Contra Kavanagh On Fideism

Responds to Chris Kavanagh's criticism that even attempting to 'evaluate the evidence' on ivermectin was a mistake (because it implies a real controversy). Scott's frame is his teenage belief in the Atlantis/Fingerprints-of-the-Gods conspiracy: skeptics who only said 'lol you're stupid/racist to believe this' pushed him deeper, while what eventually saved him was learning to reason (The Pyramid And The Garden). He diagnoses Kavanagh's stance as 'fideism' — the idea that reasoning your way to the right answer is impure, that doing good science is a near occasion of sin for bad science — and argues the 'reason it out' side almost always beats the 'never look, just trust us' side. Conspiracy theorists don't have an exotic reasoning style; they have normal biases applied slightly worse (0.99^infinity to 0; 1.01^infinity to infinity), so the fix is teaching reasoning, not insults. Reprises Cowpox Of Doubt: most real questions (is PMDD culture-bound?) have both sides citing five studies and accusing the other of sexism, so 'trust experts' is hard to apply, and the ivermectin review was valuable 'supervised learning' practice for opinion-forming.

Quality 75 · Excellent. Excellent band, low. A clarifying, well-argued, and important defense of careful public reasoning against credentialist dismissal, anchored by an excellent personal frame and a sharp fideism diagnosis; the 'conspiracists have normal biases slightly worse' and 'practice opinion-forming on supervised cases' points generalize well. In the tier of his strong epistemics/discourse essays.

Claude’s paradigm shift 46 · Moderate. Moderate. The underlying ideas (trapped priors, cowpox of doubt, conspiracy-as-normal-bias) are from his own corpus; the fideism framing and application to Kavanagh are fresh.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. A clarifying, well-argued defense of careful public reasoning against credentialist dismissal ('fideism'), anchored by a strong personal frame; the generalizable points ('conspiracists have normal biases slightly worse'; 'practice opinion-forming on supervised cases'). Conceptual influence within epistemics discourse, no material change — low RWI.