A few years ago a libertarian colleague (Ray Perceval) wrote a fascinating work of philosophy called the myth of the closed mind. His conjecture was (as the title suggests) that no one can continue to hold a belief that has been falsified by an apparently correct refutation (assuming of course that they have understood the argument et cetera, et cetera).
And I had the privilege of knowing at least two anarcho-libertarians who had been communists, but who abandoned communism almost overnight when they were exposed to the economic calculation argument.
I’d be really interested to know what you think. On the one hand we seem to live in a world in which countless people believe things that have been refuted. But on the other hand, it does seem strange that someone could hold a belief which has been shown to them to be false.
> His conjecture was (as the title suggests) that no one can continue to hold a belief that has been falsified by an apparently correct refutation
The problem is that there have been numerous instances in history when "apparently correct" refutations later turned out to be wrong, and in fact now the "refuted" belief appears to be true.
Yes, but once that's happened a few times people learn to 1) not trust the sources that have been wrong repeatedly, and 2) not update their beliefs [as quickly].
If MSNBC told me something major, shocking, and true, I would flat out not believe them. If that some thing was corroborated elsewhere from a different perspective, especially someone known to be directionally opposite (The Federalist, perhaps) then I would look into it further. I would do the same in the opposite direction as well, not trusting The Federalist blindly either.
"It does seem strange that someone could hold a belief which has been shown to them to be false"..... unless they do not trust the messenger! It is only truth if you believe it. That does not mean that their unblief changes reality but it is not apart of the "unbelievers reality".
Perhaps it depends upon the nature of the refutation. It’s hard even to conceive of what it would mean to regard Mises as lying about the Economic calculation argument! On the other hand, If a refutation is based upon a factual claim, then I suppose the perceived bona fides of the fact bearer becomes relevant.
At a meta level, I wonder if this is a philosophical or psychological question. Dunno
I think in most cases people can persuade themselves that their belief has not been shown to be false. That's pretty easy, as you suggest, for factual claims, short of the end of the world believer who observes that the world has not ended.
A logical claim, like the calculation problem or evolution, is harder to deny that way, but there may be a way around it. Abba Lerner's solution to the economic calculation argument has problems but they are not as obvious as the Stalinist solution's problems. Darwin's argument shows how design is possible without a designer but showing that it better explains what we observe than creationism requires evidence and more complicated arguments.
In addition, some people may not trust their own ability to see through fallacious arguments.
I do know that studying symbolic logic pretty much ruined my ability/willingness to watch national media TV news, and then major newspaper opnion pages.
If you never expose your self to differing opinions you are missing out on possible opportunies to further inhance your symbolic logic skills:-) It is also a wonderful way to try to gain understanding of those around you and reduce fear and predjudice. We dont have to agree or lose our selves in the process but understanding and being able to relate to each other as humans is important if we want to live in a more peaceful world.
I can handle differing opinions just fine. The number of people who agree with me may well be in single digits. It wasn't the content that got me, it was the totally broken logic. Even 'true' statements illogocally arrived at bug me no end.
I am retired, but I spent the 30+ years before that listening to, and reading, tons of opinions that differed from mine. I graded the papers on things like logical coherence and consistency much more than content.
And I didn't require that the logic be perfect, merely reasonable for an ordinary person.
The problem with knowing symbolic logic is that logical errors almost everyone else would miss are like a blaring foghorns to me. It's painful when tryung to "get the news."
I am inclined to believe that it does, indeed, depend on the nature of the refutation. I alluded to it in my earlier comment: if I can check the argument myself, it's much more likely for me to accept it than if I have to take the speaker's word for it.
A few years ago, I was shaken in even this. One of my most solid fallbacks when checking arguments is when they rely on mathematics. If I claim 21717 is prime, anyone can show how it isn't (even though it might appear so at first glance), even someone I've learned to distrust. I assumed nearly anyone with a college education (and many with just a high school diploma) agreed. But then I got into a prolonged argument with a now-ex-GF who believed that 1+1=2 was a controversial claim.
She has a doctorate in atmospheric chemistry. (Last I checked, she's a climate change researcher.)
It seems.... Everything Trump supports. Everything. Liberals will go to the opposite No matter How good of an idea or how much they would benefit.
He has all the pro American and all that goes with that for ideas.
Biden Harris were the anti American party nothing could beote obvious. Libs should let go of these imposters so their political party could start recruiting more acceptable candidates and change their anti American tune..
You guys should have never accepted brain dead Joe.
That was hard to watch
How dare they expect you to defend that or even vote for it.
Let's all get back to we love America. All of us together.
These days, pretty much, if the government says something, anything, I assume it's a lie until and unless proven otherwise. If the media says something, anything, I assume it's a lie until and unless proven otherwise.
If David Friedman says something, I'm often willing to give him the benefit of a doubt. ;-)
Pauline Kael herself had the self-awareness to understand that she lived in a bubble.
I completely understand how a certain kind of liberal would have been both shocked and depressed about Trump winning in 2016.
And I understand how pretty much the same types could be depressed with the election outcome this year.
I even understand how someone who is left of center but doesn’t care all that much about politics might be surprised at this year’s outcome.
I do NOT at all understand, however, how someone who cares about politics could be ”astonished” by either outcome in this election, but especially about the actual outcome. Because almost whatever one’s source of election information, there was nothing at all that showed this was going to be a Kamala romp.
Someone relying on either the polls or the prediction markets would not have been astonished at the outcome. But someone in a blue bubble who observed that everyone she knew was against Trump and didn't appreciate the nature of her bubble could be. Pauline Kael without the self-awareness.
And a number of people I saw commenting concluded from the outcome that the voters were either more evil or more stupid than they had expected — one attributed Kamala's loss to "slut-shaming." It did not occur to them that people might not see the world the way they themselves did, might reject the arguments for policies that they approved of.
We agree 100% on all the rest, including very much the attributions about the “others”. We also agree about blue bubblers who don’t much follow politics.
But I say again the ones who follow politics a) are aware that Trump did indeed win in 2016, and b) had to be aware it was a reasonably close election.
It is much much harder today for someone who follows politics to be unaware that the election was expected to be close - and thus be “astonished” by the outcome - than it would have been in the “Richard Nixon? Richard Nixon?” days. If nothing else, the media covers the “horse race” of the election more than any other angle of it.
Unless on top of everything else you’re contending that some folks are *so* innumerate and lacking comprehension of probability or statistics that something they thought had only a 40% chance of occurring would be “astonishing” if it happens.
I’m not claiming the set is zero. But I am claiming in 2024 that the set that contained only those that actively follow politics - which overlaps at almost exactly 100% with those who comment on politics online - who were actually “astonished” is low.
My claim is that most of those you are suggesting were “astonished” this time around are merely horrified/disgusted/dismayed, and expressing same as “astonishment”, as opposed to being actually astonished.
But perhaps I base this at the end of the day on my firm belief that most people are neither as smart nor as stupid as “experts”/analysts/marketers/strategists/pundits often pretend that they are. (Not that I am claiming that you are one such; part of why I enjoy reading you is that I find you rarely if ever do this.)
A problem I commonly encounter on the matter of bubbles involves claims whose truth I cannot check myself. For example, I cannot possibly measure and chart the temperature at every square mile on the planet and derive the average, or measure the efficacy of a new vaccine on each person who got it, or count all the ballots for POTUS. In each case, I have to take the word of other people, who in turn may be taking the word of others. They are like the Mexican-English translator in that joke I've heard you tell about the robber who hid the money. They might be motivated, and now have the means to act on that motivation since I've authorized them in effect to be gatekeepers.
If I try to dispense with all bubbles (except the one that maintains that getting the right answer is the most important thing for me to do), I can sometimes mitigate motivated gatekeepers by tracking their motivations, consulting gatekeepers with different motivations, and checking for contradictions in their claims and evidence. On rare occasions, after some digging, I can find ways to verify claims that I couldn't before, and rule out some of them. More often, things just round off to "he said, she said", and there's no way for me to know.
One peculiar confounder I don't often see mentioned is the case where one side cannot present evidence they ought to possess, because of conflicting motivations. A contrived example might be a fellow who refuses to prove there are no illegal drugs hidden in his basement - because to do so, he would have to reveal the political refugees hidden there instead. Even though I might be motivated to help him protect refugees, he can't tell me without telling everyone else.
It is always hard to accept an outcome we do not like. In politics the problem is compounded by the news media (mostly TV) trying to convince their group of followers that the other side are dangerous fascist creating distrust, anxiety and sometimes anger thus both democrats and republicians have more distrust of govermental systems than ever before including the election process. Not surprizing. More unity and less slandering might help both sides see reality more clearly.
For once, to be fair to politicians, they do it because the incentives align in favor of them doing so. I.e. more often than not, it works to help them get elected (else they would not do it).
So rather than place the blame solely on the politicians, you need also look at the people who elect them.
Same for the news media! When we stop reading or watching those speak hate or constant solacious gossip they will stop speaking it. Their rating's matter. They will ultimatly put forth the type of material that their patrons demand. Their is hope for a better future..... it is in our hands!
Now see here I partly agree with you, and partly disagree with you.
DESPITE the economic incentives of the newspaper and local TV industry, all turned ever further left.
I’d also point out that this was true of the mainstream TV media during the first 15 or so years of this decade.
I *do* agree that the leftist media on the Internet and cable today have the incentive to lean left to play to their base (and same for Fox and the couple others on the right to play to theirs). Given business models, not only is this unlikely to change, it will likely become even more pronounced.
Politicians are in it to win! We the people have to demand better behavior and they will fall into line after all most of them want to keep their jobs.
I had doubts about the 2020 outcome, not because I was convinced that Trump had to win, but because the graphs looked strange, with sharp upward jags in the D vote in the middle of the night when vote counting had supposedly stopped. But what really left me unconvinced was that the Democrats fought tooth and nail against every call for a strictly watched recount. If I were a bank CEO and the accountant was that opposed to an audit I would suspect embezzling! And the court decisions tended to be either denial of standing, or statements that the plea was made too late in the process or that there wasn't time to try the case; so I don't think the matter has really been resolved.
I'm firmly in favor of a return to older voting rules: an ID requirement, and voting in person, with ID shown, on election day, with very narrow exceptions for active duty military and the bedridden, and with paper ballots that can be audited.
If you recall, Heinlein foresaw the opportunities for electoral fraud from computerized vote counts in the 1960s, in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress . . .
I've been working through my true thoughts on the 2020 election, and I think I've come down to this story:
In the Democratic primaries and because of mail in ballots during covid, hundreds of thousands of ballots were tossed due to verification issues (not dated, improperly filled out, not signed, signatures not matched, etc.). If that continued into the general election, that would likely change the presidential election and also many many down ballot races. So Democrats did a full court press to change election rules for mail in ballots - to make them easier and to get less thrown out. Both had the well known result of helping Democrats, who were much more likely to vote by mail. Many of these rules were fast tracked through the wrong offices, and not legislatively enabled (i.e. there was no legislation that permitted the change, but it was done anyway). The stated reasoning was covid. That's believable, but only part of the story. It was also likely enough to justify the changes on some level.
Come the election, many thousands, possibly millions, of ballots that would have been tossed got counted. My guess is that the vast majority of these ballots were legitimate voters who made normal mistakes. Due to the fact that Democrats voted significantly more by mail, and how close the elections were in several swing states, this likely shifted the race to Biden. That is, in a fully legally followed count, enough Biden votes would have been tossed to swing the election to Trump. Now, this also introduced the possibility that fraudulent votes were also brought in. The late night swings and other factors support this notion. Because of the intentional lack of verification, it was not possible to verify good votes from bad votes. This destroys trust, and led to many more claims of electoral fraud. Every election has shady things happen, and the 2020 shady stuff got amplified. It's rarely possible to tell if individual shady things are true fraud, and individually most or all of them were unlikely to move the vote total. It's still a big problem in that people didn't trust the vote count.
Enter in the final problem. If all laws were followed perfectly, then it's possible that millions of legitimate votes from genuine voters would have been tossed. This is a bad outcome. Because these ballots were on shaky ground, allowing lawsuits against them could have reversed the election. Because it would have caused tremendous upheaval, courts were highly incentivized to not move forward with these charges. After all, the problem was not with the voters, but with election officials making changes that the voters followed. Penalizing the voters is a bad outcome. This creates a massive incentive to brush all of this under the rug. It's probably still the case that Biden would have won, if all real votes got counted. Reversing that is a bad outcome. If election officials had been strongly penalized (thrown in jail or heavily fined) that would lend credence to the idea that the election was in fact stolen. Courts don't want to go down that path.
The most likely scenario - Good votes made in a bad way pushed the election to Biden. If the votes got thrown out then chaos ensues and would be genuinely unfair to true Biden voters. We can't hold people accountable while keeping the votes, so we tell everyone that there's nothing we can do. Partisans then, of course, crowed about it being super-duper secure election and all that jazz. It would have been worse if Republicans won and got millions of votes thrown out over technicalities, reversing the election.
It's been a while, but didn't some of those courts have legal actions brought before them to stop the dubious new procedures before the ballots were sent out, and didn't they refuse to act? If I've got that right, it seems that they themselves may have helped to create the unfairness they claimed to be trying to avoid.
That's my recollection as well, but I no longer remember the details to check. Maybe something Pennsylvania?
The core of the problem was how seriously to take covid - *in 2020*. Even with hindsight of 2024's perspective, I'm not sure we could agree on what the proper protocols should have been. We definitely didn't then. So the courts were in an awkward place where striking down accommodations for covid could result in direct deaths, but also could result in a lot of people just not voting. That's a bad look for a court, and a bad feel for democracy. We really do need solutions during an emergency, even if I would agree that the solutions chosen were bad or that the level of "emergency" in November of 2020 was low enough to require normal voting.
I seem to recall a story about curbside voting, maybe in blue areas of Texas, where it was not legal to do it but was allowed anyway. It's a bit hard to argue that the votes were illegitimate, but it's definitely not an ideal system for many things we care about (for instance the poll workers not knowing your vote).
The Trotskyite strategy seems very normal and standard
Think about how general relativity supplanted some parts of classical physics (my GR classes were long ago so I may be hazy on the details). It's not like all the evidence behind classical physics broke because one exception was found, it's just that in the extreme you get a breakdown of how classical mechanics works.
Wouldn't that be a Trotskyite strategy but for science? Seems to me like a lot of "bubble bursting" works this way. You don t lose all the evidence you gathered in the past, you just incorporate the new evidence and move on.
> One response is to deny the evidence — as many Trump supporters did when he lost the 2020 election. It could not be that a majority of the voters rejected him, hence the election must have been stolen.
No, the reason so many Trump supporters believe the election to have been stolen is that the election was in fact stolen, rather brazenly to.
> No, your assertion is nonsense, as you haven nothing like proof,
Proof doesn't exist outside of mathematics. However, I have rather strong evidence.
Or do you have an innocent explanation for the synchronized stopping of the reported count across multiple states, the multiple instances of observers being kicked or tricked out of the counting room followed by the count resuming, in one instance the counters literally boarding up the windows so the observers can't see what's going on, the videos of counters running the same ballots multiple times through the machines, the multiple sworn eyewitness affidavits, the miscellaneous statistical irregularities, etc.?
Professor, you highlight an episode of an unnamed radio show and a Facebook comment (?!) as examples of coping.
Note what did not happen this time:
Democratic legislatures did not draw up an "alternative" slate of electors. The President did not call any secretary of state to "find" votes. Neither the candidate nor the president called the election rigged, filed zero lawsuits, defamed zero election workers. And on Jan 6 2025 the VP will certify the vote. It's night and day!
2024 is very different from 2020. So was 1964. My subject is not which party behaved worse when but how people deal with the bursting of their bubble.
Do you assume that all essays touching on recent political events are or should be about Trump's misdeeds? I didn't comment on how terrible Stalin was either, since it wasn't relevant to what I was writing about.
To be fair to Stalin - one should try to be fair especially to the character one hates - in 1939 it could not be excluded either that the capitalist countries might favour Germany to fight the Soviet Union.
Concerning the denial of the election results in the US, you quote an isolated Democrat raising doubts about the results of the 2024 election, but denial of the results of the 2020 election is almost official doctrine of the Republican Party. This I believe is unprecedented in US history. Judging from my Democratic friends and acquaintances (I am European and live in Europe but I have quite a few of them) the most persistent delusion of the Democrats is that the victory of Trump is the result of the pervasive racism and misogyny of the American society coupled with Russian misinformation. These are smart and educated people but typically in academia or in think tanks. I am afraid that part of the problem is that we have come to identify democracy with all that it is good and therefore results such as the victory of a shameless demagogue such as Trump must be due to some malign foreign influence (literally so in the case of Russian influence). Classical liberals, even democratic ones such as John Stuart Mill, would not have fallen for such a starry-eyed idea of democracy.
Those are religions for groups within the population. But democracy is more nearly a universal religion, in the US and much of the rest of the western world.
Well, then perhaps I don’t understand your definition of any of “democracy”, “universal” *or* “religion”.
I’ll let you define what democracy is that you claim is a religion. I don’t think you mean simple mob rule, nor mob rule over the legalized monopoly on violence, but I’m not quite sure what it is you do mean. Perhaps if you said you meant “rule of law vs rule of men” I might possible understand your combo claim here… but again I don’t *think* that’s what you mean.
Given that only about half the humans on the planet live in countries that can reasonably be called democracies, and given that a substantial fraction - even if it might be a minority fraction at this point - of the people in those countries still identify with a traditional religion, I don’t see how you can possibly claim “universal”.
But perhaps I least understand your definition of religion. Can one have multiple religions? If so how many does the average or median person have? Is religion defined by unwavering faith?
Does believing that democracy might be the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been invented, make one a religious believer in democracy? Because only with a yes to the last question combined with the non-assumption of monotheism - and indeed, no primary religion at all, just a set of somewhat overlapping ones - would I acknowledge that myself, and most of the people you describe, be reasonably classed as believers in democracy as a secular religion. But that’s a major twisting of the definition of religion, not just a stretch.
I can usually follow your explanations even when I disagree with them, but I’m afraid I cannot at all here.
I said more nearly a universal religion, in the US and much of the western world, not everywhere.
Someone can be a Christian or a Muslim without a clear idea of the doctrine of his religion. I don't assume that everyone who believes in democracy has a clear picture of what it means, although I expect most people think it has something to do with having elections.
It was easy for me to avoid this bubble reality problem.
* I detest both parties and the whole screwed up system. I think Trump will be marginally better overall, and voting out an incumbent is always good, but neither is going to make me happy.
* The 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections were all too close to be horrendous landslide disruptions of the universe.
Those events don't burst any bubble that you were in, but you might be in a bubble that could be broken by something else. It's worth at least thinking about.
I could be in a bubble about detesting government. Maybe government really is kind, lovable, sweet, and gentle. A lot of people think that way and I'm pretty sure they outnumber me.
I could be in a bubble about the amount of corruption, and all three elections were corrupted beyond my imagination. But I don't think very many people actually believe that about all three elections.
I could be in a bubble about brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts being the best, but that's a bubble too far.
If you are in a bubble that denies the status of chocolate chip cookies as the chief American contribution to world cuisine, I would be happy to burst it.
More seriously, it might be that government is not kind, lovable, sweet and gentle but really does function, relative to the alternatives, considerably better than you and I believe. That could, for example, be broken if we get a full scale voucher system for education and the kids that come out of the non-public school parts of it turn out to be much worse educated than the ones who go to the government run schools.
I'm with you on chocolate chip cookies, but then one gets into soft or hard, milk chocolate or dark chocolate, raisins, oatmeal, peanut butter, and even white chocolate, and the bubbles turn into a bubble bath.
I was restricting my Pop-Tart bubble to Pop-Tarts.
There are three different views of the chocolate chip cookie issue in my family, but one of them is wrong — my wife's version is more nearly a brownie made from chocolate chip cookie dough than a cookie. Our daughter doesn't follow that heresy but her refusal to include either nuts or grape nuts in the dough leads to a cookie that, while good, is suboptimal.
“listening to a progressive channel on satellite radio while driving”
You are either a more masochistic person, or a better person than I am. Or even both 😏
(And be clear, I read plenty of left-of-center mainstream media; I just cannot bear subjecting myself to leftist talk on radio or podcast.)
“The bubble can be defended against any possible evidence by rejecting the concept of objective truth”
You presented the whole piece as being essentially equally applicable to those on the left and on the right. And for the rest of your commentary, I’d agree. But this particular “technique”, at least AFAIK, is utilized exclusively by the leftists today, not by the right.
Historically speaking, it depends on whether you classify Nazis as right or left. Also, to some degree, Catholics. As a matter of doctrine they believe in objective truth but "Certum est quia impossibile est" can be stretched to justify the rejection of strong adverse evidence, however unfair that may be to Tertullian's meaning.
" 'listening to a progressive channel on satellite radio while driving' - You are either a more masochistic person, or a better person than I am. Or even both"
At first glance: yeah. At second glance: there's a weird way to do stuff like this that I've found raises my tolerance considerably. It requires consciously not listening to the content the same way I'd listen to content I'd enjoy, but rather as an academic exercise: here is a source, it is saying X, and we can assume that the source believes X. Why does it believe X? What leads it there?
I notice some progressives do the same thing with conservatives. It leads to books like _What's the Matter With Kansas?_. It can fail even then; bad epistemology can lead to conclusions even more wrongheaded than those held previously, which is why tools like steelmanning are so essential.
On a less controversial note, this method is similar to a game one can play when watching an otherwise boring movie: "You Are the Camera". Instead of trying to make sense of the movie, take in each scene, putting yourself in the mind of the director (or cinematographer), pretending you've set it up, and examining why each scene was put in, why that angle was chosen, why that filter, etc. The general idea is the same: climb one level above the content and ask yourself why it is the content.
A few years ago a libertarian colleague (Ray Perceval) wrote a fascinating work of philosophy called the myth of the closed mind. His conjecture was (as the title suggests) that no one can continue to hold a belief that has been falsified by an apparently correct refutation (assuming of course that they have understood the argument et cetera, et cetera).
And I had the privilege of knowing at least two anarcho-libertarians who had been communists, but who abandoned communism almost overnight when they were exposed to the economic calculation argument.
I’d be really interested to know what you think. On the one hand we seem to live in a world in which countless people believe things that have been refuted. But on the other hand, it does seem strange that someone could hold a belief which has been shown to them to be false.
> His conjecture was (as the title suggests) that no one can continue to hold a belief that has been falsified by an apparently correct refutation
The problem is that there have been numerous instances in history when "apparently correct" refutations later turned out to be wrong, and in fact now the "refuted" belief appears to be true.
Of course. But until then…
Yes, but once that's happened a few times people learn to 1) not trust the sources that have been wrong repeatedly, and 2) not update their beliefs [as quickly].
If MSNBC told me something major, shocking, and true, I would flat out not believe them. If that some thing was corroborated elsewhere from a different perspective, especially someone known to be directionally opposite (The Federalist, perhaps) then I would look into it further. I would do the same in the opposite direction as well, not trusting The Federalist blindly either.
"It does seem strange that someone could hold a belief which has been shown to them to be false"..... unless they do not trust the messenger! It is only truth if you believe it. That does not mean that their unblief changes reality but it is not apart of the "unbelievers reality".
Perhaps it depends upon the nature of the refutation. It’s hard even to conceive of what it would mean to regard Mises as lying about the Economic calculation argument! On the other hand, If a refutation is based upon a factual claim, then I suppose the perceived bona fides of the fact bearer becomes relevant.
At a meta level, I wonder if this is a philosophical or psychological question. Dunno
I think in most cases people can persuade themselves that their belief has not been shown to be false. That's pretty easy, as you suggest, for factual claims, short of the end of the world believer who observes that the world has not ended.
A logical claim, like the calculation problem or evolution, is harder to deny that way, but there may be a way around it. Abba Lerner's solution to the economic calculation argument has problems but they are not as obvious as the Stalinist solution's problems. Darwin's argument shows how design is possible without a designer but showing that it better explains what we observe than creationism requires evidence and more complicated arguments.
In addition, some people may not trust their own ability to see through fallacious arguments.
I do know that studying symbolic logic pretty much ruined my ability/willingness to watch national media TV news, and then major newspaper opnion pages.
If you never expose your self to differing opinions you are missing out on possible opportunies to further inhance your symbolic logic skills:-) It is also a wonderful way to try to gain understanding of those around you and reduce fear and predjudice. We dont have to agree or lose our selves in the process but understanding and being able to relate to each other as humans is important if we want to live in a more peaceful world.
I can handle differing opinions just fine. The number of people who agree with me may well be in single digits. It wasn't the content that got me, it was the totally broken logic. Even 'true' statements illogocally arrived at bug me no end.
I am retired, but I spent the 30+ years before that listening to, and reading, tons of opinions that differed from mine. I graded the papers on things like logical coherence and consistency much more than content.
And I didn't require that the logic be perfect, merely reasonable for an ordinary person.
The problem with knowing symbolic logic is that logical errors almost everyone else would miss are like a blaring foghorns to me. It's painful when tryung to "get the news."
I am inclined to believe that it does, indeed, depend on the nature of the refutation. I alluded to it in my earlier comment: if I can check the argument myself, it's much more likely for me to accept it than if I have to take the speaker's word for it.
A few years ago, I was shaken in even this. One of my most solid fallbacks when checking arguments is when they rely on mathematics. If I claim 21717 is prime, anyone can show how it isn't (even though it might appear so at first glance), even someone I've learned to distrust. I assumed nearly anyone with a college education (and many with just a high school diploma) agreed. But then I got into a prolonged argument with a now-ex-GF who believed that 1+1=2 was a controversial claim.
She has a doctorate in atmospheric chemistry. (Last I checked, she's a climate change researcher.)
It seems.... Everything Trump supports. Everything. Liberals will go to the opposite No matter How good of an idea or how much they would benefit.
He has all the pro American and all that goes with that for ideas.
Biden Harris were the anti American party nothing could beote obvious. Libs should let go of these imposters so their political party could start recruiting more acceptable candidates and change their anti American tune..
You guys should have never accepted brain dead Joe.
That was hard to watch
How dare they expect you to defend that or even vote for it.
Let's all get back to we love America. All of us together.
These days, pretty much, if the government says something, anything, I assume it's a lie until and unless proven otherwise. If the media says something, anything, I assume it's a lie until and unless proven otherwise.
If David Friedman says something, I'm often willing to give him the benefit of a doubt. ;-)
“Some were also astonished by it.”
Pauline Kael herself had the self-awareness to understand that she lived in a bubble.
I completely understand how a certain kind of liberal would have been both shocked and depressed about Trump winning in 2016.
And I understand how pretty much the same types could be depressed with the election outcome this year.
I even understand how someone who is left of center but doesn’t care all that much about politics might be surprised at this year’s outcome.
I do NOT at all understand, however, how someone who cares about politics could be ”astonished” by either outcome in this election, but especially about the actual outcome. Because almost whatever one’s source of election information, there was nothing at all that showed this was going to be a Kamala romp.
Someone relying on either the polls or the prediction markets would not have been astonished at the outcome. But someone in a blue bubble who observed that everyone she knew was against Trump and didn't appreciate the nature of her bubble could be. Pauline Kael without the self-awareness.
And a number of people I saw commenting concluded from the outcome that the voters were either more evil or more stupid than they had expected — one attributed Kamala's loss to "slut-shaming." It did not occur to them that people might not see the world the way they themselves did, might reject the arguments for policies that they approved of.
We agree 100% on all the rest, including very much the attributions about the “others”. We also agree about blue bubblers who don’t much follow politics.
But I say again the ones who follow politics a) are aware that Trump did indeed win in 2016, and b) had to be aware it was a reasonably close election.
It is much much harder today for someone who follows politics to be unaware that the election was expected to be close - and thus be “astonished” by the outcome - than it would have been in the “Richard Nixon? Richard Nixon?” days. If nothing else, the media covers the “horse race” of the election more than any other angle of it.
Unless on top of everything else you’re contending that some folks are *so* innumerate and lacking comprehension of probability or statistics that something they thought had only a 40% chance of occurring would be “astonishing” if it happens.
I’m not claiming the set is zero. But I am claiming in 2024 that the set that contained only those that actively follow politics - which overlaps at almost exactly 100% with those who comment on politics online - who were actually “astonished” is low.
My claim is that most of those you are suggesting were “astonished” this time around are merely horrified/disgusted/dismayed, and expressing same as “astonishment”, as opposed to being actually astonished.
But perhaps I base this at the end of the day on my firm belief that most people are neither as smart nor as stupid as “experts”/analysts/marketers/strategists/pundits often pretend that they are. (Not that I am claiming that you are one such; part of why I enjoy reading you is that I find you rarely if ever do this.)
A problem I commonly encounter on the matter of bubbles involves claims whose truth I cannot check myself. For example, I cannot possibly measure and chart the temperature at every square mile on the planet and derive the average, or measure the efficacy of a new vaccine on each person who got it, or count all the ballots for POTUS. In each case, I have to take the word of other people, who in turn may be taking the word of others. They are like the Mexican-English translator in that joke I've heard you tell about the robber who hid the money. They might be motivated, and now have the means to act on that motivation since I've authorized them in effect to be gatekeepers.
If I try to dispense with all bubbles (except the one that maintains that getting the right answer is the most important thing for me to do), I can sometimes mitigate motivated gatekeepers by tracking their motivations, consulting gatekeepers with different motivations, and checking for contradictions in their claims and evidence. On rare occasions, after some digging, I can find ways to verify claims that I couldn't before, and rule out some of them. More often, things just round off to "he said, she said", and there's no way for me to know.
One peculiar confounder I don't often see mentioned is the case where one side cannot present evidence they ought to possess, because of conflicting motivations. A contrived example might be a fellow who refuses to prove there are no illegal drugs hidden in his basement - because to do so, he would have to reveal the political refugees hidden there instead. Even though I might be motivated to help him protect refugees, he can't tell me without telling everyone else.
I have had several posts on the problem of discovering truth, collected under that title in my sorted list of posts: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Sorted_Posts.html#Discovering_Truth_
Examples include:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/when-you-cannot-trust-the-experts
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/how-to-learn-what-is-true
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/me-vs-huemer
It is indeed a hard problem.
It is always hard to accept an outcome we do not like. In politics the problem is compounded by the news media (mostly TV) trying to convince their group of followers that the other side are dangerous fascist creating distrust, anxiety and sometimes anger thus both democrats and republicians have more distrust of govermental systems than ever before including the election process. Not surprizing. More unity and less slandering might help both sides see reality more clearly.
"More unity and less slandering might help both sides see reality more clearly."
Thank you very much for saying this. Truer words were never spoken!
True but pointless. May as well wish politicians were angels.
For once, to be fair to politicians, they do it because the incentives align in favor of them doing so. I.e. more often than not, it works to help them get elected (else they would not do it).
So rather than place the blame solely on the politicians, you need also look at the people who elect them.
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” — Pogo
You are exactly right Andy!
Same for the news media! When we stop reading or watching those speak hate or constant solacious gossip they will stop speaking it. Their rating's matter. They will ultimatly put forth the type of material that their patrons demand. Their is hope for a better future..... it is in our hands!
Now see here I partly agree with you, and partly disagree with you.
DESPITE the economic incentives of the newspaper and local TV industry, all turned ever further left.
I’d also point out that this was true of the mainstream TV media during the first 15 or so years of this decade.
I *do* agree that the leftist media on the Internet and cable today have the incentive to lean left to play to their base (and same for Fox and the couple others on the right to play to theirs). Given business models, not only is this unlikely to change, it will likely become even more pronounced.
Politicians are in it to win! We the people have to demand better behavior and they will fall into line after all most of them want to keep their jobs.
I had doubts about the 2020 outcome, not because I was convinced that Trump had to win, but because the graphs looked strange, with sharp upward jags in the D vote in the middle of the night when vote counting had supposedly stopped. But what really left me unconvinced was that the Democrats fought tooth and nail against every call for a strictly watched recount. If I were a bank CEO and the accountant was that opposed to an audit I would suspect embezzling! And the court decisions tended to be either denial of standing, or statements that the plea was made too late in the process or that there wasn't time to try the case; so I don't think the matter has really been resolved.
I'm firmly in favor of a return to older voting rules: an ID requirement, and voting in person, with ID shown, on election day, with very narrow exceptions for active duty military and the bedridden, and with paper ballots that can be audited.
If you recall, Heinlein foresaw the opportunities for electoral fraud from computerized vote counts in the 1960s, in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress . . .
I've been working through my true thoughts on the 2020 election, and I think I've come down to this story:
In the Democratic primaries and because of mail in ballots during covid, hundreds of thousands of ballots were tossed due to verification issues (not dated, improperly filled out, not signed, signatures not matched, etc.). If that continued into the general election, that would likely change the presidential election and also many many down ballot races. So Democrats did a full court press to change election rules for mail in ballots - to make them easier and to get less thrown out. Both had the well known result of helping Democrats, who were much more likely to vote by mail. Many of these rules were fast tracked through the wrong offices, and not legislatively enabled (i.e. there was no legislation that permitted the change, but it was done anyway). The stated reasoning was covid. That's believable, but only part of the story. It was also likely enough to justify the changes on some level.
Come the election, many thousands, possibly millions, of ballots that would have been tossed got counted. My guess is that the vast majority of these ballots were legitimate voters who made normal mistakes. Due to the fact that Democrats voted significantly more by mail, and how close the elections were in several swing states, this likely shifted the race to Biden. That is, in a fully legally followed count, enough Biden votes would have been tossed to swing the election to Trump. Now, this also introduced the possibility that fraudulent votes were also brought in. The late night swings and other factors support this notion. Because of the intentional lack of verification, it was not possible to verify good votes from bad votes. This destroys trust, and led to many more claims of electoral fraud. Every election has shady things happen, and the 2020 shady stuff got amplified. It's rarely possible to tell if individual shady things are true fraud, and individually most or all of them were unlikely to move the vote total. It's still a big problem in that people didn't trust the vote count.
Enter in the final problem. If all laws were followed perfectly, then it's possible that millions of legitimate votes from genuine voters would have been tossed. This is a bad outcome. Because these ballots were on shaky ground, allowing lawsuits against them could have reversed the election. Because it would have caused tremendous upheaval, courts were highly incentivized to not move forward with these charges. After all, the problem was not with the voters, but with election officials making changes that the voters followed. Penalizing the voters is a bad outcome. This creates a massive incentive to brush all of this under the rug. It's probably still the case that Biden would have won, if all real votes got counted. Reversing that is a bad outcome. If election officials had been strongly penalized (thrown in jail or heavily fined) that would lend credence to the idea that the election was in fact stolen. Courts don't want to go down that path.
The most likely scenario - Good votes made in a bad way pushed the election to Biden. If the votes got thrown out then chaos ensues and would be genuinely unfair to true Biden voters. We can't hold people accountable while keeping the votes, so we tell everyone that there's nothing we can do. Partisans then, of course, crowed about it being super-duper secure election and all that jazz. It would have been worse if Republicans won and got millions of votes thrown out over technicalities, reversing the election.
It's been a while, but didn't some of those courts have legal actions brought before them to stop the dubious new procedures before the ballots were sent out, and didn't they refuse to act? If I've got that right, it seems that they themselves may have helped to create the unfairness they claimed to be trying to avoid.
That's my recollection as well, but I no longer remember the details to check. Maybe something Pennsylvania?
The core of the problem was how seriously to take covid - *in 2020*. Even with hindsight of 2024's perspective, I'm not sure we could agree on what the proper protocols should have been. We definitely didn't then. So the courts were in an awkward place where striking down accommodations for covid could result in direct deaths, but also could result in a lot of people just not voting. That's a bad look for a court, and a bad feel for democracy. We really do need solutions during an emergency, even if I would agree that the solutions chosen were bad or that the level of "emergency" in November of 2020 was low enough to require normal voting.
I seem to recall a story about curbside voting, maybe in blue areas of Texas, where it was not legal to do it but was allowed anyway. It's a bit hard to argue that the votes were illegitimate, but it's definitely not an ideal system for many things we care about (for instance the poll workers not knowing your vote).
Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar
The Trotskyite strategy seems very normal and standard
Think about how general relativity supplanted some parts of classical physics (my GR classes were long ago so I may be hazy on the details). It's not like all the evidence behind classical physics broke because one exception was found, it's just that in the extreme you get a breakdown of how classical mechanics works.
Wouldn't that be a Trotskyite strategy but for science? Seems to me like a lot of "bubble bursting" works this way. You don t lose all the evidence you gathered in the past, you just incorporate the new evidence and move on.
> One response is to deny the evidence — as many Trump supporters did when he lost the 2020 election. It could not be that a majority of the voters rejected him, hence the election must have been stolen.
No, the reason so many Trump supporters believe the election to have been stolen is that the election was in fact stolen, rather brazenly to.
🙄
There is lots of evidence that points to the *possibility* that the 2020 election was “stolen”, I agree.
Being certain it was stolen is as mindless and without foundation as those who claim they are sure it was not stolen.
Personally, I put the chances at 10%-15%. But there is little likelihood that we will ever find out the “truth” here.
This is "both sides" nonsense.
No, your assertion is nonsense, as you haven nothing like proof, let alone incontrovertible proof.
But I will try to reason no further with someone so obviously unreasonable and lacking any epistemic humility at all.
Though I will end by expressing my surprise that someone so certain of that particular assertion chooses to read this Substack.
> No, your assertion is nonsense, as you haven nothing like proof,
Proof doesn't exist outside of mathematics. However, I have rather strong evidence.
Or do you have an innocent explanation for the synchronized stopping of the reported count across multiple states, the multiple instances of observers being kicked or tricked out of the counting room followed by the count resuming, in one instance the counters literally boarding up the windows so the observers can't see what's going on, the videos of counters running the same ballots multiple times through the machines, the multiple sworn eyewitness affidavits, the miscellaneous statistical irregularities, etc.?
Professor, you highlight an episode of an unnamed radio show and a Facebook comment (?!) as examples of coping.
Note what did not happen this time:
Democratic legislatures did not draw up an "alternative" slate of electors. The President did not call any secretary of state to "find" votes. Neither the candidate nor the president called the election rigged, filed zero lawsuits, defamed zero election workers. And on Jan 6 2025 the VP will certify the vote. It's night and day!
2024 is very different from 2020. So was 1964. My subject is not which party behaved worse when but how people deal with the bursting of their bubble.
Do you assume that all essays touching on recent political events are or should be about Trump's misdeeds? I didn't comment on how terrible Stalin was either, since it wasn't relevant to what I was writing about.
To be fair to Stalin - one should try to be fair especially to the character one hates - in 1939 it could not be excluded either that the capitalist countries might favour Germany to fight the Soviet Union.
Concerning the denial of the election results in the US, you quote an isolated Democrat raising doubts about the results of the 2024 election, but denial of the results of the 2020 election is almost official doctrine of the Republican Party. This I believe is unprecedented in US history. Judging from my Democratic friends and acquaintances (I am European and live in Europe but I have quite a few of them) the most persistent delusion of the Democrats is that the victory of Trump is the result of the pervasive racism and misogyny of the American society coupled with Russian misinformation. These are smart and educated people but typically in academia or in think tanks. I am afraid that part of the problem is that we have come to identify democracy with all that it is good and therefore results such as the victory of a shameless demagogue such as Trump must be due to some malign foreign influence (literally so in the case of Russian influence). Classical liberals, even democratic ones such as John Stuart Mill, would not have fallen for such a starry-eyed idea of democracy.
Fair point. Democracy is the new secular religion, and a lot of people don't think through the reasons that it might produce bad results.
“Democracy is the new secular religion”
Even putting aside the distinction between mob-rule democracy and a constitutional republic with democratic elections, I disagree.
For young leftists, woke is their religion. It certainly is for the oppressor- oppressed ideologues who now “Back Hamas”.
For many older leftists, “climate change” is their religion.
Those are religions for groups within the population. But democracy is more nearly a universal religion, in the US and much of the rest of the western world.
Well, then perhaps I don’t understand your definition of any of “democracy”, “universal” *or* “religion”.
I’ll let you define what democracy is that you claim is a religion. I don’t think you mean simple mob rule, nor mob rule over the legalized monopoly on violence, but I’m not quite sure what it is you do mean. Perhaps if you said you meant “rule of law vs rule of men” I might possible understand your combo claim here… but again I don’t *think* that’s what you mean.
Given that only about half the humans on the planet live in countries that can reasonably be called democracies, and given that a substantial fraction - even if it might be a minority fraction at this point - of the people in those countries still identify with a traditional religion, I don’t see how you can possibly claim “universal”.
But perhaps I least understand your definition of religion. Can one have multiple religions? If so how many does the average or median person have? Is religion defined by unwavering faith?
Does believing that democracy might be the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been invented, make one a religious believer in democracy? Because only with a yes to the last question combined with the non-assumption of monotheism - and indeed, no primary religion at all, just a set of somewhat overlapping ones - would I acknowledge that myself, and most of the people you describe, be reasonably classed as believers in democracy as a secular religion. But that’s a major twisting of the definition of religion, not just a stretch.
I can usually follow your explanations even when I disagree with them, but I’m afraid I cannot at all here.
I said more nearly a universal religion, in the US and much of the western world, not everywhere.
Someone can be a Christian or a Muslim without a clear idea of the doctrine of his religion. I don't assume that everyone who believes in democracy has a clear picture of what it means, although I expect most people think it has something to do with having elections.
Ok… I guess.
But with this description how in any sense is democracy the “new” secular religion? Wouldn’t it be quite old by now?
And what is it that was the “old” religion (secular or otherwise) that it replaced?
It sounds like an argument that the election was on some level fraud because the people voted wrong.
I don't think the Democrats are doing themselves any favors with that kind of definition for "democracy."
It was easy for me to avoid this bubble reality problem.
* I detest both parties and the whole screwed up system. I think Trump will be marginally better overall, and voting out an incumbent is always good, but neither is going to make me happy.
* The 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections were all too close to be horrendous landslide disruptions of the universe.
Those events don't burst any bubble that you were in, but you might be in a bubble that could be broken by something else. It's worth at least thinking about.
I could be in a bubble about detesting government. Maybe government really is kind, lovable, sweet, and gentle. A lot of people think that way and I'm pretty sure they outnumber me.
I could be in a bubble about the amount of corruption, and all three elections were corrupted beyond my imagination. But I don't think very many people actually believe that about all three elections.
I could be in a bubble about brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts being the best, but that's a bubble too far.
If you are in a bubble that denies the status of chocolate chip cookies as the chief American contribution to world cuisine, I would be happy to burst it.
More seriously, it might be that government is not kind, lovable, sweet and gentle but really does function, relative to the alternatives, considerably better than you and I believe. That could, for example, be broken if we get a full scale voucher system for education and the kids that come out of the non-public school parts of it turn out to be much worse educated than the ones who go to the government run schools.
I'm with you on chocolate chip cookies, but then one gets into soft or hard, milk chocolate or dark chocolate, raisins, oatmeal, peanut butter, and even white chocolate, and the bubbles turn into a bubble bath.
I was restricting my Pop-Tart bubble to Pop-Tarts.
There are three different views of the chocolate chip cookie issue in my family, but one of them is wrong — my wife's version is more nearly a brownie made from chocolate chip cookie dough than a cookie. Our daughter doesn't follow that heresy but her refusal to include either nuts or grape nuts in the dough leads to a cookie that, while good, is suboptimal.
As the saying goes: when you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
Nice piece.
Two comments:
“listening to a progressive channel on satellite radio while driving”
You are either a more masochistic person, or a better person than I am. Or even both 😏
(And be clear, I read plenty of left-of-center mainstream media; I just cannot bear subjecting myself to leftist talk on radio or podcast.)
“The bubble can be defended against any possible evidence by rejecting the concept of objective truth”
You presented the whole piece as being essentially equally applicable to those on the left and on the right. And for the rest of your commentary, I’d agree. But this particular “technique”, at least AFAIK, is utilized exclusively by the leftists today, not by the right.
Historically speaking, it depends on whether you classify Nazis as right or left. Also, to some degree, Catholics. As a matter of doctrine they believe in objective truth but "Certum est quia impossibile est" can be stretched to justify the rejection of strong adverse evidence, however unfair that may be to Tertullian's meaning.
" 'listening to a progressive channel on satellite radio while driving' - You are either a more masochistic person, or a better person than I am. Or even both"
At first glance: yeah. At second glance: there's a weird way to do stuff like this that I've found raises my tolerance considerably. It requires consciously not listening to the content the same way I'd listen to content I'd enjoy, but rather as an academic exercise: here is a source, it is saying X, and we can assume that the source believes X. Why does it believe X? What leads it there?
I notice some progressives do the same thing with conservatives. It leads to books like _What's the Matter With Kansas?_. It can fail even then; bad epistemology can lead to conclusions even more wrongheaded than those held previously, which is why tools like steelmanning are so essential.
On a less controversial note, this method is similar to a game one can play when watching an otherwise boring movie: "You Are the Camera". Instead of trying to make sense of the movie, take in each scene, putting yourself in the mind of the director (or cinematographer), pretending you've set it up, and examining why each scene was put in, why that angle was chosen, why that filter, etc. The general idea is the same: climb one level above the content and ask yourself why it is the content.
Have you heard of alternative facts?