I wonder where my friend Seth would be politically, if he were around today. On one hand, he was a left-wing Berkeley professor who supported universal health care, Amnesty International, and other liberal causes. On the other hand, his paleo-diet enthusiasm brought him close to various internet right-wingers, and he was into global warming denial and kinda sympathetic to Holocaust denial, not cos he was a Nazi or anything but just because he had that distrust-of-authority thing going on. I guess that if he’d been an adult back in the 1950s and 1960s he would’ve been on the extreme left, but nowadays it’s the far right where the rebels are hanging out.
Anyway, my impression was that Seth had a lot of incoherence in his politics. That’s fine, there’s no requirement to be consistent with one of the name-brand ideologies. What I’m wondering now, 8 years after Seth’s passing, is whether if he’d lived through these years he would’ve lined up more clearly on the left or the right. Would the polarizing events of the past decade have polarized him too? Or would he have moved toward the center, moderating his views when he saw what extremists were saying and doing? I dunno.
I’m always asking if things are really as different from how they used to be, as it seems they are.
And one area where I’m asking that a lot is with respect to overlap between some elements on the right with some elements on the left – as seen with people like Taibbi or Greenwald or The Grey Zone – where people sure feel kinda right-wing but who bristle at that labeling and say they’re just opposed to phony librul virtue signaling, and I can’t actually just categorically dismiss that there’s any merit at all to their claims.
NPIs, vaccine mandates, policy towards Ukraine, Trump/Russia, and more. All places where there seems to be overlap.
Does anyone else feel that the “horseshoe” effect of overlap between a segment on the left with a segment on the right is larger than it used to be?
Joshua:
I dunno, but your comment reminded of another thing about Seth, which was his mix of extreme skepticism and extreme credulity, something that came up recently in our discussion of media personality Joe Rogan. Seth believed all sorts of ridiculous theories, and had somewhat warm feelings toward ridiculous theories he didn’t actually believe, such as Holocaust denial, while at the same time being properly skeptical of lots of official B.S.
Oh, yeah, Seth also had a soft spot for the ridiculous work of that beauty-and-sex-ratio researcher. I think this had to do with Seth being a soft touch for evolutionary psychology arguments, along with him not having the math background to internalize the idea that these studies were too noisy to be useful. Also, Seth was friends with the Freakonomics guys and they fell for the beauty-and-sex-ratio stuff, so maybe Seth was already committed to liking the work and didn’t want to give it up.
Andrew –
Yes. I think you’re really on to something with the overlap between extreme skepticism and extreme credulity. Maybe that’s the real phenomenon with the left/right overlap being spurious.
The whole Rogan thing… the link between anti-pharma/big tech skepticism and stunning credulity, with the whole mass formation psychosis thing where we’ve all been hypnotized in the great reset.
Greenwald is fawning over Alex Jones, for Christ’s sake.
I think there are few people who are purely left or purely right, the attention paid to polarization these days notwithstanding.
I live in a “purple” county and my experience with friends, neighbors, and people I work with in community organizations is that most people pick and choose their own beliefs. Were you and I to have a conversation, whether you would walk away thinking of me as of the left or the right would depend on which subjects we discussed. If we discussed enough of them, you would be completely flummoxed at putting me in either end of that dichotomy. Most people I know are like that–they choose from both columns of the menu, or improvise altogether.
I recall being told or reading at some point that alignment with the platforms of the two major U.S. political parties (back when both parties had a platform) went up with education level. Is there a political scientist in the house that can confirm that was or still is the case?
Bob:
Yup. See my 2008 paper with Delia.
My comment isn’t directly related to your post. But coincidentally, I’m currently looking to resume working on a self-experimentation project based on Seth’s investigations, and I’d be interested in collaborating with one or more people. Back in 2013 and 2014, Seth and I collaborated on his reaction time (RT) work, whereby we were using a simple RT test to assess various interventions aimed at improving cognitive function. We got some promising results before Seth’s untimely passing. After that, I largely abandoned the project, but now I’m inspired to get back into it. Seth’s RT test takes a few minutes of time and requires a Windows computer and a keyboard. Seth theorized that reaction time is a useful metric for assessing overall brain function. I’m especially interested in collaborating with someone who has strong statistical skills (something that I lack). I can be reached at [email protected] .
This is a fascinating topic. I agree that generalized, widespread skepticism leaves one unanchored, exposed to random attachments to whatever comes along at the right moment. I’ve seen this in a number of people in recent years, more so than in the past, so my experience accords with Andrew’s. In particular, the left-right spectrum doesn’t seem to predict much in this context.
What’s the difference between debilitating and credulity-inducing skepticism and the good kind? I suppose that’s one way of framing the theme of this blog. That said, it matters that a lot of big money has been poured into networks that promote crazy belief systems. I’m an ex-colleague of Brett Weinstein, and I knew him back in the day. He considered himself as being on the left, and in general that was true. Now he’s on the opposite end of the horseshoe. Part of that is personal experience, part a certain credulity that people who try to construct their own belief systems from the ground up are subject to, but part is the tremendous allure of right-wing money that has completely transformed his lifestyle.
It would be a different world if there weren’t right wing money spigots promoting fantasy worldviews for their political utility.
Andrew said: “nowadays it’s the far right where the rebels are hanging out.”
Peter said: “It would be a different world if there weren’t right wing money spigots promoting fantasy worldviews for their political utility.”
That’s an interesting pair of comments. Some people – including myself – argue that the Federal government, universities & the press are a massive left-wing money spigot promoting fantasy worldviews for their political utility. I do *NOT* mean that *ALL* (or even most) of the views or ideas “promoted” or advanced by these organizations are fantasy – any more than that is true on the right. But at the moment these orgs are strongly in the left camp and equally prone to delusion as the right.
The state government apparatus is of course used by both extremes. I can’t think of a specific example on the right, but I know red state Attorneys General have ganged up to sue the Feds on many occasions. On the left, the AG in my state joins other state AGs to sue the Federal government to promote left-wing politics at every conceivable opportunity, even down to USPS’ decision on what kind of goddamned trucks to buy.
So the difference is not so much whether there is money “promoting fantasy worldviews for their political utility”, but that one group is in not in power, and therefore labeled as “rebels,” and one group is power, therefore labeled as “authority”. There’s no a priori reason to believe either is right or wrong.
They are not opposite extremes in truth and fiction – as Peter seems to think – but opposite extremes in beliefs about truth and about what is most beneficial to society as a whole. Both extremes are driven in part by myth and in part by truth.
There’s little to say to someone who thinks the left is in control of the federal government, the media, etc. But it’s worth thinking about the relationship between the current fantasy landscape and more ordinary lying by those in power. What’s the difference between Bush’s disinformation about Iraq and QAnon?
I mean that as a real question. To me, it is clear there *is* a difference, but I go back and forth on exactly what it is. I’d be interested in what others think. And how does it relate to the culture of generalized skepticism (and therefore near-random credulity) broached in the OP?
“There’s little to say to someone who thinks the left is in control of the federal government, the media, etc.”
Polarization:
You’re credulously buying into the myth that whatever you believe is “mainstream”. This comes back to my point from a few threads ago about the left’s beliefs about “polarization”: they believe if we could get over polarization, we could all come together and move forward on the left-wing agenda. :) IOW, they – you – create and perpetuate a myth that there is an independent “polarizing” force that is masking Truth, and if that force could be removed, why, we’d all realize that the left is actually The Truth and pass the left-wing agenda!
More left-wing credulity: Whenever it loses, “democracy” has been undermined at the hands of the Evil Right. From Trump’s Electoral College win to the stacking of the Supreme Court and determination of election districts, the right and left have played by the same rules since the founding of the country. These rules were established for specific and important reasons, likely to balance geographic interests and maintain stability. They have been effective for 225 years, so why they should be overturned the instant they work against the interests of the left is a question I haven’t seen addressed.
The U.S. isn’t a pure democracy where issues are decided by popular vote. The way in which the U.S. feels undemocratic is that the government pushes through policies that would fail a national popular vote. There are multiple factors here. One is that we elect representatives to vote for us. Another is that the Supreme Court has the final say on laws and they’re not even elected. Yet another is the electoral college that puts presidents in office who lose the popular vote. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, small population states have more representation per capita because of the structure of the Senate, which is amplified because the senate can block any law coming from the Representatives and they get the final say on Supreme Court justices.
Peter: I read recently that some 60% of journalism departments in the US do not have a single registered Republican, and registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in journalism departments by a whopping 20 to 1. Also, href=”https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/05/survey-7-percent-of-reporters-identify-as-republican-188053″>only 7% of all journalists identify as Republican.
I’ll grant that these are surveys, which I complain about relentlessly, but the disparity is so large that the relative results and the scale must be approximately true – even if it weren’t obvious from just picking up a copy of WaPo or NYT. Moreover the press has ample incentive to lean strongly liberal, as it has been a protected industry for generations and has Democrat-supported protective legislation pending as we speak. So the idea that there is no liberal bias in journalism is untenable. There is a bias and it’s a strong bias.
Bob: Simply because certain outcomes do not match up with a national poll does not make the outcome undemocratic. Indirect democracy is still democracy. The people elect representatives who make laws and choose the people who occupy certain offices like judgeships and every position in the federal executive branch, technically including the president himself. (Side question: why doesn’t anyone cry “undemocratic” about the fact that the people don’t elect the US Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense, etc.?) The people are the ultimate source of these decisions, not some hereditary monarch, and that is enough to make our system democratic. I personally am glad not everything is up for a vote by the people, since at best there is no clear value added (Does anybody really take the time to research state judge candidates to know which would be a better judge? If a candidate has written judicial opinions, does anybody read all or even any of them? If anybody read them, would he or she recognize good vs bad legal reasoning?) and at worst we get things like the incoherent mess that is the California Constitution/California state law. (Do the people read the text of proposed laws, and if so, do they have a reasonably complete view of their consequences, particularly interactions with other parts of law?)
As for the US Senate, the 17th Amendment really should be repealed so as to at least give the States the option of returning the election of Senators to State Legislatures. Then it would be clearer that a Senator represents the governing institution that is the State, as was intended from the beginning, and perhaps this perception that the Senate is just a malapportioned House will go away. Each State needs to protect its governing powers vis-a-vis the federal government whose laws are supreme, and this is achieved by requiring assent of the States to federal acts by way of a Senate comprising representatives of the States. And because each State as a single governing institution has equal interest in safeguarding its powers against those of the federal government, each *State* has equal representation. Therefore it is inappropriate and a misapprehension to speak of “representation per capita” when referring to the Senate.
Chipmunk: That survey about universities is only 40 “leading” universities, and the underlying source on which the figure is based (https://econjwatch.org/File+download/944/LangbertQuainKleinSept2016.pdf?mimetype=pdf) says they include Communications departments if the institution does not have a Journalism department. Even then, only 25 of the 40 have at least one such department. Moreover, many of these departments are rather tiny. By my count, 9 of the 25 have fewer than 5 faculty members included in the study. There’s no doubt that there is a skew toward democrats, but I think the figures are slightly less drastic sounding when contextualized.
(Aside: the largest journalism department/school included is Columbia’s, but the qualification for inclusion was being in the top 40 of the US News “National University Rankings”. So, as readers of this blog know, they’d have to leave Columbia out if they were to re-do the study with the current rankings!)
As for the number of journalists who identify as republican, from looking at the chart, it seems the percentage identifying as either republican *or* democrat were at all time lows when the survey was done in 2013. So, while it’s true that more identify as democrats than republicans, it’s not that there’s a massive shift from republicans to democrats. Rather, what has grown is the number identifying as independents at 50.2%. That doesn’t surprise me — given the concerns about media bias like the ones expressed in this very thread, journalists may deliberately avoid expressing a party affiliation.
“What’s the difference between Bush’s disinformation about Iraq and QAnon?”
As someone who saw the QAnon movement from the beginning, when it was a series of random nonsense Nostradamus type predictions (there are six letters in Donald and the election is in 2016, coincidence?) into a very specific set of claims repeated over and over by its skeptics “QAnon people all believe the government is controlled by Satanic child abusers,” it shows signs of being taken over as part of a government disinformation campaign.
“Some people – including myself – argue that the Federal government, universities & the press are a massive left-wing money spigot promoting fantasy worldviews for their political utility. “
And the crazy people have entered the thread.
“And the crazy people have entered the thread.”
All of these institutions depend on increasing size of government for their well-being and the well-being of their employees. Is that true or false?
“ All of these institutions depend on increasing size of government for their well-being and the well-being of their employees. Is that true or false?”
Okay, buddy. Do you want to sit down for a minute? Maybe a drink of water? Have the voices come back?
“ kinda sympathetic to Holocaust denial”
Gosh (chuckles) what a cute guy!
Alternatively, what the actual f***?
Total:
People are complicated. Chesterton was anti-semitic and Kazin was racist but they still had a lot of interesting things to say, and it’s not like they were spewing nasty hatred all over the place in the manner of Belloc or whatever. Here’s my discussion with Seth a few years ago regarding Holocaust denial; it’s a little thread where an actual denier shows up in the comments. Seth’s attitude on that one struck me as similar to the attitude of the Freakonomics team regarding climate change denial: it’s not that they endorsed the position, exactly, so much as that they liked taking the oppositional attitude in this case. The substance of the matter was less important than what Tyler Cowen would call “mood affiliation,” in this case an opposition to people they view as sanctimonious conformists, even in cases where the conformists pretty much have it right.
I can’t quite say, “Don’t judge people by their worst judgments”—if you want to judge Seth by his sympathy to some hateful and ridiculous ideas, that’s not so unreasonable, I guess—so I’ll just say that you can still get value out of imperfect people. It’s good to see where people mess up though, too. We can learn from seeing people in all their imperfections, or at least in all their public imperfections. If someone has a private view that they don’t share in public, this does seem different to me in that this would be a belief they’re not fully committing to.
“ if you want to judge Seth by his sympathy to some hateful and ridiculous ideas, that’s not so unreasonable, I guess”
Thank you. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.
Shouldn’t you have a multi-level model of political leanings that you could plug Seth’s info into?
The whole distrust-of-authority thing is a curious one since the credulous form of “skepticism” is really a wholesale acceptance of authority – it’s just that the “authority” is an of-the-shelf version mostly found floating around the internet that maybe feeds into some feeling of discontent. It’s unfortunate that the “skeptic” chooses to buy into someone else’s agenda with some serious potential for bad outcomes (e.g. embracing anti-vaccine conspiracies).
We can split people in all sorts of ways but can’t help feeling (Warning: potential stereotyping ahead!) there’s a another useful split in the context being discussed: i.e. people that are comfortable with uncertainty and those that feel a need for certainty. The latter seem more likely to buy into conspiracy ideation and susceptible to being suckered by authoritarian certainties of the conspiracy sort. Things are more nuanced obviously and from your description Seth Roberts (who I’ve never heard of before) sounds like he might have been playing with some of these conspiracies rather than committing to them.
Chris:
I don’t know how Seth felt about conspiracies, but I do think he was a true believer in some of his own more dubious theories about nutrition and health. And, as a person who strongly believed in ideas that most of his colleagues thought were foolish, that gave him sympathy to other people with what he called the insider-outsider perspective.
” there’s a another useful split in the context being discussed: i.e. people that are comfortable with uncertainty and those that feel a need for certainty. ”
I don’t get how people who feel “a need for certainty” are any more likely to be “more likely to buy into conspiracy ideation and susceptible to being suckered by authoritarian certainties of the conspiracy sort” than people who to buy into idiotic theories promoted in the mainstream. Can you explain that?
What about the people who continually buy into the Societal Crash / Distopian Future hypotheses, like the Population Bomb – which many *scientists* continued to believe long after the prediction failed? Or the people – also many of them even leading climate scientists – who bought into Peak Oil, Peak Phosphorous, Peak.A B C D E F G.. time after time after time? How are those theories different than the typical “conspiracy theory”? Isn’t the belief in “Climageddon” – a belief so widely held that people are actually going to shrinks to deal with their fears – just a rehash of the Population Bomb? Just another Dystopian Social Collapse theory? Like “Climageddon”, The Population Bomb was based in a kind of ecological fact, but also based on inaccurate assumptions about the relationship between technology and ecology and – lets call them “naive” – future projections, like the “Business as Usual” climate projection, which projects 1990 technology to 2100.
Your “theory” accounts for only one term of the “fictitious belief” equation. For my money, it looks like there are different types of fictitious beliefs that fall into different categories:
1) rejection of some historical fact (holocaust, moon landings etc)
2) plausible sounding future dystopian predictions based on inaccurate assumptions (peak this that, pop bomb, climageddon)
3) “theories” about things that are scientifically bogus (homeopathy, vaccine denial…)
4) “theories” about things that are basically unknown (many nutritional beliefs, UFO beliefs…)
chipmunk –
Do you remember when a couple of weeks or so ago, you wrote a comment about how people at this blog “worship” pollsters, or poll findings, or something like that (I don’t remember exactly but that was the gist of it)?
Of course, there’s no evidence at this blog to support such a characterization – and yet you stated it. My guess is because in your zeal to make some kind of a rhetorical point, you had a “need for certainty,” and thus settled for a banal generalization.
I think we all have a tendency to move past uncertainty to reach conclusions for one reason or another. It’s pretty much a human trait, I’d say. So,
> I don’t get how people who feel “a need for certainty” are any more likely to be “more likely to buy into conspiracy ideation and susceptible to being suckered by authoritarian certainties of the conspiracy sort” than people who to buy into idiotic theories promoted in the mainstream. Can you explain that?
I think your question has a logical problem – essentially, you’re comparing apples and oranges. Yes, many people have a “need for certainty” in many different ways. But a need for certainty that leads people to conspiracy ideas is different from a need for certainty that leads people to other ill-supported beliefs (like that people here worship pollsters), is that people who believe conspiracy theories, well, believe that there’s a conspiracy.
I guess I should acknowledge that conspiracies do, of course, happen. The issue that comes up, for me, often when observing people who tend towards conspiratorial explanations for complex events, is the issue of plausibility.
For example, with COVID vaccines, how plausible is it that all the researchers from so many different fields all over the world, and public health officials from all over the world, would conspire together with big pharma execs and employees, and big tech execs and employees, and “the MSM,” to perpetrate what may be the greatest-ever crime against humanity, with indifference to the deaths of millions and serious illness of countless more, simply so they could line their pockets – or alternatively reduce population, or alternatively establish authoritarian control as a means of advancing a political agenda (I’ve seen all three reasons promoted as explanations).
I mean sure, we’ve seen things such as the opioid crisis, where there was indeed, a kind of conspiracy (involving big pharma) to perpetrate a massive malevolent fraud which resulted in much suffering. So then the question is whether, and to what the degree, the popular vaccine conspiracy theories would require a greater stretch of the plausibility window beyond that opened up by the opioid crisis.
“Of course, there’s no evidence at this blog to support such a characterization”
Ha ha ha ha! That’s hilarious. My statement was – at least to me – obvious intentional exaggeration to make a point. I did not mean to imply that Andrew or Joshua literally burn incense and chant before reviewing poll numbers!!!! I didn’t even mean it in the more likely sense that poll numbers are accepted absolutely and without question here. All I meant was – it’s amazing this even needs an explanation – that there is a significant bias toward overvaluing polls.
Exaggeration, Joshua, is a common rhetorical tool. When someone makes a statement that’s obviously false, they’re likely using rhetorical exaggeration to make the point. So here you are taking the rhetorical point absolutely literally, constructing a ridiculous argument based on your egregious misunderstanding, and avoiding the actual argument altogether. You’re a great example of why the phrase “its all academic” was coined in the first place.
Chipmunk –
Because Andrew doesn’t like a lot of back and forth – my last comment on this:
> My statement was – at least to me – obvious intentional exaggeration to make a point.
Thank you for, even though indirectly, acknowledging that you were trolling for effect.
> All I meant was – it’s amazing this even needs an explanation – that there is a significant bias toward overvaluing polls.
Given that Andrew spends a lot of time, specifically evaluating in a very sophisticated manner, how much to value polls, I will say that here you are repeating what you just denied – ignoring uncertainty so you could advance an ideological agenda.
Of course, if you have an actual argument to make about how there’s a general bias here towards “overvaluing polls,” have at it. I’d say the only evidence that you’ll find, if you bother to look, is of pretty much the exact opposite: a serious attempt to control for bias and to empirically assess the value of polling.
Chipmunk said:
“2) plausible sounding future dystopian predictions based on inaccurate assumptions (peak this that, pop bomb, climageddon)”
We should call this type of fictitious belief “prophecy belief”. It is analogous to biblical prophecy, in that an external force – in the bible, god; in science prophecy, nature – is punishing recalcitrant and arrogant humanity, who’s punishment is just deserts for their hubris against the desires of the external force. The external force is of course constructed to by the “prophets” to express their own desires, just as God was constructed in the bible to express the desires of the Hebrew prophets.