Evidence-based correction fails against adherents of fabulation because knowledge institutions have already been delegitimized.

Evidence

The law professors propose to fight fire with fire: to conspire against conspiracy. But sometimes the best way to fight this fire is with water: to meet conspiracist charges with whatever truth we can command, pronounced openly and plainly. Correction emerges from a process of submitting propositions to the scrutiny of evidence dispassionately and meticulously collected. Yet this process—mimicked by classic conspiracism and repudiated by the new conspiracism—is unlikely to be effective for those who assent to fabulations. With respect to them, one can hardly exaggerate the depth of the authority deficit that afflicts anyone claiming to be in a position of knowledge. The delegitimation of knowledge-producing institutions has been effective. As one penitent conservative lamented, “The gatekeepers have lost all credibility in the minds of consumers, I don’t see how you reverse it.” — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 344

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the authority-deficit theme shared with arguments about why fact-checking fails against entrenched conspiracy beliefs, and to Luhmann-style trust-in-systems frameworks read earlier. — connects to: Delegitimation rejects knowledge institutions and opposition conventions wholesale. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 87; Politicizing science defeats even well-designed interventions meant to boost accuracy. — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 153
• QUESTION: What, if anything, could actually restore the legitimacy of knowledge institutions once social trust in them as gatekeepers is destroyed?

Broader Connections

• Politicizing science defeats even well-designed interventions meant to boost accuracy. #corroborates (0.88) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 153