Wednesday, July 2, 2025

best posts

Click the links below 

>ENTROPY AND TRUTH

>art, craft, game-theoretic cognition and machine learning

>the necessary mediocrity of art, UFOs and religions, and the boundless imagination of science

>where is the mind and what's a thought?

>the sociology of false beliefs

>jones' 4 corollaries to Brandolini's Law

>faster than light: emergence, symbol and the representation of nothing

>free will is an oxymoron, so what's the debate about? this-

>the Gates-Musk paradox: conspiracy theories are not about what you think they're about

>the gnomiad: the science and sociology of life advice, and their paradoxical puzzles 

>of mathematical beauty: crystals and potatoes, a Darwinian explanation

>de-mystifying Wittgenstein (and a tribute to Chomsky)

>an addendum on Robin Hanson's grabby aliens

>where the future is behind you

>the fool's errand attachment: a cognitive bias

>the new libertarian, overcome by bias

the easy path to enlightenment & nirvana

Scott Aronson wonders whether attaining enlightenment is worth it given the sacrifice of time. Are there better uses of one's once-in-a-lifetime time? I wholeheartedly agree with his decision to go with all the other pursuits and accomplishments of knowledge or investigation. After all, enlightenment is a selfish goal, it benefits only oneself whereas understanding the world in its many systems and puzzles not only benefits others, it augments the mind beyond oneself. Nirvana isn't all it's cracked up to be.

But I disagree with Aronson that there's a sacrifice. When I was 13 or 14 or so, I wondered about this enlightenment question after looking into the nirvana goal. The result of enlightenment was characterized by several testimonies of those who claimed to have achieved it, as leaving experience just as it was except no more striving to attain enlightenment. Being of a logical cast, I concluded that if I stop trying to achieve nirvana, I'd be in nirvana. And so it was! 

From time to time -- when I'm frustrated with my own struggles -- I have to remind myself that I'm enlightened. Then I have a good laugh and get back to figuring out how to manage whatever struggle is before me. Nirvana, you know, doesn't write blog posts, and posts don't write themselves. :-) (Being in the state of nirvana is kind of useless, to be honest. At least for my purposes.)

I gotta say, though, nirvana is seriously lacking in personality. If you value nothing, grieve over nothing, nothing to worry over, never doubt or ever want, what are you and who are you and why are you alive? I say, grieve and worry and doubt yourself and rage and be stupid. That's personality! Better yet, take a leaf from the Bhagavad Gita -- find your role in society and play that role to the hilt. That's freedom from your selfish concerns (including nirvana) and an opportunity to play the role with style, rendering all the depths and struggles and doubts as mere surface style. A Nietzschean Gita! 

Maybe if I'd thought about enlightenment a few years earlier at an even more tender age, I could have been the Dali Lama, but that would not be my preference anyway, so no regrets. Politics is not really my thing. I find politics tawdry. Cognitive science, linguistics, behavioral psych, evolutionary psych, information, semiology, complexity, mind -- all the topics listed in the blog title -- that's what I'm spending my nirvana on. It's a different notion of "enlightenment", the Western notion, synonymous with science "scire" to know, or in the context of this blog, to understand or explain. 

two modes of information acquisition

Gamers and explorers, two modes of information acquisition:

Explorers want to understand. Gamers wanna win.

Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber in The Enigma of Reason attempt to explain why a species reliant on its intelligence for its survival would be so given to self-delusions. Humans are distinctively reliant on cognition and reason, reliant more on figuring out how its environment works than on merely instinctively reacting to it. We uniquely explore and exploit our understanding of our environment, so much so that Pinker called the environment we're adapted to "the cognitive niche". Where other species exploit a jungle or savannah or shoreline or arboreal or underground niche, the human species exploits our own cognition, our understanding and theorizing about our environment so that that cognition is our primary evolutionary niche given by natural selection. If cognition, rather than instinct, is our survival superpower, why is it that this human cognition-reliant species can be so given to cognitive bias -- intentionally false cognition -- and especially to confirmation bias (more accurately, as Keith Stanovich admonishes us, myside bias)? How can we be so reliant on reason over instinct, yet be so irrational? If our cognition is our environmental niche, and we are so given to the falsehoods of cognitive biases, how do we even survive? It's a big important question, not just for our species' survival, which I guess is important, but for the theory of natural selection, which is bigger than our species. So this cognitive information problem is a seriously big deal. 

Their clever answer: we acquire information through a highly efficient and motivated means of advocacy. We progress by taking sides and defending them. Two heads are better than one, and competition in a zero-sum game is the very fierce essence of evolutionary progress. Human interactive nature "red in tooth and claw", intellectually. It's a brilliant answer! 

With one giant flaw: zero-sum advocacy leads to increasing conflict between half-truths, not a synthesis of progress. Polarization, implied and maybe even required for the model, doesn't resolve into higher truths. 

Fortunately, biased advocacy is not the only means of information acquisition for us. Curiosity, even obsessive curiosity, is not uncommon. The strange drive to understand an aspect of the environment is obvious in the history of the sciences from Einstein's ten years probing one idea, to Newton poking his eye, and Archemides pondering in the bath. Why so curious? From a natural selection perspective -- yes, evolutionary psychology again -- the more we understand about the world, the more we can predict potential dangers. The will to power is overvalued: the will to theorize is the pervasive drive of a cognitive species thrown in temporal space. Theorizing attempts to overpower time: the whole purpose of theory is to predict. And it gives us license to act. Fortune favors the wise; natural selection favors the predictive mind. 

This presumably evolutionary drive has two flaws: it's not as immediately exigent, fierce and threatened as advocacy, so it's more complacent, and it doesn't contain within itself any check on its own bias. Exploring is fine fun and useful as far as it goes. Debating with an adversary will expose your narrowness pretty quick. 

The difference shows the superpower of the advocacy model. It's a gamer's mentality, relentless and all-consuming engagement, a competitive sport in which discipline is enforced by the opposition team and the immediacy of losing. Constant engagement in battle -- not at all like a marathon run where you can zone out all alone.

Advocacy is also insufferable. If you have the mindset of an explorer, arguing with a gamer is almost useless. You're looking for deeper understanding from discussion, but much of what you get from a gaming advocate is superficial garbage, often not even accurate. Your adversary might be brilliant, incisive, fast and devastatingly critical, but informative? Your goal is to understand better, but their's is not. Their's is to win. What drives the explorer is an engagement with information for its own sake in a larger context of understanding the world beyond the explorer. The gamers are serving themselves within the narrow space of the competition. Like any competitive market, advocacy is a short-sighted goal. 

The difference in motives plays out in social institutions as well. The market's creative destruction promotes innovation and progress, but also short-sighted excesses leading to collapses. By contrast, academia purports to have a longer vision. But it can fall prey to conformity more easily than a competitive market. The sciences try to strike a balance of adversarial criticism with a long view, but dissent is not natural to institutions, and the sciences are housed and nurtured in them. 

In education, both models are possible. A student can accept information uncritically as an explorer, or question authority as an adversarial advocate. Not every young person accepts the religion of her parents. 

That most believers choose the religion of their parents, however, presents a puzzle at the heart of the Mercier and Sperber advocacy model. Why and when and how do we choose our team to defend? If it's a social story, conformity should rule, and advocacy would be superfluous with no role to play except where the social authorities haven't decided. Then the question is, how do the advocates choose between sides? The sociology of false beliefs post suggests that wherever there are hierarchies in a society, there will be differences of interests and emotional investments. Those will be sources of polarization. 

There are other, more specialized, modes of information acquisition including the Charlatan's Check (upcoming post), and there are modes that don't work like propaganda (propaganda vs censorship: asymmetrical effects in escalation bias and polarization). The plain and obvious fact that Fox News doesn't persuade the NYTimes readers and the NYTimes has no power to persuade the Fox watcher demonstrates that propaganda has no persuasive power on the public. The public has already chosen its kool aid by the time it opens the pages of the Times or turned on the TV to Fox. That choice can't come from the propaganda venue. It could be from peers, from social location, from a social aspiration or a trusted friend, but not from the propaganda. 

Finally, there are also two internal strategies with deeply asymmetrical contrasting effects: confidence (self assertion) and doubt (especially self-doubt). One is self-reflexive and the other is not. The difference is not trivial nor merely qualitative. It's dimensional. Confidence is, in itself, one-dimensional unidirectional. Doubt, on the other hand, questions its own direction and must consider many directions in the thought space, including its own doubt. This does not imply that doubters see all directions, of course, but it will likely see more than confidence will. Doubt is the explorer's navigator, confidence the gamer. 

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

the duality of truth: functional process vs probabilistic uses of "true" (pace Pinker)

"There are no truths" cannot be true. Therefore there must be at least two, that sentence and this one.

The purpose of this post is to distinguish two uses of "true", one functional, implicit and necessary for communication, and another use, ordinary and commonly discussed albeit logical, metaphysical and theoretical and ... unnecessary and maybe even undesirable.

A friend, arguing that theories have value beyond their truth, asks me to set truth aside when evaluating a theory. He likes to entertain post modernist ideas. 

I ask, in a Pinker mood, do you think it's true that theories have value beyond their truth? You said so, but if we are to set truth aside, what am I supposed to think you believe when you say, "theories have value beyond their truth"? If I'm not to believe that you think this is true, then what am I supposed to conclude about what you're saying? Why should I even try to understand or credit it? Why are you even talking to me? Why should I listen?? To enjoy the sound of your voice???

Stephen Pinker makes much of this basic universal necessity of truth to criticize the post modernists and the Nietzsche-chic. He's partly right. Partly.

The notion of truth in the little conversation above is playing two different roles accomplishing two different kinds of work. One is communicative, functional and procedural. In order to converse, there must be an assumption of truth to the assertions intended by the conversants. Assuming otherwise defeats the purpose of conversational exchange of information. Abandoning that assumption of truth-intention also lands the conversants in a liar paradox from which conversation can go nowhere. 

That process-functional use of truth is usually not spoken, since it's a prior assumption of any meaningful conversation. H. Paul Grice called this conversational cooperation. If you're looking for a beautiful, powerful and revelatory theory, read his two papers on the logic of conversation or the sections of Larry Horn's Natural History of Negation dealing with implicature. Although Grice does not discuss them, even greetings have an assumption of cooperativeness, since they carry a meaning of agreeableness or friendliness or at least politeness. All cooperative. But even when we get into a heated argument, we still do it in a shared language! And because? Because we want agreement or respect or submission -- something from the other.  That's a social species. Even our bickering is cooperative in this needy way. When social scientists describe our species as a cooperative one, language use is not always their first example, but it should be.

So there's this practical, functional, process use of truth -- to oil the gears of information exchange, really the catalyst without which conversational information exchange wouldn't work. Without it language would never have evolved. Assuming everyone talking to you is lying, what survival benefit would you gain from listening to idle, useless noise? Language could only evolve if the exchange of information were useful and believed. 

This practical use of truth is not generally expressed. " 'My name is jones', is true." Those last two words are a waste of breath. "My name is 'jones' " would suffice. Its assertion of truth is part of the conversational function itself. 

This communicative use of truth is a mere convenience with no grand metaphysical or scientific import, but a necessary convenience nonetheless. 

The other use of "true" is the one we most often talk about when we talk about truth and truths. It gets a lot of attention because it's louder than the tacit assumed one. It's a logical or philosophical notion, not just a practical one, and it's not a function of a process. It pops up not only when you want to talk philosophy and logic, but also in disputes over facts and disputes over the content of other people's assertions. You could call this the evaluative use of "true" or explicit use. A Wittgensteinian might call this philosophical truth, abusing language outside the practical game for which it is useful.  

The explicit use though familiar, is metaphysical. "That's true" implies 'that's real', 'that exists', 'I agree that's real' or 'yes, that exists'. It's essential to how we perceive and understand. It's not only metaphysical, defining reality and existence, but it's also epistemic, defining what we think we know and agree to. You can see how different this is from the tacit conversational use. This philosophical use of "true" to indicate "reality" or "existence" -- all very metaphysical. The functional use belongs very much in the interactive world, not of metaphysics or the assessment of facts, but of pursuing the process of informational exchange. 

It's worth pointing out, as an aside, that "Truth" is widely taken as a mystery. This appears to be yet another mix up. Facts, what's actually true of the world, is a mystery -- science approaches it but never quite perfectly or completely. Look at the immense lure of quantum physics. That's full of mystery. The world is full of mystery from its start, from its base to its top and in every direction. Maybe for that reason people, especially in religions ("I am the Truth" and "What is truth?), truth itself is viewed as a mystery. Actually truth itself is quite a simple and boring property. It's a property of assertions and that's it. "The Empire State Building is on 14th Street" is false; "The Empire State Building is on 34th Street" is true. Is the Empire State Building true? That's a confused question. Things are not true or false and even words alone are not true or false. Only assertions get to be true or false. "I am the Truth" is a figure of speech, intended to mystify. "'I am the son of God' is true" is an assertion, and it could be true or false. "I am the Truth" taken literally, is just incoherent, albeit poetic and mysteriously impressive as well as conveniently ambiguous. Does it mean, believe that I'm god? Or, you should follow what I do? Or something even more abstract about the universe and all of experience? All of the above, probably. It's the beautiful poetry of religion. My favorite poetry is the poetry that I can grasp sort of but can't entirely understand. Mystery is the intellectual gift that keeps on giving. Never grasped, never spent. Ever luring. 

The two uses emerge from different motives and sources. They belong to different human processes. One is necessary for communication, although the tacit assumption can be questioned: "you don't really believe that, do you?" And because it is a kind of interactive game, as with game rules, it's not up to the individual whether to use it while playing. On the other hand, the metaphysical truth isn't necessary at all. It's a contention of the individual who asserts it. 

Steven Pinker vociferously objects to the popular post modernist, Nietzschean rejection of truth. He wrote a book about it. But it seems to me that he doesn't give enough credibility (a word essentially tied to truth) to falsehoods. :)

Going back to the top, my friend and I were discussing what makes a theory good. His answer was "It's good if it works. A theory can have value beyond truth." For example, a sociologist or a Straussian might assert that a community's religion promotes social cohesion and individual psychological health. The truth of the religion plays no role there.

Or the Pope might say "God is good" whether he believes it or not, whether it's true or not or even if there's a god or not. And he may assert that it is true, again even if it's not and he knows it's not. Does his audience assume that he believes what he says? Not necessarily. I often think he doesn't really believe any of the hocus pocus and he knows that many of his followers don't either. The conversational cooperative assumption of truth has been slightly shifted to a pretense of truthfulness. It's all a communal dance of mutual convenience, not metaphysical truth. The priority is the community, not its truth. Similarly, Donald Trump often doesn't seem to expect anyone to believe some of his patent falsehoods. It's more cheer-leading his supporters than arguing over facts. Who cares about facts? It's about the Us team. 

The Pope example may seem a stretch, but as AI spreads along with conspiracy theories, such deceitful conveniences may become the rule. Does anyone believe propaganda? Does anyone believe the alternative conspiracy theories? There was a time when information about health, for example, was univocal (saturated fat and cholesterol are bad) and everyone believed it. Now there is so much contradictory information about health that no one knows what to think or do, hence the unbounded proliferation of health advice. So what should people believe, or how should they decide? Whatever my friends believe? And what do they believe? The YouTube influencer who seems grooviest to them? It's not about truth but identity, trend and social fashion signals.

Here's where my friend has a point, a qualified point. Our sophisticated Pope thinks the theory he publicly espouses is a good one even if it's false. And that's true even if he assumes that his sophisticated audience likewise thinks the theory is good but false.

The answer to "what makes a theory a good theory?" is yet another question "good for what?" And it's this qualification that brings us back to truth. How do you assess what is good without a notion of truth? You say "faith" is good. How do you defend that? "It's good for the community" is a sound answer only if that answer is true. Whatever the defense, it'll depend on truth, or something close to truth like high probability. All kinds of lies may be good, but if they are good, then "they are good" must be true in the metaphysical sense about them, or at least, in a world where there are no absolute certainties, most likely to be true. (The post "entropy and truth" explains the role of probability in theoretical "truth".)

It seems to me that the only way around this moral necessity of "true" is another process, the process of ignoring it. Humans believe all sorts of things with little defense or question. And we still function individually and socially. Sometimes, maybe even often, ignoring truth (or high probability) is essential and necessary in the process of functioning. Those who have an accurate assessment of themselves tend to be unhappier and less successful than those who hold unwarranted, false confidence in themselves. 

This feeds a question discussed in another post "academicism versus activism". There is an essential value of truth-seeking for any academic. But that ivory tower is an isolated place of observation. The rest of the world we actually live in is a world of choices and actions. What's more, it's overrun with others' competing choices and actions, interests, movements, forces, militaries, power plays in a social context of inequalities of influence, and within those inequalities classes that are served by those militaries local or national, and classes that are not so served, those that "the law protects but does not bind" and those that "the law binds but does not protect". 

In such a world, expressing truth is not always the priority choice. Propaganda holds an institutional microphone with big speakers to defend and justify itself. On the socio-political stage, the oppressed must state their interests as loudly as they can, otherwise their side of the truth won't be heard and the only means of getting any play will be forceful actions alone. And there are multiple interpretations to any event or any circumstance (see "true but wrong" and "the questions you ask determine the answers you get"). Deciding which is true can't even depend on the inhabitants of the ivory tower, since science is an ongoing investigation, not a body of truths, and scientists have no crystal ball. The players in the world of unequal influence promote interests, the truths they promote serve those interests, not the truth-for-truth's-sake of the academic.

So there are two very different roles of "true". One works in the game of communication and is an indispensable rule of that game. The other is essential for the academic process of research (though it should be probability, not truth, see the "entropy and truth" post), but not everywhere outside the ivory tower where wealth and influence rule regardless of truth. 

[Of course, the Ivory Tower is also pressured by outside funding and inside biases. The professional class outside the sciences often underestimates these pressures, assuming scientists to be objective and incorruptible, while the conspiracy theorists overestimate them as if every scientist were morally inferior to them.]

These two common uses of "truth" or "true" are often not clearly distinguished by users or even by philosophers interested in truth or even Stephen Pinker who uses the necessity of one to try to prove the necessity of the other. Usually the focus is on the one or the other, not both, so one is forgotten in favor of the other. All uses of "truth" are linguistic -- it's a word and it applies to linguistic assertions, not to non linguistic things -- but one of the uses involves as well a lot of metaphysics and ontology. The conversational use is not metaphysical, it's practical. The metaphysical one might not be necessary; the conversational one is. It's one of the rules of the game, the sine qua non of the game. 

Monday, June 30, 2025

information faster than light: emergence, symbol and the representation of nothing

"I'm telling you, information can in fact move faster than light."

"No way."

"Way. Here's a thought experiment. You have a bat signal, a super-powerful spotlight. Super-super powerful, like made of lasers. You cast the signal to the west. The light flies out into space. Then, with the light still on, you smoothly pivot your spotlight to the east. This motion takes you, say, three seconds. All the while the bat signal is spreading across the night sky until you stop at the east. Now suppose there's a planet many light years away directly west of your bat signal and another planet equidistant from your spotlight but directly east. In three seconds, the bat signal has traversed light years of space in three seconds."

"Something's wrong. The light of the bat signal takes years to get to each planet -- at the speed of light, not faster."

"The light, yes, but the bat signal does not consist of just the light that travels at one moment. It's the symbol alone that remains stable across the skies. The symbol and its meaning don't even depend on any light. You could transcribe it with a pencil or a stencil or draw it on sand or an arrangement of cheer-leaders. What has traveled across the sky is not one particular arrangement of light, but the shape signifier holding the interpretable meaning of Batman."

"Why should I take that as one bat signal traveling across the sky rather than a series of distinct bat signals?"

"Because the recipient on the distant planets interprets the signal as the same, coming from the same source from the relatively same time."

"But how do they know it's from the same source?"

"Suppose in this thought experiment, they'd been told years ahead that they'll get a bat signal on a certain day. And they get it that day. They then report back and some years later the report arrives and indeed they both got the signal the same day but one three seconds later than the other."

"Okay, it's a thought experiment, so let's suppose all that. It's still a kind of a fiction that they got the same signal, since they didn't get the same one -- they got a similar signal from a different set of configured light rays."

"Sure, but you can see that the specific light rays don't matter, it's the symbol and, importantly, its information, that is the same, and that it's from the same source. Right?"

"But so what? No light has traveled faster than light."

"Well exactly!! You get it? No light or light information has violated any reductionist law of physics, but the symbol and its information has."

"How can the laws of physics not apply to something physical." 

"Symbols are not just physical. They carry meanings, and meanings are not physical."

"Don't get all Platonic on me. I don't have to buy that other-worldly realism, Aristotle crushed that one two thousand years ago."

"You tell me what a thought is or what a meaning is. Look, here's a simpler example. Suppose the moon is casting a shadow out in space. What's creating the shadow? No trick question, just simple."

"The moon. It's in the way of the sunlight."

"Okay. Suppose you're traveling away from the moon in its shadow . As you go through space you'll see the shadow gets wider, the diameter gets wider because the rays of light from the sun are not parallel, they are radiating from the sun each at a slight angle, like a flashlight."

"The moon is obstructing  the sun's light cone. Okay. I think I see where this is going, pardon the pun."

"As the moon moves, the shadow moves faster further from the moon. Eventually it will be moving faster than light."

"I get it, but I don't understand how it can be since it doesn't accord with the law of physics, the limit of the speed of light."

"Nothing has been violated. Literally. A shadow is not a thing. It's an absence of a thing, namely the absence of light. And the sun's light is not traveling faster than the speed of light. It's the absence that is traveling. Nothing is traveling faster than light in this example. Literally, a nothing is traveling faster than light.

Take the bat signal again. The light is not traveling faster than light, and the symbol is not traveling from one planet to the other. It's only the cognitive information of the symbol -- our perception of meaning tied to the symbol -- that is traveling faster than light. It's a kind of fiction ranging over the light rays. That fiction is what is meant by emergence. The shadow of the moon doesn't physically, reductively move faster than light, and that's because a shadow is, reductively, a nothing, an absence of light, not a physical thing. What then is a shadow if not a physical thing? It's a pattern that we perceive that we give a name. Even the physical effects of the shadow, any cooling of what's in its path, are only traveling faster than light in the sense that we perceive those aggregate effects are integrated -- by our interpretation! -- as the effects of a unity we identify as the shadow. It's a fiction of your symbolic representation, like a zero -- "0" -- the symbol that denotes what? Nothing! And it's not the symbol that moves, it's the interpretive information attached to it, not of itself, but by virtue of our collective meaning-association. 

Zero is a symbol, and a symbol token -- any particular use or application of it at some place and time -- has a physical shape. But as a symbol it also has a meaning. It means nothing, an absence of all things. Zero represents our concept of nothing. But notice that a meaning is itself not a physical thing. Symbols are mostly like this -- they are at a remove from things because they represent some kind of meaning or idea, for example, a shadow. There is no such physical thing as a shadow. There's just absence of light and our interpretation -- meaning again -- of that aggregate of absences. It's a pattern, and we can represent that pattern as a nothing thing called a shadow. It's just a name and a perception that we can talk about, locate, explain and use in our science. And it's that pattern of nothingness that can move faster than light because it's not any physical thing, it's a cognized pattern, in this case, a pattern of nothing. But any symbolic pattern could conceivably travel faster than light."

"You mean, because the bat signal is interpreted as the same symbol with the same meaning, the same information from the same source that thought it and intended it and directed it intentionally..."

"Yessss. Symbolism is a paragon of emergent properties. And it is characteristic of emergent properties that they have their own laws and don't have to follow the reductive laws of physics. Their constituent parts may have to follow reductionist laws of physics if those parts are physical, but the emergent properties or entities don't have to and often don't. That's what emergence is all about."

"I see. No physical thing has been violated. Physics has not been breached in this interpretive information travel. It seems like physics information and symbolic cognitive information belong to different...I don't want to say worlds or realms, but to different sciences."

"Yep, But they may as well inhabit different realms or worlds. You could show the physical consequences of a meaning -- here are all the chairs denoted by "chair" -- but those consequences do not exhaust the meaning, since "chair" applies to the possible chairs as well as the actual ones you can display."

"A definition of the word "chair" would imply the possible chairs..."

"But the definition is just another expression of the meaning, and you'd have to ask, what do the words of that definition mean. There is something beyond the physical about meanings."

"So this really is Platonic after all."

"Maybe. Depends on what you mean by Platonic. I'll tell you this: pretty much no one thinks consciousness is a physical phenomenon. But no one thinks it's Platonic. It's somehow tied to the physical, only physical beings have it, and only that thing can have its own consciousness. But meanings aren't tied to things at all. They don't even have a location. Or even words, since they can be translated from language to language."

"So what are they?"

"Elusive."

Thursday, May 22, 2025

the liberal blind spot and the arrogance of the Left

Blindest of all, the academic Left. 

In 2016, sociologist Arlie Hochschild published a wonderfully empathic study of rural Louisiana voters, trying to answer the question, why do they vote Republican against their own material interests. She steeled the question by focusing on a community that lost all their most highly valued material goods in life -- the value of their homes, their recreational environment including their hunting forests and their fishing lake -- yet continued to vote Republican knowing that their losses were the direct result of Republican policy, namely deregulation of the oil industry in Louisiana. 

Hochschild provides broad and ample details of the losses, and plenty of testimonials of the victims that they fully understood that the losses were the responsibility of Republican policy. And she delves deeply into their community and its values. She also constructs a narrative, a metaphorical story, of why they distrust Democrats. 

The story goes: imagine ordinary Americans are all lined up patiently and properly waiting to attain the American Dream that they can see way up the hill ahead of them, but Democrats are allowing blacks and immigrants to cut in line, cutting in front of these patient, proper Americans. That's why the Louisianans distrust the Democrats and trust the Republicans. 

I finished the book feeling that Hochschild had not at all answered her initial question. Their outrage over the line-cutting story itself makes sense, but there's something wrong, something doesn't add up. The Louisianans are fully aware that the Republican policy harms them, not metaphorically or remotely or abstractly in story-land, but in reality in their face, in their pockets, in their real estate value, and the value of their material goods in life -- nature, being close to pristine nature, enjoying the beauty of nature, hunting and fishing. If they were waiting in line for the American Dream, their Republican governor took them out of the line and dumped them in a landfill of trash. They're not in line for anything in the trash heap, and they've lost everything they had and worked hard for. 

Why then do they subscribe to the anti-Democratic Party story? Why don't they face up to their real-life enemy? Why make up a story to invent an enemy, when reality -- which needs no invention -- is right there in their face to complain about? (This is not unlike the Gates-Musk paradox I wrote about here and is an example of the reflexive data, and emotional data characteristic of the social sciences described here, and interactive identity creation here.) 

The answer came to me from Keith Stanovich's The Bias that Divides Us, a treatment of myside bias. In his chapter on bias among academics, he points out that while liberals often complain that Republicans foolishly vote against their own material interests, liberals themselves routinely vote for wealth redistribution which is...wait for it... yup, against their own material interests. 

This was an eye-opener for me. Stupid as I am, I had never recognized that professional class liberals, who are educated, even over-educated, vote in just the same foolish way as downscale, non elite Republicans. Or that material interests are not the priority of voters of any stripe. The product of the professional class myself, I had all my life failed to see this all too obvious truth. 

Stanovich doesn't go so far as to say that voting against one's material interests is an essential component of professional class liberalism, but I will say so. And more: the liberal assumption that downscale Republican voters are foolish to vote against their material interests is an ignorant, closed-minded and hypocritical bias against the Republican Party, and a narrow and stupid way to understand voter preferences altogether. 

And yet that was the question Hochschild set out as her project. It is the project of a professional class liberal, even, like Hochschild herself, a liberal Marxist professional. 

A more useful question might be, if material interests don't motivate voters, what does? 

In the context of that question, her narrative of the line to the American Dream is just an excuse, a fabrication to justify a distrust of Democrats. If the story is just an excuse, what's the underlying motivation for hating on the Democrats? Here Hochschild provides the most interesting data in her study. 

There are two deep clues in her book. The community she studied is a close one. They all attend church on Sunday. They spend much of that day together communing, talking, eating together and sharing. They all see this sharing as important to one another and important to their personal and collective identity. 

The other clue is that they all are reluctant to talk about black people. Hochschild herself says little about this except that they don't talk about it. She doesn't draw any conclusion about it. It is the presence-in-absence of the book.

Why do the Louisianans vote Republican? The Republican party is the party of their community identity is more important than anything else. We're a social species -- identity is social and identity is who we are. Material interests are what we sacrifice for our identity. 

A student of mine pointed out in class that the Democratic party was once the party of the South. What happened? 

After the Civil Rights Act, the Democratic Party became the champion of equal rights. And the Republican party became the party of white supremacy. 

Why is the Republican Party the party of the Louisianan community Hochschild studied? Because it is the party of whites. The line-for-the-American-Dream story is just an excuse. The Republican Party is more harmful to them in reality, and they know it. That doesn't matter to them. Their identity is white, and the party choice follows. 

There are two ways of viewing Us vs Them, in-group versus out-group. On one view, the Marxist view, held among may anthropologists, the in-group is defined by some material interest -- class interest, for example. There is another very different anthropological view, drawn from linguistics, particularly semiology, and promoted by Ruth Benedict and Culture & Personality school she founded. On her view, the definition of the in-group is purely historical and arbitrary, like the words of a language. There might be some remote, arcane motivation, but those motivations are so obscure that they are not present in the word or in-group definition. 

For Louisiana whites, the Us vs Them seems to be a convergence of both arbitrary history and motivated reason (cognitive bias). The motivation is not, however, material interest. It's the historical accident of color. 

Why should color make such a difference? Isn't is obvious that it's the lasting heritage of slavery? People are most entrenched in their views when they know they are wrong. The obvious wrong of holding other humans as slaves induced a lot of myside bias justifications -- "they're savages" the slave-owner insists, "we're civilizing them", "we're sending them to heaven" etc. The mere presence of a free black is an insult to their honor, since they know their enforcement of inequality is, or was and still is, so very obviously wrong. This is when people get hateful and violent over their myside bias. The wronger you know you are, the angrier you will be and more vigorously will you defend your precarious wrong, even ugly, stance. People are not interested in truth. We're interested in defending ourselves as right and good and justified.

Hochschild's study reveals that the legacy of slavery is inherited by whites. The mechanism that perpetuates it, having a heritage of ancestors involved or supporting slavery, is easy to understand. 

Tuesday, March 25, 2025

propaganda vs censorship: asymmetrical effects in escalation bias and polarization

You can resist a force, but not an absence. 

Which is worse, censorship or propaganda? Hugo Mercier observes in Not Born Yesterday, a wonderful and important book, that Hitler and Goebbels were disappointed that their propaganda had no effect on non Nazis. The propaganda was useful for rallying the choir and goading Nazi enthusiasts to act decisively, transgressively and violently, but didn't persuade non Nazis. 

This should not be surprising. We are all inundated with propaganda from many different sides, but given all the options, we choose the propaganda that we already want to believe. The NYTimes propagates anti-Trump views, but it has no effect on Trump supporters, and Fox has no effect on NYTimes readers. 

Here's the challenge for those who believe that propaganda is dangerous: 

on what basis do some citizens read the NYTimes and others watch Fox? If they are choosing one and not the other, then they must already know the poison they desire; they already know what to expect; they already know the outlines of the content. 

The reason propaganda seems so effective with its audience is because the audience already believes it. Persuasion is superfluous. It has no role in propaganda. 

Why, then are they reading or listening to their preferred resource? 

To confirm their bias. To get more bullet points to defend their bias. To get aroused and enraged by what they already are angry about. To feel triumphant in how right they are. To revel in the flood of evidence that arouses and excites and justifies their views and strokes them as right and good and better than their opponents and more insightful and in all ways superior. It's an orgasm of self-righteousness. 

That's the purpose of news media, folks. That's why it sells. It's all spin and propaganda, and its effect is not to inform and change minds, but to justify and arouse the already formed, closed mind.

[In case you object that you favor your chosen news venue because it is reliable, accurate and insightful, and not because you're biased towards it, look at the news venue you dislike. To evaluate one's own bias, looking at one's preferences won't help, since you're already biased towards it. Bias is invisible to its owner. On the other hand, if the oppositional news venue repels you, just imagine what its audience thinks of your preferences and why yours repel them. Then you can get a glimpse of your bias. After all, when we're most biased we don't think "I'm biased". We think, "I'm not biased! I'm right." True of everyone on every side.]

And what happens when propaganda is presented to the opposed mind? Resistance, rejection, dispute, disgust, dismissal, outrage and anger -- a leveling up of one's bias to 11, an increase in emotional commitment to that bias stirred into a wild frenzy of anger, and a joyous sharpening of critical thinking against the propaganda. 

Propaganda not only fails to persuade, it enrages its opponents. In social interactions, for every antagonistic push there is a greater and opposite pushback. 

What about censorship, the absence of information, whether propaganda or fact? Where there is no information, where there is no push, there is no resistance. Where there is no resistance there is no incentive to find contrary evidence. Nothing comes of nothing. 

The virtue of censorship is complacency. But ignorance is not always bliss. It can also provoke distrust, just as propaganda can, though not as perspicuously, more an uneasy suspicion. The virtue of propaganda is the relentless seeking for evidence in favor or against. The danger of propaganda is not fooling the public, but polarizing the public, arousing it, and the mutual demonization of the polar teams. 

So which is worse? Falsehoods, fights, and targeted distrust or silent ignorance and vague suspicion? Which would you regret most?

PS: There are bottom-up, non coercive solutions to polarization & misinformation, solutions that emerge from a surprising incentive. I'll be posting on these soon.