Alan Levinovitz

So W.V.

Quine, and he had this idea of what he called the web of belief.

And what he said is basically, we don't have just a bunch of different beliefs that are independent of each other.

We have a web of beliefs that all hang together.

And let's take raw milk as an example.

So if you end up believing that raw milk is some kind of life-saving,

life-saving nutritional thing, and that this has been hidden from you by the dietary establishment.

That's not a belief that's independent of other beliefs.

Instead, it's a part of a web of beliefs.

In order to believe that, you have to now distrust the medical establishment more generally, and you have to distrust the government more generally.

Those kinds of beliefs are at the center of the web.

And as soon as those more central beliefs start changing,

they open the rest of the web up to other changes.

So it's a kind of feedback loop where once you've bought into one belief that entails suspicion of sort of traditional institutions of knowledge-making or something like that,

Well, now the whole web is vulnerable.

Now people can move in and say, in the same way that people deceived you about raw milk, they deceived you about vaccines.

And in the same way that they deceived you about vaccines, they deceived you about insert whatever.

So that's why I think there's these cascade effects is that the web of belief itself gets shaken.

An external belief changes and that reverberates all the way back to the center of the web.

Yep, absolutely.