Heads, I win. Tails, you lose

when only experts can write (and rewrite) the gospel of truth

by Ann Tomoko Rosen (originally published on Substack)

It turns out you can’t be right before a consensus comes to your conclusion on its own. As a dissenting voice, you will likely remain a conspiracy theorist until the “experts” come around. And even then you will be wrong. Because, even if you reach an accurate understanding first, you did it via misinformation and dangerous wrongthink.

American philosopher Sam Harris explains:

I mean if you’re going to go against the consensus of the people who have taken the time to understand a certain domain of fact, and you live outside that domain as a non-expert… you know… the house is usually gonna win…

.. So let’s say 5 years from now we learn that ivermectin is actually perfect….and what’s more the vaccines, they’re way more dangerous than anyone thought and you don’t want any of that mRNA stuff in you… Bret (Weinstein) he was right about everything.

Will he be vindicated?

Not really, because… his reasons for thinking what he was thinking at the time were insufficient. His conviction at the time was bizarre. I mean he literally called the vaccine the crime of the century and predicted that millions of people are gonna die from it.

If millions of people do die from it, it’s still true that at the time he said that, it was a deranged and deranging claim. It made absolutely no sense. (emphasis mine)

I showed the clip to my teenage daughter and she said, “That’s like saying slavery was actually ok until everyone agreed that it wasn’t.”

Kinda.

Consider the accepted discourse from 2 years ago. Consider the tone of that discourse.

Remember when Gavin Newsom shamed dissenting voices, vaccine refusers and a “right wing echo chamber” for perpetuating misinformation for putting everyone’s lives at risk?

We are exhausted by the ideological prism that too many Americans are living under.

We’re exhausted by the Ron Johnsons and the Tucker Carlsons. We’re exhausted by the Margie Taylor Greens. We’re exhausted by the right wing echo chamber that has been perpetuating misinformation around the vaccine and its efficacy and safety. We’re exhausted by the politicalization of this pandemic and that includes mask-wearing that has been equated to the Holocaust. It’s disgraceful. It’s unconstitutio… it’s unconscionable.. and it needs to be called out…

…It’s a choice to live with this virus. And with all due respect, you don’t have the choice to go out and drink and drive and put everybody else’s lives at risk. That’s the equivalent of this moment with the deadliness and efficiency of this Delta virus.

You’re putting other people’s, innocent people’s lives at risk. You’re putting businesses at risk. Your putting at risk the ability to educate our kids by getting them back in person full-time for in person instruction. No more Zoom schools. We want to keep our economy moving. We want our small businesses on their feet.

Your choice not to get vaccinated and to listen to these pundits that are profiteering of this misinformation – intentionally misinforming you – comes at a real societal cost.

…We can deal with this disease in a month. If everybody that has not gotten vaccinated got vaccinated, we could extinguish this disease. (*emphasis and hyperlinks mine)

He wasn’t alone of course. This was a very well orchestrated campaign – some might say an echo chamber – and we were all innundated with the same messages.

Can we all acknowledge that the $10 billion campaign to instill vaccine confidence and get shots in every arm may have been a myopic and dangerous approach? Can we acknowledge that, while it preyed on compassion, it was NOT compassionate?

And can some of these people please demonstrate some remorse and acknowledge that they were wrong so that we can get some reassurance that this will never happen again?

We didn’t know what we didn’t know

A few weeks ago, Newsom sang a very different tune.

I think there’s a lot of humility. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. It was hardly “I”… it was “we”, collectively. I think all of us in terms of our collective wisdom, we’ve evolved. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. We’re all experts in hindsight. We’re all geniuses now…

…We would have done everything differently…

…There’s so many things we could have done differently… It should be alarming to all of us that health became partisan and that’s going to be something, we’re going to pay a big price going forward.

Some of us would argue that Newsom had the opportunity to know. He could have listened to Ron Johnson or Tucker Carlson and examined the studies they cited. Instead he dismissed them as part of a “right wing echo chamber” and discouraged everyone from listening to them. He also seems to believe that his own divisive speech played no role in making health partisan.

According to Sam Harris, this was justifiable behavior because it aligned with the consensus.

Consensus says it’s ok to ignore dissenters if you first decide they have no credibility…. If no one from your laminated list of trusted sources confirms it, it must be misinformation. And it would be a conspiracy to think that anyone could ever corrupt our most trusted and revered institutions… like Harvard or MIT or Rutgers… or the CDC, the FDA, HHS or the EPA…or WaPo or The New York Times or The Lancet… or your favorite celebrity.

At least until the consensus catches up, our claims are “deranged or deranging.” People who look through a different ideological prism don’t matter and are wrong.

And apparently, sometimes the burden of proof is that millions of people have to die first.

Can we please, please raise the bar?