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What do you do with disinformation when it's an emergency, but you live in a democracy that supposedly values debate and dissent? More to the point, without dissent and debate, how do you know what's disinformation and what isn't?
Complex issues that should invite thoughtful, vigorous debate are instead instantly triaged into required and forbidden views. Dissenting voices get deplatformed, demonetized, and decertified. Even Senate hearings have been taken off YouTube. Goodbye hypotheses, data, forensic techniques, and peer review. Hello "On Narrative" (with us, intelligent, good, sane) and "Off Narrative" (against us, evil, stupid, mad).
What is going on here? Do we have a disinformation crisis, or a censorship crisis?
Stop Me If I Say Something Crazy: Disinformation and Dissent in the Post-Truth World playfully analyzes a few controversial issues featuring an official narrative so tightly woven into the common-sense fabric of society that dissent is branded as only for morons and lunatics. But is that really the case?
What makes these issues analyzable is that they are based on science. We don't need to be subject experts to know that science values things like transparency, competing hypotheses, and independent peer review. We know that it isn't supposed to resort to ad hominem attacks and the silencing of challengers. Therefore we can proceed, not by struggling with biochemistry or physics, but by examining adherence - or lack thereof - to the well-known principles of the scientific process. If we can find clear breaches of those standards, then we have something more tangible to grasp than the contested murk of opinions, values, and ideological preferences. Scientific misconduct gives us a firm basis for evaluating the legitimacy of the associated norms and taboos.
In short: Truth may fail, but lies leave a trail.
Stop Me If I Say Something Crazy is as funny as it is fearless as it promotes what Bertrand Russell called "critical undogmatic receptiveness" - the only way to navigate the minefield of nonsense and propaganda that pervades our information space
