Elite misinformation is just another term for Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

From The case against municipal fragmentation by Matthew Yglesias.  He includes a readers comment to an earlier column, Elite misinformation is an underrated problem.  

In elite misinformation, Yglesias argues

People have a lot of erroneous beliefs about the policy status quo in the United States, and that seems to matter. These beliefs are normally not formed via exposure to some kind of social media misinformation; they’re just about things that aren’t in the news very much and that people misunderstand. Which is to say that “people having information that is not correct” is absolutely a huge deal in politics… it’s just not necessarily “misinformation” in the sense that the misinformation police intend. In Dylan Matthews’ profile of the State Department’s small but very successful intelligence bureau, for example, one thing that comes through is that the bulk of American intelligence agencies genuinely believed that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons program. This erroneous information had a huge impact on the media, on the mass public understanding of political debates 2002-2003, in decision-making in Washington, and on the broad trajectory of American politics.

And I think erroneous ideas that are perpetrated by mainstream institutions — what I’m going to call “elite misinformation” — are a really big deal in an underrated way.

The whole column is worth a read.  Yglesias is focusing on elite misinformation but I think we already have a term for this - Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.  And have had since it was first described in 1841.  

The reader's response Yglesias calls out in municipal fragmentation column is:

I wrote a book adjacent to this topic, Radiation Evangelists, about the early development years of radiation therapy in medicine, and I have an add-on to this column: a lot of times people doing this kind of misinformation have functionally managed to talk themselves into believing what they are pitching.

Most of the early radiation innovators that I wrote about ended up dying of cancer or other radiation-induced maladies. I expected the story to be one where people who didn't know better died of something they didn't understand. But what I found in the research is that users recognized--and documented!--the risks more or less immediately. It's just that they then proceeded to talk themselves into alternate explanations. A lot of patients were harmed as a result, but the therapists bore the worst of it; more or less an entire generation of men and women who were enthusiastic early adopters ended up dead in a pretty painful and awful way.

All of which is simply to say that I think "elite misinformation" is an even harder problem than this column suggests, because motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug. Even well-meaning humans armed with reasonable information are highly prone to talk themselves into believing wrong stuff, and they will do that EVEN WITH the counter information right there in on the table. And someone who has lied to themself first is hard to disabuse of a notion, because 1) they do not "know" that they are lying, and 2) admitting that they are wrong now carries a component of shame and disappointment to go along with the embarrassment.

It's just a really hard problem.

The book is Radiation Evangelists: Technology, Therapy, and Uncertainty at the Turn of the Century by Jefferey Womack.

The obsession with misinformation, disinformation, deep fakes, cheap fakes, etc. all appear to be mere manifestations of totalitarians obsessed with the consequences of free speech, i.e. that free speech allows challenges to their centralized power in ways they do not understand nor wish to tolerate. 

But the phenomenon of fanatical obsession with empirically unreliable beliefs is longstanding and well described.  Among the literature:

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay

Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

Radiation Evangelists: Technology, Therapy, and Uncertainty at the Turn of the Century by Jefferey Womack.

Mistaken medical beliefs in the face of clear evidence is a well populated sub-genre in itself.

All mass movements, whether cultural, popular, political, intellectual, etc. are driven by motivated reasoning touched by fanaticism.  The short term antidote is never more information.  That is necessary in the long run but is ineffective in the face of short term fanatical conviction.  The only antidote is behavioral and cultural - the cultivation of humility and openness. 

The problem is not the factual underpinnings of the belief, it is the fanaticism of the belief.  A fanatical belief that is also incorrect will eventually founder on harsh reality.  It might take days, weeks, months, years, decades, occasionally centuries, but reality always wins.  The more fanatically the belief is held, the longer it takes.

Humility and openness are the antidotes to fanaticism.  And not often seen together.  

DEI, Critical Race Theory, Communism, Treatment of scurvy with citric acid, Occupy Wall Street, Anthropogenic Global Warming, Radiation Therapy, every investment craze - all divorced from empirical reality (or unsupported by it) and yet all having their cadre of fierce believers and their periods where they dominated the public discourse despite the empirical reality.  

But getting public intellectuals and those who control the levers of power and influence to cultivate openness and humility, not to say respect for their fellow man, is not something we can readily anticipate.  But it is always the only alternative to harsh encounters with reality when fanatically held beliefs are founded on beliefs not consistent with empirical reality.

UPDATE:  In the tide of today's news, there is a further example of fervid conviction overwhelming empirical data.  From What If the Most Notorious Murder of a Gay Man Wasn’t a Hate Crime? by Ben Kawaller.  The subheading is A generation ago, Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered in what appeared to be a homophobic attack. This month, Ben Kawaller traveled to the scene of the crime. He heard a different story…

And it isn't a new story.  The book revealing that the murder was due to a drug deal gone wrong was published in 2013, eleven years ago.  But the conviction that it was a hate crime based on homophobia remains the dominant interpretation in may circles.  Not because of an absence of knowledge and information but due to a belief system which does not permit any different interpretation.  A belief system reinforced by financial inducements.