Ideology and Tribalism

 I hear the term "ideology" to refer to ideas that don't even vaguely resemble a coherent ideology. It's is used to convey a sense of intellectual stubbornness, but scarcely noticed is that this stubbornness takes two different forms; ideology and tribalism.

Ideology is a set of fundamental commitments used to interpret all else. It's a single, simple lens used to make sense of a complicated world. The ideology is initially taken on because it's able to branch out and understand a few things that are otherwise puzzling. The feeling of owning the key to unlock knowledge is satisfying, but the key soon fails to unlock all doors. The ideology reaches its limit, and when it does what doesn't naturally fit into the ideological lens is forced into it through rationalization.

Ideology is for those who feel a deep need to understand the world but don't want to work very hard for it.

Tribalism on the other hand is not a commitment to ideas but a commitment to groups. Beliefs, especially irrational ones, are signals that you are committed to the group. There isn't an interconnectedness to the ideas, but the group pretends like there is - like they're the obvious application of normal human values that any good person would have.

Tribalism is for those who feel a deep need to be a part of a group, and are willing to sacrifice their minds to get it.

Tribalism is more popular than ideology. The Republican and Democratic parties are full of tribalists. People like Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders are ideologues. Libertarians are unique in that they're mostly ideologues, but that also means they're unlikely to become popular by connecting with the tribal instincts of the broader population. Churches are filled with tribalists, but religious believers with particular views about eschatology, apologetics, and exegesis are usually ideologues.

Education is the third, most narrow path. Aristotle said, "The mark of an educated mind is the ability to entertain an idea without accepting it."

Education is the anecdote to both ideology and tribalism, but it's resisted by both. For the ideologue, education is resisted by the feeling of hypocrisy. To suspend disbelief and see with a different lens is inconsistent - of two minds. For the tribalist, education is resisted by the feeling of betrayal. To suspend disbelief and entertain an alternative view is to abandon your peers - to put yourself in the shoes of your enemy.

Everyone is capable of ideology, tribalism, and education. Unfortunately, education takes the most work. Moreover, people easily get stuck in ideology or tribalism and never get out. Our society should find a way to educate more people faster before they get caught by ideology or tribalism.

Why I Don't Celebrate July 4th

My grandmother didn't like Halloween. She called it, "the devil's day". She said it had pagan roots and was a gateway to the occult. It celebrated evil, and look at how evil the world has become with all these people celebrating Halloween.

When I was young I didn’t think this was right, but it wasn’t until I was older that I understood the bigger lesson of which this was just one example.

There are associations one could make between Halloween and paganism/the occult, and those associations are valid, but they’re only associations. X and non-X are one “non” away from each other but they couldn’t be more different.

My grandma had a vague cluster of concepts in her head like Halloween, devil, occult, skeletons, candles, masks, satan, etc. but she couldn’t explain the mechanics of how those concepts lead to her conclusion. If I asked her why she believed as she did, she would use these concepts with a lot of Fnords in between them, but a logical progression from how modern people celebrate Halloween to the occult would be as fake as the children’s monster and princess costumes.

It’s easy to make connections, it’s hard to make arguments. If we give ourselves the leeway my grandma took to make connections we could make any holiday into celebrations of absurd values.

• Celebrating Jesus or generosity for Christmas? No, you’re celebrating capital punishment or consumerism.

• Celebrating love or romance for Valentines Day? No, you’re actually celebrating a massacre or a Paganism or capitalistic exploitation or lust.

• Celebrating the story of Jesus’ resurrection or fertility or bunny rabbits and chocolate for Easter? No, you’re celebrating animal cruelty and the sugar industry.

• Celebrating family or thankfulness or the settling of America for Thanksgiving? No, you’re actually celebrating gluttony or the mistreatment of natives.

• Celebrating the abolition of slavery for Juneteenth? No, you’re celebrating how late slavery was abolished in America or how far we haven’t come in regard to racism or the death of 500,000 people in the civil war.

• Celebrating gay pride? No, you’re celebrating stereotypes or the infantilization of gay people or Noah’s Ark (because rainbows and animal floats and sexuality).

There is literally no celebration that one can’t defile if you allow this guilt by association fallacy, but some of these examples feel more justified than others. I think that’s because you hear them a lot more within certain groups. In fact, “Halloween celebrates satan” is as logically as sound as “Christmas celebrates consumerism” or “gay pride celebrates stereotypes”, but they feel more or less justified depending on which peer group you’re in. When no peer group is saying it, it feels completely absurd. Yet, in terms of the argumentative structure one can and does make to connect these celebrations to absurd values, they’re all the same.

What is the argumentative structure? Typically it’s just a bunch of Fnords, but there’s one argument I hear all the time that is at least coherent. It’s the roots argument.

The argument goes like this: the true meaning of a celebration is at its historical root. If we can trace the modern celebration back to a problematic origin, then that’s its true meaning and we should not celebrate it.

The first thing to notice about this argument is how selectively it’s used. After all, the oldest use of the rainbow as a symbol is God’s covenant with Noah. You can believe that the story of Noah absolutely literally happened, but you should understand that this symbol doesn’t mean what it used to.

The problem with this argument is it doesn’t recognize how celebrations change and take on new meanings over time. If I could tell my grandmother why she’s wrong about Halloween, I’d say that despite the fact that the holiday may have roots she disapproves of, over time it’s been revised and neutered. She should treat that as a win. It’s not like always and forever October 31st can’t be anything other than the day witches sacrifice cats. Maybe don’t give your enemies eternal monopolies over days of the year.

What determines the meaning of holidays then? The people celebrating them do. Ultimately what's celebrated is what people think is celebrated. Meanings only exist in minds. Rituals like Halloween only mean what we intend them to mean. Full-stop. This applies to all holidays, and more generally to rituals, and even more generally to symbols.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I apply the same rule to Independence day.

My evangelical grandmother and my 20-year-old niece are making the same argument. “Halloween celebrates satan” is like “Independence Day celebrates colonialism”. I’m sure there are a couple of super-weird people who actually do celebrate these things on these days, but the vast majority of them are actually celebrating something adjacent, but also different. In the case of Independence Day, or Canada Day, they’re celebrating nationalism.

I’m no fan of nationalism and I never have been, but I also understand that nationalism is different from colonialism. Nations have good parts and bad parts. One can set aside a day to celebrate a nation without even mentioning the bad parts in the same way one can celebrate a birthday without bringing up an affair from 10 years ago.

On this July 4th, if you don’t think you’re celebrating colonialism, then you’re not celebrating colonialism. You’re more likely to say something like, “I’m celebrating the birth of this great nation and independence from Britain,” and though I have my own feelings about that, colonialism is merely an adjacent issue others impose into your celebration.

Scott Alexander Vs. The New York Times

"Like an octopus, the New York Times has many arms. If you attack one, the others will get you."

 

After the New York Time’s despicable hit piece on Scott Alexander, Scott has issued a defense.

I believe they misrepresented me as retaliation for my publicly objecting to their policy of doxxing bloggers in a way that threatens their livelihood and safety. Because they are much more powerful than I am and have a much wider reach, far more people will read their article than will read my response, so probably their plan will work.

Of course, Scott gives several odious examples of NYT willfully deceiving people.

You might think this is bad faith. If the New York Times made any mistakes they simply need to issue a retraction. But they’ve been writing this article for several months now, and the deception is transparent in the content. Nobody can read Scott’s defense of himself and come away thinking this was just an oopsie. In Scott’s own words,

I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”

"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance" is a good rule. I tested this situation for ignorance. It didn't make any sense. Malice is the next best explanation.

An essay from Robert Rhinehart resonates right now. Scott Linked to it at the end of his post. Here’s the most important part,

The next step of ridding ourselves of the octopus is to stop feeding it. Stop feeding the octopus. Just stop. Stop reading the New York Times. Right now. Never again visit that awful web site or look at that awful paper or that tweet or that awful article. Do not have that conversation. Do not click or press on the link your friend sent you who is trapped in its clutches. It is a boogeyman and if you fear it it will only get stronger and if you ignore it it will go away.

It reminds of a classic Simpsons episode that depicts the same important point.

While people are charged up and in war-mode, it’s important to remember that although these sorts of hit pieces are all-too-frequent for publications like this, they are a drop in the bucket. Robert Wiblin comments on the issue,

The NYT has about 4,500 staff and publishes 150-200 stories a day! As with any vast org—like a university or government agency—its output ranges from fantastic to terrible, and generalisations about the whole are less useful than evaluations of specific teams or individuals.

A few of my thoughts on about how Scott handled the situation,

As with any of these symbiotic relationships between the media and the organism they latch themselves onto, this will no-doubt increase Scott’s subscriber count and income. Don’t forget the most important thing Jordan Peterson has ever said, “I’ve figured out how to monetize the Social Justice Warriors.” This is the same tactic Trump used to get people tribalized. While Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump are different in about a thousand different very important ways, they are similar in this, they both played their part in the symbiotic relationship to accrue money and fame.

Scott isn’t like that.

I’m sure he likes the money and he has said that he wants to use it for altruistic purposes, I don’t think he likes the fame. The attention isn’t particularly pleasurable to a introverted rationalist like Scott, and it comes packaged with being the subject of a lot of hostility, anger, and even death threats. We think it’s okay to mercilessly dehumanize famous people, and just like the Asch experiment would suggest, we think it’s okay because other people think it’s okay. Scott is smart enough to see the risk in being the subject of hate by ideologically possessed online communities - those indoctrinated by the NYTs into thinking Scott is some kind of racist, and so the awful things they say and do against Scott if “fighting racism in all it’s forms”

I also think Scott is unusually concerned with being a good person, and he recognizes how the (social) media outrage machine debases society. Between that and the downside of fame, Scott has reasoned himself into not playing along. Everything he has written has maintained a tone of diffusion. Scott deserves an A+.

Unfortunately, to a large extent, it doesn’t matter. The NYTs has leeched itself onto him and no matter what he does he cannot pry it off. Scott has become richer, more famous, and society has become a little worse. It will never stop until we, “just don’t look” and let the leeches die of starvation.

And yes, I see the irony.

The Me I cannot See

 Several characters in my life lied to me. They told me they don’t care what other people think. Maybe you’ve heard this? It’s very 90s teenage apathy, but lots of kids are still totally into this fashion statement. I can’t take it seriously.

Besides being an incredibly inhuman proposition as all humans, the social creatures that they are, care immensely what other humans think, the paradox within the statement screams absurdity. Why are you telling me that you don’t care what I think if you don’t care what I think? Clearly, you care enough to try to convince me that you don’t. If you don’t care what I think you wouldn’t say it, and you definitely wouldn’t say it as often as you do.

I’m not so different. Scratch that, I’m not different at all. I care what other people think but I don’t like to think that I do. So I fool myself. I recognize the paradox of saying it out loud, so I have to layer on a more sophisticated version of self-foolery. “I don’t care what other people think so much that I don’t feel the need to say it,” I tell myself.

I feel the weight of what goes on in other people’s heads even when I don’t admit it. I see one version of myself, and then I see me through their eyes, and those can be very different pictures. I tell myself that the real picture - the genuine me - is the one I see of myself, not the one I see through others. After all, I’m the closest thing to me. I am me. So of course I know the real me better than anyone else, right?

Wrong. I am the worst person in the world to judge the real me. I may have proximity as an advantage, but I am severely disadvantaged by having the incentive to self-deceive. I don’t just have skin in the game, I have all the skin in the game. My whole entirety is invested in this game. I am the easiest person in the world for me to fool because I have the most motivation to believe my own deception.

Ever play that game that shows you a zoomed-in picture and you have to guess what the object is? At some point being any closer obscures one’s ability to see. So I’d better care what people think because they’re not staring at the molecules in the strawberry, they’re staring at the strawberry. Other people view an angle of me that I am in no position to assess. I am way too close to me to see me.

1 Year of Corona

 At the time I'm writing this, Coronavirus has killed 2.25 million people worldwide and 447 thousand Americans. It took about a year for this to happen. 

For comparison, the world's biggest killer heart disease killed 18 million people worldwide last year and 665 thousand Americans. 2nd biggest killer Cancer killed 9.5 million worldwide and 600 thousand Americans.

Causes of death that are a little closer to the virus (give or take half a million deaths) would be diabetes which killed about 1.5 million worldwide and 270 thousand Americans, or digestive diseases which killed about 2.5 million worldwide and 250 thousand Americans.

Let me include a few caveats. We haven't been through a year since Coronavirus first entered the scene yet. And once it did enter the scene of public awareness (March-ish) it took a while for it to get going. Also, this includes all the things the government and people did to reduce the spread. I don't know how many lives were saved by wearing masks and social distancing and reducing travel and shutting down / limiting certain sectors of the economy, but I don't think it's unreasonable to guess that we could have had twice as many deaths or more. By comparing the virus to things like heart disease you might think I'm saying it's no big deal. If you think that, you're an idiot. More on that later.

I also don't know how many of these deaths should count as lives saved vs. merely postponed. If the inevitability is that 50-70% of us gets the virus, if not last year then this year, or next year, then the main value of preventing it last year is in the fact that we didn't let hospitals get overrun by all the people with the virus at the same time. Clearly, not all getting the virus at the same time saves lives, but the difference in lives saved is significantly different depending on whether the counterfactual is getting the virus at different times vs. not getting the virus at all.

Frustrated with people's unwillingness to talk concretely about how bad the virus was, last March I made an overly broad prediction that the most likely scenario is that it kills closer to 1 million worldwide than 100K or 10M. It has killed 2.25 million now which is probably worse than I thought, but definitely within the bounds of what I expected. I said this was "really bad" in contrast to "just bad" or "really really bad" because a second diabetes suddenly emerging is obviously not something we want, it's also not the scariest thing trying to kill you today.

At the time, this all seemed optimistic compared to the smart people I listened to and pessimistic compared to the average person I listened to. Looking back, I probably could have adjusted my expectations to exactly what the smart people I listened to were saying to be more accurate. Instead, I did my own thinking and ended up less accurate.

...

I still feel like this is very much a thing:

-"It's wild to see polarization on Coronavirus. One group's panic seems to be driving another's nonchalance and vice versa. While there is definitely a political overlay, it seems to be something deeper for most people: An instinctive belief that the world is hard to wake up from sleepwalking, or that the world is full of dumb panic." -Michael Dougherty

I don't talk about Coronavirus with people even when they say things I know are wrong, because I know what they say about each other. In some groups you can never be skeptical enough and others you can never be too skeptical.

I know people who remind me to "be safe" because the Coronavirus is very serious. And then some people ask me whether I'm nervous about letting my kids go back to school. It seems like they're very worried about my personal safety, which doesn't make a lot of sense. As I mentioned before, heard disease kills more people than Coronavirus and it selects for the same age bracket (65+), yet nobody is telling me to be careful of heart disease.

Of course, heart disease is not something you can "watch out" for. Heart disease is the result of a long history of life decisions. So a more appropriate comparison might be a car accident. Car accidents don't kill as many people as Coronavirus, but it's more selective for younger males like me. My risk of dying from a car accident compared to my risk of dying from Coronavirus is close enough that I don't know which is actually more likely to kill me. Yet nobody is doing this, "be careful out there" stuff.

I've decided to take their words to only mean, "I care about you". Message received. It's just a shame that they don't care about me enough to allow me to say words I think are true without undesirable social repercussions. Funny how that works.

...

Speaking of things I think are true but can't say, Coronavirus came from a lab.

Probably.

I start by not believing in coincidences, and the fact that the virus originated next to the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a big coincidence. Now you have to argue me out of believing it came from a lab.

Here's the thing, maybe there's some good evidence that it did not come from the lab, but if so I can't find it because the topic is smothered in stupid bullshit.

"The lab leak hypothesis is a racist conspiracy theory"

"Trump said suggested it came from a lab"

"All the experts all say it came from a wet market"

To the people saying these things, if you would kindly shut up so people with real evidence can have their voices heard that would be greeeat.

Currently, betting markets have, "Credible claim by 2024 that COVID-19 likely originated in a lab?" at 17%. Here's the thing, if it did come from a lab I'm not sure that A) we find a smoking gun and B) one of the listed public health agencies say so rather than just ignore it.

...

Vaccines are being rolled out and nobody is doing it better than Israel.

The United States is doing better than most but could be doing a lot better. And I do think more vaccines faster is better.

I don't think anyone who is nervous about getting a vaccine is a stupid idiot or anything. The truth is we don't know the long-term effects of the vaccine. We haven't had enough time to possibly do that. But any risks have to be compared to the risk of the virus. The vaccine would have to be pretty bad to be worse than Covid-19. Will the vaccine kill a million people? Because it would have to do a lot worse than that to outweigh the damage Covid-19 will do without it.

Besides, what are we going to do? Let the pandemic continue on for five more years and then check in on the test group to see how they're doing?

It might be rational for you as an individual to wait. You could let others take it and then see how they're doing later while you get the assurance that the vaccinated people around you won't infect you with the virus. But I'm not of the mindset that I'm a better or worse guinea pig than anyone else. As much as I'm biased in favor of myself, I'm a less than average productive member of society so I'm probably a better than average guinea pig. 

Here's a bet: Will Coronavirus take more lives in 2021 than in 2020? I'm saying yes. I'm tempted to say twice as many. Largely because last year Corona didn't really get going until April last year, and then it stayed at about 6,000 deaths a day and it stayed that way until October. And now to start the year we're at twice as many deaths per day and at the rate at which countries are rolling out vaccines a substantial portion of the population won't be vaccinated until we're already through most of the year.

Actually, yes. I'll predict 4 million deaths in 2021. That's more than twice as many deaths than 2020 in the same year we introduce the vaccine. Let's check back in a year to see how this does. See you there.

Peta and speciesist language, Christian Fundamentalists and Kadabra

 Peta says,

This is literally the same argument ultra-conservative fundamentalist Christian moms made about the Kadabra Pokemon card

"Pokemon promote the occult instead of proper Biblical values and should thus be destroyed."
-Universal Life Church

The problem with both of them is that whether in the form of a word or a pentagram, symbols only mean what they're intended to mean. Nobody who calls another person a dog has anything against dogs.

---

This post is about my society's relentless confusion over symbols and reality. Other examples like this include:

1. "What are you, Gay?" (and tiny American flags falling on the ground)

2. When a liberal politician uses blackface

3. The upsidedown cross and the confederate flag

4. The capital T True meaning of Christmas

5. Swastikas aren't just for Nazis
6. Swearing Children

7. Peta and Speciesist Language, Christian Fundamentalists and Kadabra

Rationalists and Stories

Tyler Cowen's TED talk Be Suspicious of Simple Stories is one of my favorite talks of all time. It's not saying anything new or controversial. He's relaying some pretty mainstream wisdom grounded in psychology. Our brains are more like story processing machines than logic processing machines. We like to think the prefrontal cortex is in charge because of course the smart thing is in charge of the stupid thing. But it isn't so. The less logical part of our brain that uses instinct, intuition, and most importantly previous patterns is what motivates most of our behavior. The prefrontal cortex tells stories about it afterward. This is groundbreaking if you've never heard it, but it's hardly controversial.

I think back to an old acquaintance of mine who evaluated this TED talk negatively. She studied theater. She was familiar with a long list of classical fiction in both in film and novel. She had a close relationship with stories. I suspect she felt like this talk of Cowen's was an attack on stories, so she felt like she had to defend them. She didn't have any criticism of what Cowen actually said, rather she just went on about how good and important and fulfilling stories could be, which is nothing Cowen or I would disagree with.

It's hard to reason people out of the story-telling mindset. I guess one has to do it with a better story. But rational people are stubborn in that they're always trying to reason people out of their positions, even if they know the literature on how poorly reason accomplishes persuasion. This makes me think they're not rational after all, but rather they've built a more complicated infrastructure of stories to better hide the fact that they're just like everyone else.

Captured

 

A while back I wrote about the self-reinforcing dog-whistle machine. I was trying to get at the idea of how a background of bad information assumptions can lead to lower skepticism and the absorption of more bad information. If you've already been exposed to a pattern of Barack Obama's anti-Semitism, you're not going to work very hard to evaluate the next supposed anti-Semitic thing Obama does.

When people claim the election was rigged, trans women life expectancy is 35 years, climate change will end the world in 12 years, anti-fa was responsible for the capitol riot, Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen, Clintons are involved in a pedophile ring, Trump's parents were in the KKK, family planning is an attempt at black genocide, California legalized pedophilia, Ilhan Omar was in an Al-Qaida terrorist training camp, illegal refugees get 3x more in government assistance than senior citizens, Russia 'hacked' the 2016 election, one might wonder, where are these people's skepticism?

Responsibility Starts At Choice

It's very easy to avoid responsibility. All you have to do is chase causal mechanisms beyond any choice you had. For example:

"I had bad parents"

"I had a bad society"

"I had bad genes"

Ultimately, every last influence of choice came from factors we didn't choose. So are any of us responsible for anything?

25 New Years Resolutions for 2021

Prideful Humility

"I'm the most humble person in the world" is a line so slathered in irony that no real human being could possibly utter it with a straight face. We humans do not deceive so directly, rather, we deceive in layers. We do not state out loud that we're humble, the paradox is too obvious. We illustrate how humble we are by posturing our humility indirectly.

2020 December Links