Building institutions that bend towards truth, with Clara Collier of Asterisk Magazine
I'm joined this week by Clara Collier, editor and publisher of Asterisk Magazine, a quarterly print magazine. The discussion takes us from the production constraints of 120 physical pages to the 19th century German universities that invented modern research infrastructure, to why institutional trust in science has declined so dramatically in recent years.
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Timestamps for Video:
(00:00) Introduction: Bending towards truth
(01:34) What is Asterisk Magazine?
(03:47) Challenges of print media
(05:31) The media landscape and Twitter's influence
(07:21) Editing and copywriting in modern media
(16:56) The role of style guides
(26:14) AI in writing and editing
(31:54) The origins of research universities
(35:05) Challenges in academic promotions
(37:17) Global influence of German universities
(41:02) American vs. German university systems
(41:39) Post-war scientific organization
(43:31) The role of research universities today
(46:08) Science communication and public trust
(57:12) Vaccine hesitancy and institutional trust
(01:07:32) Historical context of medical trust
(01:12:05) Wrap
Transcript
[A brief note on our transcripts]
Patrick: Hideho everybody. My name is Patrick McKenzie, better known as Patio11 on the Internet. And I'm here with my buddy Clara Collier, who is the editor and publisher of Asterisk Magazine.
You told me just before we started rolling that you are engaged in how we create social institutions that bend towards truth. I would love to talk about that both in the context of magazines and also in the context of universities and things that are shaped somewhat like a university in our system. But since you run a magazine at the moment, why don't we start there?
For the people who haven't had the opportunity, what is Asterisk?
What is Asterisk Magazine?
Clara: Asterisk is a quarterly magazine in print and online, a little bit anachronistic in this day and age. We are broadly general interest, I should say, with an emphasis on what I like to call intellectually exploratory writing. A lot of the impetus for it was feeling, around when I founded the magazine in 2022—now, oh my God—that a lot of writing, long form writing I was reading was really in this science journalism mode or policy journalism mode of trying to synthesize an expert consensus without showcasing the intellectual work that went into that synthesis. And I think—I am not against that mode of journalism. I think it is very valuable. I think it can be done extremely well and I'm very glad it exists. But I felt that a lot of the blogs I was reading, and other things I was reading outside of legacy media, were much more transparent about how they were constructing stories on quite complex topics. And this felt more interesting and vital for me, but also missing a lot of the rigor that I found in more traditional publications. And I wanted to create something that could bring together those two modes of engaging with information. So that's what we're trying to do, at least.
Patrick: I feel long form writing is an interesting phrase for me, because I like nice short form writing on my blog, 8,000 words or so. And occasionally the spirit moves me to go longer than that.
Just so people have some context, how long is long form?
Clara: When I say long form, the typical Asterisk piece is probably around 4,000 words. Some are longer, some shorter.
Patrick: I did not make a great friend of magazine editors when I dropped a 28,000 word tome on their desk. And we still ran with it because it worked out. But this was—
Clara: The VaccinateCA piece is great. Yeah.
Patrick: It started at 13,000 and I tried to cut and got longer every day.
Challenges of print media
Clara: I've had that happen too. Works in Progress now has a print edition, which is fantastic. I'm really interested in the phenomenon of more and more small magazines going print, because it's an objectively crazy thing to do. But it's harder for us because we've been print from the beginning. We have 120 physical pages, and my printer needs to know in advance how I'll be filling those 120 physical pages. If one piece runs twice as long, another piece needs to be cut or dropped. This creates—and this is a point that's maybe not obvious about print—it doesn't just affect one thing. It's not just an additional task you do. It affects your work-back schedule, how the piece is edited, and what you publish online as well. Part of me wishes we could just run a novella, but it's hard with the way our print schedule works.
Patrick: Yeah. We used to talk about column inches in print media. Bloggers mostly know column inches as a thing we laugh at print media for having. But when you have an actual physical artifact with a printer you have a contract with, where the artifact is going to be 120 pages—it will not be 118 pages, it won't be 122 pages—and you have a shipping schedule with a work-back timeline where you must get it to them by this date or it physically will not come off the presses fast enough to hit your ship days.
Clara: And they have other clients, so it needs to get off the presses when we have scheduled it to get off the presses.
Clara: And they have other clients, so it needs to get off the presses when we've scheduled it to.
Patrick: I find that intellectually fascinating, and it's often not obvious to people that this drives a lot of what they see in the world. Broadly speaking, I think one of the best things from Marginal Revolution is that it popularized the idea of a production function.
The media landscape and Twitter's influence
When you understand the production function of a magazine, things start to make more sense. We're living in a rich media landscape right now, and much of it has reoriented itself to work around Twitter speeds in the last couple of years. There are pluses and minuses to that. One thing I like is that we have many more voices than we used to have. You can find a Substack on almost any topic these days, with different takes on different topics. There's not the suffocating culture of New York journalism so much anymore. On the flip side, many people have realized that being a take merchant is really what sells and what the algorithms reward for distribution. You don't get the classic magazine piece that will devote an appropriate amount of time, an appropriate amount of depth, an appropriate number of months of research to end up with one thing that ends up in the hands of the subscriber, in a library, in the historical record.
Clara: There are still a few places that do it. It's definitely true that there are far fewer traditional magazines doing this kind of work. They do still exist. I've also noticed, especially in the community that probably encompasses your audience and my audience broadly, there's an enormous appetite for consuming text—for consuming quite dense technical text. There are people here who will read white papers or academic papers, dozens of them constantly. It's fascinating.
Patrick: I have— [Patrick notes: I was going to interject “I have previously observed that the people who run the world happily devour more than 10,000 words before breakfast most days.”]
Clara: It's difficult to monetize this kind of desire for content. Some people can do it. I think the people who do it best are bloggers who have a very distinctive personal voice. This is actually another challenge of running the magazine. I think the people who are best suited to this media environment are people who are smart and thoughtful and incredibly prolific, who have a naturally compelling voice and can create a kind of parasocial relationship with the reader. You have to be a little bit of a charismatic media figure to succeed in the modern media ecosystem. If you're that person, great—there's never been a better time to be a blogger who is writing at enormous length at enormous speed. I think there's a little less magnetism around something like a magazine that's more depersonalized.
Patrick: Mm-hmm.
Editing and copywriting in modern media
Clara: Something I think about all the time is whether my co-editor Jake Eaton and I can make the readers have a parasocial relationship with us a little bit. Can we be characters in the magazine? We don't do a lot of this because it's not actually either of our natural strong suits or preferences, but I think that's the kind of thing that drives people towards more in-depth writing these days.
Patrick: Historically that has been something of the mix with the brand personality of an Atlantic or similar, or the New Yorker's fact-checking department—you can tell I'm not in media circles a hundred percent of the time. But there are people whose construction of their childhood or youthful identity is centered around various magazines. The magazine has a personality and a vibe to it where individual writers for the magazine, based on the production function for magazines, are perhaps present in their life four times a year. In expectation, the typical reader will probably never encounter the typical writer, even if they are quite attached to the magazine for a period of years.
Clara: This actually goes back to the exigencies of print. The New Yorker's a good example because it's a magazine that has a lot of personality and has had many different personalities over its existence—from a humorous New York society and culture magazine in the thirties to being much more serious. They serialized Silent Spring in the sixties, I believe. I'm actually not sure how I would characterize The New Yorker's personality now. There's also been a grand smoothing out of magazine personas. I think The New Yorker is one of many publications that had more distinctive personalities in the past because the Internet disaggregates things. A lot of the personality of a magazine like The New Yorker comes from content like the front matter, the Talk of the Town sections, or the back matter and their special columns. These are all things that don't perform as well in the isolated landscape of digital media. They're little extra things that you get when you're reading a physical magazine cover to cover, like in the bathroom as a kid. I spent a lot of time reading magazines as a child and thinking about physically how they're put together and what goes into them. This is a very common thing for people who end up as magazine editors. You just have fewer—
Patrick: Affordances.
Clara: —affordances to create that kind of connection digitally. There are ways to do it. Some publications have been very smart about it, like New York Magazine. But it's harder.
Patrick: I think there's also a bit of flattening of our social class and similar, accelerated by any number of things. Increased mobility around the country, increased Internet, working within the communities that create magazines, which are extremely overrepresented in, say, Brooklyn versus any other town in America. And then a topic that has come up in a number of different talks this week with people is Twitter as an acculturation force. For a few years there, it was not quite a monoculture on Twitter, but it had some very monocultural-adjacent aspects to it. When you're duking it out for distribution on Twitter, with your production function exposed on Twitter, and Twitter is also the place where meta-commentary on artifacts happens, there was a lot of harmonization across organizations that didn't technically exist in the same building and didn't technically employ exactly the same people, but might have done a very good performance of it for a few years.
Clara: I have a very complicated relationship with Twitter.
I should also say I don't want to claim to be more original than I am. A lot of what I'm saying is kind of old hat among the people who professionally bemoan the state of the media world. But most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about media economics professionally, so I hope I'm saying something new to the people listening to this now. I have a complicated relationship with Twitter.
On the one hand, I have to be on it for my job. There is no question. It is relevant to figuring out what people are talking about. Where is the zeitgeist? Sharing stuff, getting your name out there, being recognized. Also, one, it makes me sad and I don't like it.
Two, you can be too zeitgeisty. This is where being quarterly is both a blessing and a curse. It means you can never be totally current, but it also means you can't be too captured. Whenever I'm commissioning a piece, I have to think about, okay, this has to be done by such and such a date so I can get it to the printer so they can send the proof so I can correct the proofs. It just cannot be up to the moment. It never will be. Logistically that is not possible. That means I need to push myself to think outside of the minute-to-minute news cycle. The way I handle this right now is I just have a blocker and I get 15 minutes of Twitter a day, no more. This works okay.
Patrick: Curious for the audience, what does the production cycle for one of these look like? My indicative fingers in the wind from having been published in a magazine or two before is it's probably minimally two months from the time you commission a piece to that piece actually appearing in people's hands. But it could be plus or minus that depending on how you do operations.
Clara: Right, yeah. Minimally. I mean, we've done it faster—two months is good. I like more. Ideally, right now we are in a couple weeks going to print, which means I will send our PDF files to our printer. Actually, I should step back even from that. While this is happening, I'm beginning to commission our winter issue, which will appear in December. So I'm starting to reach out to people and solicit pieces and ask them to write for us. They will send in drafts. The reason I'm doing this so early is some people send in amazing clean copy that I can just send to fact-checking and copy editing. Others do not. We'll have done anywhere from one to four editing rounds on pieces. Some pieces just need a lot of work, and I want to make sure there's plenty of time if a piece does come in needing a lot of surgery. So however many rounds of editing it takes, then fact-checking, which takes a lot of time. Copy editing, which takes somewhat less time, but I can't do it to my standards yet. I pray that day will come soon.
Patrick: I spend half of my budget on this podcast every week doing manual passes over a transcript. Even copy editing the transcript to get it up to the standards of two intelligent people talking to each other is unfortunately still behind the state of the art.
[Patrick notes: This has improved massively in the past year even. Using relatively consistent prompts, simple cleanup of transcripts would either fail to enhance the transcript or, much worse, insert “directionally similar statements a hypothetical guest could have made but which the actual guest did not make.” It has been at least six months since I caught that. And yet, two paragraphs below this, Claude Sonnet 4.5 needed to be reminded that “The Sort” is likely a term of art, capitalized in that fashion, if I specifically am using it.]
Clara: It's really hard. And I've also learned it's very hard to find good copy editors and good fact-checkers because it actually requires a lot of attention to detail and skill, and people who are good at it can make a lot more money doing something else.
Patrick: The Sort rears its ugly head again. If you are sufficiently good to catch mistakes being made by a professional engineer in the moment when they are writing about a highly technical topic, the software industry has any number of things that you can do.
I think that once upon a time, there was the implicit promise that one would serve one's time in an institution in the fact-checking department or the copy editing department, and then take some steps up in that institution. You start in the mail room, you end up as the CEO. You start in the copy editing department, you end up as, I don't know, a commissioning editor 25 years from now.
And the media landscape has made that trade break down.
Clara: I think that's true. And also some people are just nature's copy editors. It's a very specific skill. I've had to get better at it. I am not one of nature's copy editors, and now I spend all of my time noticing things like when a number is written as a numeral and when it is spelled out, or em dashes versus en dashes. Or nobody can format a fu—I'm sorry. Is this a no profanity podcast?
Patrick: Not explicitly, no. [Patrick notes: I personally try not to overindulge, and to reserve profanity for expressions of moral outrage, but I mostly do not impose this preference on guests.]
Clara: Nobody can format a Chicago-style footnote. I don't know why this is so hard. I didn't think it was hard until I became a professional editor, and I've worked with so many copy editors who for some reason just cannot do this. It's baffling. Some people just naturally have it, some people don't.
Patrick: That sounds to me like something that Opus can almost certainly do, and which I would be offloading to it. But it's funny, em dashes versus en dashes—that's become a thing where some people think if you've ever seen an em dash in something, it's because it was AI generated. And it's like, or you had one person in the organization that fought a very good fight for a very long time.
Patrick addresses camera: Hiya Krithika! [Patrick notes: Krithix, a long-time coworker of mine during my days at Stripe, is more responsible for me being able to properly use an em dash than the entire U.S. educational system. But I will never, ever give up capitalizing “the Internet.”]
The role of style guides
Clara: Yeah. Actually the more interesting thing for copy editing especially—I think a lot of people think that it's just mechanical and parts of it are. But there is a surprising amount of judgment involved. Coming up with a house style guide is always complicated.
I remember very, very early on we had a piece about China's semiconductor industry and we had so many questions relating to Chinese names. The author was coming from the China watching world, and so he said, oh, you should do China Project style, which is to have the names spelled out in Pinyin and then have it followed by the Chinese characters. This is often important because if you're talking about someone who is working in China, primarily known in China, just having the Pinyin transliteration of their name will not be useful if a person reading this article can read Mandarin and wants to find information about them on the Chinese Internet. So you want to include the characters. Great.
But then you have a question: what if there is a person who is famous in English with a transliteration of their name that is not Pinyin, like Mao Zedong? Or what about someone like Morris Chang, the CEO of TSMC, who has an English name—he presumably also has a Chinese name, but he doesn't go by that in English. Or what about in one case, almost everyone in this article was a Chinese person working in China, whose name was always used in Eastern name order, so surname first. Makes sense. Except for one Chinese Canadian professor who had a fully Chinese name, but Western name order. How do you refer to that person without an explanatory footnote? There's a whole set of considerations. This is just one tiny example. There's a whole set of considerations that go into coming up with a consistent style. And I realize that I sound like an insane pedant when I'm talking about this, but I think it actually matters for a magazine to have a unifying grammar and a unifying way of referring to things and understanding things.
Patrick: I would broadly agree with that. And you don't want the magazine to feel like separate sub-magazines when it discusses China versus discussing, I don't know, Japan or India, which have their own issues that are adjacent to those, but not exactly the same.
[Patrick notes: As an example, in Japanese family names come before given names, but when rendered in English it is generally standard to use the more typical Western order, but there does exist a convention in some spaces to capitalize the family name (e.g. Taro YAMADA) for disambiguation, but that convention is preferred by some people who are nationalists, but those nationalists sometimes deploy their moral authority to speak for conventions about the Japanese language with respect to the names of people who are not nationalists.
Which is one reason why this salaryman pays fairly careful attention to how people prefer to be introduced. (For bonus points: Japan is Guess Culture, not Ask Culture, and norms with young people in tech-adjacent spaces are in a rapid state of flux.)]
Clara: This came up in that conversation because you were talking about transliteration and then someone was like, well, what about Russian names? What standardized transliteration should we use there? How would you refer to someone in Russian who has a name whose modern transliteration would be different from the one they're historically known by?
Patrick: We should just do what the tech industry does and compress Chinese, Japanese and Korean all into one plane for Unicode, because that will have no negative consequences. [Patrick notes: This comment is acidly sarcastic.]
This was the thing that people seriously argued for a number of years and won the day technically, to the enduring discontent of people who are forced to live with the consequences of what is called CJK unification.
There are no easy answers to it, which I guess is why we get to have so much fun doing style guides. I will confess, I have attempted to write a style guide before for prior employers, and it is just very, very difficult. You can get the mechanical parts of style and have a house version of like, here's the difference between an em dash and an en dash. Great. But style in terms of imparting taste upon people who do not have exactly the same take on taste is just murderously difficult.
I apologize for the deletion. You're right - I should preserve all content and only make light editorial touches. Here's the proper low-touch edit:
Clara: Mm-hmm. And it's why you can't just outsource to AI, and why having a good copy editor is important because it's not just—as in the Chinese name case, it's actually about communicating to the reader and making it easy for the reader. If I reference someone, can anybody look them up and get useful information about them? It's about imparting information in a useful way, and that is actually hard to compress. Those decisions are contentful. It's not just arbitrary mechanical choices.
Patrick: What's an example of how a style guide has something which is not about just the mechanics of something, but attempts to impart taste upon someone who, again, most of the writers are presumably freelancers who have a periodic encounter with your editing process, but often after the work is actually delivered? How do you uplevel them with respect to the kind of taste that Asterisk represents?
Clara: Well, that happens well before that stage. It's actually a debate that Jake and I have all the time, which is we like to preserve writers' voices while making their pieces better. What counts as preserving a writer's voice? What should be preserved? What shouldn't be preserved? What if we just think that something sounds bad? How free should we feel to just change it? Pretty free, honestly. I think a magazine is really an extension of the editor's taste. And what this means in practice is, especially working with writers who have not written for publication before, who are more used to writing for themselves—in a way, it's kind of like being a therapist. You have to be able to intuit what are they going to react really strongly to? What are they going to be okay with? Also, there's a balance of just exerting your own will and saying, okay, I as the editor know that this isn't working. And trying to figure out—I can always tell when I'm reacting badly to something, but one of the best pieces of editing advice I ever got was, it's easier to diagnose problems than it is to diagnose solutions. So just because I'm reacting badly to something in a piece doesn't mean that I know how to fix it. And I think often, especially in early rounds of editing, it's better to just say, this doesn't make sense to me, or I notice my eyes glazing over here, or this isn't working, and give the author a chance to figure out how they want to course correct. And then if they are stumped or just don't know how to respond to that feedback, I can talk it through with them and try and figure out together what isn't working.
Patrick: Yeah. I think one of the cardinal sins of editing pieces is to go into the line-by-line too early before you have a meeting of the minds on core things. Like what is fundamentally the story that this is trying to tell, or what we are imparting upon the reader with it? How is that laid out on a macro level? And then, okay, on a paragraph-to-paragraph level, maybe these three paragraphs don't belong here, or they're not making sense to me, or similar. And maybe have a discussion of that before you start saying, well, okay, if we red pen here and then move this here and spelling mistake here, yada, yada, yada. And that makes it more efficient for both parties and also more likely that you put your cycles against things that are actually meaningful in the final draft versus—it doesn't do anyone any favors to copy edit sentences that will not be in the final draft because the thesis will wander or change during rereads.
Clara: Well, yeah, exactly. You don't want to get into line-by-line too early because it's all going to change anyway.
Patrick: In fact, a thing I attempted to do at my prior employer was institute—I'm going to write two drafts. We have an idea that there's an artifact that needs to exist on the Internet. I'll write two drafts for it and they will have the same punchline, but be very different takes on the piece. And the first decision is completely binary—A or B. You don't get to say, I didn't like the title. You don't get to say I noticed a dangling modifier in the fourth paragraph. It's just take A or take B and then we can polish one of them. But let's be aligned more on the core thesis and the core vibe. And there's a little bit of difficulty convincing writers to do that, partly because many of us are very precious with words and partly because producing twice the amount of words for one times the amount of pay and publishing opportunities is not great for many writers. But if it can win arguments in your organization, I would suggest people try it.
Clara: Interesting. Yeah. I don't think we will be adopting this practice, but I would be interested to hear how it goes.
AI in writing and editing
Patrick: It might be—places are doing it. It might be slightly easier these days in that you can have AI do the two stabs for you, or make a very different take on the first one and then say okay, just on a pure vibes level, are you attracted more to vibe A or vibe B? Even though—certainly, although I think they have many surprising strengths in writing, they are nowhere near ready to do heavy intellectual writing for magazines.
Clara: Yep. I think that's true. I think it's also very hard, at least for me personally, to figure out what I really think and how my arguments fit together before I've written them down. It is very easy to have an inchoate idea in my head of what I believe, but I find the exercise of trying to get it on paper—well, getting just an outline is part of it, but then even between an outline and a finished piece, just trying to work out, what is the proper connective tissue here? How do I make these transitions work? Often I'll find something that I think is kind of just a technical issue or a flow issue is really a conceptual issue. The reason a transition or something isn't working is because I really haven't thought through how the thoughts are connected. And I at least cannot imagine using AI for those preliminary stages of my writing process, because I just wouldn't be thinking about things in the same way.
Patrick: Mm-hmm.
Clara: And as an editor too, I've found I don't think that the models give great feedback. I have friends, smart friends for whom they do, and this could just be user error on my part, but I will spend a long time with a piece and I will really try and reverse outline it, take it apart, figure out does this actually imply the thing that it's implying here? What is this argument doing? Does it make sense in this context? And yeah, I don't think that the models are quite there.
Patrick: I have been pleasantly surprised this year for where they are in terms of giving feedback on things in particular. Going through the exercise of if you're viewing this piece with six different lenses on it, with each of them being, say, a persona for a potential reader. Embody the persona of a venture capitalist and embody the persona of this particular venture capitalist, et cetera, et cetera. Even when they're wrong, it is useful for me to have someone say, well, in the voice of—if Mark Andreessen, I would say here, here. And no, I don't actually believe that Mark Andreessen would say that, but I'm glad that one person at this table is saying, I'm the voice of Mark Andreessen for the purpose of this exercise.
Clara: Oh, that's extremely interesting because—a piece of advice that I give, we're doing a blogging fellowship right now, and a piece of advice that I've given to fellows, that I've given to people who I've done editing workshops with is user personas. I think it is incredibly useful when you are writing a piece to have in mind who is this for and what am I responding to? It's very hard to write without this. And I do have a model of the Asterisk reader in my mind, and this just helps inform things like, what do I need to explain? What can I take for granted? What counterarguments should I anticipate and have to respond to?
Patrick: Mm-hmm.
Clara: And this just informs a lot of how you word and structure pieces. And yeah, that is a really good use case. I should try that.
Patrick: Yeah. The moment at which I first woke up and took notice of how far AI had come earlier this year was there was a piece I was working on which was quite professionally significant for me, and I passed it through, I believe it was Opus 4, not sure off the top of my head, but one paragraph at a time and said, this is important and maybe even a little legally consequential. And so I want to make sure that I know exactly what I'm saying to the various audiences for this. Here's a paragraph. Tell me what your understanding of the subtext is. Tell me how you react to that subtext as A, B, C, D. Did I imply anywhere here the thing that I'm not trying to imply? In the paragraph where I twist the knife, what did you get of the subtext here? Because it really needs to include that a knife was twisted. Either the AI could be miscalibrated or I need to go back and do some more twisting. And I got—I've worked with very competent communications professionals and magazine editors and similar over the course of my career, and the non-person that I was working with was in the top 50% of anyone I've ever worked with. So to maybe experiment with it, it is a wild time to be alive.
Clara: For sure. I should also say I am a professional editor. I know that AI is useful for me for programming because I am not a professional programmer and I am not especially good at it. So the fact that I do not find AI feedback on writing a significant value add for me does not mean they're not good at it, or I think they're not good at it.
Patrick: Switching gears a little bit. I noticed when you pronounce zeitgeist, you pronounced that in the original German. And you had mentioned that you had made some study of German universities specifically. I feel a great deal of attachment to the ecosystem that is university as well. Also feeling a little bit of—they're both unfairly maligned in communities like ours, and yet there is a gap between what we would hope that they would accomplish for us as society and what they actually do deliver on any given Tuesday. What are your thoughts on the synthesis of that?
The origins of research universities
Clara: Thank you for letting me talk about my hobby horse here. For context, before I became a magazine editor, I wanted to be an intellectual historian and my area of expertise was 18th and early 19th century German academia. So this is something that I think is very interesting and like to talk about. It's also something that I wrote about recently in—not our last issue—a few months ago. I had a piece on the origins of the research university, which did come out of 19th century Germany. And this is a piece that I've wanted to write for a very long time. It's actually related to exactly what you said. It actually came out of talking to some people—I'll tell you later—in the progress studies community who spend their lives thinking about scientific institutions and knowledge-creating institutions. And I was in the process of researching this piece and I was talking about it, and they're like, wait, wait. The research university is German in origin? And I was like, I'm sorry, what?
Patrick: I think the reason both of us are surprised here—well, obviously this is your professional hobby horse. I thought that was just one of the sort of ambient things in the water that one learns while one is going through the acculturation process that results in getting out of a research university.
But anyhow, apologies for derailing us.
Clara: This is my hobby horse. And I realized that it is a kind of specific thing to be obsessed with. It is in the lottery of fascinations, this is what I rolled. But that made me feel really motivated to talk about it because we are both in or adjacent to communities that are extremely interested in institutions of knowledge production. In my own very small way, I operate an institution of knowledge production. And I think it was very surprising to me to learn how much we take that infrastructure for granted.
The reason I wanted to write that piece is it's a small miracle, I think, that we have research universities. If you asked an informed person in 1800 where would most original research happen in a hundred years from now, I really think almost no one would have said a university. I think they would have said it'll be something like the French Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society. Universities—academia is dead. It's medieval.
Patrick: They're an outgrowth of the monastic tradition. We are trying to move away from that whole thing. [Patrick notes: I am reporting my model of intellectual classes long ago rather than mocking the monastic tradition, which I have a great deal of regard for. Though: I would not recommend 60-80%+ of teenagers sign up for it.]
Why would you think they'll be doing medicine, really?
Clara: Well, they were doing medicine. The things that universities did in Europe—I can really only speak to Europe in an informed way here—they would have typically four faculties: law, medicine, theology, and what in Germany they called philosophy and other places call other things, but everything else. And philosophy is at the bottom of the totem pole. So the real function of the university is as a teaching institution. They are producing future lawyers or civil servants, doctors and priests. That is what they are for. There are scholars affiliated with the universities who do research, but they're not getting paid for it. And more importantly, they're not getting promoted for it.
Challenges in academic promotions
Patrick: Mm-hmm.
Clara: The way that you get promoted is kind of insane. Very political, very nepotistic, sort of related to teaching, not especially strongly related to teaching. Definitely not related to your intellectual output, unless you're a huge superstar who makes your university famous and draws in more students. Not a great system.
And increasingly, scholars who wanted to spend more time focusing on research were being drawn outside of the university to these different kinds of state-funded scientific institutions. But this creates a problem, at least relative to the current system, which is how do you produce new scholars? There's no affordance in this system for teaching someone to be a researcher or for developing an institutional culture around producing new knowledge. It's kind of individual people doing their own thing. And then increasingly over the course of the 17th, 18th centuries coming together with other practitioners. But there's no sense that there is a research culture that we can inculcate new students into and then they will have the career of being a researcher and producing new knowledge and learn the skills that go into that. You really have to teach yourself. And then once you've taught yourself, then you can publish and then you can go present to the Royal Society. It's not institutionalized in any way.
The global influence of German universities
And what you get through a bunch of contingent things that happen in Germany between about 1730 and 1810, stretching through the 1870s, is an institution where being a researcher is a career, has a professional culture. Professors' advancement, promotion becomes tied to their research output. And these are all new things. The idea that you would get hired or promoted or paid to do research and there would be a culture in your field of evaluating that research. And that an important goal professionally would be to teach students the particular skills that go into producing research that are specific to your field and passing on the professional culture that allows that—that's all new. That all comes to exist in this one context in a very short period of time. And then spreads all over the world. The American system of graduate education is copied from Germany. Basically everywhere where graduate education is research-oriented, they were copying Germany. There's these amazing letters from Louis Pasteur in 1868, I want to say, who is complaining about—he's doing his research in an attic and German biology professors have university-like state-funded laboratories, which did not really exist in France at that point.
Patrick: And—
Clara: And whenever I hear someone dismiss—I mean there's a million reasons why universities are valuable now, and I don't need to go into them. There's just so many other people who have made this case better than I can. But whenever I hear anybody now kind of dismissing the university system, I just think—the fact that we have an institution that has cultural mechanisms for rewarding the production of knowledge is very special and very contingent. And then for perpetuating itself. And fragile. And I think we should feel a real sense of gratitude and appreciation that this thing has come to exist because it so easily could not have happened. And the effects that it had on the world were just immense. German universities of the 19th century created so much of modern science. So much of the modern world is only possible because of this system.
Patrick: I think if you literally just graph the periodic table over years and we start filling in the blank spaces of the map, one almost-poisoned chemist at a time. And you know, we sit on the shoulders of giants in a lot of ways.
Clara: This is—yeah. And this is an important point because it's not that actually—you can go back earlier. You can talk about Lavoisier or whatever. And I feel like people in the progress world often like to lionize these Enlightenment lone wolf scientists. And a lot of them are great. I love these people, I admire these people, but I think we just underestimate the importance of bureaucracy as a force multiplier. You can be a Priestley or a Lavoisier if you are a genius and you have a lot of money and—today it's harder. But you could back then.
But the thing that was really important in Germany was the idea that as a bright but fairly normal bourgeois German young man, you could become a chemist and plug away at doing chemistry work. And you would exist in an infrastructure where you would be taught how to do chemistry and you would be professionally rewarded for making new discoveries in chemistry. And you would have access to a lab with materials to do chemistry.
Patrick: We were essentially at the time as a civilization doing breadth-first search across all chemical space. And that just requires more bodies. You can't—well—
Clara: Knowing—
Patrick: —we know now, you could reason from first principles to, oh, there must be something interesting. But the production function of chemistry knowledge is a lot of people with various volatile chemicals and applying one of, you know, 16 transformations they can do on them. And then hopefully not immediately tasting what comes out because that leads to a short lifespan for chemists. But—oh man, the fruits of 18th century chemistry. Synthetic fertilizer, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You don't really need anything else but the first one. But—
Clara: Okay. Synthetic fertilizer is a really interesting one. Because Haber and Bosch are operating at a time when the German university system in particular is—
Patrick: Is changing a lot.
The American university system vs. German system
Clara: That's a set of 19th, early 20th century innovations. I always forget which one is which. One of them was a university chemist. One of them worked for a large chemical company. And one of the reasons I think why the American university system overtook the German system is that German universities had a very strong bright line between pure and applied research. Basically for class reasons. I don't mean to get into all of this right now, but those kinds of collaborations were somewhat structurally harder to do in the German system than in the American system. Americans are just much more loosey-goosey about, oh, we can have a school that teaches science and engineering and pure chemistry and applied chemistry all in the same place. It's great. You get the Haber-Bosch process out of Germany and it's fantastic. But that kind of thing is a little bit structurally easier to do in America.
Patrick: Mm-hmm. And we continue to have derivatives of this to the present day. Granted there are other ways of doing scientific organization. Obviously around the wars there was great government interest in directly funding science on the Manhattan Project kind of model. And we've had labs in industry for a while. Bell Labs in particular gets a lot of credit in spaces like this one. But the aggregate output of all the industry labs is—it's not nothing. We're certainly glad we have it, but it does not approach the aggregate output of research universities in the United States or our close peers.
The role of public and private partnerships in science
Clara: Yeah. And I am just not nearly as knowledgeable about the post-World War II American scientific apparatus. And so I want to constrain what I say. I know that a lot of people talk about breaking down different sources of funding and the rise and fall of industrial research labs. And also now innovation clusters are a major topic of concern. In the China watcher space, there's a lot of discussion of linkages between universities and corporations and government labs, and how innovations flow between all of these sectors.
Patrick: Public-private partnerships were really big for a few years. I think that exact term has fallen out of favor in some places. But the fact of an organization where we're going to mix some academics, some people from government, some people from industry and then push money into it from all of the sources, but really from government, has led to some amount of good in the world.
Challenges in science communication
Clara: Yeah. And I don't want to say that universities are the only institutions that produce knowledge. Clearly they're not. But I do think that the structure of the research university is the backbone of knowledge production in the modern world because it is one of the very few institutions we have come up with that is able to create a culture that is in a—this goes back to the beginning of the conversation—to create a culture that is in a sustained way oriented towards truth, towards the production of knowledge and transmit that and make it a career someone can follow. There is no law of nature that says that something that does that has to exist. And we have created very few things like that.
Patrick: And it is unfortunately, I believe a lot—I think lots of institutions have taken it on the chin over the last couple of years. Universities, perhaps, less than some other institutions. Institutions are probably more fragile than anyone expects.
I went to a decent research university, took a look at potentially joining the institution, and then got a few red flags and had to exit. And then as a result, when I finally got to make my one contribution to the academic literature, they asked me, what is your institutional affiliation? And I said, “... Bingo Card Creator.”
Because instead of working in an American lab, I was grinding out bingo cards for elementary school teachers next to a rice paddy in Japan. Which, not to make this overly about myself, when we break pipelines, the nature of a pipeline is that it can be 40 years long. And when we degrade them, we'll have a bubble in that pipeline for 40+ years.
And it's tough to look at the experience the last 10 years and think, ooh, we've probably got some bubbles in the tubing at this point.
Clara: This is something actually to tie it back to my actual job that I think about a lot because the issue that we're working on now, the winter issue, is going to be science. And the reason is I like to do issue themes based around whatever I'm preoccupied with. And this is the thing that I'm going to be thinking about all the time anyway, so I might as well just make it my job. And the thing that I am preoccupied with right now is institutional science. How do we do it now? How do we do it better? How is it breaking? How can we prevent it from being broken?
And both because this is literally what I am working on, and because I run a general interest publication that has quite a bit of technical content, I've been thinking a lot about what is the role of science communicators. And I think that the collapse of institutional trust in the sciences is very multi-causal, very complicated, has been going on for a very long time. I certainly think a big part of it is science communication running ahead of the evidence base. Which goes back to why I wanted to start Asterisk, and part of it was a reaction to—it was the question of doing your own research. This was in 2022.
I was in the rationalist community and I felt like, wow, my friends got some things right about COVID that it felt like more mainstream sources weren't. [Patrick notes: Accurate. You could choose to be informed by the CDC or the ZVI. I hope you chose Zvi.]
Clara continues: On the other hand, there are people out there who have concluded that vaccines are a conspiracy to kill us all. And I was then and am now wrestling with the question of is it responsible to say, well, when my smart friends who I trust say that the expert consensus is wrong, I should trust them. But when those other people do it, they're looney tunes.
And from there to, wait—what is the expert consensus? Is there a consensus? When I'm trying to draw these conclusions, I'm still citing academic papers. But then when RFK Jr. is trying to draw these conclusions, he's also citing academic papers. On some level, I think it is impossible and not responsible to say a layperson who does not have significant expertise in a technical field can just do their own research. I think nobody can do this for all of the things that a person in the modern world needs to do in order to make informed decisions about their lives.
Patrick: This would be catastrophic too, from an economic or any other sort of perspective, if you have to be able to describe the physics of how a light bulb works before you can—
Clara: Yeah, you can't. It doesn't work. And the consequences of trying to do this can be personally catastrophic. And on the other hand, some institutions have made some pretty discrediting calls over the past few years. And the question that I am obsessed with, that I'm constantly returning to is how do I present information to the world in a way that is intellectually responsible? That both leaves the reader with a better model of the world than they had before they encountered it. And what level of deference should I exercise? How do I determine even what an expert consensus in a field looks like? What is a reasonable contrarian view? I don't have a good answer to these questions. I wanted to do a science issue because I really don't know how to approach this, and it's something I'm trying to work out every day.
Patrick: Yeah. I don't think I will immediately give you something that you've never thought about before. I think from a communications perspective and also a strategy of the institutions perspective, we had a number of years where people claimed consensus ahead of the evidence base, and where the claim of consensus itself became sort of self-referential. I think this has happened in a number of places. It is most acute in, say, climate science.
Clara: Climate science, I think about—yeah, that's the other big example. I don't even think it's that the science itself is—I mean, there is some bad science, but there's bad science in every field. I think it's that there is a cottage industry of communication around it that does not interpret that science in a responsible way.
Patrick: Mm-hmm. I also think that the call is coming from inside the house on that one too. There's a quote I can fish out for the transcript on a particular climate scientist who said, I will keep X out of the scientific record, even if I need to redefine what peer reviewed research is.
[Patrick notes: Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, in a 2004 email to Michael Mann during the "Climategate" scandal:
"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"]
Patrick continues: And actions like that, which didn't come out of nowhere, they felt they were under attack for various politically motivated—
Clara: And they were. This is the other—they were under attack for politically motivated reasons that absolutely did happen. There's a book that I like: Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway.
This book is really interesting. It's also really frustrating. It's about politically motivated attacks on—first like science showing that tobacco causes cancer, and then on science. And they do a very, very good job in this book of showing there was a specific group of scientists, mostly physicists, mostly Cold War-era Republicans, who were solicited by industry groups to muddy the waters and spread doubt first about the link between cigarettes and cancer, and then about a variety of environmental and climate goals. This is a real phenomenon that happened.
On the other hand, there's a difference in the level of actual scientific certainty on these things from the link between cigarette smoking and cancer. It is just not responsible to spread doubt about that. That is completely real. That happened. To on the other extreme, the idea of nuclear winter, that a nuclear war would cause these extreme climatic events—pretty uncertain, much more uncertain based on modeling that was available at the time. And a lot of things were kind of in the middle there.
Patrick: And I think people sort of latched onto nuclear winter as well—uncertain, sure. But if it contributes, if we just shut up and multiply here, spreading this will cost us some points over the long term on being honest interlocutors, but avoid nuclear war, which has arbitrarily large impact in the present.
And so therefore we will only have to compromise this once. [Patrick notes: The trouble with only compromising on sacred principles just the one time, of course, is that it’s never just the one time.]
Clara: And more to the point, science communicators at the time, I think, made this calculation of deliberately exaggerating their certainty about this outcome. And then their opponents seized on that to say, look, they're lying to you. Because they kind of were.
And then this was discrediting with all—and we see this dynamic happening again and again. I think another really good example today is extreme weather events. Where my understanding, and I'm not an expert, so I would love to be corrected on this if I'm wrong, is that the link between climate change, very real. The link between climate change and specific extreme weather events, much, much more uncertain. I saw this—my family live in the Pacific Palisades. So I was following news about the Palisades fires in Los Angeles at the beginning of this year pretty closely. And a lot of people really, really wanted to link it to climate change. And I think that the case for this is pretty weak for various reasons that I don't need to go into right now. Fires happen in Southern California for a lot of reasons. And this is because it is of course useful for narratives about wanting to prevent climate change, a good and noble goal, to make this connection.
[Patrick notes: It is enormously frustrating to live in Japan, which will continue existing under substantial earthquake and tsunami risk indefinitely, and read people in well-regarded generalist publications attribute earthquake risk to climate change. What could the physical mechanism even be?!
I was once interviewed by a national broadcaster in Australia in 2011, regarding the recent earthquake in Japan, and was asked about the risk of nuclear fallout reaching Australia. (As I’ve learned to my frequent annoyance, there are many institutions in the world who have the incorrect ambient impression that no Japanese people speak English and who will, needing to find an English-speaking expert to comment on a Japan-adjacent news story, reach very deep onto the bench.)
My response was, approximately, “To be clear, I am not the type of engineer who customarily deals with nuclear fallout. However, having passed a high school chemistry class, I would like to reassure your listeners that there is no risk whatsoever to the health of people in Australia from the current situation.”]
Clara continues: And again, it's a combination. It is not like, oh, scientists are lying to you. They're mostly not. It's that you can make a case that it's connected and then you can make another case that it isn't. And I think on balance, the case that it is not a result of climate change is stronger, but there's a whole cottage industry of science communication that amplifies one side of the story and it makes the whole thing look less credible.
Patrick: And there's also, I think, increased politicization in a lot of places where after it is the capital-S Science, you are, to use the parlance of our times, a denier if you would ever take the other side of the science on anything. And then it increasingly gets to the point where—things with wildly different mechanisms, fields, et cetera, et cetera. Well, if you sign up for one bit of The Science you have to sign up for everything that we put capital-S science on. And if you disagree with one bit of The Science, you're a denier.
And so people get released into this free-floating atmosphere where they find themselves disagreeing with one thing and then find that the only people that will validate them on one thing are crazy. And so they get affiliated with a lot of other crazy things downstream of it.
Clara: Mm-hmm.
Patrick: And we were talking about vaccine policy. Complicated thoughts, which I couldn't possibly go into in sufficient depth in an hour. But is there a case for optimism on how we can do science communication better? How we can reform our institutions to be worthy of the trust?
Clara: Really, really? That should really—okay. Big question. But this is also my job. So my maybe most naive Pollyanna-ish view is I think people should just tell the truth. I almost want to be argued against here because this feels—I think it betrays a very rosy view of the world, but I am fundamentally an optimistic person and what I try to do is just not print things that I don't—I mean, I will print things I disagree with. I'll do that all the time, but I won't print things that I think are dishonest or that are trying to push the reader to a conclusion that can't be defended by the arguments and the evidence that are on the page. Because ultimately people are—I mean, I'm not going to say people aren't morons. Some people are morons, but I think people are not irrational morons. They're, even when they're morons, pretty rational morons who will respond quite negatively to being deliberately misled.
Patrick: Mm-hmm.
Clara: I also think that the kind of writing that I publish reaches a very small audience in the grand scheme of things, an audience that is more selected to care about truth. So I think that I have a role in shaping a certain kind of discourse in a select community. And I don't want to underplay that because I think that that work also matters.
Candidly, elite discourse matters and there is no guarantee that things that smart people we know talk about will be correct. And I want to increase the extent to which smart people who read Asterisk—because all Asterisk readers are brilliant—are correct.
I don't have a great solution for mass public trust. I have thoughts about it.
Patrick: One thing which feels somewhat obvious is to the extent we rack up wins and make the fruits of those wins widely available, it's easy to buy trust with wins. And ultimately that is a big part of the exercise and the combination of, you know, what's the local jargon for this—your beliefs should pay rent in experience.
If we spend, you know, $10 billion on funding an institution, you really gotta deliver. Bring home the bacon.
And 2020 was rough for that, I think.
[Patrick notes: Our institutions publicly beclowned themselves, repeatedly, while draping their full moral authority as custodians of the public trust over policy decisions which included monstrous crimes. We intentionally discriminated by race in the provision of healthcare because it sounded good in the meeting and because the American PMC was going through something of a moment.
I harp on this subject (including in the Story of VaccinateCA and repeatedly on this podcast), because I think it should be taught to high schoolers next to Korematsu, Tuskegee, and other monstrous crimes, with the specific admonition that these lessons must be learned because people who consider themselves pillars of their communities, experts in their fields, and proud anti-racists will nonetheless commit monstrous crimes rather than risk their social standing.]
The impact of COVID-19 on public trust in science
Clara: I think—okay to go back to 2020 again, I think this is a case in point for a lot of these things. So I think a huge amount of falling trust in scientific institutions is the fact that public health figures were in a very verifiable way contradicting themselves or trying to cover up information they disagreed with. And this led people to conclude, oh, maybe they're lying about more stuff. And again, that's not irrational. I think that a lot of people just have incorrect beliefs about the extent to which there were widespread conspiracy theories. But yes, if you try to suppress information that will cause a backlash. But also Operation Warp Speed, it's a huge win. And that hasn't increased vaccine uptake.
Patrick: I would put there—one, it did increase vaccine uptake because in the counterfactual, we probably don't have a vaccine right now.
Clara: That's true. But there was—I mean, COVID vaccines were a huge, huge win. A concrete win. And that didn't have the effect in repairing public trust that I would have hoped it would have had. And I think that this says that even once you have a concrete win, getting that to translate into trust is still a function of the media environment. So I think it's a harder problem.
Patrick: I think media and policy environment. We did not do nearly as good on the policy side. We should not have said, okay, now that we have the vaccines, the pandemic is immediately over. The biology didn't support that, et cetera, et cetera.
But a more concrete linkage between, you know, we're going to graph our vaccination rate on a dashboard and the things that you hate about the last two years, about not being able to meet your friends, about these impositions on individual liberty, et cetera, et cetera—those things get rescinded as we go up on the dashboard. We could have put more bacon in the package for people versus, yeah, we're going to have vaccines, and in fact we're going to fire you if you don't take the vaccine, because that is what honest people do to sell you on something.
But the fact of having the vaccines changed almost nothing about the overall containment strategy here. Which seems like an unforced error to me.
But I will say this from a point of minimal expertise. I was just the person trying to get the vaccines to people because in our institutional rush to make sure that everyone got them, we lost them. That happened. That was a little weird.
If I can make one comment on the vaccine hesitancy discourse, a lot of political discourse in the United States I feel have the punchline: “This is why people who are in positions of authority are not at fault for all the bad things we are seeing.”
Clara: And vaccine—
Patrick: And they won't say it out loud, they certainly won't say it in a press conference, but the government, people in civil society, et cetera, et cetera, were incompetent with regards to doing a product rollout, and that incompetence cost lives. But if you say, oh, the real problem is that I have not failed the people, the people have failed me, they have refused this vaccine, they are hesitant about it, then it is no longer a problem that I can't write down the locations where I sent the vaccine to or successfully get that information out on nightly news or do a persuasive campaign.
And in other places in government where we have things that people should want, like say free money, there is no concept in the Department of Education or any literature about it for Pell Grant hesitancy. It's understood. Yes, we do have a mechanism within this institution to explain the fact of a Pell Grant to someone who might be a first-generation college student. It is free money. We tell you that fact. We will clarify it is not a loan if you have questions about it at this point. Like, that sounds too good to be true.
If you ask: “Is taking the money going to cause my child to have autism?” We will not respond “ You are an idiot.” We will say, we want you to attend this university. And so we would like to confirm any questions you have, even that one, and treat you like a responsible adult human and then give you the free money.
And our unwillingness to do that with respect to vaccine hesitancy is a choice.
Clara: I think there's actually a similar underlying phenomenon here, which is it's hard to be rational when the world is complicated and you don't understand it. Sorry, I want to back up.
Patrick: Sure.
Clara: And I don't want to get involved in that. And it may be the case that, yes, in fact it's free money and they should just take it. But without that extra communicative work, they might be quite rational to say, oh, it'll make my life worse to get involved in this system.
Patrick: You know, why should I believe that the government is going to do something totally with no strings attached when it has never done that before? Despite many people telling me over the years that food stamps and similar have no strings attached except for the 47 that we will attach to you immediately upon meeting. And your necessity of filling out a report every six weeks for the rest of your life.
Clara: Yeah, exactly. And these systems are humiliating. I think I don't remember if we had this conversation when you were at our house, but one of my housemates used to work at a Kroger's in the Midwest and has talked a lot about dealing with WIC, which is for new moms and small children. And it's just the most baffling, degrading set of restrictions on what you can buy. She would talk about being a checkout clerk and having moms weeping in the checkout line because they bought strawberry yogurt because their toddler likes strawberry yogurt, but they're only allowed to buy the plain unflavored yogurt and they can't afford the yogurt. It's a horrible system. Of course people have this negative reaction to it.
Patrick: And yeah—
Clara: I mean, again, not an original take at all. Very, very cold take. But a lot of institutional trust just comes from institutional trustworthiness. When you talk to British people, they love the NHS. The NHS has a lot of problems. Whenever I talk to a British friend or read about it, the consistent thing I hear is the customer service experience is really good. They feel respected by nurses. They don't have to deal with all of the insane billing situation that we have to deal with here. Just having your day-to-day interactions with the institution be pleasant and positive-sum is hugely significant.
Patrick: Yeah. I would have very different political opinions if I had grown up in Japan versus the United States of America because the retail experience of interfacing with the government in a Japanese ward office is just so much better than at the DMV or Chicago City Hall or similar. Competent people on the front line that have empathy, very helpful.
I will say with respect to this particular vaccine: of the universe of possible chemicals and possible biology are not in the most fortunate universe. You are quite likely to notice, almost immediately after being vaccinated against covid, that you feel awful. [Patrick notes: And not in the momentary discomfort sense! It can take you out for a day or two!]
And that is not baked into every vaccine everywhere. And people come up with some interesting folk theories as to why it happened. And I don't think those folk theories usefully describe reality, but an argument people make is, well, that's just because they're doing evil witchcraft on this one. It's not like the vaccines of your childhood, not like those good vaccines. No, this is the new mRNA evil brand.
And I think there was an unwillingness in some parts of the scientific establishment to even acknowledge the level of, say, side effects and similar. Not merely that there was not a willingness to acknowledge—we're getting deep in the weeds on vaccines here. But my own hyper-focused interests, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, VAERS, is a thing that exists out in the world. You either as a physician or as a person who is receiving care can say, okay, subsequent to receiving this vaccine, I had this event. And by law that gets entered into VAERS. And then the scientific community can monitor the population-wide rollout of these things and say, okay, we think it is extremely unlikely that nothing bad will happen. It's a risk-reward function that we're going after here. And VAERS is a data source. Great.
There exist papers in journals which say that the ability of people to write information into VAERS is a risk because people could write either untrue things or—and here's the leap—they could write true things that decrease the propensity of other people to become vaccinated. And so therefore people advocate in journals to turn VAERS off or to gatekeeper it behind a medical professional.
And therefore the United States misinformation bureaucracy went out to places like Twitter, YouTube, et cetera, et cetera, and said, hey, there's a genre of misinformation where the information is not wrong per se, but it is “vaccine hesitancy content.” And we would like you to zero the vaccine hesitancy content, please. And an explanation of what VAERS is and how to put your symptoms into it is “vaccine hesitancy content.”
And we have not taken nearly enough lumps either on the part of the tech industry or the part of the government for that.
[Patrick notes: I am making a very specific allegation here.
It is abundantly supported by the historical record, including emails sent by the White House Directory of Digital Strategy, which were excerpted in the court case now known as Murthy vs. Missouri, which went to the Supreme Court. (The Supreme Court, sadly, declined to find standing and therefore did not reach the question of whether the underlying behavior was permitted by the laws, Constitution, and traditions of the United States. It seems patently obvious to me that it is not and should not be.)
I will quote verbatim from the finding of the lower court, with minor formatting changes. I consider an opinion by a federal judge which directly cites emails on the record from the White House to be effectively dispositive as to the existence and contents of those emails.
On March 15, 2021, Flaherty acknowledged receiving Facebook's detailed report and demanded a report from Facebook on a recent Washington Post article that accused Facebook of allowing the spread of information leading to vaccine hesitancy. Flaherty emailed the Washington Post article to Facebook the day before, with the subject line: "You are hiding the ball," and stated "I've been asking you guys pretty directly, over a series of conversations, for a clear accounting of the biggest issues you are seeing on your platform when it comes to vaccine hesitancy and the degree to which borderline content as you define it – is playing a role."
After Facebook denied "hiding the ball," Flaherty followed up by making clear that the White House was seeking more aggressive action on "borderline content." Flaherty referred to a series of meetings with Facebook that were held in response to concerns over "borderline content" and accused Facebook of deceiving the White House about Facebook's "borderline policies." Flaherty also accused Facebook of being the "top driver of vaccine hesitancy." Specifically, his email stated:
“I am not trying to play 'gotcha' with you. We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy—period. I will also be the first to acknowledge that borderline content offers no easy solutions. But we want to know that you're trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you're not playing a shell game with us when we ask you what is going on. This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”
In response to Flaherty's email, Facebook responded, stating: "We obviously have work to do to gain your trust…We are also working to get you useful information that's on the level. That's my job and I take it seriously – I'll continue to do it to the best of my ability, and I'll expect you to hold me accountable."
Slavitt, who was copied on Facebook's email, responded, accusing Facebook of not being straightforward, and added more pressure by stating, "internally, we have been considering our options on what to do about it."]
Historical perspectives on medical trust
Clara: I really think we're going to be paying for this for a generation. It brings me no joy. I'm not—it could be worse actually. It could be worse. Have you read about the history of smallpox eradication?
Patrick: Yes, but probably not in the way that you meant that question.
Clara: Oh, the history of getting—there was a lot of very coercive stuff towards the end there, which I think was ultimately justified. But it got very, very rough. And the early history, the 19th century history of vaccination as opposed to inoculation and then vaccination also quite interesting because early vaccines were actually dangerous. We just understood the technology a lot less well. And there's a lot of what we would now call misinformation. A lot of true and quite concerning information. And I think, I'm not an expert in this, it's one of the things that I—there's two things that I want to read a lot more about, to understand this whole set of issues better. One is the early history of vaccination in Britain and then the rest of Europe and the US and how doctors managed to create trust in the first place with a much more dangerous version of this technology. The second is the professionalization of medicine in the United States in the 1920s and—
Patrick: Mm-hmm. Because—
Clara: The 19—this is in the progressive era, you have the FDA, but its powers are much more restricted than the modern FDA. Until there's a huge leap in the early thirties and another leap in the sixties after thalidomide. But the early—the twenties and thirties is full of medical quacks. Insane quantities of medical hucksterism. I guess not that insane from a hypermodern perspective, but just snake oil, like literal snake oil.
Patrick: Literal snake oil. The Coca-Cola has cocaine in it, et cetera, et cetera.
Clara: Arsenic. We had this amazing Sears catalog from 1910, and it's just arsenic in your makeup, cocaine in your medicine, arsenic in your medicine, this electric belt that you can buy and it shocks your genitals and it's supposed to cure prostate cancer. And you can just advertise this stuff and make these claims. And there was a very active movement to create trusted medical organizations that could say, no, actually real doctors think that this is crazy. And they were fighting a much more uphill battle than doctors today because this institutional credibility didn't exist. And actually, I think an underrated fact about medicine is that going to a doctor was probably net negative until, I'm going to say, I don't know, 1880.
Patrick: Mm-hmm.
Clara: You could probably make it earlier, but until modern hygiene, germ theory and anesthesia really, sanitation, you could even make the case until the introduction of antibiotics, which isn't until again, the thirties. Going to a medical professional is really at best not better, probably worse than just doing some home remedy. It takes—it is really, really late in the existence of institutionalized medicine for institutionalized medicine to be good enough to be not more likely to kill you. So doctors in the twenties and thirties are fighting a much sharper uphill battle to convince the public that, no, institutionally we know what is correct and what is poisonous. And they also knew less than we know now, and they managed to pull together this network of institutions that became much more trusted and they never abolished quackery or medical misinformation.
Patrick: Well, there's often—there's also some interesting compromises that were made along the way there. Like for example, in the United States, chiropractic practitioners are doctors. Why? Well, we kind of need the votes.
Clara: There's all kinds of things like this, but they did manage to create a level of institutionalized trust in the products of—to go back to the universities—of the scientific medical establishment. Because modern bacteriology, all of that, the modern medical sciences, also an outgrowth of the German research university. This really comes out of the university labs that were being funded in newly unified Germany after about 1871. And there's other things going on, I'm just a Germanist. But there was a very—this idea that medicine worked and produced more reliably useful results than non-institutionalized medicine was new and it took a lot of work to convince people of that. But that work got done, and I'm not an expert in how it got done, but a reading project that I'm excited to engage in over the next few weeks and months is understanding how those dynamics played out.
Patrick: Yep. Well, I think it will be interesting to catch the Asterisk edition of, I guess, history of science—
Clara: The science issue. We're also going to talk—it's not just going to be a history issue. I'm always having to fight my instinct to make everything a history issue.
Patrick: Well, I look forward to reading that when it is available on the Internet. And I'll ask the same question I usually ask, although the answer is fairly obvious for you. Where can people find you on the Internet?
Clara: They can find me at asteriskmag.com. Also, you could get the print edition. It's very beautiful.
Patrick: Well, thanks very much for coming on the program today, Clara. And for the rest of you, thanks very much. We'll see you next week on Complex Systems.
