Vocabulary and abstraction might be the drivers behind affiliative bubbles

From Thick and thin by gcochran9. I think he is on to a problem I see all the time, have seen little research on, and do not have a ready solution. From gcochran9. He is talking about thin problems (deterministic, fact-based, conceptually straight-forward, versus thick problems which involve complex systems, uncertain information, multiple sources and unclear processes, etc.

In another example at the messy end of the spectrum, Joe Rochefort, running Hypo in the spring of 1942, needed to figure out Japanese plans. He had an an ever-growing mass of Japanese radio intercepts, some of which were partially decrypted – say, one word of five, with luck. He had data from radio direction-finding; his people were beginning to be able to recognize particular Japanese radio operators by their ‘fist’. He’d studied in Japan, knew the Japanese well. He had plenty of Navy experience – knew what was possible. I would call this a classic ‘thick’ problem, one in which an analyst needs to deal with an enormous amount of data of varying quality. Being smart is necessary but not sufficient: you also need to know lots of stuff.

At this point he was utterly saturated with information about the Japanese Navy. He’d been living and breathing JN-25 for months. The Japanese were aimed somewhere, that somewhere designated by an untranslated codegroup – ‘AF’. Rochefort thought it meant Midway, based on many clues, plausibility, etc. OP-20-G, back in Washington, thought otherwise. They thought the main attack might be against Alaska, or Port Moresby, or even the West Coast.

Nimitz believed Rochefort – who was correct. Because of that, we managed to prevail at Midway, losing one carrier and one destroyer while the the Japanese lost four carriers and a heavy cruiser*. As so often happens, OP-20-G won the bureaucratic war: Rochefort embarrassed them by proving them wrong, and they kicked him out of Hawaii, assigning him to a floating drydock.

The usual explanation of Joe Rochefort’s fall argues that John Redman’s ( head of OP-20-G, the Navy’s main signals intelligence and cryptanalysis group) geographical proximity to Navy headquarters was a key factor in winning the bureaucratic struggle, along with his brother’s influence (Rear Admiral Joseph Redman). That and being a shameless liar.

Personally, I wonder if part of the problem is the great difficulty of explaining the analysis of a thick problem to someone without a similar depth of knowledge. At best, they believe you because you’ve been right in the past. Or, sometimes, once you have developed the answer, there is a ‘thin’ way of confirming your answer – as when Rochefort took Jasper Holmes’s suggestion and had Midway broadcast an uncoded complaint about the failure of their distillation system – soon followed by a Japanese report that ‘AF’ was short of water.

Most problems in the social sciences are ‘thick’, and unfortunately, almost all of the researchers are as well. There are a lot more Redmans than Rocheforts.

There are two sets of issues that intersect here. One is the asymmetric communication capabilities of those on the lower end of the cognitive scale and those at the upper end. Lower end tend to have smaller and less precise vocabularies than the upper end. Communication up is clouded by lack of specificity and precision, conversation down is clouded by jargon and the appearance of pedanticism.

In addition, the lower end tend to be anchored in the more concrete and the deterministic processes and struggle with the more abstract and probabilistic. Given the two barriers of vocabulary and abstraction, how do you disseminate ideas, particularly complex and abstract ideas from the upper end to the lower end effectively and without condescension? And vice versa? Particularly when class prejudices at both ends of the spectrum get in the way of respectful communication.

I suspect that asymmetric communication barriers is what drives many affiliative networks and their isolation. We get trapped in bubbles of those with whom it is easiest to communicate.

UPDATE: Virtually the very next item across my radar screen is this piece which seems to confirm the above speculation. Most protests at universities appear to be driven by the worst performing students. From Get On the Bus or Get Under It: Shouting Down Free Speech at Rutgers by J. Oliver Conroy.

The protesters were particularly antagonized by Foster’s contention that police violence against African-Americans has been statistically exaggerated. When he started explaining the methodological research behind his claim, the audience exploded. “Facts?! Facts?! Don’t tell me about facts!” one person screamed. Foster tried to finish as five or six people shouted at him. “Do facts matter?” Foster asked, and repeated it several times in mounting frustration. “Do facts matter? Do facts—”

The resounding, devastating answer was no, facts do not matter. One of the things that struck me over and over was the protesters’ complete intolerance of complexity. Despite intersectionality’s roots in academic theory, the politics of the intersectional Left are deeply anti-intellectual. It’s not just that many intersectional activists seem to have no capacity for nuance; they fear and hate it, because they hate anything with the potential to complicate their narrative. Things are right or wrong; you’re with us or against us. Human beings, rather than complex agents with independent motivations and intellects, are nothing more than the sum total of their identities. Get on the bus or get under it.