Dave from Vaccination Station defines evidence aversion—when people dismiss reliable sources like Wikipedia or climate scientists as "shills" to avoid conflicting beliefs, even if they recognize their credibility. He explains how exposure to facts triggers weak rebuttals (e.g., radiocarbon dating flaws) to neutralize discomfort, while the allure of unexplained complexity fuels belief substitution. This psychological gap lets misinformation thrive by framing uncertainty as spiritual or beyond comprehension, undermining critical thinking in the disinformation age. [Automatically generated summary]
And we are going to mention probably your podcast, right?
So, yep.
But yeah, so let's start it off.
And now we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is building language for the disinformation age.
So with that in mind, we're dealing with this directly today.
We're building more language today.
And I have a very special guest today, and he's going to introduce himself.
Go ahead.
Hi, my name is Dave, and I run the Vaccination Station, which is a non-profit organization which promotes vaccines, public health, and critical thinking.
Great.
And you're going to help me with something today.
I have a episode 11 of this podcast was called The Allure of the Unknown.
And it was an idea I had that was meant to describe sort of a psychological effect that influences how we interact with disinformation, or really how we interact with information that can enhance society's collection of disinformation.
But it wasn't very obvious by the name how what the idea was, and it wasn't very catchy.
And so we're going to try to rework it today.
We're going to go through this.
Dave got exposed to some of my ideas and he made a suggestion.
And so I suggested that he just come on the podcast and we go through it.
And he agreed.
And that's pretty much how the whole process works.
Welcome to Inside Baseball of this podcast.
So yeah, you suggested you do these really great little images, little kind of like little posters.
Is there another name for those?
Do you have a specific name for those?
Well, I just do a mixture of memes and infographics, really.
And the way I differentiate that.
I guess infographic is kind of the best name for them, yeah, right?
Yeah.
And the way I differentiate them is an infographic usually has sources down the bottom.
And a meme is just like a self-explanatory little image.
Right.
Yeah.
And I guess a meme is by definition meant to be taken and added upon by its kind of true definition.
We'll see if any of yours become that eventually.
But yeah.
So we're going to go through evidence aversion is the name that you came up with, the idea as you understood it.
And so we're going to try to see how well that name sticks.
I think the allure of the unknown hasn't stuck very well, as I need to acknowledge my own failures in how I communicate these ideas.
And we'll see how well that one works.
So let's go through the concept and then how it applies to the name that we're coming up for it and all the aspects and how well that works.
So I'm going to start in rethinking this and rethinking a way to communicate this.
I realized that I had to start with cause and effect.
So in doing this, I think it's kind of fun.
I'm going to start channeling my inner Douglas Adams for this first bit here.
So I'm going to start with cause and effect.
The basic and ubiquitous understanding that all of us have, that all of us possess, is that everything that happens has happened because of something else that has caused it to have happened.
And this is the very simple case, right?
That everything's here because something else caused it to be here.
You know, The glass that's in front of me is here because I brought the glass from the kitchen and it was in the kitchen because someone else put it in the kitchen and it has water in it because I put water in it and it's here now.
So, and the whole world of things, all the things around you, your house is built because is here because someone built it and put all the pieces exactly where they are.
If it has cracks in it, it's because there's a slightly shift in the foundation or something, right?
I mean, this is everything that's in the present is here because of something in the past that caused it to be here.
And this is, you know, we kind of have this general view and it's too complicated to, you know, see everything all at once.
We just, we, we, we pick shortcuts for things.
We, we have these ways of expressing like groups of ideas and groups of causes and groups of effects.
So in this same way, we look at things like things that have multiple effects, right?
So we have words like nature and climate and life, that there aren't like one thing.
They're like a group of things or a group of effects that all kind of happen.
And so in building this concept, this idea, we're going to stop here for a moment and just check in with you to see if anything I've said is way out to lunch or needs more explanation or is actually making sense.
Yeah, so as I understand it, what you're saying is that due to the complexity of our world, of the universe in general, we have a need to compress it into bite-sized chunks.
And the way we do that is by creating language for broader concepts that we can use to describe multiple things under the single umbrella of a word or two.
And everyone knows what we mean by that.
And those words encapsulate the broader concept.
One note there.
You do kind of think when you're making, having these words that everyone understands what you mean by them, but that's not necessarily true.
And that's where communication breaks down.
When I use the word climate, another person might have a completely different understanding of what that word means.
And this is almost inevitable when you have concepts as complicated as things like climate, right?
So in my mind, I might assume everyone understands what I mean when I use the word climate.
But I know from having done this a lot that absolutely a bunch of people will also think that they understand exactly what I mean when I say it, but they'll have a whole different meaning.
So that's part of the gap in between these things.
And in those gaps is where we're trying to fit our stuff today, because it's in the gap between the thing you are sure you know and the thing you don't know where this idea sits.
So sorry to interrupt you, but I had to.
No, no, I think that's a very good point.
For example, I think for a lot of people, the word climate is simply a synonym for weather.
But of course, they're very different.
A climate has weather.
The weather is determined by the climate.
They are different.
So the climate is the environment.
And if you like, the cause to some extent of the weather.
So, yes, you make a good point that we may assume that people know what we mean by these terms, but other people may have a very different perspective.
And also, these terms may need to be contextualized.
They may legitimately have different meanings in different contexts.
Context is king when it comes to comprehension.
Context determines meaning most of the time, particularly in our language.
So context is very important as well.
Yeah.
Right.
Okay.
So I think we're still on board with the same collection of ideas here.
So I mentioned when I was sort of interjecting there about this sort of gap between what we know and what we don't know.
And this is where things start to get shaky for a lot of concepts in our world, right?
You know, because as I once did, didn't understand much about climate, I had my brain had come up with some ideas about what was causing a lot of the things and what it meant, what the word meant and what the collection of ideas contained therein meant.
It was inevitable that my brain would come up with this even without proper knowledge or having to adhere to objective reality in order to know these things or feel like I knew them because I felt like I knew them at the time.
So my brain was attempting to find causal links in between things there, irrespective of anything that was going on in the objectively real world, right?
My brain was just coming, gluing things together.
Oh, this is glued to that.
This is glued to that.
These clouds are affected by this other thing.
And these things are happening because of whatever it was I was believing at the time.
These things are linked in this way.
And it could have been anything.
For some people, it still is now linked to otherworldly beings maybe that are causing the thunder to happen or whatever, right?
I mean, this is where we're trying to find the links and link these things up.
And your brain is going to do this.
It's always going to look for the cause of all of these things whenever we see the effects in front of us.
And without proper adherence to scientific research and experiments and this sort of thing, we're very, very likely to drift off course and find the not fully real explanations for a lot of these things.
In my case, I had a very solid foundation for a lot of the things involved in something like climate, but I was still off base in a lot of respects.
Once I looked deeper, I could see where my gaps had caused me to find causal relationships that weren't real, even though I thought I had really firm understanding of things like pressure changes and temperature changes and a lot of other things.
So again, we'll stop in there.
We'll check in with you to see if, am I a raving lunatic?
Am I making sense here?
Like, where am I?
Yeah, you're making sense to me.
So what we need to do then is look at this effect, which I've referred to as evidence aversion.
And I'll read out the definition that I provided for the little meme I made.
Evidence aversion occurs when a person engaging in an unreal belief activity avoids learning things that might conflict with their cherished belief.
And that is obviously a form of reality denial, which is another term I suppose we can use for it.
And what I think it might be interesting to do is to discuss why that happens and how it happens.
Right.
So right away, some astute listeners to this podcast will point out that this is we are sort of describing one small piece of of like cognitive dissonance, because overall, that's a bigger knot of things.
And we're sort of describing one small subsection of things that go on inside a mind that are part of.
the cognitive dissonance that will occur.
And I think that we are right in this situation to not go deep into cognitive dissonance because it's a whole it's a whole different, it's not different, it's a much larger concept to have to explain and it has very specific psychological or perhaps neuroscientific things going on inside it.
And I think that it's good to also have explanations for just some of the things that are happening on the fringes so that you can exactly identify, you know, the specific ways that people are going about this, the very specific little things that people are thinking and doing in a lot of these situations.
And I like your brief take on the idea that it's reality aversion, because I think that people are, when they look at something like climate and climate change, they know where the information is.
And they are, in some cases, they are devaluing the source of the real information.
They're saying things like, those climate scientists are all shills for some entity that I don't even bother to explain.
Wikipedia is not a reliable source because anyone might change anything in there at any time.
It's somehow an unreality engine, even though it's much more true and real than most of the rest of the internet.
And they'll do that as sort of a justification for avoiding the places that they feel are real.
But to me, when I hear them say things like that, it's interesting to me because they must know where the real information is in order to say to themselves that that information is not useful, right?
So they know where the real information is.
And so they know what information to avoid in order to avoid getting the thing that will conflict with them.
So to bring it around to cognitive dissonance, cognitive dissonance is when sort of you are exposed to the thing, the ideas that conflict with the shape of the things in your mind, right?
You think that God creates the weather and then you're told that it's natural forces that just occur on their own in the world.
And you have to pair these things up and then you feel that they're in conflict and then you reject the one that you got later because you don't want to let go of the one you currently have.
But in this case, I think they are one step ahead.
They're understanding that the source is going to lead to them feeling not good and having to reject one.
And they're rejecting it before they get there.
They're avoiding it.
They're devaluing the source of information that they know will counter them ahead of time.
And in a way, like we talk about something like pre-bunking, which is another term that's often used where you know you're going to be exposed to bad information of a variety that you're not familiar with.
So you purposefully go to a place that has the explanations so that you know ahead of time how to deal with that inside your mind.
They're almost doing that same thing in reverse, right?
In doing this.
So leave that with you.
What do you think?
Yeah, I like the way you've put that.
In fact, while you were talking about this, it occurred to me that there's, as I see it, there's two things that are actually going on here.
There's two processes at work.
The first is an avoidance of sources that provide information that conflict with the cherished belief or worldview.
And the second is when that information is unavoidable, something must be done with it.
So what do you do with it, especially if you can't refute it?
Well, you have to do what an oyster does.
You have to wrap it into something that protects you from it.
And the way you do that is that you wrap it in something that makes it less intimidating, less harmful, something that explains it away.
So for example, you might say, let's take the example of someone who believes that our planet was created in seven days.
Sure.
They avoid websites like answering Genesis, that provide lots and lots of evidence for evolution and all the rest of it.
But every now and then they might stumble inadvertently on a paragraph or two in Wikipedia about radiocarbon dating, which is a very reliable way of dating things on our planet, the age of things on our planet.
And so what they do is they run to a favored source, a religious source, that reassures them that carbon dating is not as reliable as scientists claim.
And so those sources will present them with little anomalies.
Oh, they tried to carbon date this particular object and it came up as being X,000 years old when this object we know is only about 50 years old or 150 years old.
Or they tried to carbon date a snail and it didn't work.
And you think, oh, okay.
So if you're that kind of person, you think, oh, right, okay, that's very reassuring.
So it turns out carbon dating can be wrong.
And that is all you need to wrap a little protective shell around the carbon dating concept.
You haven't been able to avoid it, but you've now been able to neutralize it.
And however flimsy these explanations are, and of course there are many, many problems with these explanations.
Radiocarbon dating, for example, can only be used reliably to date things of a certain age back.
You know, it's not designed for new things and it's certainly not designed for determining the age of living things.
It's for really, really ancient stuff.
So these are all poor examples, but it doesn't matter because you have examples.
And even if in the back of your mind you might feel that maybe they're a little shaky, they're enough for the moment.
They're enough.
So you quickly use those, you wrap them around the concept of carbon dating and then you've got it isolated and you've been able to neutralize it.
So even though it got in, you managed to make it, render it harmless.
And then the other stuff, the more complex stuff, you can easily ignore that.
And if necessary, throw in the basket of, well, science has been wrong before and scientists don't know everything and all the usual anti-science tropes.
Does that make sense to you then?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
In that way, it's like what you're telling yourself is a story, and what you need is a new plot element that justifies the existence of a certain thing.
Or justifies the removal of a certain thing in this case, right?
Sometimes I refer to this as like psyop stuff.
Psyops are usually in originally, a psyop was like a military operation that was meant to change the decisions of the military opponent, maybe the individual soldiers or perhaps the people making the plan.
And it was usually a thing that was fake, that was meant to be mistaken for something that was real.
But that idea has now been used in such a way that it's now by people who deny reality, it's used as a justification to remove pieces of actual evidence that would lead you to think the opposite of what you currently believe, right?
So the most ridiculous, really, and it's usually people don't call it a psyop, but people who believe in a young earth when they are asked about dinosaur bones, sometimes the explanation is given that God put those here to test our faith.
This has sort of been said by some people.
This would make the dinosaur bones a psyop, right?
Placed there as a deliberate ruse to make you believe one thing when a different thing is true.
And this is a system now, part of a narrative explanation that can justify removing or discounting pieces of evidence that would otherwise lead you to, well, to more real conclusion, right?
But I'd like to get into an aspect of this that I think your term for what I'm thinking so far really fits.
But there was an aspect of this that I was attempting to explain that, I mean, maybe it needs, maybe it's its own concept and it needs its own name and its own related thing.
I don't know.
Sometimes ideas appear more as shapes in my head than as words.
And so that's why it's difficult for me to exactly translate them into words.
But it occurred to me that part of this is the idea that when we don't know how something works, we are more fascinated by it.
And this was a, when I did the episode about the allure of the unknown, this was a big part of the conversation was about, I mean, we often use a term childlike fascination, right?
That the idea is that children are more fascinated by things than adults are.
And it's probably because more things are new to children.
They know less about how everything works.
But even for children, once they understand how something works, they're less fascinated by it.
And I think the mechanism is less about age as it is about knowledge.
That how things work and how we know that they work or how that comes together.
There's an aspect of this that becomes attractive to us.
It becomes almost attractive to throw off the the the world of knowledge in favor of the world of fantasy, right?
Where we don't know everything.
We don't know all the answers.
It's almost more romantic to not know not know everything, to not know why you like someone or you don't like another person.
It's sort of dry and icky and whatever to say that it's pheromones in working in the air that are acting on you.
It kind of weighs it down and it's less magical at that point, right?
So when I look at this notion that it's more fascinating, I see this in how grifters are taking advantage of these situations where there's a complicated thing and then they provide their simpler explanation.
Their simpler explanation almost always leaves a lot to be desired.
And from us who look at this from a scientific perspective, we think it's ridiculous that it leaves so much to be desired.
But I think that when I look at it from this perspective, that's part of the game.
That's part of the grift to leave part of it to the imagination.
And that having it be more unknown makes people think that, oh, that's a better answer because there's things yet to be known about it.
It's more fascinating.
So I'll leave that with you.
What do you think of my fascination angle here?
I think you are actually describing a different concept to the one that we began with.
It's possible.
It happens a lot to me, actually.
It may to some extent be considered a subset of reality aversion.
But what you seem to be describing more is a form of reality substitution based on the appeal of the mystique.
The mystique of the unknown, maybe we could call it.
And the mystique of the unknown is very alluring for the reasons you've described.
It saves you finding the explanations, the detailed explanations you would otherwise require to justify a belief or a worldview.
You don't have to do that anymore.
It's all a bit mysterious.
It goes so far, and then that's all.
And then the rest of it, we will never know because we can never know everything as the Andy Pax is fond of telling us.
And science doesn't know everything and blah, blah, blah.
And of course, you can use that to substitute any belief that you like.
Any belief that you could like, you could just shove into the gaps that are left by this yawning chasm of unknown and esoteric knowledge that we will somehow never have access to.
So to me, this is a form of reality substitution that is based on the allure of mystique, the mystique of the unknown.
And that, I think, is quite a powerful force because it's almost paradoxical.
Humans love to know things, but we also get a thrill out of not knowing.
Mystery is exciting.
It's one of the reasons we watch movies, you know, watch thrillers, we like psychological horror or we read mystery novels or detective stories or even police procedurals, which tend to be very gritty and realistic these days, but they still have an element of mystery and mystique to them, especially if there's a long-running plotline of a very difficult to catch felon who's doing all this kind of weird stuff.
And that, I think, that mystique of the unknown or the allure of the potentially esoteric knowledge that we can never quite grasp, that's not only fascinating because also it also tells us, hey, I'm actually doing something more sophisticated than not knowing something.
The reason I can't know it is because this knowledge is actually quite almost spiritual and it requires a higher plane of thinking or whatever.
And maybe I'll only ever get glimpses of it.
And this too can be used as a justification for our worldview.
We can say, well, the reason we can't exactly know everything about it is because it's such a, there are such sophisticated knowledge, such high concepts here, almost above human comprehension.
And it makes more exciting, more interesting.
But it also gives you an excuse for simply blurring out anything that you can't explain.
Yeah.
Well, it's possible that I have two ideas that are just sort of, you know, overlapping or entangled, and I haven't quite totally pulled them apart in my mind yet.
Like I said, it happens to me more often than I'd like to admit.
I think it's part of why I like to talk these things through with someone because when it doesn't make sense, you know, I'm forced to acknowledge, because it always makes sense in my head.
I'm forced to acknowledge that I need to attack it from a different angle or I need to get at it.
So, yeah, this idea that it's a mystery, that it's that leaving it with gaps, specifically with, you know, pieces of it that aren't told and aren't described, you know, I can't help but think that this is part of how we're getting to the disinformation world we're getting to.
That, yeah, what I didn't, what I didn't queue up at the start of this episode was that I have a whole second idea for an episode that's related to this.
And this idea of a thing being more fascinating when we don't know it and less fascinating when we do know it is a segue directly into that episode, that other topic.
So I think what we're going to do is we're going to wrap this up with a little wrap-up right now.
We're going to go through.
We can ask again where people can find your work, Dave.
Sure, my website is www.thevaccinationstation.org.
And there you will find all my resources and also links to my Facebook page and my Blue Sky account and a contact form and also links to my podcast and other people's podcasts and YouTube channels that I recommend.
Great.
And if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything they heard on this podcast, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And we're going to sign this off with until next time, which for you and I will do just a few minutes.