neural networks -- LLMs -- are the zombie revival of logical positivist Wittgensteinian behaviorism

The sciences over the last century have endured three revolutions. The 20th century began with an empiricist rejection of idealism in favor of strict behaviorism that excluded the inner world of the mind, meanings and thoughts from scientific investigation. Then extending Alan Turing's development of computational machines for cryptography, Chomsky's 1956 Syntactic Structures showed that language behavior couldn't be learned, produced or understood without an innate mental structure -- a computational structure -- burying the behaviorist program and returning the mind as a subject of scientific investigation. Forty years later, Rumelhart, McClelland and Hinton introduced back propagation into parallel processing, a model of behavioral learning, texts being the behaviors. This was the beginning of neural networks which have given us chatbots. So in the 2020's, we've come full circle: LLMs have learned language behaviorally, implying that human understanding too might be all mere behaviors. AI is the zombie revival of behaviorism. 

While the public worries about whether AI is intelligent, the implication of AI's behavioral learning for human intelligence and learning seems to have been ignored. The implication is that we too are zombie learners, negotiating information with no more access to the world of phenomena than an AI, the only difference being that AIs learn from read-only texts while we poke around with things-as-information and can edit the things with our hands and tools. It's all just information, with different sources and means. If you dismiss LLMs as having no immediate access to the world of things, look in the mirror. 

This is the story of science, understanding and explanation over the last century:

The long history of the sciences in the 20th century begins with an attempt among scientists and philosophers of science to define the difference between a scientific theory and non scientific theories like theologies, metaphysical theories and the grand narratives like Marxism and Freudianism that were spreading widely. At the same time, the discoveries of the sciences were reaching beyond human perception and human imagination with reliable predictions -- not merely speculative explanations -- about the invisible micro world of particles, forces and wavelengths. 

The frustration among the sciences over non scientific theories amounted to what today we'd call a Bayesian criticism: selecting evidence in support of a theory is easy -- among the vast phenomena lying around, some will no doubt support just about any theory, and if you ignore the base rate of all the evidence that doesn't support your theory, it looks like you've got a predictive theory. What's hard is predicting which phenomenon will not be found lying around according to your theory. That's risky -- if that phenomenon turns up, your theory is disproved. The non scientific theories relied on an after-the-fact explanation scheme, so it always seemed to be true and couldn't be falsified.

The scientists' initial attempt to distinguish their theories from non scientific theories was a kind of extreme empiricism called logical positivism: non scientific theories are full of speculative fictions and fantasies while science progresses strictly through testing and verifying concrete evidence. Wittgenstein was its most famous exponent. 

It was abandoned in its first form for a variety of reasons, though not for the reason that today is most cited, the clever zinger "it doesn't apply to itself". This zinger appeals especially to the post modern sensibility and stoners since self-referentiality seems so cool. Setting cool aside, logical positivism actually can apply to itself successfully as described in this post though one could also say that the zinger is a category error like "the word 'blue' is not blue, so it's an incoherent word" (aporia is also so cool). This category error fails too: apply "blue" to the word "blue" and you find the word is indeed not blue -- it's a sound shape in English denoting blue things, which is exactly what you want it to be, a symbol tied to a meaning, not the thing the meaning denotes. The stoner post modernists are all confused, but they like confusion. Enjoy the smoke. 

The logical positivist idea was that if a statement can't be verified by empirical observation, then it's meaningless in the sense that it doesn't tell us how the world is. It's not that religion is false, it's just that it doesn't predict anything particular about the phenomenal world. Such meaningless statements might be true, even necessarily true, but they don't impact the world of phenomena. The beauty of this verificationism criterion for theories is that it doesn't reject religion or metaphysics as false; on the contrary, it grants that they are true, necessarily true because there is no evidence that can disprove them, and because of that necessary trueness, they don't tell us about the world as it is or can be. True, but meaningless, in this particular positivist meaning of "meaning". 

The classic example of such a meaningless yet necessarily true theory is creationism. If you find a rock that can be dated beyond the creation date indicated in your scripture of choice, the theory can explain it as "God made it seem older to test your faith in the scripture." The theory, in other words, can never be wrong, regardless of the evidence. For that very reason it can't predict what we will find in nature, since whatever we find, the answer will always the same: the deity made it seem that way for his or her own purposes however inscrutable. The theory can be tested, but it always tests positive, necessarily, so the testing is pointless. 

The beauty of this distinction between the religious theory and the scientific one is that it's not based on truth. After all, scientific theories are pretty much never perfectly true. They are not a body of knowledge, much less of doctrine. They are an ever ongoing investigation into truth or into highly probable accuracy. But the scientific theory has to identify what evidence would prove it wrong. In other words, it has to predict something about the world, and predict other things that won't be found in the world, not just merely explain what's there or not there post hoc after the evidence is found. It's accuracy is conditional, the condition being the accuracy of its predictions. It can fail a test. 

The verificationism of logical positivism failed because it falls into the inductive fallacy. Positive evidence -- verification -- is easy to obtain for any theory, and, more important, no matter how much positive evidence, the theory is never proved. Regardless how many times you've verified your hypothesis, it may just be that you haven't yet found the counterexample that would prove it false. You've seen dozens and dozens of swans and all have been white, but you can't draw the conclusion that swans are all white because you haven't been to Australia where there are black swans. That's the inductive fallacy. 

Now, there is a odd asymmetry between positive and negative evidence. No matter how much positive evidence, a hypothesis can't be proven, yet it can be disproved by a single piece of negative evidence. So Karl Popper fixed this failing of verificationism with his criterion of falsificationism: for a hypothesis to be scientific, it must identify the evidence that would disprove it if that evidence turned up. In other words, what demarcates science from non science is not the evidence that verifies the theory, but that the hypotheses of science identify the evidence that could falsify the hypothesis. It's not about testing to verify, but testing to falsify: falsification must be at least possible. 

There are several more failings of logical positivism. It's notion of "meaningfulness" was circular. Let's see how. Why was Freudianism meaningless? Because the Oedipus Complex could explain any behavior x and also the opposite of x, so it couldn't predict any particular behavior. A patient rejects his father's advice because he hates his father in an Oedipal jealousy. Another patient honors his father's advice because he is ashamed of his jealous hatred for his father so he represses it with honoring him. The theory is necessarily true, but doesn't predict, and this lack of prediction about behavior is what the positivists call meaninglessness. But this definition of meaninglessness is just another way of saying it doesn't predict anything about the world. Surely the Oedipus theory has meaning in the ordinary English use of "meaning", even if it fails to predict. "God is good", has meaning -- it has some kind of sense to it even if its impact on the world is incoherent as in "God created the tsunami and killed all those innocent people for his own good reasons" and sacrifice the normal meaning of "good" in order to maintain its use in "God is good". You couldn't make that sacrifice if the expression didn't have a meaning in the ordinary sense of "meaning". 

A third failing was observed by Wittgenstein himself. Our internal feelings, our senses, can't be verified. To steelman this argument, he took the sensation of pain, surely the one most salient feeling that you can't not know when you have it. Yet how do you know that your pain is what others mean by pain? You can't compare your sensation to see if it's the same as theirs. All you can do is observe their pain behavior and compare your pain behavior. 

Counterintuitively, Wittgenstein's conclusion was not to reject verificationism but instead banished the mind as a subject of discussion. For him, verificationism showed that the mind was an incoherent notion cooked up by philosophers remote from the practical purpose of language. His is a clever and in some ways useful corrective way to look at philosophy and language. 

His work produced many important insights, but for philosophy, psychology and for the social sciences generally it was extremely restrictive. For the first half of the 20th century, empirical behaviorism -- the view that the mind is a blank slate -- prevailed. No more talk about the mind, about thoughts, about ideas, about meanings. Just behaviors: stimulus and response, the human being just a robot responding to environmental information. Btw, this view survived in the second half of the 20th century among those post modernists who view everything in human nature as a "social construct." Gender is just a behavioral norm. Inequality is just a social hierarchy of power relations. Nothing is innate, everything is relative, a construction of local culture. 

Behaviorist stimulus-response was a kind of no-theory theory much like Copenhagen interpretation of physics: we can't talk about the mystery; it works, that's all, that's enough. That was explicit in Wittgenstein both early "whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent" (talk about tautologies! and self-reflexive contradictions!!) and his later private language argument -- it's not a nothing, but there's nothing to be said about it. 

Behaviorism reigned until Chomsky's 1956 Syntactic Structures.

Here's one way to approach his shocking results. Looking at language behavior alone, it's obvious, even necessary -- given that we speak in sound sequences, not with elaborate paintings or diagrams -- we speak one word at a time. But a machine that simply accepts each word as it is produced won't be able to parse the sentence as a whole. The sentence has an internal structure that only certain kinds of machines can parse. In other words, we humans don't parse sentences each word one at a time as we hear them behaviorally. Language cannot be accounted for as a Markov chain -- one word at a time. I've explained this in detail here in the post complexity and AI (and in an upcoming post on the structural complexity of the simple little word "and").  

The zombie revival is just a question of productivity -- can a neural network produce beyond its training data. And it seems that LLMs have succeeded in being more productive than Chomsky's innateness research, which is hampered by a high bar of evidence: for the innateness of a language faculty, it's essential to distinguish linguistic productions that are instinctual versus linguistic productions that are learnt outside the language faculty. If general cognition can be productive, there's no way to tell from the behaviors whether they are produced by an innate faculty or learned and produced by general cognition. 

Linguistics provided a superpower within psychological research. Sentences are concrete, analyzable into discrete parts, and therefore manipulable unlike the elements of say, the visual field (it's not obvious what the discrete elements are) let alone emotions or even memories. And sentences are generated by the mind in the brain, so manipulating sentences provides a rich source of experimental evidence of the working and structure of the mind and brain. It's indirect, but highly detailed. The speed with which children grasp and handle language and the universality across all humans -- everyone is fluent in language, unlike math or logic or even reading -- implies a machine capacity. So the entire debate over behaviorism can be described as Wittgenstein-Skinnerian no-mechanism behaviorism versus Chomsky's mechanical contraption. None of it addresses meanings. Wittgenstein and Quine thought there were none. For W it was a behavioral game of pragmatic exchange -- things we do with language oriented towards things we want out of each other and the world. 

LLMs raise the question of what a meaning is, how we distinguish between the extensional -- what we see before us -- and the intensional (with an "s") of what is possible, not just real. This an LLM can do as well as a human. It's the meaning of meanings that are unique to us. That word"meaning" so pregnant. We invest it with so much...well, meaning! "The meaning of life" "what's the meaning of this movie?" "what's the meaning of this news event?" A meaning is a piece of a theory of life, and we all have these -- too many of them, which is probably why it's so hard to answer "what's the meaning of life?" 

Humans interact and manipulate the world, not just take in information. We're doing science from the start, with a natural selection program. We test out conjectures and predict with this drive to find patterns and explain, which is turn helps us predict harms to prepare for them or even prevent them.  

The reason LLMs appear to be mysterious is because they are behavioral models and not computational ones. A behavioral machine looks for phenomenal results -- behaviors, visible consequences -- not generative ideas, reasonings, or symbolic representations. In trying to understand their learning, there's no systematic rational guide -- they climb the accuracy mountain without any goal or any computational program beyond the incremental accuracy. 

LLMs are without theories, explanations, or understandings. They mimic them. They don't do science without a prompt. Humans do all these things all the time. We are little generative theory machines. 

the two selfs

"Those glasses are not for you" says my best friend at the eye-glass store. He knows me better I know me. 

I'm sure you've had this experience. How's it possible? How could someone outside me know me more than me the one who lives with me 24/7, who knows all my secrets? 

'Cause he knows the me that everyone else sees that I can't ever quite see, since I'm hopelessly biased about me and hopelessly wishful about what I'd like to be. But they all see me just as I am.

We're all familiar with this two-person-in-one incongruity, the you-to-yourself, and the you that others perceive; two very different people in one body and they actually don't know each other all that well. 

So which is the real you? 

Most people, certainly in the West, answer, the me-to-myself, my inner me, the me that has my beliefs, my emotions, my decisions. I alone truly know me. The me to everyone else is partial in both senses of the word "partial": they get just a glimpse and it's biased by their own me-to-themselves. 

I want to argue that the you-to-others is the more important one, the more integral and consistent one, and the more real, and that the you-to-yourself isn't independent of others, isn't integral, isn't consistently one person, and isn't real. It's a fiction and a lying fiction since it's made up of many selves pretending to be one (when it obviously isn't one despite its insistence on being a united self), whereas the you-to-others is not at all a fiction. And it's valuable to many more people than you-to-yourself, which actually isn't very useful and is mostly an obstruction (this relates to the post on unconscious mind is rational, the conscious mind is not). 

Some of this you already know well enough. 

In the first place, identity belongs to others, not to oneself. Every day you dress up in symbols that others interpret in the language of the local culture. You wear a skirt, you're stuck sending a gender identity message. You have the choice to wear it or some other symbol, but no control over its interpretation, which belongs to everyone around you. No doubt there are actions that are your own and not signaling, and maybe moms are more authentic because they've got commitments beyond themselves, but that's sort of my point in the post. It's that the relations to others rule, whether it's signals or commitments. 

In the post on activism, opera and the Gita, I argued that we in the West tend to ignore the importance of our social role and the collective interactive cooperation involved in identity creation. We all want to be our own "authentic" self. I put it in scare quotes because authenticity -- free will -- is probably a fantasy, and even if it were real, we probably have little access to it. There is another way, respecting others' view of us and live by and for it. 

Second place: the multiplicity of inconsistent and even contrary identities are obvious to us whenever we try to discipline ourselves (the post on the unconscious is rational, the conscious mind is not). Have to get out of bed? In a sec. Desperately want to lose weight? One last ice cream, just for tonight. 

There's more. Third: your identity is a fiction, a story that you wish were true, full of excuses, self-praise or self punishments, designed to satisfy some need that you can't even identify, and if you try to identify, you are almost surely to fall into a probability failure of selective memory (the spark bird) choosing the evidence you're looking for rather than observing the oblivious obvious of the base rate of your past. And who knows better whether you'll in fact, in the end, choose the ice cream? Your friends. 

So you don't know yourself, you're just a loop replaying yourself, even if there were self-recognition. You can't eliminate your bias -- it's constitutive of you (fool's errand attachment -- political bias -- propaganda persuades no one). That's a fourth problematic. 

And if that were'n't enough -- if Wittgenstein was right about this -- your inner self is the one thing you can't really know. Knowledge pertains to phenomena out there in the world, not the inner world reporting itself

The you-to-yourself, in other words, is a big waste of your time. Instead of dwelling on oneself, dwell out there (where is the mind and what's thought). For actions: play your social role. For thoughts: contemplate the universe and all its systems. Understanding is the gift of human evolution. Don't waste it on an inner loop.

That's my contribution to the gnomiad : )

on prediction markets and news media's market failure

 [this was originally posted as a comment on mathbabe.org. I've lightly edited it for this context.]

I just wish commentators, media and the public would stop describing prediction markets as accessing "the wisdom of the crowd" which, as Francis Galton originally observed, relies on regression to the mean of a random sampling. That regression fails if any member is aware and influenced by others' bets, or if some bets have greater weight than others. When these requirements are not carefully applied, the "wisdom" is not only lost, it can turn into its very opposite, a market bubble.

Two further consequences of this muddying of Galton's insight: prediction markets discredit the true wisdom of crowds that perhaps alone can offer a bottom-up solution to the freedom of speech dilemma; and regulating or banning prediction markets from media provides a false sense of security by ignoring the underlying market failure of top-down, "expertise" in news reporting.

Teaching the sociology of false beliefs over the past few years has taught me that the dilemma of free speech -- the Scylla of allowing lies or the Charybdis of censorship -- can only be solved from the bottom-up, not from media sources that are captured by their audience.  Unfortunately, accurate information is tied to that market so information, even when true, is tagged with socio-economic status. NYTimes readers are never persuaded by Fox News perspectives even when they are accurate, and Fox News watchers are never persuaded by NYTimes perspectives. On the contrary, NYTimes reader finds Fox information or spin as evidence of its depravity and the Fox watcher finds the Times' spin equally depraved and misguided. It's all a game of socio-economic confirmation/myside bias. The media's problem is not its relation to accuracy, it's a market failure of its audience capture -- the consumer drives the market, even when information itself is the commodity.

Untampered regression to the mean and crowd-sourcing are the only means out of that market failure. I mentioned this to Jon some years ago, but I think he assumed I was suggesting that there needed to be some means of controlling or regulating lies. Far from it. The sources of influence on the public can only be understood by looking at the motivated reasoning differences between the educated elite respected class -- the professional class members that reap the most from their society, economy and governance and are most invested in its society's success -- and the non elite class, the class disrespected by the elite and by the prestige values established in the mainstream of culture, the class seeking mutual approval by rejecting elite spin and embracing complete distrust of elite information sources. Conspiracy theories give them street cred as being smarter and more insightful than the elites who believe mainstream "propaganda". The audience of conspiracy theories often view voters as chumps. Regulating media, suing them in court, implies top-down censorship, but who fact-checks the fact checker? And when mainstream media is duly chastised, its audience will turn to social media.

I want to say, the free speech dilemma will never be solved through improving media. News media is a market failure. A solution can only begin with understanding the zero-sum game of class difference: the sociology of false beliefs, whether those beliefs be leftist nostrums or rightwing conspiracies, the self-interest of the virtue-signaling class at the economic top or the solidarity among the respect-signaling class at the cultural bottom. Above all, it begins not through concourse with one's ideological peers but socializing extensively with the cultural, "uneducated" bottom.

I wrote more in detail on my blog deperplex.blogspot.com in posts on "the obvious fact showing propaganda persuades no one", "the Gates-Musk paradox: conspiracy theories are not about what the theorists think they are", "the sociology of false beliefs", "The Fool's Errand Attachment: a cognitive bias", "corporations are followers, not drivers".

Just to be clear: it’s not Galton’s “wisdom of the crowd” (regression to the mean, a robust and established result of probability) that needs debunking, but the widespread public mistake that prediction markets tap into that “wisdom of the crowd”.

The important point, stated more briefly(?): in a class-distinct society, we all live in an information-confirmation bubble based on social location; the professional class in its bubble assumes improving media will improve civil discourse by reforming media in the professional class’ own image. Could be they have better information than the Right. However, in our zero-sum polarized society, members have already chosen what they want to believe based on their social location, not based on truth. (Just look at what the Fox watcher thinks of mainstream media.) So “improving” media will merely drive an audience to other sources, as we’ve already seen in social media with Joe Rogan, Carlson, Fuentes, Yarvin … too long to list, which says something important about the market for it.

A solution must come from the distributed bottom, not censorship from the top or from the professional class. I don’t know whether Galton’s original observation of the wisdom of the crowd plays a role in the solution, if there is one, but surely we should be looking for such bottom-up solutions. Observers smarter than me should be able to come up with possible solutions to try, if they would just focus on it.

OTOH, go to Cairo Egypt and you will find no political polarization. Everyone knows their government is a military dictatorship that serves the military and the military owns everything. The consequence: ordinary Egyptians take care of each other, as if they were one big family. When times are good, they tolerate Sisi. When inflation rises, everyone agrees Sisi is an idiot. I see something of this among Russians. They’re not happy, but they’re not hating each other the way the secular middle-class Istanbula hate the religious conservatives. The pretense of participatory democracy is not an unalloyed good. And if it’s a mere pretense, then it’s surely a net bad.

Full disclosure of hypocrisy: I’m a monthly donor to The Intercept because if we lose investigative journalism, then nothing remains but propaganda and clickbait. But I support investigative journalism only on the left-liberal side. I recognize my bias but have to accept it: it’s me.

constitutional autocracy: the alternative to democracy, polarization, factionalism, bias and dysfunction

If liberal democracy has failed in the West, it would be no surprise if it failed largely because political participation drives factionalism -- as James Madison notably observed right at the start of the US project. But in the debate over whether liberalism has failed and should therefore be replaced with autocracy -- which seems to me a false dichotomy straw man intended to bias the solution in favor of techlords and emperors -- I haven't seen any advocacy for constitutional autocracy, the autocrat constrained by the rule of law. I mean, we don't have a direct democracy, we have a constitutional democracy with a bill of rights that protects the individual from mob rule. Why shouldn't the autocracy promoters devote their attention to a system of likewise constrained autocracy? 

When I mentioned something of the sort to a friend, he objected that he'd rather not be ruled by a Trump or Musk. He's a smart guy, but this objection seems contradictory to me. We live in a so-called liberal democracy and here we are ruled by Trump and Musk...and soon to be ruled by a bunch of techlords who show no concern for humans at all except maybe as consumers. 

And how did we come to ruled by Trump? Because of the polarization facilitated by liberal democracy, a zero-sum two party system that divides voters by identity, not policy. Go to Cairo, Egypt, and you will find no political polarization. Everyone knows their government is a military dictatorship that serves the military alone and the military owns everything. The ordinary Egyptian well knows their government doesn't care much about them. The consequence of this broadly understood knowledge: ordinary Egyptians take care of each other, as if they were one big family. When times are good, they tolerate Sisi and look for the silver lining; we're stable, construction is up. When inflation rises, everyone agrees Sisi is an idiot, resents the stability and criticizes the construction. I see something of this among Russians. They're not happy, but they're not hating each other the way the secular middle-class Istanbula hate the religious conservatives. The pretense of participatory democracy is not an unalloyed good. And if it's a mere pretense, then it's surely a net bad. 

One wonders whether a constitutional autocracy -- one that grants freedom of speech, for example, and a right to health care, a job, a home -- would get us a lot closer to solidarity, well-being, and greater accuracy in our debates than our fractious and dysfunctional democracy.  

I pointed out to my skeptical friend that Singapore and China seem more functional and less abusive than US democracy. China hasn't conducted a war since 1979 while the US Democratic Party regime, which he reservedly supports, rejected the 2023 Chinese peace plan for Ukraine even though its first principle, "respect sovereign borders", was a clear slap in the face of Putin and seemed to be a clear friendly gesture towards the EU, a big market for China. The US remains as much a military "empire" as Russia, while China's regime seems to be "make money, not war". 

He feels that if only our media were improved, the quality or our democracy would rise.

But in a class-distinct society, we all live in an information-confirmation bubble based on social location; the professional class in its bubble assumes improving media will benefit civil discourse by reforming media in the professional class' own image. Now, it could be the professional class and its economists and political scientists have better information than the Right. However, in our zero-sum polarized society, members have already chosen what they want to believe based on their social location, not based on truth. (Just look at what the Fox watcher thinks of mainstream media, and the NYT's reader thinks of Fox.) So "improving" media information will merely drive an audience to other sources, as we've already seen in social media with Joe Rogan, Carlson, Fuentes, Yarvin ... too long to list, which says something important about the market for it.

Teaching the sociology of false beliefs over the past few years has taught me that the dilemma of free speech — the Scylla of allowing lies or the Charybdis of censorship — can only be solved from the bottom-up, not from media sources that are captured by their audience. Unfortunately, accurate information is tied to that market so information, even when true, is tagged with socio-economic status. NYTimes readers are never persuaded by Fox News perspectives even when they are accurate, and Fox News watchers are never persuaded by NYTimes perspectives. On the contrary, NYTimes reader finds Fox information or spin as evidence of its depravity and the Fox watcher finds the Times’ spin equally depraved and misguided. It’s all a game of socio-economic confirmation myside bias. The media’s problem is not its relation to accuracy, it’s a market failure of its audience capture — the consumer drives the market, even when information itself is the commodity.

Untampered regression to the mean and crowd-sourcing are the only means out of that market failure of a polarized zero-sum politics. Here's what I see: The media sources of influence on the public can only be understood by looking at the motivated reasoning differences between the chosen media audiences, on the one hand the educated elite respected class — the professional class members that reap the most from their society, economy and governance and are most invested in its society’s success — and on the other, the non elite class, the class disrespected by the elite and disparaged by the prestige values established in the mainstream of culture. That non elite class seeks peer approval by rejecting elite spin and embracing complete distrust of elite information sources. Conspiracy theories give them street cred as being smarter and more insightful than the elites who believe mainstream “propaganda”. The audience of conspiracy theories often view voters as chumps. 

Regulating media implies top-down censorship, but who fact-checks the fact checker? And when mainstream media is duly chastised, its audience will turn to social media.

I want to say, the free speech dilemma will never be solved through improving media. News media is a market failure. A solution can only begin with understanding the zero-sum game of class difference: the sociology of false beliefs, whether those beliefs be leftist nostrums or rightwing conspiracies, the self-interest of the virtue-signaling class at the economic top or the solidarity among the respect-signaling class at the cultural bottom. I tell my friend that above all, understanding and solving the dysfunction begins not through concourse with one’s ideological peers at the top but socializing extensively with the cultural, non professional, alternatively educated bottom.

A solution to both solidarity and good information must come from the distributed bottom, not censorship from the top or from the professional class. I don't know whether Galton's original observation of the wisdom of the crowd plays a role in the solution, if there is a solution, but surely we should be looking for such bottom-up solutions. Observers smarter than me should be able to come up with possible solutions to try, if they would just focus on it. One possible solution is scrapping the zero-sum politics and constructing a constitutional autocracy that protects the entire people without engaging them in the politics. 

Full disclosure of hypocrisy: I'm a monthly donor to The Intercept because if we lose investigative journalism, then nothing remains but propaganda and clickbait. I read Right-wing magazines more than Left-wing ones, mostly because the Left is so familiar and predictable that I don't need to read them, while I feel it's important for me to keep up with what's bothering the Right so I can understand it better. But I support investigative journalism only on the Left-liberal side -- I just couldn't possibly bring myself to give money to the Right. I recognize that's my bias but have to accept my bias: it's me.

intellectual weakness of the Left: its moral high ground

The left is expert at complaining about "the system" or "capitalism" or current models of national relations. Lots of complaints, mostly well taken. But their solutions seem lame to me. This is likely an effect of confirmation bias which leads to incisive criticisms of the opposition, and the embracing of lame evidence for what one promotes. The Right is also expert at complaining, but it's mostly complaining about the Left and its solutions. This is also an effect of confirmation bias ("myside bias" following Stanovich, which includes criticism of the opposition as well as confirmation of what one wants to believe) along with a bias against social progress. Their libertarian or conservative solutions are, conveniently, "all purported solutions are bad!" In other words, do nothing, what we have is the best of all possible worlds. You know, if you change white supremacy, you might tip the boat! Stability is best for us all! 

Complain, complain, complain. I find myself in agreement with all these complaints of both sides, but they are tiresome, especially because I find myself mostly in disagreement with their solutions, and I'd prefer to hear more talk about solutions, since many, if not most, of the complaints would disappear if any of them actually worked. 

There's another difference between Left and Right. The Left is convinced it has the moral high ground. That assumption, even if it is true, is a kind of intellectual crutch. It dulls the mind. Libertarians, who are often aggressively sharp, have no such crutch. Their morality runs against the grain of the morality of the culture. The Golden Rule -- treat others as you'd want them to treat you -- is the essence of our morality. It's where equality comes from, our sense of fairness, justice, politeness, orderliness. The libertarian has to argue against all those with a theory that being selfishness leads to those goods in the long run and even to greater goods. That requires some sharp thinking and knowledge too. I think it makes libertarians smarter. Not nicer. Smarter. 

Here's a little dialogue I've heard all too many times:

Left-liberal: The Poor are suffering! We must help them!

Right-libertarian: The intervention you recommend will make everything worse for everyone including The Poor. [There follows a detailed economic explanation of just how bad things will go with the Left solution.] 

Left-liberal: But they are suffering. We must help them. 

Right-libertarian: Didn't you understand what I just explained to you?

Left-liberal: Yes, I understand: you don't care about the suffering of The Poor. 

Right-libertarian: M@#$!@#!@$#!@$!!r!

Debates between Left and Right frequently have this form: the Left, champion of the weak, call for an intervention to help them. The Right complains that, given the nature of the market or of society or of human psychology, the intervention will downstream cause more harm than good and in particular will harm those whom the the intervention is intended to help; the cure is worse than the disease. 

In response, the Left reasserts the need for the intervention to remedy the suffering of the moment, viewing the complaints from the Right as callous indifference to the suffering before them. 

The Right in turn view this response as willful, biased misinterpretation. The Right has identified a flaw in the Left program, but the Left misunderstands the criticism as Right-wing immoral indifference. That moral judgment against the Right allows the Left to ignore the criticism rather than figure out a cogent rebuttal. Not seeing any rebuttal, the Right not only concludes their criticism is just, but that there must not be any possible rebuttal, since even their sworn enemies, the Left, can't come up with one. They think they've won the debate, and they are justified to think so, since the Left has failed to respond intelligently. The Left has simply stood its ground and attacked the right ad hominem.  

[Daniel Stone in his book Undue Hate describes this kind of misunderstanding as naive realism and false consensus on vertical goods, though he is careful and wise not to play into this particular situation. Here the Left assumes that everyone agrees that if we allow the unfortunate to suffer, we are not good people. The Right assumes that everyone will agree that suffering of the unfortunate can only be achieved through effective means. Being good and being effective are "vertical" goods in that everyone agrees that more of each is better. But it is naive to assume that everyone holds these two vertical goods equally. The point of this post is to suggest that the Left is victim of its own righteousness priority: once it identifies its goodness, it stops thinking. It's a kind of confirmation bias: as soon as we find the evidence we're looking for or a prima facie solution to a problem, we stop thinking. We got what we want, why think more? I call it TST "thinking stops there", following Kahneman and Tversky's "what you see is all there is" WYSIATI. On the Right side, effectiveness requires more thought and analysis than merely identifying the sentiment of being good. The interactive result is that the Left concludes that the Right is immoral and the Right concludes that the Left is stupid.] 

an example

When I was involved as a Leftist working on the housing crisis in New York, I constantly had to face the Right-wing objection to rent regulations. Every trained economist knows it all to well. Rent regulations are the economist's go-to example of a market distortion that hurts those whom it intends to help. It's Economics 101. Rent regulations drive developers away from the housing market because they can't recoup their investment if the rents are artificially kept low. That leaves a housing crunch -- no new houses means too few houses means overcrowding and eventually homelessness for the most vulnerable, not to mention the increased demand for housing that raises rents and housing prices. 

Except the economists are all wrong when you actually look at NYC's regulations. Rent regulations in New York were imposed only on existing housing, not on new development. As I pointed out in a comment box in the NYTimes around 2010 or so, rent regulations in New York, far from driving developers away, were one of the few incentives for developers to build new housing, since new housing was the only housing that was unregulated, and the only solution to a housing crunch is developing more housing. Rent regulations are not a problem, they're part of the long-term as well as short-term solution. 

This comment found some traction despite being economic heresy. Someone I'd never met before cited this exact comment of mine to me in a random conversation on the street about rents in the city. And a few months later an attorney wrote an op-ed in the Times explaining this regulation incentive. It seemed that at last the curse of Economics 101 was being dispelled. 

But no such luck. At the next State Assembly election cycle, a progressive candidate made rent regulation his platform as always on the grounds that ending rent regulation would evict many residents. No mention that rent regulations were the great incentive for developers to build new housing that might bring more housing to the market. 

[Now, some study found that rent regulations also incentivize landlords to convert rentals to condo/coops, rather than investing in development. But a law preventing such conversions solves the problem, and political campaign would be the ideal moment to promote and debate such a measure. There's also the empty-nester inefficiency argument -- that empty nesters remain in their now too-large apartment because it's cheaper than market-rate apartments, and this is inefficient. I find this argument amusing, since it is never used to complain about the rich who occupy more space than they need, including multiple units, which does in fact reduce supply and raise rents. The complaint that landlords of rent regulated units are less willing to repair or upgrade the property, but the habitability laws require the basics of repair. The only serious downside to rent regulations is the unfairness of first-come, first served. That's no argument against rent regulations: it's true that impoverishing everyone equally is fair, but it's not good. We should also build more public housing for everyone, not eliminate rent regulations.]

I don't know whether this candidate understood the incentive or felt it was too complex for the public or was afraid to appear to be developer-friendly. Whatever the reason, he chose the Left's low hanging fruit of "I'm on the side of the weak and against the rich developer. Vote for me!" And the Right are fully justified in saying, no, your solutions will create a worse housing crunch in which everyone will suffer and in the end, as usual, the most vulnerable will suffer the most. Because the Left didn't bother to present the counterargument.

Of course the Right is mistaken. But the Left candidate fails to educate the Right as to why the Right is mistaken. This is the weakness of the Left. It's solutions are as short-sighted as the market itself, but whereas the market wants returns fast now, the Left wants to do good now. Neither one looks ahead, neither one thinks complexly. 

The accusation of immorality is not drawn out of the air. The concerns of the Left are motivated by moral virtue, or, more accurately, the desire to appear to be moral. The Left, remember, is populated and led by coastal elites, educated and over-educated, well-served by their polity, privileged and prestigious. As I've written at length in "the sociology of false beliefs" and "the fool's errand attachment; a cognitive bias", this professional class which benefits so much from its society, has an investment in its social structure and its government as well as conscience-driven desire to appear to others, to each other and to themselves to be working towards the betterment of society as a whole. It's at once conscience-cleansing and a pragmatic support for a society that they would lose the most from should it fall as a result of chaos at its foundational bottom. 

The Left, the professional class, in other words, is the virtue-signaling class. The virtue it signals is taken from the standards of the culture: helping others selflessly. It's a kind of appeal to approval, like the fallacy of appeal to authority, but here the authority is the Judeo-Christian values inscribed in its scriptures all the way from Genesis, where the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil distinguishes humanity from the innocent animals inhabiting the garden, to the prescriptions of the son of the deity loving one's neighbor as oneself. These virtues are the low-hanging fruit that require no public justification, no complex technical contortions of reason. "We're helping the weak. What could be wrong with that?!?" You don't need to be very bright, or bright at all, to understand the sentiment of being kind to the weak. 

For the conservative, and especially the libertarian Right, no such fruit hang low. It took seventeen centuries past the new dispensation of the eleventh commandment for a scientist to come up with arguably the first science of emergence, economics, explaining that the selfishness of the baker plus the selfishness of the butcher added together made a win-win for them both. To be a libertarian is to militate against the most sacred cultural religious value, the notion of personal goodness: selflessness. The defense of selfishness can't rely on religion or even on philosophical morality. It's defence comes to us from a science, a cold empirical analysis where facts are hard and incontrovertible, where feelings play no role. The defense of selfishness requires intelligence, insight, and a capacity for complex thinking beyond the simple sentiments of "being nice". It's the reason that libertarians so often seem so much smarter and more incisive than Left liberals. It's the reason for the lameness of that frequent debate. 

liberalism and its contradictions, the altright and its inspirations

Liberalism has become increasingly preachy (PC, sacrifice for equity, treat immigrants-trans people-women fairly). I agree with all its precepts and intentions, but preachiness is essentially anti-liberal -- don't do this, we must do that! The essence of liberalism is individual freedom. It's at bottom, me me me -- the consumer rules, selfishness creates an efficient market etc., etc. 

Take one look at the AltRight -- say Nick Fuentes. He's inspirational: screw equality, me me me, us us us, screw them. The left preaches: Hitler bad. You must hate Hitler. Fuentes: I like Hitler! The Altright has become the ur-child of liberalism, the extreme impetuousness of consumerism and individualism. It's an ideology of YES YES YES to ME and US! No wonder Americans like him. 

two anthropological theories of gender

With all the debate over what gender is or means, and how it relates to the sexes, it might be useful to look at two very different anthropological hypotheses of what gender is all about, one materialist, Marxist and diachronic -- that is, explaining how gender came to be, its historical origin, the material, economic pressures that created it -- and the other synchronic and symbolic, how it works in culture once it has come to be, the meaning of the system as it exists at a given moment. 

The material hypothesis goes like this: every culture has an incest taboo which plays out in either requiring that the daughters marry out of the family, or the sons must marry out of the family. Staying with the family means inheriting its property, and marrying out of the family means losing the family property. In western culture, the tradition of the bride taking on her husband's surname and the tradition of leaving the kingdom to the sons are familiar evidence that Westerners are patrilineal -- the daughters marry out, the sons stay with the family and its property. And there are cultures that are matrilineal where the daughters are the property owners, not the sons, who marry out. There are fewer of these than of the patrilineal cultures though this probably was not always so, and I've got a post here with an explanation for the depletion of matrilineal cultures. 

These material facts explain the origin of gender: gender is a distribution of property by sex given the incest taboo and its marrying-out consequence. Property is intrinsically associated with power, since property can supply needs and independence, while being propertyless leaves one in need and dependent. So gender is a hierarchical distribution of power and property according to sex. This original causal explanation is what feminists and egalitarians and liberals point to as an antiquated legacy no longer necessary.

There are lots of questions left unanswered in this hypothesis, but what's interesting to the debate is that it's a sex-based explanation. If you are born male in a patrilineal culture, you inherit family property, if not, you don't. It doesn't matter how you feel about your sex, it's the physical fact of your sex that matters to this distribution of property. It is a sex-essentialist view. In matrilineal cultures, the sons get the short end of the stick; in patrilineal ones the reverse. It's a theory that appeals to materialists including Marxists, since it describes a kind of structural inequality and oppression. 

The synchronic view is quite different. Every culture expresses or indicates the sexes with distinct behaviors, rituals, dress, vocations, norms or expectations. In Western culture, a skirt or dress symbolizes -- and is an expression of -- femininity, denoting the female sex. It's all symbolism. Gender is a kind of expressive symbolic interpretation of the sexes, the beliefs about the sexes in the culture. 

Those gender beliefs are not uniform across cultures, since, for one thing, the distribution of property and the attitudes, emotions, norms and expectations surrounding property ownership are very different from culture to culture. In some cultures moms are imperious and demanding and fathers nurturing and forgiving, in others just the opposite. 

Gender, on this synchronic view, is a language. Like language, each culture has its own peculiar vocabulary and sometimes they are not fully intertranslatable. The distribution of meanings can differ. 

An important characteristic of symbols, especially linguistic symbols, is that they are arbitrary. This brings us to the heart of the gender-as-language theory. The ancient Roman men wore tunics -- a short dress -- and their soldiers wore skirts. This is not, obviously, because they were all feminized. They associated the skirt with masculinity and superior civilization. The uncouth Germanic barbarians wore pants to keep their legs warm, those sissies. Just as the word "dog" doesn't sound like a dog, smell like a dog or look like a dog any more than Russian "sobaka" or Egyptian Arabic "kalb" does, a skirt or dress has no intrinsic relation to femininity or masculinity. Roman skirt-wearing is just a different gender language or vocabulary. The sexes are the same from Rome to Moscow to Cairo, but the genders? Masculinity can be signaled by skirts, pants or galabiat depending on cultural location. 

What's interesting to the debate is that if gender is a kind of symbolic language, then it allows for expression and identity creation. You don't have to be female to appear feminine if you use the signals of femininity. 

This linguistic view of gender -- and of the cultural symbols generally -- gives the members of the society more agency than the materialist view which demands that property be inherited strictly according to the fact of sex, whether one wants to be that sex or not. On the symbolic view, I can dress up against my sex and people will interpret me by those symbols. 

Gender as a language means that gender is an interaction between members of the society. It's all about identity-creation.  It's the difference between dressing up as a billionaire and being one. Which matters more, playing the role or having the bank account? Well, it depends. One can go a long way pretending and succeeding in a role, as long as your checks don't bounce. Now, people might complain that financial fraud can hurt others, but in the case of transgenderism, it's only the trans person who feels harm and that harm is from the unaccepting. 

(Now is when you complain that trans women athletes harm cis women athletes. But the trans athletes have to play on some team, so this is a zero-sum dilemma -- someone's gonna hurt. Who decides? I don't pretend to have a perfect solution to this, but it seems to me that the gender-as-a-language view is compatible with trans people playing with cis athletes on which ever team accepts them. I mean, I see mixed male and female basketball pickups at the local park frequently. Or maybe it's just a matter of time until there are enough trans players to have their own team. Or it may remain zero-sum, but not necessarily a big deal.) 

It's not all free agency, however. There's a narrow restriction in the language of gender, as in any communicative language: you're limited to the accepted symbols of the language community. English speakers of any gender can express whatever they want as long as they say it using English words with English meanings. If I use "I" to refer to you, and "you" to refer to me, I'll lose you pretty fast. Expressiveness depends on the ability of the audience to interpret the expressions with reasonable accuracy. 

Gender is indeed performative -- performed for an audience that understands the language. If I wear a dress to class, I'm signaling that I want to be taken for a woman or a trans woman or a gender-fluid human. But I shouldn't expect to be viewed as cis gender. In order to express my gender preferences, I have to use the signals others will recognize. I can even mix signals to show that I'm non binary or a free spirit. But go to South Sulawesi and all those signals reduce to nothing since their men be wearing skirts and your freedom signals look conformist. 

So if gender is a language, we can use it to express whatever gender we prefer regardless of sex, but not regardless of the gender symbolisms that have meaning among us. When Alice questions whether he can use words to mean anything he wants, Humpty-Dumpty's reply "The question is, which is to be master — that's all" is meant to be read as an ironic logical joke. We are manifestly not the masters of the meanings of our words if we are to express ourselves so as to be understood. Our freedom and expressive capacity to identify ourselves depends on the communicative tool we're given. To identify as trans, as to identify as cis, we're stuck with the symbolism of our community. Alone in the forest, there is no identity. There is no private language; no you without us. It's a case of interactive cognition mentioned in this blog's subtitle.

Two theories, one materialist and sex-essentialist, no free choice about it, the other symbolic, arbitrary and agentic. So far we've seen unfairness in both views: property distribution according to sex is unfair, trans athletes have no team and no restroom. Western culture is successfully resolving the property problem. Maybe it can solve the team player one too. Doesn't seem like a big one to overcome. We're smart enough to solve this one -- if we want to. All that's needed then is the good will.