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On occasion, if you read blogs written by rationalists, you’ll come across posts that start with a notice about their epistemic status. This is particularly the case when such status is still fluid, i.e. the post is highly speculative. Given that this might be the most speculative post I’ve ever done, perhaps I should follow suit:
[Epistemic status: wildly speculative, mixes religion, science, and neurology in a way that is almost certainly overly simplistic, and furthermore advances a “this explains everything” argument which obviously overlooks much of the subtlety and complexity of our moment. All that aside I think there’s something to it….]
Many things came together to create the theory I’m about to expound. And I’m hoping that if I lay these things out as sort of a foundation, that you might see the same connections I did. So let’s start with that.
I.
I just barely mentioned religion, and we might as well get that out of the way. For the non-religious out there who might be worried, I assure you that the religious element is not necessary for the rest of the argument, but there’s a specific parable I heard long ago that encapsulates what I think is one of the central insights. This parable was given in a speech all the way back in 1977, by Boyd K. Packer, an apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS/Mormon). It went something like this:
There once was a man who wanted something very much, and went into debt to get it. Under the terms of the debt, payment was due in its entirety many years later. And while the debtor didn’t entirely ignore the debt, when it eventually came due he had paid off only a small faction of it. And it was only then he realized that if he couldn’t pay the debt in full that the creditor would send him to prison. In deathly fear of being imprisoned, he pleads for mercy. In response the creditor demands justice. Both justice and mercy are important principles, but it’s clear that in this case you can’t have both, if the creditor forgives the debt, that’s merciful, but it would ignore the justice of his claim, on the other hand if the creditor throws the debtor into prison this would be just, but no one would say that it is also merciful.
Fortunately a friend of the debtor intervenes. He pays off the creditor, thus fulfilling the demands of justice, while also rescuing the debtor from prison, and thus also fulfilling the demands of mercy. In the process he restructures the debt into something the debtor can conceivably pay. (This being a religious parable the friend represents Jesus, and his paying off the debt is analogous to the way in which Jesus paid for our sins.) For our purposes I want to take away three things:
- The conflicting demands of justice and mercy.
- The need for a third party to resolve this conflict.
- The idea that mercy doesn’t eliminate the debt, but it does restructure it into something that can be paid.
The next piece in my foundation is the play Fences by August Wilson. I first saw it at the nearby Pioneer Theater a few years ago, and I remember, at the time, expecting it to be about a noble black father and his family who had been thwarted by 1950s racism. And to a certain degree it was, but the main character, Troy, was also a deeply flawed individual, and at the time I left with mixed feelings. It was hard to take the side of someone who *spoiler alert* had cheated on his utterly faithful wife, Rose, only admitted to the affair when his mistress got pregnant, refused to stop seeing his mistress even then, and finally, when his mistress died in childbirth, asked his wife to help raise a child that wasn’t hers. But then, a few weeks ago, I watched the movie adaptation with Denzel Washington as Troy and Viola Davis as Rose (btw I cannot praise the acting highly enough, they were both beyond amazing) and I finally realized that rather than marring the play, Troy’s “sins” were what made the play a masterpiece.
This realization had an interesting impact on the way I view the current BLM protests, and while I understand trying to make this connection might get me in trouble, I think it nevertheless might be an important one. That first time around I wanted Fences to be a straightforward tale of injustice, of a black family and a black father that could have been successful except for the injustice of racism. In a similar fashion I think the people protesting also see things as a straightforward case of injustice, of black families who could have been successful except for the injustice of racism. Not only is that narrative attractive, it’s simple, probably too simple, because just like the story of Troy in Fences, the story of race and racism is a complicated mix of justice and mercy, of things that should have been done much better, and other things where people did the best they could. In the play Rose knew that despite all the wrongs which had been done to her, that it was still important to keep her family together, and that justice for Troy would have meant injustice for the daughter, and so she raised the daughter of her husband’s mistress, but in the process declared to Troy, that “you’re a womanless man.” Thus mercy and justice were both served but it took the sacrifice of a third person.
Unfortunately, no straightforward policy recommendations fall out of this observation. Though I think the need for more mercy among all the parties to the current unrest is self-evident. I also admit that it’s not entirely clear who the third party is that needs to make a sacrifice so that both justice and mercy can be served in this situation. But despite that it does serve as another point towards my claim that perfect justice is not only unattainable, but in conflict with many other important values, especially mercy.
The final piece of the foundation is a book I’m reading, The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. It’s a book about hemispheric differences within the brain, and it’s yet another one of these very dense, massive books, clocking in at nearly 600 pages, and as I alluded to I’m not done, but for the purposes of this subject McGIlchrist makes two very important points. First that hemispheric differences are real, though much more nuanced than popular culture has led us to believe. And that the increasing dominance of the left hemisphere is responsible for much of what makes Western culture unique, but also responsible for much of what ails it as well.
As I said it’s a massive and densely argued book, and I’ll get into it more in my month end round-up, but for our purposes the key difference between the two hemispheres is that the left is the half that focuses in on something, and breaks it down into parts, while the right is the half that assembles discrete things into a coherent whole. The title of the book comes from a story Nietzsche told about a spiritual master who manages a large domain, and while his concerns must be for the whole domain, and everything associated with it, he does occasionally need to focus on specific places, and urgent issues. To do this he appoints an emissary who can act in his name and go forth to deal with localized problems, or perhaps gather the knowledge the master needs. In this analogy the right brain is the master, and the left brain is the emissary, but McGilchrist contends that the emissary has usurped the authority of the master, and it’s this imbalance, this perversion of the way things should work that’s causing many of our modern problems.
It’s at this point, in an attempt to ground my theory in actual neurology, that I make my biggest conceptual leap. And believe me I’m aware that I’m doing it, but I’m hoping that you’ll at least stick with me to the end of the post before you pass judgement. That plea in place, my core observation is that we are currently suffering from an overactive drive for justice, and that at a larger level this overactive drive for justice is part of a dangerously ascendant left hemisphere. That to a certain extent we have a neurological problem. More controversially, I’m going to make the claim that it is useful to equate left hemisphere attributes to the concept of justice and right hemisphere attributes to the concept of mercy.
It’s not my intention to give a full review of McGilchrist’s book at this point. For the moment I just want to bring him in as a buttress for my theory, but in order to do that, some additional context would be helpful. McGilchrist places the start of this trend of leftward ascendence at the start of Western civilization and philosophy, especially Plato, and in bringing his book to bear, I’m not willing to go that far, but we don’t have to in order for this theory to have some predictive power. You can even imagine that the left and the right hemisphere’s are in perfect harmony up until the end of the last century, all you have to accept is that the left hemisphere is all about the specific. It’s the half of the brain that reaches out to grasp something. And my argument is that even if this “grasping” nature is unchanged since our first ancestors descended out of the trees, that modern technology, and social media in particular has led to a sky-rocketing in the number of things available to grasp. That a profusion of stories, and anecdotes, and data, and hypotheses and accusations rather than being our salvation is proving to be our doom.
II.
While the three things above proved to be the theoretical foundation of my hypothesis, the practical expression of it hit me while I was putting together my last post. For those who may have missed it, I spent nearly 5000 words examining just one tiny set of data: police officers killed since 1965 by left or right wing extremists as reported by the Anti-defamation League. It is possible that I exhausted what could be said about those numbers, but I suspect not, and even if I did, I reached no unassailable conclusion. At best I demonstrated that the ADL had incorrectly interpreted the numbers to emphasize right-wing extremism, but that was about the extent of it. So I spent 5000 words on a very focused examination of a small set of data, and ended up without much to show for it, and as I went through this laborious exercise, it hit me, data isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.
That’s a pretty bold statement, and many people are going to start by questioning not the last half of that statement but the first half, the idea that the bulk of people have an ideology driven by evidence and facts, so let’s start by tackling that. Obviously the scientific revolution happened centuries ago, but I would argue that it didn’t percolate down to the “masses” until after World War II. As just one data point, the number of people graduating from high school doubled between 1940 and 1970 going from around 40% to around 80%. As a consequence of this and other trends just about everyone absorbed some part of the scientific method, with all of its associated recommendations: backing up arguments with data, the way in which biases can influence data, etc. And not only was the importance of the scientific method impressed upon the minds of nearly everyone, more importantly, they also had revealed to them the great reward this methodology could provide. If it were followed it would spit out the (blog) Truth. And once you had the (blog) Truth, you could use it to pursue (blog) Justice! Furthermore, and most distressingly, if your Justice was based on objective, data-driven, verifiable (blog) Truth, there would be no need for mercy. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This state of things was already pretty well developed when the internet, and later social media arrived on the scene, and their advent only served to make things worse. First by creating an even greater emphasis on data and evidence. (I know that the internet seems like a cesspool of biases and baseless insults, but it’s also equally full of people challenging and/or providing evidence for every assertion.) And second by vastly increasing the amount of data available.
This is the world we live in. For what still seem like very good reasons, we have spent decades emphasizing the values of science, testing, experimentation, data, etc. And we expected this sanctification of data to lead us to an evidence based progressive and technological utopia. But it hasn’t happened and for the longest time the feeling has been that we’ve just needed to push harder. Place an even greater emphasis on evidence and rationality, but I would say that among the many “gifts” 2020 has brought us, one would have to be a realization that this approach is definitely not working. Why?
Well after reading McGilchrist, one theory would be that this whole drive is not a solution to the problem, but a symptom of it. That an emphasis on evidence, and discrete bits of data has not come about because we’re all committed scientists, but because it’s the perfect tool for an out of control left hemisphere trapped in a positive feedback loop. In other words, and I want to be very clear about this, what we’re seeing is not a failure of science but a perversion of it. Certainly the behavior we’re seeing is exactly how McGilchist describes what happens when the emissary usurps the master. From the book we read that:
- The left hemisphere offers simple answers.
- The left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right.
- The left hemisphere is not keen on taking responsibility.
- The left hemisphere is conformist, largely indifferent to discrepancies.
- The left hemisphere [possesses a] narrow focused attentional beam.
- And finally, Reductionism has become a disease, a viewpoint lacking both intellectual sophistication and emotional depth.
I assume that at this point most people would like to see these points applied to something specific. Something that’s happening right now. So let’s take that most infamous of all current conspiracy theories: QAnon.
III.
It’s possible that you are entirely unfamiliar with the QAnon theory, or that you only recently heard about it after Marjorie Taylor Greene, a supporter of the theory, won the Republican primary for Georgia’s 14th Congressional district, putting her on a probable path to win the election in November in heavily Republican Georgia. And to be clear I’m not claiming to be any kind of expert but I think I know enough about it and have interacted with enough people who believe it to explain how it fits into the framework I laid out above.
To begin with I need to start by clearing up some misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions. The most common being that the conspiracy is baseless. And before you unleash on me, allow me to explain what I mean by that. When talking about QAnon people will mention that it’s fringe, or crazy, or something else essentially synonymous with the sentence immediately following the initial description in the Wikipedia article, “No part of the theory has been shown to be based in fact.”
I fully agree with all of these statements, but the problem is that this leads people to misunderstand the phenomenon, to assume that QAnon supporters are ignoring data and evidence, when in fact it’s the opposite they’re fixated on the data and evidence. This is not to say that the evidence and data would not be more properly characterized as a collection of anecdotes, or that it fits into anything resembling a broader model of the world, or that it’s not entirely circumstantial or that the evidence doesn’t follow from the theory rather than the theory following from the evidence. But rather to say they’re fixated on data and evidence in exactly the fashion you would expect from an overactive left hemisphere after reading McGilchrist’s book. Returning to the attributes I pulled from McGilchrist’s book:
The left hemisphere offers simple answers.
The whole point of conspiracies is they offer simple answers. The idea that there’s a worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are running things, and that Trump is the only person who can stop them, is a pretty simple tale of good and evil.
The left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right.
There is a lot of uncertainty in this world, and whatever else may be said of QAnon, it’s a worldview that’s far simpler than the real one. Further it allows people to justify their support for Trump. He wasn’t the best out of two bad options, he’s the only thing standing between us and Satanic pedophiles. And voting for him was the right thing to do.
The left hemisphere is not keen on taking responsibility.
Trump has made numerous mistakes as president. With QAnon it’s easy to avoid responsibility for those mistakes because they were all in service of a much more important goal. It’s everyone else that needs to be held responsible for tolerating the worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
The left hemisphere is conformist, largely indifferent to discrepancies.
Certainly among some groups being a QAnon supporter is being a conformist, but obviously being indifferent to discrepancies is the attribute that really applies here because there are lots of discrepancies.
The left hemisphere [possesses a] narrow focused attentional beam.
This may be one of the best descriptions of what QAnon looks like that I’ve come across, it’s a narrow focused beam of attention which has all the time in the world to think about Epstein and the people who associated with him and very little time for anything that doesn’t fit the theory.
And finally, Reductionism has become a disease, a viewpoint lacking both intellectual sophistication and emotional depth.
Replace reductionism with QAnon and the statement remains just as true.
But beyond all of this, and most important for my purposes, QAnon is a search for justice. To the extent that Epstein and his many crimes serve as the kernel of QAnon, you could say that justice obviously wasn’t served. Epstein was a very, very bad dude. And while I’m not certain he didn’t kill himself (how could you be) I don’t think we can discount it either. But they have taken this kernel and allowed their left-brained thirst for justice to grow so large that it encompasses incidents and individuals who almost certainly were guilty of no more than being naive or in the wrong place at the wrong time, or maybe even nothing whatsoever. But I would still argue that justice is a huge part of it. It’s a simple theory where they end up in the position of both being the only ones who are right, and also the heroes. And in addition to bringing to justice all the pedophiles they also get to reverse the grave injustices which have been done to Trump, who really has been the target of an enormous amount of hate. How much of that hate is deserved or whether hate is ever appropriate I leave for the listener to decide.
Now, lest you think that this is only a phenomenon of extremists on the right, I would argue that if anything the list is more widely applicable to what’s currently happening on the left. At the risk of making this post ridiculously long (too late?) Let’s go through the list again and apply it to the current protests.
The left hemisphere offers simple answers.
“White Fragility” and “Systemic Racism” are all pretty simple and straightforward answers to what is actually a devilishly complex problem. To this you might add assertions like, “Race and Gender don’t exist.” A statement that simplifies things almost to the point of ridiculousness.
The left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right.
Obviously as I go through this list, the observations being made are my observations. But when I see the protesters chanting and yelling, the overwhelming impression I come away with is their absolute certainty in the justice of their cause, and their unassailable moral correctness.
The left hemisphere is not keen on taking responsibility.
George Floyd had a large amount of fentanyl in his system, but to even suggest that he might have been the tiniest bit responsible for what happened to him is essentially inconceivable. (Which is why, to be clear, I am also not suggesting that.) And in a broader context any discussion of responsibility that doesn’t involve racism by white people is also inconceivable.
The left hemisphere is conformist, largely indifferent to discrepancies.
The degree and speed to which people pledged their support to Black Lives Matter was frankly astonishing. It would be difficult to find something post 9/11 which had greater public support. Nor is there much tolerance for discrepancies, for example the inconvenient discrepancy in the narrative illustrated by the Ferguson Effect. Something I keep bringing up.
The left hemisphere [possesses a] narrow focused attentional beam.
As many people have remarked on, it was amazing how fast attention shifted from COVID to BLM. And how long that beam has been focused on a single killing, when killings of one sort or another happen nearly every hour of every day in the US.
And finally, Reductionism has become a disease, a viewpoint lacking both intellectual sophistication and emotional depth.
I believe I covered this one in my post, Things Are More Complicated Than You Think (BLM) and also several of the posts that followed it.
After applying this list to both sides, I feel like McGilchrist’s theory has a lot of explanatory power. That people are looking at the data and evidence, but in a monomaniacal fashion which throws away the actual world which is messy, nuanced and complicated and replaces it with a simpler world of good guys and bad guys, of righteous acts and heinous atrocities. That, in other words people have dispensed with mercy, and are interested only in justice. They have beheld the world and passed absolute judgement upon it.
IV.
We covered a lot of territory in those first three parts so I’m going to try to bring it all together, but let’s take a different path. This time around let’s start with people doing things we disagree with and consider stupid. Let’s assume that we’re even correct, that these things are stupid, that we’re not suffering from our own biases, our own overactive left-hemisphere. How do we get these people to stop doing these stupid things? One method, which has been drilled into us since we started school is to prove that these things are stupid. How do we prove that these things are stupid? With evidence and data!
But we immediately run into several problems with this approach.
- There are mountains of data out there, and not only is that mountain growing it’s growing faster than it ever has.
- Even if the majority of the data supports one position there is always going to be data that supports the opposite position. Plus point 1 makes it even more difficult to survey enough data to determine what constitutes a majority.
- The only choice left is to focus in on a selection of data or to prioritize certain pieces of evidence over other pieces of evidence.
- But as I showed in my last post, not only can a narrow focused reading of the data back up nearly any position, but it becomes a positive feedback loop of validation and the push for more focus. This is particularly dangerous if McGilchrist is right about the prevalence of overactive left hemispheres.
- Even if McGilchrist isn’t right, we still have to grapple with things like confirmation bias, selection effect, echo chambers and the memefication of discourse.
As I went through that list I kind of ended up lumping together both sides of things. As in the side where you dispense wisdom and the side where you receive (or gather) wisdom. But both suffer from the same problems. Whatever knowledge you’ve received through this method is bound to be fragmentary and biased, but in spite of this it also ends up laden with certainty, both because of its perceived scientific basis, but also because, as we’ve seen, that’s how the left hemisphere operates. And then when you turn to the project of dispensing that info, of explaining what a just world looks like, you run into the same problems, and that’s even if the person you’re dispensing it to is a blank slate. It’s actually far more likely that they have followed this same procedure and ended up with their own completely different vision of a just world, also imbued with the certainty that comes from focused but fragmentary evidence.
This idea that people don’t respond to facts and evidence is well covered territory (though hopefully I’ve approached it from a very different angle) and is so often the case, Scott Alexander, of Slate Star Codex’s contribution to the discussion is particularly brilliant. He argued that rhetoric and other similar tools are available to both sides and indeed any side of a debate, and thus the side you’re on accrues no inherent advantage by using these tools. But if the tool you’re using is the truth, then it does give you an advantage over those without it, even if that truth is hard to communicate, and percolates outward only very slowly. I have no strong disagreements with this view and indeed I’ve forwarded that post to many people, but I think it needs to be amended to include everything I’ve mentioned above.
More specifically I would argue that there’s a way of getting at something which feels a lot like the (blog) Truth, through a method that looks a lot like Science! A way that comes naturally to us, probably because we’re dealing with an overactive left-hemisphere, but that this is exactly the path that helped to get us into this mess. And that the most natural takeaway of a post like Alexander’s is to put people on this same path. I would amend it to guide people towards a path that is more subtle, and less certain, but that ultimately leads to deeper truths. If McGilchrist is correct it’s because this would be a more right-brained approach, but even if he’s not, I think it’s clear that we’ve been way too focused on data and evidence, and not enough on a broader picture of the interrelated nature of the world. Or to put it even more simply, that Alexander’s rationalism is best applied in service of mercy not justice. (For awhile that last bit was going to be the title of this post.)
This post is already 50% longer than one of my normal posts, and those were already too long. So I’d better wrap it up. Though I had a lot more thoughts on this subject. Some of which will hopefully appear when I review The Master and His Emissary, some of which may be developed in future posts. (This post should be considered a very rough draft of these ideas, a first pass on a collection of topics that’s pretty complex.) And some of which I’m going to quickly spit out here at the end.
- I’m not sure how well it worked to frame all of this as a conflict between mercy and justice, but if this idea is to have any impact, it has to eventually take a form that’s easy to understand. Mercy and justice was my stab at that.
- To put this in context with some of my other recent posts. One of the most important developments of classical liberalism is the creation of mediation and the rule of law, which acts as the third party I mentioned at the very beginning the party required to balance the demands of justice and mercy which are otherwise incompatible.
- One problem with a more right brained approach is that if the right brain is The Master in charge of the entire empire, that empire is vastly greater today than it was for our hunter-gatherer/agrarian/medieval-village-dwelling ancestors. And it might be that it’s too big and too complex to allow for a return to a “right-brain” mode.
- I think there’s an interesting connection between this topic and the discussion of theodicy that I mentioned in my review of A Secular Age. Theodicy deals with the evil in all of us, and mercy and justice are ways of coming to terms with our own evil. I mentioned that lately an alternative has come to the fore whereby if someone takes on the mantle of victimhood they can claim absolute innocence while placing 100% of the guilt on their oppressor. This is both, justice taken to its extreme, as I’ve discussed, and also a pretty left-brained view of things as well.
If you’ve made it this far I appreciate it. This ended up rougher and more scattered than I had hoped, that said I think I’m on to something here, and I’d love to know if you agree, and love to know even more if you disagree, and particularly what part you disagree with. If you take away nothing else I hope that in some respect I demonstrated, however strangely, the importance of mercy. Something that seems like a quaint and outdated concept, but perhaps that just means that it’s needed now more than ever.
There was a time when people were paid by the word. This is one of those posts where I wish that was the deal I had. Instead I get paid by my patrons, if that’s you, thanks! If it’s not, perhaps consider it? These long posts are even harder than they look.
Interesting take, I’m sure your author must have covered it but the thought that immediately sprang to mind was bicameralism. Bicameralism was the theory by Julian Jaynes in the 70’s that the right brain hemisphere transfers its thoughts, memories, and so on to the left hemisphere through language and words. In early man this was literal, early man would occasionally (or often?) hear auditory instructions, commands, etc. ‘in his head’. As humanity took a more modern form, the hemisphere’s fused together and the constant ‘speaking’ many experience in our mind became more unified but occasionally some still heard voices from the ‘exterior’ of the mind and this began to become primitive forms of religion with God and various gods ‘talking’ to humans.
The race to collect and react to data points brought to my mind what biologist Bret Weinstein calls ‘verificationism’. He has a review early in his podcasts on how hypothesis is supposed to work. In his back to basics view, science is a king of the mountain game with one concept holding the place of ‘theory’. Truth is a process of coming up with an idea, stating it as a hypothesis which produces a prediction which can be tested. The passing or failure of that prediction serves to elevate the hypothesis or not. ‘Theory’, for him, is misused with (esp. from the physics community) a lot of concepts getting tossed around with the term ‘theory’ (see ‘string theory’) when in fact theory should be reserved for the one set of concepts that makes the current ‘king of the mountain’.
“Verificationism” results from either having an idea first and looking for data points that confirm it (I have a long standing fight with someone on Facebook who has spent the last 6 months telling us over and over again that 99.999% of kids survive Covid so there’s no issue….he does nothing but add more ‘9’s to the same post as time goes on.) Or it means looking at all the data without a hypothesis and deriving one from the data. You can do that but the hypothesis derived from the data *must* produce some statement that can be tested.
Machine learning, big data, etc. toss things on the head a bit. It is easy to feed huge amounts of data in and let the machine find patterns. Hence, you might discover medical claims dip on Wednesdays. A verificationist mindset might leap and say this demonstrates Doctors still take Wednesdays off to golf. A proper hypothesis would say something like “claims dip because doctors golf on Wednesdays, therefore you should see doctors in areas with hard winters not golfing during that time and their claims won’t dip”.
A verificationist mindset, though, never resolves anything. Internet commentators will find endless data points that verify or harm the golfing doctor hypothesis. Some will find docs who don’t golf still do less on Wednesday. Others will find evidence that bosses would rather give people days off at the end or beginning of the week rather than middle hence people don’t make Wednesday appointments. On and on it goes.
You could argue that what’s needed is not more data but better filters but the internet provides great filters. You can filter the schedules of golf courses, doctors, sales of golf clubs to doctors, etc etc. What’s needed IMO is a discipline of hypothesis, proper test, and then live with the consequences of the test.
Yes, he has a whole section on bicameralism, and his take on it is kind of the opposite, but equally interesting (which kind of supports my point I suppose).
And I think the concept of verificationism dovetails in here nicely, and one of the things I probably didn’t emphasis enough is that I think science is productive, and produces stuff which is “true” it’s just that real science is hard and, as you say, “find[ing] endless data points that verify or harm” the person’s pet thesis is easy, and close enough to science to give them… moral? cover.
Well thinking about this a bit. In more primitive times you didn’t have a huge number of data points. You might have thought the red berries were good to eat or they were poison. You could leave the question unknown or you could eat the red berries.
Today we have thousands of ways to argue this to death. Are the red berries from Utah the same red berries as Scotland? Are some people allergic to them but others are fine with them? It’s easier to fall into verificationism as we communicate more and start collecting more and more data.
If the red berries are bad for you, but I wanted to con you into eating them I could go out and find a lot of information about good red berries to eat. I could show you pages stripped of context about good red berries to eat, I could craft a Facebook post about good red berries and get a network of bots, trolls and dupes to keep sharing it until it trends. Yet in primitive times the communication would be more secure.
Me trying to get you to eat the red berries would be very suspect and you would likely suggest I eat them first. Doing that (or not) wouldn’t be a guarantee (you might be the one with the allergy) but it would be pretty reliable.
Verificaationism, though, breaks that process down. A good example here is hydroxychloroquine where more than a few quacks have asserted things like “lots of people take it with no side effects”. The formulation of proper testable questions from hyphothesis seems like a proper counter balance. But it has to be done *before* the data is collected.
QAnon-
I’m going to depart here a bit from your view of them. I’m going to rely upon this post that describes it as an ‘Alternative Reality Game’. ARG is a brilliant concept, in my opinion and the evidence for QAnon is overwhelming.
It’s very simple. Set up your account using the right descriptions and hastags and you will immediately be rewarded with followers, likes, and supporters. Post ideas that align with the rules, and your ‘points’ will increase, do not and you will get social media cold shoulders. Just like kids in middle school will suddenly start flocking towards the same fashions after the first days back from summer vacation, many users who think they are part of a real thing implicitly ‘learn’ how to take direction from the gamemasters.
“There is clearly a leadership structure and well known nodes for specific subjects and predilections and a set of rules for what is and isn’t allowed to be a target. Just to pick an example out of the air, there is ZERO negative information about Russia. Pausing here again to repeat. ZERO. When Russia is mentioned it is always in positive terms. Yeah, always.”
But there is nothing simple about this. An ARG requires you to take the real world and explain its facts consistently with the rules of the ARG. Think of the Flat Earth idea. It too can be seen as an ARG. To be a member, you must come up with explanations for things like how is it that you can book plane flights going around the world? Your explanation, then, is judged based on how consistent it is to all the other explanations for all the other things.
Here Occams Razor is semi-suspended. A hypothesis that has 3 elements is preferred to one that has 4, but under no circumstances does that apply to any hypothesis that falls outside the rules of the game.
ARG’s probably have some useful potential. For example, maybe if scientists played an ARG where time wasn’t assumed to be independent the span between Newton and Einstein would have been much shorter. If you really crowdsourced an intellectual mechanism that yielded a ‘hypothesis’ that explained all our observations but did it with earth being flat, you might stumble upon some really interesting maths.
But under no circumstances would I accept the idea that QAnon is about some misguided ‘search for justice’. Reality is that its players are playing a game and do not care about child abuse. I say that categorically. Even though I am sure there are some ‘innocent’ players who think they are doing it for the children, none are and my proof is that they do nothing to actually try to help children in the real world. They don’t even try to advise people to watch their kids more carefully least the hidden network of ‘child snatchers’ strike locally. They no more care about children than people binge watching reruns of Law and Order: Special Victims Units care about sex crimes.
The decision to retreat from the real world into fiction or games can be perfectly valid for the individual. We need our fiction but it is of the utmost importance to recognize that decision for what it is. The moment you start telling yourself that your binge watching of TV crime shows is about preparing you to solve real world crimes, is the moment you lose credibility and it would be an injustice to not hold people to that.
https://medium.com/@registrarproject17/qanon-is-an-enormous-alternate-reality-game-arg-run-by-malevolent-puppetmasters-27e6b098ce9b
You won’t accept it’s a misguided search for justice even for very broad definitions of misguided? Can you come up with a better example than just their lack of snatch precautions?
As far as the ARG theory, I like it, but couldn’t it be applied more broadly to most performative social media?
I think ARG is marked by the expansion of Occam’s Razor (the blunting of it?). New observations must be explained by more and more assumptions to the theory and ultimately the player is deemed skillful if he can add even more outrageous assumptions without breaking the rules. If a flat earth person builds a rocket and actually witnesses the full curvature of the earth with his own eyes yet still sets forth explanations that consistently explain how the earth is still flat…then he has ‘won’ at flat earth. If you are stumbling over published airline flight paths……you’re novice level.
I would say most performative social media doesn’t quite fit that. For example, the ex wife of CA governor had an over the top speech at the RNC Convention a few nights ago…screaming that Trump ’emancipates us’, ‘frees us to follow our dreams’ etc. etc. If you interviewed her after and asked “what the hell are you talking about” she’d probably give you some mumbling answer. If you challenged her that it almost sounded like she was depicting Trump as a replacement for Christ (BTW there is a Trump supporter running around ‘hoping’ that someday they add a new book to the Bible about Trump….sigh) she would say you took her out of context. ARG rules aren’t being played there….or played well.
Now in terms of search for Justice…… A while ago near me a Black teenager hung himself. It raised some questions from local BLM activists. He was by all accounts a popular kid and he was part of a group that tried to trap and expose pedophiles online. Some people raised questions of whether he really killed himself….did he perhaps make an enemy of someone? At least so far, though, it seems like it was suicide but there really was/is a group of kids who are doing something with exposing pedophiles online…..
So it isn’t that hard to get involved with being anti-pedophile. Yet despite being around for years, not a single Q has done even something as simple as hang out in a chat room and document pedophile advances. Maybe there’s a kid in your town being abused by his gym teacher who might be caught. Sorry kid, no time for that. But here’s what we did do:
* Decide General Flynn is a good guy and part of this!
* Called out Wayfair on their overpriced furniture….is it really a way to order live children from an online catalog?
* Explored the possibility that Tom Hanks and people who wear red shoes are secret members of this cabal.
* Taken over keywords like #savethechildren and distract from actual charities trying to do just that.
If you think of this as a big ARG then your charity towards them will decrease dramatically. If people burned down an orphanage playing Pokemon Go….you’d be wondering why the game is even still in business. These are people playing a game for whom real life child molesting is being made into a prop even at the expense of actual children. Justice, I think, would include holding people responsible even for things they might do out of ignorance.
This whole post is an interesting contrast to a book I’ve been reading: How to Have Impossible Conversations (Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0738285323)
It’s a lot of stuff you should already know, but presented in a systematic way that’s a good reminder for best practices. Some of their more salient advice that’s anathema to the Standard Model for Conversation:
– Don’t try to share facts and ideas; wait for someone to ask first, and then don’t share a ‘message’
– Walk away before the conversation turns from collaborative to contentious
– If someone isn’t interested in incorporating new evidence, don’t try to present it; instead focus only on learning their point of view
Sounds like it’s right in line with the point I was trying to get at. But having it systematized is obviously a huge boon, rather than whatever you would call what I was doing.
I think this applies well but how would you work it with Qanon? ARG’s are a bit different because they aren’t meant to be communicated. You are meant to join the game or be left out but a bit like Professional Wrestling you will not be told it’s a game.
I had an Uber driver once who was from Eastern Ukraine. Unlike most of the Ukrainians I’ve met, he was clearly pro-Russia. As in, very VERY pro-Russia. To the point where he didn’t really identify as Ukrainian so much as a Russian who held Ukrainian citizenship. (Yes, I understand there are a lot of Russians who consider Ukraine to be part of Russia in an aught/is kind of way – that’s this guy.)
We started talking about Russian history, and he complimented me on my understanding of the relevant underlying issues going back a century and a half. Then we started talking about the Holodomor. His stance: it’s not a real thing. What about those pictures? Lies and propaganda. Same with the survivors’ testimonies.
I quickly realized there was nothing I could do on a short Uber ride to change his mind. So I abandoned that approach. Instead, I asked him what HE thought was going on. I am happy I did. For the next half hour, I got a treasure trove of conspiracy theories from the Russian perspective! He told me that Putin is too soft. He lets the Americans push him around, and doesn’t realize he is giving the country away.
I asked what the Americans want. He told me all about a ‘secret American plot’ to take over Siberia. Really, why for? For the rich natural resources, of course!
I could have focused on the narrow task of trying to convince this man that he’s wrong. I could have told him that no American president who pursued a policy goal of annexing Siberia would be able to go out into the Rose Garden without a bag over his head for all the fun everyone would make of his lacking judgement. I could have at least told him that I found his ideas too outlandish to ever take seriously. I could have let out the laugh building in my chest. But if I’d done any of that, I’d have missed out on the opportunity to probe conspiracy theories from a Russian conspiracy theorist. This was just the tip of the iceberg.
My parting question: why, if he’s so convinced that America is trying to take over Russia, did he move to Houston?
Because Russia is going downhill. It was time to get out before all the bad things his conspiracies predicted came true.
Great example, and this mirrors my experience as well. I’m having lunch on Monday with a guy who doesn’t believe we landed on the Moon. And if you just attempt to understand his worldview it’s very interesting. He knows I think it’s a crazy conspiracy theory, but the fact that I’m willing to listen to him as he explains it drains all of the contention out of the interaction. Nor would I want there to be contention. He’s a good guy (mercy), and I like going to lunch with him.
It occurs to me that part of the problem is what people see as asymmetries in how they’re viewed. That they’re not listened to, and unfairly blamed for everything. And I’m not sure how to fix that because when your worldview is skewed (as basically everyone’s is) selection bias is going to make “coverage” seem skewed regardless of what’s done (and social media makes it worse, again) but one of the strengths of classic liberalism was the amount of effort it spent trying to be impartial, and wearing it’s impartiality as a badge. This is an aspect of mercy, and the point I made about third party intervention, and I would argue that was a bigger deal than we thought.
I play this game too with people. I like to tell them something totally absurd but with such a straight face that they sometimes believe it. When they doubt, I will add more and more absurd ‘facts’ to show how it could be true.
Once worked with a guy from China who was very pro-China. He pointed out Italy got noodles from Marco Polo’s trip to China. I said it was Italy that gave them noodles. I asked him, “they eat a lot of rice in China no?” “Yes”…”well think about it, they eat rice and noodles. How could Italy have taken noodles from them? What did Italians eat? Obviously you had rice first and we gave you noodles”. But in terms of a true ARG, this is nothing but baby stuff.
But at its core we did land on the moon. Your friend is ultimately either making logical errors (uninteresting) or purposefully relaxing or modifying one of the rules of reasoning (see suspending Occaam’s Razor above). Ultimately in honest conversation this is where disagreement isn’t possible. You can say nouns don’t have genders, I can say they do, but if ultimately you agree I want to speak German and you English we are at the honest core of our disagreement.
But I’m not sure how much of a model justice versus mercy would work here. In my limited experience with QAnoners, I don’t buy “That they’re not listened to, and unfairly blamed for everything”.
Typical exchange:
Q: A lot of what QAnon has alleged turned out to be true.
B: Name something.
Q: What, do you *really* believe there are no pedophile rings left in Hollywood?
In principal you don’t have a bad faith disagreement with your moon landing hoax friend. In theory if a lot of very specific steps were taken, a nation might very well ‘hoax’ a moon landing. Especially back in 1969 when TV was limited to a handful of broadcast stations, there was no Internet and you couldn’t have a million people videoing everything with their cell phones and then having Twitter fiends pick apart every pixel. I could imagine this for QAnon but in reality they have embraced bad faith in their core operating system.
And actually the nature of their character is right there in their assertions. QAnon believes in things like martial law, ‘secret indictments’, military trials for US citizens and elected legislatures. They believe in them as good and necessary things. They believe people trying to execute a plan that ignores the US Constitution and essentially jails people by Executive fiat are ‘patriots’. Your moon landing friend, in contrast, believes a conspiracy has been done and can/should be uncovered with careful digging. QAnon believes the conspiracy should be executed and they are just lucky holders of ‘back stage passes’.
I can’t see an argument that tries to treat them ‘fairly’ as just people who are too hyped on Justice but are ignoring Mercry. To me they seem to be ditching both virtues.
So I think there’s a different level of analysis here. In a certain sense some ARG players can be aligned with truth with you and I. Others are aligned against it. To use the language analogy the question of whether nouns have genders has different answers depending on the language, but this is ultimately a question of language. Someone who comes along asserting language should be abolished (think maybe the mind virus in the novel Snow Crash), isn’t just disagreeing but carrying on another level of argument (language vs no language).
If you’re interested in taking some of the book’s recommendations, try the following with your friend:
1. Don’t get bogged down in details about the facts. Don’t even bring ANY up. (Seriously, just try the experiment. No facts.) If he wants to tell you his ideas, listen, but then try to move the conversation on to –
2. Focus on epistemology. Specifically his epistemology.
2a. How strongly do you believe that?
2b. Why that strong and not stronger? (Don’t ask why not weaker.)
2c. How did you come to that belief?
Then, if you sense there’s room in the discussion for it, ask,
2d. “Do you use this same reasoning for other things?”
3. End conversation on the topic long before any contention or disagreements. Don’t insert yourself or try to change his mind, just probe the depths of his epistemology as far as he’s comfortable. If you get into areas of inconsistency that’s good, but don’t stay there, as it’s likely to become uncomfortable to drill down there. Just move on. We all have areas of inconsistency in our epistemology, and plumbing those depths is one way we see the world more broadly.
Let me know how it goes. You can even send me a private email, if you want.