imprecise to be useful and that often we invoke it in order to make it harder to ask critical questions. We invoke it in order to cloak some ways in which elite institutions themselves might end up engaging in quote unquote misinformation. In other parts of his conversation, we also talked about other issues like what he calls the everyone is biased, biased. How should we recognize that we don't just naively understand the world, that when we're tempted to think, if you disagree with me, you must be a bad person or you must be a stupid person, we are probably wrong. We're probably not appreciating how hard it is.

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