Just as our distant ancestors were too gullible about their sources of knowledge on the physical world around them, we today are too gullible on how much we can trust the many experts on which we rely. Oh we are quite capable of skepticism about our rivals, such as rival governments and their laws and officials. Or rival professions and their experts. Or rival suppliers within our profession. But without such rivalry, we revert to gullibility, at least regarding “our” prestigious experts who follow proper procedures.
On a recommendation from the redoubtable John Alcorn, I am reading Hugo Mercier’s Not Born Yesterday. Mercier claims that we have evolved not to be gullible. Otherwise, we would be taken advantage of and not survive.
Incidentally, if I tell you that you are not gullible, how gullible do you have to be to believe me? To not believe me?
I think Mercier relies quite a bit on a distinction between cheap talk and actionable beliefs (he terms these “reflective beliefs” and “intuitive beliefs,” respectively, which I find unhelpful). He says that the implausible beliefs that we hold, which make us seem gullible, are in the cheap talk category–we don’t act as if we deeply believe them. When we need to act, we make the effort to sort out truth. Libertarian economics would predict that political choices are based on cheap talk and consumer choices are based on actionable beliefs.
Cheap talk, like say encouraging social isolation when all it costs is someone else’s job, and then rather shamelessly abandoning it to advance your political agenda?
Hope I’m not being glib. I don’t mean to be. 100% support police reform. Under my preferred policy (treating people like adults and letting them weigh the risks) these protests still happen. Maybe more COVID, but that’s a decision society makes collectively, not one made by a politicians whose scared of being labelled responsible for COVID deaths and even more scared of being labelled a racist.
Kailer is completely correct. Where the Hell is Dr Fauci? This whole lockdown has proven to be the biggest government farce since the bogus pretext for the invasion of Iraq.
Perhaps the greatest example of current gullibility is the widespread notion that the police deliberately killed George Floyd out of racial animus. The lack of skepticism about the dominant narrative is somewhat disturbing, but may only reflect the press’s determination to keep excited delirium syndrome out of the public discourse.
The skeptical narrative appears better supported by the evidence. The skeptical narrative runs something like
George Floyd was not asphyxiated or strangled. The medical examiner’s autopsy showed no trauma to the body. The coroner’s report states that he died of a heart attack. He was high on fentanyl at the time of the arrest.
Fentanyl has the ability to cause muscle rigidity of the chest wall, diaphragm, and larynx and to induce excited delirium which may have in turn induced the heart attack.
The reason the officers put Floyd on the ground was likely that they observed behavior consistent with excited delirium.
The American College of Emergency Physicians’ white paper on excited delirium syndrome states:
“In subjects who do not respond to verbal calming and de-escalation techniques, control measures are a prerequisite for medical assessment and interven- tion. When necessary, this should be accomplished as rapidly and safely as possible. Recent research indicates that physical struggle is a much greater contributor to catecholamine surge and metabolic acidosis than other causes of exertion or noxious stimuli. Since these parameters are thought to contribute to poor outcomes in ExDS, the specific phys- ical control methods employed should optimally minimize the time spent struggling, while safely achieving physical control. The use of multiple personnel with training in safe physical control measures is encouraged.”
By restraining Floyd as they did, using a chokehold technique that was not specifically prohibited and for which some jurisdictions train officers to use in such situations, the officers were acting consistent with the best available medical guidance and therefore quite likely acting in Floyd’s best interests.
The “law officer” blog goes into deal and suggests convictions of the officers are anything but assured. Nevertheless, I don’t expect to see any humility amongst the haut minded commentariat in their high minded pronouncements.
All the comments seems correct to me. On the rioting there is many hidden agendas, non of them explicit. For inner city youth it is about discovering they are stuck at the bottom of the economic ladder/ For city officials is is increasingly about the total cost of cops and firemen, the two most demanding public sectors. Then their is the desire for Californians to get a federal bailout of the pension mess.
Mish nailed this: ‘Politicians are paid to be ignorant”. It boils down to instability in government structure. And this is all a repeat performance, about every 35 years, once for each generation of inner city youth.
On the covid, I give them somewhat of a pass, it is a first for the politicians, they truly do not know.
“He says that the implausible beliefs that we hold, which make us seem gullible, are in the cheap talk category–we don’t act as if we deeply believe them….Libertarian economics would predict that political choices are based on cheap talk and consumer choices are based on actionable beliefs.”
That’s why it seems like, “Politics makes people stupid.” Political decisions are collective, meaning the costs and benefits of being right or wrong are not borne by the decision maker. When I hear many people say stupid things in political discussions, I try to identify potential trades that, were such prevailing stupid ideas reflected in securities prices, would represent arbitrage opportunities. I haven’t found any such arbitrage opportunities. Once costs and benefits are internalized, people stop being so gullible.
Related, it’s ironic that conventional wisdom holds that the political system is good for dealing with externalities, which are *defined* as costs and benefits not borne directly by decision makers. Political actions *inherently generate* externalities.
Depends on who “we” are. It’s long been show that the “educated strata” are very gullible. Not surprising since they have the longest and most successful period being conditioned to take in what they are told by the “sage on the stage” unreflectively and reproduce it on the test to get the good grade. To question, is to let nuance lead you to the wrong answer. Paul Graham examined the incentives to get good grades rather than real learning in his December 2019, ‘The Lesson to Unlearn’.
The “educated strata” are told a thing, reproduce that thing for good grades and think they know a thing, but have never reflected on what the “know”.
Some observations on the gullibility of the “educated”:
“The fading of the critical sense is a serious menace to the preservation of our civilization. It makes it easy for quacks to fool the people. It is remarkable that the educated strata are more gullible than the less educated. The most enthusiastic supporters of Marxism, Nazism, and Fascism were the intellectuals, not the boors. The intellectuals were never keen enough to see the manifest contradictions of their creeds. It did not in the least impair the popularity of Fascism that Mussolini in the same speech praised the Italians as the representatives of the oldest Western civilization and as the youngest among the civilized nations. No German nationalist minded it when dark-haired Hitler, corpulent Goering, and lame Goebbels were praised as the shining representatives of the tall, slim, fair-haired, heroic Aryan master race. Is it not amazing that many millions of non-Russians are firmly convinced that the Soviet regime is democratic, even more democratic than America?”
–von Mises, Ludwig (1945). Bureaucracy
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
“It is possible for the mind to indulge in false logic, to make the worse appear the better reason, without instant exposure. But for the hand to work falsely is to produce a misshapen thing—tool or machine —which in its construction gives the lie to its maker. Thus the hand that is false to truth, in the very act publishes the verdict of its own guilt, exposes itself to contempt and derision, convicts itself of unskillfulness or of dishonesty.”
“It is easy to juggle with words, to argue in a circle, to make the worse appear the better reason, and to reach false conclusions which wear a plausible aspect. But it is not so with things. ”
—Charles H. Ham, Mind and Hand: manual training, the chief factor in education (1900)
I don’t think the restraint of a knee on the neck is a chokehold. The pressure on the side of the neck as shown in the video would not cut off the airway. A chokehold involves the arm looped around the neck so that it presses back and closes the airway.
From the officer site:
“According to the Minneapolis Police Policy Manual, the restraint used was in policy and it also indicates that training is given to officers on the maneuver.
According to the policy, a neck restraint can be used as a form of a “non-deadly option” and is defined as “compressing one or both sides of a person’s neck with an arm or leg, without applying direct pressure to the trachea or airway (front of the neck).”
Chauvin was applying pressure to the back and side of the neck and not in the front and appeared to be compliant with existing policy.
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The problem is not one’s own cheap talk, it’s someone else who is able to abuse trust and leverage socially-sensitive cognitive biases regarding deference to prestige, in order to pass off shoddy merchandise as quality goods. We must reign in prestige, and the only way to deal with talk that is too cheap is to raise the price in the form of negative consequences for spouting BS.