The Poisoning of the American Mind: Part I

Epistemic Crisis

by Lawrence M. Eppard

Image from the U.S. Capitol Insurrection (Credit: C-SPAN)

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This is the first entry in a multi-part series titled “The Poisoning of the American Mind” where I take a look at the ways in which both liberal and conservative Americans are being fed questionable messages by the information sources that they rely on.

This series will be included in my forthcoming book (with my coauthor Jacob Mackey) titled, The Poisoning of the American Mind, due out in early 2024.

“These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learn anything. In the United States and other developed nations, otherwise intelligent people denigrate intellectual achievement and reject the advice of experts. Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge.”

–Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise[1]

“Someday, historians will look back at this moment and tell one of two stories: The first is a story of how democracy and reason prevailed. The second is a story of how minds grew fevered and blood was spilled in the twilight of a great experiment that did not have to end the way it did.”

—Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic[2]

“In the 20th century, America built the most capable knowledge-producing institutions in human history. In the past decade, they got stupider en masse.”

—Jonathan Haidt, coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind[3]

“False, partisan, and often deliberately misleading narratives now spread in digital wildfires, cascades of falsehood that move too fast for fact checkers to keep up. And even if they could, it no longer matters: a part of the public will never read or see fact-checking websites, and if they do they won’t believe them.”

—Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy[4]

“The most obvious explanation for American political life since the end of the Cold War is that we have become an unserious country populated by an unserious people.”

—Jonathan V. Last, editor of The Bulwark[5]

“The unbundling of truth makes the business of democracy ever more difficult to conduct. As we fly ever farther apart, we can only hear each other when we scream.”

—Martin Gurri, author of The Revolt of the Public[6]

“With the rise of radio, television, and now the Internet, it sometimes seems that anyone can have their opinion heard, quoted, and repeated, whether it is true or false, sensible or ridiculous, fair-minded or malicious. The Internet has created an information hall of mirrors, where any claim, no matter how preposterous, can be multiplied indefinitely. And on the Internet, disinformation never dies. ‘Electronic barbarism’ one commentator has called it—an environment that is all sail and no anchor. Pluralism run amok. . . [M]any of the important issues of our day are reduced to he said/she said/who knows? Any person could be forgiven for being confused. This cacophony of conflicting claims is particularly unhelpful when it comes to sorting out matters related to science, because science depends on evidence, and not all positions are equally grounded in it.”

—Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, authors of Merchants of Doubt[7]

PART I: EPISTEMIC CRISIS

In the U.S. today, both liberals and conservatives are regularly bombarded with misleading information as well as flat lies by people they believe to be trustworthy and authoritative sources of information. As a result, we are faced with an epistemic crisis that is poisoning American culture. As Jonathan Rauch argues: “[T]his is the first time we have seen a national-level epistemic attack: a systematic attack, emanating from the very highest reaches of power, on our collective ability to distinguish truth from falsehood.”[8]

Unfortunately, I do not see an obvious way out of this mess.

As one example, even years after it took place, most Republicans believed the 2020 presidential election was stolen[9]—despite not only a lack of evidence[10] but also the fact that the author of this “Big Lie” (Donald Trump) telegraphed that he would make such a preposterous claim before the election even took place.[11]

As another example, this time from the left, one risks serious damage to their reputation[12] in some progressive circles by simply acknowledging biological differences between men and women[13] and the impact of those differences on people’s lives.

Misleading information comes in a variety of forms, including ideology presented as fact, mal-information (true information used in a misleading manner), misinformation (false information), and disinformation (intentionally false information).[14]

In this introductory chapter I will try to explain some of the reasons why we find ourselves in this crisis. While there are several factors one could plausibly blame for our current predicament and I do not pretend to know all of the causes, I believe that the sources of information that the right and left rely on—and how those sources have declined in quality over the last few decades—play a primary role.

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We Live in a Golden Age of Information

I claim that the American mind is being poisoned, so I realize the whiplash this must cause the reader when I immediately follow up with the assertion that we live in a golden age of information.

Let me explain.

Imagine for a moment that you were to travel in a time machine back a century or more into the past. You greet somebody you encounter there and ask to be taken to his/her country’s most impressive library. This person honors your request, and upon arrival he/she brags to you about the immense knowledge contained within the library’s walls. You then retrieve your smartphone from your pocket (with a noticeable smirk on your face) and explain to your host that this small device in your hand contains exponentially more information than their library could ever hope to. Your new acquaintance would be speechless (if he/she believed you).

It might seem odd to say this, but I nonetheless contend that it is true: Americans have easier access to high-quality factual information, and more of it, than ever before.[15] As David Frum snarkily wrote: “I was promised flying cars, and instead all I got was all the world’s libraries in my pocket and the ability to videochat 24-hours a day for free with my grandchildren on the other side of the world.”[16]

This should in fact be a golden age of information.

The scale and quality of knowledge production that occurs in the modern world is a marvel and a historical breakthrough. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explained, our modern epistemic system is:

“a set of institutions for generating knowledge from the interactions of biased and cognitively flawed individuals. English law developed the adversarial system so that biased advocates could present both sides of a case to an impartial jury. Newspapers full of lies evolved into professional journalistic enterprises, with norms that required seeking out multiple sides of a story, followed by editorial review, followed by fact-checking. Universities evolved from cloistered medieval institutions into research powerhouses, creating a structure in which scholars put forth evidence-backed claims with the knowledge that other scholars around the world would be motivated to gain prestige by finding contrary evidence. Part of America’s greatness in the 20th century came from having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history, linking together the world’s best universities, private companies that turned scientific advances into life-changing consumer products, and government agencies that supported scientific research and led the collaboration that put people on the moon.”[17]

Jonathan Rauch has written extensively about our modern epistemic system. In this system, he notes that there are a variety of important rules[18] that have led to its success, including:

• Any hypothesis can be floated.

• A proposition qualifies as knowledge only if the larger epistemic community agrees that it has withstood vigorous questioning and criticism: “You can believe and say whatever you want. But if your beliefs don't check out, or if you don't submit them for checking, you can't expect anyone else to publish, care about, or even notice what you think.”[19]

• Validated propositions qualify as knowledge only until they are debunked.

• The epistemic system is defined by its values and practices, not by its borders. It includes all evidence-based professions that require competing hypotheses to be tested and justified and that hold each other accountable for errors.

• There is no authoritarian oversight—the epistemic system relies on a decentralized,[20] non-coercive process that forces participants to convince each other with evidence and argument.[21]

Regarding the “truth” that this system produces, Rauch argues:

“In everyday vernacular, reality often refers to the world out there: things as they really are, independent of human perception and error. Reality also often describes those things that we feel certain about, things that we believe no amount of wishful thinking could change. . . [Objective reality] is a set of propositions: propositions that have been validated in some way, and have thereby been shown to be at least conditionally true—true, that is, unless debunked.”[22]

This epistemic system includes many intelligent and hardworking people working across interconnected and often overlapping fields, including journalists, scientists, researchers, scholars, government workers, judges, lawyers, and social/political commentators, among others. The “body of validated propositions”[23] this community collectively produces is greater than the knowledge any one contributor could personally possess or understand. Participants work in places like news organizations, universities, government agencies, courts, law offices, think tanks, nonprofits, and corporations. Within these organizations, there are a variety of important built-in guardrails and quality controls:

“The distinguishing characteristic of journalism is professional editing, and its institutional home is the newsroom, which curates and checks stories, trains reporters, organizes complex investigations, inculcates professional ethics, and more. The distinguishing characteristic of academic research is professional review: a sophisticated, multilayered project distributed among university faculties, journals, credentialing organizations, scholarly conferences, and so on. Modern jurisprudence, policy development, and intelligence collection would be unthinkable without institutions like the courts, law schools, and think tanks, as well as agencies like the Congressional Budget Office, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Central Intelligence Agency, and many others—all staffed and run by elaborately trained people who exchange detailed knowledge across specialized channels, using protocols developed over decades and centuries. To be an accomplished scholar or journalist requires years of training and acculturation, which only institutions can provide.”[24]

As cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach explain in The Knowledge Illusion,[25] human beings live within a community of knowledge. The entirety of human knowledge exists in the larger community, with only a tiny fraction contained within individual people’s minds. Most of us do not know much about how basic everyday things like toilets or zippers truly work,[26] despite how vitally important they are in the modern world. But does this lack of knowledge about myriad aspects of our daily lives hold us back? Not necessarily. In fact, it is an advantage:

“A modern society cannot function without a social division of labor and a reliance on experts, professionals, and intellectuals. . . No one is an expert in everything. No matter what our aspirations, we are bound by the reality of time and the undeniable limits of our talent. We prosper because we specialize, and because we develop both formal and informal mechanisms and practices that allow us to trust each other in those specializations.”[27]

If each of us had to master everything in our environment in order to use it, our environment would have to be necessarily limited and technologically basic. We are able to excel in the modern world not because of our incredibly complex understanding of this world, but because of the community’s collective understanding of it and our reliance on the expertise of others within that community to sustain it.[28]

“Most of us do not know much about how basic everyday things like toilets or zippers truly work, despite how vitally important they are in the modern world. But does this lack of knowledge about myriad aspects of our daily lives hold us back? Not necessarily. In fact, it is an advantage.”

Our ever-evolving and ever-improving understanding of reality is produced by “error-seeking inquirers”[29] working within an impressive structured epistemic system of institutions, resources, rules, values, and norms involving “impersonal critical exchange to seek truth and hold each other accountable for accuracy”:[30]

“Although the network is a human creation and all its participants are people, it far exceeds the comprehension of its creators, and it undergoes a version of natural selection, driven by its own dynamics. The reality-based network behaves like an ecosystem, producing a body of validated propositions whose composition humans can influence but not control. That is objective reality, insofar as we can know reality. The totality of those propositions is as close as we come to objective truth.”[31]

Members of this system have agreed to a social compact[32] assuring they “follow certain rules and forgo certain claims because other group members will do the same.”[33]

The “error seeking” part of this is key. In a court of law, you are innocent until proven guilty. But in our epistemic system, it is useful to think about ideas as being wrong (or at the very least, their veracity unknown) until shown to have significant empirical support. This is the only way it can be. The reverse—that all ideas are true until proven false—would be epistemic chaos, as Guy Elgat points out in discussing whether we are all just brains in vats in some Matrix-style dystopia:

“Should we then suspend our judgment and neither affirm nor deny the belief that we are brains in vats? Is it the most that we can hope for? It is easy to see that this way madness lies, for then we will also have to suspend judgment over an infinite number of equal or worse absurdities. We would thus have to admit that we can’t really say whether unicorns are real or not, whether there is or there is not a troupe of invisible leprechauns dancing the hora behind our backs, or whether or not we are professional assassins whose incriminating memories are erased by our employers, the undetectable aliens from planet Xanadu. This would be utter epistemological bankruptcy.”[34]

All knowledge claims must (a) be falsifiable, (b) be offered up for rigorous critique by the larger community, and (c) withstand attempts at falsification in perpetuity.

Within the epistemic system, there are countless people with countless points of view and interests who are busy at work every day attempting to disprove the ideas that are published in academic journals, newspapers, and other major outlets of information. Ideas are constantly tested against new pieces of evidence and our collective assumptions are adjusted according to how these challenges play out. As Martin Gurri notes, “We can never know with certainty that any proposition is right. We can only try to show that so far, it hasn’t been proven wrong.”[35]

Participants in the epistemic system have voluntarily plugged themselves into a decentralized yet organized network of (largely professional, trained/credentialed, experienced, specialized, and expert)[36] colleagues with diverse viewpoints[37] who read the work of others and then build upon it using acceptable, rigorous, and reproduceable methods. Participants share their methods and results with, and justify their interpretations of their findings to, the larger epistemic community so that it may critically evaluate their work. Findings are checked against existing information and alternative explanations in an objective and dispassionate manner[38]—while many participants are decidedly not objective and dispassionate, these are attributes of the system as a whole (when it is working properly) despite the failings of individuals within it. Outside evaluators act as devil’s advocates who attempt to find shortcomings in the findings. System incentives tend to operate in such a manner that competing researchers or journalists are promised career gains when they show that a prevailing claim is wrong and that their work is actually more accurate. Others will try to replicate findings which challenge major preexisting understandings—bias may crop up in one person’s work, but subjecting the findings to scrutiny by several other qualified people with varying viewpoints and interests should reduce the impact of any one individual’s biases on the overall process:

“One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for people’s natural inclinations. In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward.”[39]

As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explain:

“Each scholar suffers from confirmation bias—the tendency to search vigorously for evidence that confirms what one already believes. One of the most brilliant features of universities is that, when they are working properly, they are communities of scholars who cancel out one another’s confirmation biases. Even if professors often cannot see the flaws in their own arguments, other professors and students do them the favor of finding such flaws. The community of scholars then judges which ideas survive the debate. We can call this process institutionalized disconfirmation. The institution (the academy as a whole, or a discipline, such as political science) guarantees that every statement offered as a research finding—and certainly every peer-reviewed article—has survived a process of challenge and vetting. That is no guarantee that it is true, but it is a reason to think that the statement is likely to be more reliable than alternative statements made by partisan think tanks, corporate marketers, or your opinionated uncle. It is only because of institutionalized disconfirmation that universities and groups of scholars can claim some authority to be arbiters of factual questions.”[40]

Defining reality is not an endpoint but a constant process—propositions, tests, findings, challenges and critiques from the community, refined propositions and better testing in response to critiques, and on and on for eternity.  

In the epistemic system, truth and reality are produced socially and collectively. The goal is to continuously stimulate as many new propositions as possible and then submit them to rigorous and systematic criticism in order to attempt to disconfirm them—knowing that truly valuable propositions will withstand even the most rigorous scrutiny. Members aim to mistrust their senses, avoid certitude, and skeptically interrogate sacred values and beliefs (including those of the groups to which they belong). This is an open, public, and “social process of continuously comparing notes and spotting errors and proposing solutions.”[41] Members should define what they know, and just as importantly, what they do not know.[42] Within this community, evaluation/disagreement/criticism/correction are expected and necessary.[43] Any proposition may be wrong and participants should expect intense scrutiny of their work, the point of which is to help identify both strengths as well as errors. While all people (including even the best researchers) have biases, the collective production of knowledge by a global community of scholars helps keep much of it in check. Strengths and errors identified in people’s work provide lessons that are integrated into the existing literature, a body of knowledge that is now larger, more accurate, and more helpful to the world:

“[A] hypothesis passes through one screen after another: testing, editing, peer review, conference presentation, publication, and then—for the lucky few ideas deemed important—citation or replication. . . [A]fter a process which can take years or even decades, a kind of social valve admits the surviving propositions into the canon of knowledge by granting them prestige and recognition, indicated with designations like ‘generally accepted’ or ‘well confirmed.’”[44]

There are multiple layers of quality control and accountability, from standardized credentialing processes, to internalized professional ethics which guide one’s work, to peer review, to the expectation of transparency regarding one’s methods (and increasingly their data, too), to dissemination of one’s work to the larger community of experts for critiques and attempted replication, to sanctions by professional associations for misconduct, to name a few.[45]  

In the epistemic system, authority rests not with individual people but with propositions that the larger community has validated:

“It is not acceptable for a scholar to say, ‘You have shown me convincing evidence that my claim is wrong, but I still feel that my claim is right, so I’m sticking with it.’ When scholars cannot rebut or reconcile disconfirming evidence, they must drop their claims or else lose the respect of their colleagues. As scholars challenge one another within a community that shares norms of evidence and argumentation and that holds one another accountable for good reasoning, claims get refined, theories gain nuance, and our understanding of truth advances.”[46]

Even dominant propositions are always assumed to be imperfect, provisional, and tentative—the weight of the empirical evidence at any given moment can change in the future as new evidence emerges.

The network of knowledge-producing institutions within our modern epistemic system is something to behold, unimaginable to our ancestors. The advances taking place in areas such as science, technology, and medicine are enormous. And there are more high-quality news and information outlets than ever before. People from different historical eras would be awestruck to find out that we have so many high-quality sources of information available to us at all times in our pockets.

Of course, our epistemic system regularly gets things wrong. Mistakes are frequently made. Peer review will sometimes fail. Journals will sometimes publish work that is not at all rigorous. News outlets get stories wrong. Findings that cannot be reproduced are sometimes accepted as settled fact for decades. Many participants fail to meet high standards on a regular basis. Some frequently violate established norms. There are members who are very bad at their jobs and use flawed methods. Some let their biases pollute their work or their evaluation of others’ work. Some participants commit outright fraud. Others kill important lines of inquiry for unethical reasons. Some will intentionally mask their partisanship or self-interest in order to engineer outcomes that they favor. Many make claims far greater than the empirical evidence warrants—and some make claims diametrically opposed to the best available evidence. Some attack researchers whose findings make them uncomfortable.

All of these things are true, yet on the whole, the modern epistemic system gets it right at a far greater rate than any alternative way of knowing. Whatever mistakes are being made at the current moment, one can be assured that we are closer to “the truth” and “reality” now than we were 50 years ago (and they were closer than those 50 years before them and so on). Our understanding of reality at any given moment is always imperfect, always provisional, and always tentative. It can and will change in the future as more information becomes available. We keep working, always inching closer and closer to the truth, year after year after year.

The modern epistemic system, with its “open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error seeking social network,” is “the only legitimate validator of knowledge”:

“Other communities, of course, can do all kinds of other things. But they cannot make social decisions about objective reality. . . [This assertion] goes down very badly with lots of people and communities who feel ignored or oppressed by the Constitution of Knowledge: creationists, Christian Scientists, homeopaths, astrologists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, birthers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, political partisans, QAnon followers, and adherents of any number of other belief systems and religions. It also sits uncomfortably with the populist and dogmatic tempers of our time.”[47]

The system’s logic and structure ensures that, even though mistakes are made, the larger system will eventually identify, correct, and learn from these mistakes:

“The advantage of the reality-based community is not that it catches every error immediately, but that it catches most errors eventually, and many errors very quickly. No other regime can make that claim, or come anywhere close.”[48]

The modern epistemic system’s track record is unmatched by any other way of knowing.[49] 

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Keep an eye out for the second entry in this series—coming soon from the Connors Newsletter.

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The Connors Forum is an independent entity from the institutions that we partner with. The views expressed in our newsletters and podcasts are those of the individual contributors alone and not of our partner institutions.

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[1] Quote from: Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 2-3.

[2] Quote from: Adrienne LaFrance, “The New Anarchy,” The Atlantic, April 2023, 37.

[3] Quote from: Jonathan Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” The Atlantic, April 11, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/.

[4] Quote from: Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (New York: Anchor Books, 2020), 113.

[5] Quote from: Tom Nichols, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 87.

[6] Quote from: Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (San Francisco, CA: Stripe Press, 2018), 328.

[7] Quote from: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 240-241.

[8] Jonathan Rauch, “The Constitution of Knowledge,” National Affairs, Fall 2018, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-constitution-of-knowledge.

[9] Alison Durkee, “Republicans Increasingly Realize There’s No Evidence Of Election Fraud—But Most Still Think 2020 Election Was Stolen Anyway, Poll Finds,” Forbes, March 14, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/03/14/republicans-increasingly-realize-theres-no-evidence-of-election-fraud-but-most-still-think-2020-election-was-stolen-anyway-poll-finds/?sh=113c205628ec.

[10] Isaac Saul, “Not Rigged! How We Know Recent Elections Are Not Fraudulent,” Skeptic Magazine, November 1, 2022, https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/not-rigged-how-we-know-recent-elections-not-fraudulent/.

[11] Morgan Chalfant, “Trump: ‘The Only Way We’re Going to Lose This Election Is If the Election Is Rigged,’” The Hill, August 17, 2020, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/512424-trump-the-only-way-we-are-going-to-lose-this-election-is-if-the/.

[12] Aja Romano, “J.K. Rowling’s Transphobia: A History,” Vox, March 3, 2023, https://www.vox.com/culture/23622610/jk-rowling-transphobic-statements-timeline-history-controversy.

[13] Robert Lynch, “From Sex To Gender: The Modern Dismissal of Biology,” Skeptic Magazine, April 7, 2023, https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/from-sex-to-gender-modern-dismissal-of-biology/.

[14] Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 162.

[15] As naïve as it may sound now, many thought the internet and social media would reduce misinformation and disinformation, not unleash it. As Jonathan Haidt explains: “In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry? What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?” And as Tom Nichols writes: “Years of better education, increased access to data, the explosion of social media, and lowered barriers of entry into the public arena were supposed to improve our abilities to deliberate and decide. Instead, these advances seem to have made all of this worse rather than better.” Jonathan Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” The Atlantic, April 11, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/. Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 40.

[16] Frum posted this on Twitter on February 13, 2020:

https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1228009917682012160.

[17] Jonathan Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” The Atlantic, April 11, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/.

[18] “[W]e need an elite consensus, and hopefully also something approaching a public consensus, on the method of validating propositions. We needn't and can't all agree that the same things are true, but a critical mass needs to agree on what it is we do that distinguishes truth from falsehood, and more important, on who does it.” Jonathan Rauch, “The Constitution of Knowledge,” National Affairs, Fall 2018, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-constitution-of-knowledge.

[19] “What is often called the marketplace of ideas would be more accurately described as a marketplace of persuasion, because the only way to establish knowledge is to convince others you are right.” Jonathan Rauch, “The Constitution of Knowledge,” National Affairs, Fall 2018, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-constitution-of-knowledge.

[20] “Who can be trusted to resolve questions about objective truth? The best answer turns out to be no one in particular. The greatest of human social networks was born centuries ago. . . a decentralized, globe-spanning community of critical testers who hunt for each other's errors. In other words, they outsourced objectivity to a social network. . . Though nowhere encoded in law, the constitution of knowledge has its own equivalents of checks and balances (peer review and replication), separation of powers (specialization), governing institutions (scientific societies and professional bodies), voting (citations and confirmations), and civic virtues (submit your beliefs for checking if you want to be taken seriously).” Jonathan Rauch, “The Constitution of Knowledge,” National Affairs, Fall 2018, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-constitution-of-knowledge.

[21] Rules from: Jonathan Rauch, “The Constitution of Knowledge,” National Affairs, Fall 2018, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-constitution-of-knowledge.

[22] Jonathan Rauch, “The Constitution of Knowledge,” National Affairs, Fall 2018, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-constitution-of-knowledge.

[23] Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 87.

[24] Jonathan Rauch, “The Constitution of Knowledge,” National Affairs, Fall 2018, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-constitution-of-knowledge.

[25] Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017).

[26] Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017).

[27] Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 14.

[28] Elizabeth Kolbert, “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds,” The New Yorker, February 19, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds.

[29] Jonathan Rauch: “The great advantage of scientific investigation is not that it frames hypotheses and then tries to confirm them (everyone does that), but that it floats and falsifies hypotheses on an industrial scale, something no other system can do.” Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 58.

[30] Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 15.

[31] Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 87.

[32] In the current environment not everybody in the epistemic system is acting honorably: “[I]t is especially important to remember: politicizing an academic discipline like sociology or literary criticism, or spreading propaganda to discredit and drown out fact-based journalism, or shading an intelligence assessment to please a president, or lying to a judge: each of those is every bit as much an attack on the Constitution of Knowledge as is, say, banning the teaching of evolution or propagating fake science about vaccines. The reality-based community is defined not by its particular disciplines or findings but by its rules and values, and an attack on those rules and values in any one part of the community is an attack on them in every part.” Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 99-100.

[33] Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 15-16.

[34] Guy Elgat, “‘Prove that I am Wrong!’ What QAnon, Descartes, and Brains in Vats Have in Common,” Skeptic Magazine, https://pocketmags.com/skeptic-magazine/244.

[35] Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (San Francisco, CA: Stripe Press, 2018), 266.

[36] “Creating knowledge is inherently a professionalized and structured affair. Whether you are engaged in bench chemistry, daily journalism, or intelligence analysis, testing hypotheses requires time, money, skill, expertise, and intricate social interaction. . . [A]t the core of the constitution of knowledge, by its very nature, are professional networks.” Jonathan Rauch, “The Constitution of Knowledge,” National Affairs, Fall 2018, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-constitution-of-knowledge.

[37] Helen E. Longino argued that, “[T]he greater the number of different points of view included in a given community, the more likely it is that [the community’s] scientific practice will be objective.” Jonathan Rauch argues that, “[W]hen we encounter an unwelcome and even repugnant new idea, the right question to ask is ‘What can I learn from this?’ rather than ‘How can I get rid of this?’” From: Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 194, 198.

[38] And ideally a civil manner, critiquing the proposition, not its proponent.

[39] Elizabeth Kolbert, “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds,” The New Yorker, February 19, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds.

[40] Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (London: Penguin Books, 2018), 109.

[41] Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 93.

[42] William Feather wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” From David Dunning, “We Are All Confident Idiots,” Pacific Standard, October 27, 2014, https://psmag.com/social-justice/confident-idiots-92793.

[43] Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 263.

[44] Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 95.

[45] “[T]hink of the constitution of knowledge as a funnel. At the wide end, millions of people float millions of hypotheses every day. Only an infinitesimal fraction of new ideas will be proven true. To find them, we run the hypotheses through a massive, socially distributed error-finding process. Only a tiny few make it to the narrow end of the funnel. There, often years later, a kind of social valve—call it prestige and recognition—admits the surviving propositions into the canon of knowledge.” Jonathan Rauch, “The Constitution of Knowledge,” National Affairs, Fall 2018, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-constitution-of-knowledge.

[46] Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (London: Penguin Books, 2018), 39-40.

[47] Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 87.

[48] Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 75.

[49] Tom Nichols notes that, “[E]xperts being wrong on occasion about certain issues is not the same thing as experts being wrong consistently on everything. The fact of the matter is that experts are more often right than wrong, especially on essential matters of fact. And yet the public constantly searches for the loopholes in expert knowledge that will allow them to disregard all expert advice they don’t like. . . No one is arguing. . . that experts can’t be wrong. . . the point is that they are less likely to be wrong than nonexperts.” Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 23-24.