Rationality and radical ideas

A very good piece, Were Trump Voters Irrational? by Keith Stanovich. A little too much weight on the Left:Right or Democrat:Republican axes but to some extent that was unavoidable given the nature of the issues being discussed.

In the mainstream media such as the New York Times, Atlantic, New Republic, and the ilk, for the past few years, it has been common to see much attention paid to research that finds conservatives/Republicans to be disadvantaged compared to liberals/Democrats in terms of rationality, knowledge, IQ, etc.

Much of the research they rely on has been questionable in terms of framing, sample size, randomness of the sample, etc. It has been increasingly clear, as the research gets more sophisticated and robust in order to address the legitimate criticisms, that there is no real difference in IQ, rationality, or epistemic volume between the parties/factions.

Jonathan Haidt began injecting some rigor into this whole comparative process by pointing out (and documenting) in The Righteous Mind that differences in moral foundations between the left and right were in part responsible for who and why people were seeing the world differently from their opposites.

Stanovich's article is an excellent complement to Haidt's work.

In September 2016, in collaboration with my colleagues Richard West and Maggie Toplak, I published a book titled The Rationality Quotient. In it, we described our attempt to create the first comprehensive test of rational thinking. The book is very much an academic volume, full of statistics and technical details. We had expected our academic peers to engage with the statistics and technical details, and they did begin to do just that after its publication.

But then the November 8, 2016 United States presidential election intervened.

The nature of my email suddenly changed. I began to receive many communications containing gallows humor, like “Wow, you’ll sure have a lot to study now” or “We sure need your test now, don’t we?” Many of these emails had the implication that I now had the perfect group to study—Trump voters—who were obviously irrational in the eyes of my email correspondents.

Stanovich follows through and looks systematically at whether Trump voters were unknowledgeable, irrational actors voting against their own interests. He makes many important points and raises interesting ideas.

Cognitive scientists recognize two types of rationality: instrumental and epistemic. Instrumental rationality is achieved when we act with optimal efficiency to achieve our goals. Epistemic rationality concerns how well beliefs map onto the actual structure of the world—that is, whether our beliefs are accurate, or true. A quick and memorable way to differentiate the two is to say that they concern what to do (instrumental rationality) and what is true (epistemic rationality). Of course, the two are related. In order to take actions that fulfill our goals, we need to base those actions on beliefs that are properly calibrated to the world.

Stanovich makes the broad point that in order to assess rationality, you have to understand the nature of the goals being pursued. It is not correct to say someone is irrational simply because they have different goals than you do. The test is whether, given their goals, they are rational in pursuit of those goals.

The mainstream media routinely condemn people as irrational simply because they have a different set of goals than your average 27-year-old journalist.

Stanovich introduces another classification which I think is quite interesting. Emphasis added.

But what about temperament, character, and fitness for office? Surely it was irrational to vote for Trump if temperament is relevant, Democrats might say. But this argument is not a slam-dunk from the standpoint of rationality. It is simply not self-evident how people should trade off temperament versus worldview in their voting choices. This is especially true in the 2016 presidential election, where the candidates were unusually differentiated in their worldviews. In that election, Clinton represented what I will term the Global and Groups perspective (GG) and Trump represented the Country and Citizen perspective (CC). Clinton signalled to the electorate that she represented the GG perspective by emphasizing global concerns (climate change and global climate agreements; increasing US refugee intake; rights and protections for noncitizens) and continually addressing groups in her speeches (the groups of Democratic identity politics: LGBT, African-Americans, Hispanics, etc.). Trump signalled to the electorate that he represented the CC perspective by continually emphasizing country in his speeches (“make America great again”) and addressing his audiences as citizens with nation-level interests rather than group interests (trade deals that disadvantaged American workers; securing the country’s borders; etc.).

Global and Groups perspective versus Country and Citizen perspective is an interesting formulation and you can see a bridge between those perspectives and the moral foundations model.

Instrumental versus Epistemic rationality and GG versus CC, are very useful/interesting constructs. I would add two more, one of which I alluded to. Goal comprehension - recognizing that people 1) have different goals, 2) they rank order those goals (even if they are the same goals) differently, and 3) they have different trade-off formulations among those goals.

It would be easy to say that since Citizen A and Citizen B both value personal freedom and personal security, that they are of like mind. But we don't know that. One might rank security as of top priority and the other, freedom. But even if they have the same ordinal rank, Freedom One and Security Two, we still can't say they have aligned goals if they have different trade-offs. For example, Benjamin Franklin valued both but his trade-offs were strict, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Citizen B who might be willing to sacrifice some freedom in order to purchase security would be in conflict with Franklin even though they both might value freedom and security in that order.

I think goal comprehension is a whole chapter that is important towards assessing rationality. If we do not understand someone else's goals, we are not in much position to understand their rationality.

I would also add a further complication which is a common barrier towards understanding someone else's rationality and that is taking account of temporal priorities, tactical versus strategic concerns. If, for example, I believe that establishment politicians have become a sclerotic barrier to the necessary reforms that would allow the economy to flourish, I might be willing to vote for any non-conformist candidate in the near term, even if I think they might be ineffective, in order to achieve the more valuable goal of long term displacement of the sclerotic establishment.

By assessing Instrumental versus Epistemic rationality, GG versus CC, Goal comprehension and Tactical versus Strategic, we begin to get ourselves in to a position to assess relative degrees of rationality. But that requires a lot of good faith openness and hard work. It is usually easier, and far more common, to simply dismiss someone as voting against their own interests and as irrational simply because they have different goals, priorities, trade-offs, tactics and strategies.

The whole piece is well worth reading. In terms of assessing rationality, he concludes in his penultimate paragraph:

I am afraid that my Democratic friends are just going to have to reconcile themselves to the conclusion that the cognitive science of rationality does not support their judgment of the Trump voters. You can say whatever you want about the rationality or irrationality of Trump himself, but cognitive science does not support the claim that his voters were irrational—or, more specifically, that they were any less rational than the Clinton voters. Politics is not the place to look for objective rightness or wrongness—and that is what judgments about the rationality of voting entail. Our judgments in this domain are uniquely susceptible to myside bias.

I agree. But I think his final paragraph has an even greater insight.

Many of our most contentious political issues hinge on values and culture rather than facts. That may be a good thing. It could be signalling that our society has already handled the easiest issues—those that can be solved by educating everyone to accept the same facts and then implementing the obvious solution that follows from these facts. We may have achieved a social structure that is so optimized that the remaining disputes revolve largely around values and cultural choices. Rather than calling the Trump voters irrational, it might be a better idea to engage with their Country and Citizen cultural concerns and treat them as equally valid and rational as the Global and Groups cultural concerns that largely drove the Clinton voters.

Instead of writing off someone with whom you disagree, extend respect to your counterpart and engage with the issues in terms of their worldview as well as your own - an idea so radical it might just work.

People might demonstrate isolated transactional irrationality but they tend to be systemically rational.

The academy can be extremely narrow-minded, intolerant and faddish, especially in the social sciences. It matters not how many research failures are revealed, they continue dogmatically believing in whatever trendy thought has recently emerged at the expense of real world experience.

One trend in the past five years or so has been the emerging conviction, trumpeted in books and articles, that the human mind is irredeemably illogical, irrational and incapable of consistent thought. Much of this depends on lab experiments on small numbers of usually middle class, affluent twenty-year olds, conducted under unrealistic conditions.

An example has been the joy with which sociologists greeted the Implicit Attitude Test which seemed to reveal that everyone was strongly biased against African-Americans. Sociologists being ideologues primarily from the Frankfurt School of reformed Marxism and broadly committed to critical theory celebrated the discovery of what they wanted to be true. But then it emerged that African-Americans taking the test were also biased against African-Americans. Then it was discovered that IAT results had no correlation to observed behaviors outside the lab environment. IAT is dying a slow death but cognitive pollution, once spread in the public discourse, like oil from a shipwrecked tanker, sticks around a long time.

At last we have a journalist/researcher willing to declare, in the context of the faddish conviction that all humans are irrational, that the emperor has no clothes. From The Irrational Idea That Humans Are Mostly Irrational by Paul Bloom.

My position on the irrationality claim is that indeed there are circumstances where humans are irrational but that the appearance of irrationality usually arises from biases on the part of the researcher, and/or because the goals and priorities of the subject are not understood, and/or because the context in which the decision is being made is not understood.

Bloom goes along with some of this.

My bet is that the relevant factor in variation in rationality, including moral reasoning, is not about different types of people, but different types of situations. If you want to see people at their stupidest, check out national politics, which is replete with us-vs.-them dynamics and virtue signaling, and where the cost of having silly views is harmless. Unless I’m a member of a tiny, powerful community, my beliefs about climate change or the arms deal with Iran will have no effect on the world, and so it’s not surprising that people don't work so hard to get those sorts of facts right.

It’s revelatory, then, that we do much better when the stakes are high, where being rational really matters. If I have the wrong theory of how to make scrambled eggs, they will come out too dry; if I have the wrong everyday morality, I will hurt those I love. So if you’re curious about people’s capacity for reasoning, don’t look at cases where being correct doesn’t matter and where it’s all about affiliation. Rather, look at how people cope in everyday life.

[snip]

Look at the discussions that adults have over whether to buy a house or where to send their kids to school, or consider the social negotiations that occur among friends deciding where to go for dinner, planning a hike, or figuring out how to help someone who just had a baby. Or even look at a different sort of politics—the type of politics where individuals might actually make a difference, such as a town hall meeting where people discuss zoning regulations and where to put a stop sign.

My own experience is that the level of rational discourse in these situations is high. People might be self-interested, but they know that they are involved in decisions that matter, so they work to exercise their rational capacities: They make arguments, express ideas, and are receptive to the arguments and ideas of others. They sometimes even change their minds.

I like his point about the importance, not just of context, but of consequentiality. The more consequential the outcome, the more people invest in making informed decisions.

Blooms point ties to the other recently popular notion that voters are irrational and fail to vote their own interests. The higher the level of the election, the less critical it is to make a well-informed decision because of the less degree of impact within the election (one vote out of however many), as well as the weak relationship between national politician statements and actions. There is no point in investing time and effort becoming mini-experts, as some academics would wish, if the causal relationship between investment and outcome is so weak.

Know the goals, know the proxy measures used, know the priorities, know the perceived trade-offs among goals, know the context, know the relative costs - only then do you even begin to be in a position to consider whether irrationality is in play. Short of that, as a talking head, all you are doing is substituting your opinions and biases over everyone else's interpretations. It is a totalitarian/authoritarian mindset rather than a classical liberal one in which everyone is deemed to have equal agency and respect.

Public reason is our best hope for survival

It doesn't rain but it pours. I mentioned only few days ago that I had not seen much commentary on some of the disturbing implications behind Cass Sunstein's book Nudge. Now that he has a couple of new books out, it seems as if commentators are focusing on some of the same issues which have been disturbing me. Reflecting on yesterday's post while driving around, it occurred to me that Sunstein is a little like a kid with a new toy which happens to be a chain-saw. It's neat and can be both fun and useful but it should be treated with care and caution.

Its not that what Sunstein is saying about nudging is wrong. Its that it is dangerous and he is not demonstrating due caution to what can go wrong. He appears an exemplar of what Thomas Sowell calls the Self-Anointed - those undoubtedly high IQ individuals who overestimate their own intelligence and wisdom to the detriment of everyone else. In fact Sowell wrote a whole book documenting the resultant disasters arising from the inclination of the Self-Anointed to appropriate decision-making on behalf of others, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy by Thomas Sowell.

Not so foolish by Steven Poole focuses on a somewhat different argument. Poole wishes to refute the idea underpinning Nudge and its ilk that people are a portfolio of irrationalities and biases. The implication of the worldview of other people as being irrational is that they are fundamentally unqualified to make good decisions. This becomes the groundwork for the idea that others with a higher IQ, who are wiser or more informed should be allowed to make decisions on behalf of those poor deluded irrational darlings.

Poole raises some important points but I think he misses several issues that are as or more important.

Poole starts out with a summary of the recent attacks on the assumption of man as a rational decision-maker.

. . . the news from popular psychology, neuroscience, economics and other fields is that we are not as rational as we like to assume. We are prey to a dismaying variety of hard-wired errors. We prefer winning to being right. At best, so the story goes, our faculty of reason is at constant war with an irrational darkness within. At worst, we should abandon the attempt to be rational altogether.

[snip]

This is a scientised version of original sin. And its eager adoption by today’s governments threatens social consequences that many might find troubling. A culture that believes its citizens are not reliably competent thinkers will treat those citizens differently to one that respects their reflective autonomy. Which kind of culture do we want to be? And we do have a choice. Because it turns out that the modern vision of compromised rationality is more open to challenge than many of its followers accept.

Poole then has a long discussion about the consequences of defining rationality too narrowly. I think he is materially correct and has some great examples but I don't think that definitions are the primary weakness of the camp wanting to proclaim the fundamental flawedness of human decision-making.

I think the rationality critics go wrong in the following ways.

1) They fail to take into account that people's objectives differ from one another and over time. Decisions that appear irrational in one context appear rational in another. One's objectives create an internal framing that shapes how one approaches a decision. By not taking into account individual objectives, the irrationalist camp fails to acknowledge the agency of their fellow man and how unlikely it is that all people will have identical goals, prioritized in the same way, pursued in the same fashion, at the same time.

2) They ignore the issue of tactical and strategic decision-making. Some decisions that are tactically detrimental are strategically beneficial. Some decisions that are tactically beneficial are strategically detrimental.

3) They fail to address how Perceived Risk and Uncertainty drive decisions. If I live in a very uncertain environment, I am likely to have a very high time discount, i.e. I put a premium on immediate gratification or return. Consequently, I am unlikely to invest much in an activity, no matter how high the objective return might be, if that return is beyond my planning horizon. It is obvious between countries (say someone living in Haiti versus in Indiana). It is less obvious but still apparent when comparing within a country (say a fifteen year old considering to save for a rainy day versus a fifty year old). It is least apparent, but just as real, between individuals of near identical backgrounds (say two fifty year-olds, one concerned about perceived future inflation rates versus a second not concerned about inflation). In the latter case we are dealing with what Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to as The Black Swan, conceivable but not quantifiable future events with a low probability but a high consequence.

4) They underestimate the role of trust in factual determination. High trust societies extend a lot of credence to others of the in-group in order to save time and effort vetting the quality of information. This has some small cost at the tactical level (bad information or assumptions work their way in to any system) but tends to be outweighed by the aggregate efficiency that such trust enables.

5) They discount the impact of limits and constraints. A poor person has fewer resources to buffer against unexpected events which in turn can have very high consequences and therefore may rationally overinvest in insurance or other actions that protect them from the consequences of an unexpected event. Taking a day off to go to the doctor's office to deal with that bad cut might put your job at risk if you are very poor so you "irrationally" make do with a big band-aid. If you are in a white collar profession, the risk of losing your job for going to the doctors is remote and therefore you do go. Is one more rational than the other given their respective constraints?

6) They undervalue the importance of narrative coherence. We seek to understand things in a fashion that validates our understood narrative. That predisposition is useful when there is a lot of noise in the system. By being predisposed to affirm the accepted narrative, we are essentially filtering out variant noise. It is only when there is sufficient disconfirming evidence to the narrative, and the consequence of an incorrect narrative is sufficiently large that it forces us to expend scarce cognitive resources to adjust or completely change the established narrative.

There are other important issues beyond the basic idea of nudging and Poole raises some of them.

Short-circuiting the principle of consent of the governed is one of those issues. When a select group is allowed to frame choices in a fashion likely to lead to a predictable outcome it essentially disenfranchises individuals. Usually not on a decision-by-decision basis, but in aggregate. Everyone certainly wishes to be the one to do the framing. It is the lifeblood of marketers. But as long as the economy is reinforced by principles of free choice and competition, then there is an evolutionary pressure to stay within certain boundaries of framing. You can't get away with as much framing if you have a competitor who is seeking to unmask you. The naivete of Sunstein is that allowing governments, which are inherently resistant to competition, the power to frame undermines the principle of the consent of the governed. Poole touches on this:

Nudging is far from being a dystopian tool of state mind control: we remain free, after all, to make the ‘wrong’ choices. Yet there is something troubling about the way in which it is able to marginalise political discussion. Is it always irrational to eat fatty food? What about organ donation: should we always be happy about doing that? These are murky questions and opinions might differ, but the architects of choice never have to consult the public about them. Thus the attempt to bypass our reasoning selves creates a problem of consent, a short-circuiting of democracy. Why bother having a political argument if you can make (most) people do what you want anyway?

All the complaints of political gridlock today reflect a desire to impose a choice on others without having to go through the work of arguing and convincing. All the checks and balances created by the Founding Fathers were precisely to make it hard for legislation to occur without material social consent and agreement.

I like this description of reasoning as being a product of community discourse and debate.

Indeed, even as he calls the ‘worship’ of reason a ‘delusion’, Jonathan Haidt celebrates humans’ ability to reason together. ‘If you put individuals together in the right way,’ he writes in The Righteous Mind, ‘such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.’

Combining reasoning individuals ‘in the right way’ is important, so as to avoid the irrational effects introduced by phenomena such as group polarisation or informational cascades. Yet we are all familiar with various examples of the right way to combine individuals into public bodies capable of high-level reasoning: scientific societies, universities – even, sometimes, government debating chambers. Indeed, reasoning is the social institution whose reliability underwrites all the other civil and political institutions of civilised life.

And so there is less reason than many think to doubt humans’ ability to be reasonable. The dissenting critiques of the cognitive-bias literature argue that people are not, in fact, as individually irrational as the present cultural climate assumes. And proponents of debiasing argue that we can each become more rational with practice. But even if we each acted as irrationally as often as the most pessimistic picture implies, that would be no cause to flatten democratic deliberation into the weighted engineering of consumer choices, as nudge politics seeks to do. On the contrary, public reason is our best hope for survival. Even a reasoned argument to the effect that human rationality is fatally compromised is itself an exercise in rationality. Albeit rather a perverse, and – we might suppose – ultimately self-defeating one.

I think the cultivation of civility, tolerance and a love of discourse is the easiest and fastest way for us to continue development and prosperity. Those who seek to circumvent discussion, verbal competition and exploration of new ideas which might be uncomfortable in the status quo are the ones who pose the greatest threat to the commonweal.

Irrational optimism

The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. Page 9.

Had I only known it, experiments in laboratories by the economist Vernon Smith and his colleagues have long confirmed that markets in goods and services for immediate consumption - haircuts and hamburgers - work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to deliver efficiency and innovation; while markets in assets are so automatically prone to bubbles and crashes that it is hard to design them so they work at all. Speculation, herd exuberance, irrational optimism, rent-seeking and the temptation of fraud drive asset markets to overshoot and plunge - which is why they need careful regulation, something I always supported. (Markets in goods and services need less regulation.)

This touches on the crux of the issue regarding cultivating a culture of enthusiastic reading - the trade-off between the present and the future, the trade-off between the tactical and the strategic.

Learning to read is like goods and services for immediate consumption. All OECD countries achieve nearly uniform levels of technical reading capability, i.e. 99% of the population can read at a fifth grade level. Most countries are pretty effective at teaching the skill of reading.

Cultivating the culture and behaviors that reinforce continued habitual and enthusiastic reading is a different matter entirely. It is much more like markets in assets, "prone to bubbles and crashes", "herd exuberance, irrational optimism", etc. Cultivating the culture of habitual and enthusiastic reading involves (unlike immediate consumption) trading off present goods for probable future value and requiring tactical sacrifices for strategic gains. It is all about trade-offs and risk taking. Do I keep reading to my child or do I force him to do more reading for himself? Do I allow them to read what they want or what I think is good for them? Is it worth my time reading myself so that my child has a role-model? How much money do I spend on providing an environment rich in books when I know that my child won't necessarily enjoy all of those books?

These are all trade-off and risk taking decisions. There are some heuristic rules of thumb that are useful (see Growing a Reading Culture: Just for Parents) but there are no gurantees. Just like asset markets - past performance is no guarantee of future outcomes. Individual judgment and weighing of options rules over simple analytic algorithms.

The limits of rationality

I am not making the claim that people are all irrational all the time. I am saying that the model where people make decisions solely based on rationality has its limits. There are reasons for people making these inferences, even if they may not be good ones or even if we can't discern them.

Are people willing to pay for predictions of unpredictable outcomes (like tosses of a fair coin)? You bet. Slightly jaw dropping [ungated👍] paper by @NickPowdthavee et al (HT @AnnieDuke) https://t.co/DNqkj8qhkR pic.twitter.com/CkWD4mpb36

— Koenfucius (@koenfucius) December 24, 2018

If someone were to show me a "fair" coin which had been flipped five times and had each time come up heads, I would recognize a low probability event. If someone shows me a coin which came up ten times in a row, I begin to doubt the predicate claim that it is a "fair" coin. From a pure statistical view, I am being irrational, the coin is fair and it is just a low probability event. From a contextual view, doubts about the integrity of the experiment are, of course, perfectly rational.

From Would You Pay For Transparently Useless Advice? A Test of Boundaries of Beliefs in the Folly of Predictions by Nattavudh Powdthavee and Yohanes E. Riyanto. From the Abstract:

Standard economic models assume that the demand for expert predictions arises only under the conditions in which individuals are uncertain about the underlying process generating the data and there is a strong belief that past performances predict future performances. We set up the strongest possible test of these assumptions. In contrast to the theoretical suggestions made in the literature, people are willing to pay for predictions of truly random outcomes after witnessing only a short streak of accurate predictions live in the lab. We discuss potential explanations and implications of such irrational learning in the contexts of economics and finance.

Dwelling on the irrationality of the part misses the adaptive rationality of the whole

From The Mental Health of Nations by Infovores.  An interesting insight to a Simpson's Paradox in mental health.

Healthy, well-adjusted people successfully make their way through life in part thanks to self-enhancement strategies that accentuate their positive qualities. It is easy to make fun of any one of these enhancements in isolation (recall that nearly all drivers believe they drive better than average), but dwelling on the irrationality of the part misses the adaptive rationality of the whole.

To hint at the connection between positive illusions and national pride just a little more, consider the regard marriage partners have for each other in a thriving and committed relationship. Research suggests that successful couples are still able to see each others faults but look for ways to downplay them while looking for silver linings and emphasizing more positive qualities. What some might call cognitive distortions probably enable them to stay together.

Critics of irrational behavior are, sometimes, merely fixated on the wrong lens.  What can be tactically irrational might be strategically rational.  It is like winning battles and wars.  Ideally, you win all your battles AND win the war.  But that's not the real world.  Sometimes, you win all the battles and lose the war.  It is also true that you can lose some or most of your battles and win the war.  

Similarly with adaptive rationality.  Some behaviors are tactically irrational but are strategically markedly effective.

When maths was taken seriously

From Wikipedia, Hippasus of Metapontum.

Hippasus of Metapontum (/ˈhɪpəsəs/; Greek: Ἵππασος ὁ Μεταποντῖνος, Híppasos; fl. 5th century BC), was a Pythagorean philosopher. Little is known about his life or his beliefs, but he is sometimes credited with the discovery of the existence of irrational numbers. The discovery of irrational numbers is said to have been shocking to the Pythagoreans, and Hippasus is supposed to have drowned at sea, apparently as a punishment from the gods for divulging this.

A slight elaboration. Pythagoreans argued that all numbers could be expressed as the ratio of integers. The mathematical discoveries of the Pythagorean were part of a tightly woven mesh of science, philosophy and religion. The discovery of irrational numbers was, therefore not just a mathematical shock but a philosophical one as well and bordered on blasphemy.

Optimal versus theoretical outcomes

Glad to see this point being made. From Are Humans Really That Irrational? by Paul Warren and George Farmer. My past posts about purported irrationality.

What is claimed to be irrational is frequently, when investigated robustly, proven heuristics which come into play under circumstances of scarcity, uncertainty, differing goals and objectives, and absence of trust. Time span (short or long term) and system position (tactical or strategic) also come into play. People are sometimes indeed irrational. Sometimes you fail to understand the context.

For example, I am in a psychology lab and I am told to flip a "fair" coin and have to make an estimate of what the next flip will be. After ten heads, it is more than rational to assume that perhaps they are not measuring my mathematical rationality but my deference to authority. How long will you trust what a person in authority says is true when the evidence is consistently against the authority claim?

Context matters. Trust matters. Uncertainty matters.

From the article:

Although our decision making falls short of the standards required by logic and mathematics, there is still a role for rationality in understanding human cognition. The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has shown that while many of the heuristics we use may not be perfect, they are both useful and efficient.

But a recent approach called computational rationality goes a step further, borrowing an idea from artificial intelligence. It suggests that a system with limited abilities can still take an optimal course of action. The question becomes “What is the best outcome I can achieve with the tools I have?”, as opposed to “What is the best outcome that could be achieved without any constraints at all?” For humans, this means taking things like memory, capacity, attention and noisy sensory systems into account.

Indeed - Given my context and constraints, I want the practical optimal outcome, not the theoretical outcome.

Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

I am enjoying The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene. It is no real guide as to how to win, but rather, a compendium of successful strategies. You need to be wise enough to both choose your goals well and also pick your strategies well.

Each strategy is discussed with quotes and examples.

For example, Strategy 10 is Create a Threatening Presence - Deterrence Strategies. I have seen a lot of this between Trump and the press over the past couple of years. The mainstream media got accustomed to lightweight presidents playing within the establishment rules for thirty years. Presidents who wanted to work with the establishment parties in a fashion that left the politicians better off, but not necessarily the citizens.

Trump seems to be simply working his list of campaign promises, quietly (well, not so quietly) achieving his promises one-by-one. His reelection campaign seems built on, "I deliver what I promise". And he seems to be relying on strategies which are pretty standard and routine in a commercial environment, certainly recognizable, but which perhaps haven't been seen often in the international old-boy environment of the establishments which are now being upended by citizens.

One of those strategies is essentially bluster. Create in the mind of your opponent a sense of uncertainty as to what you are willing to do and a reputation for doing the unspeakable. Time and again the establishment and the mainstream media are appalled by his apparent bull-in-the-china-shop approach. "You can't do that" and then off he goes and does it. It appears unsettling and unpredictable and they are aghast. And it is not an uncommon strategy in war and business.

Getting inside one's opponent's head is the vernacular. And, as the internet meme goes, he is living rent free in the heads of his political (Democrat and Republican) opponents as well as his media opponents.

Greene Describes Strategy 10 as:

The best way to fight off aggressors is to keep them from attacking you in the first place. To accomplish this you must create the impression of being more powerful than you are. Build up a reputation: You're a little crazy. Fighting you is not worth it. You take your enemies with you when you lose. Create this reputation and make it credible with a few impressive--impressively violent--acts. Uncertainty is sometimes better than overt threat: if your opponents are never sure what messing with you will cost, they will not want to find out. Play on people's natural fears and anxieties to make them think twice.

Germany, China, France, North Korea, Iran - he is creating a threatening presence for all of them and the mainstream media are doing all the heavy lifting for him. He breaks one no-longer effective convention after another and the media lose their mind. The wailing and gnashing of teeth by the media delivers a direct message to Bonn, Beijing, Paris, Pyongyang, and Tehran - here is a man who is nearly crazy as demonstrated by the panic he is creating among the press.

If it were not so absurd, you might consider it an elaborately choreographed performance between the White House and the press. Instead, it seems to be a deliberate White House strategy. And it is not new for Trump. His career has been built on braggadocio alternating with charm and thunderous noise. Think of all those years bragging about his fortune, the audacity of his deals, the size of his buildings, his willingness to take risks. And yet there are interviews where he is charming and reflective. There are friends of longstanding. As a stranger, you never know with which Trump you might be dealing.

Greene elaborates:

Inevitably in life you will find yourself facing people who are more aggressive than you are--crafty, ruthless people who are determined to get what they want. Fighting them head-on is generally foolish; fighting is what they are good at, and they are unscrupulous to boot. You will probably lose. Trying to fend them off by giving them part of what they are after, or otherwise pleasing or appeasing them, is a recipe for disaster: you are only showing your weakness, inviting more threats and attacks. But giving in completely, surrendering without a fight, hands them the easy victory they crave and makes you resentful and bitter. It can also become a bad habit, the path of least resistance in dealing with difficult situations.

Instead of trying to avoid conflict or whining about the injustice of it all, consider an option developed over the centuries by military leaders and strategists to deal with violent and acquisitive neighbors: reverse intimidation. This art of deterrence rests on three basic facts about war and human nature: First, people are more likely to attack you if they see you as weak or vulnerable. Second, they cannot know for sure that you're weak; they depend on the signs you give out, through your behavior both present and past. Third, they are after easy victories, quick and bloodless. That is why they prey on the vulnerable and weak.

Deterrence is simply a matter of turning this dynamic around, altering any perception of yourself as weak and naive and sending the message that battle with you will not be as easy as they had thought. This is generally done by taking some visible action that will confuse aggressors and make them think they have misread you: you may indeed be vulnerable, but they are not sure. You're disguising your weakness and distracting them. Action has much more credibility than mere threatening or fiery words; hitting back, for instance, even in some small, symbolic way, will show that you mean what you say. With so many other people around who are timid and easy prey, the aggressor will most likely back off and move on to someone else.

This form of defensive warfare is infinitely applicable to the battles of daily life. Appeasing people can be as debilitating as fighting them; deterring them, scaring them out of attacking you or getting in your way, will save you valuable energy and resources. To deter aggressors you must become adept at deception, manipulating appearances and their perceptions of you--valuable skills that can be applied to all aspects of daily warfare. And finally, by practicing the art as needed, you will build for yourself a reputation as someone tough, someone worthy of respect and a little fear. The passive-aggressive obstructionists who try to undermine you covertly will also think twice about taking you on.

The following are five basic methods of deterrence and reverse intimidation. You can use them all in offensive warfare, but they are particularly effective in defense, for moments when you find yourself vulnerable and under attack. They are culled from the experiences and writings of the greatest masters of the art.

I have seen instances where Trump seems to do something completely irrational, or is certainly represented as such by the press. And yet if you look at it, is usually around a matter of little consequence. I suspect he has picked a fight on an inconsequential matter in order to act ostentatiously irrational simply in order to bolster the credibility of his deterrence strategies. Again, with the press as an obliging handmaid.

Greene highlights five types of actions which help build a threatening presence. The following are the headlines, he has much detail in the book.

Surprise with a bold maneuver. [Think the Jerusalem announcement]

Reverse the threat [China trade]

Seem unpredictable and irrational [Paris Treaty]

Play on people's natural paranoia [Build the Wall]

Establish a frightening reputation [ICE]

Check, check, check, check, check.

Perhaps it is crediting him with way too much sophistication and talent. Maybe. But whether he is doing these things consciously or instinctively, it sure seems to match what he is doing.

Greene litters his book with both examples and illustrating quotes. Here are a few of the quotes pertinent to Deterrence Strategies.

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
RULES FOR RADICALS, SAUL D. ALINSKY, 1972

Injuring all of a man's ten fingers is not as effective as chopping off one.
--Mao Tse-tung (1893-1976)

Brinkmanship is...the deliberate creation of a recognizable risk, a risk that one does not completely control. It is the tactic of deliberately letting the situation get somewhat out of hand, just because its being out of hand may be intolerable to the other party and force his accommodation. It means harassing and intimidating an adversary by exposing him to a shared risk, or deterring him by showing that if he makes a contrary move he may disturb us so that we slip over the brink whether we want to or not, carrying him with us.
THINKING STRATEGICALLY, AVINASH K. DIXIT AND BARRY J. NALEBUFF, 1991

When opponents are unwilling to fight with you, it is because they think it is contrary to their interests, or because you have misled them into thinking so.
--Sun-tzu (fourth century B.C.)

Postmodernism - root of all modern evil?

From How French "Intellectuals" Ruined The West: Postmodernism and Its Impact Explained by Helen Pluckrose.

Postmodernism presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but to modernity itself. That may sound like a bold or even hyperbolic claim, but the reality is that the cluster of ideas and values at the root of postmodernism have broken the bounds of academia and gained great cultural power in western society. The irrational and identitarian “symptoms” of postmodernism are easily recognizable and much criticized, but the ethos underlying them is not well understood. This is partly because postmodernists rarely explain themselves clearly and partly because of the inherent contradictions and inconsistencies of a way of thought which denies a stable reality or reliable knowledge to exist. However, there are consistent ideas at the root of postmodernism and understanding them is essential if we intend to counter them. They underlie the problems we see today in Social Justice Activism, undermine the credibility of the Left and threaten to return us to an irrational and tribal “pre-modern” culture.

Postmodernism, most simply, is an artistic and philosophical movement which began in France in the 1960s and produced bewildering art and even more bewildering “theory.” It drew on avant-garde and surrealist art and earlier philosophical ideas, particularly those of Nietzsche and Heidegger, for its anti-realism and rejection of the concept of the unified and coherent individual. It reacted against the liberal humanism of the modernist artistic and intellectual movements, which its proponents saw as naïvely universalizing a western, middle-class and male experience.

It rejected philosophy which valued ethics, reason and clarity with the same accusation. Structuralism, a movement which (often over-confidently) attempted to analyze human culture and psychology according to consistent structures of relationships, came under attack. Marxism, with its understanding of society through class and economic structures was regarded as equally rigid and simplistic. Above all, postmodernists attacked science and its goal of attaining objective knowledge about a reality which exists independently of human perceptions which they saw as merely another form of constructed ideology dominated by bourgeois, western assumptions. Decidedly left-wing, postmodernism had both a nihilistic and a revolutionary ethos which resonated with a post-war, post-empire zeitgeist in the West. As postmodernism continued to develop and diversify, its initially stronger nihilistic deconstructive phase became secondary (but still fundamental) to its revolutionary “identity politics” phase.

It has been a matter of contention whether postmodernism is a reaction against modernity. The modern era is the period of history which saw Renaissance Humanism, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the development of liberal values and human rights; the period when Western societies gradually came to value reason and science over faith and superstition as routes to knowledge, and developed a concept of the person as an individual member of the human race deserving of rights and freedoms rather than as part of various collectives subject to rigid hierarchical roles in society.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica says postmodernism “is largely a reaction against the philosophical assumptions and values of the modern period of Western (specifically European) history” whilst the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy denies this and says “Rather, its differences lie within modernity itself, and postmodernism is a continuation of modern thinking in another mode.” I’d suggest the difference lies in whether we see modernity in terms of what was produced or what was destroyed. If we see the essence of modernity as the development of science and reason as well as humanism and universal liberalism, postmodernists are opposed to it. If we see modernity as the tearing down of structures of power including feudalism, the Church, patriarchy, and Empire, postmodernists are attempting to continue it, but their targets are now science, reason, humanism and liberalism. Consequently, the roots of postmodernism are inherently political and revolutionary, albeit in a destructive or, as they would term it, deconstructive way.

Indeed. The whole piece is worth reading.

Any argument requires premises that it assumes and does not prove

Are Your Political Opponents Crazy? by Gary Gutting

People are, of course, frequently irrational; they ignore obvious facts or make silly mistakes in reasoning. But the mere failure to support some of your basic claims with good logical arguments does not show that you are irrational. Any argument requires premises that it assumes and does not prove. We may construct a further argument for an unproven premise, but that argument will itself have unproven premises. That’s why even mathematics, the most thoroughly rational enterprise we have, begins with unproven axioms.

The coldest of all cold monsters

From The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

States impose themselves on top of peoples. In some cases, the state forms the people, as the laws of Lycurgus and Romulus were held to have formed the ethos of the people of Sparta and Rome, respectively, or as the rule of liberty and equality has shaped a democratic consciousness among the various immigrant peoples making up the United States of America. But states in many cases sit in uneasy tension with peoples, and in some instances might be said to be at war with their peoples—as when the Russian and Chinese communists sought forcibly to convert their populations to Marxist ideals. The success and the stability of liberal democracy therefore never depends simply on the mechanical application of a certain set of universal principles and laws, but requires a degree of conformity between peoples and states.

If we, following Nietzsche, define a people as a moral community sharing ideas of good and evil, then it becomes clear that peoples, and the cultures they create, originate in the thymotic part of the soul. That is to say, culture arises out of the capacity to evaluate, to say for instance that the person who defers to his elders is worthy, or that the human being who eats unclean animals like pigs is not. Thymos or the desire for recognition is thus the seat of what social scientists call “values.” It was the struggle for recognition, as we have seen, that produced the relationship of lordship and bondage in all of its various manifestations, and the moral codes that arose out of it—the deference of a subject to his monarch, the peasant to his landlord, the haughty superiority of the aristocrat, and so forth.

The desire for recognition is also the psychological seat of two extremely powerful passions—religion and nationalism. By this I do not mean that religion and nationalism can be reduced to the desire for recognition; but the rootedness of these passions in thymos is what gives them their great power. The religious believer assigns dignity to whatever his religion holds sacred—a set of moral laws, a way of life, or particular objects of worship. He grows angry when the dignity of what he holds sacred is violated. The nationalist believes in the dignity of his national or ethnic group, and therefore in his own dignity qua member of that group. He seeks “ to have this particular dignity recognized by others, and, like the religious believer, grows angry if that dignity is slighted. It was a thymotic passion, the desire for recognition on the part of the aristocratic master, that started the historical process, and it was the thymotic passions of religious fanaticism and nationalism that have propelled it along through war and conflict over the centuries. The thymotic origins of religion and nationalism explain why conflicts over “values” are potentially much more deadly than conflicts over material possessions or wealth. Unlike money, which can simply be divided, dignity is something inherently uncompromisable: either you recognize my dignity, or the dignity of that which I hold sacred, or you do not. Only thymos, searching for “justice,” is capable of true fanaticism, obsession, and hatred.

Liberal democracy in its Anglo-Saxon variant represents the emergence of a kind of cold calculation at the expense of earlier moral and cultural horizons. Rational desire must win out over the irrational desire for recognition, particularly the megalothymia of prideful masters seeking recognition of their superiority. The liberal state growing out of the tradition of Hobbes and Locke engages in a protracted struggle with its own people. It seeks to homogenize their variegated traditional cultures and to teach them to calculate instead their own long-term self-interest. In place of an organic moral community with its own language of “good and evil,” one had to learn a new set of democratic values: to be “participant,” “rational,” “secular,” “mobile,” “empathetic,” and “tolerant.” These new democratic values were initially not values at all in the sense of defining the final human virtue or good. They were conceived as having a purely instrumental function, habits that one had to acquire if one was to live successfully in a peaceful and prosperous liberal society. It was for this reason that Nietzsche called the state the “coldest of all cold monsters” that destroyed peoples and their cultures by hanging “a thousand appetites” in front of them.

For democracy to work, however, citizens of democratic states must forget the instrumental roots of their values, and develop a certain irrational thymotic pride in their political system and a way of life. That is, they must come to love democracy not because it is necessarily better than the alternatives, but because it is theirs. Moreover, they must cease to see values like “tolerance” as merely a means to an end; tolerance in democratic societies becomes the defining virtue. Development of this kind of pride in democracy, or the assimilation of democratic values into the citizen’s sense of his own self, is what is meant by the creation of a “democratic” or “civic culture.” Such a culture is critical to the long-term health and stability of democracies, since no real-world society can long survive based on rational calculation and desire alone.

Did statist euphoria, when offered the pretext of a pandemic, lead to irrational and destructive public health decisions?

A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith.  A short but enjoyable treatise.  He has a dry, acerbic, understated humor.  He starts with some of core episodes covered in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay and adds 19th and 20th century panics.  

Galbraith identifies a common qualitative pattern for financial panics.

1. Cheap money (low interest rates) with high leverage (debt)

2. Plausible (but not true) reason for inflated valuation

3. Irrationally exuberant expectations of future return (greed)

4. Conviction that it is different this time 

5.     Representation of financial genius by the purveyors of euphoria

6. Certainty of superior knowledge ("I'll get out before the peak")

7. Crash

8. Search for those to blame

His advice is to be vigilant in spotting the pattern and then act accordingly.  Easier said than done.

What struck me reading the book was that his pattern extends beyond the financial.  All his cases are financial but euphoria can manifest in many ways.  Money is one manifestation of power.  Might there also be euphoric episodes in the exercise of power aside from the financial aspect?  I suspect so.  

Specifically, what if euphoria is the underpinning condition for all the bad public health decisions of the past two years?  Did statist euphoria, when offered the pretext of a pandemic, lead to irrational and destructive public health decisions?

Switching Galbraith's model into a more generalized form, we would have:

1. Perceived threat to individual and collective well-being (pandemic, war, terrorism, poverty, crime, civil disturbance, etc.)

2. Plausible (but not true) reason for the inflated panic

3. Irrationally exuberant expectations of public policy effectiveness

4. Conviction that this time is different from the past

5.     Representation of expertise by the purveyors of panic

6. Certainty of superior knowledge ("Just one more public sacrifice will get us there")

7. Unavoidable evidence of failure

8. Search for those to blame

 

Mapping that model to the Covid-19 Pandemic response seems a pretty good fit.  And we certainly seem to be entering stage 7 with stage 8 to follow soon.  The Swedish, UK, Danish, and Israeli data, far superior to our own, seem to confirm what has been suspected by many all along.

Zero Covid was a mistaken policy approach

Masks were a failure

Lockdowns were a destructive failure

Ignoring treatment approaches was a costly error

Failure to measure and experiment was a costly error

Vaccine mandates were damaging failures

Vaccine passports were damaging failures 

School Shutdowns were damaging failures

Vaccines have a dramatically shorter shelf life than anticipated

Vaccines do not stop contagion

Vaccines might not be mitigating impact

OAS might be more consequential than anticipated

Failure to recognize the two-week immune suppression after the first jab probably cost lives

Basically, our public health policy "experts" when faced with decisions, seem to have pretty consistently made the wrong decisions, ignoring both current data and past knowledge.  This is understandable in the first three months, possibly even the first six months.  But since the summer of 2020, the evidence against the above approaches has been reasonably compelling.  

Why did the "experts" stick with their bad decisions?  For the same reason that investors get caught up in a financial euphoria.  Both of them are convinced of future benefits, the one in terms of dollars and the other in terms of power and prestige, regardless of the absence of evidence to support their convictions.  

Seems plausible.

Equivocation fallacy - bias, prejudice, discrimination and bigotry

A long article, The Psychology of the New McCarthyism by Lee Jussim. Worthwhile as a single essay drawing in many strands of the argument that postmodernist intolerance is societally destructive.

But reading it made me consider that the logical incoherence of the postmodernist critical theory left, the social justice people, is being exacerbated by a lack of language precision. I have not seen any conversation about this phenomenon.

We are using the terms bias, prejudice, discrimination, and bigotry as interchangeable with one another and then we are conflating all those terms with the unspecified concept of racism. There is a good reason that we use these terms interchangeably. Each of these words individually have multiple distinct meanings, at least one meaning of which is synonymous with other definitions. Biased and prejudiced both share an overlapping meaning but they also have unique definitions that precisely distinguish them from one another. For example, there is no prejudice in a data set but there might be a bias in that set (see below.)

Each of these terms has a precise meaning and by eliding them, we confuse ourselves and the pursuit of truth. Here are the dictionary definitions, all from Merriam-Webster.

Bias

a : bent, tendency
b : an inclination of temperament or outlook; especially : a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment : prejudice
c : an instance of such prejudice
d (1) : deviation of the expected value of a statistical estimate from the quantity it estimates (2) : systematic error introduced into sampling or testing by selecting or encouraging one outcome or answer over others

You can see why confusion arises, given this proper definition of "bias." It can mean dramatically different things, some reprehensible and others having no moral implication. In particular, it is becoming increasingly common to not distinguish the statistical meaning in d1 and d2. This is especially so when discussing IT algorithms and artificial intelligence. You increasingly see statements to the effect that the system is biased against one group or another or that the AI is adopting biased assumptions about groups. See here for an example.

When this claim is made, it occurs because there is a logical fallacy of equivocation (ex: all banks are beside rivers therefore my financial institution must be by a river.) Algorithms and AI are not biased (prejudiced) against particular groups. Algorithms properly respond to statistical deviations against the expected values and AI systems are recognizing patterns in the data associated with a group. The statistical bias might be related to anything and has no inherent moral content. The data for different groups may reflect a bias around savings rates, conviction rates, familial formation rates, probability of speaking at least two languages, height, weight, etc. A statistical bias in the data is a reflection of reality, not a moral judgment. To conflate the two is to commit the fallacy of equivocation.

In conversation, the term bias is frequently used interchangeably with the term prejudice.


Prejudice

1: injury or damage resulting from some judgment or action of another in disregard of one's rights; especially : detriment to one's legal rights or claims
2a (1) : preconceived judgment or opinion (2) : an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge
2b : an instance of such judgment or opinion
2c : an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race, or their supposed characteristics

Definition one is a precise and narrow use of the term in the context of the law. That definition is frequently pertinent within the legal system but not much used otherwise.

The confusion in use of the term "prejudice" arises from a failure to distinguish definitions 2a and 2c. This confusion glosses over a very real issue. None of us are omniscient and therefore we are all, to a greater or lesser degree, operating before we have sufficient knowledge. It is a tautological truism. We are all necessarily prejudiced to some degree in that we cannot know everything. We act based on generic averages and gross assumptions in the absence of certain information. This is not a moral decision, it is a pragmatic necessity. The moral issue only arises when we fail to update our assumptions, opinions and knowledge when new information becomes available.

As an example, if I go hiking in the woods on a summer day, I wear boots and rugged jeans. My goal is personal safety and while I do not know that there are going to be snakes on my path, it is a rational opinion based on generic knowledge of snakes, their preferred environments, and past experience with hiking this path. That is an example of (2a) prejudice. 2c prejudice would be if I were to wear protective attire against snakes when I went ice skating, it being irrational to anticipate danger from snakes on ice.

In conversation, the term prejudice is frequently used interchangeably with the term bigotry.


Discrimination

1a : the act of making or perceiving a difference : the act of discriminating * a bloodhound's scent discrimination
1b psychology : the process by which two stimuli differing in some aspect are responded to differently
2: the quality or power of finely distinguishing * the film viewed by those with discrimination
3a : the act, practice, or an instance of discriminating categorically rather than individually
3b : prejudiced or prejudicial outlook, action, or treatment * racial discrimination

Definitions 1 and 2 are very precise (but sometimes also used ambiguously) but I think the real confusion is between definitions 3a and 3b. 3a is a statistical and mathematical issue and is usually related to the absence of complete knowledge. For example: the category of snakes include many venomous snakes but also many non-venomous snakes. When I flinch from a snake that I encounter and do not recognize, I am discriminating categorically in the absence of individual knowledge of that particular snake.

3a discrimination is a form of heuristics - a rule which might be generally true but not necessarily specifically true (in all instances.) Heuristics reduce cognitive load by providing usefully true habits of behavior; useful in terms of either efficiency or safety. There is no necessary animus in 3a, only utility. However, while 3a discrimination can have great utility for the discriminator, it might exact a price on the individual being discriminated against.

3b, though, is far more morally ambiguous. There can be animus, in which case it is morally unsound. However, there are many instances in which we sanction 3b discrimination. We discriminate against people who are less than eighteen years old by preventing them from voting. We discriminate against young drivers by charging higher insurance premiums. We discriminate against "Unknown Caller" calls on our telephones. 3b discrimination is very context specific and often, but not necessarily, has some moral component.

In conversation, the term discrimination is frequently used interchangeably with the term prejudice.


Bigotry

1: obstinate or intolerant devotion to one's own opinions and prejudices: the state of mind of a bigot * overcoming his own bigotry
2: acts or beliefs characteristic of a bigot * racial bigotry * will not tolerate bigotry in our organization

Bigotry, in this portfolio of words, is the term most frequently associated with clear animus and intolerance. It is the most morally freighted word of the group.

In conversation, the term bigot is frequently used interchangeably with all the other terms - prejudice, bias, discrimination.

When doing so, we commit the fallacy of equivocation. All these words can be used to convey hostility and intolerance, but bias, prejudice, and discrimination have other, independent, and more precise meanings.

I think it is hopeless to change our habits of speech so that people distinguished the four terms by their differences rather than eliding their common elements. All we can hope for is that people of good faith can keep in mind that when a statement is made using one of the terms, that an awareness is maintained that bias, prejudice, and discrimination might be being used in their more precise definitions and therefore the statement might be less morally fraught than it sounds when we pretend all four terms mean only hostility and intolerance.

And even that hope is on pretty weak ground, given the assumption of good faith. True believers don't believe because of knowledge, precision and good faith. They believe, and they punish others, based on emotions and rhetoric. The Equivocation Fallacy, for those advocates, is not an error but a useful rhetorical tool.

We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice

 From Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason: Text and Documents by F. A. Hayek.

There is still, however, one point left, to which I have already referred, but which is so important that I must give it further attention. It is that any work- able individualist order must be so framed not only that the relative remunerations the individual can expect from the different uses of his abilities and resources correspond to the relative utility of the result of his efforts to others but also that these remunerations correspond to the objective results of his efforts rather than to their subjective merits. An effectively competitive market satisfies both these conditions. But it is in connection with the second that our personal sense of justice so frequently revolts against the impersonal decisions of the market. Yet, if the individual is to be free to choose, it is inevitable that he should bear the risk attaching to that choice and that in consequence he be rewarded, not according to the goodness or badness of his intentions, but solely on the basis of the value of the results to others. We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.

The text and train of thought is somewhat dense but well worth study.  The following passages tie the thinking together.  I have added emphasis.

While the theory of individualism has thus a definite contribution to make to the technique of constructing a suitable legal framework and of improving the institutions which have grown up spontaneously, its emphasis, of course, is on the fact that the part of our social order which can or ought to be made a conscious product of human reason is only a small part of all the forces of society. In other words, that the state, the embodiment of deliberately organised and consciously directed power, ought to be only a small part of the much richer organism which we call ‘society’, and that the former ought to provide merely a framework within which free (and therefore not ‘consciously directed’) collaboration of men has the maximum of scope.

This entails certain corollaries on which true individualism once more stands in sharp opposition to the false individualism of the rationalistic type. The first is that the deliberately organised state on the one side, and the individual on the other, far from being regarded as the only realities, while all the intermediate formations and associations are to be deliberately suppressed, as was the aim of the French Revolution, the non-compulsory conventions of social intercourse are considered as essential factors in preserving the orderly working of human society. The second is that the individual, in participating in the social processes, must be ready and willing to adjust himself to changes and to submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instance may not be recognisable, and which to him will often appear unintelligible and irrational.

I need not say much on the first point. That true individualism affirms the value of the family and all the common efforts of the small community and group, that it believes in local autonomy and voluntary associations, and that indeed its case rests largely on the contention that much for which the coercive action of the state is usually invoked can be done better by voluntary collaboration need not be stressed further. There can be no greater contrast to this than the false individualism which wants to dissolve all these smaller groups into atoms which have no cohesion other than the coercive rules imposed by the state, and which tries to make all social ties prescriptive, instead of using the state mainly as a protection of the individual against the arrogation of coercive powers by the smaller groups.

Quite as important for the functioning of an individualist society as these smaller groupings of men are the traditions and conventions which evolve in a free society and which, without being enforceable, establish flexible but normally observed rules that make the behaviour of other people predictable in a high degree. The willingness to submit to such rules, not merely so long as one understands the reason for them but so long as one has no definite reasons to the contrary, is an essential condition for the gradual evolution and improvement of rules of social intercourse; and the readiness ordinarily to submit to the products of a social process which nobody has designed and the reasons for which nobody may understand is also an indispensable condition if it is to be possible to dispense with compulsion.   That the existence of common conventions and traditions among a group of people will enable them to work together smoothly and efficiently with much less formal organisation and compulsion than a group without such common background, is, of course, a commonplace. But the reverse of this, while less familiar, is prob-ably not less true: that coercion can probably only be kept to a minimum in a society where conventions and tradition have made the behaviour of man to a large extent predictable.

This brings me to my second point: the necessity, in any complex society in which the effects of anyone’s action reach far beyond his possible range of vision, of the individual submitting to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society—a submission which must include not only the acceptance of rules of behaviour as valid without examining what depends in the particular instance on their being observed but also a readiness to adjust himself to changes which may profoundly affect his fortunes and opportunities and the causes of which may be altogether unintelligible to him. It is against these that modern man tends to revolt unless their necessity can be shown to rest upon ‘reason made clear and demonstrable to every individual’. Yet it is just here that the understandable craving for intelligibility produces illusory demands which no system can satisfy. Man in a complex society can have no choice but between adjusting himself to what to him must seem the blind forces of the social process and obeying the orders of a superior. So long as he knows only the hard discipline of the market, he may well think the direction by some other intelligent human brain preferable; but, when he tries it, he soon discovers that the former still leaves him at least some choice, while the latter leaves him none, and that it is better to have a choice between several unpleasant alternatives than being coerced into one.

The unwillingness to tolerate or respect any social forces which are not recognisable as the product of intelligent design, which is so important a cause of the present desire for comprehensive economic planning, is indeed only one aspect of a more general movement. We meet the same tendency in the field of morals and conventions, in the desire to substitute an artificial for the exist- ing languages, and in the whole modern attitude towards processes which govern the growth of knowledge. The belief that only a synthetic system of morals, an artificial language, or even an artificial society can be justified in an age of science, as well as the increasing unwillingness to bow before any moral rules whose utility is not rationally demonstrated, or to conform with conventions whose rationale is not known, are all manifestations of the same basic view which wants all social activity to be recognisably part of a single coherent plan. They are the results of that same rationalistic ‘individualism’ which wants to see in everything the product of conscious individual reason. They are certainly not, however, a result of true individualism and may even make the working of a free and truly individualistic system difficult or impossible. Indeed, the great lesson which the individualist philosophy teaches us on this score is that, while it may not be difficult to destroy the spontaneous formations which are the indispensable bases of a free civilisation, it may be beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct such a civilisation once these foundations are destroyed. 

Music is at the center of education, both for giving the passions their due and for preparing the soul for the unhampered use of reason

From The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom.

Symptomatic of this change is how seriously students now take the famous passages on musical education in Plato's Republic. In the past, students, good liberals that they always are, were indignant at the censorship of poetry, as a threat to free inquiry. But they were really thinking of science and politics. They hardly paid attention to the discussion of music itself and, to the extent that they even thought about it, were really puzzled by Plato's devoting time to rhythm and melody in a serious treatise on political philosophy. Their experience of music was as an entertainment, a matter of indifference to political and moral life. Students today, on the contrary, know exactly why Plato takes music so seriously. They know it affects life very profoundly and are indignant because Plato seems to want to rob them of their most intimate pleasure. They are drawn into argument with Plato about the experience of music, and the dispute centers on how to evaluate it and deal with it. This encounter not only helps to illuminate the phenomenon of contemporary music, but also provides a model of how contemporary students can profitably engage with a classic text. The very fact of their fury shows how much Plato threatens what is dear and intimate to them. They are little able to defend their experience, which had seemed unquestionable until questioned, and it is most resistant to cool analysis. Yet if a student can -and this is most difficult and unusual-draw back, get a critical distance on what he clings to, come to doubt the ultimate value of what he loves he has taken the first and most difficult step toward the philosophic conversion. Indignation is the soul's defense against the wound of doubt about its own; it reorders the cosmos to support the justice of its cause It justifies putting Socrates to death. Recognizing indignation for what it is constitutes knowledge of the soul, and is thus an experience more philosophic than the study of mathematics. It is Plato's teaching that music, by its nature, encompasses all that is today most resistent to philosophy. So it may well be that through the thicket of our creates corruption runs the path to awareness of the oldest truths.

Plato's teaching about music is, put simply, that rhythm and melody accompanied by dance, are the barbarous expression of the soul. Barbarous, not animal. Music is the medium of the human soul in its most ecstatic condition of wonder and terror. Nietzsche, who in large measure agrees with Plato's analysis, says in The Birth of Tragedy (not to be forgotten is the rest of the title, Out of the Spirit of Music) that a mixture of cruelty and coarse sensuality characterized this state, which of course was religious, in the service of gods. Music is the soul's primitive an primary speech and it is alogon, without articulate speech or reason. 1 is not only not reasonable, it is hostile to reason. Even when articulate speech is added, it is utterly subordinate to and determined by the music and the passions it expresses.

Civilization or, to say the same thing, education is the training or domestication of the soul's raw passions-not suppressing or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy-but forming an informing them as art. The goal of harmonizing the enthusiastic part of the soul with what develops later, the rational part, is perhaps impossible to attain. But without it, man can never be whole. Music, or poetry, which is what music becomes as reason emerges, always involves a delicate balance between passion and reason, and, even in its highest and most developed forms-religious, warlike and erotic-that balance is always tipped, if ever so slightly, toward the passionate. Music, as everyone experiences, provides an unquestionable justification and a fulfilling pleasure for the activities it accompanies: the soldier who hears the marching band is enthralled and reassured; the religious man is exalted in his prayer by the sound of the organ in the church; and the lover is carried away and his conscience stilled by the romantic guitar. Armed with music, man can damn rational doubt. Out of the music emerge the gods that suit it, and they educate men by their example and their commandments.

Plato's Socrates disciplines the ecstasies and thereby provides little consolation or hope to men. According to the Socratic formula, the lyrics -speech and, hence, reason-must determine the music-harmony and rhythm. Pure music can never endure this constraint. Students are not in a position to know the pleasures of reason; they can only see it as a disciplinary and repressive parent. But they do see, in the case of Plato, that that parent has figured out what they are up to. Plato teaches that, in order to take the spiritual temperature of an individual or a society, one must "mark the music." To Plato and Nietzsche, the history of music is a series of attempts to give form and beauty to the dark, chaotic, premonitory forces in the soul-to make them serve a higher purpose, an ideal, to give man's duties a fullness. Bach's religious intentions and Beethoven's revolutionary and humane ones are clear enough examples. Such cultivation of the soul uses the passions and satisfies them while sublimating them and giving them an artistic unity. A man whose noblest activities are accompanied by a music that expresses them while providing a pleasure extending from the lowest bodily to the highest spiritual, is whole, and there is no tension in him between the pleasant and the good. By contrast a man whose business life is prosaic and unmusical and whose leisure is made up of coarse, intense entertainments, is divided, and each side of his existence is undermined by the other.

Hence, for those who are interested in psychological health, music is at the center of education, both for giving the passions their due and for preparing the soul for the unhampered use of reason. The centrality of such education was recognized by all the ancient educators. It is hardly noticed today that in Aristotle's Politics the most important passages about the best regime concern musical education, or that the Poetics is an appendix to the Politics. Classical philosophy did not censor the singers. It persuaded them. And it gave them a goal, one that was understood by them, until only yesterday. But those who do not notice the role of music in Aristotle and despise it in Plato went to school with Hobbes, Locke, and Smith, where such considerations have become unnecessary. The triumphant Enlightenment rationalism thought that it had discovered other ways to deal with the irrational part of the soul, and that reason needed less support from it. Only in those great critics of Enlightenment rationalism, Rousseau and Nietzsche, does music return, and they were the most musical of philosophers. Both thought that the passions —and along with them their ministerial arts-had become thin under the rule of reason and that, therefore, man himself and what he sees in the world have become correspondingly thin. They wanted to cultivate the enthusiastic states of the soul and to re-experience the Corybantic possession deemed a pathology by Plato. Nietzsche, particularly, sought to tap again the irrational sources of vitality, to replenish our dried-up stream from barbaric sources,, and thus encouraged the Dionysian and the music derivative from it.

When the real world refuses to conform with your ideological assumptions

What a dog's breakfast of ideology, unstated assumptions and capacity to bury the lede. From Bursting people’s political bubbles could make them even more partisan by Carolyn Y. Johnson.

There has been a strain in academia and elsewhere on the left which has always assumed that anyone on the right is both ignorant and irrational. That whatever assessments which they might make are based on ideology and malice. The assumption has always been that you could overcome that ignorance by exposing them to more information. That usually doesn't work. Then the assumption was that if you force them to interact with the "other" that would work at reducing animosities or pre-existing biases. It is now becoming apparent that that also does not reliably work.

These are not innocent assumptions free of consequences. All sorts of public policy have been built on these untested assumptions.

Johnson is reporting on some of the research that is now emerging that indicates that sometimes forcing people to interact with one another is actually counterproductive.

There are many strands coming together here. Reading the article, you see time and again sociology/psychology research and experiments which have all the characteristics which have led to the replication crisis which has brought down most of the exciting findings of the past three decades. Experiments which are designed with unintended ideological biases in them, too small test populations, a preference for lab research over real world observational studies, manufactured scenarios over natural scenarios, non-randomization of populations, absence of methodological rigor such as double-blinds, weak measurement approaches and weak effect sizes. Basically, left leaning academics are proving to themselves that their unstated assumptions are probably true.

The more rigor you build into the research the more the findings prove to be untrue.

Forcing people to interact with their "other" does not inherently make them more tolerant or change their knowledge base. It is very context dependent. Stereotype accuracy is one of the confounding strands. Trying to strip people of a stereotype which is actually accurate is not going to occur by exposing people who hold that stereotype to more people who conform to that stereotype.

Johnson spends a lot of time veering about, covering various postmodernist researchers who are finding problems with their assumptions. There is a lot of topical bleating about polarization and social media and sociological research which does not have empirical support.

The lede which is buried is that academia has been willing to treat untested ideological positions as true without testing those beliefs. They are willing to do this for decades at a time. They are willing to advocate for policies based on those untested beliefs. They are happy to force onto their fellow citizens policies inimical with those citizen's own beliefs and then are confounded when the real world outcomes are not what was expected and may have even been counterproductive.