the sociology of false beliefs

Background (if you find this familiar and boring, skim to the next section which is the meat of the post)

Here are two mutually distinct sets of believers in our society: believers in government propaganda (weapons of mass destruction, e.g.) tend to dismiss fringe conspiracy theories, and believers in fringe conspiracy theories dismiss government propaganda (obviously, since an important component of fringe theory is distrust of government propaganda). 

Can we map these false beliefs -- like beliefs in government or partisan propaganda and fringe conspiracy theories -- onto the social pyramid or other social places like gender or religion or urban or rural? Can such socially located false beliefs tell us about those social places and vice versa, do the social places tell us about the beliefs? Answering those questions is my goal: a sociological explanation for who believes what and why.

Why only false beliefs? A true belief can be held solely because it is obviously true or highly plausible. It could be being held because the believer is biased or it could be being held because the believer is rational. But a patently false belief -- a belief that contradicts its own premises or conflicts with facts accepted by the believer -- can't be explained by the belief's rational consistency or perception of accuracy. The holding of it can only be explained by some choice, bias, ignorance or lack of rationality in the believer. False beliefs tell us more about the believer than the belief. 

How do we know which beliefs are true or false? In many cases it's not obvious but there are clear cases of contradictory beliefs. There are also beliefs or theories that are far more complex than a simpler theory (see the post "Entropy and truth" about the role of simplicity in theory choice). These over-complicated theories raise the question of motivation. Why choose the complicated theory over the simpler one? The answer should give us direct insight into the psycho-social mapping. 

Cognitive psychology, from Tom Gilovich and Daniel Kahneman to Jon Haidt, tells us that our choice of beliefs (e.g., Gilovich's How to know what isn't so, Kahnemen's Thinking fast and slow, Haidt's Righteous Mind, also see the posts on this blog "Fool's Errand Attachment: a cognitive bias" and "the free will oxymoron" among others) are not rationally motivated at heart; we believe whatever we want to believe, regardless of facts. The crucial word is "want". There is always some emotional desire motivating our choices, which we hide behind a veneer of rational justifications to defend and hide our selfish motivations from others -- and from ourselves, since honesty is easier than lying, deceiving ourselves makes it easier to deceive others. 

Our rationality seems to be in the service of two emotional drives, one a selfish personal interest, the other an interactive social interest. Our behavioral cognitive psychologist says a liberal Democrat might provide lots of rational justifications for being a liberal Democrat, but it's mere rationalizing, a public show hiding some deeper emotional commitment. It may be, following Jon Haidt, a seeking for approval from one's chosen peers -- the virtue-signaling of the liberal. Or following Robin Hanson, it's a creating of one's identity within one's social context -- holding a respected or prestigious ideology, in his words "good-looking ideas". Or it may be, following Rob Henderson, the luxury ideas that signal high socio-economic status. These are all interactive social drives. On the other hand, the political beliefs may be driven by cognitive dissonance over personal gain, not at all an interactive choice but a merely self-serving one: for example, I'm paid to teach in a public university, so I'm inclined to favor a candidate who endorses public higher education, and I then defend my choice by scraping around for other justifications for voting for that person. 

To the extent that we hold our beliefs for reasons other than their superficial public rational justifications, our beliefs are falsely held, regardless of the truth value of those beliefs. We should expect, then, to find many false beliefs held for no reason but personal and interactive reasons alone. If personal interests and interactive social interests depend on social identity, false beliefs should tell us about social locations including distinctions of class, rural vs urban location, even race or gender. The relevance to identity politics is obvious, but in this post I'm interested in two classes, the professional class (the educated elite) and the non elite or anti-elite(?) class. I'll start with the interests and emotional commitments of the professional class and their investment in partisan propaganda.

the professional class -- the virtue-signaling class -- and their beliefs

The following is a very broad-brush picture. Think of it as a kind of caricature. It's meant to describe a statistical inclination among the members of a class. I am well aware of the many many counterexamples to this description and the description in the following section. I beg the reader for indulgence. 

Members of the professional class can be identified easily. And quickly. Within five minutes of meeting one, they will tell you what they do for a living. They have a career that they are proud to announce, "I'm a partner with Bellstein and Whistle", "I teach at Superior T U" or "I'm a physician with a clinical practice in insurance-guaranteed pharmaceutical FDA-approved remedies and addictions -- a branch of government finance, you should know". Humor aside, they perceive themselves to be, and are, privileged. They live in safe, clean, well-served neighborhoods; their children go to fancy schools. They themselves attended fancy schools and have fancy degrees with fancy letters before or after their names. Their interactive position is one of prestige and social respect, and they are, and perceive themselves as, the beneficiaries of the many goods that their society affords. 

They are, therefore and crucially, deeply invested in their society that gives them so much, including respect. The last thing they want to see is a socio-political revolution in which they'd risk losing everything. They are the defenders of the faith in American democracy, progress, justice and equality. They want to believe that their government and social structure are basically good or at least, better than any alternative, or at the very least, capable of improvement and for that reason worthy of upholding. 

However, they also perceive that a vast non elite public does not reap all these social benefits. They have two responses to this inequality. One is self-justification, holding the belief -- perhaps false belief -- that they deserve their benefits. They worked hard for their fancy degrees, their education has given them an appreciation for fine culture, a superior understanding of the world, of politics and of economics and science, whereas, they believe, the non elite are without all of this. According to elite perception, the non elites don't appreciate culture, abuse and debase the heritage of the language, and understand so little of politics that they vote against their own material interests (apparently ignoring entirely that liberalism is defined by voting against one's material interests in order to benefit society as a whole -- see the post on Hochschild vs Stanovich and the liberal blind spot). They believe that the non elites are concerned only in creature comforts so they are naturally lazy and unambitious, lacking all merit. At best, they pity them. 

That strategy is widespread -- you see it in the regular publication every couple of years of a new book describing how the plebes are destroying the English language. It's almost comical how something so trivial and misguided (I'll post on this soon, but Pinker did a great job with this in his The Language Instinct) is the source of so much pride, while ignoring that the liveliest, subtlest and most beautiful linguistic innovation is ceaselessly created at the social non elite bottom. I digress. It's the linguist in me. 

This strategy of superiority, though widespread and deep, does not however alleviate the educated elite from feeling any less dickish. If anything, it makes them feel more dickish. They need another strategy to alleviate, resolve or hide the dick. It's virtue-signaling, social and financial liberalism, in Phil Ochs' 1966 words, "love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal". 

As every news venue must find and cater to an audience market share to serve up to its advertisers, the NYTimes, Atlantic and NPR provide the desired information -- including false beliefs -- to the educated elite. The NYT reader reads the NYT not only because it has prestige, but also because it tells its audience what that audience already wants to believe. Your government, essentially good but imperfect, can be improved by voting Democratic. If you vote for the Democratic Party, it will take a bit of your taxes, not too much, but some, and redistribute it to The Poor. Then your conscience will be clear. And if this doesn't work and doesn't save the society that you get so much from, blame it on the evil Republicans. It's a tidy, neat package wrapped in a pretty blue ribbon. 

If the NYT reports government propaganda the NYT reader will believe it. Weapons of mass destruction is the classic case. NYT readers believed this propaganda even though anyone with their eyes open knew it was a dog and pony show from the start. Kofi Annan knew it. Hans Blix exposed it. Nevertheless NYT readers believed it. And today, now that we know that the NYT failed to present the propaganda as absurdly false, the educated elite still read the NYT. NYT readers are original victims of Murray Gell-Mann amnesia. The professional class -- educated elite -- are prone to false propaganda beliefs. It's their emotional investment in a society that provides them with all good things, especially their interactive social value -- respect -- that drives their beliefs. It's their need for virtue and virtue-signalling to cleanse their conscience. 

So much for the professional, educated elite class. 

[Once, when I was arguing that the educated elite have high voting rates because they believe in the voting process, the person I was talking to objected that there are too few of them to make a difference in elections. It dawned on me that on the street "elite" now refers to a cabal of CEOs or a small cohort of Skull & Bones members or Bilderburg members or Illuminati.  Conspiracy theory has overtaken the language. In this post "the educated elite" refers to the professional class and those that identify with it or aspire to it.]

the non elite distrustful and respect-signaling class

The non elite have no need for virtue-signaling. They do not perceive that they are privileged within their society. Many actually do get a lot from the government, but it is in the form of subsidies, so they can't claim them for respect. On the contrary, subsidies are signs of inequality, of the injustices of the society. Subsidies do not argue for an investment in the society, they demonstrate its injustices of its economic structure.  

What the non elite want and don't get from the society is respect. They know that the professional class looks down on them. They don't have careers, they have jobs. They have subsidies, not fancy degrees. It's in this world of want that conspiracy theories and distrust of government thrive. Respect is available only from their peers. The essence of conspiracy street cred is "Those educated professionals, they believe government propaganda. I know better. The government at every turn is lying to them and they believe it. Not me. They vote, those chumps. They've been had, losers." A flat-earther once used those very words to me. "You think the earth is round? You've been had." 

The sense among the non elite or anti-elite that government is inaccessibly remote is a kind of structural violence. Not physical, but a psychological violence. Its consequence is this response: distrust of government and social distrust of "the elites", the perennial target of their conspiracy theories. 

the outcome

There are many false beliefs that can be mapped onto social spaces and class structure. The post on the Liberal Blind Spot focuses on religion and fictional political narratives in urban vs rural social locations. The current post has focused only on the mutually exclusive government propaganda beliefs and conspiracy theories among the educated elite and the non elite respectively. 

This mapping suggests that beliefs are reflexes of social place, that properties of social place -- especially degrees of prestige and respect, but also material wealth and perception of inequality -- incline towards specific beliefs to resolve cognitive dissonances (having more wealth than others, getting less respect than others). 

There are other reflexes besides propaganda beliefs and conspiracy beliefs. Those who believe propaganda dismiss conspiracy theories as stupid and dangerous. Those who believe in conspiracy theories dismiss propaganda believers as fools. 

There's also a behavioral reflex. The virtue-signaling class expect government to solve social problems, and they support change. They are prone to the Fool's Errand Attachment bias. 

Conspiracy believers do not expect progress. Their baked-in distrust expects only harm from legislation and the corporate world's manipulations, harm in the form of agricultural poisoning, vaccines, surveillance, indoctrination, war. They are political fatalists (see the post on the Fool's Errand Attachment) and are naturally drawn to Reaganite neoliberalist ideology of small government and deregulation. 

However, the non elite are often found helping the people around them. Who is more dangerous, the non voting flat-earther sharing lunch with a homeless migrant and finding him a discarded winter coat, or the voting, unquestioning NYTimes reader, leaving the white cloister to join a protest march? Obviously, each thinks the other is more dangerous. Outside of the US, especially among the ordinary people in the so-called global south, the US Democratic Party is commonly viewed as extremely militaristic, dangerously aggressive and violently murderous. Something for the liberal Democrat to think about. 

true but wrong

My favorite statistic: 

some years ago I came across Citigroup's Global Economic Outlook & Strategy. In it I found a page on revolutions! According to their research, a revolution in a nation on average will induce a 14% decline in that nation's GDP. And if it is coupled with a civil war, the dip is likely to be twice as great!! 

I love this statistic. I think it's safe to say that this decline in GDP is hugely important and no doubt more or less true. And yet it also misses everything important about a revolution. From the perspective of the revolutionary and social justice, it's strictly irrelevant. It's totally true, and utterly wrong. 

When we consider theories and explanations and understanding, do we check to see whether we've got the right truth or the wrong one? Is there a bigger picture than the narrow truth? Is there a biggest picture? 

I know it's common to complain that, say, scientific theories are too narrow, that they may be true, but still wrong. I think these complainers are the narrow ones. Their view of the potential of the sciences is limited by their anti-scientism. There are many narrow scientific theories, but I think there are also scientific biggest pictures. 

The Citigroup statistic is narrow truth. The justifications for a revolution are also a narrow truth. A bigger picture is, obviously, a cost-benefit-plus-risk analysis, weighted by some values like justice, human rights etc. You can maybe see when the biggest picture is intuited by the public. If the regime is extremely repressive, it can be because it knows the public wants to take that risk. But a small radical military faction can also induce extreme oppression from the regime. A civil war following a revolution might also indicate a public rejection of that radical faction. Everyone involved is intuiting what Citigroup has measured in a number. Of course, Citigroup's statistic is addressed not to regimes nor to the public nor to the revolutionary. It's addressed to the investor, indifferent to them all. 

The anti-scientismists complain that science can't give us our values, our aesthetic sense, our emotions. But surely everyone knows that's not so. As E.O.Wilson pointed out, our moral values are the ones that natural selection selected for us as a social species, the values that conduce to social species survival. Same with emotions, and there's a post here on why mathematical beauty is beautiful to us, and it's all about natural selection of reliable signals. So could we retire this anti-scientismism? 

Ah, but once you know the scientific explanation for some value, will you still hold the value? That's a real problem, since some illusions are practically helpful and useful. Cleave only to truth and you're left with no reason to live at all. Except for your naturally selected values and emotions. 

So I say, don't worry about truth undermining your values. The values that science shows you are yours are in fact the ones you want. Don't worry, be happy. I mean, don't harm yourself, be engaged in something engrossing outside yourself. 

"jones"'s four corollaries to Brandolini's Law (aka The Bull Shit Asymmetry Principle)

For those who don't know, "Brandolini's Law" is a tongue-in-cheek so-called law, akin to Godwin's Law and Murphy's Law, frequently applied to fringe conspiracy theories. It reads like this, according to Wikipedia:  The energy required to debunk a stupid idea is orders of magnitude greater than the energy it takes to produce a stupid idea, also known, according to Wikipedia, the bullshit asymmetry principle, coined by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer, after listening to an interview with the former Prime Minister Sylvio Berlusconi.

Here are four corollaries that seem to me consequent to his "Law": 

1. The asymmetry is in inverse relation to the quantity or availability of evidence. The less evidence available for or against the stupid idea, the harder to debunk. 

If you can't practically go to the moon, you can't easily demonstrate that stars don't appear on camera there. Instead you have to rely on an elaborate explanation of optics on lunar-like surface locations. A conclusive and thoroughly persuasive explanation might require a comprehensive understanding of physics, a comprehensive understanding that might take years of effort and math. And even if the debating parties were willing to pursue that study, considering the resources of intelligence immediately available to the discussants, it's probably impossible. People will believe what they want to believe regardless of any facts. Why should they bother to learn all that background? "Learning? F*** no!"

What's motivating the preference for one or another belief about the moon landing? Here are two posts explaining these preferences: the sociology of false beliefs and the Gates-Musk paradox: conspiracy theories are not about what you think they are about.

To extrapolate this corollary (corollary 1.a): where there is no evidence, the orders of magnitude of difficulty reach to infinity, iow, impossibility. This leads to another corollary:

2. Corollary 2 is the flip side of (1): wherever there is no easily available evidence, therever will be a playground for stupid ideas and hoaxes to fill the vacuum of information. 

Consider the difficulty of proving that China doesn't really exist, it's just a gov't conspiracy. You'd have to persuade people that all the local Chinese immigrants and tourists, along with everyone who claim to have visited China and returned, are in the conspiracy, that all the books on China are fabricated, news casts from "China"  etc., etc. And the risk would be high. Anyone can just buy a ticket and go visit to prove your conspiracy hoax is false. So where there's evidence, hoaxes will be few and stupid ideas only at the very extremist end of stupidity. 

However, it does not follow from (2) that wherever there's lots of evidence, therever will be no conspiracies. Corollary 2 does not lead to an infinite conclusion as (1.a) does. A stupid idea can always either twist evidence in favor of a theory, or find some coincidence that supports a theory. This is one reason why confirmation bias is so intransigent -- it's so easy to find supportive evidence for almost any theory. Fringe conspiracy theories, like the poor, will always be with us. 

A flat earther tells me that maps have historically always been flat. Proof! If I point out that all the portraits for George Washington are also flat, but he certainly couldn't have led the armies if he were flat, the response I get is, there are statues of Washington. And if I argue that there are no statues of Hitler :-), the response I get is, yes, Hitler was flat and black and white too. He's a gov't fake. 

The persuasiveness of a belief depends on the degree and source of distrust and the sources of information. Paranoia is extreme and often contradictory, but not unwarranted. It's the difference between confirmatory evidence, of which the paranoid has plenty, and discomfirmation, which the paranoid either hasn't thought of or hasn't been exposed to. 

3. is a corollary of (2). Wherever there is little evidence available, therever will be a playground for real conspiracies, that is, propaganda. What's an opportunity for the goose is just as rich an opportunity for the gander. 

4. There's yet another corollary to (1). Where there's no evidence, or no practical evidence (like the moon), there the debunking of a stupid idea with evidence is waste of time reaching towards an infinite waste of time, and anyone engaging in debunking the evidence of such a theory is infinitely foolish. 

That's not to say that debunkers should give up on stupid hoaxes. Disproofs don't depend only on empirical evidence or even on best theories of physics. Many hoaxes rely on internal contradictions. It's just a matter of identifying them. They are not always obvious, often because the absurdities of the conspiracy focuses attention on the details set out by the conspiracy. Conspiracy theorists too easily set the terms of discourse. Accepting the assumptions of the theory is an easy trap to fall into.

The moon landing is a case in point. The temptation is to debunk the empirical evidence about stars and flags waving in "the breeze". It's easy to miss the contradictory assumption in the conspiracy itself, that gov'ts produce fakes for the purpose of propaganda. Take that seriously and you've got to ask, why didn't the Soviets (or as we used to say, the Russians -- a telling and interesting expression that has been overlooked since the collapse; it implies that we intuited that the CCCP was really an extractive Russian empire more than an ideological alternative, or maybe that was our gov't's propaganda) produce their own fake in response? Really. It was recognized across the globe that the Russians were ahead of the US in the space race. They'd sent a satellite in orbit first, the first dog and animal, the first extra-orbital object, and the first human in orbit. Anyone would have believed a Russian photo of Russian cosmonauts carousing on the moon. And their photo could have been even more persuasive, correcting and improving the US photo!

This question -- why the Soviets didn't produce their own fake landing -- takes the conspiracy assumption seriously and renders it, if not contradictory and inconsistent, then certainly stupid. 

I once asked a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist why didn't the Soviets produce their own fake. His  emailed answer (I don't know how long it took him to figure out the answer) was, if they had produced a fake, they'd be risking exposure! 

Do I need to point out that his answer is the reason to believe the US landing was real? That if he truly and fully credits that answer, then he can't also believe the US faked its landing? More accurately, he can't be a consistent thinker and hold onto the fake landing belief without some ad hoc extenuating belief like the US gov't doesn't care about being exposed even though the Soviet gov't is.

An even more interesting question is why anyone believes the conspiracy when the premise of the theory leads to an obvious inconsistency. One could salvage the theory by insisting that only the US practices propaganda, but you'd need an additional explanation for why that would be so. IOW, salvaging the theory only complexifies it, making it less probable. I've got a post on probability and truth ("entropy and truth) and another on why the lack of any Soviet fake moon landing is a really interesting puzzle regardless whether the US landing was real or fake ("where are all the missing fake moon landings?)

Also notice that his answer is a thinking answer. Yet he doesn't think to apply it to the US fake -- he doesn't apply to his own view. That's the character of human thinking -- we use it when we want it and only then. That's why conspiracy thinking is so important for us to understand ("the sociology of false beliefs). It shows us the general character of our thinking in bold relief. 

Musk again? A lesson in inefficiency and ambiguity

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, September 1, 2023

A friend, explaining why he admires Elon Musk, describes the efficiency of Musk’s auto-transport tunnel: subway train cars are expensive because they can’t be mass-produced, they require large tunnels the boring of which require exponentially greater energy for every increment of diameter, and trains must support rush hour capacity even on off hours, whereas autos are mass-produced cheaply on the assembly line, they require little tunnel space, and on off hours, only the occupied ones run. He concludes that the Musk tunnel is efficient.

Well not so fast, pun intended. And there’s an important linguistic and conceptual lesson to be learnt from that lack of speed.

The carrying capacity of a packed subway/metro car is about 250 people. The average train is eight cars, so about 2000 people running, in NYC, every two to five minutes in rush hour. Off-loading that efficiency onto autos would require about 2000 autos every five minutes, or about 7 autos per second. A car would have to have 1/7th of a second to load onto Musk’s tunnel platform to meet rush hour demand. Not likely.

Even if that were possible, consider an on-ramp for a midpoint station B from destination A to C. In rush hour, there’d be a constant flow headed from A towards C.

A–>——B–>——–>C

To accommodate cars coming from station B, that traffic flow would have to slow down to allow a car to enter into the single-lane traffic of the tunnel, and the on-ramp itself would have to be backed up for the one-by-one entry onto the tunnel, even if this were all automated. A subway train typically has dozens of stations between its endpoints. Imagine the traffic jam in a single lane tunnel at rush hour, each car containing one person since the 2000 people in each train have now been distributed into individual cars. Depressing.

In other words, the Musk tunnel can’t handle rush hour traffic if used for a metro system. It would probably be so slow that either long lines would drive people away, or it will be priced high enough to prevent long queues. You don’t need to think long and hard to figure which option will be the business model. It only makes sense as a luxury shuttle from airport to hotel district for the business class, with a discount during off hours.

And what does the subway/metro serve? The entire public, the society as a whole, the economy that serves everyone. The inefficiencies of the system are sacrifices to the priority it serves. And it is fast. Very fast by compare!

Tunnels are not new. We know when and where to use them efficiently for the public. There’s a reason why we use tunnels only for A to B destinations, like midtown NYC to Weehauken — nobody needs to get out in the middle of a river.  There are projects that serve money, others that serve the public, and some that serve the vanity of their promoters’ public image.

Here’s the lesson: a grotesquely inefficient idea implemented efficiently remains grotesquely inefficient. Its efficiencies are intended to create more profit for the owner. So of course there will be efficiencies in any business model. That does not at all imply that the business purpose is efficient.

This notion of “efficiency” is trading on an amgibuity between the efficiency of the business idea (Musk’s is not) and the efficiency of its implementation (conveniently for his profit). The inefficiencies reveal the respective purposes: serving the public, the society, the economy as a whole or making money serving a luxury economy. This is why Adam Smith despised the wealthy — their servants could have been employed in the productive economy that serves all, but instead were wasted on serving wealthy individuals with no benefit to the nation’s economy, the wealth of the nation.

And it’s a lesson for the libertarian: because the market supplies demand, in unequal societies the wealthy will be served more and better in ways that are inefficient for the economy as a whole and the nation. Smith’s book is not entitled “The Wealth of Individuals” but “The Wealth of Nations”. Remember that.

Fool’s Errand Attachment as policy

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 20, 2022

After posting on the Fool’s Errand Attachment, it occurred to me that the Fool’s Errand Attachment might not be a cognitive bias after all, but is a policy failure, or is not just a cognitive bias but also a policy failure. Executive office holders no doubt feel compelled to show their constituencies that they are solving social problems. A virus emerges, the elected officer can’t just sit by and watch the dead pile up. Something must be done! So mask, get a vaccine, stay home, effectively end education for children, effectively ruin the economy. CO2 levels have gone through the roof, so let’s undermine global improvements of quality of life by curtailing the energy that drives that progress, disregarding entirely that the current atmospheric CO2 is not reduced thereby (CO2 remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, as most of us by now know, unless it is removed) so if CO2 will warm the planet, even zero emissions won’t prevent it (and I haven’t heard Greta Thunberg or Extinction Rebels scold us that we’re not spending more on carbon sequestering or on preparing to welcome climate refugees). That’s the fool’s errand attachment. And once a government has instituted a useless program, it’s hard to crawl back and admit failure. It just looks better to push it to the bitter end and declare victory amidst the ruins than stand there with egg on one’s face and be labeled “WRONG STUPID HARMFUL” which would be political suicide for the next election cycle. Like capital, politicians have limited interests that make them systematically dysfunctional.

A brilliant friend pointed out to me — I’d name him but he doesn’t like attention — that these fool’s errands proliferate in countries where the politics is polarized. The one nation that did not succumb to Covid foolery was Sweden, which is not polarized and where the people actually trust their government to make wise and even difficult decisions. In polarized nations, it’s much harder for office holders to make difficult decisions, since their opposition is lying in wait for any weak point of policy.

So whether it is a cognitive bias, it does seem to be a policy problem. On the other hand, the comparison with conspiracy theorizing is I think a revealing one, and maybe the best part of the post on Fool’s Errand Attachment (see the post below).

Fool’s Errand Attachment: a cognitive bias

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 14, 2022

How about this for a new cognitive bias to add to the 38,407 so far identified cognitive biases: Fool’s Errand Attachment, grasping onto a “solution” where there is no solution; attaching oneself to a policy to the degree of need for a solution, not to the degree of its effectiveness, clinging to a program because there is some perceived desperate problem to solve, not because the program will work. Examples: 

The fears about inflation from the Russian invasion of Ukraine — and the selective sanctions — tell us that we’re incapable of getting off fossil fuels now nor for the foreseeable future, and we all know it. And even if we did give up on the fossil fuel addiction, we’d still be stuck with the current excessive atmospheric CO2 levels for hundreds of years. So if atmospheric CO2 will warm the climate, then it’s already too late to fend off climate change, yet the solution so many have invested in, emotionally, politically and morally, is the goal of zero emissions. That is, we still grasp for solutions where there is none, ignoring the inevitable mitigations that we should be focusing on and trying to solve now when we still can. (The IPCC’s recent report is finally recognizing the inevitability and the need for focusing on mitigation.) In other words, aiming for zero emissions, though it would have other benefits like reducing air, water and soil pollution, is no solution to human-induced global warming. And there are other measures we should all be focusing on but aren’t — like preparing and providing for the inevitable mass relocations of populations who are without the resources in this world of ownership to save themselves.  

Notice which people are attached to this non solution, how strongly they hold it and how narrowly — to the exclusion of mitigations or sequestering programs. Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg are only the most prominent examples of this narrow devotion to a program that will do absolutely nothing to change the climate. 

Another: Even when the research tells us that only KN95 masks are effective, mask mandates still apply to any kind of mask. In this case, the urgent need lies in those who don’t have an effective mask. But we don’t then allow them to walk freely without a mask. Not only do they use useless masks, but we expect them to use those useless masks, rather than accept that those who can’t access an effective mask should just as well go maskless. 

And another: The stubborn insistence on vaccine mandates implies that the promoters of vaccine mandates still believe that they can end the inevitable spread, however slowed even though 80% of new cases are of fully vaccinated patients, the “breakthrough” rate being >10%, and the re-infection rate, the measure of natural immunity, is around 4%, and nowhere in the world the vaccine has reduced the R0 below 1. (A quicker spread of a mild virus like omicron might actually be more effective if immunity is time-limited, but this doesn’t seem to be factored in at all by anyone. The urgent desire to prevent any spread has closed off the understanding that there is no solution to zero spread, and closed off the possibility of reducing the extent of the spread through rapid spread.)

Finally: violent revolutions do not guarantee that they will yield a better regime rather than a worse, more authoritarian and more violently oppressive one, yet many who are most sensible to the injustices of regimes believe that revolution is the best solution rather than the worst. Pervasive injustice cries out urgently for a solution, so there must be one. 

That’s the fool’s errand attachment. I want to offer an explanation for why victims of it exclude any alternative solution, why some kinds of people are victims of it and other kinds not, and what the personality source of it is. 

Fool’s Errand Attachment often intersects with availability bias (we’ve seen pollution effectively reduced so maybe atmospheric CO2 can be reduced), anchoring and sunk cost fallacy (we’ve invested financially or politically or emotionally in masks and vaccines so we have to stand by them), but unlike the sunk cost, the Fool’s Errand chooses a program that is known to be a failure from the start. It’s this counterproductive choice of the useless that is so interesting in the Fool’s Errand Attachment. The cloth masks may be ineffective, but those without N95s can’t just walk around unmasked! So everyone has to mask, even though the emperor has no clothes. That’s a fool’s errand. Zero emissions is not happening, and it wouldn’t make a difference anyway, but that doesn’t matter — there *must* be a solution, therefore there *is* a solution, no matter what the cost, no matter impossible and absurd, including the many counterproductive measures that will hinder the wealth and well-being of the populations in developing nations for the sake of a zero emissions program that serves no climate good at all and harms many. 

So what’s the moral source of this choice and attachment?

Fool’s Errand Attachment vs Conspiracy Theory

Fool’s errand bias contrasts with conspiracy theory. Victims of Fool’s Errand reject all other possible solutions: natural immunity isn’t possible according to them even though the breakthrough rate for the vaccinated is over 10% while the reinfection rate remains around 4%. And Omicron, a mild disease the free spread of which would likely end the pandemic since it spreads quickly enough to provide herd immunity sufficient to sterilize the virus and end its mutations at once, *must* not be the end of the virus, only masks and vaccines can be the solution! Similar narrowness holds with zero emissions rather than mitigation or sequestering.

Conspiracy theorists provide a fascinating contrast. Conspiracy theorists will believe all sorts of theories, even ones that contradict one another. For them the only banned theory is the mainstream one. Fool’s Errand Attachment: “Nothing but this works!”; Conspiracy Theorizing: “Anything but that is true!”.

This difference between Fool’s Errand Attachment, clinging to one solution only, and Conspiracy Theorizing, accepting any and every theory but the mainstream one, predicts that conspiracy theorists are not motivated by a desire for a solution to the problems they identify. That is, the motivation for a Fool’s Errand is always the perceived urgency of a solution. The desperate need for a solution is what causes the desperate attachment. Conspiracy theorists seem to hold the opposite. Give them a solution and they will reject it. Their view seems to be that the problems of the world are beyond solution. At least, these problems are beyond our capabilities to resolve. There are powers running our world far greater than the meagre powers of the common people. We common people are doomed to be victims. 

Victims of the Fool’s Errand Attachment are utopianists, victims of Conspiracy Theorizing are fatalists. Utopianists consider themselves morally superior on the grounds that they are doing good for all. This predicts that victims of the Fool’s Errand Attachment — let’s call them the Fools for short — will be given to virtue signaling. They want to solve the problems of the world, so they are therefore good people by their definition of good. And they have in hand what they think is the only solution. This need for virtue may itself be the source of their narrowness. To signal virtue one must have not only the desire to do good, but to have a solution. *[But see note below.] If there is no solution, there can be no good to be done. Without a solution, signaling virtue is an empty, facile, cheap mockery. “I can’t do anything to help you, but if I could I would sacrifice myself for you. But all I can do is tell you I’m a good person.” So a virtue-signaler — people who want approval for their virtue — need a program to get behind to give their signal meaning. 

And they are also given to authoritarian oppression to the extent that they believe that they possess the good and therefore are justified in imposing their good on all. No one is quite so oppressive as those who believe they are doing good for all. The Good will justify everything and anything. 

This is the utopian profile: the desire to be perceived as good (virtue signaling) imposes a need for a solution, the solution, their solution. And there seems to be a reason why the solution must be the only solution. To doubt the effectiveness of their solution would be to undermine their virtue signaling. And doubt might suggest that there is no solution, and that would end all virtue, all moral superiority, and all doing-good too. If they cannot admit any possible doubt, then their solution must be the only solution. If any solution can be doubted, then virtue-signaling ends and we live in an ambiguous world of hope and experiment where anybody’s solution might turn out to be better than ours, the only signal left, “I don’t know. Let’s try yours.” 

To put it differently, if the goal is to find a truly effective solution, then flaws in a program will be quickly admitted and the proposal will be rejected. But the Fools are not looking for an effective solution. They are looking for a program to provide them their sense of doing and being good and also appearing to be good. So if there is no solution, they will still have to take up some program for their goal of good identity. That implies rejecting all criticism of their program. So they are narrow and intransigent. And they will be all the more arrogant towards their critics, since they see themselves as doing good (and they cannot admit the flaws of their program both for garden variety confirmation bias but also because they desperately need to hold onto their virtue signal) and see their critics as indifferent to that good, that is to say, those who disagree are evil and are looked down upon with indignation as deplorable. *[But see footnote below.]

The conspiracy theorist harbors a different kind of superiority, not superior morality but superior wisdom. While the bulk of humanity accepts the mainstream view of political actions, the conspiracy theorist knows better. Those who disagree with the conspiracy theorist, or believe that there are solutions, are not evil, but frustratingly foolish and pathetically or angeringly naive. The conspiracy theorist does not insist on being good, but on being right. Their response is not moral indignation but anger or impatience. Both conspiracists and Fools share smugness towards their out-group.

Fool’s errand bias thrives on the political left (revolution here in the US is a fool’s errand, for example — it’s assessed by the need for it, not its likelihood of success) because the left wants to solve all the problems of the world, and childishly believe they can all be resolved. They are fervent, earnest but naive utopianists, and the Fool’s Errand Attachment is their holier-than-thou authoritarian prop. Fool’s errand doesn’t thrive on the right presumably because their interests are narrower — their own personal interests only, national interests rather than internationalist, in-group race rather than diversity-embracing — along with the rejection of all those many left utopian solutions because, you know, the left is their out-group “Them”, so they must be evil and all their programs.

The right is vile; the left is insufferable; everyone else is abused, deceived, manipulated and otherwise victimized by both left and right. 

Other motives for accepting a failed solution beside the Fool’s Errand Attachment, and the source of morality

It’s possible that the ordinary believer in the urgency of zero emissions simply doesn’t know that zero emissions will not solve the problem. That’s not surprising given the overwhelming media attention, including social media attention, given to climate disaster on the one hand, and the near total silence on the facts of atmospheric CO2 longevity on the other. Such attention exacerbates the need for a solution, playing to the Fool’s bias. It may be that media focus on disaster because news leans towards the bad, or it may be because it is convenient and morally comforting to point blame. Whatever the reason, media provides a picture that encourages the Fool’s Errand Attachment. 

Since KN95’s are effective, it’s not quite fair to say that masks are ineffective. It’s mask mandates that are a fool’s errand. Studies show that such mandates don’t work.

But not all maskers are Fools. Probably most cloth maskers simply don’t know that their masks are ineffective. I’m guessing most maskers believe cloth masks are effective because they don’t know the differences between masks and they want to mask because of the The Doctor Says So Bias, and especially because they see so many others sacrificing to mask for what seems to be the best of reasons — the Solidarity Heuristic Error, a cognitive consequence of pluralistic ignorance and The Illusion of Explanatory Depth. It’s a rational conclusion: masks must be effective otherwise why is everyone wearing them? And a kind of information market bubble — a rational cognitive symmetry breaking under stress in ignorance. It’s a powerful influence. Look at the tenacity of religious beliefs that are contrary to all evidence. Grice’s maxims have something essential to say about this gullibility too (a post on this is forthcoming). 

Other maskers, probably relatively few, may have succumbed to the Fool’s Errand and its intersection with availability bias, a sunk cost fallacy and biased anchoring, grasping for a solution where there is none. Still, the Fool’s Errand Attachment seems to hold a strong, broad place in cognition. As someone said to me a couple of years ago at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, “What are you saying — we should let people drop dead in the streets?” The answer, of course, is, if you can’t prevent them from dropping dead in the streets, then yes, you have to let them. When I tried to explain this to someone recently — that if someone is dying and you can’t do anything at all to prevent it, you have no moral obligation to try to prevent it — he looked at me incredulously as if I were Hitler. I doubt it would have helped to say ‘possibility must precede necessity’. Human beings do not generally think with logic. They think with familiar schemas and biases and peer group consensuses and above all approval-seeking from their chosen peer group. Logic is way down on the list of influences on cognition and judgment. 

Offering a non solution may make yourself look good or make you feel better about yourself, but it doesn’t help anyone else. Of course, making oneself look and feel good is a primary motivator of morality — we are after all a social species and create our identities, like it or not, aware of it or not, in response to those we surround ourselves with. When you hold the door for someone coming behind you, you know you’re not providing some important help, especially when that person quickens their pace to prevent compelling you to hold longer. In that case you’re actually inconveniencing that person, not helping. And most everyone for whom we hold doors can open doors by themselves anyway and do so constantly every day. We hold the door largely because we are afraid that if we shut the door in their face, they’d be justified in judging us as a douche. Our self-identity is a function of our perception of others’ perception of us. We want to appear good to them, more than to be good, although we also like to be good so as to feel superior or justified. Being good is mostly a self defense. As a social species, we need morality, and natural selection has given us a variety of emotions that conduce to social behaviors, approval-seeking one among them, and the one that probably most influences our public moral behavior. There are other motivations or incentives, including the warm feeling that you get from the smile in response to holding the door or any such polite gesture — also likely a natural selection emotion that contributes to social cohesion — and the simple convenience of conforming to social norms and habits. None of it is solving a problem for anyone but oneself. 

I revert to my very first thought about the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Global poverty has been so broadly alleviated that we are convinced for the first time in history that we can save everyone, so there’s no justification for giving up. We recognize our moral obligation given to us by the strength of our technology. We have the resources, surely our elected officials can save us all. Previously in human history, poverty was so pervasive, there was no possibility of saving everyone. “Finish your dinner. People are starving in India” was a common U.S. mom’s refrain in the 1960’s. It was a recognition that not everyone could be saved. Things have changed. The elimination of starvation is within sight. And in morality, possibility implies necessity, in other words, obligation; if we can save the world, then we are obliged to do so. But, unfortunately, we are deceived by our own wealth and technology. Eliminating a highly contagious virus is still beyond our capacity without unsustainable sacrifices.

Further questions about this cognitive bias

If the Fool’s Errand Attachment differs from other cognitive biases in not being universal across all persons but applies more to utopianists than to non utopianists and fatalists, examining it may give us further insight about cognitive and emotional differences between such different groups.

It’s a good question what the basis of the difference might be. We’re all familiar with studies that show correlations between liberalism and conservatives in their feelings about disgust, for example, but how and why someone becomes the one or the other isn’t so clear. Neither is it clear which is the cause. Is it the inclination towards conservatism or liberalism that causes a greater or lesser inclination to be disgusted, or vice versa — levels of disgust causing a political position — or are they both reflexes of some other underlying disposition. The popular assumption is that levels of disgust causes the politics, but there’s an older tradition that says otherwise, expressed in W.S.Gilbert’s wicked silly joke:

How Nature always does contrive

That every boy and every gal

That’s born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal

Or else a little Conservative!

The joke, of course, is not that it’s so absurd to think that we’d be born with a politics. The joke is that it’s so true.

And it not only shows how absurd we are as political partisans, but also how utterly absurd politics itself is. To put it bluntly, the choice of politics is mostly identity, not deliberation. The deliberation, as we all now know having learnt the lessons of behavioral psych, applies only to confirming the views we’ve already chosen, or attacking the ones we didn’t choose, even if these were selected already in our childhood identities. It makes one wonder whether politics might be the one area of human interests where algorithms would work better than human deliberation. 

The Fool’s Errand Attachment and confirmation bias

I heard yesterday Richard Wolff explaining to Lex Fridman why reformists usually win against revolutionaries: revolution is scary and violently dangerous. He made no mention at all that revolution is risky, that in most circumstances there is no guarantee that a revolution will result in an improved regime or progress of any kind. More likely, the winner will be the possessor of the superior force and weaponry and there’s no reason to believe that the most and best weapons and good regime should be aligned. The opposite is more likely. It is reasonable to expect the winner of a revolution to be the more violent and therefore be less needy of popular support, less caring of that support, and more oppressive, since the weapons that won the revolution are easily turned to maintaining authority. Nevertheless, many on the Left still insist on discussing revolution as if it were a solution even where appropriate conditions of success are not even remotely available. But there must be a revolution because if not, there’s no solution to the urgent injustices we live with and our comforting position of knowing what’s better would be lost. 

I notice that revolutionaries in the US are full of detailed complaints about our current society, but they never discuss how to manage a revolution or work on tactics and strategies, and almost all of them spend no thought on solutions or alternative means of structuring a society, and when they do, they do not examine the unintended consequences, look for the flaws or consider the possible failures. It’s all confirmation bias — accepting any cheap support for the view of what the world should be and blindness to any criticism. It’s not surprising that Marx’s Capital, lengthy as it is, provides no details on how a society should be structured. It’s all criticism of capital. Likewise, libertarians have endless criticisms of socialism, but don’t seem to understand the most obvious flaws in an unregulated market. It seems that everyone understands the enemy in detail, but accepts an absurdly simplistic view of what they themselves support. Want to understand capitalism? Don’t ask a libertarian supporter of capitalism. Their understanding is superficial and pollyanna-ish. Read Marx, if you want to understand capital. Want to understand communism or socialism, don’t bother with Marx. Read a libertarian. They’ve a got a grasp on every possible failing of it, and to understand those failings they need to understand the system deeply. 

* [A friend points out that many virtue signals include no solution, for example a rainbow flag or Black Lives Matter banner on one’s lawn. This shows an interesting intersection between virtue signaling and identity or partisanship signaling, and implies that Fool’s Errand Attachments may also be mere identity signaling. Consider two neighbors, both white and heteronormative, one displaying a MAGA banner and an American flag, the other a rainbow flag and a BLM banner. Both are signaling partisanship-identity, but only one is viewed as signaling virtue. The signals of the Left purport to reflect a kind of excess of thoughtfulness, on the one hand thinking beyond the in-group interests to think about the Other’s interests and embracing the out-group, with an added sophistication of hypocrisy, thinking more about how those thoughts will be evaluated by others than the value of the thoughts in themselves. The signals of the Right are routinely viewed as an absence of thought, patriotism often described as “blind”, accepting positions for the sake of in-group loyalty rather than deliberation, giving little thought to those positions and even less thought to the out-group interests. The difference between Left identity virtue signaling and Fool’s Errand Attachments may simply amount to signaling an acceptance of the out-group (whatever it may want for itself) versus having a solution to an impending problem for the in-group and out-group both. So embracing the Other is another way to signal virtue, one that does not require any specific solution, and offering a solution might even be viewed as odious paternalism to be avoided by the signaler. Nonetheless, paternalist or not, promoting gender non conformity in early schooling and defunding the police are solutions promoted by Left partisanship-identity signalers.]

Before reading “Art, craft, game-theoretic cognition and machine learning”

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022

A few essentials about the language game: language is cooperation; cooperation, far from being occasional among us, is the underlying condition of humanity as water is to a fish. Cooperation is so basic to our nature that we scarcely notice it. We share a code and share it among us constantly. We are the conversing species. The seven points below are an expansion of H. Paul Grice’s insights into conversational logic. 

1. It is obvious that language evolved and survived for the purpose of conversation — sharing information. As powerful as symbolism is for an individual alone — to have a symbol “yesterday” or “tomorrow” or “will” or “may” or “could” or “not” let alone “could not have” or “couldn’t not have” allows us to think about imaginaries beyond the real, possibilities, counterfactuals and even impossibilities, that non symbolic minds cannot think about — as powerful as that individual possession is, it is vastly more powerful for a species to use it for sharing information. Cultural transmission allows rapid technological accrual; instruction on self-protection allows a species to evolve out of instinctual behavior into flexible choice-behaviors including interacting with the world through understanding rather than narrow instinctual responses to it. 

2. If conversation is the purpose of language, then analysing the code (words, grammar, sounds) alone will only get you so far. Language can’t be fully understood except in the context of interaction, and that interaction turns out to be game-theoretic, that is, the value of the symbols (roughly, the words) do not depend only on their value in the code (the language). The most obvious and simple example is sarcasm. The conversational context will determine the final meaning or value of the symbol in a particular conversational situation or context. So even knowing the code and all its symbols does not suffice for understanding the meaning or value of those code-defined symbols.

3. Language is a form of cooperation. It is also the most distinctive behavior of the species. It is a constant behavior, whether in conversation with others or with oneself. The cooperation in language holds even when we argue vehemently: we do so sharing the same code, and our arguments are most vehement when we desperately want the other to agree with us, demonstrating a need for each other in argument as in any other sharing of information. This communication cooperation is accompanied with other forms of cooperation like politeness, deference and even morality. Self-identity — arranging our appearance so that others will understand our place in relation to them — is itself also a form of cooperation. Your choice of clothing, western or ethnic or even weird, are forms of cooperation, accepting the norms even when rebelling, since the rebellion is a rebellion against a norm with a meaning recognized and accepted as such by the rebel. IOW, your most common interactions and even your identity are all forms of cooperation, although we don’t view these as cooperation at all. We take them for granted since they are the underlying conditions of being and living in a culture. 

4. Anyone who thinks humans are a combination of occasional competitiveness balanced with occasional cooperativeness doesn’t understand what “social species” means. We can’t make it on our own. Together we build bridges, fly across the world, conduct wars, understand the origins of the universe. The role of the individual competitor is utterly trivial compared with the cooperativeness of cultural transmission and collective actions. This is the meaning of Newton’s “I stand on the shoulders of giants.” Even competition in a market is working to supply what people want — yet another pervasive aspect of cooperation, the necessary condition for competition is that cooperation of buying and selling under the mutual assumption of trust.

5. Language, the most powerful tool of our species, would never have evolved without the default assumption that what people tell us is true. If we all assumed that we’re being lied to, there’d be no point in conversing at all and language would never have evolved as a species trait. That it did evolve and survive and thrive, demonstrates that our default assumption must be and must have always been that what we are being told is true. That is why it is possible to deceive someone with a lie. If we didn’t assume truth, no one could ever deceive with a lie. And we can deceive with a lie. That’s the meaning of “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” For a society with speech, the default assumption must be that everyone is at least sincere and generally accurate. Doubt must be justified. The default must be belief, otherwise we would never have evolved language.

6. This logic of language evolution predicts that humans must be deeply and fundamentally gullible. And, of course, we are. The prediction is abundantly evidenced. Anthropologists and atheists wonder why humans believe in beings without any evidence, invisible beings, absurd beings, fanciful beings, deities, angels, Djinns, devils. The reasons should be obvious. We’re gullible — otherwise we would have no language. We’re social. We’re deeply devoted to, cooperative with, our group. The power of language — that it allows us the flexibility to believe beyond instinctual behaviors that protect us; the gullibility that facilitates cultural transmission; this constellation of cooperativeness that keeps us together and powerful — overcomes every weakness attending it, and that includes the fantasy land of religion. And like any fictional story, the fantasy itself will have some value to its listeners. Where it distinguishes the Us vs Them, all the more value when it isn’t practical (“We do it this ridiculous way just to show that we’re not you! So there.”)

7. We’re actually somewhat stupid as a species. Chimps can handle game-theoretic activities faster and better than we do, and it seems because we’re constantly second guessing each other. We’re invested in what others think. It’s part of the gullibility of conversation and our cooperative sociality. It’s smart in one way — to consider other minds that way, not just what I think and want– but stupid in another. It slows us down and complicates decisions. If you depend on what others do, and not what they think, it’s easier to predict others’ behavior. But if you second guess the other, and assume the other is second guessing you, it’s impossible to make any decision.

Now on to art, craft and artificial intelligence.