Cultivating my Civility Garden

In the Scott Alexander blog post "In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization" he writes about when and why he chooses his battles:

"Creationists lie. Homeopaths lie. Anti-​vaxxers lie. This is part of the Great Circle of Life. It is not necessary to call out every lie by a creationist, because the sort of person who is still listening to creationists is not the sort of person who is likely to be moved by call-​outs ... Everybody who wants to discuss things rationally has already formed a walled garden and locked the creationists outside of it....

"And so our community grows. And all over the world, the mysterious divine forces favoring honest and kind equilibria gain a little bit more power over the mysterious divine forces favoring lying and malicious equilibria." 

This column in the Guardian is titled: "End the odes to political 'civility'. Do you really think Republicans will reciprocate?" The writer makes mistake of assuming the worst impulses are representative of the entire GOP. The better question is to ask which Republicans will reciprocate. 

If I follow the logic of Scott Alexander, it makes more sense to form a walled garden locking out people like Mitch McConnell and cultivate a garden with people in the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. Ignore the "send her back" republicans and cultivate a garden with those who like your message if not your politics. 

The point of a liberal democratic society to maximize and empower the number of people who agree to civility even when it benefits the other team. Those Republicans do exist. Give them the key to your garden and invite them to join you in locking out the illiberalism that makes a lot of noise but always ends up losing in the long run.

In my post on salience I quoted a New York Times story about a writer insisting on not engaging with Republicans. After the 2016 election, he reached out to Trump supporters in good faith, tried to change their minds, then gave up after seeing on TV other Trump supporters on their worst behavior.

Instead, I admire this story of a homosexual student who was bullied at school. 

"I called him and asked him why he attacked me. He explained that he does not agree with my “lifestyle” and said I made him uncomfortable. He also stated that his father was a conservative pastor. It seemed as if he never had a choice to have modern opinions.

People will always be angry at individuals’ choices surrounding self-expression. Yet a way to combat this anger is through conversation, communication and education. 

He appreciated that someone finally listened to him, rather than just judging him and his beliefs. This inability to be heard was what seemed to have provoked his anger and lack of respect for others."

Here is how I propose to cultivate my garden with people like Braver Angels.  It looks like this:

Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 6, 2020

... only the exact opposite. I want a list of the 27 Republicans who acknowledged that Biden won the election. I want to publicly call them out, and to thank them.  I want to invite them into my garden of people who agree to play by the rules, even when we disagree on policy.

Book Review: Talking to Strangers

Talking to Strangers is the best Marlcolm Gladwell book since Blink, which was his best work. The book tells stories revolving around three different types of phenomena: default to truth, mismatched personalities, and coupling/displacement. 

Gladwell begins and ends with the case of Sandra Bland, the woman who was pulled over for failing to signal a lane change, was placed under arrest for dubious reasons, and committed suicide in her jail cell. I have to hand it to Gladwell; he pretty much wrote a whole book about a white cop arresting a black women who ended up dying, and never once insinuated racism played a role.

Instead, he focused on policy and incentives. Gladwell is my kind of guy.

The arresting officer, Brian Encinia, pulls over dozens of people every day, usually for benign reasons, usually finding nothing. He's also doing exactly what he was trained to do. Gladwell traces the changes in policing that led to police departments acting the way they do. It started with good intentions but has become inappropriate, to say the least. 

Coupling

The coupling/displacement section looks at the suicide of Sylvia Plath who used carbon monoxide poisoning from her gas stove. The common belief is that, if you take away one avenue for suicide, people will pick another. This belief is called displacement.

Gladwell shows that suicide and gas poisoning are coupled. Once London switched over to a different heating for conventional stoves, suicides went down. Before I knew this phenomenon had I name, I used to justify gun reform.

Default to Truth

Gladwell says one of the reasons we are easily deceived is that humans default to truth. It's like our Bayesian base rate. His research into the criminologists that influenced cops like Encinia suggests that it asks cops to default to lying, which is disastrous when used incorrectly.

Some of this just didn't ring true. It feels like, when it comes to our outgroup, more and more people default to lying. In a David Brooks column on trust, he writes:

"A Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape survey found that 55 percent of Americans believe that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was created in a lab and 59 percent believe that the U.S. government is concealing the true number of deaths. Half of all Fox News viewers believe that Bill Gates is plotting a mass-vaccination campaign so he can track people. This spring, nearly a third of Americans were convinced that it was probably or definitely true that a vaccine existed but was being withheld by the government. When Trump was hospitalized for COVID-19 on October 2, many people conspiratorially concluded that the administration was lying about his positive diagnosis for political gain. When government officials briefed the nation about how sick he was, many people assumed they were obfuscating, which in fact they were."

This essay about the research of Hannah Arendt might provide some clarity. She describes how loneliness and isolation (increasing in modern society) make one susceptible to a totalitarian ideology.

"But in order to make individuals susceptible to ideology, you must first ruin their relationship to themselves and others by making them sceptical and cynical, so that they can no longer rely upon their own judgment…

"And this means that one can no longer trust the reality of one’s own lived experiences in the world. Instead, one is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right." 

So if Trumpism tells you that everything is Fake News, you must trust that it is right. When you do, your default to stories from the mainstream media will be a default to lie. 

Someone in my community mentioned how an early voting site had a sign asking to have identification ready, even though she was never asked. In fact, no one could recall ever being asked. She also noted that there was a cop out front and concluded that it must be voter intimidation.

The sign asking for ID doesn't make sense to me, but jumping to the conclusion that it is a part of a collusion with local police officers to intimidate and suppress voters seems silly to me. But if your bubble tells you voter suppression is a very real, dangerous, and prevalent thing, when a scenario presents itself and voter suppression is a plausible answer, it will become your default.

If you are outside that ideological bubble, you default to honesty. Someone probably meant for the sign to read that newly-registered voters will need ID. Cops are always outside voting locations as sometimes fights break out.

My point is that "default to truth" probably depends on the context. Of course, the book is called Talking to Strangers so maybe the point is that we default to truth with strangers because they are a blank slate and we don't have enough information to confirm our priors.

Mismatch

Finally, Gladwell describes the idea of mismatched personalities. We think we are good at spotting liars, but the evidence shows we are terrible at it. We all think we have an idea of how liars behave, but there are liars who act like they are telling the truth and truth-tellers who act like they are lying. 

The best example he gives is of Amanda Knox, who was falsely accused of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher. From an outsider, the obvious suspect should have been Rudy Guede.

"Guede was a shady character who had been hanging around the house in the Italian city if Perugia, where Kercher, a college student, was living during a year abroad. Guede had a criminal history. He admitted to being in Kercher's house the night of her murder - and could give only the most implausible reasons for why. The crime scene was covered in his DNA. After her body was discovered, he immediately fled Itlay for Germany."

Instead, investigators focused on Knox because she was, well, weird. 

I know I'm biased, but I feel like society still underestimates the importance of Philip Tetlock's research into superforcasting. Superforcasters are right, not all the time, but more than anyone else. And it isn't because they are smarter than other people or have access to exclusive information, it's because they use Bayesian reasoning. 

A good detective should ask himself, before discovering Kercher's body, what is the probability that Knox would kill someone? What is the probability that Guede would kill someone? Develop a base rate and start from there. Otherwise you allow the flawed human mind to fall prey to heuristics that can have the potential to ruin lives.

If police detectives don't start using superforcasting techniques, I hope they at least read Gladwell's book.