Frustration burnout

and inoculation

A world where experienced qualified people give research based advice and the policy makers do the opposite… what the hell is that about?

In the end those people giving good advice get frustration burnout, quit their job and go and do some gardening or whatever. Even worse is the advice they give gets taken to the cleaners by uninformed, biased people with vested interests in the status quo. In every field that you want to imagine, agriculture, housing, energy production, the economy : whatever.

Lies, smoke and mirrors and misdirection, the arts of the stage magician brought into politics and used by lobbyists. New research: 15% of U.S. citizens believe that climate change is a hoax, why is that then? Because of they are told to confuse the weather, which is right in front of them, with climate change, which is right in front of them but hidden behind the weather. Or it’s made into a conspiracy theory and and that secret agents are colluding to destroy their way of life, the ‘wokists are out to get you’.

Misdirection, smoke and mirrors and lies to conceal the truth.

Profiteering, make prices rise by creating a false scarcity and then blame someone else for it. Everybody doing it, doing it. Take the U.S. car industry, post covid they keep production volume down and max their profits, they also push big expensive planet destroying SUV’s ‘because $60,000 vehicles are significantly more profitable than the $25,000 ones’.

Fake substitution, replacing a toxic substance with one that is, supposedly, less toxic, yet subsequent research by independent scientist reveal this to not be the case.

False hope, telling people that the product is ok because it can be recycled, and then we find out it was a lie. We continue using the product, plastic as an example, because it’s easy, convenient and can be effectively recycled, which it can’t.

Future dumping, make a mess and leave it to future generations to sort out. It’ll be ok, they’ll come up with a solution for it, don’t blame us.

Fait accompli, make and sell some substandard products and then say ‘whoops sorry’ afterwards when it’s too late to do anything about it. Take the U.K. commercial building sector, there is what is politely called the ‘performance gap’ the difference between the as-designed energy performance and the as-built energy performance. Around 65% of all new-built houses over the past 10 years have failed to reach their as-designed energy target. ‘Whoops, sorry, too late now they’ve been built’. 64% difference between what you’re told you’ll get and what you end up getting, for the worse. If you bought a 24 pack of beers and there were only 15 cans and a squashed one you’d get a bit upset.

In a maze of smoke and mirrors, with directions that misdirect, in a fog of lies and distortions; how can we be coherent, how can we see and understand what is real? Something which was already difficult becomes impossible and we simply latch onto the easiest to digest lie that we come across.

To take a boxing saying, the people trying to do good stuff, based on solid data, are always on the back foot. Publish some sound research and you get hammered by factless opinions screamed out in newspapers and on social media. The people trying to do good stuff often get attacked just for quietly doing their job because someone can score some cheap media coverage and political advantage.

“Neither force, nor argument, nor opinion," said Merlyn with the deepest sincerity, "are thinking. Argument is only a display of mental force, a sort of fencing with points in order to gain a victory, not for truth. Opinions are the blind alleys of lazy or of stupid people, who are unable to think. If ever a true politician really thinks a subject out dispassionately, even Homo stultus will be compelled to accept the findings in the end. Opinion can never stand beside truth. At present, however, Homo impoliticus is content either to argue with opinions or to fight with his fists, instead of waiting for the truth in his head.” (T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn)

The truth will out as we used to say, but in today’s world both White and the adage seem optimistic, the truth just gets quickly buried under heaps of lies, misdirections and unfounded opinions. Faced with chronic cognitive dissonance people latch onto the easiest lie to digest. “This persistence of misinformation has fairly alarming implications in a democracy because people may base decisions on information that, at some level, they know to be false,” (Lewandowsky). ‘It is extremely difficult to dislodge strongly held beliefs through rational or logical methods.’

Inoculation and getting off the back foot

Inoculation theory? Basically it’s ‘pre-bunking’. Tell people beforehand what misinformation and lies are going to follow what you publish or what you do/are doing and they build up a psychological resistance to them. People develop an immunity to misinformation and the inoculation can ‘improve people's ability to recognize misinformation, boost people's confidence in their own truth-discernment abilities, and reduce self-reported willingness to share misinformation in people's social networks’

Then get your inoculation to go viral and repeat it to get population-level herd immunity. A lot of work and time wasted simply to avoid having your stuff shredded by fake ‘debunkers’. Will each climate research group have to have hire specialist ‘pre-bunkers’ who work out what lies and misinformation will follow any research publication? Probably. Will we see a world where ‘pre-bunking’ and ‘fake debunking’ generative AIs war with each other across all the different medias? Maybe. Faced with our various acute existential crises we are wasting time and energy, frustration burnout is a cause of ill health, depression and suicide.

Inoculation can help but it’s a like putting an egg white in a leaky radiator, it’ll work for a while but you need to change the radiator. We must educate ourselves better, schools can do a better job, we need to understand fully that we must question more. The old ‘I heard from someone in the Pub’ or on TikTok isn’t good enough, faced with an opinion we must pose questions like ‘what evidence do you have?’ ‘What information is your opinion based on? It all requires us to think more, with better clarity, ‘Opinion can never stand beside truth.’

A good scientist, reading some research will ask at least three basic questions : who did the research? What methodologies were used? Who funded the study?

Science is based on doubt, this is why conclusions are most often expressed with a probability, ‘we are 98% sure’. This leaves the door open for detractors to argue that the scientists aren’t 100% sure. Well of course they aren’t, but if 98% of scientists are 98% sure about something we need to really pay attention. The planetary climate crisis is such a case, the vast majority of researchers are convinced that our economic activities are producing enough greenhouse effect gases to dramatically change the climate. The research that comes out today is based on this and said research is simply showing how and at what speed this is happening.

One can only wonder what a climate change denying parent will say to their children when asked ‘what did you do during the climate war?’