The app for independent voices
For a thesis that "The crisis of expertise is about values", not much is said to defend the premise that it's a matter of values rather than facts. I'd argue the reverse!
Democrat degrowthers tend to act like nuclear reactors are super dangerous, to the point of opposing nuclear power more than fossil fuels, and the German greens went further by planning to shut down nuclear plants years before coal plants ― following through on that plan even after the invasion of Ukraine strained the natural gas supply. All facts considered, nuclear power is much safer and more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels[0], but at times it has been impossible for the public not to encounter fearmongering[1] even as key facts are very hard to find[2]. And the antinuclear attitude has lasted at least 50 years, making it generational: young degrowthers believe it because old degrowthers told them so. Even if the previous generation had some values-based objection, when the narratives are dominated by fact-free fearmongering, the new generation's worries are just based on a lack of facts.
Climate change is similar; there's been a cottage industry of science denial stretching back to 1988, if not earlier. Historical misunderstandings and revisionism even created a perception of a 1970s global cooling consensus[3]. In reality, climate scientists predicted CO₂-induced global warming long before it happened, the warming trend has matched climate models reasonably well and the trend is vastly faster than natural climate change[4]. As an internal 1982 report at Exxon Mobil noted[5], "over the past several years a clear scientific consensus has energed regarding the expected climatic effects of increased atmospheric CO₂. The consensus is that a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ from its pre-industrial revolution value would result in an average global temperature rise of (3.0 ± 1.5)°C". Svante Arrhenius, who btw later won a nobel prize, published a study in 1896 that modeled the atmosphere in enough detail to estimate the effect of doubling the CO₂ concentration ― no easy feat without a computer! (He wasn't particularly worried about global warming though, because based on the amount of coal being burned at the time, it would take 400 years to double the CO2 concentration.)
But who (besides me) harps on this information? No, a typical Republican has been told for 50 years first that the whole thing is a hoax, and now that humans don't cause it, but if humans do cause it, it's too expensive to fix and it's a good thing anyway. All four of these statements are just factually untrue!
I think a hell of a lot of issues are like that.
There are some "values" factors ― the narrow moral circle of right-wingers, their ability not to care about people outside their country's borders, is legendary. Yet I often watch Professer Gerdes on YouTube. He's a Reagan conservative Ukraine war commentator, and at the end of every video he says "thank you for being the kind of person who cares about Ukraine". Does that sound like something a conservative would say? No! And that’s why I like him. I remember George W. Bush, too, was a "compassionate conservative" who somehow blundered into getting a great number of Iraqis killed thanks to his ill-planned, ill-executed invasion. And I think Bush’s mistakes were more about facts than values.
People with narrow moral circles are conservative, which I think is a matter of values, but not every conservative has a narrow moral circle, and I think that's where facts ― misinformation ― must enter the picture.
It's even possible for people with relatively narrow moral circles to endorse "liberal" policies. A conservative can understand that the only reason he can buy a RTX 3060 that renders 60 frames per second of high-resolution photorealistic graphics is because millions of other people had enough money to buy millions of units. It simply takes endless billions of dollars to develop technology like this, so a lot of people need to have (and spend) a lot of money. The same logic applies to cancer cures and bis-ass trucks. Prosperity for people you don't care about can help you pay for things that you care about. But to get people to understand why common prosperity (not just the prosperity of my family, town, tribe or country) is valuable requires explaining a lot of facts. It's probably why educated people skew left ― sure there's a lot of woke nonsense in universities, but there's also a lot of facts, and facts matter a lot!
Which reminds me, Slow Boring is distinctly wanting for sources and evidence for its many, many assertions. Maybe people don't follow sources anyway, and maybe that's why facts don't land. I'm sure your rhetorical style will reach more people than more common antagonistic styles[6], because most humans are extremely easy to trigger into their "facts don't matter😡" mode, but I still think communicating evidence is valuable.
There is one value I think we would both agree matters: the value of speaking accurately and reasonably. Not just telling the truth, but understanding that one could be wrong and feeling responsible for any misperceptions we create in other people. But this isn't a partisan matter; tolerance of inaccurate and misleading speech is ubiquitous. Failure of people to recognize that they could be wrong about something is pervasive. I propose that the reason politics is so dysfunctional is that accuracy and reasonableness is vastly undervalued on both sides of the political spectrum, and that the disvalue of unreasonable or false statements is vastly underestimated. The difficulty of telling fact and fiction apart is also underestimated. Were it not so, maybe I could get some funding for my project.[7]
[4] xkcd.com/1732
[5] docs.house.gov/meetings… / insideclimatenews.org/w…
[7]
