Through the Lens of Salience

From The Economist:

"In America the big liberal shift took place in the mid-1960s. To deal with the legacy of slavery, liberals began to concede that you need to treat the descendants of slaves as members of a group, not only as individuals....

“To say that whiteness is a standpoint”, [Robin] DiAngelo writes, “is to say that a significant aspect of white identity is to see oneself as an individual, outside or innocent of race—‘just human’.”

This is a long post about the tension between the center-left individualist identity and far-left groupishness identity. I am going to give examples of how the far left makes tactical errors by viewing individuals, especially individuals who think of themselves as individuals, through a groupish lens. Then I'm going to critique individualism, which is not as individual as most people think it is. Finally, I am going to define my group and how I think it can do better.

I.

After the election, everyone had access to the same data but were drawing different conclusions. Consider the following headlines:

From MSN Newsweek: "Donald Trump Made Gains in Every Demographic Except For White Men". 

Meanwhile, Vox writes: "Election results: White people make up the majority of Trump voters". 

Not to be outdone in the hyperbole department, Charles Blow at the New York Times writes: "Exit Polls Point to the Power of White Patriarchy".

Here's an angle I'd like to see explored: why are White people the most diverse voting bloc? The chart below shows the last two presidential votes by race, the longer the bar the more that race supported a given candidate.

White people are closest to the center, which means they had the most people voting for both parties. No one talks about going after the "white vote" because it is not a monolithic group. People who work on campaigns know that simple truth, yet so many of the far left continue to make that mistake.

Here is another interesting angle: Why are Black Americans the most uniform voting bloc? Nikole Hannah Jones wrote a long Twitter thread about that very topic. 

Again we see how expertise in race, racism, racial history is an essential but underdeveloped journalistic skill.That Latinos, Asian & white votes are split is NOT surprising. It is the uniformity of the Black vote that is exceptional & it stems from a singular racial experience.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) November 4, 2020

When you identify with a racial group, you tend to associate others by their racial group. This can lead to oversimplification.

II.

Consider this blog post titled "White Rage, White Guilt." The writer works in a bookstore and describes the post-George Floyd jump in sales for books like  So You Want to Talk About Race and How to Be an Antiracist. The store quickly ran out of books and the employee had to field calls from distressed white women who didn't want to have to wait.

The author then makes this leap in logic:

"And yet, despite all of the learning that supposedly took place via these books, in early November 2020 exit polls stated that among white women, Trump still held their support: An estimated 55 percent of white women voted for Trump."

Forget for a moment the historic inaccuracy of exit polls, which overrepresented in-person (read: Trump) voters and think about how, in 2020, we can observe the behavior of a few white women in an upperclass, well-educated clientele and think it is a good sample of all registered voters nationally. 

Another example comes from an Op-Ed in the New York Times called "‘Reach Out to Trump Supporters,’ They Said. I Tried." After the 2016 election, the writer, Wajahat Ali, went around the country speaking to Trump supporters.

"My standard speech was about how to “build a multicultural coalition of the willing.” My message was that diverse communities, including white Trump supporters, could work together to create a future where all of our children would have an equal shot at the American dream. I assured the audiences that I was not their enemy...

Those in the audience who supported Mr. Trump came up to me and assured me they weren’t racist. They often said they’d enjoyed the talk, if not my politics. Still, not one told me they’d wavered in their support for him. Instead, they repeated conspiracy theories and Fox News talking points about “crooked Hillary.” Others made comments like: “You’re a good, moderate Muslim. How come others aren’t like you?”

In Ohio, I spent 90 minutes on a drive to the airport with a retired Trump supporter. We were cordial to each other, we made jokes and we shared stories about our families. But neither of us changed our outlook. “They’ll never take my guns. Ever,” he told me, explaining that his Facebook feed was filled with articles about how Mrs. Clinton and Democrats would kill the Second Amendment and steal his guns."

I really admire his effort, although I think it was a mistake to make conversion a part of his speech. Ali continues:

"What was my reward? Listening to Mr. Trump’s base chant, “Send her back!” in reference to Representative Ilhan Omar, a Black Muslim woman, who came to America as a refugee. I saw the Republican Party transform the McCloskeys into victims, even though the wealthy St. Louis couple illegally brandished firearms against peaceful B.L.M. protesters."

(This mistake happens on the right too. Most Democratic candidates showed strong support for socialist programs, as well as advocacy for woke culture, which caused many Trump voters to vote against the moderate Biden, including many Latinos. The fact that Biden has been a centrist for his whole career didn't matter, voters took the socialist movement and applied it to the individual.)

The book store owner is wrong because she viewed white women as a monolithic voting bloc, when White people are the most heterodox voting racial group. While there was probably some ideological churn, for the most part it was White Democrats who didn't pay attention to pre-Floyd police brutality who bought your books, not Trump voters. 

Ali is wrong because he assumed the people who talked to him were representative of the broader category of Republicans and Trump voters. The types of people who denigrated  Ilhan Omar and enshrined the McCloskeys are not the type of people who willingly hold polite conversations with a liberal Muslim man.

III.

Is it wrong to categorize people by their race? And why are White people more reluctant to identify by their race?

As a White American, it's hard to understand what it's like to be a person of color in a predominantly white culture that constantly reminds you of your race. For people of color, especially Black Americans, it creates an us/them distinction, which has the effect of unifying "us".

John Turner developed a self-categorization theory. He said that what causes us to adopt one self-categorization as opposed to another is the "relative salience" of that category. What makes a category salient? When a comparable or contrasting category is present.

In The Nurture Assumption, Judith Harris writes:

"Thus, the social category adult is not salient when you're in a roomful of adults, but as soon as some children enter the room it becomes salient....

"When a particular social category is salient and you categorize yourself as a member of it - that is when the group will have the most influence on you. That is when the similarities among the members of a group are most likely to increase and the differences between groups to widen."

For the most part, White Americans are surrounded by other White Americans, making race less salient. So there is less unity, group bonding, and consistent voting patterns. 

The above slide is from a mandatory diversity training session. Look at the bullet points about the racial makeup of politicians; US Congress: 90 percent white, US Governors: 96 percent white, top military advisers: 100 percent white, etc. The implication seems to be that these White people are looking out for all White people, regardless of political affiliation. 

For whoever wrote these slides, race is a salient category. They look at Congress, see a bunch of white faces, and conclude, "these people represent them, not us." White people look at Congress and see good guys (Democrats/Conservatives) and bad guys (Conservatives/Democrats), regardless of race.

Part of what makes diversity training like this so unsuccessful is that the language is made for groupish identitarians and instead is delivered to individualistic people. It tells them: "Your identity is wrong. Stop thinking of yourself as a center-right, small government, civil liberties, Southern Baptist, Dallas Cowboys fan and start thinking of yourself as a White person."

IV.

I think the decline of religion and civic participation has created a need for group bonding, which makes the allure of Robing DiAngelo's message so seductive. 

White Americans are told that it is a privilege to not wear our race as an identity, a privilege that leads to ignorance and harm toward BIPOC populations. Unlike persons of color, White people can never be united as victims of oppression, but the antiracists offer them something better. They can distinguish themselves from the bad (racist) whites and show they are the good (ally) whites. Instead of race, the salience becomes ideological: wokeness.

Race never informed how White Americans voted because it was not a part of their identity; it wasn't a salient category. Antiracism has now created a wedge among White people: the antiracist allies and the people who are sick of being called racist.

For the antiracist, this isn't even about assuaging white guilt as much as it is giving one's self over to the thrilling feel of belonging to a community that unites over a common enemy: racists. And Dr. Kendi made this distinction very easy: a racist is anyone who is not an antiracist.

Kill the Demon, Destroy the Wall

 

"Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment created by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867 in which he suggested how the second law of thermodynamics might hypothetically be violated.

In the thought experiment, a demon controls a small door between two compartments of gas. As individual gas molecules approach the door, the demon quickly opens and shuts the door so that only fast molecules are passed into one of the chambers, while only slow molecules are passed into the other. Because faster molecules are hotter, the demon's behaviour causes one chamber to warm up and the other to cool down, thereby decreasing entropy and violating the second law of thermodynamics."

I.

In my review of The Third Pillar, I quoted a reference in the book to a study about schools' gifted student programs. The study found that "there is no overall improvement in results as the benefit to the brightest is cancelled out by the drag on the rest." In other words, putting a student in a gifted program will raise their scores while also lowering the scores of the students in the class the gifted student was removed from.

In a study called The Social Structure of Schooling, researchers found a similar phenomenon when schools used tracking. Put a bunch a smart kids together and their grades go up. Put a bunch of low performing kids together and their grades go down. 

This is Maxwell's Demon in the classroom.

There should be more disorder, more entropy, more poor kids finding success and rich kids falling behind. But there is a demon in our society that interferes, which causes feedback loops we all get stuck in.

You can draw different conclusions from these studies. Maybe you think it means that successful people are only that way because of unearned privilege of being placed in the fast molecule room, or that schools need to spend more on low performing students at the expense of high performing students. But I think the lesson should be that society underrates the impact of peer influence.

The number one villain here is zoning regulations, not a lack of spending on public schools in poor neighborhoods. Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to Newark, NJ public schools didn't work because it did not address the core problem: kids being stuck in the slow molecule room. Infusing the slow molecule room with money isn't the same as infusing it with fast-molecule students. 

Instead, we need to kill the demon and [Ronald Reagan voice] tear down that wall.

II.

It isn't just poor parents without college degrees that are holding their kids back. In The Nurture Assumption, Judith Harris writes:

"British studies have shown that when delinquent London boys move out of their city their delinquency rates decline - even if they move with their families. By living in one neighborhood rather than another, parents can raise or lower the chances that their children will commit crimes, drop out of school, use drugs, or get pregnant."

It's probably wrong to blame the family for a problematic child, often times it's the school and community that influence him.

A New York Times study shows that poor white boys are more likely to become successful than poor black boys, and that rich white boys are more likely to stay rich, while rich black boys are more likely to end up poor, which is disheartening to say the least. 

The NYT study looked for outliers and found that:

"The few neighborhoods  (where poor black boys do well as well as whites)  ... were the places where many lower-income black children had fathers at home. Poor black boys did well in such places, whether their own fathers were present or not.

"Other fathers in the community can provide boys with role models and mentors, researchers say, and their presence may indicate other neighborhood factors that benefit families, like lower incarceration rates and better job opportunities."

This is perfectly in line with Harris's research: It's not the makeup of the child's family that matters, it's the makeup of the families in the child's community.

I've touted the importance and privilege of two-parent families, but I wasn't totally correct. Outside of the home, parents have little influence over their children. Instead, children absorb the values of their peers, which is partially a reflection of their peers' parents. 

The best predictor of a child's future earnings is a combination of their parents' earnings and their friends' parents' earnings. So when towns pass things like single family zoning, they prevent the benefit a disadvantaged child would get from the positive influence of living in that community.

This is Maxwell's Demon in the community.

III.

Here is the problem with tearing down the wall and creating a demon-free society. If you eliminate gifted programs and other opportunities for high income parents to give their kids a leg up, they will just find new ones. The Seattle public schools equity initiative led to high income parents pulling their kids out and putting them in private schools. And even if highly educated parents to opt to mix their kids with low-income students, their children will see a reduction in test scores and an increase in things like dropping out, incarceration, or teen pregnancy (offset by a decrease in those things for low-income children).

The challenge is to create a great enough incentive for high income parents to open the door and let their kids into the slow molecule room and to tweak the settings just right to maximize the benefit of the slow molecules and minimize the harm of the fast molecules. There are a few uphill battles. First, scalability.

Research shows that children learn better in smaller classrooms. 

"After four years, it was clear that smaller classes did bring substantial improvement in early learning in cognitive subjects such as reading and arithmetic. Following the groups further, the Lasting Benefits Study demonstrated that the positive effects persisted into grades 4, 5, 6, and 7, so that students who had originally been enrolled in smaller classes continued to perform better than their grademates who had started in larger classes."

In small classes, teachers are able to convince students they are a unit so the salience becomes the classroom, rather than race or class distinctions, which have the Maxwell's Demon effect of feedback loops. I mentioned earlier that spending more on education will not fix the problem, but the right kind of spending can help. Any spending to reduce classroom size is a good start.

Second, not just any teacher will do. You need the right classroom leader who can make the classroom unit salient. A leader will define the stereotype the classroom has of itself and prevent students from falling into separate groups that perpetuate the Maxwell's Demon effect. The right teacher, like Miss A, can turn the entire class into an "us" that sees itself as scholars.

Third, you have to get the mix right when you try to de-sort the molecules. Without the right things in place, mixing molecules can make things worse. Janet Schofield's research in the racially-diverse Wexler school showed that students clustered by race and adopted opposing attitudes toward school that became more pronounced over time.

Harris's research found that:

"Whether a classroom of kids will split up into contrasting groups depends partly on how man kids there are ... whether kids will form groups that differ in village of origin, or in race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic class, or academic ability, depends on how many there are in these social categories....

Number is important. A few students from a different socioeconomic class, ethnic group, or national background will be assimilated to the majority, but if there are enough of them to form their own group they are likely to remain different and contrast effects may cause the differences to increase. At intermediate numbers, things can go either way: two classes with the same number of majority and minority students may in one case split up into groups and in the other remain united. It will depend on chance events, on the characteristics of the individual children, and, crucially, on the teacher."

The final challenge is stereotype threat. Claude Steele found that all you have to do to lower the score of a bright black kid on a test of academic ability is to give her, before she takes the test, a short questionnaire that includes the question 'Race?' The same thing happens when you test a woman and ask her gender. (There is some evidence of replication failure for stereotype threat.) 

In contexts where gender is less salient, girls and young women do better in science and math. Women's colleges produce a disproportionate number of outstanding female scientists. Likewise historically black colleges and universities produce a disproportionate number of outstanding black scientists. 

This research is a good argument for HBCUs, and unfortunately, a bad argument for black spaces in majority-white colleges.  

Unfortunately we don't know the right number yet to know the ideal settings for getting the most benefit out of peer influence and the best ways to minimize the Maxwell's Demon effect. But if I could wave a magic wand I would do three things.

Reduce classroom size. Reward/retain/attract teachers who are leaders in the classroom.

Abolish single family zoning.

Incentivize highly educated, high income parents to put their kids in low performing schools. 

Best of 2020

 2020 was a crap year but there was still a lot of good content. Below is my yearly round up.

"War over being nice" by Joseph Gentle

"How Did Americans Lose Faith in Everything?" By Yuval Levin

"The Enemies of Writing" by George Packer

"Unbecoming American" by Johann N. Neem

"The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free" by Nathan J. Robinson

Best exposition

Nothing about these pieces was exceptionally new or illuminating but they explained the history and context of things like critical theory, classical liberalism, and civilization.

"Enlightenment liberalism is losing ground in the debate about race"

"In America the big liberal shift took place in the mid-1960s. To deal with the legacy of slavery, liberals began to concede that you need to treat the descendants of slaves as members of a group, not only as individuals. Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, argued that affirmative action, though a breach of liberal individualism that must eventually be dispensed with, had to stay until there was reasonable equality of opportunity between groups.”

“The appeal of critical race theory—or at least its manifestation in popular writing—is partly that it confidently prescribes what should be done to fight injustice...

“Liberals have no such simple prescription. They have always struggled with the idea of power as a lens through which to view the world, notes Michael Freeden of Oxford University. They often deny that groups (rather than individuals) can be legitimate political entities. And so liberal responses to critical race theory can seem like conservative apathy, or even denial."

"Liberalism and Its Discontents" by Francis Fukuyama.

A good history of liberalism, humanism, and Enlightenment values. Why they emerged, their flaws, how they've come under threat, and why they should not be abandoned.

"Markets worked more efficiently if individuals were not constrained by obligations to kin and other social networks. But this kind of individualism has always been at odds with the social proclivities of human beings."

"The Chump Effect" by James B. Meigs.

 A good perspective on the free rider problem in contemporary society.

"Thousands of norms, rules, and traditions make civilized life possible. Some, like paying taxes or not littering, are enshrined in law. Others are informal. Most of us take pride in adhering to basic standards of etiquette and fairness, to say nothing of following the law. And we have a deep emotional investment in having the people around us follow these norms as well. There’s a reason that we call selfish, disruptive, or criminal behavior “antisocial.” We know that if everyone stopped paying their taxes, or started running red lights and shoplifting, our society would be on its way to collapse."

"Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media" by Gideon Lewis-Kraus.

A fair and honest take on Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander, and rationalism.

My favorite Slate Star Codex essays (RIP)

Studies on Slack

The Amish Health Care System 

Shameless Self Love

My favorite writings from yours truly. 

On Worshipping and Compression

Assimilation vs. Multiculturalism

A Near Future Conversation with my Son

Short takes

 I wrote a long blog post comparing the issue of trust among countries. One of my issues is that the measure asks people what they think rather than observing how they behave. As it turns out, someone did a study based on behavior. Scandinavian countries still come out on top.

Researchers left 17,000 wallets on the streets of 355 cities, some empty, some with money. Contrary to the predictions of economists, people everywhere were more likely to return wallets with money in them. But rates did vary from country to country. https://t.co/xpOC3fW1lG pic.twitter.com/mGT8A3v5pK

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) November 28, 2020

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My post on formative institutions was about many things, but in one section I made the case for the necessity of media as an institution. Similarly, Tanner Greer makes the case for why Substack will not be as disruptive as many people think. 

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I wrote a blog post about my depression and how reading and learning something new is a way of drowing that out. Now it appears there is some science that backs up my behavior. 

"In recent years, other dopamine pathways in the brain have been proposed that are strongly linked to the reward value of information. People who score high in the general tendency toward exploration are not only driven to engage in behavioral forms of exploration but also tend to get energized through the possibility of discovering new information and extracting meaning and growth from their experience....

"Don’t understand why everyone else around you is so interested in sex, drugs, and money, and you get so turned on by stimulating ideas and learning new and interesting things? Now you have a potential answer: You may be highly sensitive to the reward value of information."

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I support ideological diversity. Now, science supports it. 

One of the more interesting papers I've read lately: If you average your own best guess with your best guess from the perspective of someone you often disagree with, you'll tend to be more accurate. Disagreement is good! https://t.co/Xy0b65nwyF HT @ImHardcory pic.twitter.com/An74kKHiAl

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) October 31, 2020

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Contrasts a previous study I read that showed teachers favoring boys over girls on math tests.

Boys Lag Behind: A comparison of gender-blind vs. non-blind test scores reveals a teacher marking bias in favor of girls. This appears to be part of the reason that boys fall behind girls at school. https://t.co/CQFFflJVGi pic.twitter.com/nzMHkFof2s

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) October 4, 2020

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Again, my messy post on formative institutions was about many things. One of them was why I think it's a mistake to make police brutality a racial issue rather than a human rights issue. As a reminder, here is a list of unarmed white people killed by cops. This affects everyone.

Time for a thread.

I'm tired of insufferable circus clowns who are unable (read: unwilling) to research for themselves. So, I will do it for them.

December 2019:
Matthew Krupar was shot and killed by police in League City, TX while he was assaulting an officer. He was unarmed. pic.twitter.com/IRsey5Zq8Y

— Leonydus Johnson (@LeonydusJohnson) August 28, 2020

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In my blog post "True, Kind, and Necessary" I cited a tweet from Bret Weinstein speculating about the coronavirus possibly being created in a lab. His intention wasn't to point the finger at China but to draw attention to the fact that, if true, it will shape how we go about creating a vaccine. However, after reading that Moderna developed the vaccine in just two freaking days, way back in March, I have to downgrade Bret as an expert on viruses.

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My most viewed blog post, by quite a wide margin, is called "Ideology is a Pair of Sunglasses". I wrote about the power of viewpoint diversity in cancelling out false negatives and false positives. In a single tweet, John Wood Jr. summarized what I was trying to say.

There are many ways to not see something clearly.

One is to be too far away.

Another is to be too close.

— John Wood, Jr. (@JohnRWoodJr) December 15, 2020

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. 

On Worshiping and Compression

For a long time, one of the most helpful books I've read is Arnold Kling's Three Languages of Politics. He described conservatives as seeing the world through the civilization vs. barbarism axis, which really helped me understand the way they think.

It's a very Hobbsien view that says the default setting of humanity is sinful ("idle hands are the devil's tools"). In the absence of the institutions that uphold civilization (police, military, church, etc.) we will naturally devolve into barbarism and sin.

Kling described progressives as seeing the world through the oppressor vs. oppressed axis. It's a very Marxist view that views the world as a zero-sum conflict with constant battles for power and resources. 

Although Kling never says so, what both groups have in common is the idea of a default setting and the need to fight against it. In fact, I'm starting to think that most views are some version of this. 

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.).

I could make the same case for Enlightenment liberals, who believe our default setting is tribalism. The only thing that keeps society from falling into civil war is humanism, liberalism, reason, and Enlightenment values. Here's Scott Alexander proving my point:

"Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell – the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable – until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully."

Thine Own Self

For David Foster Wallace, the default setting is solipsism:

"Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence....  It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of."

His solution was the practice of self-awareness and exercising the agency to choose what to worship.

"This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self....

"Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience....

"The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it...

"This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship." 

(In fact, the only people who don't fall under this view are free-market fundamentalists, who think the absence of government is our default setting and any tinkering with the market will set us on the path to communism.)

Implicit Compression

At the college where I work, our DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) officer keeps stressing to us that we need to be aware of our biases and microagressions. This type of practice requires constant vigilance, but it's important if we want to be an ally. In other words, harmful implicit biases are our default setting and we need to be aware of them and check our privilege as we strive toward the work of antiracism.

But there is a tradeoff that comes with defining one's default settings and choosing how to fight against it.

In "Wokeness and Myth on Campus", Alan Jacobs uses the term "lossy compression" to describe how the mind works.

"The term “lossy compression” comes from the encoding of computers files, typically images, video, or audio. Non-lossy encoding — that is, encoding that captures all available sonic or visual information — results in enormous, unmanageable file sizes. So the challenge for programmers has been to reduce file sizes in ways that lose some information (thus “lossy”) but retain vital information to ensure that audio files don’t sound fuzzy or images appear blurry — think of how your streaming Netflix video degrades over a bad Internet connection. Lower-fidelity encodings allow for smaller files that are easier to transfer and store; higher-fidelity encodings offer better quality, at the cost of slower transfer, more costly storage, and more processor resources to perform computations on them, like object and facial recognition. "

So small, compressed files are easy to send but look crappy; large files look crisp but take forever to process. He then goes on to show how lossy compression is a good metaphor for how the mind processes information.

"a recent article by Sarah E. Marzen and Simon DeDeo, 'The evolution of lossy compression,' is very useful in this context. The article argues that all living things need to “extract useful information from their environment,” but to do so without imposing overly great cognitive burdens on themselves:

'… evolved organisms are expected to structure their perceptual systems to avoid dangerous confusions (not mistaking tigers for bushes) while strategically containing processing costs by allowing for ambiguity (using a single representation for both tigers and lions) — a form of lossy compression that avoids transmitting unnecessary and less-useful information...'

I like the example used here. Mistaking a tiger for a lion isn't that big a deal; either way you need to run. But mistaking a tiger for a bush will get you killed, you cannot afford to compress and fast-track that mental processing. 

"For it is safe to say that no human beings have ever lived in a more cognitively complex environment than we do. Faced with the constant inflow of information, we grow increasingly reluctant, if not actually unable, to make subtle distinctions."

Daniel Kahneman called this system one and system two. System one involves mental shortcuts, heuristics, and intuitive thinking. System two is the more rational part of our mind. We use system one to answer 1+1=2. That equation is committed to memory, we don't actually calculate it. We use system two for 247+49. System one works fast. When it cannot process the information, it switches over to system two, which moves much slower. His book is appropriately named Thinking Fast and Slow.

Buffering

This is another challenge of living in a multicultural society with no common values: there are multiple groups of people telling you to process their information in high fidelity, in system two. There is an obvious tradeoff that none of these prophets or DEI officers ever mention: the slow melt of human cognition. With all non-lossy encoding and slow thinking, the mind gets overwhelmed. We can't exist solely on system two. No one would ever leave their homes because they could not stop wondering how each step they took was oppressing some group. Something has to get compressed, but no one is telling you what.

When I used to go to a Zendo, after we had finished meditating and before we all left, our Zen Priest would tell us "take it with you." In other words, take the mindfulness you cultivate during meditation into all aspects of your waking life. In Buddhist philosophy, our default setting is for our ego to control our actions and thoughts, and mindfulness is a way of fighting against that. So it's not enough to just sit once a week at the Zendo, or by yourself once a day. You have to practice mindfulness when you're driving, exercising, talking, writing, etc.

Here is my point: I don't think I can practice zazen and "take it with me" while also focusing on how my unconscious biases might lead to harmful microagressions against persons of color. We can choose what to worship, but we can only worship one God.

By telling someone: "You need to focus on checking your privilege/asking 'what would Jesus do'/avoiding logical fallacies" you are also telling them that everything else is unimportant and should be compressed.

I think some give and take with your religion makes sense. If I'm a Buddhist, that doesn't give me license to pretend systemic racism doesn't exist. If I'm on a search committee, it makes sense to give a second look to a resume with a black-sounding name, knowing that research shows they get fewer call backs. But I've also been told that "fit" is a racially-charged term I should avoid, as in "refer someone you thing would be a good fit," which I think is ridiculous and I will be adding that to my compression bin.

I wrote about a blog post that contrasted two workplace cultures. The author's conclusion was that workplaces should be transparent about what type of culture they are and potential employees could self-select and find their best fit. I think the same solution is necessary here; people need to be in an environment where they can choose, without fear of getting cancelled, what information to compress and what to focus on. 

Wallace was right, life is about choosing what to think about - what to worship - in order to combat our default setting, which isn't always suited to modern life. If I were to rephrase Wallace's point I would say this: We should choose what to worship with our System Two, rational minds. Because if we do not, our System One minds will choose it for us.

Once we have made that decision, the next step is finding a culture that accepts that which you worship and, more importantly, that which you compress.