How to "Question the Science" Without Becoming a Conspiracy Theorist

It requires a balancing act, since there's more bullshit outside the mainstream than inside it.

A few days ago I got into an internet argument with a conspiracy theorist whose blog readership happens have some overlap with mine. (Yes, I know, arguing with conspiracy theorists isn’t a good use of one’s time – but “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”)

The conspiracy theory that day (though of course the blog’s author would never call it that) was a claim that the decay heat from spent nuclear fuel is an important carbon-free energy resource that’s being ignored by the scientific establishment so that they can channel public money into less efficient technologies like wind and solar power instead – and also that these fuel rods will continue to be an importance energy resource for hundreds of years into the future. I left a comment saying that this was wildly off-the-mark.

First of all, if the spent fuel (which continues releasing heat by radioactive decay even after fission stops) was making enough energy to be economically useful, then it wouldn’t have been taken out of the reactor in the first place. But actually, the moment after shutdown it only gives off about 6.5 percent of peak power, which falls to 1.5 percent after an hour, and 0.4 percent after a day. By the time the spent fuel is a year old, it’s giving off about 10 kW of heat per ton, and at ten years it’s closer to 1 kW. (The non-exponential curve is due to spent fuel having a large mix of radioisotopes with different half-lives.) Since you can also get 1 kW of heat by collecting sunlight with an 8-square-foot mirror, encouraging people to dig up radioactive waste in the hopes of getting their hands on some sort of treasure is a really bad idea.

In response to which, the conspiracy theorist claimed that, since freshly-produced nuclear waste has to be kept in cooling pools and is in danger of catching fire if the water boils off, it must be a valuable energy source. He also complained about the “wiki-propaganda” that I had cited, and said that if I cited some other source, then he might pay attention. Things just went downhill from there, with him angrily spluttering about the “replication crisis” (while citing zero sources of his own that disagreed with Wikipedia’s data), and accusing me, in a very rude fashion, of not understanding the differences between steam engines and thermocouples. Now it’s true that thermocouple-based RTGs, like the ones on the Voyager spacecraft, can make electricity from smaller heat sources than a steam engine needs. But they’re a very expensive way to make tiny amounts of power (470W for Voyager at its 1977 launch, decaying to about half of that by now) and the spacecraft only use them because there are literally no other options when the Sun is 19 billion kilometers away. I tried explaining all that in my comments, but he paid no attention. Basically, there is a reason this guy makes his living by writing stuff on the internet, and not in, say, engineering or architecture.

Basically, if you’re the sort of person who thinks that modern science is deeply corrupt, but that the “solution” to its problems is to dismiss any data that contradicts your own pet theories, put zero effort into searching the scientific literature for different points-of-view, and base your opinions on random guesswork instead, while spewing insults at anyone who criticizes your reasoning… then if you get into an argument with me, you’ll probably think I’m a gullible technophile who blindly trusts mainstream opinion and never does his own thinking.

Which is odd, because there are some issues on which I’ve criticized the scientific establishment quite a bit, such that the use of ADHD medication for small children, which I think is very harmful. (My thesis is that, in order to create a temporary and, in the big picture, rather trivial improvement in children’s performance in grade school, it saddles them with growth suppression, lifelong drug dependencies, and permanent deficiencies in the same neurotransmitters (like GABA+) that the drug is increasing in the short term.)

And when the real technophiles hear me say all that, they often accuse me of not believing that the drugs work in the first place (this is false – I believe they do work, but they also cause damage that should never be acceptable in the struggle to get an 8, 10, or 12-year-old to sit still for longer). Or they accuse me of being a sadist who wants children to suffer from a treatable disease, or they might insist that, had I been alive when insulin was found to treat diabetes, I would have been against that too. And finally, when such a person knows that he has run out of arguments, he might say “Well, I trust the experts” as if that settled everything, and then go on his way, thinking that I’m just as much of a paranoid conspiracy theorist as the nuclear waste blogger.

What is a Conspiracy Theory, Anyway?

Since I titled this essay “How to Question the Science Without Becoming a Conspiracy Theorist,” I owe it to my readers to explain what I mean by “conspiracy theorist,” and by extension, “conspiracy theory.”

The plain sense of the word “conspiracy” is two or more people agreeing, in secret, to do something that the authorities or the broader public would disapprove of. And this is the meaning when somebody is charged with “conspiracy to commit murder” or “conspiracy to commit wire fraud.” In this sense, conspiracies are common – for instance, I am quite convinced that Jeffrey Epstein was involved in several criminal conspiracies, and I am very disappointed in Donald Trump’s decision not to release the full, unredacted Epstein files.

But a “conspiracy theory” in the common, negative sense refers to a set of claims that ascribe an unrealistic degree of coordination to the evil forces in the world – or at least to the people the conspiracy theorist thinks are evil – and which assumes that certain power centers are working together to carry out a sinister plan, when in real life there is no plan, just a lot of people following their own interests or biases, usually without much foresight.

Consider, for example, that durable old conspiracy theory (a theory that lies at the root of a lot of newer ones!) which claims that the French Revolution, complete with the guillotine and all its other horrors, was planned out in advance by the Freemasons and Illuminati as a plot to destroy the Catholic Church. (As is explained in detail in the bestselling 1798 book Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism by the Abbé Augustin Barruel.)

As far as the facts went, Barruel’s thesis was bunk. The French Revolution wasn’t planned in advance by anybody. It began with spontaneous bread riots and a financial crisis which Louis XVI thought he could solve by convening the États Généraux. And it progressed through several stages in which the revolutionaries quarreled viciously about what kind of state they wanted to build, until the losing side (including many winners of the previous quarrel) was thrown out of power and perhaps guillotined. And the Freemasons, a mostly-aristocratic club whose members came from all political factions (and who were much more likely than the average Frenchman to be decapitated) had nothing to do with it.

But the conspiracy theory caught on anyway, since by grossly exaggerating the coordination of its villains, and by flattening out the complicated politics of the era into a simplistic tale of Good vs. Evil, it satisfied its audience’s hunger for easy answers.

This, then, is what I mean by conspiracy theory – any account of events, be it in science, politics, or otherwise, which ascribes an unrealistic degree of coordination to the Bad Guys, and which accuses them of working in secret to do Bad Things, with little or no evidence and often without a realistic motive.

When a Dissenting Opinion Isn’t a Conspiracy Theory

The claim that I mentioned at the beginning of my post – that spent nuclear fuel is a valuable energy source that’s being overlooked due to inaccurate thermal data published by nuclear physicists – is a conspiracy theory. You can blather all you want about the replication crisis (which is a big problem in the life sciences and especially pharmacology, but not in physics or materials science) but at the end of the day, the fact that there are 54 commercial nuclear power plants in the United States alone, all equipped with facilities for processing and storing spent fuel, and not a single one of these has had a fatal spent-fuel-related accident, means that the engineers who design and operate the plants have a pretty good idea of how much heat the nuclear waste is producing. So the only way you can claim that something’s being held back from the public is if you posit an unrealistically elaborate conspiracy… and a conspiracy that also works against the material interests of the people involved (since if nuclear waste is a resource rather than a burden, why would nuclear engineers hide that fact?)

On the other hand, the mainstream scientific opinions and medical practices that actually deserve criticism tend to be different in a few important ways.

First, the propaganda (i.e. the mainstream belief that you have recognized as propaganda) will involve a lot of truth mixed in with the lies, since it’s against human nature for large groups of people to unite behind pure falsehoods. (For the same reason, nasty political ideologies like Communism and Nazism always begin with a lot of fair criticisms of the status quo.)

Second, when the authorities do behave dishonestly, they mostly lie by omission – i.e. by just not talking about the downsides of what they’re doing, rather than making up data out of thin air. (Scientific fraud happens, but it’s poorly coordinated, and less common than just avoiding important topics entirely.)

Third, there will be dissent from within the scientific or medical profession itself – that is, even if the bad ideas have gained majority support, there will be a minority of unconvinced scientists who put their expertise to work criticizing the dominant theory or practice.

And fourth, the harmful consensus will serve the interests of the people who are pushing it.

The National Institutes for Health’s decision to ignore the dangers of gain-of-function research, and fund the Wuhan lab anyway during the years before Covid-19, is a good example of this. The bad idea (i.e. that gain-of-function research was safe) was mixed with a lot of accurate technical data about how bat viruses would need to mutate in order to infect human beings. The deceit was by omission, since the possibility that a virus might escape the lab was mostly ignored, not covered up with a false claim that, say, the researchers possessed a master-vaccine that could stop any virus their program might later create. There was indeed dissent from within virology (see for instance this 2014 symposium on the risks of GOF research). Meanwhile, going ahead with the research anyway clearly served the interests of the researchers, who were deeply invested in their specialty, who looked forward to their future publications, and whose careers would fall apart if gain-of-function research didn’t continue.

And so we have a clear case of a failure of institutional science, that isn’t a conspiracy. No virologists ever met in a secret meeting and consciously decided to create a pandemic. They just followed their own interests, and, one at a time, gave in to the normal human impulse to only pay attention to the good things their profession does, and not talk about the downsides.

There are plenty of other cases of non-conspiratorial institution failures. Just think about the numerous people who have lost faith in modern medicine after trying for years to treat asthma, migraines, or some other chronic disease with drugs (with only partial success, and lots of unpleasant side effects)… only to find out that their problem was caused by a food allergy that could have been fixed with some simple diet changes if their doctor had simply recommended that they try.

Now in this case, as with gain-of-function research, there is an element of truth when medical NGOs publish statements saying that dietary treatments of asthma and migraines are unreliable, and that doctors should try medication first. This is because, in a technical and statistical sense, drugs are more reliable. While some people’s conditions are caused by food allergies, some aren’t, and even for the people for whom a diet change (getting rid of eggs, perhaps, or wheat or soy) will work, it’s not the same diet change. Whereas a drug works on nearly everybody. The deceit is by omission – by not telling patients that the dietary solutions are worth trying. And yet, there are dissenters; there are hundreds of doctors who research and write about the role of diet in causing and curing disease, and who recommend that their patients try dietary changes first… even as their work gets the cold shoulder from the big medical NGOs (which are funded mostly by pharmaceutical firms.) And finally, unscrupulous doctors have an obvious interest in keeping patients in the dark about non-drug solutions to their problems, since, as the saying goes, a patient cured is a customer lost.

Thus we see that all four qualities of a genuine institution-failure – that is, propaganda that’s partly true, lying by omission, dissent within the scientific field, and a clear financial interest in keeping up the racket – are involved in the near-blackout of dietary solutions for druggable problems. So “questioning the science” here doesn’t mean spinning up an unrealistic conspiracy theory – it just means keeping your eyes open to a bog-standard case of human beings pursuing their own interests, and covering for the bad behavior of their fellow professionals.

The same process is at work in the medical controversy I’ve written the most about, namely the question of whether or not it’s harmful to diagnose children with ADHD and drug them with Ritalin, Adderall, and other stimulants. (I’ve explained my position at length here and here.) As in the other cases, I acknowledge the truth of big parts of the mainstream position – i.e. I am not so thickheaded as to deny that the medications work, in the sense of producing the desired behavior change in the child. It really is possible to get children to focus better on their schoolwork, squirm less, write neatly, and not talk out of turn by drugging them.

The deceit, once again, is mainly by omission – doctors who prescribe those medications almost never admit that research about the prevalence of ADHD is chaotic and irreplicable (studies can’t even come close to agreeing on how many children have it) and this is in part because factors like how much recess a child gets, whether his school-day includes shop class, and whether he’s a few months older or a few months younger than his average classmate, all heavily affect the diagnosis rate. Which is exactly what you would expect if you admit that ADHD isn’t a well-defined biological condition at all, but just a list of traits that all children have to some degree or another (like “Fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in chair,” and “Fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes”) along with a license to drug the child if this interferes with his schooling.

What’s also omitted, from most discussions of the issue, is neuroimaging studies that show anomalies of brain development in medicated children – including lifelong deficiencies of GABA+, a neurotransmitter that the drugs increase in the short term – that don’t show up in undrugged children, whether they’re diagnosed with ADHD or not. Granted, these studies are somewhat rare, but this isn’t because scientists have tried to replicate the results and failed, it’s because most researches just choose not to follow up on those studies, despite the obvious urgency of the matter, since findings that reflect badly on common drugs are hard to publish. (Scientific journals are often funded by “charitable” contributions from pharmaceutical firms, and editors know better than to bite the hand that feeds them.)

Then there is the matter of growth suppression – and the handful of studies that pay close attention to dosage and duration of treatment are mostly agreed that children on a heavy dose of stimulant drugs for three years or more end up shorter as adults. And then of course there is the fact that, while medicating a child for ADHD produces improved academic performances for the first two or three years, the effect disappears, or at least becomes statistically insignificant, at longer timescales.

And so what we’re seeing is a great deal of lying by omission.

On to the third test of a genuine institution failure: are there a minority of dissident doctors who criticize the consensus? Yes. Such eminent men as the psychiatrist Peter Breggin and the pediatrician Leonard Saxe have written at length about why drugging millions of children, for a condition that wasn’t considered a disease at all a few decades ago, is a huge mistake.

Finally, the fourth question: does the propaganda serve anyone’s interests? Yes, obviously. The medical industry makes billions of dollars a year this way. Also, as with gain-of-function research, a lot of people are facing professional ruin if the pro-drugging consensus were to collapse. In the course of debating this issue I’ve been told things like: “These drugs are some of the most common medications in the world, and I don’t think that a treatment that’s been studied for so long, by so many people, could be harmful.”

I happen to think this gets the casualty backwards. When a treatment has been studied so long, by so many people – people whose careers would be ruined if it was broadly recognized as harmful – then no amount of evidence will convince the governing NGOs that it’s harmful.

A Harder Question: The Covid Vaccines

A lot of people who share my negative views about gain-of-function research, ADHD medication, and the overmedication of modern Americans in general, will probably be disappointed to hear that I have never believed that Covid vaccines were harmful. To be honest, I’ve been more skeptical of their efficacy than a typical liberal, and I’ve always been against vaccine mandates, censorship, and masking, but none of the evidence I ever looked at convinced me the vaccines were actually harmful. This, along with climate change, is one of those middle-of-the-road issues for me.

When the pandemic began in early 2020, and I heard a lot of power people say things to the effect of “we must keep the schools, churches, etc. closed until we have a vaccine,” I was quite annoyed. Coronaviruses, I had learned, are the same family of virus that includes the common cold, and one thing they all have in common is their rapid mutation rate – rapid enough that, up to then, there had never been a commercially successful coronavirus vaccine. So what I was being told was that my civil liberties would be held hostage indefinitely until scientists could solve a problem that had never been solved before, and that degree of confidence in science seemed misplaced.

The next summer, I got vaccinated against covid-19. I had never worried about the vaccines being harmful; I only doubted their efficacy, and worried about what lockdown enthusiasts might do if they believed it was realistic to keep us all waiting for a 100 percent effective vaccine. (This comic, for instance, has aged rather poorly.)

And for what it’s worth, my prediction of less-than-perfect vaccine efficacy basically came true; a slight majority of Americans were vaccinated in the spring and summer of 2021, yet the United States had about 85 percent as many covid deaths over the following winter as the winter before. And while I myself have probably had covid several times, the one time I actually got diagnosed and had to stay home from work was after I’d gotten three shots. (Though I still believe the statistics about vaccinated people having lower hospitalization and death rates.)

But at no point did I believe the wild predictions of vaccine-caused illnesses and deaths that the internet has been full of since about a year before the vaccines became available. The people who made those predictions weren’t making them because they knew anything about how the vaccines worked – they just distrusted the medical industry and were going to be anti-vax no matter what happened. When the vaccines were rolled out in mid-2021, and people didn’t suffer immediate vaccine-related illnesses as bad as or worse than covid, the conspiracy theorists either (1) claimed that the excess deaths were covered up, thus positing an unrealistically complicated scheme, across every country in the world, to tamper with mortality statistics, or (2) switched to claiming that vaccines cause long-term heart problems, or infertility, or some other effect that’s bad enough to justify not getting them… but the precise timing and severity of these adverse effects is of course being continually altered to stay one step ahead of reality.

Finally, if you want to keep insisting that covid vaccines are harmful, you have to believe that the United States, Russia, China, India, and all of the other Great Powers – countries which are usually quite non-cooperative with each other – are somehow in on a common scheme to sicken their own citizens. (This is in contrast to, say, psychiatric drugs, many of which are popular in the USA and Western Europe, but rare or even illegal in much of the global East and South.)

To be honest, I don’t actually blame people much for wanting to avoid the vaccines. I believe in liberty, after all, and I’ve always been against vaccine mandates and censorship. And after the blatant lies about, say, masking – which a lot of doctors were against at the beginning of the pandemic, only to drop the matter like a hot rock when wearing masks started to function as a political shibboleth – it’s not reasonable to trust the institutions anymore.

But my own decision to get vaccinated wasn’t based on blind trust in anybody. It was based mostly on a knowledge of how mRNA vaccines work. They’re an injection of messenger-RNA that makes the body produce viral proteins without building complete viruses, so that the immune system can make antibodies that will attack the real virus if it ever comes along. Since vaccines in general are a one-time (or two or three-time) activation of immune pathways that would be activated at least as strongly by the real virus, I just don’t see nearly as much potential for harm as there is in drugs that people take every day.

It’s the routine drugs, the drugs like Ritalin and OxyContin that steadily modify the chemical balances in the patient’s body, that I worry about. But it’s hard to be angry at people who don’t have my scientific background when they simply make a snap judgment about whether they trust the medical industry, and then accept or reject every controversial treatment at once. Usually these people are just doing the best with the information they have.

(I am, however, much less forgiving of Senate Republicans for voting 52 to 1 to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, after all, is a hard-left environmental lawyer who until last year believed that abortion should be legal up to the moment of birth, and his only qualification for the HHS job is that he hates vaccines even more than the average GOP voter.)

At the end of the day, people who are going to blog about controversial topics owe it to their readers to research them thoroughly, and to not fall for wild conspiracy theories. It’s perfectly acceptable to conclude that a mainstream opinion is bad or harmful, but if you’re going to accuse intelligent people of spreading propaganda, then your accusations should be realistic. You need to be aware of what parts of the official story are true, which important details are being omitted, who among the experts agrees with you, and why the majority has a motivation to spread false ideas.

If you can’t do those four things, then your blog post or essay is just fan service for people who already agree with you. It won’t convince deep thinkers who haven’t made up their minds yet, and it might even repel people who used to find your writing attractive. Chances are that there are a lot of people who were once suspicious of the very parts of institutional science that you despise… but who ran back into the shelter of mainstream opinion when they realized that there was even more bullshit outside that shelter than inside it.