Dan Williams on misinformation; Scott Alexander on libertarianism unloved; Kevin Corcoran on the nature of political beliefs; Bronski and Archer on mutational load
Re: "trying to persuade people to change their beliefs using reason is likely to fail. Instead, get them to change their alignment—who they think of as the friendly tribe and who they think of as the enemy tribe."
Arnold Kling throws in the towel?!
Arnold, You often succeed in persuading various readers by argument and evidence. Please keep at it!
I don't know, I think this really does represent a kind of intellectual crisis of post-liberalism, and amazingly it has much less to do with trendy edgy Carl Schmitt - popular on the left *and* right - illiberalism of a symbolic culture war sort and more perfectly liberal, scientific, empirical neuroscience.
At the very least it requires a somewhat duplicitous, Straussian strategy I'm saying different things to different people, which is part of the liberal facade the post-liberals have been deconstructing for some time.
Here's an alternative explanation for a correlation between paternal age and inclination toward leftism. Presumably, as most adults age, they transition from self-reliance to increasing dependence on government entitlements, and thus are increasingly inclined to support such entitlements and the taxation that funds them.
Let's play with some toy numbers. We'll assume that from the time someone joins the labor force until about 55 years of age, they chiefly perceive the entitlement system as 'taking money away from me to give to other people'. As they draw closer to Social Security and Medicare, they become increasingly favorable toward those major economic-redistribution programs. When they reach an age at which Medicare's paying the considerable costs of that hip replacement, much of their opposition to governent entitlements evaporates.
Now let's consider their children. If I'm born to a 25-year-old father, then up to about the time I'm 30, I'll be exposed to his opposition to entitlements and the associated taxation. I won't actually see him benefit from those programs until I'm 40 or more, by which time my position on a conservative-progressive continuum will be largely fixed.
On the other hand, if I'm born to a 40-year-old father, then by the time I reach my late teens, he'll have begun to transition toward a more favorable view of entitlements; before I'm 30, he'll be on Social Security and will probably be deriving substantial benefit from Medicare. That will almost certainly affect my attitude toward such social programs.
"they transition from self-reliance to increasing dependence on government entitlements, and thus are increasingly inclined to support such entitlements and the taxation that funds them"
The questions they used to determine degree of "leftism" had nothing to do with fiscal conservatism, taxation, etc...
They used a very peculiar definition of "leftism" by asking only about the respondents position on LGBT issues, "race ideology" and feminism...
My hypothesis is that children born to older parents have a worse relationship with them (ceteris paribus) and feel more of a need to rebel, for example by paying lip service to a few edgy/cool "leftist" positions which their parents don't approve of. That's it.
Good point re. the measure of 'leftism'. I could try to salvage my argument by noting that people tend to pick a political orientation based on one or two issues close to them, and then take the default positions for that orientation on issues that don't matter to them: so, for instance, a gun enthusiast would choose the rightist orientation, which would give him ready-made views on abortion, taxation, immigration... But that smacks of desperation, and I should probably try for a new hypothesis...
However, I'm not sure about the wish-to-rebel hypothesis. I'd expect birth order to have a much stronger effect, with oldest children's views most likely to resemble their parents', and younger children most likely to be rebellious. But Bronski and Archer write that 'this finding is robust to controlling for... birth order.'
A test of the rebelliousness hypothesis would involve looking at the late- versus early-born children of leftist parents. Are they more likely than earlier-born children to take positions to the right of their parents?
" I'd expect birth order to have a much stronger effect, with oldest children's views most likely to resemble their parents', and younger children most likely to be rebellious."
You're right. I hadn't thought about the birth order effect, or lack of one.
"They used a very peculiar definition of "leftism" by asking only about the respondents position on LGBT issues, "race ideology" and feminism..."
It might just be that people are more likely to hold views on these issues closer to how it was during their youth. Like a liberal who grew up in the '50s would have more conservative views than a liberal who grew up in the '60s. So older parents just seem farther away.
"Leftism correlates with paternal age (the age of someone’s father at birth). This finding is robust to controlling for the father’s politics, participant age, and birth order. Which means the correlation is not due to older fathers having more-leftist genes, the homes of older fathers being in more leftist environments, older people (who could be more conservative for some other reason) having younger fathers, or people with older fathers having lower quality womb environments. "
I'm not sure if this is covered in the controls specified but I still strongly suspect that the higher (on average) SES of older people produces a more significant differential in the standard of living enjoyed by a child who recently left a home with an older father vs a younger father. Since the important thing is the differential to the parents, not the SES level of the child relative to other people their age, this would also tend to produce the absence of correlation noted above. Young people are moving from an environment where somebody else paid for their stuff (among other things) and doing so after spending more and more time in such an environment, so it's only natural they want that situation to continue.
One key is experts NOT opining outside of their area of expertise.
PH during the pandemic is the best example. PH official (presumably) soon knew and were constantly finding out more about how COVID was spread and what kind of NPI affected the spread of the disease. They had zero knowledge, could not have any knowledge of costs and benefit of applying NPI's in specific places in specific circumstances. Nevertheless they still made recommendations of what people and policy making local officials should DO. They should rather have used their real expertise to giver individuals and local decision-makers the information and tools/methodologies for how to make net benefit maximizing decisions about masking, venue closing/capacity limitations.
Another related point, also evident by its absence in the COVID incident is communicating the model that the detailed recommendations are based on.
Here I have observed that one's 'area of expertise' is difficult to define; and often much smaller than most people imagine; for academics, it is often a vanishingly thin slice of a subject. They are trained to speak outside that area by teaching introductory survey courses, in which they are not at all expert. In government, the actual academic expertise turns out to be even smaller or non-existent; but the expertise in a certain community of people is very real, and rather fleeting. If you are fortunate, you can know Dunbar's number of senior officials in a silo of practice, like intra-state cancer public health, starting as they enter the higher offices after some notable event, and during the next couple decades, until they all collectively begin to fade from prominence.
This is what true expertise looks like; and speaking outside of it is detectable by gross generalizations, aged information, and misapplication of principles/a gravitational pull to the area of true expertise. But we don't have enough experts to cover everything and nobody has enough contacts to find them; and trust is hard to build, even in motivation, let alone expertise. As a result, the experts are almost always having to speak outside their real areas of expertise...
It's too bad that Dan Williams' articles often start with the election of Donald Trump & the Brexit referendum as the cause for misinformation panic. The next two US elections. in 2018 & 2020 were far more affected by false news. Biden was elected because of it--false claims that H. Biden's laptop, with evidence of corruption, was Russian disinformation. Made by 51 US govt officials & former officials. All lying. Based on those lies, many news feeds, including NYT, CNN, Twitter, Facebook, & Google all censored the truth.
When the truth is censored, the election is not fair; any election unfair to the loser can rightfully be called stolen.
Neither Kling nor hardly any of the Fantasy Intellectuals accept this truth. Here's LibertiesEU with 8 requirements:
2. Reliable Info: voters "need accurate information about the candidates ... governments can’t prevent the media from covering opposition candidates or parties. "
3. Citizens can run; 4. All voters are able to vote; 5. Voters are not intimidated; 6. Voting is free from fraud*; 7. Ballots are counted accurately and the correct results are reported; 8. Results are respected.
If some activity has 8 requirements to be called fair, but fails in any one of those requirement, the activity was not fair. Not too unsurprising, this article claims: "the run-up to the election and the election itself were free and fair" << a false claim. Censorship of the truth makes it unfair.
Biden was elected because of the false info, misinfo, disinfo - lies about H. Biden's laptop, and the censorship of the truth. That the FBI had the laptop since Dec, 2019, and already knew it was genuine, is arguably election interference (IMO).
*Trump focuses more on the mail-in fraud issues of chain-of-custody and unlikely acceptance of voter signatures on mail-in ballots, as well as the many dead, duplicate, illegals who voted. While I also believe many of Biden's 81 million ballots were cast fraudulently, that's not as provable, without the ballot envelopes for audit and analysis.
Anybody who talks about misinformation without explicit discussion of H. Biden's laptop is providing an article that satisfies the, (how was it called? by Dan Williams!) The Market for Rationalizations. Noting it as "stories of H. Biden's laptop" is far too little.
Similarly, the FBI lies used in their conspiracy to use HR Clinton's oppo research & speculations, the Steele Dossier, as an illegal way to get FISA judge approval (4 times!) so as to spy on Trump & his campaign in 2016,. These FBI lies were used to justify the 2-year Mueller investigation, which itself never found the Clinton source of the speculative info. All of the leaks and frequent Trump negative news reports were thus more Fake News, including Obama's dishonest claim that his admin was not spying on Trump (Barr later admitted the FBI had been). That 2 year smear campaign was successful in making many Dems win over Reps in 2018 -- an election certainly influenced by misinformation.
The 2016 election of Trump had little to do with misinformation, but Rep loss in 2018, and Rep & Trump loss in 2020 were based in some part on Fake News.
The next 2 years include the lie that Trump supported an insurrection -- there was no insurrection, none have been charged with insurrection, tho some 100+ are political prisoners still because of their protesting the 2020 stolen election.
The 2022 loss was influenced somewhat because of the slanderous charge of insurrection, but also significantly by the unpopular abortion question--total ban on abortion is often voted down in states which had votes on it after Roe was overturned.
The reason for the panic about misinformation is mostly elections -- but there is almost no analysis on Fake News affecting 2018, 2020, 2022.
Now in 2024, we'll see real news about Trump being convicted of Fake Crimes, by a Dem weaponized justice system. Loss of genuine Rule of Law is part of the destruction of America by elite Dems.
I continue to think that one key to fixing both expert trustworthiness and university trustworthiness is a stronger cultural norm of ought-is distinction. This means recognizing that:
1. Being an expert in empirical matters (what *is* in some domain) does not make you better than others at making value judgments (what *ought to be* in that domain)
2. Scholarship and activism are both socially necessary functions but they work much better if kept separate, because confirmation bias otherwise leads scholar-activists to get worse at scholarship.
One test of the Bronski-Archer mutation-load argument would be to examine the political positions of people relative to the age of their paternal grandfathers at the time of their fathers' births.
Deleterious mutations that develop during the grandfather's life and are transmitted to the father will then be transmitted to that father's children. If those explain a tendency toward leftism, then we'd expect to see an effect from grandpaternal age, even controlling for paternal age.
Of course, we'd have to control for paternal political position, which is presumably heritable even if not genetic. Ideally, we'd look at a population, all born to 25-year-old fathers with similar political positions; but some of whose paternal grandfathers were 50 at the time of their birth, while the rest were born when their paternal grandfathers were 65.
there is no place for censorshiop in the supposed meme that there is called democracy here in the USA. There used to be more of a democratic state in the 50s 60s 70 and 80s of my youth but post 9/11 the usa has gone far right when it comes to surveillence and thought control (censorship). Both major parties have gone...over the top. Our only hope is, IMHO, states relaxing the rules governing who can and can't run for election in their particular state. Third parties need to enter into races unincombered but BS entrance rules. Our choices of this upcoming election prove what a farce our democracy has become. Most of our politicians are neofacists. Open your eyes comrades. Look at the many ways our government is denying us our constitution rights. We need to reboot the current system. It ain't working for us. It is working for the elites, the war lords, the corportists. the oligharchs
I assume Alexander is referring to the spying on citizens that became legal after 911. At that time it was liberals who were against this. I'm a little skeptical far right was but IDK. Either way, have liberals changed sides on this issue?
On the topic of experts providing advice outside of their expertise, I came across an interesting example of this phenomenon recently. Alexander Huberman, the self-anointed health guru who is suddenly everywhere, offered some comically bad fitness advice on YouTube recently. A sports medicine doctor called him out on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVJSf7Cj0Sk
This seems to be a much more prevalent issue than many people understand.
Re: "trying to persuade people to change their beliefs using reason is likely to fail. Instead, get them to change their alignment—who they think of as the friendly tribe and who they think of as the enemy tribe."
Arnold Kling throws in the towel?!
Arnold, You often succeed in persuading various readers by argument and evidence. Please keep at it!
You can do both. Treating people with respect and accepting them for who they are will make them more open to hearing your intellectual arguments.
I don't know, I think this really does represent a kind of intellectual crisis of post-liberalism, and amazingly it has much less to do with trendy edgy Carl Schmitt - popular on the left *and* right - illiberalism of a symbolic culture war sort and more perfectly liberal, scientific, empirical neuroscience.
At the very least it requires a somewhat duplicitous, Straussian strategy I'm saying different things to different people, which is part of the liberal facade the post-liberals have been deconstructing for some time.
I said neuroscience but I might be overshooting. Let's say social psychology/political science.
Here's an alternative explanation for a correlation between paternal age and inclination toward leftism. Presumably, as most adults age, they transition from self-reliance to increasing dependence on government entitlements, and thus are increasingly inclined to support such entitlements and the taxation that funds them.
Let's play with some toy numbers. We'll assume that from the time someone joins the labor force until about 55 years of age, they chiefly perceive the entitlement system as 'taking money away from me to give to other people'. As they draw closer to Social Security and Medicare, they become increasingly favorable toward those major economic-redistribution programs. When they reach an age at which Medicare's paying the considerable costs of that hip replacement, much of their opposition to governent entitlements evaporates.
Now let's consider their children. If I'm born to a 25-year-old father, then up to about the time I'm 30, I'll be exposed to his opposition to entitlements and the associated taxation. I won't actually see him benefit from those programs until I'm 40 or more, by which time my position on a conservative-progressive continuum will be largely fixed.
On the other hand, if I'm born to a 40-year-old father, then by the time I reach my late teens, he'll have begun to transition toward a more favorable view of entitlements; before I'm 30, he'll be on Social Security and will probably be deriving substantial benefit from Medicare. That will almost certainly affect my attitude toward such social programs.
"they transition from self-reliance to increasing dependence on government entitlements, and thus are increasingly inclined to support such entitlements and the taxation that funds them"
The questions they used to determine degree of "leftism" had nothing to do with fiscal conservatism, taxation, etc...
They used a very peculiar definition of "leftism" by asking only about the respondents position on LGBT issues, "race ideology" and feminism...
My hypothesis is that children born to older parents have a worse relationship with them (ceteris paribus) and feel more of a need to rebel, for example by paying lip service to a few edgy/cool "leftist" positions which their parents don't approve of. That's it.
Good point re. the measure of 'leftism'. I could try to salvage my argument by noting that people tend to pick a political orientation based on one or two issues close to them, and then take the default positions for that orientation on issues that don't matter to them: so, for instance, a gun enthusiast would choose the rightist orientation, which would give him ready-made views on abortion, taxation, immigration... But that smacks of desperation, and I should probably try for a new hypothesis...
However, I'm not sure about the wish-to-rebel hypothesis. I'd expect birth order to have a much stronger effect, with oldest children's views most likely to resemble their parents', and younger children most likely to be rebellious. But Bronski and Archer write that 'this finding is robust to controlling for... birth order.'
A test of the rebelliousness hypothesis would involve looking at the late- versus early-born children of leftist parents. Are they more likely than earlier-born children to take positions to the right of their parents?
" I'd expect birth order to have a much stronger effect, with oldest children's views most likely to resemble their parents', and younger children most likely to be rebellious."
You're right. I hadn't thought about the birth order effect, or lack of one.
"They used a very peculiar definition of "leftism" by asking only about the respondents position on LGBT issues, "race ideology" and feminism..."
It might just be that people are more likely to hold views on these issues closer to how it was during their youth. Like a liberal who grew up in the '50s would have more conservative views than a liberal who grew up in the '60s. So older parents just seem farther away.
Maybe, except this is not your grandfather's FDR leftism we're talking about here.
Astute!
"Leftism correlates with paternal age (the age of someone’s father at birth). This finding is robust to controlling for the father’s politics, participant age, and birth order. Which means the correlation is not due to older fathers having more-leftist genes, the homes of older fathers being in more leftist environments, older people (who could be more conservative for some other reason) having younger fathers, or people with older fathers having lower quality womb environments. "
I'm not sure if this is covered in the controls specified but I still strongly suspect that the higher (on average) SES of older people produces a more significant differential in the standard of living enjoyed by a child who recently left a home with an older father vs a younger father. Since the important thing is the differential to the parents, not the SES level of the child relative to other people their age, this would also tend to produce the absence of correlation noted above. Young people are moving from an environment where somebody else paid for their stuff (among other things) and doing so after spending more and more time in such an environment, so it's only natural they want that situation to continue.
"We won’t be epistemically better off by elite control over information flows"
I've been frustrated by the quality of counsel from doctors: https://jakeseliger.com/2024/01/03/who-cares-about-your-healthcare-whats-commonly-overlooked-in-the-health-care-system/ regarding cancer care. I'm lucky enough to live in the Internet age, when doctors don't completely control medical information flows.
One key is experts NOT opining outside of their area of expertise.
PH during the pandemic is the best example. PH official (presumably) soon knew and were constantly finding out more about how COVID was spread and what kind of NPI affected the spread of the disease. They had zero knowledge, could not have any knowledge of costs and benefit of applying NPI's in specific places in specific circumstances. Nevertheless they still made recommendations of what people and policy making local officials should DO. They should rather have used their real expertise to giver individuals and local decision-makers the information and tools/methodologies for how to make net benefit maximizing decisions about masking, venue closing/capacity limitations.
Another related point, also evident by its absence in the COVID incident is communicating the model that the detailed recommendations are based on.
Here I have observed that one's 'area of expertise' is difficult to define; and often much smaller than most people imagine; for academics, it is often a vanishingly thin slice of a subject. They are trained to speak outside that area by teaching introductory survey courses, in which they are not at all expert. In government, the actual academic expertise turns out to be even smaller or non-existent; but the expertise in a certain community of people is very real, and rather fleeting. If you are fortunate, you can know Dunbar's number of senior officials in a silo of practice, like intra-state cancer public health, starting as they enter the higher offices after some notable event, and during the next couple decades, until they all collectively begin to fade from prominence.
This is what true expertise looks like; and speaking outside of it is detectable by gross generalizations, aged information, and misapplication of principles/a gravitational pull to the area of true expertise. But we don't have enough experts to cover everything and nobody has enough contacts to find them; and trust is hard to build, even in motivation, let alone expertise. As a result, the experts are almost always having to speak outside their real areas of expertise...
It's too bad that Dan Williams' articles often start with the election of Donald Trump & the Brexit referendum as the cause for misinformation panic. The next two US elections. in 2018 & 2020 were far more affected by false news. Biden was elected because of it--false claims that H. Biden's laptop, with evidence of corruption, was Russian disinformation. Made by 51 US govt officials & former officials. All lying. Based on those lies, many news feeds, including NYT, CNN, Twitter, Facebook, & Google all censored the truth.
When the truth is censored, the election is not fair; any election unfair to the loser can rightfully be called stolen.
Neither Kling nor hardly any of the Fantasy Intellectuals accept this truth. Here's LibertiesEU with 8 requirements:
https://www.liberties.eu/en/stories/free-and-fair-elections/43642
1. Voter Reg.
2. Reliable Info: voters "need accurate information about the candidates ... governments can’t prevent the media from covering opposition candidates or parties. "
3. Citizens can run; 4. All voters are able to vote; 5. Voters are not intimidated; 6. Voting is free from fraud*; 7. Ballots are counted accurately and the correct results are reported; 8. Results are respected.
If some activity has 8 requirements to be called fair, but fails in any one of those requirement, the activity was not fair. Not too unsurprising, this article claims: "the run-up to the election and the election itself were free and fair" << a false claim. Censorship of the truth makes it unfair.
Biden was elected because of the false info, misinfo, disinfo - lies about H. Biden's laptop, and the censorship of the truth. That the FBI had the laptop since Dec, 2019, and already knew it was genuine, is arguably election interference (IMO).
*Trump focuses more on the mail-in fraud issues of chain-of-custody and unlikely acceptance of voter signatures on mail-in ballots, as well as the many dead, duplicate, illegals who voted. While I also believe many of Biden's 81 million ballots were cast fraudulently, that's not as provable, without the ballot envelopes for audit and analysis.
Anybody who talks about misinformation without explicit discussion of H. Biden's laptop is providing an article that satisfies the, (how was it called? by Dan Williams!) The Market for Rationalizations. Noting it as "stories of H. Biden's laptop" is far too little.
Similarly, the FBI lies used in their conspiracy to use HR Clinton's oppo research & speculations, the Steele Dossier, as an illegal way to get FISA judge approval (4 times!) so as to spy on Trump & his campaign in 2016,. These FBI lies were used to justify the 2-year Mueller investigation, which itself never found the Clinton source of the speculative info. All of the leaks and frequent Trump negative news reports were thus more Fake News, including Obama's dishonest claim that his admin was not spying on Trump (Barr later admitted the FBI had been). That 2 year smear campaign was successful in making many Dems win over Reps in 2018 -- an election certainly influenced by misinformation.
The 2016 election of Trump had little to do with misinformation, but Rep loss in 2018, and Rep & Trump loss in 2020 were based in some part on Fake News.
The next 2 years include the lie that Trump supported an insurrection -- there was no insurrection, none have been charged with insurrection, tho some 100+ are political prisoners still because of their protesting the 2020 stolen election.
The 2022 loss was influenced somewhat because of the slanderous charge of insurrection, but also significantly by the unpopular abortion question--total ban on abortion is often voted down in states which had votes on it after Roe was overturned.
The reason for the panic about misinformation is mostly elections -- but there is almost no analysis on Fake News affecting 2018, 2020, 2022.
Now in 2024, we'll see real news about Trump being convicted of Fake Crimes, by a Dem weaponized justice system. Loss of genuine Rule of Law is part of the destruction of America by elite Dems.
Thank you for these digests
I continue to think that one key to fixing both expert trustworthiness and university trustworthiness is a stronger cultural norm of ought-is distinction. This means recognizing that:
1. Being an expert in empirical matters (what *is* in some domain) does not make you better than others at making value judgments (what *ought to be* in that domain)
2. Scholarship and activism are both socially necessary functions but they work much better if kept separate, because confirmation bias otherwise leads scholar-activists to get worse at scholarship.
I wrote a post giving more detail on this awhile ago: https://futuremoreperfect.substack.com/p/saving-the-world-by-separating-ought
One test of the Bronski-Archer mutation-load argument would be to examine the political positions of people relative to the age of their paternal grandfathers at the time of their fathers' births.
Deleterious mutations that develop during the grandfather's life and are transmitted to the father will then be transmitted to that father's children. If those explain a tendency toward leftism, then we'd expect to see an effect from grandpaternal age, even controlling for paternal age.
Of course, we'd have to control for paternal political position, which is presumably heritable even if not genetic. Ideally, we'd look at a population, all born to 25-year-old fathers with similar political positions; but some of whose paternal grandfathers were 50 at the time of their birth, while the rest were born when their paternal grandfathers were 65.
there is no place for censorshiop in the supposed meme that there is called democracy here in the USA. There used to be more of a democratic state in the 50s 60s 70 and 80s of my youth but post 9/11 the usa has gone far right when it comes to surveillence and thought control (censorship). Both major parties have gone...over the top. Our only hope is, IMHO, states relaxing the rules governing who can and can't run for election in their particular state. Third parties need to enter into races unincombered but BS entrance rules. Our choices of this upcoming election prove what a farce our democracy has become. Most of our politicians are neofacists. Open your eyes comrades. Look at the many ways our government is denying us our constitution rights. We need to reboot the current system. It ain't working for us. It is working for the elites, the war lords, the corportists. the oligharchs
"the usa has gone far right when it comes to surveillence and thought control (censorship)."
Strange sentiment. The far left (e.g., totalitarian communist regimes) are much more known for this sort of thing.
I agree. Power left or right or center will kill rather than give up control.
I assume Alexander is referring to the spying on citizens that became legal after 911. At that time it was liberals who were against this. I'm a little skeptical far right was but IDK. Either way, have liberals changed sides on this issue?
On the topic of experts providing advice outside of their expertise, I came across an interesting example of this phenomenon recently. Alexander Huberman, the self-anointed health guru who is suddenly everywhere, offered some comically bad fitness advice on YouTube recently. A sports medicine doctor called him out on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVJSf7Cj0Sk
This seems to be a much more prevalent issue than many people understand.