MM notes, chapter 2
continuing my review of A Theory of Everyone
This is the third essay in a series. The first one is here. The second one is here.
Chapter 2, called “The Human Animal,” discusses how humans learn. MM writes,
Innovations occur as an evolutionary process, a giant calculation of the collective brains of our societies. A key feature of this system is not just social learning but knowing who to socially learn from.
As I have often put it, we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe.
MM points out that sometimes we identify expertise. To become a better chess player, you seek out a chess master.
Sometimes, we use a heuristic of success. Why do we read biographies of CEO’s? If somebody has achieved outcomes that we desire, we think that we can learn from them. The challenge is to know what behavior to copy. Did Steve Jobs’ tirades help cause his success? Were they irrelevant? Or did they actually hinder him?
Finally, there is a heuristic of prestige. We listen to a scientist who has a Nobel Prize, even if the scientist is talking about a subject outside of his or her field.
The prestige strategy helps to explain the famous-for-being-famous phenomenon. . .We copy someone because other people are copying them (or appear to be copying them).
Hence, we have social media influencers. Heaven help us.
I found this aside interesting:
Accents are thus a hard-to-fake and generally reliable signal that reveals the sources of much cultural influence. Indeed research reveals that accent trumps race when it comes to judgements. That is, people will individualize and ‘forget’ race if they can distinguish someone by better cues of culture, such as accent, clothing, and mannerisms.
As I read this chapter, I mostly nodded along in agreement. I had already bought into the idea that as humans we are The Social Learning Animal. That essay may be worth re-reading.
"We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe." Arnold mentions the heuristics of expertise, success, and prestige for making this decision. In the case of the latter, "We copy someone because other people are copying them... " I don't think the term "prestige" fully covers this. Many people mindlessly emulate others' opinions to signal affiliation. They are people who think that if they know what is the accepted way to think about something, i.e., what opinion to have about it, they have somehow adequately dealt with it without the effort of learning about it and thinking it through. The NY Times and similar publications cater to such a readership, and indeed they have run advertisements promising that readers "will know how to think about issues." This is the essence of midwittery.
"We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe."
Yes, but the river's source lies still higher up the mountains. It's downstream of a logically prior canon, which one can demonstrate by pointing out that it's only mostly true, but there are exceptions.
For an example of an exception, consider that people aren't blacklisted no matter what they say, and can be rehabilitated for a limited time and purpose if they say something useful. In legal evidence, consider the "admission against interest" of an indicia of reliability, even from someone who otherwise is not considered trustworthy, or as Tom Bethell (and independently, Joe Sobran) put it, the "strange new respect" the media gives any typical enemy the minute they say anything that supports The Cause. One hears this from pro-Hamas people anytime a Jew says anything anti-Israel, "If a Jew says it, you know it's true!" As if any member of Hamas cares at all about anything any Jew ever says.
On the flipside of that coin, consider how even elite figures belonging to certain causes can get the full cancelation treatment and get thrown under the bus the moment they go heretic on any big important topic. You aren't deciding "who to believe" when the "who" you believe can so easily and quickly be un-believed the moment they walk off the reservation.
So, Try this:
"We decide what to believe by its utility to the side we are on."
That is, just as one assesses people by making the Carl Schmitt fundamental political distinction between "friend and enemy", one assesses / "comes to believe in" ideas, based on whether those ideas are the equivalent of friends or enemies, that is, helpful or hurtful to one's side. That's basically a long-winded definition of Cowen's "Mood Affiliation", right?
So, because people tend to pick and be on "sides" and people in these teams or groups tend to believe the same things - naturally things that tend to raise the status of the group - then believing in what an elite leading figure of that same group says is not much distinguishable from believing things with utility to the group. And since elites / leaders serve as focal points that one knows everyone else in the group is paying attention to, followers parroting what they say and think is the shortcut to group convergence, consensus, and coordination.
But still, the "side we are on" is what comes first, the "who" comes later.