Friday, May 20, 2022

Updating My Priors: Short Takes 5/2022

Regarding my post about patents as a sign of innovation (scroll to the bottom); I am now less confident that it's a good signal at all.

So the increase in patents might not be a sign of our independent, innovative society but just a sign of big business using government power to crush competition. 


Regarding my purple dots post, the Transparency Effect is another way of framing it.

I've been thinking about my post "The Diffusion of Rhetoric." I said that for persuasion to be effective, you need a simple message for the uneducated, normie, persuadable crowd, and a message that won't ignite the activist, opposition crowd. This has been on my mind with the recent Roe v. Wade controversy. I see many from the pro choice crowd posting the arguments that they find convincing, but they're never gonna work on changing the mind of pro-lifers. 

But I've updated my view. Rather than worry about messaging that will ignite the pro-life activist crowd (at this point, they couldn't possible be more engaged in this war), I think the better strategy might be to do what the pro choice people are doing. How you word the poll can have an effect on responses regarding abortion, but the one thing that seems clear is that most people don't want Roe v. Wade overturned. 

So if Republicans are doing something that is unpopular, you should make it a salient topic if you want to them to lose the next election. Keep talking about it. Keep the unpopular thing on people's minds. And keep reminding them that it is Republicans who are doing the unpopular thing (I'm very bearish on the takes that "gay rights and interracial marriage are next on the chopping block" and worry this will lose credibility among The Persuadeables).

As of this writing, the GOP's unfavorability rating is at 58%. Let's see if it dips. (Update, since the first draft of this post it has dipped to 57%.)


I normally find WhErE iS tHe OuTrAgE? whataboutism to be loathsome, but sometimes I just lean into my own hypocrisy. I love how everyone was pointing out that the richest people in the world made tons of cash when the pandemic tanked the economy, which was really just a way of saying the stock market performed well and the people who had the most money in the stock market made the most money. 

And now that the stock market is in the tank, guess who is hurting the most? The billionaires.  


Another victory for us both-sidesist folks pushing our civility porn! Yeah!

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