Haha! If only. One by one the more intelligent Qers are waking up. However, the lower IQ Qers probably never will figure it out. It does require a smidgen of independent thought.
Since you know your way around philosophy, perhaps you’re familier with philosophy of science? Thomas Kuhn rocked that world with his epic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
There is a fascinating study of perception recorded in Kuhn’s masterpiece. It involves test subjects and playing cards. The subjects were shown a card—the ten of spades, for example—and asked to identify it as quickly as they could.
At first all went well. Then the researchers started interposing anomalous cards in with the standard set. I.e.: the researcher would display, for example, a red ten of spades.
At first no one hesitated. They simply identified the anomaly through the standard lens. I.e.: the red ten would either be identified as a ten of hearts or a ten of spades.
As the card-displaying slowed down, some of the subjects experienced confusion. They would say things like, ‘That was a ten of spades, but something was wrong with it.’
As the cards slowed down further, the subjects began to catch on. They would begin to accurately identify the anomalies, such as, ‘That was a red ten of spades.’
But some subjects couldn’t make the paradigm shift, no matter how slowly the cards were displayed. A red ten of spades simply didn’t fit the template, and so they never successfully identified it.
The trust Sessions crew is the same. As Sessions’ betrayal becomes more and more clear, some are waking up. But some never will. They are locked into a perception template that glorifies Sessions and cannot see past it. They will trust Sessions forever.
TL/DR
S = Stupid
oh, yes, I’m highly familiar with Kuhn’s work, although certainly no expert. I even got to meet him when he was still alive and teaching at MIT in the ‘80s. Remarkable, brilliant man. Enormously influential, of course, although one must be cautious about distinguishing Kuhn’s own views from many of his followers who went in different directions, which is not surprising in such a dynamic intellectual movement across several major disciplines from history of science and philosophy to most/all of the social sciences and humanities to one degree or another.
The perception/resistance issues are fascinating, and can lend support to some of Kuhn’s major themes (paradigm, normal vs. revolutionary science, etc.) at least for metaphors and analogies. But such examples can cut different ways, since the “Q” followers can say THEY are the ones “seeing” accurately and others are confused and “resisting”.....
What the card experiments (Bruner & Postman, 1949) may imply can be interpreted in different ways, though. The matter gets complicated (typical for philosophy, ha). For instance, one can argue that issues about perception of color, shape etc. don’t necessarily apply widely outside of the psychology of perception, in which case this might still be valuable as a metaphor but not as some firm description of the “reality” of all kinds of conceptual processing in other areas of mental activity. Kuhn was often accused of trying to make too much of the gestalt and perception type issues, but at the very least the metaphorical examples can still be useful. I don’t know where the “scientific” aspects of comparing perceptions of physical experiences vs. all kinds of other cognitive activities has gone.
Overall, there is a lot about the “paradigm” concept that can be applied to the “Q” situation, although nothing of what is going on so far could be called scientific.... so it’s all more in the metaphor stage, I would say. Still, “Q” followers can say that it is they who are developing a “revolutionary” new paradigm and skeptics are resisters, ignorant, failing to “see” the world in terms of the new paradigm, etc. I would say more that in relation to Q we are in a “pre-science” phase where there is no justification at all for moving forward into what Kuhn called “normal science” where a paradigm is accepted and everyone should just get on with the daily business of examining alleged facts in relation to the overall “Q-paradigm.” That is what the Q followers want to do, in Kuhnian terms, and of course they have every right to keep developing things in terms of their favored “paradigm.” But I am not in the least convinced that there the fundamentals of “Q” are sound, so of course I am unwilling to proceed within that paradigm.
The issues of developing any new paradigm and judging among competing theories, views, paradigms, etc. are very intricate and many books and articles are written about this kind of thing. In brief, I’d just say that one shouldn’t develop a “new paradigm” by embracing things that are obviously unsubstantiated (Q world), but the everything comes down to arguing through details of what should or should not be regarded as substantiated (to use a different term than is common in either Q discussions or Kuhn discussions).
Also, absolutely ANY new view can be claimed to be a “new paradigm” — that doesn’t make it right, correct, rational, sensible, etc. A lot more has to be said for it (any view, not just “Q”) than simply “oh, you other people are stuck in your old ways, you just can’t SEE the world the way Q sees it” etc.).
A lot of followers of Kuhn went into very “relativistic” directions, such as no rational judgments across competing paradigms etc. But that is not what the “Q” followers do, since of course they claim that they are right and everyone who resists or dissents is wrong. Kuhn himself used a lot of language at times which seemed to feed relativistic views, but he denounced strongly, at least informally in personal settings, etc. the more relativistic interpretations. He thought there there were enormous challenges in comparing different paradigms and that one could not simply try to compare individual bits of “data” across different paradigms, since so much went into the conceptual structures of even understanding what one is “observing”....
In relation to Kuhnian terms, I’d say that the Q followers are jumping into a new paradigm before they have completed even the most elementary assessments of what goes into developing a sound paradigm. But one can always argue about rationality from “within” vs from “without” i.e., IF Q is right about certain things then of course it may make enormous sense to pursue further “normal science” in a Q-paradigm. But I (and you, obviously) don’t see how the Q-paradigm even gets started intelligently unless certain things about Q are indeed TRUE.
[still, getting into true and false, fact and value, etc. raises enormous trains of arguments about Kuhn’s work and about much/all of philosophy of science]