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.

Why Guns are not like Motorcycles

 

I.

Whenever I see the above bumper sticker or yard sign, I get irrationally angry. 

I'll explain.

Motorcycle ownership comes with costs and benefits. The benefit is that they are very fun to ride. The cost is that they are very dangerous; if you are in an accident your chance of dying is very high. (My dad told me about a friend who was in the Navy with him who had to hide his motorcycle from his own father, who was a trauma surgeon. He referred to motorcyclists as "organ donors.")

The reason I hate the messaging of the sign is that it is an attempt for motorcyclists to pass the costs (ie increased risk or injury and death) on to everyone else by making them drive more cautiously. 

If you want me to share the costs, let me share the benefits. I want access to your motorcycle one week every summer. In exchange, I will be extra observant of the speed limit.

In the absence of this campaign, what I like about motorcycle ownership is that the benefits and costs of owning a motorcycle are symmetric, the rider receives and bears both. This brings me to gun ownership, which is very much not like owning a motorcycle.

II.

There are benefits that come with owning a gun. You get to go hunting. You can protect your home and family. You enjoy firing off rounds at the gun range or at beer cans in your backyard. It's a hedge against tyranny, zombies, or a real-life Purge scenario. I'm sure there are many others I cannot think of because I do not own a gun.

There are also costs to gun ownership, costs that are unique to our country. Think of a spectrum with a total gun ban on one end and total gun freedom on the other. We live in a country that is optimized toward the gun freedom side, as compared to other countries. 

The way our optimization settings are tuned means we have easy access to guns, which leads to a lot of guns in circulation. We have more guns than any other country. We have more guns than we have people. 

There are a lot of studies that attempt to find a cause of gun violence. They control for things like strict gun laws, poverty, mental health access, voting patterns, etc. The only really reliable variable is that the presence of guns in a community increases the amount of gun violence. Therefore, the cost of our country's gun optimization setting is that we have a lot more guns, which means lot more gun violence.

And unlike our motorcycle friend, the law-abiding hunter or NRA member gets to enjoy the benefits of his gun without paying the costs. The cost is paid by the number of police officers annually killed in the line of duty. The cost is paid by the families who cannot afford to move out of their high-crime neighborhood and become victims of stray drive-by bullets. The cost is paid by people like Daniel Shaver who was executed while pulling up his pants because the cop thought he was reaching for a gun. Why? Because cops are terrified of being shot due to the high presence of guns in circulation.

I don't know what the solution to gun violence is, but I think it has to address this assymetry. The closest solution I can think of is treating gun ownership like cars; everyone has to get insurance that pays out if the gun is used to kill someone. Insurance companies will assess risk when assigning premiums. The higher the risk--no gun safe, AR-15, kids in the house, etc.--the higher the premium. 

How to Make Enemies and Influence Students

I've seen two videos going around social media that have been shown in elementary classrooms and stirred up some controversy. Both sides are making bad faith arguments and, as usual, I am going to use this post to steelman both sides and try to get to the heart of what I think the controversy is really about.

Video 1: Black Lives Matter

The first video attempts to explain the origins of Black Lives Matter. It's mostly harmless and informative. But around the 5:00 mark it mentions Michael Brown, saying he was unarmed and shot multiple times and that the officer wasn't charged. It leaves out that Michael Brown was beating the cop and reached for his gun when he was shot.

The video mentions the death of Breonna Taylor but leaves out the part where her boyfriend began shooting at the cops, who then returned fire.

The video also leaves out thousands of white people killed by cops every year, which obviously isn't the point of Black Lives Matter but its exclusion leads the young viewer to the conclusion that White people are free from police violence.

These are little nitpicky things, but their exclusion helps explain why some parents are raising an issue.

Can you imagine a video of George Floyd that just talked about his criminal past, how he was high on fentanyl, how he said "i can't breathe" while still standing, his history of heart problems, the number of cops killed in the line of duty each year? All these things are true, but they would leave out important context that would lead the viewer toward a particular conclusion that sounds like victim-blaming.

Nothing about the video is factually wrong, but it does present a story that will lead a child to believe a particular narrative. A more complete, albeit complicated narrative, would present each individual shooting as part of a complex story. Sometimes it's an evil police officer; sometimes it's racism; sometimes the deceased is actually a dangerous criminal; sometimes it's bad laws, policies, and incentives; and sometimes it's just an awful tragedy.

The fairest complaint of this video is that it tackles a complex problem by framing it as a simple narrative and it may be too complex for young students to fully grasp.

The fairest argument in favor of the video is that, as a society, we do not know how to have this conversation about race. Putting off uncomfortable conversations is ignoring a problem which will not go away.

My nuanced take is that those in favor of the video think they have all the facts but they don't. You have some facts, including facts that many other people do not have, but that is not the same as having all the facts.

A nuanced discussion about systemic racism in police shootings would look like this, but it will go way over the heads of 5th graders. This is a good opportunity for others to step up with suggestions for having these conversations, filling in the gaps via ideological diversity, and avoiding attempts to shut down speech, which is sadly the option opponents are choosing.

Video 2: Antiracism and Anti bias training

In the second video is about antiracism and anti bias training.

Around the 6 minute mark, the teacher talks about the fickle idea of race. The video later shows an image of hands and the spectrum of pigment to call attention to the complexity of color. The teacher says this is evidence that race is a social construct. I would say that one cannot build a satisfying taxonomy of race/color, making it an unreliable category. But that's why I'm not an elementary teacher.

Anyway, I mostly agree with this content and think it is good to share with young children. However, around the 7 minute mark she then goes on to say that this "social construction" of race was created to keep one group in power over another, and seems to suggest the idea of race was invented by the early colonial settlers. For an anti bias training, this content has an awful lot of bias.

If you are going to show students this take about how America has been steeped in racism from its foundation, you should couple it with Danielle Allen's Commencement speech, which is closer to the idea of viewing U.S. history through the progression and failures to live up to our founding ideals.

Allen starts by quoting the Declaration of Independence, musing that "It’s not just about individual rights—about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—it moves from those rights to the notion that government is something that we build together to secure our safety and happiness."

Allen tells the students that it is "our job at the end of the day is to build institutions that secure our shared rights. That means understanding the user manual." It's a great speech in and of itself, but all the more powerful when you reflect on how an African American woman can find such inspiration in our founding document. In this version of America, students feel empowered by recognizing that we were gifted with this power and have a responsibility to one another.

Instead of a tool of oppression, Allen views the legacy of our founders as a tool for moving toward prosperity. You can criticize this view but you cannot convince me it's wrong and the video's version is correct.

I'm fine with someone having a different interpretation of America's founding. But I think it's fair for a parent to see this and think our children are being taught one version of history as the "correct" one. It might be a small thing, but it will feel like they are losing the culture war by progressives flooding the curriculum with antiracist orthodoxy.

Steelmanning

The criticism of the pushback is that "you just don't want to teach about the history of racism" or "you're trying to protect your feelings from getting hurt." While the anti Critical Race Theory bills being introduced can have the effect of making it virtually impossible to teach about the history of racism, and have a chilling effect on free speech, the general worry coming from this crowd is more about the narrative around these topics is controlled by educators who do not view the world through the same lens as some parents. (In case it isn't clear, I think these bills are a terrible idea and do more harm than good.)

People outside of progressive circles use the academic term "Critical Race Theory" because they don't have the language to describe what they are seeing, which feels to them like progressive activism. And they want their kids to get an education without being turned into progressive activists.

The arguments in favor of the curriculum changes say that racism is a problem and if we are going to solve this problem, we need to educate people about it. So if you are against educating kids about racism, it must be because you want to keep racism in place and assert your white supremacy. They also argue that this sort of education is a corrective for the decades of public education that left out the important stuff about racism.

The Objectivity Problem

For most of U.S. history, public education, whether intentional or not, has optimized behavior in the direction of patriotism. It achieved this by focusing on the accomplishments of (mostly) great white men and ignoring, or downplaying, tragedies like the Trail of Tears and the Tulsa Massacre.

Notice that I never said this version of education lies. It just leaves out events in order to lead the learner to a particular conclusion that orients behavior to patriotism.

Now, if the purpose of public education was to create patriots, the purpose of the new curriculum change is to create antiracist activists. They both use the same rhetorical tool of leaving out nuance to lead the student to a particular conclusion.

A good metaphor for the exclusion of America's tragedies, in order to create patriotic students, would be to call it punching minorities in the face. There are two answers to this: punch back or adopt a "no punching" resolution. It appears modern educators have chosen the former.

I'm obviously a "no punching" kind of guy but I'm in a losing battle here. I don't think I can convince progressive educators that aiming for objectivity is even possible (see part III for my take on objectivity). Here is a long Twitter thread arguing something as seemingly as objective as science cannot help but be political, therefore justifying the intentional injection of one's politics into the classroom.

This paper argues against 'politicisation of science'. It's a seductive idea that science has been apolitical and things like decolonisation contaminate it, but it's wrong. Science has always been political - with significant impact on outcomes & culture.https://t.co/3OPqyUBgUQ

— David K Smith (@professor_dave) June 11, 2021

Three Types of Reactions to these Videos

1. Ben does not believe in systemic racism, or at least doesn't believe it's important enough to be front and center in elementary education curriculum. Therefore he works to stop these changes but does not feel the need to offer alternatives. Since he follows Chris Rufo and James Lindsay, he believes that these changes are just part of an attempt at an ideological takeover of our schools, rather than his beliefs being led by motivated reasoning (something like status quo bias).
2. Robin believes systemic racism is not only real, but the most pressing issue facing America today. Since she is highly credentialed, she believes that she is led by The Facts, has done the work, read the right books, etc., etc., rather than being led by motivated reasoning (eg confirmation bias leading her to preferring a narrative that frames history in a Oppressor vs. Oppressed lens). Since she believes her education led to this view, then it stands to follow that educating others will bring them to share that view, which is how we've ended up where we are today.
3. Coleman recognizes systemic racism, but believes the solution lies in expanding the project of liberalism and Enlightenment values. He sees inequity as a panoply of different scenarios, each deserving its own solution. He believes that mandated bias trainings and compelled speech are not only anathema to liberalism, but thwart the very efforts of Robin's antiracism. Since he reads Steven Pinker and IDW types, he believes he is above the partisan pettiness of Ben and Robin, rather than being led by motivated reasoning (eg fear of civil war and the end of liberalism due to polarization).

Robin is unable to distinguish Ben from Coleman. Coleman is unable to convince Robin that liberalism is the answer. Coleman believes that Robin is moving in the right direction but using the wrong tools. His dilemma is in deciding if he should join up with Ben in preventing Robin from using the wrong tools, believing that Ben is moving in the wrong direction.

A Plea for Communitarianism

My children are being raised Catholic. I have never complained that my public school was failing to teach my children about the glory of God, the meaning of the sacraments, or how to pray to the rosary. My children get that at Sunday School.

No one has ever complained to our priest that a Sunday School teacher was indoctrinating her child with Critical Christian Theory. Everyone is there voluntarily. We're there to be indoctrinated.

My point is that there is nothing stopping parents from forming a community civic organization that meets weekly to discuss this history of racism and the importance of activism with their children.

Our community institutions have evaporated but our need for a moral community persists. I think it is a mistake for people to try to use their public school as a proxy for a moral community. It will be more meaningful, and less hostile if people create their own. (Of course, as Tanner Greer has argued, Americans no longer have a "builders" attitude.)

My super hot take: I don't care. It really doesn't matter to me what version of history we teach or what gets excluded because schools no longer hold a monopoly on information. A quick summary on my education as it relates to US history and race:

• I am aware of our country's racist housing policy because I read a review of Richard Rothstein's book from a link I found on a Pearl Jam message board.
  
• I know about the Tulsa Massacre because it was in a TV show I watched about comic book heroes.
  
• I know a lot about John Adams and Alexander Hamilton because of HBO and Disney+.
  

I learned all of this after the age of 30 and with nothing more than my laptop and a $15 monthly subscription. I didn't even mention all I've learned from Wikipedia and free podcasts. Teach it. Don't teach it. But stop acting like high school is "our one chance to get it right."

Facts Man and the Social Justice Warrior

I.

On Coleman Hughes's podcast, he talks about debunking the "Hands up; don't shoot" myth regarding the Michael Brown shooting. To his credit, he does attempt to understand why people would believe what he calls a "poetic truth", which he contrasts with empirical truth. And while I don't think his steelmanning quite gets it right, the larger issue I have is with the ineffectiveness of this approach to sensitive topics like these. 

In this context, Hughes is acting as what Annie Lowery calls "Facts Man."

"The Facts Man gives it to you straight. With his college degree, with his top-quality résumé, with his insider knowledge, with his background in euclidean something-or-other—sharpened by debating with the smartest people, who never went to school—here is what he has found. These are the data. These are more data. This. Is. It. Here’s the inevitable conclusion. It’s the only conclusion possible!"

 II.

A very progressive woman in my town posted a video on Facebook. She saw a local cop had pulled over a Black driver. She pulled her car to the side of the road and began filming. Despite the fact that nothing happened--nor does anything ever happen in our town, including complaints of police abuse--the comments on her post were filled with praise and instances of the word "brave."

I couldn't help but be reminded of Liz Bruenig's comment about a lack of opportunities for heroism in modern society. It should come as no surprise that this woman's post came just days after Derek Chauvin's conviction. The media made Darnella Frazier a star, the girl who filmed Floyd's murder. I can't help but feel that the woman was motivated by her own desires for heroism.

I felt like commenting with some statistics. Things like the lack of police complaints in our town, or how police abuse happens in violent neighborhoods, not our town. Or how nationally the vast majority of police complaints go to the same small number of cops, so going by base rates this cop is likely to be harmless.

But then I realized how much I would have sounded like Facts Man. Social Justice Warrior can be irrational, but Facts Man can be just as annoying and ineffective, even when he's right. 

There has to be a better way.

III.

John Warner wrote a Twitter thread contrasting Adam Serwer and Conor Friedersdorf's coverage of the Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure denial controversy. Serwer and Friedersdorf aren't exactly Facts Man and the Social Justice Warrior--or if they are, they're the best versions of them--but Warner's analysis points toward something deeper.

Warner dislikes Conor's objective approach. 

But posing as objective (or even neutral) when you are not objective does not enhance anyone's credibility when it's apparent that you are not objective or neutral. This is why even when I agree with Friedersdorf, I roll my eyes because I know I've been subject to a performance.

— John Warner (@biblioracle) May 22, 2021

Here is why Warner likes Serwer's writing better. 

Serwer's description of the precipitating incident is in no way slanted on the facts, but it also isn't an attempt at establishing an "objective" persona. He's telling the reader where he stands so we can evaluate what's to come with that knowledge in hand.

— John Warner (@biblioracle) May 22, 2021

Warner is free to prefer whichever type of writing he likes, but I think he makes two logical errors. The first is to view objectivity/subjectivity as a binary, before rejecting the idea of objectivity at all. 

Scott Siskind explains how rationality is not a binary, but a spectrum, writing:

"You can definitely be bad at rationality, objectivity, and staying unbiased. But if you can be bad, you can also be good. You've admitted there's a spectrum from better to worse, you've admitted that the worse end deserves terms like "irrational" - so shouldn't the natural term for the better end be "rational"?"

In another post, Scott compares rationality to weight training; like objectivity, it's something you get better at the more you train. But because Warner cannot conceive of someone being objective, he becomes immediately suspicious of anyone who appears to approach topics with an objective lens. They must have some evil, hidden agenda, he thinks. 

I see a different distinction between the two writers. Serwer writes beautifully, but what is the point? He is basically reassuring liberals that they are right in believing conservatives are terrible.

Yes, by striving for objectivity, Conor has established credibility for a certain group of readers. But unlike Serwer, Conor's writing does what Amanda Ripley calls Complicating the Narrative. When Warner calls Serwer's writing "illuminating," I call it confirmation bias. Conversely, what Conor does is what I would call persuasion.

The other error Warner makes is to discount the effect of persuasion. Persuasion is so rare now that when people like Warner come across it, they mistake it for something nefarious. They assume people like Conor must have some secret evil motive. But what if Conor's motive is simply to update the priors of readers who are open to having their minds changed? Because I can guarantee you that Serwer isn't changing anyone's mind.

In an interesting column, Tom Chivers wonders "When did we give up on persuasion?" Chivers is curious about people's reaction to Scott Siskind's writing and draws a conclusion.

"When was the last time you read an article, an opinion piece, that you felt was trying to persuade you of something? To argue a position that you don’t hold, and make you believe it?

I suspect such experiences are rare. It is easier to write things for people who already agree with you: to make them cheer or feel clever, or to remind them how dreadful the other lot are. It’s also more fun. 

I’m not talking about reading a column that disagrees with you. I’m sure you read them regularly, or at least the headlines: pieces get hate-shared all the time among people who disagree with them. But they are not written to persuade, and readers are not persuaded. The intention, I think, is to provoke a reaction, to elicit cheers and boos. Not, primarily, to change minds."

IV.

To me, the myth-debunking Facts Man is as pointless as the callout-culture Social Justice Warrior. I think the world would be a better place if both archetypes cared more about the art of persuasion. 

Facts Man doesn't change minds when he debunks. He only angers his interlocutor and riles up his base. In other words, he writes and speaks for those who already agree with him.

Social justice warrior doesn't achieve social justice when he calls out or cancels someone. He just adds to the growing resentment of his outgroup.

The only positive thing both men achieve is higher status within their ingroup. There must be a third way.

I've reimagined what I think Braver Angels should look like. I think it's a mistake to recruit reds and blues as reds and blues. The people they recruit should not have politics as the top layer of their identity. The people they recruit should be Antitribalists. They should recruit Persuasion Man.

Their goal should be to recruit Gladwell's connectors, mavens, and persuaders. People who take debunked myths and present them in a way not intended to make others feel dumb, but to update their priors. People who explain to Facts Man why he should sit this one out and let people be empirically wrong if they're not hurting anyone. People who show Social Justice Warrior how to call in, rather than call out. Or better yet, just ignore people who say mean things. 

The Antitribalists care about truth and justice, but not as much as they fear civil war. The Antitribalists start from a place of empathy. They study, listen to, and learn the language and culture of Facts Man and Social Justice Warrior. They are bayesians, who constantly evaluate and update their beliefs when presented with new information.

They focus on their cognitive biases and work to overcome them and be less wrong. They recognize that persuasion is a two-way street; they cannot expect to change others' minds if they will not change their own.

The Antribalists recognize the irony that a group of people being against tribes is, in fact, a tribe. And they are okay with this because they are bound the similarities of the ingroup rather than hostility toward the outgroup.

Richard Hanania wrote an essay titled "Why is Everything Liberal?" His conclusion is that liberals simply care more. Consider this a post for the Antitribalists out there to care more.

The Slippery Slope to Losing the Culture War

                                    Pixabay — mstlion

I.

I was having a conversation with a conservative friend recently. She was upset that Penn State was changing the class year's names (freshman, sophomore, etc.) to be more inclusive and less hierarchical. Trying to follow the scout mindset, I asked her to continue that line of thinking. Why was this change bad? What did it portend? How does it affect her?

What I came to take away was that the Penn State change really was a low stakes battle. But it was a sign that her tribe was losing the war. It wasn't about the name change as much as it was liberals getting another W.

I've seen people on Twitter lose their minds over a presentation that begins with a land acknowledgment. I've been very critical of the coercive use of Critical Theory-inspired movements.  But a land acknowledgment? Really? Who gives a shit?

But now I understand the resistance. It's a sign that the other tribe has won another battle and it feels like they are losing the culture war.

II.

In my worshiping and compression post, I described how progressives view the "default setting" of humanity:

"For example, I think Ibram Kendi, and the successor ideology at-large, think the default setting of America is racism. In How to be an Antiracist, he describes the birth of the "conjoined twins" (capitalism and racism) in 1450 Portugal, tracing it to the founding of the United States. 

The 1619 Project makes a similar claim, that America was founded on protecting slavery. In this view, the only thing to save us from falling back into slavery, and allowing racism to grow like metastic cancer, is the constant practice of antiracism in the face of the institutions that uphold racism (capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.)."

Looking back, I don't think I did a great job describing that viewpoint. For starters, that description doesn't align with how I described the other groups. I wrote that conservatives fear that losing the culture war means we descend to barbarism. Enlightenment liberals fear that losing the culture war means we descend to civil war. Libertarians fear that losing the culture/policy war means we descend into totalitarianism. (I don't feel confident in my ability to steelman Trumpism, but I would say they fear that losing the culture war means being replaced by socialist-loving immigrants.)

But what about progressives? Why does my description of a default setting and fear of losing sound so clunky?

First, I think a better description would be to say that their belief is that our default setting is for one group to accumulate power (eg White people) and use it to oppress everyone else. They fear losing the culture war means descending into total White Supremacy oppression. 

I like that definition better because it works on both the cultural and policy level. This helps me understand the aggression toward capitalism; they conflate it with White Supremacy. In both instances they see that a bunch of white dudes have accumulated power/capital and are using it to assert their dominance/extract labor from everyone else.

The only thing that makes progressives different from all the other groups is that they don't frame the default settings as a "descent" to their greatest fear (ie White Supremacy). They think they already have lost. White Supremacy has been winning since time immemorial. 

This helps me understand why it's so difficult to talk across ideological lines. Libertarians think the government is already too big. Enlightenment liberals think we are already too polarized. Conservatives think society is already too permissive and chaotic. So collectively, they are understandably confused when progressives lump all these groups together, based on most of them having white skin, and declare that not only are they the bad guys, but they're winning the culture war. 

We're all living different narratives and in each version, someone else is winning.

(As an Enlightenment liberal, I just want to say that I do not think polarization is worse than racism. I just think that we cannot solve racism, or any major problem, until we solve polarization.)

III.

The Georgia voting laws dominated the news cycle for quite some time. Some people argued it was the worst thing ever and others said the hype was overblown. At first, I thought the different reactions was a decouple vs. contextual dichotomy. In other words, how you felt about the laws depended on whether you could decouple them from Georgia's history of racism and voter suppression or whether that context always played a role on how we should interpret them.

For instance, here is a breakdown of how the law is being overblown, with the exception being the part that takes power away from the Secretary of State. That part is actually scary overreach.

But even if a progressive reads the above link and believes every word, they will not be comforted. Because just like my friend hearing about the rather benign Penn State name change, the voter law is a sign that progressives are losing the war. No matter how much you downplay the effects of the law, it will always be interpreted as "My outgroup used their power to put into law something that takes power away from my ingroup." If you're a progressive, this reifies your fear that we are descending into White Supremacy.

IV.

I like the decoupling vs. contextualizing idea. It helped me understand why some people just talk past one another, why we can't even seem to agree on what we're arguing about. Decoupling is considering facts on their merits, irrespective of their context, while contextualizing says that true honesty must acknowledge cultural context.

However, I think the dichotomy is flawed. I don't think the world is made up of people who are decouplers OR contextualizers. I'm not even talking about a spectrum. I think the flaw is that the description is fluid. In some contexts, I'm a decoupler. In others, a contextualizer. The determining factor is how much skin me or my tribe has in the game.

Take the Masterpiece Cakeshop. Should a Christian baker be allowed to refuse a cake for a gay couple? As a straight, non-Christian, I don't have any skin in the game. So whatever my opinion, it is decoupled from the context. 

Now consider the biracial student forced to confess his white dominance in his sociology class. This is the unnecessary race-baiting of Critical Race Theory that increases polarization and puts the culture wars in a pressure cooker. As an Enlightenment liberal who believes our default setting moves us toward civil war, I cannot decouple this scenario from it's context in the polarization culture war. I place it right within the context of the polarization problem. In this case, I am a contextualizer.

So if someone seems to be overreacting to a news story, ask yourself: Is it possible they view the world as a different war than the way I view it? Do they have a different belief about the default setting of humanity?

Is their biggest fear White Supremacy, civil war, barbarism, totalitarianism, or something else different than my biggest fear? If so, are they contextualizing this story as just a battle in a larger war they feel they are losing?

My point is that we all overreact to seemingly mundane news stories and that our reaction has less to do with the context of the story than with the overall feeling that our team is losing. If your response to this point is to justify why your war is more righteous than someone else's war ("Boo Hoo, Christians. You have to call it a Holiday Tree? Guess what? I'm fighting against White Supremacy, which has been oppressing black people for 400 hundred years!") then you're missing the point of living in a multicultural society. We have to make space for everyone, and, yes, that includes the antiracists. 

I think an important step is for members of each tribe to ask themselves: Where do I draw the line? At which point do I concede a battle, knowing that any one group should not have too much power, even if it's my tribe in power?

As an Enlightenment liberal, the American Civil War is a good example. If keeping two factions from tearing one another apart includes allowing a violation of human rights (eg slavery) then I am going to sit this one out or align with whoever is on the side of human rights.