Category Archives: Three-Axes Model

Political Language Appropriation

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A web site called Campus Reform reports,

A conservative student at Orange Coast College has filed a civil rights violation report after a knife was found lying near hateful graffiti messages targeting him by name. . .

“I am personally appalled by the fact my case was never reported as a hate crime, even though in the state of California it is one by law,” Recalde-Martinez continued. “I wasn’t notified that the incident occurred until the case was already closed, and am also shocked [that] all evidence of the incident was destroyed by campus employees before the incident was reported to the Costa Mesa Police Department.”

“Hate crime” is a term that fits with the progressive oppressor-oppressed axis. It is meant to refer to a crime against a member of an oppressed group that appears to be motivated by hatred of that group.

Set aside the question of whether it is possible to tell when an assault/threat includes “hate” and when it does not. I want to make the point that trying to call an attack on a conservative student a hate crime amounts to appropriating the progressive oppressor-oppressed axis in a way that will not compute with progressives. They are not going to see conservatives as an oppressed class. I would advise conservatives not to bother trying this linguistic trick.

And a Lot Less Rock ‘n’ Roll

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Peter Beinart thinks we need a whole lot more religion.

Maybe it’s the values of hierarchy, authority, and tradition that churches instill. Maybe religion builds habits and networks that help people better weather national traumas, and thus retain their faith that the system works. For whatever reason, secularization isn’t easing political conflict. It’s making American politics even more convulsive and zero-sum.

For years, political commentators dreamed that the culture war over religious morality that began in the 1960s and ’70s would fade. It has. And the more secular, more ferociously national and racial culture war that has followed is worse.

My thoughts.

1. He is not the first to suggest that bad things happen when politics comes to fill a void left by a decline in religion.

2. I am glad that there are people on the left who would like to see the heat turned down in politics. The Three Languages of Politics is my attempt to help with that project. The revised edition is due out soon.

3. I hope that the left did not discover that political warfare is ugly only because of their shocking defeat in November. Instead, I would prefer to believe that Beinart would have written the same essay decrying politico-religious movements on both sides even if the requisite thousands of votes in key states had gone a different way and Hillary Clinton had won the Presidency.

Charles Murray at Middlebury

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The coverage in the Washington Post and in the New York Times was meager, with no follow-up op-eds.

The Times story, to its credit, says in the lead paragraph that it was “an encounter that turned violent and left one faculty member injured.” The Post story, which was buried deep in the paper (or maybe only appeared on line?) waits until the 6th paragraph to say that it “felt like it was edging frighteningly close to violence.”

On the other hand, the Times very early in the story quotes the Southern Poverty Law Center accusing the Murray of being a “white nationalist.” That is an irresponsible allegation coming from an unreliable source.

My thoughts:

1. In the view of conservatives, this is a very important story. I am pretty sure that a staff of reporters and editors that was more ideologically balanced would have given the story more prominence.

2. In terms of the three-axes model, this story feeds the worst fears of conservatives, which is that in the struggle between civilization and barbarism, progressives are on the wrong side.

3. Megan McArdle writes,

when it comes to physical violence, however noble the cause, that’s assault, not speech, and the perpetrators should be arrested.

The problem is that college administrators do not think in those terms. If you think that a college is capable of punishing violent demonstrators, you will be disappointed. For the most part, college administrators believe in hand-wringing and therapy, as opposed to punishment.

If I were in charge at a college, I would have real police at the event, and I would announce that protestors would be given five minutes to peacefully yell whatever they want. Following that, disturbing the peace will be dealt with by the authorities.

But that approach is about as alien to today’s college administrator as a visitor from Mars.

4. This incident will greatly reduce the likelihood of conservative speakers being invited to college campuses. Administrations do now want to risk being embarrassed by radical protests, and the best way to avoid that risk is to avoid having prominent conservative speakers. I may not be quite so prominent, and I only get one or two invitations a year, but my guess is that I have received my last invitation.

5. College politics can provide a prelude to national politics. Gender identity was a big issue on campus before it flared up on the national scene. The anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party today looks a lot like the anti-Israel movement that emerged on college campuses several years ago. If conservatives are treated as unacceptable and violence against them becomes the norm on colleges, then there is a risk that this will spread well beyond the campus.

6. Late in 2015, I started to write a novel in which a left-wing movement became increasingly violent. I shelved it, because I did not have experience writing fiction (not even short stories), and I was making things too complex for a rookie writer. Also, only one person to whom I showed a draft gave me any encouragement. Still, many of the sorts of left-fascist rationalizations and behaviors that I was going to speculate on in the novel have become more manifest in the past year.

7. All that said, there is a non-zero chance that the Murray incident was isolated, and that it has no larger significance. I hope it turns out that way.

Ev Psych and Motivated Reasoning

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From a piece by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker.

Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

I have a new, expanded edition of The Three Languages of Politics coming out soon, and, like the first edition, it discusses these sorts of cognitive biases in the context of political rhetoric.

Kolbert also discusses “the illusion of explanatory depth.”

“As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

Here, Kolbert and her New Yorker readers are reassuring one another that they are right to be contemptuous of President Trump. To me, they are illustrating the sort of socially-motivated biased reasoning that her article is describing.

Suppose that I were to apply the illusion of explanatory depth to the response to the financial crisis, including the bank bailouts. The elites in this country believe that they understand the causes of this policy (too much deregulation) and the consequences of this policy (saved us from another Great Depression). They hold this baseless belief because their fellow elite-members hold this baseless belief. And one could argue that the Trump Administration is a consequence of the fact that the elite view is not convincing to the rest of the country. (Note, however, that I do not claim to understand last year’s election. I am just suggesting that elites can be just as shallow as Trump supporters. I would go further and suggest that flattering yourself because you hate Trump is itself a sign of intellectual shallowness.)

Timothy Taylor on Homo Narrativus

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He writes,

Homo sapiens likes to protest that all conclusions come from a dispassionate consideration of the evidence. But again and again, you will observe that when a certain homo sapiens agrees with the main thrust of a certain narrative, the supposedly dispassionate consideration of evidence involves compiling every factoid and theory in support, as well as denigrating those who believe otherwise as liars and fools; conversely, when a different homo sapiens disagrees with the main thrust of certain narrative, the supposedly dispassionate consideration of the evidence involves compiling every factoid and theory in opposition, and again denigrating those who believe otherwise as liars and fools. Homo sapiens often brandishes facts and theories as a nearly transparent cover for the homo narrativus within.

That is his gloss on Robert Shiller’s recent address to the American Economic Association.

Notes from the 2017 Edge Question

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Folks were asked to name a scientific concept that deserves to be better known.

Lisa Randall nominates “effective theory.”

an effective theory tells us precisely its limitations—the conditions and values of parameters for which the theory breaks down. The laws of the effective theory succeed until we reach its limitations when these assumptions are no longer true or our measurements or requirements become increasingly precise.

Matthew D. Lieberman nominates naive realism.

If I am seeing reality for what it is and you see it differently, then one of us has a broken reality detector and I know mine isn’t broken. If you can’t see reality as it is, or worse yet, can see it but refuse to acknowledge it, then you must be crazy, stupid, biased, lazy or deceitful.

In the absence of a thorough appreciation for how our brain ensures that we will end up as naïve realists, we can’t help but see complex social events differently from one another, with each of us denigrating the other for failing to see what is so obviously true.

Matthew O. Jackson nominates homophily.

New parents learn from talking with other new parents, and help take care of each other’s children. People of the same religion share beliefs, customs, holidays, and norms of behavior. By the very nature of any workplace, you will spend most of your day interacting with people in the same profession and often in the same sub-field.

…Homophily lies at the root of many social and economic problems, and understanding it can help us better address the many issues that societies around the globe face, from inequality and immobility, to political polarization.

Dylan Evans nominates need for closure.

However great our desire for an answer may be, we must make sure that our desire for truth is even greater, with the result that we prefer to remain in a state of uncertainty rather than filling in the gaps in our knowledge with something we have made up.

Gary Klein nominates decentering.

Decentering is not about empathy—intuiting how others might be feeling. Rather, it is about intuiting what others are thinking. It is about imagining what is going through another person’s mind. It is about getting inside someone else’s head.

…Being able to take someone else’s perspective lets people disagree without escalating into conflicts.

Adam Waytz nominates the illusion of explanatory depth.

If you asked one hundred people on the street if they understand how a refrigerator works, most would respond, yes, they do. But ask them to then produce a detailed, step-by-step explanation of how exactly a refrigerator works and you would likely hear silence or stammering. This powerful but inaccurate feeling of knowing is what Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil in 2002 termed, the illusion of explanatory depth (IOED), stating, “Most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and depth than they really do.”

Cristine H. Legare nominates Cumulative Culture.

Cumulative culture requires the high fidelity transmission of two qualitatively different abilities—instrumental skills (e.g., how to keep warm during winter) and social conventions (e.g., how to perform a ceremonial dance). Children acquire these skills through high fidelity imitation and behavioral conformity. These abilities afford the rapid acquisition of behavior more complex than could ever otherwise be learned exclusively through individual discovery or trial-and-error learning.

If someone had asked me, I would have proposed something similar: cultural intelligence.

Eric R. Weinstein gives us Russell Conjugation.

the human mind is constantly looking ahead well beyond what is true or false to ask “What is the social consequence of accepting the facts as they are?” While this line of thinking is obviously self-serving, we are descended from social creatures who could not safely form opinions around pure facts so much as around how those facts are presented to us by those we ape, trust or fear. Thus, as listeners and readers our minds generally mirror the emotional state of the source, while in our roles as authoritative narrators presenting the facts, we maintain an arsenal of language to subliminally instruct our listeners and readers on how we expect them to color their perceptions.

Sarah Demers nominates blind analysis.

The idea is to fully establish procedures for a measurement before we look at the data so we can’t be swayed by intermediate results. They require rigorous tests along the way to convince ourselves that the procedures we develop are robust and that we understand our equipment and techniques. We can’t “unsee” the data once we’ve taken a look.

John Tooby nominates coalitional instincts.

These programs enable us and induce us to form, maintain, join, support, recognize, defend, defect from, factionalize, exploit, resist, subordinate, distrust, dislike, oppose, and attack coalitions. Coalitions are sets of individuals interpreted by their members and/or by others as sharing a common abstract identity

…to earn membership in a group you must send signals that clearly indicate that you differentially support it compared to rival groups. Hence, optimal weighting of beliefs and communications in the individual mind will make it feel good to think and express content conforming to and flattering to one’s group’s shared beliefs, and feel good attacking and misrepresenting rival groups.

Ideology and Polarity

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Jordan Peterson says,

In a sophisticated religious system, there is a positive and negative polarity. Ideologies simplify that polarity and, in doing so, demonize and oversimplify.

That sentence really bolsters my approach in the Three Axes Model. The whole interview is interesting.

In fact, I have been binge-watching his lectures. Reviews of his book suggested that it might be inaccessible, but his lectures are very accessible, albeit with a big investment of time. If you don’t have the patience for his style, you might want to jump to lecture 5, part 1. But my view is that you should have patience for his style.

Peterson, like Jung, believes that ancient myths tell us a lot about how we are wired. In my eBook, I say that the Progressive oppressor-oppressed axis can be found in the Exodus story. I think that Peterson would locate what I call the civilization-barbarism axis in a lot of ancient myths in which the death of a king or the emergence of a terrible king leads to chaos until a hero fights the chaos and is crowned the new king.

The libertarian liberty-coercion axis may be more modern. In Peterson’s terms, government (and our cultural inheritance in general) always enbodies both the good father who provides order and the tyrant who chains people. The liberty-coercion axis sees the tyrant and not the good father. Peterson probably would find libertarian utopianism to be akin to other utopianisms. In that sense, he would view a really dogmatic libertarian as dangerous, the way that Whitaker Chambers famously remarked that reading Ayn Rand made him feel as though there was lurking a “To a gas chamber–go!” mindset.

I think that embedded in his course is a philosophy of science that is profound. I think it can be applied usefully as a perspective on economic models. I will say more about that when I finish the course.

A Note on the Oppressor-Oppressed Axis

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A commenter writes,

It seemed obvious to me that one could apply the oppressor-oppressed axis by noting that Castro was the oppressor and the Cuban people were the oppressed.

I need to clarify that the oppressor-oppressed axis is not about oppression per se. It is about classifying certain groups as inherently oppressed and others as inherently oppressors. A couple of generations ago, the Left would have considered manufacturing workers to be oppressed. Today American manufacturing workers (and former manufacturing workers) are treated as oppressors, because they are white. Meanwhile, very affluent people can be seen as oppressed, because of their skin color or sexual orientation.

In the case of Cuba, poor Cubans were granted the status of “oppressed,” and rich individuals and corporations had the status of oppressors. Castro, who personally accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars in net worth while he was dictator, was regarded as a friend of the oppressed because the government provided the health care system.

When it is applied appropriately (for example, during the Civil Rights movement in the early 1960s), the oppressor-oppressed model is to the Left’s credit. However, when applied unthinkingly or hypocritically, I think it discredits the Left. Some progressives realize this, but many do not. I think they would benefit from reading my revised Three Languages of Politics when it appears next year.

The Fake News Problem

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Typical Washington Post Headline:

D.C. Council to vote on nation’s most generous family leave law: 11 weeks off, up to 90 percent pay

Note the modifier “generous.” Not “intrusive” or “coercive” or “attempting to be generous with other people’s money” or “blithely unaware of unintended consequences.” Just “generous.” Why didn’t every government think of that? Why not have a whole year off, with 150 percent of pay? That would be even more “generous.”

Interestingly, the print edition had a much more neutral headline, but the lead paragraph still refers to the potential for a “generous” paid leave policy.

I see this editorial bias in many stories, particularly the local ones. I have remarked before how the Montgomery County School system is always described as having an “excellent reputation,” when the only thing that is excellent about it is the pay and benefits lavished on the employees, most of whom are not classroom teachers. The outcomes, which the Post never looks at, but which are readily available on the state department of education web site, are mediocre.

Finally, I would note that the Post‘s coverage of Fidel Castro was much less antagonistic than its coverage of Donald Trump. This is a case where I think that the attempt to view a phenomenon along the progressive oppressor-oppressed axis, and accepting Castro’s self-designation as a savior of the oppressed, is pathetically misguided. Instead, conservatives who view Castro as barbaric along the civilization-barbarism axis and libertarians who view him as coercive along the liberty-coercion axis strike me as much more sensible.

One of my fantasy jobs is “conservative curmudgeon” at the Post. I would write a weekly column listing all of the biases I find each week in the paper, most of which are not even in the editorial section. Maybe next year I will start a regular weekly series of blog posts along those lines.