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Comment by tester34 | Hacker News Reader

I do wonder what's the cost of relatively skilled, proficent at rhetorical gymnastics and eristics with domain knowledge individual?

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Corporate lobbyists get paid very well. Which is probably the top of that game without going into politics.

I think this is a winners takes most of the pie situation, not unlike the situation with CEOs and OnlyFans models. I also believe that there are 2 distinct paths - public advocacy where one manipulates the plebs who vote for people in power, and political advocacy where one manipulates the people with legislative power.

Here is my conspiracy theory:

From discussion with people I disagree with, I often find a similar M.O.

- An actual legitimate academic suddenly starts outputting content that is completely left field from their expertise.

- The content is Sophistry at best or blatant lies at worse. However it consistently serves a destabilizing purpose.

- A critical mass gathers around them, with youtube/twitter/fb giving them momentum.

Examples:

- Bjorn Lomborg, Political Science academic turned climate science denialist.

- Steven E. Koonin, published physicist turned climate science denialist

- John W. Oller, Linguistics Academic turned Editor of a make believe Immunology Journal claiming adverse Covid vaccine effects.

Perhaps I am just looking for patterns and malice but it makes me worried that there is more orchestration than what we assume there to be.

No conspiracy. Really smart people with egos tend to overate the transfer of their expertise from one domain to another. You see this all the time in tech.

Noam Chomsky, linguist turned political commentator and becomes a leading voice for the left and critic of American foreign policy?

John Maynard Keynes, English mathematician becomes an economist and leading proponent of stimulus programs that have helped millions?

Here is what Hayek said about Keynes for instance: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y8l47ilD0II

Sometimes an outsider is unaffected by the established biases and censorship, in their thinking.

The people you highlighted to the best of our knowledge seemed to have done such a shift out of their own volition. My conspiracy is that in my examples people are being payed towards an orchestrated destabilizing agenda.

Well, don’t always attribute to conspiracy that can be readily explained by decenttalized human motivation.

I remember reading books by Serge Lang in my mathematics Ph D courses at NYU. (He had an idiosyncratic approach to complex numbers, entirely basing it on Taylor series and deriving everything that way.)

That same person got heavily involved in debunking or challenging certain mathematical analyses (look at his wikipedia page). Most notable was his denialism of the connection between AIDS and HIV. His arguments mirror much of what is said about coronavirus and vaccine denialists and the Google Books from early 1990s features the same Dr Fauci responding in much the same way about that pandemic.

There is nothing new under the sun. Look at the Anti Mask League of San Francisco during the 1918 Flu pandemic. Same arguments.

There are many books like this, as well as people who are fed up with chemotherapy and publish alternative cancer cures, and so forth. You don’t need George Soros to fund BLM protests and you don’t need a conspiracy to have these people publish either:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter-Duesberg/publicat...

Same goes for people who challenge claims made for macroevolution, etc.

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