Social Learning Links, 2/13/2025
Lee Bressler sees a preference cascade at Davos; Mana Afsari contrasts the Natcons with the old-fashioned liberals; Dan Williams on epistemic privilege; The Zvi on frictions
WEF has a reputation for being very woke and globalist. Most people who have never gone assume that it is just Greta telling everyone to eat grasshoppers. I think that has always been inaccurate, but even more so this year. I didn’t meet a single person who admitted that they voted for Kamala. I met many people who had attended the inauguration and then flew to Davos right after. I saw MAGA hats in various colors. It was like a massive Trump rally without Trump present. Even the Europeans were talking about how much they wished they had a leader like him. I’m sure some of it is that they sense that he is having a moment and they want to be aligned with that. But it was quite staggering how much the vibe at WEF shifted rightwards.
WEF means World Economic Forum, also known as Davos. Lee uses the phrase “preference cascade,” which is Timur Kuran’s term for when people suddenly decide to express beliefs that they were afraid to express before.
Young men like Lucas and Alex make up about 90 percent of an informal group of conservative Hill staffers, think-tankers and young professionals who host debating parties around the city. Between NatCon and the election, I attend several of the debates. The young men give eloquent, sometimes sophomoric, but always earnest speeches, at whatever venue they can find, and they do it all for free—they even chip in to keep the parties going. The men wear tailored two- and three-piece wool suits and matching pocket squares, and the (few) women wear cocktail dresses; there’s apparently nowhere they’d rather be on a Saturday night.
These young intellectuals call themselves—like pitch-perfect nineteenth-century romantics—“sensitive young men.” At the after-parties they discuss metaphysics.
She refers to July’s National Conservative gathering in DC. I attended, also, and I appreciate how eloquently she captures the atmosphere there. Recall my post-event write-up. I wrote
The conference selects for people whose idea of a good conversation is to talk about how something that the last speaker said relates to Aristotle or Nietzsche. I have no desire to spend time with such folks.
She also describes a subsequent conference staged in opposition to NatCon, one that I also was curious to attend but passed on.
Walking in, I see a sea of white hair. There are white heads shaking in disapproval on every other panel like parodies of nineteenth-century conservatives—staid, unaware, too furious at the incomprehensible incomprehension of the young toward their legitimate authority to understand their own decline.
Perfect prose. Pointer from Rob Henderson.
If sources of error, ignorance, or delusion are widespread, how did you—the theorist attempting to explain the nature and origins of other people’s misperceptions—escape them? This worry is not unique to Marx’s views or those broadly within the Marxist tradition. For example, elsewhere, I have observed how some modern "misinformation” researchers are inconsistent in positing a vast range of factors that allegedly underlie widespread belief in misinformation—identity, group polarisation, disinformation campaigns, motivated reasoning, echo chambers, and so on—whilst simultaneously depicting any concerns about the objectivity of their own views as “postmodernism”.
People claim to have what David McRaney calls “asymmetric insight.” I might claim to know that you are motivated to have false beliefs, but then deny that any similar motivations apply to me. Another term for this might be “epistemic privilege,” meaning that one person claims to have beliefs that are immune from the errors that plague other people.
As Williams points out, some epistemic privilege is legitimate. On some topics, people who grasp probability theory have an advantage over people who don’t. The same with physics or chemistry. But in the realm of social science, or what I prefer to call human interdependence (to avoid the term “science”), no one has absolute epistemic privilege.
When you make a thing easy to do, people often do vastly more of it.
When you put up barriers, even highly solvable ones, people often do vastly less.
Let us take this seriously, and carefully choose what inconveniences to put where.
The most direct way to introduce or remove frictions is to change the law. This can take the form of prohibitions, regulations and requirements, or of taxes.
One can also alter social norms, deploy new technologies or business models or procedures, or change opportunity costs that facilitate or inhibit such activities.
He says that we need to ensure that antisocial actions have higher friction.
When you make the anti-social action easier than the pro-social action, when you reward those who bring disorder or wreck the commons and punish those who adhere to order and help the group, you go down a dark path.
Imagine if at our local subway stop the policemen periodically hid out of sight and then when fare-jumpers did their thing the policemen arrested them and they were forced to pay fines or go to jail.
Zvi offers this example:
people can’t handle low-friction sports gambling apps being available on phones that get pushed in the media.
Note that I am not sure that the term “friction” does that is not already accomplished by the term “incentives.”
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"Lee uses the phrase “preference cascade,” which is Timur Kuran’s term for when people suddenly decide to express beliefs that they were afraid to express before."
Ugh. I can't read the Davos recap because its paywalled, but I gotta say: maybe the WEF wasn't just about having Greta Thunberg types browbeat people about various progressive preoccupations, but my impression is that wasn't absent from the scene, either. Now it turns out everyone there was a secret Trump voter? Frankly, that's a little appalling. Maybe we wouldn't be in this position right now if these people hadn't falsified their preferences in the first place? Maybe they could have put some torque on whatever meager backbones they possessed and told Greta and her pals to go back to middle school where they belonged?
On the one hand I am glad to hear that stifling expectations of progressive conformity are lifting, but I am also contemptuous of people who are doing a sudden about-face right now or are feeling emboldened to say what they really think. I don't claim to be Solzhenitsyn or anything, but it seems to me like an awful lot of people acquiesced to stuff they knew was BS for a long time with nary a peep, which is not an admirable quality.
"Note that I am not sure that the term “friction” does that is not already accomplished by the term “incentives.”
To see the difference, one has to remember that it's the term of art preferred by the proponents of "Nudge"-like interventions, like Thaler and Sunstein. I don't agree with the Nudge folks, but I can accurately explain their model.
In that worldview, the problem is that people have all these maladaptive impulses, self-regulation deficits, profoundly miscalibrated psychological sensitivities, and cognitive biases all highly ill-suited to the modern environment. And so they often -DON'T- respond correctly to the incentives they face, leading them to make all kinds of bad decisions they regret, and making them vulnerable to sophisticate firms trying to exploit these weaknesses to whatever extent they can get away with, which leads to profit-opportunities in negative-sum games that are in their nature antisocial.
From that perspective, not all "incentives" or "costs and benefits" are created equally. One's accountant may try to measure them all in the same monetary units. But to the individual trying to make a decision, they all have a kind of decision-distorting "force multiplier" coefficient in from of them, representing how over or under-weighted they are experienced in terms of how psychologically and behaviorally compelling they seem.
So, you can end up in the situation in which a decision has benefits of +100 and costs of -10, but the costs are -FELT- as if they have been amplified by a force multiplier of 20, and so the individual doesn't make the "right" decision according to any objective measure of the incentives he faces.
That's the special factor that differentiates 'friction' from 'incentives' in Nudge parlance. A nudge can be the attempt to reduce bad friction to make it easier to make the right (incentives-based) decision that one wouldn't ordinarily make, given the whole context of how the choice is presented. Or it can be the introduction of good friction to make it seem harder to make a bad decision that a person with particular psychological vulnerabilities will find it hard to avoid making.
So, let's say you wanted to place a sports bet with expected financial cost of -$1,000, multiplier of 1, and expected addictive-dopamine-hit benefit of +$1,100, multiplier of 1. But there is another cost, which is the annoyance factor of doing it, which has a multiplier of 50. The annoyance cost of placing the bet on your smartphone is -$1, and so you'll still make the bad bet. And you'll make that bad bet over, and over, and over. If I say you must actually walk into a casino to place the bet, the annoyance cost goes up to $-10, and you won't bother, not the first time, and not ever. That's the kind of friction they mean.
These force multipliers are why using the word 'friction' is not reducible (in their framework) to a mere attempt to name a region of a continuous spectrum that includes 'incentives', like naming wavelengths near 470 nanometers "blue".
Ok, with that explanation out of the way, we can step back a bit and ask whether any of this really makes any sense - or accords with the modal historical view and common sense about the human condition - and to what extent these terms are actually useful on the one hand or reflect hopeless efforts to square a circle and invent unreal constructs avoid philosophical self-contradiction ("libertarian paternalism") and so end up mostly euphemisms and signifiers of belonging to the educated intellectual class.
To make a long story short, this is kind of language educated intellectuals use to say "This is very common and very harmful vice and the government should prohibit commerce in it." But they don't want to just say it like that, because it sounds traditionalist and conservative and vaguely old-style religious-ish - almost like all those old bible thumpers (and thoughts about behavior and governance going back at least to the beginning of records of thoughts) may have actually been right about a thing or two - and because any perceived concession to or endorsement of which would immediately be status-lowering. So, to get around this, they can reboot all that old-school thinking and use fancy new technical terminology and pretend they aren't just saying we need bans on sins.
That is, to an extent a governing authority cannot accurately identify who has or doesn't have a particular susceptibility, and cannot enforce a different law to each individual according to his needs for paternalism, that a crude, blanket prohibition on everyone is, at least in some case, the least worst option, and that for the people harmed by this legal regime who are losing what for them is a very valuable harmless pleasure, one can only ask for them to summon their public spirit and make this sacrifice for the sake of the greater good, and indeed, as part of a solution to a coordination problem, a higher quality of life and quality of community, which is also for their own good.
If you want to live in a good neighborhood, it helps to tolerate the prevention of things which tend to tempt your good neighbors into becoming bad neighbors.