How To And How Not To Debunk Contrarian Theories

Hint: calling people who know more about the topic than you do racist, ignorant liars isn't a good way to debunk them.

There’s a profitable online cottage industry for contrarians. If you spend your time promoting falsehoods about Ivermectin, Covid vaccines, and government conspiracies, you might just make millions of dollars on Substack. Misinformation circulates far faster than debunking of it does, and people mostly want to read contrarian views. Very few people spend much time reading articles titled “turns out this piece of common knowledge is correct—here’s how we know.”

Yet figuring out why the consensus view is correct does take an extraordinary amount of knowledge. It isn’t enough to snark about those crazy conspiracy theorists who believe ridiculous things and hope all your conformist friends will agree. Being able to go to bat against contrarians requires that you actually know what you’re talking about to a degree that’s hard to match. As I’ve noted before, I’d probably lose an argument with the typical flat earther who does debates about these things, and certainly with the typical 9-11 truther, because I haven’t investigated the topic remotely thoroughly. I am, of course, quite confident that the Earth is round, but that’s mostly because of higher-order evidence rather than having personally undergone an investigation of the topic (also a vast conspiracy has a ridiculously low prior probability). Scott Alexander, in a characteristically excellent passage, discusses the frequent incompetence of snarky supposed debunkers of conspiracy theories:

When I was a teenager I believed in a conspiracy theory. It was the one Graham Hancock wrote about in Fingerprints Of The Gods, sort of a modern update on the Atlantis story. It went something like this:

• Did you know that dozens of civilizations around the world have oddly similar legends about a lost continent that sunk under the waves? The Greeks called it Atlantis; the Aztecs, Atzlan; the Indonesians, Atala.

• Various ancient structures and artifacts appear to be older than generally believed. Geologists say that the erosion patterns on the Sphinx prove it must be at least 10,000 years old; some well-known ruins in South America have depictions of animals that have been extinct for at least 10,000 years.

• There are vast underwater ruins, pyramids and stuff. We know where they are! You can just learn to scuba dive and go see them! Historians just ignore them, or say they’re probably natural, but if you look at them, they’re obviously not natural.

Teenage me was impressed by these arguments. But he also had some good instincts and wanted to check to see what skeptics had to say in response. Here are what the skeptics had to say:

“Haha, can you believe some people still think there was an Atlantis! Imagine how stupid you would have to be to fall for that scam!”

“There is literally ZERO evidence for Atlantis. The ONLY reason you could ever believe it is because you’re a racist who thinks brown people couldn’t have built civilizations on their own.”

“No mainstream historians believe in any of that. Do you think you’re smarter than all the world’s historians?”

Meanwhile, I learned to scuba dive and checked out a site where Hancock said there were underwater pyramids. They were definitely there!

Nobody was under any obligation to handhold me out of my Atlantis beliefs. But the #1 Google rank for “site about how Atlantis isn’t real” is a scarce resource. Article space on skeptic blogs (podcasts were still years into the dystopian future at this point) was a scarce resource. And when people frittered these scarce resources away on a thousand identical pieces saying “lol you’re stupid and racist if you believe this, haven’t you heard that conspiracies are always wrong?” - and never on any explanation of the GIANT UNDERWATER PYRAMIDS - yes, I feel like I was wronged.

Eventually I lifted myself up by my own bootstraps. I studied some of the relevant history myself (less impressive than it sounds, Wikipedia was just coming into existence around this time). I learned enough about geology to understand on a gut level how natural processes can sometimes produce rocks that are really really artificial-looking - yes, even as artificial-looking as the ones in the picture above.

More important, I learned something like rationality. I learned how to make arguments like the one I use in The Pyramid And The Garden. I realized that, for all their skill at finding anomalies, the Atlantis books couldn’t agree on a coherent narrative of their own. Some placed Atlantis in the Atlantic, others in the Pacific, others in Antarctica; some used it to explain artifacts from long after others said that it fell. For a while if I squinted I could sort of kind of smush them into a single story, but that story had even more anomalies than normal historians’. Eventually I gave up and joined the mainstream.

I’m not angry at Graham Hancock. I see no evidence he has ever been anything but a weird, well-meaning guy who likes pyramids a little too much. But I feel a burning anger against anti-conspiracy bloggers, anti-conspiracy podcasters, and everyone else who wrote “lol imagine how stupid you would have to be to believe in Atlantis” style articles.

Either these people didn’t understand the arguments for and against Atlantis, or they did. If they didn’t, they were frauds, claiming expertise in a subject they knew nothing about. If they did, then at any moment they could have saved me from a five year wild-goose-chase - but chose not to, because it was more fun to insult me.

Speaking of Scott and contrarian theories (I use that instead of conspiracy theories because many of them aren’t actual conspiracy theories, and some of these contrarian theories are decently plausible, while the term conspiracy theory is just a term of abuse) he recently wrote a roughly 15,000-word writeup about a debate between Saar Wilf and Peter Miller. Saar is an entrepreneur and successful poker player who made a website applying Bayes theorem to various real-world events. Peter Miller is a random “physics student, programmer, and mountaineer” who “obsessively researches random topics” (he has a blog that’s quite good).

$100,000 was riding on who would win the debate—the winner was determined by two unbiased judges who didn’t have settled opinions on the matter. Saar issued this challenge, confident that he could win.

Yet in an upset, Miller ended up doing what all the online skeptic blogs and people claiming that believing Covid came from a lab means you hate Chinese people couldn’t: he managed to win the debate in quite decisive fashion by presenting an extraordinary wall of evidence. He demonstrated the level of knowledge needed to win a debate with a smart and informed contrarian. Saar even admitted:

Peter, I think everyone can agree, has much more knowledge on [COVID] origins than we do. He's invested much more time. He may be a much more talented researcher. He's much more into the details. He probably knows the best in the world on origins at this point.

Ironically, the debate flipped much of the typical dynamic in contrarian debates. Those arguing against contrarians often point to higher-order evidence and broad general claims about the world, while contrarians generally are more informed about specific topical facts, trying to litigate them in detail. If arguing about 9/11, it will generally be the person defending the mainstream view who will appeal to broad general facts like the unlikeliness of a conspiracy, and the 9/11 contrarian who will be pointing to specific claims about the melting point of steel. Yet in this debate, Saar was much more focused on the big picture—what are the odds that the main pandemic would begin to near the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of the world’s few places doing this kind of gain of function research?—while Peter litigated minute details about spread inside the market and which side of the market had had most of the early cases (turns out the side with the animals).

Peter also seemed to possess a frightening range of knowledge about the topic. This was actually one thing Saar pointed to as a reason the debate didn’t reach the truth—Peter just turned out to be some kind of weird debate wizard whose knowledge thoroughly outstripped Saar’s. As Scott says:

Another of Saar’s concerns with the verdict was that Peter was an extraordinary debater, to the point where it could have overwhelmed the signal from the evidence.

It’s hard to watch the videos and not come away impressed. Peter seems to have a photographic memory for every detail of every study he’s ever read. He has some kind of 3D model in his brain of Wuhan, the wet market, and how all of its ventilation ducts and drains interacted with each other. Whenever someone challenged one of his points, he had a ten-slide PowerPoint presentation already made up to address that particular challenge, and would go over it with complete fluency, like he was reciting a memorized speech. I sometimes get accused of overdoing things, but I can’t imagine how many mutations it would take to make me even a fraction as competent as Peter was.

It’s easier to light a fire than to put it out. If you want to be able to fight all the misinformation that has been churned out by an entire community, you’ll have to know, on hand, why each of their claims are false. While the lab leak hypothesis is not an inherently unreasonable hypothesis—in fact, I gave it probably around 75% odds prior to the debate, and still give it maybe 20% odds—a significant community has built up around it, leading to huge amounts of misinformation being spread. Peter seemed to have thoroughly investigated every piece of misinformation and memorized ten reasons each of them was false, leading to Saar being embarrassed at multiple points in the debate by bringing up something that Peter decisively debunked.

Peter’s not the only one who can do this. Avi Bitterman, in a hilarious five-hour debate, ended up totally wrecking Steve Kirsch, one of the leading purveyors of anti-vax misinformation. Saar is a much more serious guy than Kirsch, and much more intelligent, so this was easier than what Peter did. Similarly, some fellow called History Speaks (not the name given to him by his mother) had an excellent written debate in which he thoroughly demolished one of the leading holocaust deniers.

The basic point is that debunking these contrarian ideas takes time and effort. Because they’re contrarian, a lot of misinformation circulates surrounding them. The average subject-matter expert cannot do it, nor can the average person who says the lab leak theory is racist (I’ve always found it an amusingly contingent quirk that the left-wing non-racist theory is that Covid arose because of Chinese people eating weird things).

Contrarian theories cannot be debunked by doing 5 minutes of googling.

They cannot be debunked by hastily written articles for skeptic magazines.

They cannot be debunked by calling the people who believe them stupid or racist or ignorant.

They can only be debunked by people who do thousands of hours of research investigating them, people who develop a weird obsession with the topic and investigate every claim.

They can only be debunked by a Peter Miller.