Why Debating Non-Facts is Bad

You want to debate me? You can’t spell the subjects you’re wrong about. You don’t even know the names of the scientists you’re dismissing. You’ve never read the studies you’re rejecting.And I know. Spelling is hard for you.No. I will not debate you. I will not talk to you. I will not argue with you about what the facts are. The facts were settled before you showed up. By scientists. By doctors. By people who gave decades of their lives to actually understanding something. That conversation is over. You missed it. You were not qualified to be in it.You did not discover the truth in a Facebook group. Your crazy uncle’s YouTube channel did not crack what every research institution on earth somehow missed. You are not smart. You have never been smart about this. And everyone in your life who actually respects science already knows it.If you want to play independent researcher you should probably learn what research actually is first. Because googling until you find a result that agrees with you is not research. That is confirmation bias with a wifi connection.In 1999, psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning at Cornell University published a paper called “Unskilled and Unaware of It.” They called it the Dunning-Kruger effect. People who know the least about a subject consistently believe they know the most. Participants who scored in the bottom 12th percentile on logic and reasoning believed they were performing in the 62nd percentile. Not because they were lying. Because the skills required to recognize your own incompetence are the exact same skills you are missing.Some people are too stupid to know they are stupid.That is not a burn. That is a peer reviewed scientific finding. And it is you. Documented. Published. Cited hundreds of times in academic literature. You are a case study.Being anti-science is not edgy. It is not brave. It is not independent thinking. It is embarrassing. It was embarrassing when people thought the sun orbited the earth. It was embarrassing when doctors thought washing hands was unnecessary. Every single time in human history that someone decided feelings were more reliable than evidence they were wrong and they looked like idiots to every generation that came after them.That is you right now. In real time. Looking like an idiot.The schoolyard bully who pushed people around because they had nothing else going for them went out with the 1980s. Demanding debates you have no business being in is that exact same energy. Trying to feel powerful by intimidating people who are smarter than you. It did not work then. It does not work now. And everyone watching can see exactly what it is.And here is the thing nobody says out loud. The moment I agree to debate you I have told the world that your misinformation deserves to share a stage with facts. That propaganda belongs in the same conversation as truth. That what you read in a Facebook group is on the same level as what scientists spent decades proving in a laboratory.It is not. It never will be.Debating you does not make me open minded. It makes me complicit in the lie. It tells every person watching that there are two sides to facts. There are not two sides to facts. There is the truth and there is the garbage you were fed by people who needed you stupid and angry. Those are not the same thing. They will never be the same thing. And I will not stand across from you and pretend otherwise.You are not a debate partner. You are a vector for misinformation. And I will not legitimize you.Here is what happens every single time we corner you with facts. When the evidence is airtight. When you have no way out of being wrong. You shout fake news. You say we have Trump Derangement Syndrome. You say the moon landing was faked. You change the subject. You get louder.You do not update. You do not concede. You just move the goalpost and keep screaming.That is not someone searching for truth. That is someone who decided the answer before they asked the question and will burn the whole conversation down before admitting they were wrong.To debate any expert you have to agree to one thing first. That facts are the standard. Not feelings. Not what resonates with you. Not what your gut says. Facts. Verifiable. Reproducible. The rest of society has already agreed to this. You have not. Which means there is no debate. There is just you, wrong, demanding an audience for it.Someone convinced you that being a mediocre person who outsources their thinking and calls it courage is something to be proud of. It is not. You got played. You got made into a product. You got handed conclusions and told they were your own. And the most brutal part is that the Dunning-Kruger effect makes it almost impossible to see it from where you are standing.You are not a researcher. You are not a rebel. You are not the person who figured out what everyone else missed.You are a loser who got played.And I will not be debating you about it.SourcesKruger, J., and Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121 to 1134.Motta, M., Callaghan, T., and Sylvester, S. (2018). Knowing Less but Presuming More: Dunning-Kruger Effects and the Endorsement of Anti-Vaccine Policy Attitudes. Social Science and Medicine, 211, 274 to 281.Dunning, D. (2011). The Dunning-Kruger Effect: On Being Ignorant of One’s Own Ignorance. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 247 to 296. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe