One of my
long-standing lines of enquiry when it comes to people who habitually get
things wrong for a living – whether that’s Ken Ham, Richard Carrier, Jeremy
Corbyn, Owen Jones, or whomever – is to ask whether what’s at the heart of their
folly is primarily confusion or deception. I say ‘primarily’ because it is
invariably both, but I think the ratio differs depending on the individual in
question.
In the deepest sense, to ask whether figures like Richard Carrier or Ken Ham are deliberately deceptive or sincerely confused is framing it too simplistically – because it is actually a dynamical mix of the two, where, in practice, I’d say the psychology looks more like this:
Initial confusion → motivated reasoning → identity investment → strategic misrepresentation.
By the time someone is publicly entrenched, sincerity and deception coexist at a level beyond which it’s hard to shake off – but it’s clearly different for different individuals. Some have more of an innocent misunderstanding – like, say, Corbyn on economics – that leads them astray. Some have more of a sinister form of controlled deception – like Richard Carrier – that leads them astray. But for most of these individuals, what usually begins as more honest category mistakes (like misapplying tools, overgeneralising models, misunderstanding disciplinary norms, etc) soon become being wrong with more confidence (see the Dunning-Kruger effect) as motivated reasoning kicks in, and evidence is no longer evaluated fairly or honestly. At this stage, counter-evidence is reframed as bias, conspiracy, or incompetence; methodological choices start to track desired outcomes, and so forth. But, curiously, I think at this unconscious stage the perpetrators still feel honest - they are just selectively reasoning.
Then, once we get to the identity investment stage, we’re almost dealing with a different person – because at this stage confusion becomes directional in order to serve their own needs - and in many cases the beliefs are so inextricably bound up in the individual’s identity, reputation, self-image and income stream that you’ve got almost zero chance of them changing their ways. And I don’t think ‘almost zero’ is an exaggeration either, because remember, you have to a certain kind of person to dig yourself into such a hole in the first place.
What’s interesting is that by the time they get to the strategic misrepresentation stage, the more similar to each other they have become. Not in temperament, necessarily – but usually with hostility at getting found out, asymmetric standards (strict for opponents, lax for self), metric inflation (citations, lists, popularity), shifting definitions mid-argument, treating criticism as evidence of persecution – the whole range of bulls**t bingo I’m always going on about. At this stage, once this level of self-deception is in place, outward deception becomes seamlessly blended into their output. They’ve been lying to themselves for so long that tactical behaviour replaces honest integrity, and they’ve become largely inured to the cheat and to their own loss of integrity.
Of course, there are tangible indicators for how to tell confusion from deception in practice. One reliable diagnostic is how they behave when corrected by more qualified peers or better arguments. If you never see them pause for thought, honestly consider counter-evidence, or seriously engage with alternative propositions, it’s a dead giveaway that truth-seeking is not the governing norm for them.
In summary, this is the complex psychology of the grifter – it’s more than just ‘confusion or deception’ – it has to be a heavy mix of both, because confusion is a form of deception, and deception is a form of confusion, and it comes in degrees. What you see with them is an interesting trifecta; a mind that is simultaneously confident enough to feel righteous, confused enough to be wrong, and strategic enough to continually mislead. And they can be on complete opposite sides, yet be pretty much the same person when it comes to these psychological operations.
