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I.
My father spent many years working for himself as a management consultant. He wasn’t one of these people that advised CEOs on vision, instead his specialty was shiftwork. Companies that operated around the clock, 24 hours a day seven days a week. Quite frequently he ended up having to work with unions which was its own special brand of crazy, particularly if layoffs were involved.
During the winter of 1990, after the holiday rush was over, it was my turn to get laid off. Beyond all of the normal annoyances which accompany getting laid off, I was also annoyed because I felt that I had been laid off in favor of people who were worse than me at the job, but had greater seniority. So I asked my dad why companies did it that way. He explained: because it was a system which was easy to understand for all of the parties. Competence is fuzzy, and it can be hard to judge even if you’re not the person being judged, and no one has an accurate view of their own competence, but seniority is a bright line. Even if it has to come down to the difference of a few days, it’s clear who’s been working there longer. It’s clear to management, it’s clear to the person being laid off, and it’s clear to that person’s wife or husband. That last bit may be the most important of all, your significant other isn’t going to get angry about your lack of seniority, but they may get mad if they feel you were slacking off or alternatively if there was some favoritism involved. And, as we’ll get into, managing anger is a pretty important part of any process.
II.
Last week I was reminded of this story by an article Matthew Yglesias posted to the subscribers of his new newsletter, Slow Boring. The article was titled Making policy for a low-trust world. (Fortunately this was one of his public posts so you can easily read the whole thing if you want.) His subject is pretty clear from the title, and it touches on something real and pressing (moreso after the events of the 6th) how do you carry out policy when people don’t trust those in power?
Yglesias offers up two options:
- Layer on more rules: “If people are worried about the discretionary use of power, you need to make sure the decision-makers go through an elaborate compliance checklist.”
- Fewer and far simpler rules or what Yglesias calls “it does exactly what it says on the tin” approach.
Yglesias favors that latter and offers up three steps for doing that:
- It’s easy for everyone, whether they agree with you or disagree with you, to understand what it is you say you are doing.
- It’s easy for everyone to see whether or not you are, in fact, doing what you said you would do.
- It’s easy for you and your team to meet the goal of doing the thing that you said you would do.
The shorthand for these steps might be accessibility, accountability and achievability. (Yeah, I got cute and chose three words that began with “a”.) And Yglesias goes on to show what this looks like when applied to vaccine prioritization (he’s been a big proponent of simply prioritizing by age), the fiscal stimulus/PPP program, quantitative easing, and finally local infrastructure. It’s good stuff, (Tyler Cowen called it the best short essay of the year so far) and as I said it’s not paywalled so you should just go read it.
All that said, I want to take things in a somewhat different, and broader direction. First I should mention that I was saying something very similar in a post from 2017. (Truly I was ahead of my time.) Without getting too deep into the weeds (for that read the original post, I think it holds up really well) I was comparing the book Rationality: AI to Zombies (RAZ) something of a bible for rationalists and bayesians with the actual Bible. And basically arguing that RAZ and rationality in general were examples of Yglesias’ first option for dealing with the world. While they aren’t exactly making a compliance checklist (though I think some of that is in RAZ) they are trying to craft a decision framework for every eventuality. Contrariwise the Bible is an example of the second option. Obviously a totalizing religion is going to have a hard time always complying with all three of Yglesias’ steps, but it is pretty rare for someone to say they don’t understand Christianity (step 1-accessibility). And most people (especially non-Christians) feel perfectly comfortable identifying if someone is being Christian (step 2-accountability). Most of the trouble comes in the execution (step 3-achievability) which does create some unfortunate hypocrisy, but hypocrisy is not actually as bad as people want to claim.
All of the steps are important, but as you might have already guessed step 1, understanding the plan, is the most important not only because the remaining steps build on top of it, but also it’s the chief thing differentiating the two options. And it’s not even all of step one, within that step there is one word that’s more important than all the rest… “everyone”. In my aforementioned post, I pointed out that this was a key difference between rationality and Christianity. As an example of what I mean by this the story of someone in jail converting to Christianity or some other religion (see Malcolm X) is so common as to be a cliche. The story of someone reading the 2300 pages of RAZ and converting to bayesianism is so counterintuitive that I’m sure they could make a TV show out of it. Something similar to My Name is Earl (which was cancelled too soon by the way). In other words it’s not enough that your system is understood by bureaucrats, or people who’ve read the right hundred posts on social media (or 4chan) or the right 2300 page book. It has to be something everyone (or at least a percentage in the high 90’s) can understand.
III.
What’s interesting about Yglesias’ essay is that, despite the timing, he didn’t apply this framework to the election, which, for me, is the obvious place to do so. And you can see that this was basically what I was getting at in my post Voting as a Proxy For Power. I offered up three potential systems for deciding who had won. Which, if we restate them in Yglesias’ framework might look like this:
System 1: Elections as they are supposed to work
- Accessibility: We’re going to count up all the votes in the individual states, assign the electoral votes from that state to the one who got the most individual votes, and then whoever got the most electoral votes is president.
- Accountability: Each party gets to have observers at critical locations to confirm whether we did the above. (I understand that there are disputes about how well this worked, and in general step 2 in this system is weaker than I would like. But in theory counting votes should be something that can be transparent.)
- Achievability: Counting votes is a relatively straightforward exercise, and while it’s not unheard of for people to have questions (see hanging chads) nearly everyone feels confident about their ability to do it, and in fact the people who pushed back most vigorously on accusations that the election was stolen were frequently the election officials.
System 2: Voting as a proxy for power
- Accessibility: We’re going to have a smooth, non-violent transition of power, as opposed to what happened historically.
- Accountability: We’re going to use voting and democracy to grant legitimacy to the person taking, or keeping that power. In a way that’s convincing (particularly to the elites in the media and government who are custodians of the power) even if it’s not perfect.
- Achievability: Everyone has done a good job if power is peacefully and smoothly transferred.
Once again the most difficulty comes on step two, but as you can see, this system is arguably actually even simpler and more straightforward than the first. Now let’s look at what Trump and his supporters actually tried:
System 3: Overturn the election by any means necessary
- Accessibility: We are going to get to the true winner of the election by uncovering proof, filing lawsuits, creating spreadsheets, tweeting out accusations, spreading innuendo, and crafting conspiracies. As a result of one or all of these plans the election will be given to Trump by the courts, or the state legislatures, or the Insurrection Act, or the military, or Mike Pence, or occupying the capital, or Trump himself in some bold stroke we didn’t even see.
- Accountability: Everyone can tell that it’s still working as long as any of the foregoing still has the slightest chance of working, and if all of them have been eliminated, then Trump supporters will provide you with six other possibilities you’ve never even heard of which are the real way to tell that it’s working, and unless every one of these possibilities has been made physically impossible by the laws of nature the plan is still working.
- Achievability: People working in this system should: Stop the count (except for a few days in AZ, in which case you should keep counting); release the Kraken; wait for the courts; wait for the state legislatures; watch Mike Pence; disregard everything that happened before January 6th (it’s all happening after that); gather in DC; storm the Capitol; wait for Trump’s instructions on Twitter; realize the video of Trump conceding on Twitter is a fake; and finally pay attention to the Emergency Broadcast System.
As you can see despite cramming this into Yglesias’ framework this is the first option he talked about, the idea of layering on more rules, though in this case they’re layering on every conceivable option so that no avenue for victory is left unexplored. And the point is, it’s so easy to convince yourself that this system has to work. That surely if you just account for every eventuality, mistakes won’t be made. Or if you pursue every possible avenue for victory one of them has to work out. But this is one of those times when no plan survives contact with the enemy. Your rules, checklists, and plans don’t exist in isolation, at some point they have to be understood and implemented. When the rubber actually hits the road, the additional complexity is a liability not an asset.
As we have seen in the days since the election, you can be the biggest Trump supporter there is, firmly believing in both his genius and in the fact that the election was stolen, and it still should be obvious at this point that the third system was never going to work because it entirely ignored the all important task of being something everyone could understand. And not merely does it need to be something your supporters can understand, it needs to be straightforward to understand and implement for all of the organizations you need to have on your side to be President when the smoke clears (regardless of whether it’s an election or a revolution/coup). The military can easily understand systems one and two, but even if you assume that they’re mostly on Trump’s side, how are they going to enact system three? Are you sure they’re not going to be confused by Christopher Miller, the acting Secretary of Defence, the guy Trump put in after the election (according to his supporters as part of the whole secret plan) saying:
I strongly condemn these acts of violence against our democracy. I, and the people I lead in the Department of Defense, continue to perform our duties in accordance with our oath of office, and will execute the time-honored peaceful transition of power to President-elect Biden on January 20.
How is anyone trying to execute on system three not going to be confused by that? Trump and his followers have weaponized complexity, but they haven’t figured out how to target anything with it yet.
Okay, as you might be able to tell I’m a little annoyed. And to be fair complexity has been weaponized for a long time, it might in fact be a serviceable definition of postmodernism. But we’ve certainly reached some kind of landmark.
Before I move on, a few notes about stability and history. First off I think we’ve had stability for so long that most people don’t realize how bad a non-peaceful transfer of power is. So let me be clear, I have strong misgivings about Biden, and Democrats, and progressives, and wokeism, and policies like student loan forgiveness, and reparations, etc. etc. But I would take Biden with a filibuster proof Senate majority composed entirely of Andrea Ocasio Cortez clones over full on civil war which ends up being as bad or worse than the last one. And I’d certainly take what we ended up with (President Biden and Democratic control of the Senate) over a repeat of the violence of the late 60’s/early 70s. For example 1972 when there were 1900 domestic bombings. Now unfortunately we may get both but I don’t think storming the Capitol made either Biden’s presidency or domestic terror less likely.
On the other side of the coin people forget how difficult it is to actually pull off a coup or a revolution. I think people imagine that the French Revolution, for example, looked similar to last Wednesday’s march on the Capitol. That some people spontaneously rose up, and the next thing you know the whole government had changed. One day there was the monarchy and the next there wasn’t. But in reality the revolution was largely a very gradual process whereby the Estates General was replaced by the National Assembly which was replaced by the National Constituent Assembly which was replaced by the Legislative Assembly, and so forth and so on until eventually ten years later you get Napoleon, and for the first three years of that period the King was still around.
Mostly I point all of this out to add another angle on how dumb Trump’s plan really was. Not only was it very unlikely to work, it would have been horrible if it had.
IV.
Perhaps, despite its appropriateness, you’ve noticed that I’ve avoided using the word “legible”, as in “Yglesias is contending that policies need to be legible”, which I’ve expanded to the idea that “the transfer of power should be legible”. Even though it’s basically the perfect word to describe what he and I are talking about. I’ve avoided using that word because this post unfortunately fell immediately after my review of Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. which is critical of the idea of trying to impose legibility on a natural system. And thus that word, right at this moment, has some baggage, and I wanted to make sure I’d laid the foundation of my thinking before I introduced it. But I do think we should consider Scott and the claims made in Seeing Like a State when discussing Yglesias’ framework, because it’s important to identify when “legibility” is a problem and when it’s an asset.
Perhaps the biggest thing to keep in mind is that there’s a great deal of difference between efforts to make the citizenry legible to the state as opposed to making the state legible to the citizenry. In the former case the benefits accrue to the state, and in the latter they accrue to the citizenry and I’m almost exclusively talking about the latter.
Additionally, legibility is one of those things where you should apply as much as is needed but no more. In a sense it’s closely related to the idea of subsidiarity, that programs should be implemented as close to the problem and the people affected as possible. Legibility should be as close as possible to the way nature already works.
It might help to think of there being three possible levels:
- Natural
- Legible
- Controlled
As it says in the Federalist papers, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Which get’s at the first and third levels. If men could be trusted to behave without any government that would be the best solution, and this is the state of nature as described by Scott, and the philosophy of anarchists and libertarians (though to different degrees). If on the other hand angels were to govern men, then we could give them control of everything knowing that we would never need to second guess them, and it wouldn’t matter how complicated those controls became. But since there are no angels in sight, the middle ends up being the goldilocks spot described by Yglesias where there are rules and policies, but they’re easy to understand. They’re legible but not complicated.
As I was working through this post it occurred to me that Yglesias’ framework can be applied to the recent reckoning on race, though I’m sure he’d probably rather not go there, and even I am only mentioning it as an observation rather than any kind of recommendation.
What I’ve noticed is that as things have progressed since the death of George Floyd, the complexities of race have become very apparent. A few examples: There’s been a tendency to separate people as being either white or people of color (POC) and yet Asians who would be considered POC have much higher median household incomes than white americans. Affirmative action largely benefits people who are already in the upper middle class rather than minorities that are truly disadvantaged. When it comes to reparations there are all sorts of complexities. Does Oprah get reparations? Do people who recently immigrated from Africa, and have no enslaved ancestors get reparations? And what about the Native Americans?
I’m not saying these problems are insuperable, I’m just pointing out that they lead to exactly the sort of rules layering that Yglesias pointed to as being bad. On the other hand, the old standard of being completely colorblind is legible, straightforward and a perfect example of Yglesias’ criteria. But as I said I’m merely observing, not recommending.
V.
After taking the Yglesias framework up a level, and using it to consider the recent unpleasantness (i.e. from policies to the choosing of people to enact those policies). I think we can take it even one step higher, to the level of values.
As I was working my way through all of this I was reminded of my post on the justice/mercy dichotomy. As usual when I wander this far afield everything I say is pretty speculative, but I once again see a situation where there’s too much focus on justice and not nearly enough focus on mercy. To begin with, while I understand it’s hard for some people to understand, the riot that happened last week, insofar as it had a motive other than “riot tourism” (I forget where I saw that phrase but it seems apt) was motivated by justice. All or nearly all of those people are convinced, deep in their bones, that the election was stolen. That Trump actually won, but the Deep State contrived to make it appear as if he had lost. That if they had been able to sway enough of the senators to change the outcome of the electoral vote counting and give Trump the win, that this would have been just and proper. Now you can go back and read the previous post if you want an explanation for all the reasons why the modern world has made this path particularly easy to follow, and not just for Trump Supporters. So to an extent everyone is obsessed with justice. The problem is that justice and mercy are opposed. You can’t have both. And what we needed last week, and really since the election is more mercy.
Of course calls for the left/Biden Administration/institutions to be merciful to Trump supporters are legion. And while I think that’s an area where we should err on the side of mercy, in this space I’m going to argue that actually it’s Trump and his supporters who need to be more merciful. I understand that some people don’t think that’s possible. They think mercy is something that can only be granted by the people in power to the people who aren’t in power. But in reality mercy can operate even if you’re the weaker party. As long as you have some power you can decide to forgo using it and exercise mercy. Even if you have less power than your opponent, as long as you have any power you can use it to cause harm. Deciding to not to is an act of mercy. As such, conceding is an act of mercy, directed both at the other side (even though they won) and at the nation as a whole. And it’s actually more important if you think justice has not been served. Anyone can be merciful if they think they’re in the wrong, it’s being merciful when you think justice is on your side that poses all of the difficulties.
So what does all of this have to do with legibility vs. complexity? I would argue that mercy is legible. Forgiveness is easy to understand. On the other hand justice, true justice, is enormously complicated. And I’m not arguing that we should abandon our quest for justice. I’m just pointing out that when Yglesias was calling for a framework that could easily be understood that he was also calling for mercy.
As I’ve said this is all on the highly speculative end of things. And I can completely understand that in calling for mercy, particularly from the weaker party, I am in a sense calling for people to accept some injustice, and of the worst kind too: that committed by the strong against the weak. But perhaps, by flipping the framing such that Trump supporters are the ones who are being asked to meekly submit to injustices (whether perceived or real) and to do so for the good of the country, those most inclined to object to my conclusion might be induced to see that it contains a sliver of wisdom.
Perhaps the appeals I make at the end of every post also suffer from the weakness of being too complicated, so let me try Yglesias’ framework:
- I’m asking for money so I can prove to my wife that I’m not wasting my time.
- You’ll know it’s working by my periodic mentions of having a wife in the present tense.
- You can execute on this plan by going to https://patreon.com/jeremiah820 and clicking on one of the “Join” buttons.
I think this is probably your best podcast yet. The plea for mercy from not the winners of the election but the losers is brillant and demonstrates the value even a bit of religious influence can have….
That being the case, I think the problem making policy in a low-trust world is not quite hitting what is going on. I’ve been in some IDW groups where I see people tackling this as a trust problem, usually trying to offer something with the word blockchain in it to solve it. No objection, I’d love to see some type of voting bitcoin system developed that would generate results instantly and provide some type of key anyone could use to verify their vote was counted.
But trust is not the problem. Hate to say it but Trump supporters trust the vote and know it is right. Consider this, charges were made both against in person voting (dominion machines with secret code inserted…errr….years ago by Hugo Chavez before he died) as well as voting by mail. QUESTION…how come Trump supporters didn’t have any opinion on voting in the GA runoffs? I mean what were they supposed to do? Vote by machine or by mail?
Among my Democratic leaning friends, there was a huge concern that Trump’s Post Office appointee was trying to tilt the election by slowing down the post office. Whether this would work is debatable, rural voters need the post office more so if the post office’s services were degraded it might hurt Trump voters more on balance so it’s not so easy to do unless you spent a lot of time being very strategic about it. But the response to this great concern was a lot of people opting to use the drop boxes set up in towns or mailing their ballots in extra early.
I’m going to say among the leaders of this thing and many of the masses, there was no distrust of the results. They knew and know they lost the vote. The issue is a decision to distrust voting as a means of deciding power (well at least when they lose, but that’s not helpful….even Islamists had a slogan “One vote for Islam” meaning once Islam was established there’d be no need for future voting). Put a pin in that.
I was in a discussion online with someone. They were big on things like “being about facts” etc. But after a while, back and forth, he asserted that the economy was great under Trump but it ‘committed suicide’ because people wanted Trump out so badly. So the entire US, actually the entire world, opted for ‘economic suicide’ to make Trump unpopular using the pandemic as cover…..
Then consider the Republican chairman from Nye NY whose letter got famous. In it he parsed Trump’s words very carefully and declared that while Trump said he was going to transition to the new administration, he didn’t say it would be a Biden administration….why it would be a new Trump administration with a different VP and ‘everything different’. Then it hit me.
This is not about trust or ideology, this is a proto-faith or religion. I mean we have it all right there. The diety has all the solutions but the world, out of irrational hatred, rejects him…opting for suffering despite that being such an irrational choice. You have prophecy with a banal statement from a banal man being given the deconstruction analysis as if this was something said by Gandalf or some supernatural entity.
Perhaps, then, we are seeing a proto-faith formulating around Trump. Will this become a religion? Doubtful, successful religions take a long time to demonstrate their staying power and most religions seem to flare up and then vanish. An interesting thing, though, all the successful religions that have been arounda while have oppression as part of their origin story (well maybe not so much Buddhism but India’s history has its own unique style).
The oppression as part of origin is usually seen by a religion from a very self-centered narrative. “Our new faith was so true and revolutionary most couldn’t deal with how great it was”. But maybe there’s a surviorship bias here. We don’t hear much from new faiths that got oppressed and then vanished. Maybe quite frankly new faiths are very damaging and destructive to societies and they oppressed all of them more often than not because of that, leaving the ones that survived long term because they were among the few whose upsides just barely compensated for the harm they brought.
Your plea for Trump idolists to show mercy by accepting their loss, then, might be rephrased as a plea they drop their new faith. A faith cannot compromise and this one has so many intenal contridctions and weaknesses and incoherency, it is unlikely to have anough anti-fragility to survive such. For the rest of us, there is no option here. We’re not going to ignore votes because a rabid minority has decided that they just must have their way no matter what.
Glad you thought it was my best yet. Not sure I agree, but that’s how these things go…
As far as the rest, most of it seems to hinge on this statement, “Hate to say it but Trump supporters trust the vote and know it is right.” What makes you say this? I know many, many people who I very much respect, and with whom I have a good relationship with, who are as sure as they’ve been about anything that there was massive fraud and the election was stolen. Or at least that’s what they claim, and I think I’m close enough to them that if they really believed the vote was fair, but that Trump should win anyway because of their “faith” in him, they would tell me that, even if they weren’t willing to post that publicly. But thus far none of them have, despite close questioning and deep discussions. And these are smart people. I think you underestimate the certainty people have after a steady diet of strictly far-right sources.
I admit that my evidence is anecdotal, but what evidence to you have of the opposite?
I guess most of your friends were not in GA so there was no issue of them voting in the run off. What do you think your friends would do if they were? Like if you really believed voting machines were hacked to report wrong totals, would you switch to vote by mail? If you thought vote by mail was being hacked would you switch to voting by machine? AS both claims were going around, this would have produced quite a bit of anxiety in someone who really believed in mass voter fraud, would it not?
Question: Did anyone ever assert the Republicans elected in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania should not be seated? I mean if the the votes either weren’t counted properly or the boxes filled with fake ballots, how could those races be trusted?
I didn’t see any evidence of this. I do feel there was quite a lot of the Scott Adams type of “you can’t trust anything” type of throwing one’s hands up. That perspective nicely works with a conclusion of “I’ll take a win by voting and if I lose I’ll just assert we should ignore the vote”.
I agree getting to people’s ‘true beliefs’ is hard, most of your friends believe this but have a defensive layer of ‘motivated reasoning’ covering that up. You could patiently be the psychoanalyst and pull it out of them but given my limited time I’d rather just throw the challenge to them and demand they prove me wrong.
Yeah, clearly there’s motivated reasoning, illogical thinking, and cognitive dissonance all happening here. But accessible, accountable, and achievable (AAA) systems help with those problems as well. And it’s like I’ve always said, the timing of the pandemic was extremely unfortunate. Forcing lots of hasty (or seemingly hasty) voting changes to an election that was always going to be extremely hard fought and contentious.
Recall in 2016 we also heard there was massive voter fraud and Trump really won the popular vote. Why we had people saying that Pence should have objected to California….basically Trump is really as popular in CA and NY as he is in Texas but just, inexplicably, that’s somehow being repressed. The states that made changes but Trump won (NC extended their voting period even longer than PA) had no objections.
While I agree there’s always going to be all types around, my little pet theory is that our cognition of the world tends to move between 3 zones:
Memory – records, data, information….essentially what you probably deploy if someone asked you who won the Super Bowl 5 years ago.
Mental models – This is where rationality is deployed, what you’ll pull from if someone asks you who you think will win the next Super Bowl. This is very helpful but it’s only as good as the models you built in your head.
Faith – This doesn’t fall into the first two but can influence them and be influenced by them. This would answer questions like why do you intend to remain married to your wife for the next year or why you find Joseph Smith had credibility that L Ron Hubbard didn’t.
The other two influence the 3rd but I don’t think they are definitive. For example, your mental model would say if L Ron Hubbard was right and thousands of hydrogen bombs were blown up in volcanos 50M years ago, we’d see trace radioactive elements in the environment today. We don’t therefore he wasn’t right. Mental model combined with memory.
I think a lot of ‘believer versus atheist’ debates end more or less there. But if you lowered the defences of the Scientologist I think they might admit the mental model criticism is a thing but then they would back up and assert there are simply things we don’t understand.
Generally to defeat a faith, you need another faith. Relying on the first two modes is usually insufficient. I think we can both imagine a Scientologist who is told to shun her family and it just triggers a sense of “this is not right”. While you might have explained radioactive isotopes and hydrogen bombs for years to her, ‘proving’ her faith wrong, it’s the other trigger that does it.
My contentions then would be:
1. There is a core of a proto-faith formed/forming around Trump idoltry. This isn’t a majority of Trump supporters but in politics even 10% can accrue massive power.
2. This faith is veering into the other 2 modes of cognition. My evidence for this is absurd mental models such as world wide ‘economic suicide’ just to make Trump less popular and, of course QAnon.
3. In general, when a faith does this it tends to be very destructive. When faith does this, it inhibits the proper functioning of memory and models. Hence we see the spinning on a dime….mail in voting is bad, but machine voting is now bad. Pence is a traitor, but Trump picked Pence? A faith that is essentially a miscariage that should die will try to live by pushing the other two modes to the breakng point so they can not longer reallyy function.
I would say then we should move beyond arguments that depend more on the first two modes here. Yes it’s necessary to be able to pull out the fact checking on claims like Dominion voting machines and explain calmly that no Tom Hanks is not a pedophile getting children sent to him every month so he can rape them and then have their blood transfused into him. This only goes so far and ends up with a Richard Dawkins type of argument where one side throws up their hands after having won the argument on all counts but the other side just keeps going.
I suspect then that what else is needed is gentle pushing away of faith outside when it is showing up outside its proper domain making demands combined with a challenge to faith on faith’s terms. For example, your suggestion of showing mercy to the guy who beat you would be a faith based challenge, if we added to that something like “accepting that Trump is not going to be President, what specific changes to your state’s voting laws do you think are needed” would push the faith bully (what does Trump need to win here!) out of the mental model mode forcing it to work on the more ‘boring’ level of actually discussing voting systems without reference to a proto-faith.
If you do accept my idea of this being a proto-faith forming, it is something really new to see in real time. Yes we have new faiths that come about all the time and sometimes get big (Scientology), but we have’t seen new ones that grew very rapidly in a modern media environment. My thinking here is that we are seeing an angle of new faiths that history forgot, namly new faiths tend to produce a lot of destructive assholes who more often than not produce more trouble than their worth. The Great Faith Filter keeps most new faiths from sticking around because it’s rare to get a new one that justifies its cost.
I sense I probably just rephrased my original comment but hopefully in a way that is more coherent. One can only have faith.
Clarity check, Scientology grew up in a modern media environment but never got very big. It probably never broke much more than 100K serious followers and has many people only tangentally dipping their toes in it. Since it tries to avoid coming out and saying it is a religion to new members…selling itself as some type of biofeedback psychotherapy group you don’t need health insurance to get.
The LDS Church took about 40 years to get to 100K members, but that was in 1870 when 100K was quite a bit in the US. It’s followed exponential growth since then while all indications are Scientology is not going to explode much beyond what they currently have unless it becomes something very different from what it is today.
Do I think Trump idoltry will be around in 40 years? No, it’s a deformed baby who sucks so much life support from the other two modes it can’t grow up, but it can suck too many resources right now.
A lot to chew on. Yes this comment was better than the last, particularly since you kind of backed away from the idea that people “know the vote is right”. Or perhaps better said, you realized that “know” was carrying a lot of weight there and you expanded on the full epistemology of your stance. I’m going to have to chew on it. In particular how do we distinguish between a religion and the echo chamber effect dialed up to 11?
Perhaps echo chambers are a good way to breed new faiths. The Great Disappointment, for example, could be seen as an extreme echo chamber not of a faith but around a mental model (taking the Bible as its base). A receipe for spawning baby, mostly monster, faiths then would be:
1. Echo chamber up to 11.
2. Use the chamber to make mental models that make predictions.
3. Out come the baby faiths.
I suspect new media regimes might be very important to this. Printing presses, mass news paper, radio, TV, Internet open up fertile territory where echo chambers can form before mainstream media arrives and creates an standard for credibility
Okay, I like this idea. I may have to run with it. Reminds me of an article I saw on MR other day about the influence of the new medium of radio on the riots of the late 60s.
If you start your own faith I want 10% of the donations. 15% of giant flag sales.
God, this has been a depressing week. I really wanted to believe that Trump had the best interests of the country in mind, though I voted for Clinton in 2016 and, thanks to your suggestion, Gen Mattix in 2020. I think it’s that same faith in the institutions of the US Government that gave me hope that this election wouldn’t spiral into a mess. I thought the weight of the office would transform Trump into something more honorable than the man we elected.
I generally respected his foreign policy decisions and I liked that the stock market did well over the last 4 years. His ability to connect to working-class americans pleasantly surprised me, I think they’ve been too long ignored and misunderstood. It’s sad that a small element of that same class thought violent action in the Capitol building was a good way to keep Trump in office. I’m not actually sure that’s what they wanted, it sure doesn’t seem practical to me.
Yglesia’s framework, and your riff on how it relates to faith, reminds me of Paul’s comparison of grace vs works in Ephesians 2:8 ‘For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith–and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God– not by works, so that no one can boast.’
Those of us who trust the electoral system to be mostly correct, concede that when the votes are all tallied we will abide by the decisions made by the state voting authorities. The world runs smoother when we have faith in principles like these.
Trump’s character is to save himself, and the election, through Works, calling the Georgia governor to find him an extra 11,000 votes, tweeting out incredible lies, rallying his supporters to walk to the Capitol building and cheer for the congressmen who support him. To me, fighting this hard against an established election process is a good definition of sinful behavior. Enduring a second impeachment hearing led by Nancy Pelosi seems as close to hell on earth as anything I’ve imagined, not only for Trump. It’s yet another painful episode for our country, I guess it’s our punishment for electing him.
Thanks for your podcast Jeremiah, it helped keep me sane last year!
Glad I could help with the sanity, mine own has been a little bit frayed as well.
Excellent observation on grace, which is of course very closely related to mercy and in fact all but synonymous with divine mercy. And in a sense that’s what I mean when I talk about the second system (though of course it’s much uglier than actual grace). But obviously in a nation of 300 million the election isn’t going to go perfectly, just like are life isn’t going to go perfectly, but in the end we hope that it will still end up somewhere good, that we can all be happy with.