The Retroactive Redemption Pattern
They really thought they were cookin’
Arguing against crackpots (and the fans they’ve gathered) is a losing battle, as losing is overdetermined. This post documents one reason why: The Retroactive Redemption Pattern.
I
Any interesting and complex topic usually comes with a public person making a set of claims about it. We’ll call that set the claim cloud:
To be taken seriously, not every claim in the claim cloud has to be true. Being directionally right is hard enough on its own. But you see, the problem is this claim-maker is somewhat of a crackpot. Not because of the validity of their claims, but because of how the claims and the claim-maker’s relationship to them interact with the world. Let me introduce the element of time to illustrate this interaction:
Over time, the original claims can become arguably more true, or arguably more wrong. Claims rarely stay static, especially because there are subtle forces at play here: elasticity and ego. The crackpot subtly or not so subtly makes changes to the original claims: they become narrower, wider, or more convoluted, depending on how the events in the real world pan out. Therefore, through the claim-maker’s ego and the elasticity of the wording, the claim cloud drifts from t0 to t1, toward whatever version looks most true in hindsight.
To be fair, one claim in the cloud may turn out prescient. Most of the cloud was still misleading in its original form. The pattern kicks in when that one true fragment gets used as retroactive redemption for the whole cloud.
The original claim cloud evaporates and explodes at the same time. The one correct claim launders a whole cloud of bullshit.
The cleanest example of this pattern is the retroactive redemption of anti-vaxxers. Anti-vaxxers put out a whole cloud of claims: microchips in the shot with Bill Gates tracking you, armchair-expert biology like wild mRNA theories, and so on. Then the big claim that vaccines were the devil’s way of controlling your biology narrowed down to one defensible fragment: the shots could cause heart inflammation in young men. That turned out to have a real basis: rare cases, mostly in young males, usually mild and self-resolving (and generally lower risk than the myocarditis you’d get from COVID itself). Of course, now the anti-vaxxers ride the victory lap, as if they were right all along.
II
Likely reasons the pattern exists:
- The obvious point: people don’t only want to be right, they want to have been right all along.
- Status is involved as well. If the claim-maker is a public thought leader with fans, the audience starts defending the thought leader, not just the claim.
- The argument gets hotter, because admitting you were wrong now means admitting it to yourself, to your opponent, and to the people who liked you for being right.
- There’s research showing that we reconstruct our memories without noticing: your current knowledge, beliefs, and feelings quietly reshape your memory of what you used to think and say.
- It’s just easier to elaborate and convolute why you were right than to accept you were wrong.
- It’s also why arguing rarely works: persistent disagreement tends to run on self-favoring priors and self-deception, not a shared hunt for truth.
- Knowing something other people don’t know is weirdly affirming for crackpots and conspiracy theorists alike.