How To Know Who To Trust, Potomac Plane Crash Edition

With, as always, complications

Trust is a concept deeply rooted in evolution. As soon as the first organism figured out how to attempt to deceive other organisms for its own gain, it created something of an arms race: The ability to deceive would confer survival advantages, but so too would the ability to detect and defend against such deception.

The battle over trust is particularly complicated for humans, because unlike every other known species, we have written and spoken language, theories of mind, and extremely complicated social structures that have evolved out of our inherent interreliance. Our deceptive shenanigans can get very byzantine.

The internet, as everyone knows, has brought with it tremendous new problems pertaining to trust and expert authority. Now that our knowledge-generating landscapes consist of a trillion influencers, citizen journalists, actual experts, and every other sort of figure imaginable, with mainstream sources of authority (themselves eminently fallible) becoming ever more marginalized, it’s more important than ever before to figure out how to know who to trust. In the worst cases, when someone’s trust instinct misfires it can lead them down a road to conspiracy theorizing, financial ruin at the hands of a charismatic grifter, or worse.

The problem is, it is very, very hard to come up with hard-and-fast rules for determining whether a source is trustworthy. In fact, the only surefire way to do so is to already possess certain knowledge or knowledge-discovering abilities. Imagine X, who is making a claim about the unfamiliar species the floojaks and the even more unfamiliar color blurple.

X: “All floojaks are blurple.”

Is this a trustworthy account of the color of floojaks? The only way to really know for sure would be either to possess preexisting expertise about floojaks, which hardly anyone does. Alternatively, the listener would conduct an independent investigation to try to determine X’s trustworthiness. But this would itself require expertise: This person, call them Y, would need to, at bare minimum, know how to read the extant literature on floojaks, know how to suss out high-quality information about floojaks from the conspiracy theories and unreplicable papers about floojaks we’ve all seen flood our inboxes and social media feeds, and so on.

In short, there’s no shortcut. This is why it’s so useful to find experts who are generally trustworthy. Not so that you can automatically assume everything is true, but so you don’t have to start from scratch with each and every claim.

Yes, credential-related heuristics can obviously help here. When it comes to the topic of William Faulkner, I will trust the opinion of a PhD who completed doctoral work on The Sound and the Fury over the opinion of a random blogger — but it can take you only so far. For one thing, PhDs are constantly fighting with other PhDs over very complicated subjects inaccessible to most of us non-PhDs; for another, as we’ve seen in recent years, PhDs often don’t acquit themselves well, and can sometimes be outperformed by individuals with far less impressive credentials.

Certain supposed signals of untrustworthiness aren’t very good. For example, Dan Williams, who I interviewed on Blocked and Reported last year, is one of the best and clearest thinkers when it comes to our discourse about misinformation, and he had this to say about a scheme for detecting misinformation promoted by Sander van der Linden, a Dutch social psychologist and leader in this field:

The alleged “DNA” of misinformation — namely, Discrediting, Emotion, Polarization, Impersonation, Conspiracy, and Trolling — are not usefully understood as “misinformation techniques.” Instead, four of them — discrediting, emotion, polarization, and conspiracy theorising — are not inherently manipulative or misinformative; they often characterize reliable content. Given that (at least relative to the definition of misinformation that van der Linden uses in the book) reliable information is far more prevalent than misinformation, using the presence of these techniques as a way of detecting misinformation is therefore likely to produce more false positives than true positives, especially given that people are already highly (in fact, overly) vigilant against manipulation.

(Definitely read his essay for more details.)

I do think we can at least sketch out a few rules, though, and I came upon an interesting case study after the tragic midair collision between American Eagle Flight 5342 and a Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac earlier this month.

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The day after the crash, a YouTube personality who goes by Captain Steeeve, whose real name is Steve Scheibner and who has about 300,000 subscribers, posted a video titled “Analyzing the Mid-Air Collision Over the Potomac: A Detailed Examination of ATC Communications” that racked up millions of views. I’d watched and enjoyed his videos before, and like everyone else I was curious about what had happened, so I watched it. (It’s now offline, but we’ll get to that.)

According to the video, here’s what Captain Steeeve thinks is the most likely cause of the crash: During the moments before the crash, ATC (air traffic control) notified the Black Hawk pilot that there was a CRJ-700 nearby and about to land. The Black Hawk pilot asked for and received permission to maintain visual separation, meaning the responsibility was, at that point, on her to keep an eye on the plane and make sure there was appropriate distance. The pilot then looked out the window, saw the plane, and made sure not to get too close to it.