My article in the upcoming print edition of Current Affairs is about Atlantis. Specifically, it is about people who think mainstream archaeologists have been concealing the possibility that Atlantis was real. These skeptics cast archaeologists as a priesthood unwilling to entertain truths that challenge their sacred dogmas. The skeptics portray themselves as the true defenders of scientific inquiry, because rather than simply accepting the consensus of a field, they ask questions and try to get to the actual truth. The story they tell, then, is that those who pose as scientists are actually anti-science, and it is skeptics who question what passes for “the science” who are the genuine practitioners of rational critical inquiry. 

But, as I show, the case for Atlantis is weak. There is simply no good evidence for it. The proponents of the “lost civilization” theory rely on intellectual trickery, such as showing spurious numerological correlations that supposedly prove things (some ancient Egyptian building has some particular ratio vis-a-vis the size of the Earth, for instance). They don’t use sound archaeology. The romantic story of mavericks exposing an establishment conspiracy simply isn’t true. The less interesting truth is that archaeologists are scientists and the Atlantis proponents are cranks. 

Elon Musk said something recently that is incredibly wrong but also easy to assume might be right. Defending Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he said that: 

He’s unfairly maligned as someone who is anti-science. But I think he isn’t. He just wants to question the science, which is the essence of the science. The scientific method, fundamentally, is about always questioning the science. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is someone who casts doubt on the mainstream scientific consensus about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Some call Kennedy anti-science because of this, but Musk is arguing that this is a mistake, because Kennedy’s “questioning” of the science is in fact a fundamentally scientific attitude. Science is, after all, not a series of sacred unquestionable truths but must always be subject to scrutiny and revision. Therefore Kennedy is actually behaving as a good scientist would, and it’s the critics who are anti-science, because they believe that questioning and inquiry should be shut down.

I have written many words in this publication explaining carefully why much of what Elon Musk says is bunk and much of what he does is harmful, so I am hesitant to spend more time debunking him. But it’s worth responding to what he says here, because it’s such a tempting attitude to have. It’s certainly how RFK Jr. presents himself, as the defender of health/science/medicine against the cabal of frauds in the establishment, whom he argues are corrupted by corporate interests. And if you are someone who tends to be suspicious of corporate interests and the establishment, you may think there’s something to his claims.

But it’s important to stress that Kennedy’s opponents are not criticizing him because he is questioning scientists. They are criticizing him because he is wrong. For instance, Kennedy has said that he would not vaccinate his children against measles, arguing that children who get measles are actually healthier in the long run and suggesting the vaccine was unnecessary. When John Stossel pointed out that since the introduction of the measles vaccine, many fewer children die of measles, Kennedy was having none of it. He said:

"You know what, they died in the 1900s, or early 1900s. There were about ten thousand Americans a year [who] died. In 1964, there [were] about three or four hundred who died, and they were almost all severely malnourished kids, mainly from the Mississippi Delta. This is before the poverty program, so there was a lot of starving children in our country. It's very, very hard to kill a healthy child with any infectious disease, but particularly with measles. And the World Health Organization now says vitamin A is an absolute cure for measles, which we didn't know about back then. Back then, you know, we were treated with chicken soup, and it was, you know, a week at home watching Leave It to Beaver, and every kid caught it. Every single kid got it. And I had 11 brothers and sisters, and we all got it, and we were all fine. And there are lots and lots of studies out there now that show that kids who get measles as a child are much healthier when they grow up, that they're much more resistant to cancers, to atopic diseases, to allergies, and to heart disease."

Now, even if you don’t know the things Kennedy is lying about here, some simple reflection can tell you that the fact that he and his 11 siblings survived measles does not in and of itself prove anything about the danger of measles In fact, historical data shows that 1 in 1,000 measles cases tend to result in death, meaning that the overwhelming majority of people will be fine, but if measles spreads through a population, a lot of children will die.  Vaccine scientist and pediatrician Peter Hotez notes that for every 10,000 people who get measles today, 10-30 children will die, and hundreds more will face complications like pneumonia or potential hearing loss. Kennedy’s family experience is irrelevant to the question of how dangerous measles is at a population level, because a disease can cause many thousands of preventable deaths even if most people who get it are fine. 

Kennedy is also simply lying about the state of the research. The World Health Organization does not say that “Vitamin A is an absolute cure for measles.” In fact, they say that “there is no specific treatment for measles” but that taking Vitamin A can “help prevent eye damage and blindness” and “may also reduce the number of measles deaths.” The WHO insists that “all children should be vaccinated against measles.” Kennedy acknowledges that hundreds of children per year died of measles in the United States prior to the introduction of the measles vaccine, a number which was brought down to zero as mass vaccination eliminated the disease in the U.S. But Kennedy argues that it was antipoverty programs, not vaccination, that helped, since the children who died of measles were poor, malnourished children in the Mississippi Delta. 

To see the hole in Kennedy’s reasoning, we might consider the 1991 Philadelphia measles outbreak. A teenager who had visited Spain brought back measles, which he spread at an R.E.M. concert. Measles spreads like wildfire, and eventually over a thousand people were infected. The disease hit especially hard among a group of Christian fundamentalists who shunned medical treatment. A total of nine children died, of whom six were associated with the church. The outbreak was only stopped by a mass vaccination campaign, which vaccinated the children of religious parents even if the parents objected. 

The church in Philadelphia was described as “working class,” but there’s no evidence that the people there were starving or especially unhealthy, beyond their general suspicion of doctors. But as soon as measles hit the community, kids started dying. That’s precisely what happened in Samoa, too, when a 2019 measles outbreak killed 83 people in a population of 200,000. (Kennedy went to Samoa to discourage vaccine use and later lied and said the cause of the deaths was unknown at the time.) So, no, it’s not just that the Mississippi Delta was starving when the measles vaccine was introduced. The vaccine is effective and saves lives. 

But also: even if the only children likely to actually die of measles were poor, so what? If the vaccine can save the lives of poor children, that’s good. Consider how odd Kennedy’s remark is that healthy children are “hard to kill” with infectious diseases. First, I’m not sure what Kennedy means by this. If 999 out of 1,000 children who get a disease do not die, does that mean children are “hard to kill”? The fact is that a lot of children do die of infectious diseases, millions every year. Now, it’s true that many of those children are in poor countries, or may have other conditions. But again, what’s the relevance? Obviously, we should solve poverty, but until we do so, if we can save lives with a vaccine, isn’t this a good thing? 

There’s so much nonsense packed into Kennedy’s response to Stossel that it takes far longer to respond to it than he took to produce it. (This is known as the “bullshit asymmetry principle.”) It is not the case that children who get measles are healthier later in life—in fact the disease raises child mortality for years afterwards and does long-term damage to the immune system—although it is true that the measles vaccine can reduce deaths from conditions other than measles. The fact is that about 100,000 people worldwide, mostly young children, continue to die of measles each year, and the vaccine has saved more lives globally in the last 50 years than any other childhood vaccine. These are facts, and Kennedy doesn’t present any evidence to contradict them. He just ignores the evidence and presents entirely specious arguments.

Is that science? It’s certainly skepticism, and if we take Musk’s position that “questioning science” is the essence of science, then Kennedy is indeed doing good scientific inquiry. But Musk’s definition is wrong. Skeptical questioning may be the beginning of a scientific process, but that process depends on rigorous examination and weighing of evidence. It’s tempting to think that because sound reasoning requires a willingness to ask critical questions, those who ask critical questions are engaged in sound reasoning, but this is a fallacy. If you’re going to cast doubt on the efficacy of vaccines, you need good arguments and evidence. What Kennedy says to Stossel may be skeptical of the established consensus, but that doesn’t mean it’s of any value at all. 

We might says something like “All scientists are skeptics, but not all skeptics are scientists.” To be a scientist does require a willingness to look at seemingly settled truths and ask curious questions. But that is not all it requires. It also requires a process of testing hypotheses carefully to try to arrive at what is actually true, and abandoning a hypothesis when the evidence in front of you keeps telling you that your hypothesis is wrong (such as, for instance, the hypothesis that vaccines cause autism). This is the part of science that Kennedy, who is now our Health and Human Services Director, does not engage in. He cultivates the image of someone who is engaged in critical reasoning, but he is not actually doing it. 

I am stressing this because I think it is very easy to nod when Musk says that questioning is the essence of science. But that’s not really true. Questioning has no value on its own. I can question whether the moon exists, but whether I am a scientist depends on what I do to answer my question. Do I look at the evidence for the existence of the moon and weigh it carefully? Or do I just assume that because the government says the moon exists, they are probably hiding the fact that it doesn’t, because you can’t trust the so-called experts, who are all part of of the pharmaceutical-military-tech industrial complex and probably secretly being manipulated by George Soros and the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein.

We need scientific rigor and critical thinking more than ever. But that’s why we need to avoid being fooled by charlatans like Kennedy and Musk, who pretend that just because they’re casting doubt on the research of scientists, they are somehow engaged in scientific reasoning themselves. In fact, they are just bullshitters.