Ignorance is strength

oops, close italics.

Yes but are there any serious right wing thinkers? I mean, way back in the day you had Nietzsche and Heidegger, although these are not the sort of thinkers, to put it mildly, who tend to prop up the copies of Ayn Rand novels on Republican bookshelves nowadays.

More recently you had Friedman, Hayek etc, (Quine in philosophy, although his ‘right-wingness’, so to speak, was never essential to his appeal). But who is there more recently? Whatever one might think of Hayek he was not a fraud or a charlatan, accusations that can be made, with varying degrees of accuracy, at almost all of the current crop of ‘righties’. As you point out, anyone with any pretensions to seriousness (John Gray, as one example, Andrew Sullivan as another) has bailed out. Those who have remained or moved to the Right (Christopher Hitchens is the oustanding example) are no longer taken seriously by thoughtful people.

So who is there to talk to?

‘… since 1995, movement conservatism and its new ally, Fox News, haven’t actually accomplished anything very impressive beyond improving the egos of some right-leaning pundits and making a lot of money.’

Well if you are a right leaning pundit and/or someone who made a lot of money, that’s actually extremely impressive.

The ego/self-esteem aspect should not be under-estimated. Conservatives generally favour strong hierarchies and the maintenance of order through authoritarian government. Invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, sanctioning Iran, sending predators to blow away perceived enemies in Yemen and Pakistan, putting illegal immigrants in their place, giving liberals the finger by illegal wiretapping and detention without trial …. measures like these just make them feel good dammit.

What more can you ask from government than going to bed every night knowing the liberal scum are still unhappy ?

“In the 1990s they were triumphant, and with some justification. The Soviet Union had collapsed.”

How is this the case? The Soviet Union collapsed from the burdens of its own internal contradictions and 40 years of rivalry with the USA and its allies. The cornerstone of American foreign policy towards the Soviet Union was the Truman containment policy, erected by a solidly liberal administration. Your statement implicitly concedes the reality of the conservative-Republican view of Reagan bludgeoning the Soviet Union to death. This is not accepted by any creditable historian, even those (John Lewis Gaddis) of a somewhat conservative bent. The fall of the Soviet Union was an enormous political windfall for the Republican Party, and one they did little to deserve.

A blog that occasionally bans commentators from the right is probably not the best place to opine about the problems of agnotology/epistemic closure. Just sayin’ . . .

David @9 – apparently you didn’t read the bit about there not being any reason to even pretend to engage such folks in honest debate. Especially with comments like yours . .

Addendum: It’s true that the right wing is losing the battle for hearts and minds in a lot of ways. But the whole point of hegemony is that you don’t have to care about that.

I disapprove of contractions in serious discourse. We have standards. Please use the full, uncontracted phrase in the future, rather than ‘d’oh.’ It almost sounds like something from a cartoon.

ice

Gene: yes, in my experience as well, Opus Dei members are generally kind, sensible, and serious. Because the organization was born and first flourished in the Spanish-speaking world, and is still strongest there, Hispanics are comfortable with it and vice versa.

Ideologically, though, it certainly is close to the evangelical Right. They do not accept strict separation of church and state, would definitely outlaw abortion, contraception, and probably even divorce, would censor textbooks at least as heavily as the Texas school board, would not permit sex education in public schools, and in general have not advanced an inch beyond Joseph de Maistre or the Council of Trent.

Another notable difference between Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin on one side and Michael Moore and John Stewart on the other is that Moore and Stewart are honest. One of the things that all conservatives think they know is that Moore’s documentaries are full of false claims. However, they can’t point to any. Recall Moore vs Gupta’s fact check on CNN. Do you really think that if Gupta tried to fact check Limbaugh, the one clear error of fact discovered in the end would be a false claim by Gupta about what Limbaugh had said ? The rest of the alleged fact check was presenting counter arguments as if they were proof of factual errors. Gupta could argue that Sicko wasn’t
fair and balanced, but he found no errors at all (while making a gross errof and accusing Moore of covering up a fact which was projected on the big screen by Moore and blocked by the CNN logo on the little screen by CNN claiming that Moore had hidden it). Here is an article in which CNN admits to two factual errors and yet says that facts are no big deal http://tinyurl.com/2uwv8re. I think to see that one of those errors was the only claim that Moore had made a factual error in Sicko, it is best to watch the video http://tinyurl.com/3bdru6
. Also Krugman’s take is worth a look as usual http://tinyurl.com/84uskm.

After that episode, to compare Moore’s honest to the standards of integrity of CNN is already libelous. To compare him to Limbaugh is absurd. Yet you implicitly concede that he is like Limbaugh. He is like Limbaugh in manner and he profits by appealing to a huge audience. However, he is honest and a source of reliable facts — definitely more reliable than Gupta anyway. Oh and after that Obama considered Gupta for surgeon general proving your point which is, however, not a tenth of it.

I think much more highly of Stewart than Moore. He is very entertaining. However, he is much more worthy of consideration as a serious thinker than say Douthat.

In your post telling us to buck up and stop conceding too much, you concede much too much.

I (don’t)blush to admit that when I started reading the post I had neither any idea what “agnotology” means nor indeed any inkling that there was such a word.
Elsewhere I have objected to the overuse of “epistemic” and I beg you don’t agnotize me. You wouldn’t like me when I’m agnotized.

Reported on Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (though not as an instance of bad science): Nyhan and Reifler (2010) gave conservatives information about Iraq and WMDs. Half of the subjects were told that the claim that there were WMDs in Iraq had been proved false, giving details about the Duelfer Report. The subjects were then asked whether there were WMDs in Iraq. Those who had been presented with the claim, backed up by reliable sources, that there were no WMDs in Iraq were more likely to say that there WMDs).

@20 Neal

Those who had been presented with the claim, backed up by reliable sources, that there were no WMDs in Iraq were more likely to say that there WMDs).

Good lord, don’t keep us in the dark! Is the missing word were or weren’t?

I’m betting on were.

JQ: The discussions here and elsewhere on agnotology/epistemic closure have established the existence of a set of mechanisms on the right[1] for propagating ignorance and protecting it against factual refutation.

Has it? There undoubtedly is such a set of mechanisms, but those threads didn’t improve my understanding of them at all. They were so heatedly adversarial that al course.

Retreat into defensive dogmatism is a natural reaction to the right’s flagrant abuse of fact and argument, but it may not be the best approach to public debate: until more headway has been made in understanding agnotogenesis on the right – and more widely – it’s hard to say, I’d have thought. I think this, from Lee A. Arnold @131 in the Agnotology followup thread, is apt:

in one part, the Left believes that it should not have to fight, because its ideas really ought to be self-evident. And in the other part, the Left believes that it is in a losing battle…The Right never makes this mistake. The Right understands that it is a class war and that it is continuous. They will even use easy falsehoods to try to win it. The Left is lazy and isn’t ready to fight. The Left does not appear to understand that the fight is almost entirely rhetorical. And the Left doesn’t know what is necessary in a rhetorical fight; they were taught that rhetoric is a lesser art. They feel helpless—yet engaging in politics is beneath them.

If one is to fight, the question is how to do it: earnest and painstaking engagement and advocacy is appealing; cursory ridicule may be effective in shaming those opponents capable of shame. A combination of both ought not to be impossible given a modicum of wit and hard work, given that the opposition’s position is so ridiculous to start with.

Another aspect of this question is the extent to which one follows the right in using misrepresentation or obfuscation of various kinds and degrees from deliberate whole-cloth falsehoods, through the more marginal, gap-papering, sort of noble-cause (of course!) corruption, to the ‘fours legs good’ style of simplification.

A fight-agnotopoiesis-with-agnotopoiesis strategy would explain and possibly justify the uncompromising, polarised response to the so-called ‘climategate’ revelations in those threads: credence in the integrity of the science is to be maintained at a strict, though absurd, 100%. Anything less is a hostage to the deniers and could even lead to back-sliding in one’s own camp.

This approach also presumably underlies the forceful rhetoric of Rich Puchalsky @230 about those from the left who responded to the the previous post:

…boring, vain, narcissistic, wrong, and in general the kind of person who would diss people on their supposed side for no good reason. It surely fills me with confidence, knowing that these people have my back.

This whole thing really isn’t necessary—that’s the lesson I wish that people would take away for next time. It is not necessary for the left to prove that they are fairer than anyone else and to form a circular firing squad to come up with ways in which we are supposedly wrong in order to prove our fairness, or to prove our individual freedom from supposed leftist dogma. It’s not something that marks you as someone who is taking politics seriously. On the contrary, it marks you as being a prat.
Perhaps ‘racist’ could be added as an additional incentive to hold the line?

There is a potential problem: adopting the oppositions’ dogmatic tactics obviously entails adopting its proneness to agnosis and BS. Those not cowed by that kind of doxastic policing, furthermore, are likely to infer that there is something to hide – and probably to overestimate or exaggerate the significance of the corruption involved.

For example, the behaviour of the UEA climate guys certainly casts some small degree of doubt on the integrity of their science in general.

To maintain the staunch line that there was nothing dodgy going on at all avoids making a concession which would undoubtedly be pounced on by the opposition.

On the other hand, taking the high moral ground and making the effort to explain that in the context of the relevant cost-benefit calculation, the small decrease in credibility has no practical consequence would avoid the need to adopt an ultimately unconvincing position which if discerned is likely to damage one’s case.

I suspect the latter approach might be better (I certainly find it more congenial), since it can actually change peoples’ minds rather than simply holding the line. That of course depends where the balance of power is to start with, the extent to which it is possible to change the minds of opponents or ‘floaters’, and the degree to which those on one;s own team can be relied up on to close ranks, ingenuously or not. I suppose there might also be general policies or rules that could affect one’s decision whether to adopt a ‘noble-cause corruption’ approach.

Actually, on second thoughts, that’s all wrong, a total misrepresentation and entirely wrongheaded. (Say no more, a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat, etc.)

The results sketched by Magistra seem for the most part intuitively understandable, which is a good thing since I tend to regard these kinds of models as abductive rather than inductive: the models are never anywhere near adequate (they are not simulations), so an initially surprising result might either be an artefact or provide a real insight, and therefore needs to be understood rather than taken as data. The 17% magic number, for example, might go either way AFAICT so far.

The setup:

One binary proposition, everyone has an opinion.

A population consisting of some of 3 kinds of subject: majoritarian (adopts local majority view), contrarian (adopts {local} minority view), dogmatist (never changes).

An initial distribution is generated.

Random groupings of subjects are formed, and views changed among its members according to type.

Presumably this is iterated until a stable distribution (at micro- or macro lebvel) appears to have been arrived at.

Findings/expectations:
1. A population containing all majoritarians obviously tends to converge to the view with the initial majority.

2. (A population containing only contrarians, I would think, tends to work in favour of minority views and against majorities, the salient result being a 50-50 split, which is presumably the only one which can be stable.)

3. With Ms + a sufficiently small proportion of Cs, the Cs will tend to form a stable minority, which again seems intuitive.

3a. But with a suffiently large proportion of Cs, the result converges to the 50-50 distribution which I assume would be the All-C result. I can picture one way this might work with a small number of Ms: basically they are a minor perturbing influence to the dominant C-phenomenon of convergence to 50-50, and the stable result occurs just when the 50-50 distribution is reached and there is nothing to change either majoritarians’ or contrarians’ views. How the cases with, say, equal numbers of Ms and Cs, or other significant mixes would work I can’t quite see.

4. Dogmatists seem more simple. An all-dogmatist ditribution would be stable.

5. Evenly balanced Ds on each side, among a population of Ms, would presumably cancel out, allowing the 50-50 result to be reached.

6. A small enough number of Ds on one side would presumably slow or accelerate the process of majoritarian convergence (depending on whether the Ds are aligned with the initial majority.

6a. A large enough proportion of Ds, all on one side, would presumably dominate and drive majoritarians to agree with them, since if the D’s position gets a majority in any local grouping, it will ratchet up the Ds’ opinion

Going from Magistra’s summary, the magic 17% comes in to specify a threshhold relevant to 3/3a and 6/6a. To what extent this is a coincidence, and whether either instance of the 17% figure is artefactual (perhaps something to do with the size of groupings – though that doesnlt seem likely) rather than some naturally significant quantity, I dunno.

Better look at the paper I suppose…

Garymar,
you win the bet.

And here’s Tim Wilkinson again. Complete with his “You’re asking for so much dogmatic purity that you don’t want me to repeat false right-wing talking points. Oh dear me!”

Here’s something that Tim wrote:
“For example, the behaviour of the UEA climate guys certainly casts some small degree of doubt on the integrity of their science in general.”

What exact behavior do you think casts some doubt on the accuracy of their science? Please be specific, keeping in mind that multiple investigations cleared them of everything except possible FOIA foot-dragging, complicated by the uncertain FOIA status of their data. Surely you must have something serious in mind. I mean, acting with bad integrity is about the worst thing a scientist can do.

I’m not dogmatically defending the left here. I’m asking you to back up a serious accusation that you’ve made. Back it up with something solid or you deserve everything I’m going to say about you.

“There is a potential problem: adopting the oppositions’ dogmatic tactics obviously entails adopting its proneness to agnosis and BS. ”

Since you quoted me as an example, note that I didn’t tell people to believe in anything that wasn’t true. I told them something that should be obvious: people who diss people who are supposedly on the same side for no good reason are jerks. That’s a value judgement, not a false claim.

Presumably John Quiggin is still of the opinion that he and others of his ilk should talk to some who disagree. But I suspect he is lying to himself. Can we expect future posts in which he engages economists at, for example, the Levy Institute, New School, University of Massachusetts, and University of Kansas City at Missouri? Such Australian economists as Bill Mitchell, Geoff Harcourt, and Steve Keen?

It would help if I had written the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Graham White is another Australian economist who I find of interest. I only know your work from what bits I read on the Internet, and probably not all of that.

“irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

One could not hope for a more apt description of Quiggin’s periodic rantings.

Come November we’ll see who is winning the left/right argument. Somehow I doubt there’ll be a whole lot of tax-and-spend liberals left. But hey, self-anointed thought-leaders of the left: please do keep those shriveled, bitter minds closed. Not that anyone listens to you anyway, but at least that way you’re guaranteed to have zero influence until well-and-truly flattened by the oncoming bus.