How do we fight for truth and protect democracy in a post-truth world? How does bias affect our understanding of facts?
Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean’s Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
As a novelist and philosopher of science, you address these important questions on truth. Your latest book is On Disinformation. As you write, “Disinformation is the new censorship.” You’ve spoken with Flat Earthers, climate deniers, science deniers. I think with all the noise, there's a longing for simplicity and the one big explanation, the one big lie, as you identify. I think that there's a lot of frustration now. With AI, social media, and the decline of journalism, people find it hard to trust anything. They just don't have the time to wade through all that, and that just feeds into people's vulnerabilities to following these lies.
LEE McINTYRE
One thing people don't realize is that the goal of disinformation is not simply to get you to believe a falsehood. It's to demoralize you into giving up on the idea of truth, to polarize us around factual issues, to get us to distrust people who don't believe the same lie. And even if somebody doesn't believe the lie, it can still make them cynical. I mean, we've all had friends who don't even watch the news anymore. There's a chilling quotation from Holocaust historian Hannah Arendt about how when you always lie to someone, the consequence is not necessarily that they believe the lie, but that they begin to lose their critical faculties, that they begin to give up on the idea of truth, and so they can't judge for themselves what's true and what's false anymore. That's the scary part, the nexus between post-truth and autocracy. That's what the authoritarian wants. Not necessarily to get you to believe the lie. But to give up on truth, because when you give up on truth, then there's no blame, no accountability, and they can just assert their power. There's a connection between disinformation and denial. People don't just wake up one day thinking that there's a Jewish space laser or tracking microchips in the vaccines. These ideas come from somebody who made them up because it serves their own political or economic interests. You can't just bring them back with evidence or facts because they don't trust the person sharing the facts or the evidence. So once somebody's gone down that rabbit hole, it’s almost impossible to change their identity. A much more effective and important strategy is to keep them from hearing the disinformation in the first place, work on the amplification of disinformation so that people are not hearing the lies in the first place.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
I admire you for your patience and compassion when you have confronted people who really hold points of view that are difficult to fathom. But it's not often that we get to be face to face. A lot of this is done anonymously and online. AI is accelerating all the time. ChatGPT can create a lot of hate speech. It's being used for disinformation, so how do you foresee these bad actors leveraging this technology to propagate misinformation and extremist ideologies?
McINTYRE
The AI challenge is a very real one. I mean, we've all seen deepfakes and wondered, you know, is that really Tom Cruise's voice? Is that video really him? And what happens then? As I talked about earlier, the danger is not just that people will see the false thing and think it's true, it’s that we'll stop believing that there is any such thing as truth anymore. We won't just take the false thing for true. We'll take the true thing for false. I was reading a law review article the other day, where a lawyer was bemoaning the day when video and audio evidence could no longer be used in court because jurors would be so savvy to the problem of deep fakes, they would say, “Oh, that's just a fake.” Think back to the Access Hollywood tape from Trump in 2016. He said at the time, “Oh, that's fake.” But the fakes weren't that good. But now, the day is coming quite soon when we will lose all confidence in audio and video evidence for the law. It's a chilling thing. I think that AI can be useful for many different things, like catching pancreatic cancer before it’s fatal, but we do need to be aware of the threat because it can be misused just as any other technology. When ChatGPT first came out, I tried valiantly to make it create disinformation, and I couldn't get it to do that. I thought, “Well, good. Somebody's fed in the algorithm so that it won't do that.” But then I immediately despaired and thought, “Oh, no. That means it can be tampered with. So when it falls into the hands of somebody who's a bad actor, it can be a very bad thing.”
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
So with so much of your work focused on identifying disinformation, bad actors, and trust in a post-truth era, I'm wondering how you avoid burnout and cynicism and maintain your belief in the resilience of democracy and institutions?
McINTYRE
My dad fought in World War II in France, and my mom was an electrician building warships in the United States. They were both war workers very proud to be Americans and instilled in me from an early age that the wonderful thing about America is that anybody could be an American, that you didn't have to be born here, that you didn't have to be a particular ethnicity or speak a certain language or be a certain religion. The wonderful thing about America was that you just had to believe, and that meant it was open for everyone. I find great hope in that because despite all the horrible rhetoric about people seeking asylum and immigrants, I'm cheered by just the casual conversations I have with people who have just come to this country. Despite all of our flaws in the United States, I really believe we have great diversity, and that sustains me. I think deep down, some Americans have been poisoned into thinking immigrants are a threat, and I think that's wrong. And so in my work, I'm trying to fight that by fighting for the idea of truth. As a philosopher, I don't ever get burned out. I mean, what do philosophers believe in more strongly than the concept of truth?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
And what do you think it means for our culture that education systems are not currently based on the same facts across the country?
McINTYRE
I'm not sure there's a one size fits all answer because American education right now is fairly fractured, and I'm not simply talking about the difference between public school and private school, or parochial school and homeschooling. It’s more so even in science education these days, there seems to be a lot of political pressure over what you can and cannot say. You think evolution deniers came for the school board a long time ago and got slapped back by the courts in various ways, but they're still out there. Flat Earthers, part of their agenda, their long term plan is to run for school board to teach the controversy. It sounds laughable, but it is not. Elections, not just who runs for president or senator, but also who runs for school board, can make an enormous difference in your life. I think people are educated best when they're allowed to ask all the hard questions. When certain questions are off limits, I think that's when someone is in danger of being miseducated. When certain things are taboo or we wish they weren't true so we don't teach them, we're doing a great, great disservice. So I'm all in favor of the most progressive education people can have. And I say this because I've taught not only college, but also taught fifth graders logic. I've been a dad, you know, raised kids and trained both my kids to be philosophers. I know just how curious kids are. You've got to let them spread their wings and ask all those questions.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
I’m wondering about teachers who've been important to you and your broader reflections on the future of education? And what your reflections are about the beauty and wonder of the natural world and the kind of planet we’re leaving for the next generation?
McINTYRE
Getting people to care is the most important thing. I went all the way to the Maldives for research for my book How to Talk to a Science Denier because I wanted to see coral death. I wanted to see the Maldives. I wanted to see the country most under threat from climate change. One of my teachers was a 17 or 18-year-old kid who was the captain of a fishing boat. He said, "Oh, sir, outside the Maldives, no one cares." And that was when I realized that climate denial was not just about belief, it was about caring. He was right. Could you get people to care? How do you get people to care about what happens to the Maldives? They have to go there and meet people and/or know someone in order to care. I've been really fortunate in my life to have had so many teachers in that way, sometimes through short interactions.
I had an absolutely wonderful high school history teacher, Dave Corkran. I dedicated On Disinformation to him. He taught me to think for myself and not to be afraid to express what I thought. And in college, Richard Adelstein, a very philosophical economist, who basically said, “Do not go to graduate school in economics, they won't let you do what you're interested in. You've got to go to philosophy graduate school.” So he was really my mentor in thinking that I could become a philosopher. Then there’s my mom. She didn't go to college, but was extraordinarily intelligent and interested in all sorts of things. She was fascinated with Einstein and wanted to understand physics. When I was a little boy, she would wrap me up in a blanket on cold nights, and we would look at the stars. I was four years old, so I would ask, “What are the stars?” And she said, “They're suns. They're just very far away.” I also asked, “So all those stars in the sky, do they have planets like the Earth?” I still remember this to this day. She said, “Probably. We just haven't found them yet.” And this was 1967, so they hadn't found any yet. But when I gave her eulogy a few years ago, they had found 4,000 exoplanets, so she was right. What my mom was saying in 1967, that yes, there are other worlds out there, we just haven't found them yet, was so inspiring to me. She really was the one who made me become a philosopher. I try to channel the teaching she did in raising my own kids. The answer should never be “Because I said so.” It should be “What do you think? Let's have a conversation.” We never talked baby talk to our kids because my mom never talked baby talk to me. She treated me seriously as if my opinions mattered. My mom taking me seriously as a thinker from the age at which I could talk allowed me the confidence to go forward. Even though we grew up in a blue collar family, my dad became disabled, we were poor, I went to terrible public schools for the first part of my life, I always had it better than the other kids because I had parents who believed in education and a mom who talked to me.
