The opposite of FITs

Ordinarily, I like to focus on good writing and ignore the bad. But this WaPo op-ed is such a classic illustration of how to reinforce closed minds on your own side that I am willing to violate my own rule. Adam Laats writes,

At moments when American culture has taken some progressive turn, conservatives have consistently blamed a single culprit for indoctrinating vulnerable youth with radical ideas: public schools. Local school board meetings offer an attractively close-to-hand target — a place to vent frustrations and feel some measure of control, instead of admitting defeat.

The theme is that conservatives are trying to “turn back the clock.” This is classic asymmetric insight–claiming to understand the other side’s motives better than they do, and not taking their concerns at face value. At no point in his piece does Laats try to articulate what conservatives are saying about critical race theory in schools, much less steel-man their argument.

I should note that it would take only a few minutes to find an equally bad column written by a conservative. In fact, here is Victor Davis Hanson on why he left National Review. Hanson is another master of asymmetric insight. In this case, he claims that the true motives of those on the right who oppose Donald Trump are:

that’s kind of a virtue signal to the left. .. a lot of them felt it was their duty as Republican establishmentarians to tell the world they didn’t approve of Donald Trump’s tweets or his crudity.

I think that a lot of never-Trumpers genuinely believe that U.S. foreign interventions are necessary and that cutting entitlement spending is necessary. And they dislike Mr. Trump’s style because they think it damages the conservative cause.

That is the way to charitable to never-Trumpers, and those are the positions you should argue against. Just to be clear, I was not a never-Trumper, although his post-election complaints are making me one.

VDH is doing the opposite of being charitable. And he does it with the left even more. So you can like him for being on your team, but I don’t think he earns many FIT points.

I wrote The Three Languages of Politics to try to get people to reject this sort of writing and to demand better. To no avail.

De-institutionalization just shuffles the institutions

Christopher F. Rufo writes,

The question now is not, “What happened to the asylums?” but “What replaced them?” Following the mass closure of state hospitals and the establishment of a legal regime that dramatically restricted involuntary commitments, we have created an “invisible asylum” composed of three primary institutions: the street, the jail, and the emergency room.

Here is an issue that is better framed by conservatives than by progressives or libertarians, no?

Misfits for Kling

The Three Languages of Politics is the subject of a podcast by Darnell Samuels and Joel Nicoloff, which I found heartwarming and head-sobering. It was heartwarming in that they clearly understood and bought into the book. It was head-sobering to consider how unconventional they are. If all I tell you is that they are young and Canadian, you are unlikely to guess their intellectual framework(s).

I hope you will listen and enjoy.

Some are teachable

Bo Winegard writes,

From listening to podcasts such as Econtalk with Russ Roberts, I began to understand the dangers of top-down solutions and intellectual arrogance, and about the importance of diffuse social knowledge, knowledge that is contained in social institutions but that we can’t necessarily articulate. The idea that if we just worked hard and elected the right people, we could solve long intractable problems became silly. The left appears to believe that almost every bad outcome is the result of a moral failure of society. . . .

But this ignores stubborn facts about human nature, individual differences, and incentive systems.

Thanks to a reader for the pointer.

Isolation, attention, and totalitarianism

UCSD scientists wrote,

Joint attention episodes set the stage for infant learning. In many cultures and contexts, infants and children learn to attend to whatever adults attend to. This helps children learn their group’s language, social routines, and practical skills.

We learn by paying attention to what others attend to. I speculate that this is why in-class learning works better than watching a lecture on line. When I am in a classroom, others are paying attention to the speaker. This makes my attention to the speaker instinctive. I don’t have to use so much willpower to pay attention. But when it’s just me sitting in front of a computer, I have to will myself to pay attention. It uses up more effort and takes more out of me.

In the twentieth century, watching television or listening to the radio were often social activities. TV and radio could command our attention the way the speaker in a classroom would, through people paying attention to what others were attending to.

But we use 21st-century media in isolation. That means that the media need other means to command our attention. They cannot rely on our use of social cues. Instead, they have to rely on dopamine hits. Porn. Games. And demonization.

We get a dopamine hit by seeing the demonization of people with whom we disagree. So demonization becomes a winning Darwinian strategy in the age of contemporary media.

The whole point of writing The Three Languages of Politics was to describe demonization rhetoric under the assumption that people would not want to demonize. I thought that if you recognize the rhetoric, you would back away from it.

Instead, the religion that persecutes heretics justifies demonization. To criticize demonization is to be a heretic. In a world where people consume media in isolation, an ideology that justifies demonization has an advantage.

My thought is that the fact that we consume contemporary media in isolation has made made people more receptive to demonization, with its totalitarian characteristics. This is probably accentuated by the virus-induced isolation, which increases our use of contemporary media and reduces our social interactions.

More from John Tooby on coalitions

John Tooby wrote,

ancestrally, if you had no coalition you were nakedly at the mercy of everyone else, so the instinct to belong to a coalition has urgency, preexisting and superseding any policy-driven basis for membership. This is why group beliefs are free to be so weird. Since coalitional programs evolved to promote the self-interest of the coalition’s membership (in dominance, status, legitimacy, resources, moral force, etc.), even coalitions whose organizing ideology originates (ostensibly) to promote human welfare often slide into the most extreme forms of oppression, in complete contradiction to the putative values of the group.

.. . .Forming coalitions around scientific or factual questions is disastrous, because it pits our urge for scientific truth-seeking against the nearly insuperable human appetite to be a good coalition member. Once scientific propositions are moralized, the scientific process is wounded, often fatally. No one is behaving either ethically or scientifically who does not make the best case possible for rival theories with which one disagrees.

My thoughts:

Suppose that we can be either politically combative or scientifically neutral. If we are political, our tactics are intended to discredit the other team. If we were scientifically neutral, we would try to give as much credit as possible to all sides.

One might hope that, given a set of issues, over time we would expand the subset that we approach from a scientifically neutral point of view. Instead, we seem to be expanding the subset about which we are politically combative (scientists against science). This seems particularly true in academia, and I agree with Tooby that it is “disastrous.”

Tooby and Leda Cosmides wrote,

Hate is (1) generated by cues that the existence and presence of individuals or groups stably imposes costs substantially greater than the benefits they generate, and (2) is upregulated or downregulated by cues of relative power (formidability), and by cues signaling the degree to which one’s social network is aligned in this valuation. (It is also worth investigating whether, as seems likely, there is a special emotion mode “rage” designed for combat, which orchestrates combat adaptations along with murderous motivational processes.)

Continue reading

Notes for a TLP talk

1. Terms that describe the current state

–Negative polarization. Political energy comes from hatred of the other side. May not even like the leaders on your side.

–Zero cognitive empathy. Unable to imagine that the other side is reasonable. Makes you inclined to want to make the other side disappear.

–Asymmetric insight. The belief that the other side does not realize what its motives are, but you do.

2. The desired state

–Widespread cognitive empathy

–Goal in political arguments is to understand the other side, not to humiliate it.

3. Three-axes model

progressive: oppressor-oppressed

conservative: civilization-barbarism

libertarian: liberty-coercion

4. example: “de-fund the police”

5. axes of demonization?

6. the Trump era–elites vs. populists

7. example: defer to health authorities on the virus?

TLP and police

Consider the phrase “De-fund the police” from a three-axes perspective.

From the oppressor-oppressed perspective, it sounds like a call to take resources away from oppressors and give them to the oppressed.

From a civilization-barbarism perspective, it sounds like a call to undermine civilization and pave the way for barbarism.

From a liberty-coercion perspective, it sounds like a misdirected effort. Excess coercion comes from unnecessary laws and unaccountable enforcement. For libertarians, reform would start with having fewer laws. Those who enforce the laws should be accountable for acting within the law themselves.

As is often the case these days, the libertarian view sounds the most sensible to me, followed by the conservative view. As to the progressive view, I understand the emotion but not the logic.