All you know about them is what they say of themselves

From Miss Marple and the Problem of Modern Identity by Alan Jacobs. A lot of insights into the nature of identity, privacy, knowledge, progress, and productivity.

Physical movement from one place to another is a progenitor of expanded knowledge and knowledge is a predicate to productivity. But with movement comes uncertainty as to identity. Not only does the new community want to know who you are but so does the state. The more transparency there is, the greater the certainty we can have as to what we are dealing with and therefore the greater the productivity. But that transparency and certainty comes at the price of lost privacy.

As we shift ourselves from the physical world to the digital world, where, on the internet, "No ones knows you are a dog", the historical problems of identity multiply and the balance of interests between individuals and the state are in terrific flux. We want our certainty of identities in order to fuel the security and productivity of our lives and yet we want our privacy as well and we don't want the government to intrude too much.

It is a time of change and potential but also great anxiety as we sense tectonic forces at work but with no clarity as to the nature, direction or destination of those forces.

Jacobs:

One of Agatha Christie’s more famous mysteries is A Murder Is Announced. A Miss Marple story published in 1950, the novel partakes fully in the anxious and pinched mood of postwar “austerity Britain.” Christie typically writes efficiently and briskly, with much give-and-take dialogue presented in short paragraphs, so the passage I’m about to cite is an unusual one: it’s essentially a monologue by Jane Marple, who is talking to a policeman who has expressed concern for her well-being — a murderer is on the loose — and would prefer her not to “snoop around.”

“But I’m afraid,” she said, “that we old women always do snoop. It would be very odd and much more noticeable if I didn’t. Questions about mutual friends in different parts of the world and whether they remember so and so, and do they remember who it was that Lady Somebody’s daughter married? All that helps, doesn’t it?”

“Helps?” said the Inspector, rather stupidly.

“Helps to find out if people are who they say they are,” said Miss Marple.

This is a story in which several characters are not — or may not be — who they say they are. So when Miss Marple continues by asking the policeman, “Because that’s what’s worrying you, isn’t it?” she puts her finger on the precise problem.

She then — and this is key — goes on to explain why the problem of identity is a particularly significant one for them, situated in their particular time and place:

“And that’s really the particular way the world has changed since the war. Take this place, Chipping Cleghorn, for instance. It’s very much like St. Mary Mead where I live. Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house — and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys ... They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already. If anybody new — really new — really a stranger — came, well, they stuck out — everybody wondered about them and didn’t rest till they found out.”

And Miss Marple’s conclusion: “But it’s not like that any more. Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come — and all you know about them is what they say of themselves.” All you know about them is what they say of themselves — this is, in a nutshell, one of the core problems of modernity.

Smallness, locality, insularity and stability are powerful agents keeping the question of identity at bay. We know you because we have always known you. There are no strangers.

But sometime after the transition from hunting/gathering to permanent settlements, the question of the stranger entered the social equation. With roads, then steam engines and then internal combustion engines, the question of identity amplified. Places that were insular became connected. Communities of known people became crowds of strangers.

How do we know you?

Back to Jacobs:

But the essential point that we can discern from this brief look at A Murder Is Announced is that identity documents play a double role in the social changes that Miss Marple describes. On the one hand, they are a response to those changes: as MacLean, Landry, and Ward comment, the “profound shift [that] occurred in the balance between the urban and rural populations of England” between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries had “particular consequences for the making of social identities.” One of those was that people had to turn to official documents to compensate for a lack of direct, personal acquaintance. On the other hand, as Inspector Craddock reflects, they contribute to those changes: “partly because of” the rise of identity cards, which are so easily forged, “the subtler links that had held together English social rural life had fallen apart.”

[snip]

What makes Miss Marple distinctively insightful, and useful to the police, is her ability to transfer her minute observations of “the subtler links” that once held society together to a context in which those links have broken. The same small traits of speech and action that once would have instructed her in social belonging now enable her to discern social displacement. The same attentiveness that enabled her to interpret a social photograph now enables her to interpret its negative. The police can consult their records, can obtain files from their counterparts in Switzerland, but as servants of an administrative and bureaucratic regime they have no training in or understanding of the social cues Miss Marple has mastered.

Which is a lesson we are relearning. It is easy to slip into the anonymity and structure of the digital world - but the digital world only exists at the sufferance of the social world. If you are not a master of the subtler links of sociability, of person-to-person interaction, digital mastery only takes you to a lonely basement.

Jacobs introduces James C. Scott's insight about "legibility"(from Scott's Seeing Like A State, well worth reading, in fact it should be mandatory in understanding the evolving relationship between the individual and the state):

It is not easy to see — though I think it is necessary to see — how many of the technologies of modernity, from filing systems to postal systems, from photography to fingerprint analysis, have arisen in the service of making us “legible” to the state. We are all legible people now, and most of us see no alternative; thus the quests by so many to have their own sense of identity — who or what they “identify as” — be officially recognized by the state. If the state cannot read us — “legible” is from the Latin legere, “to read” — do we exist at all?

Further, the state’s distinctive ways of reading us are easily extended to private organizations, and especially commercial enterprises: consider how many financial transactions require the provision of one’s Social Security number as a means of establishing unique identity in ways that mere names cannot. The larger the enterprise, the more its ways of seeing resemble those of governing bodies — and the closer it works with those bodies, though sometimes not close enough to suit governmental agencies, who demand “back doors” into customer data gathered by private companies. Thus Facebook, the largest social media company in the world, today demands that its users employ their “authentic identity,” as confirmed by a government-issued ID or by forms of nongovernmental ID that are themselves usually only obtainable with a government-issued ID. Facebook is trying to link its users’ identities as closely as possible with the ratification provided by the state.

The challenge is, of course, that the more legible we are, serving the legitimate and advantageous purposes of reducing uncertainty, increasing security, increasing productivity, the more we are also striping away our privacy. It is useful to be known but we also wish to have the right to be unknown.

Even Miss Marple puts her exceptional acuity in the service of this state-sponsored model of identity: she offers her local, personal, intuitive knowledge to supplement the deficiencies of police work, to fill in the gaps in official documentation, to bring people’s self-proclamations into line with governmental records. To “find out if people are who they say they are” is to set self-description against what the state sees, what the state reads.

This is what happens when the social structures — family, community, church — that were once key to the establishment of identity fade into insignificance, supplanted by the power of the modern nation-state. Miss Marple may seem to speak on behalf of those older, humbler sources of meaning, but in fact she quite coldbloodedly acknowledges their disappearance. “But it’s not like that any more.... And people just come — and all you know about them is what they say of themselves.” The task of the amateur detective is to bring “what they say of themselves” into line with what the state says of them; that is all. Because there is no alternative.

Jacobs concludes:

Thus we conclude one chapter — the most recent to date — of a story that begins in the early modern period with the transfer of large numbers of people from Europe’s countryside to its cities. Social mobility is preceded by literal mobility: people who can walk or ride from one place to another. Economic and technological changes (starting with the building of roads) enabled that movement, then accelerated in order to accommodate it; this in turn has made further such movement more attractive, more inevitable. Supplemental technologies of writing, record-keeping, and administrative organization (including regular naming practices and travel documentation) have also arisen in order to keep track of all the movement and to prevent descent into social chaos. The result is the world we live in, a world in which we all must ask — in a tone and for a purpose quite alien to those of the person who coined this phrase — “Who is my neighbor?”

I focus on a different question. How can we obtain all the value and benefits of legibility while preserving some necessary modicum of control over our privacy. We want to know who are our neighbors but we don't want our neighbor to know us without our consent. We want legibility to be unidirectional. We want to know others but not for others to know us. At least, not without our approval.

Is there a solution to the desire for seeing and being simultaneously unseen? I have no ready idea but that question will occupy us for a generation or more.

As a final note, reading Jacobs' essay suggests another and different idea to me. I have long ascribed the pernicious evil of Identity Politics to postmodernism and its attendant intellectual fads of post-war Europe: critical theory, critical race theory, gender theory, deconstructionism, post-colonial theory, etc. And I still think that is by-and-large true. Identity Politics is simply a noxious by-product of corrupted ideologies.

Jacobs' essay, though, opens up the possibility that perhaps postmodernism was a manifestation of, or a more formal articulation of an underlying and unseen wave of change. Post-World War II has seen immense migrations of people - from country to city; from lower class to upper class; from religiosity to secularism; from country to country. All of us now live in a sea of strangers.

Postmodernism postulates the existence of the all-powerful privilege of the male patriarchy, of white privilege, Christian dominance, class privilege etc. But all the whites and males and Christians, and even the upper class are looking around trying to figure why they haven't been given access to this secretive privilege. These privileges don't exist, at least not in the way postulated by ideologues. What postmodernism and critical theory are conjuring are not any real worlds of power and privilege. What they are conjuring are myths in an environment where we are all strangers to one another.

Those who are marginal in terms of educational achievement or race or ethnicity or religion or class or orientation, can imagine themselves as being the victim of some great conspiracy of exclusion and hidden privilege. What they fail to see is that everyone is adrift among strangers. There is no fixity of advantage. All is contingent and uncertain.

My guess, having read Jacobs, is that Identity Politics is a phenomenon that is attired in the words and ideology of postmodernism but that perhaps its shape is a product of that underlying conflict between legibility and privacy. There are no safe places and insular communities anymore. We are all adrift on a sea of change and of communities to which we are only lightly attached. It is unsurprising that the capable are still anxious and that the marginal are frightened. For the marginal there is the soothing pablum of postmodernism and Identity Politics but those are just products of the real disconnect. The real disconnect is that there is no place to call home.

Teleology, metaphysics, and epistemology

From Why Information Matters by Luciano Floridi.

While information has been a concept in the background for so long in the history of philosophy, it now also fits neatly in its foreground. Seventeenth-century philosophers redirected their attention from the nature of the knowable object (metaphysics) to the relation between the object and the knowing subject (epistemology). Problems surrounding how we come to know the world then consumed much of modern philosophy. Then, in the twentieth century, philosophers came to reflect primarily on how knowledge is organized — how it is stored and linguistically structured — thus moving from epistemology to philosophy of language and logic. And with the growth of the information society in which billions of people now spend their lives, some philosophers have increasingly focused on the very fabric of knowledge — information and its dynamics, including communication, flows, and processing. As a result, information has arisen as a concept as fundamental and important as being, knowledge, life, intelligence, meaning, and good and evil — all concepts with which it is interdependent, and so equally worthy of autonomous investigation. It is also a more impoverished concept, in terms of which the others can be expressed and to which they can be related. This is why the philosophy of information may explain and guide the purposeful construction of our intellectual environment, and provide the systematic treatment of the conceptual foundations of contemporary society.

And don't forget Teleology - the explanation of phenomena by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated causes.

Leibniz’s law of the identity of indiscernibles and the Turing Test

Why Information Matters by Luciano Floridi.

So Turing suggested replacing the question with the imitation game, which fixes certain variables in a rules-based scenario that is easily implementable and controllable. Suppose that A and B are a human being and a computer, but you do not know which is which. You can ask A and B any question simultaneously, but they are in another place and you can only interact with them by e-mail (or, in Turing’s day, by teleprinter). If after a reasonable amount of time you cannot tell which is the human and which the computer, then the computer has passed the test — that is, the computer is at least as good as the human in providing answers to the questions you asked. Turing’s test is based on a weaker version of Leibniz’s law of the identity of indiscernibles: if, everything else being equal, significant differences between A’s and B’s answers are indiscernible, then A and B are interchangeable. Given the same input of questions, the output of answers a human and a computer can generate are such that the differences between the two are insufficient for the purposes of unmistakable recognition.

The Codpiece of the Law

From by Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais. The young giant Pantagruel comes to Paris for his education. Rabelais makes a mockery of some of the more tediously unworldly volumes of early Renaissance monasteries. I hope, at some time, to find an annotated version of this supposed index of made-up tomes. There is a lot more humor in the titles than I am getting.

In his abode there he found the library of St. Victor a very stately and magnific one, especially in some books which were there, of which followeth the Repertory and Catalogue, Et primo,

The Two-horse tumbrel of Salvation.
The Codpiece of the Law.
The Slipshoe of the Decretals.
The Pomegranate of Vice.
The Clew-bottom of Theology.
The Duster or Foxtail-flap of Preachers, composed by Turlupin.
The Churning Ballock of the Valiant.
The Henbane of the Bishops.
Marmotretus de baboonis et apis, cum Commento Dorbellis.
Decretum Universitatis Parisiensis super gorgiasitate muliercularum ad placitum.
The Apparition of Sancte Geltrude to a Nun of Poissy, being in travail at the bringing forth of a child.
Ars honeste fartandi in societate, per Marcum Corvinum (Ortuinum).
The Mustard-pot of Penance.
The Gamashes, alias the Boots of Patience.
Formicarium artium.
De brodiorum usu, et honestate quartandi, per Sylvestrem Prioratem Jacobinum.
The Cosened or Gulled in Court.
The Frail of the Scriveners.
The Marriage-packet.
The Cruizy or Crucible of Contemplation.
The Flimflams of the Law.
The Prickle of Wine.
The Spur of Cheese.
Ruboffatorium (Decrotatorium) scholarium.
Tartaretus de modo cacandi.
The Bravades of Rome.
Bricot de Differentiis Browsarum.
The Tailpiece-Cushion, or Close-breech of Discipline.
The Cobbled Shoe of Humility.
The Trivet of good Thoughts.
The Kettle of Magnanimity.
The Cavilling Entanglements of Confessors.
The Snatchfare of the Curates.
Reverendi patris fratris Lubini, provincialis Bavardiae, de gulpendis lardslicionibus libri tres.
Pasquilli Doctoris Marmorei, de capreolis cum artichoketa comedendis, tempore Papali ab Ecclesia interdicto.
The Invention of the Holy Cross, personated by six wily Priests.
The Spectacles of Pilgrims bound for Rome.
Majoris de modo faciendi puddinos.
The Bagpipe of the Prelates.
Beda de optimitate triparum.
The Complaint of the Barristers upon the Reformation of Comfits.
The Furred Cat of the Solicitors and Attorneys.
Of Peas and Bacon, cum Commento.
The Small Vales or Drinking Money of the Indulgences.
Praeclarissimi juris utriusque Doctoris Maistre Pilloti, &c., Scrap-farthingi de botchandis glossae Accursianae Triflis repetitio enucidi-luculidissima.
Stratagemata Francharchiaeri de Baniolet.
Carlbumpkinus de Re Militari cum Figuris Tevoti.
De usu et utilitate flayandi equos et equas, authore Magistro nostro de Quebecu.
The Sauciness of Country-Stewards.
M.N. Rostocostojambedanesse de mustarda post prandium servienda, libri quatuordecim, apostillati per M. Vaurillonis.
The Covillage or Wench-tribute of Promoters.
(Jabolenus de Cosmographia Purgatorii.)
Quaestio subtilissima, utrum Chimaera in vacuo bonbinans possit comedere secundas intentiones; et fuit debatuta per decem hebdomadas in Consilio Constantiensi.
The Bridle-champer of the Advocates.
Smutchudlamenta Scoti.
The Rasping and Hard-scraping of the Cardinals.
De calcaribus removendis, Decades undecim, per M. Albericum de Rosata.
Ejusdem de castramentandis criminibus libri tres.
The Entrance of Anthony de Leve into the Territories of Brazil.
(Marforii, bacalarii cubantis Romae) de peelandis aut unskinnandis blurrandisque Cardinalium mulis.
The said Author's Apology against those who allege that the Pope's mule doth eat but at set times.
Prognosticatio quae incipit, Silvii Triquebille, balata per M.N., the deep-dreaming gull Sion.
Boudarini Episcopi de emulgentiarum profectibus Aeneades novem, cum privilegio Papali ad triennium et postea non.
The Shitabranna of the Maids.
The Bald Arse or Peeled Breech of the Widows.
The Cowl or Capouch of the Monks.
The Mumbling Devotion of the Celestine Friars.
The Passage-toll of Beggarliness.
The Teeth-chatter or Gum-didder of Lubberly Lusks.
The Paring-shovel of the Theologues.
The Drench-horn of the Masters of Arts.
The Scullions of Olcam, the uninitiated Clerk.
Magistri N. Lickdishetis, de garbellisiftationibus horarum canonicarum, libri quadriginta.
Arsiversitatorium confratriarum, incerto authore.
The Gulsgoatony or Rasher of Cormorants and Ravenous Feeders.
The Rammishness of the Spaniards supergivuregondigaded by Friar Inigo.
The Muttering of Pitiful Wretches.
Dastardismus rerum Italicarum, authore Magistro Burnegad.
R. Lullius de Batisfolagiis Principum.
Calibistratorium caffardiae, authore M. Jacobo Hocstraten hereticometra.
Codtickler de Magistro nostrandorum Magistro nostratorumque beuvetis, libri octo galantissimi.
The Crackarades of Balists or stone-throwing Engines, Contrepate Clerks, Scriveners, Brief-writers, Rapporters, and Papal Bull-despatchers lately compiled by Regis.
A perpetual Almanack for those that have the gout and the pox.
Manera sweepandi fornacellos per Mag. Eccium.
The Shable or Scimetar of Merchants.
The Pleasures of the Monachal Life.
The Hotchpot of Hypocrites.
The History of the Hobgoblins.
The Ragamuffinism of the pensionary maimed Soldiers.
The Gulling Fibs and Counterfeit shows of Commissaries.
The Litter of Treasurers.
The Juglingatorium of Sophisters.
Antipericatametanaparbeugedamphicribrationes Toordicantium.
The Periwinkle of Ballad-makers.
The Push-forward of the Alchemists.
The Niddy-noddy of the Satchel-loaded Seekers, by Friar Bindfastatis.
The Shackles of Religion.
The Racket of Swag-waggers.
The Leaning-stock of old Age.
The Muzzle of Nobility.
The Ape's Paternoster.
The Crickets and Hawk's-bells of Devotion.
The Pot of the Ember-weeks.
The Mortar of the Politic Life.
The Flap of the Hermits.
The Riding-hood or Monterg of the Penitentiaries.
The Trictrac of the Knocking Friars.
Blockheadodus, de vita et honestate bragadochiorum.
Lyrippii Sorbonici Moralisationes, per M. Lupoldum.
The Carrier-horse-bells of Travellers.
The Bibbings of the tippling Bishops.
Dolloporediones Doctorum Coloniensium adversus Reuclin.
The Cymbals of Ladies.
The Dunger's Martingale.
Whirlingfriskorum Chasemarkerorum per Fratrem Crackwoodloguetis.
The Clouted Patches of a Stout Heart.
The Mummery of the Racket-keeping Robin-goodfellows.
Gerson, de auferibilitate Papae ab Ecclesia.
The Catalogue of the Nominated and Graduated Persons.
Jo. Dytebrodii, terribilitate excommunicationis libellus acephalos.
Ingeniositas invocandi diabolos et diabolas, per M. Guingolphum.
The Hotchpotch or Gallimaufry of the perpetually begging Friars.
The Morris-dance of the Heretics.
The Whinings of Cajetan.
Muddisnout Doctoris Cherubici, de origine Roughfootedarum, et Wryneckedorum ritibus, libri septem.
Sixty-nine fat Breviaries.
The Nightmare of the five Orders of Beggars.
The Skinnery of the new Start-ups extracted out of the fallow-butt, incornifistibulated and plodded upon in the angelic sum.
The Raver and idle Talker in cases of Conscience.
The Fat Belly of the Presidents.
The Baffling Flouter of the Abbots.
Sutoris adversus eum qui vocaverat eum Slabsauceatorem, et quod Slabsauceatores non sunt damnati ab Ecclesia.
Cacatorium medicorum.
The Chimney-sweeper of Astrology.
Campi clysteriorum per paragraph C.
The Bumsquibcracker of Apothecaries.
The Kissbreech of Chirurgery.
Justinianus de Whiteleperotis tollendis.
Antidotarium animae.
Merlinus Coccaius, de patria diabolorum.
The Practice of Iniquity, by Cleuraunes Sadden.
The Mirror of Baseness, by Radnecu Waldenses.
The Engrained Rogue, by Dwarsencas Eldenu.
The Merciless Cormorant, by Hoxinidno the Jew.

Of which library some books are already printed, and the rest are now at the press in this noble city of Tubingen.

An Oath of Not Remembering

From After Thermopylae: The Oath of Plataea and the End of the Graeco-Persian Wars by Paul Cartledge.

One absolutely key way in which the Athenians dragged themselves out of the mire of civil bloodshed and internecine hatred was by imposing upon themselves a great oath, an oath of forgetting - or, as they put it the other way round, "not-remembering." That is, in the sight of the gods as witnesses, they publicly and collectively threw a veil over the black deeds of especially those Athenians who in a frenzy of ideological madness had embraced the most extreme form of anti-democracy. Strict observance of this oath of Amnesty was put under great strain in the coming decades, but nonetheless it did still, just, hold. Even non- or anti-democrats such as Xenophon were loud in their praise of the Athenians for that achievement, and rightly so.

Not dissimilar to modern day Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. But what an example. An Oath of Not Remembering.

Eyes of the Ethiopians, eyes of the Thracians

Hasn't that always been the way? The world is as we ourselves see it. From Xenophanes of Colophon, 570 – 480 BC.

Ethiopians say that their gods are snubnosed and black
Thracians that they are pale and red-haired.

Αἰθίοπές τε <θεοὺς σφετέρους> σιμοὺς μέλανάς τε
Θρῇκἐς τε γλαυκοὺς καὶ πυρρούς <φασι πέλεσθαι>.

Strange epistemic times

Stipulated that President Trump can be bombastic, crass, ill-spoken and ill-mannered. Also stipulated that he is not a traditional or establishment conservative, he is a recent interloper into Republican politics. He is a phenomenon of some sort but of what sort we do not yet know.

That is no explanation for the sustained din of negative news reporting that seems to have been going on since his inauguration. I understand that Democrats are shattered that they are a shell of their former selves and thunderstruck that the election did not turn out as they expected. I also understand that establishment Republicans especially, but Burkean conservatives as well, are appalled by their candidate.

But he won the election fair and square.

If it were only Representative Maxine Waters calling for his impeachment even before his inauguration, that would be one thing. But that's not the case. During the interim between the election and the electoral college there were constant entreaties and speculation as to how the electors could overturn the election results. Then there was the constant discussion about how Trump could be prospectively disqualified. This growing cacophony since inauguration of calls for impeachment, special investigations, special prosecutors, serial false claims, baseless allegations, etc. seems extraordinary.

The closest I can recall anything like this was Ronald Reagan and even that was not the same. The press attitude was the same in the sense that both Trump and Reagan are/were cast as clueless, not too bright, and of dubious competence but I don't recall this relentless press to overturn the results of the election. It almost feels like an attempted institutional coup to give the establishment (the establishment of both parties, civil servants, universities, the media) the results they wanted over what the electorate actually chose.

The opposition claims seem to have gone from inane to insane.

Whenever there is such a disconnect between what you think you see and what the mainstream narrative is saying, you have to question whether the problem resides with yourself. And as I said at the beginning, there is plenty of reason to find Trump distasteful. But so far all I am seeing is disappointment, bias and smoke. I am not seeing anything out-of-the ordinary about Trump compared to his predecessors. And indeed, one of the striking things has been the outrage by the mainstream media when Trump either endorses or implements a policy that was happily accepted by the MSM under the previous administration.

I think I am assessing this correctly but you can't help but have doubts about your own perceptions.

And then along comes News Coverage of Donald Trump’s First 100 Days by Thomas E. Patterson. This is from Harvard's Kennedy School, hardly a hotbed of John Birchers or Breitbart devotees.

It turns out that indeed, on an objective measured basis, the mainstream media has gone crazy. They are devoting more of their news time to the president than under earlier administrations and their coverage is overwhelmingly more negative in contrast to earlier presidents. It's not an issue of misperceiving. They really are going crazy.

Donald Trump has received 80% negative coverage compared to 41% for Barack Obama, 57% for George W. Bush and 60% negative for Bill Clinton. All the traditional MSM bugbears of the right are in on the game with negative coverage from CNN (97% negative), NBC (97%), CBS (91%), New York Times (87%), and the Washington Post (83%). I read the New York Times and Washington Post and thought they were pretty unhinged. Thank goodness I don't watch CNN, NBC and CBS - it must be nauseously disorienting if they are even worse than NYT and WaPo.

Not only are they covering him more negatively but they are devoting more time to doing so.

President Trump dominated media coverage in the outlets and programs analyzed, with Trump being the topic of 41 percent of all news stories—three times the amount of coverage received by previous presidents.

It is good to know that it wasn't me going crazy and misreading the behavior of the press.

Patterson concludes:

Trump’s coverage during his first 100 days was negative even by the standards of today’s hyper-critical press. Studies of earlier presidents found nothing comparable to the level of unfavorable coverage afforded Trump. Should it continue, it would exceed even that received by Bill Clinton. There was not a single quarter during any year of Clinton’s presidency where his positive coverage exceeded his negative coverage, a dubious record no president before or since has matched. Trump can’t top that string of bad news but he could take it to a new level. During his first 100 days, Clinton’s coverage was 3-to-2 negative over positive. Trump’s first 100 days were 4-to-1 negative over positive.

[snip]

Nevertheless, the sheer level of negative coverage gives weight to Trump’s contention, one shared by his core constituency, that the media are hell bent on destroying his presidency. As he tweeted a month after taking office, “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

[snip]

At the same time, the news media need to give Trump credit when his actions warrant it. The public’s low level of confidence in the press is the result of several factors, one of which is a belief that journalists are biased. That perception weakens the press’s watchdog role. One of the more remarkable features of news coverage of Trump’s first 100 days is that it has changed few minds about the president, for better or worse. The nation’s watchdog has lost much of its bite and won’t regain it until the public perceives it as an impartial broker, applying the same reporting standards to both parties.

What to do? I liked this recommendation:

The press should also start doing what it hasn’t done well for a long time—focus on policy effects. Journalists’ focus on the Washington power game—who’s up and who’s down, who’s getting the better of whom—can be a fascinating story but at the end of the day, it’s food for political junkies. It’s remote enough from the lives of most Americans to convince them that the political system doesn’t speak for them, or to them.

A broadening of the scope of political coverage would require journalists to spend less time peering at the White House. Our analysis of news coverage of Trump’s first 100 days found that, except for his court-challenged immigration orders, the press paid only minimal attention to Trump’s executive orders. He issued a large number of them, covering everything from financial regulation to climate change. Collectively, these orders, immigration aside, accounted for less than 1 percent of Trump’s coverage, and rarely did a news report track an executive order into the agencies to see how it was being handled.

Journalists would also do well to spend less time in Washington and more time in places where policy intersects with people’s lives. If they had done so during the presidential campaign, they would not have missed the story that keyed Trump’s victory—the fading of the American Dream for millions of ordinary people. Nor do all such narratives have to be a tale of woe. America at the moment is a divided society in some respects, but it’s not a broken society and the divisions in Washington are deeper than those beyond the Beltway.

The surprises don't stop. In Vox, of all places, that firmly left-left-of-center website that seeks to explain, there is this astonishing confirmation that opponents of the president are getting too desperate; Democrats are falling for fake news about Russia by Zack Beauchamp. Vox is just about the last place I would look for confirmation of some pattern I might think I see in politics.

Now granted, Beauchamp is only acknowledging that the Russia scare stories are fake news because he is concerned that it will damage Democrats, but still. The Truth is Out There. Acknowledgement is acknowledgement.

What you’ve got are prominent media figures, political operatives, scholars, and even US senators being taken in by this stuff — in addition to the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of ordinary people consuming it on Twitter and Facebook. These people, too, are letting their biases trump interest in factual accuracy.

This is the key danger: that this sort of thing becomes routine, repeated over and over again in left-leaning media outlets, to the point where accepting the Russiasphere’s fact-free claims becomes a core and important part of what Democrats believe.

“Normal people aren’t reading extensively about what Louise Mensch claims someone told her about Russia,” Nyhan says. “The question now is whether Democrats and their allies in the media — and other affiliated elites — will promote these conspiracy theories more aggressively.”

Strange epistemic times.

UPDATE: Hanson has a good round up of the churn of fake news and hysteria. Regime Change by Any Other Name? by Victor Davis Hanson

The Lucas critique and Heraclitus's river

In Vast literatures as mud moats, Noah Smith mentions the Lucas critique. As described in Wikipedia:

The Lucas critique, named for Robert Lucas's work on macroeconomic policymaking, argues that it is naive to try to predict the effects of a change in economic policy entirely on the basis of relationships observed in historical data, especially highly aggregated historical data. More formally, it states that the decision rules of Keynesian models—such as the consumption function—cannot be considered as structural in the sense of being invariant with respect to changes in government policy variables.

I would argue that the Lucas critique is, consciously or unconsciously, derivative of Heraclitus and has broader application than just economics. In fact, I think the scope is any complex, dynamic system subject to unpredictable external shocks and internal evolution. In other words, it has application to any human system: economics, politics, diplomacy, sociology, language, business, finance, etc. Anything that involves a person as a constituent of the process.

Heraclitus of Ephesus captured this with his more abstract:

πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει

Everything changes and nothing stands still.

and his more concrete:

δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης.

You could not step twice into the same river.

Any decision you make in a dynamic system changes at every instant. Every decision is necessarily unique. Your priorities change over time, the system itself evolves, constraints change, additional factors are added, there are different levels of uncertainty, different risks, etc.

A concrete example: You buy your first house when you are thirty and single. When you are forty and married with children, you buy and move into a second home. Is the decision-making process of buying a house the same? I would argue (with Lucas and Heraclitus) that the answer is no.

Nominally this looks like the same decision but it is not. You cannot simply recapitulate the first process. You have a spouse whose interests have to be taken into account, children in the home introduce a different risk awareness, the external market has changed, your income has changed, the mortgage market has changed, you have the experience (and lessons learned) of already having bought a house, etc. What looks like the same decision is not. You are not stepping into the same river.

We are rational beings and we want to recycle as much as possible and that works for static systems. You do something once and then you keep doing it the same again and again.

It does not work for dynamic complex systems and it warrants separating the two categories.

The two paper solution to the mud moat

Noah Smith has an excellent post, Vast literatures as mud moats. Tyler Cowen has some additional thoughts on the Two Papers rule that Smith proposes.

Smith:

I don't know why academic literatures are so often referred to as "vast" (the phrase goes back well over a century), but it seems like no matter what topic you talk about, someone is always popping up to inform you that there is a "vast literature" on the topic already. This often serves to shut down debate, because it amounts to a demand that before you talk about something, you need to go read voluminous amounts of what others have already written about it. Since vast literatures take many, many hours to read, this represents a significant demand of time and effort. If the vast literature comprises 40 papers, each of which takes an hour to read, that's one week of full-time work equivalent that people are demanding as a cost of entry just to participate in a debate! So the question is: Is it worth it?

The demand to know the literature is essentially a rhetorical argument designed to preclude non-experts from participating in the argument. Much like the point I was making in Undermining confidence in decision-making is a defensive strategy for "experts".

Smith has some great discussion on the various issues attached to the demand. My only supplement would be that, depending on how it is wielded, the demand to read the literature is both perfectly reasonable and also deliberately exclusionary.

Smith proposes:

My solution to this problem is what I call the Two Paper Rule. If you want me to read the vast literature, cite me two papers that are exemplars and paragons of that literature. Foundational papers, key recent innovations - whatever you like (but no review papers or summaries). Just two. I will read them.

If these two papers are full of mistakes and bad reasoning, I will feel free to skip the rest of the vast literature. Because if that's the best you can do, I've seen enough.

If these two papers contain little or no original work, and merely link to other papers, I will also feel free to skip the rest of the vast literature. Because you could have just referred me to the papers cited, instead of making me go through an extra layer, I will assume your vast literature is likely to be a mud moat.

And if you can't cite two papers that serve as paragons or exemplars of the vast literature, it means that the knowledge contained in that vast literature must be very diffuse and sparse. Which means it has a high likelihood of being a mud moat.

The Two Paper Rule is therefore an effective counter to the mud moat defense. Castle defenders will of course protest "But he only read two papers, and now he thinks he knows everything!". But that protest will ring hollow, because if you can show bystanders why the two exemplar papers are bad, few bystanders will expect you to read further.

Cowen objects and has some good reasons but to my eye they read as defensive pleading of the "expert." I like Smith's problem definition and, in the absence of a better proposition, I like his suggested solution.

Undermining confidence in decision-making is a defensive strategy for "experts"

From How Gullible Are We? A Review of the Evidence From Psychology and Social Science. by Hugo Mercier.

I am deeply involved in the science and art of decision-making and do a lot of research in this area including the prevalence of logical fallacies, psychological biases, and other cognitive kinks in our capacity to identify patterns, assess the quality of information, estimate risk, and make effective decisions that will move us towards our desired goals. It is a fascinating field.

An observable phenomenon in the past decade has been the burgeoning plethora of books focused on the various mechanisms by which we reduce the quality of our decisions. It almost feels like there is a conspiracy to not only reduce our confidence in the effectiveness of our decision-making but indeed to advance the notion that we cannot make good decisions. There are many reasons for this radical proposition. I suspect one significant contributor is a certain defensiveness on the part of experts.

With the increasing capacity of the internet to help people gather information and learn on their own, it has undermined the status and economic livelihood of experts. I suspect that the messaging that people are not to be trusted to make decisions on their own is an uncoordinated and unconscious effort to shore up the position of experts. Something along the lines of "You may have read twelve articles on on the internet on this topic but don't try it at home, call the expert."

Regardless of the cause, I think the pendulum has swung too far. Yes people should be realistic and cautious about the quality of their thinking and decision-making, and yes there is variance between people in the quality of their thinking and decision-making, but they are still perfectly capable. Experts are useful and necessary, but not to everyone, and not all the time.

Mercier makes this point in his research. From the abstract:

A long tradition of scholarship, from ancient Greece to Marxism or some contemporary social psychology, portrays humans as strongly gullible—wont to accept harmful messages by being unduly deferent. However, if humans are reasonably well adapted, they should not be strongly gullible: they should be vigilant toward communicated information. Evidence from experimental psychology reveals that humans are equipped with well-functioning mechanisms of epistemic vigilance. They check the plausibility of messages against their background beliefs, calibrate their trust as a function of the source’s competence and benevolence, and critically evaluate arguments offered to them. Even if humans are equipped with well-functioning mechanisms of epistemic vigilance, an adaptive lag might render them gullible in the face of new challenges, from clever marketing to omnipresent propaganda. I review evidence from different cultural domains often taken as proof of strong gullibility: religion, demagoguery, propaganda, political campaigns, advertising, erroneous medical beliefs, and rumors. Converging evidence reveals that communication is much less influential than often believed—that religious proselytizing, propaganda, advertising, and so forth are generally not very effective at changing people’s minds. Beliefs that lead to costly behavior are even less likely to be accepted. Finally, it is also argued that most cases of acceptance of misguided communicated information do not stem from undue deference, but from a fit between the communicated information and the audience’s preexisting beliefs.

We are all free agents who can make our own decisions.