Anti-vaxxers and promoters of quack therapy over efficacious medical treatment for serious conditions are frequently called out as dangerous and evil. And many attempt to convince themselves or others that this proves they are latter day heretics being silenced by a medical establishment intent on self preservation.

And I don’t actually think that’s a useful way of responding to them because it reinforces that feeling. But there are also debunkings. The most anti-creationist people in the world set up a website (talkorigins.org) that catalogues every creationist argument alongside point-by-point rebuttals. I’ve seen similar websites for moon landing denial. People aren’t always nice about it, but for a long time the dominant counternarrative was, “here is a point by point explanation of how everything you’re claiming is wrong” which sometimes escalated to “you are an idiot”.

Actual dangerous heretics can’t be treated that way because their beliefs are reasonable enough to withstand scrutiny, so usually they just end up getting misrepresented and silenced instead. When we adopt the same strategy with kooks, we just make the kooks look more reasonable IMO.

In fact I don’t think the example of anti-vaxxers goes far enough. The worst kooks in the world, who are almost universally terrible people, are Holocaust deniers. And yeah, I think it’s perfectly fine to rhetorically slap literal Holocaust deniers in the face and tell them they are horrible people. But it’s even better to rhetorically slap them in the face with reams of evidence proving that the Holocaust happened. And to some extent we do that. People aren’t covering up the vast amount of primary source material on the concentration camps, the SS, etc. There is no stigma on actual research on the subject. And, as awful as he may be, nobody is throwing David Irving into a gulag.

Nobody is throwing Irving in a gulag, but he did spend a year in a comparatively nice Austrian prison. And I think the kind of responses to 'heresy' PG is talking about is more along the lines of mild censure, opprobrium and deplatforming/firing anyway. Anti-vaxxers et al get plenty of that, more so than serious discussions or replication attempts in the scientific literature.

Institutions which pounce on 'heresy' might be doing so because they're insecure and that insecurity might be driven by fear they're mistaken, but sometimes their reasons to fear the other side winning the rhetorical argument are good ones. The result of self-styled heretic Andrew Wakefield appears to be a measurable increase in childhood measles [and no decline in autism...]. And going back to PG's original argument which was more about the fruits of 'heresy' rather than pluralism, what the nature of that risk is might be something to consider before going beyond questioning authority to promote 'heresy' against a particular cherished idea.

And certainly it'd be good to avoid the confirmation bias that people actually being angered by what you're doing is a sign you're looking in the right places.

I'm pretty sure every vaccine goes through clinical trials to prove both safety and efficacy. The mere act of doing that debunks anti-vaxxers just as the mere act of publishing history about the Holocaust debunks Holocaust deniers. In that sense, anti-vaxxers get all the serious discussions they could ever realistically want.

Or hey--maybe they don't. Maybe there are some procedural mistakes going on and those clinical trials don't reliably replicate or something. But we all know vaccines still work. What should we do--try and fix our clinical trials, or just get those annoying anti-vaxxers to shut up? I say we improve the clinical trials.

Let's talk about another kooky idea: that OJ Simpson didn't actually murder his ex-wife and her friend, and that the LAPD planted all of the evidence because they are so racist that they decided to irrationally hate one of America's most beloved actors and professional athletes. You know what immediately happened after a jury of twelve people in Southern California seemed to actually buy this ridiculous conspiracy theory? By and large, the consequence was that American law enforcement radically improved their handling of evidence. It turns out that sometimes, even if you listen to people who are wrong and believe things that are completely crazy, you go out of your way to improve your own epistemic hygiene just to debunk them.

The thing is, this is a very hard subject to discuss without actually saying some of the possibly-true heresies that are being suppressed, because then the discussion just becomes a discussion of the alleged heresy. You can point out anti-vaxxers and I can agree that anti-vaxxers are wrong and that actual harm results from people believing anti-vaxxer arguments, but if I countered by suggesting a heretical belief that I believe to be true and to be wrongfully suppressed, I've put myself in a bad position personally and completely changed the subject.

So let's use the same historical example I've been using. Anti-vax is wrong, terrible pseudoscience. Lysenkoism was also wrong, terrible pseudoscience. If you have a civic tradition where not even pseudoscientists can be silenced, thrown into gulags, or executed, you run the risk that anti-vaxxers will convince people of pseudoscience and then people will die of measles because they listened to pseudoscientists. If you have a civic tradition that you should just silence people and throw them into gulags for promoting pseudoscience, you run the risk that Lysenko will become director of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, falsely designate actual genetics as "pseudoscience", and promote pseudoscience while all of the legitimate scientists get silenced, thrown into gulags, or executed. To make matters worse, Lysenkoism won't work, you won't grow enough food, people will starve to death, and the only people who actually know how to fix it will be either dead, in gulags, or either silenced or intimidated from speaking up.

In other words, you're making the assumption that might literally makes right--that the truth will always be on the same side as power and that there is no way that kooks will ever hijack your anti-kook system. Are you really willing to take that risk? I'm not, which is why I'm willing to err on the side of celebrating heresy and contrarianism and allowing a free exchange of ideas. It's not a perfect system, but I think allowing the free exchange of ideas will, in aggregate and in the long run, systemically favor truthful claims over false claims far more than implicitly trusting anyone with the power to decide by force what's true and what's false.

> In other words, you're making the assumption that might literally makes right--that the truth will always be on the same side as power and that there is no way that kooks will ever hijack your anti-kook system. Are you really willing to take that risk?

No I'm not, in fact my previous post explicitly acknowledged that some institutions suppress heresies precisely because they're insecure about the possibility their critics might be right.

What I am doing is criticising the equally crass argument that if someone wants to suppress something enough, it's probably an indication there's some merit to it...

> What I am doing is criticising the equally crass argument that if someone wants to suppress something enough, it's probably an indication there's some merit to it...

Which is not the argument that I'm making, at least not quite. I'm discussing the interaction between suppression and counterargument. If an idea is suppressed in the absence of any convincing counterargument, that combination of factors can be heavily suggestive of merit.

tbh my criticism was more directed at PG's essay and particularly his linked earlier than anything you had to say. I mean, I largely agree that absence of convincing counterargument is a point in favour of the suppressed idea [though even Lysenko attempted one, and I'm not sure anyone's ever disproved TimeCube ;)]

But I'm not convinced that the suppression is correlated with whether the idea is remotely worth exploring or not, still less that it's positively correlated with it being a good thing. And I think that's where 'is there a good reason why people researching into this are ostracised comes into question, which is where there's a less obvious case of a risk to society from heliocentrism than sympathetic takes on Naziism