Josh Marshall writes:
Trump doesn’t think of truth or lies the way you or I do. Most imperfect people, which is to say all of us, exist in a tension between what we believe is true and what is good for or pleasing to us. If we have strong character we hew closely to the former, both in what we say to others and what we say to ourselves. The key to understanding Trump is that it’s not that he hews toward the latter. It’s that the tension doesn’t exist. What he says is simply what works for him. Whether it’s true is irrelevant and I suspect isn’t even part of Trump’s internal dialog. It’s like asking an actor whether she really loved her husband like she claimed in her blockbuster movie or whether she was lying. It’s a nonsensical question. She was acting.
The analogy to the actor is a good one.
Regarding the general sort of attitude and behavior discussed here, though, I don’t think Trump stands out as much as Marshall implies. Even setting aside other politicians, who in the matter of lying often seem to differ from the former president more in degree than kind, I feel like I’ve seen the same sort of thing with researchers, which is one reason I think Clarke’s law (“Any sufficiently crappy research is indistinguishable from fraud”) is so often relevant.
When talking about researchers who don’t seem to care about saying the truth, I’m not just talking about various notorious flat-out data fakers. I’m also talking about researchers who just do unreplicable crap or who make claims in the titles and abstracts of their papers that aren’t supported by their data. We get lots of statements that are meaningless or flat-out false.
Does the truth matter to these people? I don’t know. I think they believe in some things they view as deeper truths: (a) their vague models of how the world works are correct, and (b) they are righteous eople. Once you start there, all the false statements don’t matter, as they are all being done in the service of a larger truth.
I don’t think everyone acts this way—I have the impression that most people, as Marshall puts it, “exist in a tension between what we believe is true and what is good for or pleasing to us.” There’s just a big chunk of people—including many academic researchers, journalists, politicians, etc.—who don’t seem to feel that tension. As I’ve sometimes put it, they choose what to say or what to write based on the music, not the words. And they see the rest of us as “schoolmarms” or “Stasi“—pedants who get in the way of the Great Men of science. Not the same as Donald Trump by a longshot, but I see some similarities in that it’s kinda hard to pin them down when it comes to factual beliefs. It’s much more about who’s-side-are-you-on.
Also incentives: it’s not so much that people lie because of incentives, as that incentives affect the tough calls they make, and incentives affect who succeeds on climbing the greasy pole of success.
Question for Andrew: What do you think truth is?
I like Philip K Dick’s “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.”
Sean: I like that P. K. Dick line too!
Adrian: I don’t have a general definition of truth. There are some claims that there is enough combination of theoretical understanding and historical documentation to know, or to be very sure, that they are true (Oswald shot Kennedy, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, etc.) or that they are false, despite being claimed by famous people (Doyle claiming those photos were from fairies, Trump claiming that “I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering”). There are other claims that we just can’t be sure about, in the absence of any clear documentation or confessions from those involved (Wansink’s claimed use of the “bottomless soup bowl” in an experiment, Ariely claim about altering a paper shredder). I think of truth as a latent state that exists even if we don’t know it.
I’m also interested in the distinction between evidence and truth.
See also this discussion from a few years ago.
Am I the only one confused by the title of this post?
Maybe I should’ve used one of these titles.
“There’s just a big chunk of people—including many academic researchers, journalists, politicians, etc.—who don’t seem to feel that tension.” Unfortunately, that big chunk seems to include a lot of the electorate — what Trump is selling, they seem eager to buy. Why is that, and who studies that? I don’t remember seeing anything very incisive about it.
John:
I guess it’s a mix of things, but, ultimately, in an election, you’re choosing between available options. If you come into it thinking that all politicians are corrupt liars, then you’ll want to choose the corrupt liar who you think will pursue policies that are more to your preference.
Money is a shared delusion. Unfortunately so is Trump.
Preferences stem from your perception and priors
“The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders states that a person cannot be diagnosed as being delusional if the belief in question is one “ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture.” It is not clear at what point a belief considered to be delusional escapes from the folie à… diagnostic category and becomes legitimate because of the number of people holding it.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_delusional_disorder
We create everything as truth except physics. And statistics. Thanks for doing statistics – at least even I – at great time and effort – am able to prove your reasoning and results.
The rest is belief and delusion.
He just seems to be an alternative to the status quo (Democrats/Republicans) that have been overseeing falling life expectancy, widening wealth inequality, increasing invasions of privacy, everything getting more expensive, and so on. Meanwhile they promised the opposite results, publish a constant stream of stuff saying how great they are doing, and enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense.
The main reason he seems like that: the same people/organizations that have overseen these trends seem to hate him. That speaks louder than whatever Trump himself says.
Meanwhile, the Fed’s inflation target has gone from an upper bound of 2% -> 2% -> averaging 2% -> (now, apparently) a lower bound of 2%. That should be the topic of discussion rather than who is president, which seems to have no effect.
I agree that elections make you choose between options — that’s why I’ve voted for people I don’t much care for, like the Clintons, but where do the preferences come from? The best work I’ve read about this is Strangers in Their Own Land, by Arlie Hochschild, but that is just descriptive.
My (current) take on Trump is that the whole purpose of words is to have an effect on people. That’s not a bad underlying reason for words! I sort of agree with Josh Marshall in a way: Trump has found a way to disconnect the intended effect from the truth-value, which is normally a big principal component of the effect.
What I think Josh ignores is my slow understanding that Trump’s supporters don’t care all that much about whether or not what Trump says is true: it is enough that it enrages his opponents because they (the opponents) know it to be false. (Note that the opponents knowing something to be false and it actually being false are not the same thing, though they often coincide.) His supporters cheer what he says because it makes their enemies seethe all the more.
This differs from the case of the ambitious academic indifferent to statistical truth. It’s not as if by delighting the economists they are pwning the non-economists.
Jonathan:
I think the economists do delight in pwning the non-economists; see here for example. Or here.
As I’ve said before, it’s fine for people to be provocative. They just shouldn’t be surprised when people then get provoked.