My girlfriend's slow descent into 9/11 Truthiness

A thing that is both weird and a little upsetting: for a few days there, I thought my girlfriend was going to become a 9/11 Truther, but for Sarah Palin. When the interblogs started buzzing with rumors that Sarah Palin had never been pregnant and actually little Trig was actually daughter Bristol's baby etc., etc., my girlfriend was right there with them for like half a day. Fortunately for our relationship, she abandoned this line of thinking fairly quickly, and now of course we know that in fact Bristol was pregnant with her own damn baby, thank you very much, and also (and here I'm imagining Bristol's response to the interwebs), frankly, fuck you very much for saying she looked pregnant 8 months ago when she wasn't, that's kind of a fucked up thing to say about a 16 year old girl who just happens to be a little chunky around the midsection. But whatever.

If we could I'd like to take us back to those heady days of earlier this weekend when speculation about the maternity of little Trig was running rampant. My girlfriend was citing all sorts of facts that she learned from Tumblr that JUST DIDN'T ADD UP. Such as: the fact that Sarah didn't look like the Demi Moore Vanity Fair cover when she was 6 months pregnant, or that Bristol was taken out of school with "mono" at some time point that was deemed suspicious, or that baby Trig was not listed in the web-based birth announcements of the hospital where he was ostensibly (OSTENSIBLY!!!) born, or how weird it was for a woman to give a speech after her water broke and then fly for 9 hours to get back to Alaska and not tell the flight crew that she was in labor, etc. All of these unusual facts, or "problems" with the official account of Trig's birth, were cited as leading inexorably to one conclusion: Sarah Palin couldn't deal with the shame of her underage daughter making a baby, but also couldn't deal with the sin of anyone having any abortions, so she faked a pregnancy and then pretended Trig was her son instead of her grandson.

What I noticed when my girlfriend was on board with all of this theorizing was a series of classical cognitive mistakes happening in real-time. The first, and most relevant to actual 9/11 truthiness, was the failure to create a positive account. That is, at some point you have to stop pointing out things in the official account that you find hard to believe, and instead you have to put forward your own account of what happened. Matt Taibbi, in The Great Derangement, has rather brilliantly elaborated on how completely idiotic the 9/11 Truth movement is revealed to be if you simply create a positive account for them based on the ideas that they cling to. Similarly, with BristolGate, we can do something similar:

Bristol Palin: Hey mom, sorry to be calling right before your big speech in Texas, but my water just broke.
Sarah Palin: That's okay honey, in keeping with our vast conspiracy that we have going here, I'll tell everyone that my water broke, but then I'll insist on giving this speech anyways, and then I'll insist on flying 9 hours to get back to where you are.
Bristol Palin: Um, mom, wouldn't it make more sense for you not to tell anyone your water broke until you get back to Alaska? That way, nobody will freak out and it won't look as suspicious later on.
Sarah Palin: No, no, I think it's best that I pretend that my water broke at the exact same time as your water actually broke, just so everything lines up. I don't really know what that accomplishes, but there's a nice symmetry to it.

And so on. The second classic cognitive mistake that I see in BabyMamaGate is a failure to take base rates into account. See Bayesian Inference if you don't know what I'm talkin' bout. Yes, all of these "interesting facts" you are listing would be consistent with someone who is pretending that her grandson is her son. Just as a child in an emergency room who had taken aspirin and was vomiting, lethargic, and mentally confused, would be consistent with Reyes Syndrome. That doesn't change the fact that while all these interesting facts are anomalies, they are nowhere near as rare as the condition your are diagnosing based on them. That is, the base rate of mothers pretending their grandchildren are their children is incredibly low in the US. There is no doubt in my mind that the bloggers who are examining the evidence are failing to take that base rate into account, since doctors, scientists, and economists all have been found to fail to take them fully into account when making decisions (and I don't know if this research has been done, but I'd be willing to bet that psychologists who study base-rate errors also fail to fully take them into account when dealing with real-world problems).

The third major cognitive mistake that I see people making in this situation relates to Karl Popper and the falsification model of science. This blog post ended up way longer than I intended, so I'm going to leave this issue for another day, but suffice it to say that the batshit insane bloggers who were propogating these scurrilous rumors spent a lot of time looking for confirmatory evidence and very little time looking for disconfirmatory evidence. As do we all. Of course, that's the opposite of what you want to do if you're interested in finding out the truth about something. A related post for later: how I got to be so fucking discouraged about neuroimaging approaches to neurocognition in psychiatric disorders.