Epistemic Sunk Costs and the Extraordinary, Populist Delusions of Crowds?

Plato didn’t have the experience of video games that we do, so the cave in the Republic is presumably an allegory, about how we’re taken in by lies told by politicians.

The idea that you could really build a technology that keeps everyone deceived is more of a modern SF thing. One lesson of the Internet is that it doesn’t need to be full imersive VR. Step 1: replace face-to-face communication with text, so you no longer know if the “person” you’re talking to is a Foreign agent, or even an AI. Step 2: add lots of people who are being paid to lie, or even lots of AIs. The usual social psychology processes do the rest.

IMHO, it’s just that modern day right leaning populism needs to be logically inconsistent AND to have every week a new scapegoat, be it North Korea or Canada.

Because the purpose of right leaning populism is to screw workers even more, but while pretending that they are fighting the “real” enemies of the working class, no they can’t be all that consistent, they need a new enemy every 2 weeks, but they can look very “authentic”.

Why do people believe in such transparent bull? The only explanation is that people want to believe. Why do people want to believe? Because other explanations of reality are offensive, or don’t offer better solutions, or the solutions are too difficult and far in the future, or the solutions would work for other people but not for me, etc.

Will this end well? I doubt it.

You’re not saying anything here that many people haven’t already said, John, but you’re saying it from an angle that I haven’t seen before. Really excellent. Kudos!

Murali @1: that’s a great insight into “credo quia absurdum” in early Christianity. There had to be an absurdity in it for social reasons.

From the Origins of Totalitarianism:

“A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that the audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

Trumpism has a long way to go to equal the record of the Roman Catholic Church in successfully willing the suspension of disbelief. Then again the Church had something for everyone, and not all of it either insubstantial or evil. With apologies for making this the third comment in a row with a Latin tagline, when you’re short of panem, it stands to reason that the circenses have got to be pretty spectacular. Fake news and gold vestments will do the trick, it seems, at least for a while.

This really makes a whole lot of sense to me, although I’m not sure it explains one element of Trump’s hard-core base: the evangelical Christians. Which is to say: I’m sure there are evangelical Christians, just as there are people in all walks of life, who have the epistemic flexibility to believe 2+2=5 the way you argue in this post. But surely by and large adherence to the truth is an important cornerstone of being evangelical Christian. I mean: their truth isn’t my truth, but neither is it the sort of endlessly flexible whatever-the-fuhrer-says quantity you talking about in this post. Maybe Pence is a massive hypocrite, but say he’s not, say he genuinely in-his-heart believes that he has a God-ordered duty to pay witness to the truth even unto death (along with the way and the light): how does he serve a leader like Trump without simply shredding his religious conscience?

I daresay I’m being naïve even asking this.

Please re-title this post “Epistemic Ratchets”!

Sorry for the double post. For some reason my browser has stopped confirming a successful post by showing it immediately, albeit with the usual your comment is awaiting moderation. caption. After hitting the Submit button, my comment simply vanished.

Chalk it up to the curse of software updates with unintended consequences, Internet gremlins, who knows what? The differences in the two versions do show, though, the subtle landslides of memory, the sudden swerves of intention, the arbitrariness of editing decisions, etc., so maybe the outcome wasn’t so bad after all. Unanticipated, like so many of the aftereffects of our Internet discourse are, but perhaps not as horrifying as some.

I think you are ascribing a model of presidential conduct to Trump supporters that many of them do not adhere to, in a strong sense, namely that “The President should not be ridiculous.” I have heard Trump supporters respond to this or that bit of zaniness not by saying specifically that it is right, but that “he’s keeping his promise to be a different kind of president.” Carrying himself like a pro wrestler is, I think, something admirable to some supporters. The “like it is” that he tells it could be more meta, attitudinal rather than factual.

It’s not necessary to believe anything Trump says to appreciate that he’s trying to get a better trade deal.

Meanwhile, you apparently want us to believe that all Trump supporters are mind numbed cultists.

Stephen @ 19 – I’d say that Monboit is confused both as to how democracy works and how treaties work. The US, Canada, and Mexico could each pull out of NAFTA the same way they entered – by normal democratic legislation. This is the same for all normal laws. There’s no need for laws to “sunset” to be democratic – the new generation is able to change them just like the old did. The idea that democracy requires starting over all the time is just a confusion. (I think it’s also a bad idea, but that’s beside the point that it’s a confusion about the nature of democracy.) Now, maybe you say that, say, Canada wants the benefit of part of NAFTA, but not all of it, and there’s no good way to easily change part of it. That’s right! But in the case of any complex agreement with others, why should one party get to choose the parts it wants to comply with? And, in fact, it’s possible for a country to decide it won’t comply with part of the agreement – it just has to be willing to pay for it. That seems reasonable – why should it get the benefit but not have the burden?

The US (and Canada, and Mexico…) has done just this several times. NAFTA required the US to give access to Mexican truckers. The US didn’t want to – perhaps for protectionist reasons, but there are legitimate ones, too (safety and inspection standards on trucks are different.) An arbitration tribunal, rightly, found the US in violation. This allowed Mexico to put in place countervailing tariffs, which it did. The US wanted a certain right, and had to pay for it. That’s just how bargains work, and there’s nothing undemocratic about that. Monboit is just fundamentally confused. And Trump is, of course, even worse.

Almost everybody interested in US politics has a huge sunk interest in believing that Trump knows what he’s doing. This is true whether you are in the camp that believes he is right in the things he says, or you are in the camp that sees him as some sort of criminal mastermind. Nobody can afford losing the sunk cost entailed by admitting that he’s just demented.

Or at least they can’t keep that admission in focus long enough to act on it. It’s perfectly obvious that he’s an idiot. Take this case as an example. Whatever else is going on here with casting Trudeau as a dairy products rustler or foister or whatever, it’s hard to see how it serves Trump any purpose. In that it joins the inaugural crowd size thing, and the Comey firing, etc, etc. Trump pulls off these quadruple back flips of ridiculous all the time, and yes, one question is how he gets away with them. But isn’t the deeper question, why does he bother? The obvious answer is that it’s no bother at all. He really is disconnected from reality.

The rest of us fall in line, or rather, behind either the pro-Trump or the anti-Trump line, because the US presidency is about the most coveted prize in the known universe. Battalions of relentless strivers spend decades in pursuit of it, fighting their endless polemic campaigns over ideological ground so fought over that only completely dead and artificial concepts remain standing to fight over, idealets like The Western Alliance, or Free Trade, or Securing the Border. or a Pathway to Citizenship. Only people of unusual work ethic and resolve and at least animal cunning could possible come even close to the brass ring they all fight over. That Trump actually won has to mean that he knows what he’s doing even more than everyone else in this highly motivated and talented field.

You and I may think that his mastery is satanic, a knowledge of the dark arts of manipulation, and folks on the other side may imagine that he has succeeded because of his singular insight and ability to cut through the BS to see the real issues underneath.

I actually think his followers are closer to the truth, though fatally only half right. It’s not that he cuts through the BS because he sees any underlying realities. He just doesn’t care about any of the usual pieties and fake issues we’ve let US politics devolve into arguing over, and calls BS on all of it. Why should he prep for a meeting with Rocketman? His briefers would just repeat conventional drivel nonsense about non-issues. Enough of the electorate is similarly disgusted with the usual relentless strivers that they decided to try something novel at the last election, someone who is as dismissive as they are of the whole lot of BS the relentless strivers excel only at disputing.

Trump won because he is demented, and doesn’t live in a world in which the Western Alliance, or NAFTA, or any of the rest of it, has any point of contact.

RH Fabian

It’s possible that medieval alchemists were sincerely trying to transmute base metals into gold; but what they were doing could not possibly work whether they were sincere or not.

So even if Trump is sincerely trying to get a better trade deal, well …

Nia Psaka

People ridiculed Eisenhower and Kennedy as well. Americans have been ridiculing their Presidents all the way back to Washington.

Just not enough, that’s all.

William Timberman

The change is not browser-specific.

J-D @ 30 (06.14.18 at 1:16 am)

Nice to know, thanks. As probably seems obvious, I haven’t commented for a while. (I think I liked the oldfunctionality better, though, unless it screwed up the comment numbering sequence or something.) Ah, well, none of my concern, really, now that I’ve been clued as to what’s what. Thanks again.

I was struck by the inversion of Orwell’s basic story in the recent accounts of the two staff who tape Trump’s documents back together. In 1984 Winston’s job is getting documentary evidence of contradictory facts and destroying it irrevocably, to make Big Brother’s propaganda task easier. In 2018, these two people’s job was restoring documentary evidence that Big Brother had destroyed, in order to make (I guess) everyone else’s job of seeing through propaganda easier. And they still failed, and still got sacked. We’re so far lost in the Upside Down that even 1984 isn’t a useful guide.

I think Monbiot’s trade article was deeply wrong. As others say, you can pull out by normal democratic means so you don’t need to sunset it. Also he cites a bunch of examples of some trade courts being used to override national laws and/or get compensation, but all his examples are of American companies abusing the law to frustrate Canadian or Mexican rules. Presumably if Canada and Mexico think that’s so bad, they can withdraw from the treaty; they don’t, so presumably they see bigger benefits to it. Furthermore, we should all by now be so comfortable with the idea that American capitalist entities are uniquely nasty, that we should be thinking there is no trade deal we could negotiate with the US that wouldn’t end up with the same abusive behavior. Canada and Mexico obviously can’t reform US politics, so it doesn’t seem like an anti-trade agenda is really going to help them. They’ll just lose the trade, but American companies will still behave badly in Canadian and Mexican markets.

The problem is simply that in every major international political issue facing the world right now, America is the problem. We have no solution to that problem until Americans grow up.

@28
”Enough of the electorate is similarly disgusted with the usual relentless strivers that they decided to try something novel at the last election, someone who is as dismissive as they are of the whole lot of BS the relentless strivers excel only at disputing”

but that still is not a good enough reason that the ”something novel” has to be a ”a-hole”?

”Something novel” could be ”a better solution”?

And why do – we – lately – always pick the most self-destructive – self-defeating and utmost suicidal solution for our (political) problems?

It’s not funny jumping off the cliff.
-(and otherwise what De Niro said!)

I keep returning to Adorno on this theme: for example, “Hitler was liked, not in spite of his cheap antics but just because of them, because of his false tones and his clowning.” That is to say, the truth content of most of these statements is entirely besides the point, and potential ridicule is nothing to be scared of.

@36,

Well, a-hole is exactly what people disgusted with messaging want. They want someone who gaffes left and right, offends people, because what has them disgusted is politicians afraid to offend anybody.

Ds, for example, no matter how much they may incline towards helping the undocumented, after they finish talking about a pathway to citizenship, always throw in that they are also for “securing our borders”. That’s just standard in the completely artificial world we’ve let political discourse become. As a D, you always throw in the “securing our borders” thing because there may be some voters out there not paying enough attention to know that if they’re Hispanophobes they should be voting R, and maybe they’ll vote for us if we throw them that line about securing the border. Also, of course, “securing our borders” is in there as a sop to people worried that immigrants will steal their jobs. Elections are often decided by <0.5%, so you can't afford clarity when obfuscation might bring in 2 or 3 votes from people who think that it's the Ds who are the racists on immigration, or that you can have your cake and eat it too (not face greater competition for jobs because those Ds managed to secure the borders even as they let the undocumented already here have citizenship) and you end up winning by 2 or 3 votes.

Most voters have their own row to hoe, engagement in making a living, in family, etc., that keeps them from paying enough attention to public policy to be able to sort out these always complex matters. But we're all quite familiar with being lied to and BSed at. The very voters least able to afford the time to understand public policy are disproportionally likely to be the victims of the system now in place, and so both the most motivated to anger at that system, and the most likely to have experienced in their own lives getting screwed by relentless striver BS spewers much like those conventional politicians. It's hard to understand the nuances and ramifications of immigration policy, but easy to see that someone who tells you they are for both a pathway to citizenship and securing our borders, is BSing you, is treating you like an idiot.

These people want to destroy the system, but they are only able to judge novelty in terms of style, because our political discourse systematically obfuscates substance. Anti-politicians like Trump and Palin draw on populist rage at a corrupt system, and voters who agree that the system is corrupt see that voting for these people will bring down the system. But these anti-politicians aren't actual populists who have any sort of novel system they plan to build in place of the system they are destroying. No novelty in public policy from Trump, no novelty in ends, just novelty in means, someone who will destroy the old system rather than behave in office as just another BSer continuing the status quo.

Maybe this sawed-off populism will fizzle, and we'll go back to the status quo of conventional politicians of the two artificial parties facing off in their fake struggle with each other, a struggle from which nothing ever issues except perpetuation of the status quo. But maybe the ancien regime is doomed, and the wreckers will bring it down. But, sure, these wreckers, Trump and Palin and the Rs in general, have not the first clue what to build in place of the old system. Novelty of means, but they have no idea what ends to aim for.

I think Glen Tomkins is correct that there are three possible choices to make with respect to Trump. Trump is either Lord, Liar, or Lunatic.

I don’t know, but I’d suggest that Trump voters take all of Trump’s statements on a meta level. That is the statements may be true, they may (more likely) be false, but their truth value is unimportant. Trump is saying these things not because he believes them, or wants you to believe them, but because he thinks that saying them improves his bargaining position.

I think Trump’s speech is a *perfect* counterexample to the theory that the meaning of a statement is what you make other people believe when they hear it.

https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1005861357080731648

Fake Dave 06.14.18 at 11:05 am @ 39 —
Plus, as I said, there’s doublethink. All this fulminating about Trump’s inconsistencies and illogic — it’s not beating a dead horse, it’s beating a fake horse. Meanwhile Trump remains the person who is Doing Something.

There’s a great deal to be analysed on Trump, his angry supporters, and his cowardly Congressional enablers, but putting it aside for one specific point: both his supporters and his detractors do not understand trade. Trump himself does not appear to understand it. The conversation at the G7 meeting probably went something like this: Trump says, “Canada, why do you have such big dairy tariffs?” and Trudeau says, “You protect US dairy even more than we protect ours — almost every country protects their dairy industry, and for good reasons too — only the US protects dairy by trade quotas, not tariffs.” So then Trump is caught not knowing anything (once again), and he blurts out, “Um, duh, so let’s get rid of all tariffs and protections” with that typical blank look on his face. So then the rest of them all stand around the table, staring back at the ridiculous fool.  See the instantly epochal photo. Because the US and its allies have been reducing tariffs for decades slowly without suddenly disrupting domestic arrangements and supply chains and Trump is the only one at that meeting who doesn’t know this. But then, neither do his supporters (nor his detractors).

Meanwhile, you apparently want us to believe that all Trump supporters are mind numbed cultists.

Looking at his bloggy oevre over a period of years, Professor Holbo appears to be working on a taxonomy of the epistemically impaired. I’d bet money that at some point, he has dealt with the rhetorical advantages that some derive from inventing persecution where none exists, as Fabian does here. It’s a common enough maneuver.

But, in the interest of fully developing that taxonomy, I wonder if the professor has noted that this advantage is obtained even when the perceived insult is obviously accurate.

Charles Murray is, definitionally, a racist. (He claims black people are intrinsically intellectually inferior to white people. He literally got caught burning a cross.) But he is a master of rhetorical jiu jitsu, and has emerged victorious by turning this accurate description against his attacker. “How dare you say such a horrible thing about me.”

Trump does the same thing, as do many of his supporters.

Glen Tomkins

Well, a-hole is exactly what people disgusted with messaging want. They want someone who gaffes left and right, offends people, because what has them disgusted is politicians afraid to offend anybody.

So you’re telling us that what they’re looking for is somebody who is not afraid to offend people by describing them as, oh, let’s say, for example, ‘deplorables’? Hold on just a minute …

Z, it is trivially obvious that the supposedly false statement “NAFTA is good for the majority of people” is different to the definitely false statement “that was not me on the Hollywood Access tape.” It is trivially obvious that the supposedly false statement “the EU is ruled democratically” is different to the definitely false statement “we enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history.” When you pretend that these kinds of debatable political positions are the same, you don’t help yourself at all, and you don’t help the working class people you want to help. They’re categorically different kinds of bullshit, and treating them the same renders you helpless to understand what is happening.

It’s also bullshit that people voted for trump because they were sick of political insiders. They voted for Trump because he’s a racist arsehole. Until you get that through your skull, you’re analyzing the wrong voters and the wrong problem.

christian h they are not just wrong, but recognisably so – they do not conform to the common sense out there

My point is, I think, that this statement relies on a well-defined notion of common sense, and perhaps a subject to the verb recognize (“recognizably” by whom?). In a left/right (or R/D) spectrum, this common sense is somewhat well-defined in practice as the intellectual space carved around the wide center (and in particularly tends to be closely related to élite concerns). But in a tripartite political system, common sense may not really exist or (which is the same) be group-dependent. If I remember correctly your political positions here these last years, you and I might recognize as absurd many things which are common sense for the editorial page of the NYT, people there might recognize as absurd typical Trumpist concerns or the statement that he won the popular vote and typical faithful Trump voters surely find absurd our core beliefs. In all likelihood, we are all correct in these evaluations.

To take your concrete example, I don’t think you can count as common sense the idea that the US gets along well with Canada among the Trump electorate, an electorate which was electrified by Trump’s speech on how the US was humiliated by everyone and was getting “bad deal” everywhere, or the simple idea that a G7 summit should involve a minimal measure of diplomacy among those who rallied around Put America First.

In a sense, I could be more receptive to John’s argument with respect to consistency (that is Trump voters were praising Trump when he threatened North Korea with annihilation then praised him when he gave it unprecedented international recognition), but even there, I think my puzzlement simply stems from my misunderstanding of the priorities of these people. Probably, there are issues I don’t care about and about which my favorite political parties could probably flip-flop all they want with me not minding too much. It’s probably the same for them with North Korea, as long as Trump kicks out immigrants and insults liberal elite (someone like Ann Coulter, for instance, bitterly criticizes the Trump administration for caring too much about international affairs).

Further to my 52, I want to propose that making a truthful accusation is often correctly regarded as unwise and offensive, whereas it is less of a problem if the same accusation is false — and no problem at all if your accusation is irrelevant and/or absurd.

Here’s how it works: When we say “Trump is a racist,” we are typically informed by the media and by Trump supporters — with considerable justification — that this is a grievous insult to Trump voters, who will be alienated from our point of view. But when it was said that “Obama is a racist,” literally nobody thought this was an important insult to Obama voters.

Let’s take it a step further into outright lunacy. Let’s say “Obama is a Muslim” or “Obama was born in Kenya.” No Obama supporter said: “I am offended at your implicit accusation that I would vote for someone who is lying about his religion or birthplace.”

(And of course, this accusation has the benefit of being irrelevant, too. There’s actually nothing wrong with being a Muslim or a Kenyan. So no harm, no foul.)

Let’s look at Fabian @22 again:

Meanwhile, you apparently want us to believe that all Trump supporters are mind numbed cultists.

This accusation was made about Obama voters frequently (Obama voters were mocked for considering him to be the Messiah, or “The One.” Remember that?). I was an Obama voter. There are probably others here. Was anybody personally offended by that? Me, I thought it was just silly.

And yet, we all understand that Fabian was presenting this as a powerful insult. I leave it as an exercise for the reader why Trump voters are offended in a way that Obama voters were not.

J-D@54:
So you’re telling us that what they’re looking for is somebody who is not afraid to offend people by describing them as, oh, let’s say, for example, ‘deplorables’? Hold on just a minute …

But of course that’s looking at things wrong. Weak-willed, thin-skinned, navel-gazing snowflakes get offended. Tough-minded realists who believe in truth and justice feel righteous and deserving outrage at despicable, cowardly lies and slanders.

At this point in the game, the basic tenets of American conservatism — white supremacy, patriarchy, and homophobia — are deeply, profoundly stupid. There are just too many successful counterexamples constantly being given.

There’s only one way to stay conservative, and that’s to embrace being stupid. And so Trump is the man for the time.

@64

What’s stupid, per se, about white supremacy, assuming you happen to be white?

Actually, what’s ‘stupid’ about patriarchy and homophobia, assuming you happen to be male and straight?

It’s like people here seem to be arguing ‘An ideology which implies one should prioritise one’s own interests over those of others is irrational’. Eh?

The idea that Trudeau, who actually looks profoundly stupid (I mean…..just look at those big vapid eyes and that stupid grin of his. There’s nothing going on behind there) is some kind of economic wizard who has some profound insight into the nature of trade denied to the rest of us (or even denied to Trump) is beyond risible, incidentally.