The Diffusion of Rhetoric

 

There is a theory called the diffusion of innovation that looks at how to capture market share. A certain group of the public (innovators, early adopters) will be the first in line to get the first-ever iPhones. The last group, the laggards, won't give up their flip phone until Samsung stops making it.

Most others are somewhere in between. Maybe it's like Mark Granovetter's concept of the riot rock threshold.

"In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them."

So the first person to throw a rock has a threshold of zero. The second person has a threshold of one, he never would have thrown the rock until someone else did. On and on until you get to the hundredth person who never would have joined the riot if 99 people before didn't step in.

I think this model is helpful for understanding rhetoric. If there is a cause you care about, your message should depend on whom you are speaking to.

Activists, Unengaged, Stubborns, and Persuadeables

Say your cause is climate change. The early adopters are the Greta Thunberg's of the world, the people who care as much as you. Let's call them The Activists. You don't need to convince them of the severity of climate change, you just need to give them direction on how to mobilize and take action.

The second group is The Unengaged. They don't have a stance and don't really care. Your message needs to be one of education. If they understood more, some will care as much as you and will join your cause. (In the case of vaccinations, this is the group that isn't motivated to get a free life-saving vaccine until you entice them with a $1 million vaccine lottery.)

The third group opposes you. Maybe they think climate change is a hoax. Maybe they think the threat is overblown. Maybe they just oppose anything progressives support.

This group has two subgroups; those open to changing their mind and those who are not. For the latter, don't even bother. In fact, the best you can do is not piss them off so they turn into activists who oppose your cause and make life harder. For the other sub-group, your message is one of persuasion. You have to know their beliefs and have good counterpoints. Let's call these subgroups The Stubborns and The Persuadeables. 

Winning Converts

If these groups are anything like the rioters, the most efficient method will probably be to target the second group, The Unengaged. Not only are they the largest, but they likely have a domino effect. Once one of them becomes joins your cause, a second person, with a conversion threshold of one, will join him. Then another and another. As I noted in a previous post, the biggest change in support of Black Lives Matter came from people who had no opinion of the group (i.e. The Unengaged); there was little movement among people who opposed BLM.

But then again, it might make more sense to target The Persuadables. Jetty Taylor is a conservative who made frequent media appearances where he expressed his skepticism toward climate change. In The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef describes how climate activist Bob Litterman was able to persuade Jetty by speaking his language. Now, Taylor is an activist for environmental causes. 

It might be easier to convince The Unengaged that you are right, but the most they will do is vote or donate in your direction. You cannot convince someone to become an activist, it's more of a personality type. That is why it might be more efficient to convert a Persuadable activist like Jetty, he will do more for your cause than 100 converted unengaged types.

The problem is targeting the message. If anyone outside The Activists hears an activist message, it will come across as preachy and condescending at best. At worst, it will mobilize The Stubborns to oppose you. Even a message for The Unengaged can sound preachy and condescending. For the uneducated on climate change, you need to create a simple story. The Stubborns and The Persuadables are often educated on the topic, or at least think they are, and will poke holes in your simple story and create their own narrative.

For The Persuadeables, you have to leave activism out of your message if you even want to engage. Then you have to know their side of the argument better than them. Then you have to deliver your message in a way that makes it easy for them to change their mind.

Controlling the Narrative

The other challenge is not letting The Activists take control of the narrative. They know the messaging that works for them, but they do not realize how ineffective it is against everyone else. They are unable to distinguish The Uneducated from The Stubborns so they think a simple message of education should work on everyone. They don't know how The Stubborns and Persuadables think.

Matt Yglesias wrote a great post called "Who is the racial justice case for zoning reform for?" He writes about zoning regulations and shows how they have empirically slowed economic growth, in addition to contributing to racial disparities. 

If your focus on racial justice, you can motivate The Actvists. If you focus on economic growth, you can motivate The Persuadeables who support free markets. But if social justice activists hear the latter message, they might oppose you since the benefits of housing conflict with their anti-market beliefs.

"the people I am trying to convince are generally ideologically motivated college-educated professionals ... They conceive of urban land use politics as pitting activists or regulators against developers and are disinclined to side with the developers...

"The problem is that the very same racial angles that help zoning reformers win intra-progressive arguments have the opposite impact on the right... A struggle against white supremacy sounds a lot more righteous than a struggle against inefficient regulation."

Someone who really gets this is David Shor; a socialist who keeps urging Democrats to stop talking about socialism. I've even seen him tweet that liberals should not publicly denigrate moderate Republicans because the few sane members left in the GOP might be holding society together.

Leveraging Unity

The diffusion of innovation chart is a nice visual but not a perfect metaphor for rhetoric because it only measures people who e.g. end up buying an iPhone, rather than all potential consumers. In the diffusion of rhetoric, you have to consider the impact of people who oppose you.

In that sense, there are two charts I like to think about. They both show sharp increases in the support and they also measure the decrease in pushback.

The first chart is support for Black Lives Matter. The blue line shoots up when the George Floyd video surfaces. The second chart is George W. Bush's approval rating. The blue line shoots up after 9/11.

Wesley Morris wrote a long thinkpiece about how we should use this moment when the national narrative is focused on racial justice. The most similar moment of a tragic event that created some unity was 9/11. Unfortunately for Wesley, the "moment" has been squandered. The 9/11 moment was not squandered, which makes me wonder why?

Nassim Taleb likes to say that you don't ask your barber if you need a haircut. Well, after 9/11 we collectively asked our barber (the military) if we needed a haircut (foreign invasion) and that is how we ended up in a very unpopular war with a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. This time when we asked our barber (social justice advocates) if we needed a haircut, they told us the answer was to defund the police. 

First, this was not a popular response. Second, the principles of democracy and the separation of powers prevented this unpopular idea from becoming policy. Bush, however, did not need to play by these rules. He did not need Congressional (or UN) approval to invade Iraq, which is a big hole in our democracy and a good example of what can happen when we try to leverage a nation's emotional unity.

So even though I had hoped the George Floyd video would lead to serious police reform (think "end qualified immunity" and not "defund/abolish"), I'm still happy with the way things played out. I would rather live in a world in which politics prevents meaningful police reform if it also prevents unnecessary wars. 

I also believe that reform is possible if we get the messaging right. (I wish I was as hopeful that we could end the president's power to unilaterally get us into a war.)

Blueprint

Here is how things should have gone. Activists cannot control the narrative, but you still need them. They are great at action and getting attention, but it has to be tactical.

The spokesperson to the public needs to be someone like Persuasion Man. It has to be someone who understands his audience. Racial justice advocates should have given a bigger platform to Killer Mike. 

Persuasion Man reads the polls and understands what ideas are popular, like unbundling the police or investing in social services, and sticks to those. You cannot allow people in your movement to be talking about abolishing the police or saying ACAB.

In the background, you have to target Persuadable activists and try to convert those with a big audience. They will do a lot of heavy lifting for you.

A Final thought re: The Unengaged

The controversy about teaching critical race theory or systemic racism in public schools is really an effort to present an education message to The Unengaged (school children not already indoctrinated by their woke parents).

It's important to correct any curriculum that still teaches falsehoods like "The War of Northern Aggression". But I've read many think pieces about how much of the details of things like lynchings and slavery are left out of our K-12 history, and how this needs to be corrected. What I don't see is a justification for teaching these details, other than truth for the sake of truth. Why not focus on the systematic oppression of Irish immigrants, antisemitism, or Native American slaughter? Why increase the spotlight on this one group? 

I think the answer has to do with rhetoric. 

I read an interview with Richard Rothstein about his book The Color of Law. He says we have to teach about systemic racism, specifically w/r/t housing, so the next generation can make the necessary changes. If more progressives share this view, then the reason for including the bloody details in K-12 curriculums is for rhetorical purposes; i.e. to create activists. The charts I posted above show that the bloody details of George Floyd's murder warmed support for BLM, just like the bloody details of 9/11 spiked fear of Islamic terrorism.

If so, even if the facts are facts, I can understand why conservatives push back. They don't want their kids to become liberal activists. These same conservatives can recite in detail all the worst features of Islam; misogyny, homophobia, female genital mutilation. If hawskish conservatives had their way, these details would be included in K-12 curriculum for the sole purpose of creating anti-foreigner activists.

Maybe this is why people say bias is written into any curriculum. Any facts you choose to present or leave out can cull an emotional response that orients the learner in a particular direction. 

(Of course, I don't believe this will have the intended effect. Kids are more influenced by their families and peers than what their teacher says.) 

This is how people adapt a war mentality; opposing activists think the fate of society depends on whether The Unengaged gets the message from The Activists or The Stubborns, when the reality is that their aggressive messages just make people hate both groups. The stakes feel so high that they end up talking themselves into illiberal ideas like censoring speech, fearing what will happen if The Unengaged hear disinformation or hateful rhetoric from the bad guys.

Hopefully my blueprint is a way out of this hellhole. Illiberalism is illiberalism, whether it comes from the left or the right.

Updating my Priors: Short Takes pt. III

So my BLM forecast was wrong. Support has dropped 2 points and opposition has risen 1. My confidence was only at 55%. In retrospect, I should have forecasted that the opposition would fall, rather than support would rise, but I still would have been wrong. 

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This study finds that "Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven entirely by large differences in wages and employment rates between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and white women."

Indeed, the following chart shows that for those living in poverty, who are disproportionately black, the gender wage gap goes the other way. Read more.

I've written about this several times but I still don't know what to make of it. If the racial wage gap is caused by past and/or present discrimination, why does it affect boys and not girls? Intersectionality suggested that racism + sexism should equal worse outcomes for black girls but that does not seem to be the case.

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FiveThirtyEight made a really good case for ranked choice voting and proportional representation.

"This also echoes something social psychologists have found in running experiments on group behavior: Breaking people into three groups instead of two leads to less animosity. Something, in other words, appears to be unique about the binary condition, or in this case, the two-party system, that triggers the kind of good-vs-evil, dark-vs-light, us-against-them thinking that is particularly pronounced in the U.S.

Ultimately, the more binary the party system, the stronger the out-party hatred."

Will promotion of a non binary system lead to less animosity? 

"in proportional democracies, multiple parties can still win seats in geographically unfriendly areas, with coalition governments including some balance of both urban and rural representation.

It’s not just the lack of a stark urban-rural divide that makes proportional democracies less polarized, though. There is also less of a clear strategic benefit to demonizing the opposition in an election that has more than two parties. For instance, in a multiparty election, taking down one party might not necessarily help you. After all, another party might benefit, since negative attacks typically have a backlash. And because parties can take stronger positions and appeal more directly to voters on policy, there’s less need to rally your supporters by talking about how terrible and dangerous the other party is. Moreover, in systems where parties form governing coalitions, demonizing a side you’ve recently been in a coalition with (or hope to be in the future) doesn’t ring quite as true."

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In my post, "In Defense of Violating Social Norms," I gave examples of Jackie Robinson and Copernicus as people who violated a social norm that was unpopular and now is celebrated. I wish I had thought to include Harvey Milk, who was openly gay at a time when it had very little public support. Coming out violated a social norm that is now popular.

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I wrote a post about how teaching a "patriotic" education might have been an attempt to create a myth about America since mythology is the only way to unite a large, diverse body. I suggested that the antiracist group was attempting to create a new myth that makes America the villain. I think I misinterpreted the motives of the antiracists. The goal isn't to villainize America, it's just an unintended consequence. The goal is to create a hero via a minority-as-victim narrative, since we have moved into a society that grants the highest status to the victim.

I recall seeing a progressive friend at a Black Lives Matter rally. He had a sign that spelled out his Mt. Rushmore: Tamir Rice, Emmit Till, Ruby Bridges, and Trayvon Martin. Not Frederick Douglas or Harriet Tubman. Not Barak Obama or Ta-Nahesi Coates. No, with the exception of Bridges, the people he chose as the most revered icons were all famous for being victims. 

It reminded me that progressives live in the victimhood culture, while I'm stuck in the dignity culture. If the icon of honor culture is John Wayne, the tough guy who responds to insults with violence, and the icon of victimhood culture is Tamir Rice, the innocent minority oppressed by a White member of a violent institution, then the icon of dignity culture would be a stoic like, I dunno, Teddy Rosevelt.

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I came across this quote about a blogger describing her writing "not as her permanent opinions, but instead as ‘a stream of thoughts, caught in the middle of updates." That is how I view this blog and why I keep up old takes I no longer hold. Case in point, I wrote a blog about why I hold to Truth and call out lies (part VI) even if they are moving in a direction I agree with. A few posts later I wrote a post about Persuasion Man and how it's sometimes better to just let people be wrong if they aren't hurting anyone.

I recently had a Truth vs. Justice conflict. JD Vance wrote a column about daycare and linked to a study that purportedly showed how daycare can be worse for some children than staying at home. I looked at the study, which was actually a Christain think tank's analysis of the study. Then I read the actual study and found that the supposed negative impacts of daycare disappear when you control for income. 

So Vance is wrong, or at the very least dishonest. But I decided to let it go because his final conclusion is that we should not be subsidizing daycare, we should just give people cash and let them decide how to use it (eg spend it on daycare or use it as income so one parent can stay home). And I agree with his conclusion, so why waste time calling out his dishonesty when we could be building a coalition.

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In my post "Balancing Theory and Action" I wrote about how I'm more theory than action because I'm so concerned with getting to the truth of the matter before deciding if acting on it is the right decision. I regret that I only now realize the perfect metaphor for what I was trying to describe would be the Ents (talking trees) from The Lord of the Rings. War is raging around them and they're still taking their slow-ass time to make a decision.

"It takes a long time to say anything at all in Entish and we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say."

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In "Through the Lens of Salience" I wrote of Dr. King "His prescription (which later became more nuanced and antiracist) was a color-blind humanism ... We will reach equality when we see past color."

I think I got this backward. I think he saw colorblindness as the goal, not the process. You need something like reparations to level the playing field, then you could have something like a colorblind society.

Loyalty to the Realm

Mike Pence once said, "I am a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican--in that order."

The order part is what I find interesting. Although his actions often said otherwise, I think it's supposed to mean that his identity has a hierarchy. If he is faced with a situation where he has to choose between being a conservative and being a republican, he chooses the former (supposedly).

Many Republican politicians choose being a Republican when it conflicts with being a conservative. So rather than advance conservative policies, like free markets, they will do whatever it takes to win power for their party, like showing solidarity with Trump even if it means supporting his anti-market tariffs.

A lot of progressives like to describe capitalism as being inherently racist and oppressive. But these ideas can separate. 

Suppose you are a racist loan officer. A black family comes into your bank to apply for a mortgage for a home in your white community. Their credit and references are excellent. You are certain to make money off of this loan. But you are also a racist. Your identities are in conflict. Do you choose to be a capitalist and make money or do you choose to be a racist and deny the loan? I guess it depends on the hierarchy of your identity.

Jesse Singal believes that when lies are spread about a journalist, other journalists have a duty to come to their defense. Jonathan Rauch spoke of the University of Chicago's belief that an attack on one faculty anywhere, is an attack on all faculty. So if there is pressure to fire someone for political reasons, it is incumbent on other faculty to come to their defense.

Rauch also wrote about the concept of "professionalism." In A Time to Build, Yuval Levin expands on this idea from politics to careers like journalism or education. 

"Journalism gradually became a profession - with some broadly accepted general standards ... the development of a journalistic code of ethics, layers of something like peer review in the editorial process, and procedures for punishing, shaming, or ostracizing violators... The professions exist in large part to handle knowledge responsibly."

The reason this concept does not exist anymore, and people like Rauch and Singal are shouting into the void, is that modern professionals have reordered their identity hierarchy. They are antiracists first, journalists second. So if someone tries to get you fired for appearing on Joe Rogan, your professionals are not coming to your aid just because you share a career. You oppose their top identity (eg progressivism) and that is all that matters.

So how are my identities ordered?

Serving the Realm

In Game of Thrones, Ned Stark asks:

"Tell me something, Varys. Who do you truly serve?" 

To which Varys replies:

 "The realm, my lord. Someone must." 

Most characters are loyal to a ruler or a family. But Varys says his loyalty lies with the realm (ie King's Landing). It is difficult to determine Varys motivation throughout the series. He aligns with different factions, seemingly when convenient. But if I take him at his word, I think he describes how I feel.

Between Fairness and Power

In Freedom, Sebastian Junger writes "...civilians had to be willing to give up leadership when they were overruled by a majority, because they presumable valued having no power in a fair system more than they valued having all the power in an unfair one."

I read somewhere that today's GOP has to be willing to give up short term political gains in order to not sacrifice long term democracy. In other words, they have to be like the civilians Junger describes, valuing a fair system with fair elections rather than amplifying conspiracies to keep their base active even if they end up overthrowing the government after another election loss.

I have certain policies I favor. I would like a public option for healthcare. I would legalize all drugs and release all non-violent offenders from prison. I would end exclusionary zoning. I like all these things, but not as much as I like democracy. I would not favor ways to put my policies into action now if it threatened the stability of our society. 

I serve democracy first. After that, I serve the abolition of the war on drugs and all my other pet projects.

My Twitter bio says I am a rationalist, humanist, localist, and apatheist. I don't know which order those appear in my hierarchy. But I know they are all secondary. 

My loyalties are to the realm.