Dune is the greatest sci-fi novel of all time. An opening scene sees the hero tested with the gom jabbar, to see if he’s a rational “human” or an unthinking animal. It’s a good analogy for modern social-media, where people behave more according to instinct than reason.
Yes, yes, I’m obsessing too much over a pop culture reference, pretending it represents some deep philosophical thought. I sound a lot like the crazies that have adopted the Red Pill from The Matrix, or the nerds who have adopted 42 as the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
But I have reasons.
Musk is a famous sci-fi geek. From electric cars to underground tunnels to rockets, he has been about bringing the sci-fi of his youth into existence. He’s been fabulously successful at this. Since his world view comes form sci-fi, let’s use it. Let’s express the problem in terms he can understand.
I propose the following test of a rational human being:
Rising above the fray
Minimal Education
Clear thesis statements
Support arguments with specifics
I’m just describing high-school debate here. My gom jabbar standard is simply whether you can engage in rational conversation as well as a teenager on the debate team. It’s an incredibly low bar to clear.
And it’s a bar Musk fails to clear.
Rising above the fray
There are videos [*][*] showing dogs viciously barking at each other on opposing sides of a gate. But when the gate is opened, the dogs stand back, calming down, unwilling to get into a physical fight. When the gate is closed, they resume their vicious barking.
We humans stand above this canine fray. We can see how they are just responding to instinct. The first test of humanity is whether you can likewise stand above the fray of human disputes, whether you can dispassionately examine the political debates that divide us.
This is the fundamental principle of high-school debate. They often include political topics like “Should Roe v Wade be repealed?”. Most people have conviction that one or the other side is obviously true, and the opposing side is obviously false. They think the winning strategy in such situations, therefore, is to choose the right side, and you’ll always win the debate.
But that’s not how high-school debate competitions work. You don’t pick a side you want to debate. They pick your side for you. To win a debate contest, you’ll have to debate both sides equally. You have to win the argument regardless which side you are assigned. There are multiple rounds in the competition, as your team competes against others. You’ll have to defeat one team taking one side in the debate, then turn around and defeat your next opponent arguing the other side.
It’s not something most people can do. Not only can then not argue the opposing side, they can’t even describe the opposing side in neutral terms. Such descriptions would be prejudiced, like “they want to kill babies” or “they hate women”. They struggle even for the most meaningless debates, like whether Batman could kill Superman in a fight. They can do it even less when given emotionally charged political debates like abortion. climate change, immigration, LGBT issues, and so on.
Rational humans will have opinions on these issues, of course. They will privately take sides. The test is whether they can still rise above the fray and look at them analytically rather than emotionally.
Musk is failing at this — egregiously. Take for example his tweets on George Soros.
This is silly. Soros doesn’t hate humanity. Soros’s politics aren’t extreme. From a U.S.-centric point of view, he appears to support “progressive” politics, but these are considered normal for Europe. Elsewhere in the world, Soros promotes “classically liberal” policies, including fighting government corruption and championing “free-speech”. Soros’s effort defending speech against corrupt governments around the world have been more consequential than Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
I, like Musk, oppose the Soros-funded CAP political agenda. The difference is that I can rise above the fray.
The thing about Soros is that he has a long term strategy to reach his goals. Musk appears to have none. Musk just flits around with no plan.
In a recent interview, Musk defended his political tweets were hurting Tesla’s stock price. He claimed “I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”. He think this is some virtue, but it’s a failure of the gom jabbar on a couple of levels.
The first failure is that he’s not the owner of Tesla, just its largest shareholder (at around 13%). Tesla isn’t his plaything. As the Chief Executive Officer, he’s got a duty to those shareholders. The word “officer” implies “duty”. Becoming an officer means you willingly take on responsibilities, and that if you don’t want those responsibilities, you don’t accept the role. Officers in the military and of corporation don’t have political opinions, at least not publicly. They’ll certainly make quiet donations to causes and political candidates they prefer, but they’ll never publicly criticize Trump, Soros, Biden, and so on.
In the Dune books, the good guys (the Atreides) are defined by honor and duty. It’s the bad guys (the Harkonnens) who have no sense of duty, who do whatever they want personally, without regards to whom it hurts. Musk driving down the stock price hurts those holding the other 85% of the company. He’s a Harkonnen CEO, not an Atreides CEO.
Musk’s second problem is that he has no strategic vision here. It’s just tactics. He’s like a dog ineffectively barking at the gates with no strategic plan. If Musk doesn’t like Soros’s support of slacking prosecutors, then he should create a foundation that promotes law-and-order prosecutors. Soros only has $20 billion in his foundation, which is much less than the $200 billion drop in Tesla stock price over the last year as Musk has been fruitlessly barking on Twitter. A better strategic view is to stop hurting his brand, raise his stock price, and use that money to champion causes against Soros.
Musk isn’t a charismatic speaker, so he’s not going to exploit demagoguery to lead the masses. He’s not going to be Mau’dib at the head of a fanatical army. Neither is Musk an educated speaker about political topics, his analysis is superficial compared to his deep understanding of electric motors and rocket engines. He’s not going to appeal to intellectual leaders. Neither is Musk an original speaker, he’s just repeating the memes created by charismatic demagogues rather than coming up with his own.
The point is that his tweets aren’t helping any cause. He’s just barking.
If he’s got a strategy here, so far it’s failing. He’s losing influence rather than gaining it — and he’s losing money along the way.
One of Musks feuds is with the mainstream media. The media certainly deserves some criticism. But all of Musk’s criticism comes from being inside the fray, not above it. He can’t see the larger perspective.
There is a well-known cliché that everyone in jail claims to be innocent. Actually, most admit committing the act, it’s just that they believe the system has unfairly treated them. They think the legal system should work differently. Criminals are upset that everyone fails to see things from their point of view.
Musk’s view of the mainstream media comes from the same perspective. Every public figure believes the media mistreats them. They are frustrated that the media doesn’t see things from their own point of view. They believe the system, journalistic principles, should work differently, in ways that benefit them.
CEOs and politicians stop whining like petulant children about this and instead rise of the fray and learn to manipulate the system to their advantage. This is called media training.
Take interviews as an example. The journalist is interviewing you for their reasons. Media training teaches you how to take control of the interview to maximize its benefit to you. It’s like high-school debate where you come prepared. Specifically, you have key messages you want to get across. Whatever questions they ask, you bridge to those messages.
I can’t find it, but there’s a video somewhere on YouTube of Marissa Mayer (former Yahoo CEO) getting some sort of “women in tech” award. When she accepts the award on stage, they do an interview with her. The interview is supposed to be about her, but she makes it an interview about Yahoo, how they are a leader in tech and all that nonsense. First of all, (continuing the conversation above), her duty is always shareholder interests, so nothing is purely about her, it’s always an opportunity to increase shareholder value. Second of all, she rises above the fray here. She’s using the interview to serve her goals — which are the goals of her company.
Musk either hasn’t had media training or ignores it. You can see this in that video with Musk side-by-side with the CEO of T-Mobile. Everything the T-Mobile CEO said was pure media training. He’s even helping Musk along with key messages, like saying how “Starlink is the leader in satellite Internet”. Conversely, Musk gets into tech details that confuse most consumers. He can’t rise above the situation to promote his brand. He’s talking about what excites him personally, rather than paying attention to what excites the audience.
Musk isn’t necessarily wrong. Starlink is so far ahead of the competition it’s silly. He’s not in the same position as T-Mobile, neck-and-neck with competitors, who has to claim they are a “leader” precisely because they aren’t. Whether intentional or not, he’s doing “nerd branding”, getting hard-core nerds on his side, whether it’s 0-60 Plaid numbers, or 350 bar rocket engines, or low-latency satellite Internet. The point is simply that he’s not really rising above the fray.
The book Dune had other examples of this than just the gom jabbar. Consider the banquet when they arrive on the planet. The book describes the event at two levels. At one level is the conflicts among the various factions. The other level is the hero Paul and his mother standing above the fray, analyzing the conflicts. They seek to manipulate those who can’t rise above the fray, or to ally with those who can.
You don’t win by choosing sides. A good example is how the Bene Gesserit in the book have their own goals. They don’t take sides in the conflicts among the great houses. Taking a side means that when the side loses, so do you. Even worse, when that side wins, you still don’t win, because their agenda is to help themselves rather than help you.
It’s like how the environmentalists side with the left-wing while getting very little action on the environment. Left-wing politicians don’t need to do anything more the lip service to get their support. Meanwhile, the left-wing exploits environmentalism for their own ends. Even though Biden’s big spending bill seems to subsidize issues like EVs and solar energy, those benefits are buried by the costs of unionization and trade barriers, his true goals. Making photovoltaic cells 50% more expensive with 10% subsidies does not actually help climate change goals.
When you take a side to pursue your goals, you stop being the one in the driver’s seat. Instead of you using them, it’s now they who are exploiting you. Musk is right in not partnering with the left-wing to promote his electric cars. But he’s a fool to side with the right-wing.
Elon Musk is a goddamn billionaire. He needs to stop getting involved with the petty disputes of the small people. He’s grossly failing the gom jabbar here, unable to rise above the fray.
Minimal Education
In the book Dune, the hero undergoes extensive training, whether it be fighting skills, Bene Gesserit techniques (“fear is the mind killer”), or Mentat techniques. Rationality depends upon knowledge and training.
It’s hard having a rational conversation with the ignorant. Take for example speed-of-light delay and network latency. It’s the defining feature of Starlink’s innovation over the prior generation of satellite Internet. It’s a game changer, literally (it makes online games playable). But Starlink critics just don’t or can’t understand it. This video critical of Starlink is a great example, downplaying the importance of latency.
The problem here is that if people don’t understand latency, and hate Musk, it’s now impossible to educate them on the issue. They aren’t interested in a long explanation of Internet architecture, phased arrays, speed-of-light delays, and orbital mechanics when the goal is weakening their hatred of Musk.
It’s the same in every field: law, economics, business, law enforcement, the military, science, journalism. All these fields have basic principles. Those most ignorant of the principles of a field are those with the loudest opinions. People’s understanding of these fields starts with their opinions, and then working backwards to develop a model of how they think these fields work.
We see this in Elon Musk’s view of the mainstream media and the field of “journalism”. He criticizes mainstream media, but his comments are laughably ignorant of how journalism actually works.
Mainstream media has problems. They have a left-wing bias. They often make mistakes. The biggest mainstream outlets like the New York Times sometimes violate journalistic ethics with impunity. But these flaws have to be described in terms of how journalism works, from knowledge, not from a standpoint of ignorance.
An example of this is when Musk sent “on background” or “off the record” comments to a journalist, who then published them. Musk then claimed this was a violation of journalism ethics. “Everyone knows” that journalists are supposed to protect the anonymity of their sources.
The opposite is true. What “everyone knows” is wrong.
As the Society of Professional Journalists describes, anonymous sources are supposed to be rare. Anonymity should only be promised when there’s no other way to tell a story, such as whistleblower uncovering wrongdoing afraid of retaliation. Otherwise, the journalist’s job is to name sources, to hold them accountable.
You can’t force anonymity from a journalist, such as emails claiming to be “on background” or “off-the-record”. If the journalist hasn’t promised anonymity, it’s not anonymous, and the journalist will probably name the source. You can ask for anonymity, but the journalist doesn’t have to grant it.
Of course, if the journalist has promised anonymity then revealed a source, they should keep that promise, but that’s not what happened here, where the journalist made no such promises. What happened where is that the source demanded anonymity.
This is how we know something is wrong with the NYTimes — that they are too willing to keep sources anonymous. They play the “Washington Game”, citing anonymous sources to spew claims with no accountability. In exchange the journalist gets access, so that when the next major story breaks, they can quote the official on the record.
Here’s an example of this Washington Game, where the NYTimes quotes anonymous “federal officials”. There’s absolutely no reason in that story to keep their identities anonymous. This isn’t a whistleblower afraid for their jobs. It’s an official leak, where the administration wants people to believe this, but aren’t willing to be held accountable for the claim. Or it’s infighting within the administration, where such a leak serves one side. In such stories, the anonymous “federal official” is sometimes the President themself, or their press secretary. It’s a clear violation of journalistic ethics by the NYTimes, but everyone just shrugs their shoulders and goes along with the game. So what? The NYTimes is still the “paper of record” because when other events happen, they have the only quotes on-the-record from these officials.
There are two points here.
The first is that when Elon Musk believes the journalist has committed an ethical failure, there’s no way of convincing him otherwise. Even when you teach journalism ethics, he’ll just claim journalism ethics are wrong. The lack of basic understanding of journalism makes rational debate impossible.
The second point is that news sites like the NYTimes does indeed have important journalistic failures that can be described by journalistic principles. We can show problems with the mainstream media from an educated perspective. But since Musk’s criticism are uneducated, nobody takes him seriously.
We see the same effect with science in regards to the pandemic. We have rational reasons to debate government mandates, but these debates go off the rales because people are just too ignorant. The right-wing was egregiously anti-science with people refusing to be vaccinated. But the left-wing wasn’t really any better, insisting everyone be vaccinated, against their will if necessary. The science is in the middle between these two positions, vaccines help people individually, but don’t appear to do much against transmission. It’s a personal good, but not a community good. The science doesn’t support mandates.
Musk rightly identifies that Twitter improperly censored what they claimed was “misinformation” about such mandates. Employees were motivated by their ignorant views of science rather than knowing what the science actually said. It might’ve been a good moderation policy to suppress the crazies claiming falsehoods to discourage people from personally getting a vaccine that would help them. But the pre-Musk Twitter took this too far and censored legitimate debates about mandates.
While a minimal amount of education is necessary for rational debate, extensive expertise isn’t necessary — or even helpful. At some point, experts become corrupt and hidebound. Appeal-to-authority, “trust me because I’m an expert”, is a logical fallacy.
A perfect example of this is Bob Lutz, a former top executive at all three American car makers. Over the past decade, he’s written many insightful and powerful articles explaining why Tesla won’t succeed. They are all great articles and we can learn a lot from them.
And, of course, they are all wrong. Tesla has succeeded precisely because it violated Lutz’s principles, like avoiding dealerships. The rest of the industry is trying to following Tesla’s on this, avoiding dealers for electric cars.
In other words, by “ignorance” I don’t demand that everyone be an expert on every field. I’m instead insisting that there’s some minimal level of education necessary to have a reasonable discussion.
This problem of “too ignorant to talk to” applies not only to general fields (science, journalism, economics, law, etc.) but also specialty issues, like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve or SPR. This is just a narrow subject that you can’t possibly be expected to know anything about it before it hits the news and people start forming opinions. Instead, it’s a matter of how you approach the topic, that you simply don’t parrot any “expert” who appears to agree with your opinions.
The SPR became a hot topic when Biden release some oil from the reserve and sold it to the Chinese. Biden’s adversaries accused Biden of selling out the lifeblood of our country to our adversary, and weakening our military. This is just exploiting people’s misunderstanding about the strategic reserve and oil markets in general. The SPR has nothing to do with the military, and was designed to be used exactly as Biden used it — even if the oil ends up in China’s hands.
A common misconception is that the SPR is for the military, which is why anti-Biden “experts” have claimed Biden’s actions hurt the military. In fact, the SPR has nothing to do with the military — the military has its own contingency plans. It’s easier for an adversary to take out all the 147 refineries or the 10 locations of strategic reserves than it is to disrupt production from 916,934 active oil wells in the United States.
Thus, the utility of the SPR is near zero to the military. It’s the refineries that are most vulnerable to attack, which the SPR doesn’t help against. Conversely, oil production is far too dispersed. The only easy target is the SPR itself.
One of the things I found fascinating is the inability to point to the Wikipedia page on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to debunk this specific misconception. Since the SPR has nothing to do with the military, the Wikipedia page doesn’t mention it. But neither does it debunk this misconception. While I read the page as confirming my world view, the ignorant read it as confirming theirs. The article never actually says the SPR isn’t for the military. This demonstrates how when you are determined to be uneducated about a topic, you can resist becoming educated.
You can’t possibly learn “enough not to be ignorant” about every specialty subject in the world, there are too many. Instead, to pass the gom jabbar, you need the humility to accept that you are ignorant, that maybe the “obvious” things you believe aren’t really true, and the ability to change your worldview. You need to not twist education to fit your desired result.
Musk seems to have this flexibility, to learn topics when he’s motivated. But he appears to share the same demotivation to fix ignorance, expressing misconceptions about a wide variety of topics, such from the oil industry to how journalists report breaking stories.
Clear thesis statement
People struggle to clearly say what they mean. It’s especially difficult when they are discussing something they don’t understand.
In high-school debate, a match starts with each side making a clear argument that they will then have to defend. One side might start with something like “Government needs to tax carbon because X, Y, and Z”. That side will then have to defend their points from challenges by the opposing side.
When people aren’t prepared to defend their statements, they shift to some other strategy. One is to make their statements deliberately vague. Another is to declare some moral high-ground, where the facts don’t actually matter. Yet another strategy is to punt, instead of making argument themselves, they point to somebody else making an argument in a video, podcast, or blogpost.
For example, the UFO crazies point to a smudge on a photograph and say “Explain this!!!!”. This isn’t a clear thesis statement.
Explain what, exactly? The above picture comes from an infrared video from a military jet. But that’s obviously not what they mean by “explain”. They probably mean something dealing with space aliens. It’s probably from a misunderstanding of parallax, exposure, optics, or gimbals. Or maybe the actual claim isn’t what we see in the video but what we hear — the pilots talking on the radio expressing confusion.
The point is that “explain this” isn’t a clear thesis statement. A clear statement would be something like “we clearly see the object rotate in a way impossible with human technology”.
In the debate over space alien UFOs, we see one side making clear thesis statements, while the other side rarely does. With our gom jabbar, it’s easy to see which of the sides is more rational.
Unclear thesis statements are often fancy. Search on Twitter for “133 million voters”, where people are implying there were more votes than voters in the 2020 election, and hence the election was stolen. But they don’t say it this clearly, but instead wrap it up in some fancy argument, usually requiring some math.
If there were more votes than voters, this would be a winning argument if stated clearly. All they need to do is make a solid thesis statement and defend it. Just tweet “we know the election was robbed because there were 160 million votes but only 133 million voters”, then cite sources.
The problem is that there were 209 million active voters, they don’t have a source for “133 million voters”, it’s just a number they made up. A clear thesis statement won’t succeed when it’s clearly wrong. Thus, the fancy statements, the less tenable the claim, the harder it becomes to refute.
Again, we have a gom jabbar that can identify which is the rational side: it’s the side making clear thesis statements, not fancy circumlocutions.
An even better way to avoid debate is by telling people to go watch a video, listen to a podcast, or read a blogpost that makes the argument for them: “Just go watch/listen/read that thing, in its entirety, then you’ll understand”. In most cases, they can’t be more specific than that. When pressed, they can’t summarize in their own words the argument the video/podcast/blogpost makes. They can’t point to a timestamp in the video/audio or page in the blogpost where the salient points are made.
A good example is people pointing you to “2000 Mules”. It’s a movie claiming a big “ballot harvesting” conspiracy, detected by buying geolocation tracking from data brokers, showing people visiting ballot dropboxes more than once during the 2020 election.
The problem is the movie doesn’t show what it claims. It never shows the geolocation data, only artistic recreations of what it might look like. It never shows a single “mule” dropping off ballots more than once. It never showed any evidence.
The point is that you (the rational side) will see something very different than they do (the believer side). Rational debate won’t be possible. Since they couldn’t make a clear summary of the movie before you watched it, they aren’t going to be able to discuss afterwards with you. Their only response is to question whether you really watched it.
The gom jabbar test here isn’t simply whether they are rational here, but whether rational discussion is possible. They are hoping you’ll be won over the say way they were, but can’t discuss it.
The same applies to reading thesis statements as writing them. The test is when a clear thesis statement is made, whether the opposing side can hear what was said.
For example, Bret Stephens wrote an op-ed criticizing the absolute certainty of climate change. He says:
Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.
It’s a straightforward, clear thesis statement, but his critics ignored it. Instead, they accused him of being a “science denier”. It’s like when Martin Luther questioned Catholic orthodoxy like “indulgences”, critics ignored his points and called him a “heretic” or “atheist” or “satanist”. They are ignoring the text of what he writes and instead read subtext, what they think he really meant.
To some extent, clearly getting to the point requires training. It’s not an innate skill. It’s a big part of law and journalist training. You can see this in every news story, the first paragraph gets to the point, telling you what’s in the rest of the story. The body of the story is made with the same clarity, where each statement made is clear and to the point, not talking around it. This isn’t how people write naturally, it has to be taught.
Whatever criticisms Musk might have for the NYTimes, the fact is that they still can make a clear thesis statement at the start of every story, and thus pass the gom jabbar test of rational humanity. You can’t discuss the stories. In contrast, Musk struggles to make clear statements, and supports conspiracy-theorists who can’t. Musk isn’t wholly irrational, he makes clear statements in subjects he understands, like electric cars and rocket engines. It’s just that his tweets on other subjects are less clear.
In high-school debate, clarity of statements is one of the first things you are judged upon, as well as correctly interpreting the opposing side’s statements. In a debate over such topics as “Do politicians exaggerate climate change?”, taking umbrage calling the opposing side a “climate denier” isn’t going to work.
Support arguments with specifics
The last section ends with describing high school debate class, that you can’t have a rational debate unless both sides can make coherent thesis statements. That’s the first requirement, the second requirement is supporting those arguments with specific, citing facts and sources.
This is the basis of “rational-verse”, the universe of lawyers, journalists, scientists, and Wikipedia articles. The above XKCD cartoon is joking applying the standard used by Wikipedia to statements made by a politician. Politicians are the opposite of rational, making statements free from any citable support. We don’t even demand such rigor from politicians, long ago having given up holding them accountable for their statements.
The problem with the irrational is that it doesn’t even occur to them that specifics might be necessary. For example, in those “more votes than voters” claims, they never cite where they got their numbers. I’m confident with such words as “never” because if they ever did cite good sources, it would be winning argument. Whether at the national, state, or county level, if they can cite just one location where there were more votes than voters, it would be a big deal and a national story. When you don’t have a winning argument is when you avoid citing sources.
To a certain extent, there’s laziness involved. We all have these conversations where we hang around in bar where a friend is expounding about an unfamiliar topic, or a crazy uncle (that’s usually my roll) at Thanksgiving Dinner going off on some tangent. Unlike high school debate, we haven’t prepared ahead of time by researching the topic. We don’t have notecards at our fingertips with facts and sources.
Instead, all we have are half-remembered things we heard. We may have often heard “133 million registered voters” and thus use it as the basis of our argument. Even if we aren’t tracking down the source, we are confident that somebody at some point must have, otherwise we wouldn’t keep hearing the number. Most such facts are just memes. They keep getting passed because everyone makes the same assumption, that somebody somewhere has fact-checked it.
Fact-checkers do check such memes. If it’s a meme you’ve frequently heard, then it’s almost certain a fact-checker has looked at it, where you can either confirm or refute it. Just google “fact check” in front of the meme. For example, Reuters and Associated Press have debunked that “133 million voters” numbers. Again, it doesn’t occur to people to google “fact check xxxx” for any meme they’ve heard.
This doesn’t mean fact-checkers are always right. It means they are rational. They cite support for all their claims, so you can quickly identify their failures. When disagreeing with a fact-checker, you can have a rational back-and-forth discussion.
I’m a fact-checker. I have criticisms for other fact-checkers, even those like Reuters or AP that have excellent reputations. They often make the mistake of “appeal to authority” when the question is that the authorities aren’t truthful. In other words, when addressing the claim of a CDC cover-up, you wouldn’t quote the CDC spokesperson saying “completely false”. Or if you think there’s been massive election fraud committed by election authorities, you can’t cite election authorities as debunking such claims.
The difference here is that the fact-checkers cited something — even when they cite bad sources. We can debate them and point to the problem. If the fact-checkers are wrong about the EAP claiming 209 million active voters, for example, we can claim it’s wrong by citing a better source. We can’t have a rational debate when somebody claims “133 million voters” with no source for that number.
During the pandemic, the left-wing simply cited “the science”, generically rather than specifics. The truth is that the science never knew much. About the only thing we really knew is that the mRNA vaccines have saved millions of individual lives. But there was never good science that vaccines would have much impact on transmission (stopping sickness isn’t the same as stopping transmission), or that masks would do much either. Even Fauci has admitted this recently: masks and vaccines are good for individuals, but mandates have only a small marginal impact. Those citing “science” justifying mandates were just as wrong as the crazies who reject science altogether.
At one point the CDC posted this false information to their website. The crazies were claiming the vaccines entered the nucleus and changed the DNA, so the CDC claimed the vaccines don’t “enter the nucleus”.
It’s factually wrong. The viral vector covid vaccines (AstraZeneca, J&J) certainly do “enter the nucleus”, and the latest page has fixed the error, admitting the viral vector DNA enters the nucleus.
But you can’t debate this with those who claim to follow the science. They have no understanding of the science. It’s like God. People assume God agrees with their opinions, and left-wingers assume Science (pbuh) agrees with their political policies.
The point is that debate requires specifics, citing support for the arguments you make. Even when those claims are wrong, they are still rational. They can be refuted with better specifics, citing better sources.
Twitter Community Notes
Twitter’s Community Notes features describe many of the same principles here. People are asked to rate the community notes with the following dialog box:
This isn’t simply a measure of a high-quality note attached to a tweet, but could also be treated as a gom jabbar test for any tweet.
Take for example the following tweet by Musk that’s in response to this news story:
Apply the above criteria to the story. Is it easy to understand (clear thesis statement)? Does is cite high-quality sources? Does it provide important context? Does it use neutral/unbiased language?
Now let’s apply the criteria to Musk’s tweet. First of all, it does it directly address the story’s claims? No, he doesn’t. The story claims Musk’s twitter complies more than old twitter to censorship demands. Musk ignores this. He doesn’t make a clear thesis statement, but asks a question. He provides no context. His language is biased.
He’s a billionaire. He can easily hire somebody in cases like this to rebut with a high-quality tweet that passed the gom jabbar.
Conclusion
This post is intended to be in sci-fi terms that Musk can understand. I could describe this in terms of critical-thinking or high-school debate instead.
Musk fails this test, while many of his opponents (like the NYTimes) pass the test. I say this even though I’m more on Musk’s side than I am on the NYTimes side, in general. Musk isn’t behaving rational according to this test, and promotes those who are even less rational on his Twitter.