Preference Falsification: Collapse of

The Biden Story

As of June 26th, practically everyone in the Democratic party and the mass media aligned with them took it for granted that Joe Biden should and would be the Democratic nominee. A month later, large parts of the party and most of the media believed that he shouldn’t be, with at least some willing to say so. It was an extraordinarily sudden shift, produced by perhaps ten minutes of his June 27th debate with Donald Trump. Why did it happen?

The best answer I have seen was a post on an internet forum; I quote it in full:

ISTM like the Biden thing is a pretty classic preference falsification cascade. 

A simple model: Most people express agreement with their ingroup's "social truth," the outward expressed consensus within their ingroup, that which Everyone Knows and Everyone Says.  This is how legalizing gay marriage went from obviously a nutty and wrongheaded idea to obviously the only decent or sensible policy in about a decade — few people were ever expressing a deeply-thought-out opinion about that policy's moral or practical benefits, they were mostly just saying what was expected of them.  In 2020, we saw a huge sweep of various bits of a formerly obscure racial ideology through mainstream journalists and writers and public personalities.  I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that very few of those prominent people suddenly read a bunch of works on critical race theory and discovered the genius of Ibrahim X Kendi all at once.  Instead, the social truth changed, and so those people changed what ideas they expressed.  Perhaps they didn't/don't have strong beliefs in that area, the way I don't have many strong beliefs about fashion. 

Suppose proper interview attire for men suddenly transitions from a jacket and tie to a toga and sandals.  That would seem weird to me, but I wouldn't actually care enough to oppose it.  My guess is that for very many people, religious, political, philosophical, and even scientific and historical ideas or claims work this way.  A few theologians care deeply about whether Jesus was always with the Father or was the Father's first creation, everyone else just chooses a side and coordinates with them.  Hell, questions like "are there important physical differences between women and men" can get this sort of widespread switch in public statements.

Everyone is playing a game where they are rewarded for staying in synch with the social truth in their ingroup.  (For journalists, the ingroup is mainstream media journalists and much of the coordination happens on Twitter.)  When the social truth becomes "America is the most racist society in history and is based entirely on white supremacism," a few literal-minded weirdos think "wait, how does that make sense" and get cancelled, but normies quietly add "filoque" to the Nicene Creed/swap from opening meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance to opening them with land acknowledgements and wait for the next change in social truth.

In this model, showing each individual journalist/pundit evidence of Biden's apparent incapacity in private might not change the social truth.  After all, everyone in your ingroup still says Biden's sharp as a tack and claims otherwise are Republican disinformation, so apparently the social truth is that Biden is sharp as a tack.  But a big public event (the debate) where every journalist/pundit knows that every other journalist/pundit saw the same evidence, that can change the social truth.  What do I think you're going to say is the truth tomorrow?  Well, you've seen this evidence, but also, you know everyone else saw it, so you probably expect others to flip, so you'll probably flip, so I should also flip so I stay in synch with social truth. (albatross11 on Data Secrets Lox)

Dan Kahan of Yale Law School has done research on the pattern of beliefs about issues such as evolution or climate change, beliefs that link to group identity. One of his conclusions is that the more intellectually able someone is, the more likely he is to agree with his group, whether that means believing in evolution or not believing in it. That makes little sense if you model individuals as truth seekers; truth seeking should cause people’s beliefs to converge towards truth, faster the abler their intellect. It makes more sense if you model them as utility maximizers.

Dan is a professor at Yale law school. If he pointed out that there is no good reason to expect the distribution of intellectual abilities to be the same for men as for women, hence no good reason to interpret unequal outcomes as due to discrimination, he would suffer significant social costs. If he made the same point in the context of racial differences, the costs would be more than merely significant, just as acknowledging that there is good evidence for evolution would have undesirable effects on the interactions of a small-town Baptist minister with his colleagues and parishioners. The cleverer he is, the better he, professor or minister, will be at explaining away things he does not want to believe. If we imagine the typical person asking himself not what is true but what it is in his interest to believe, Dan’s observations make perfect sense, what we would expect from rational self-interest.

Now apply the same logic to beliefs about Biden. As long as the accepted orthodoxy among Democrats is that Biden is in fine shape, fully competent to be president for another four years, that any purported evidence of mental failure is Republican propaganda, it is in the interest of a Democrat to believe it too. What matters is not what is true but what the relevant reference group claims to believe.

Another Falsification Collapse?

The explanation of the collapse of the bogus consensus on Biden may be relevant to the future of the other preference falsification equilibrium that Albatross discusses, the current Woke orthodoxy. Are there plausible futures where that too would collapse?

Currently wokeism has support from the federal government and parts of the court system — pressure by the Department of Education on universities, the threat of lawsuits against companies insufficiently diverse, the understanding that visible support for DEI endears a firm or individual to the federal powers that be. The election of Trump, if it happens, is probably not enough to bring wokeism down, wasn’t the first time he won. The election of Trump combined with Republican control of Congress and a competent use of the resulting political power to give conservatives control of the federal bureaucracy, more or less what Project 2025 proposes, might do it. If the current situation is, like the belief in Biden’s competence, a preference falsification equilibrium, if enough of the people who are woke because woke is the thing to be see it as the wave of the past instead of the future, …

Interestingly, word is that my super-liberal employer will pivot away from DEI if Trump wins the election, since we do so much government work. (Post online)

There is another orthodoxy which I would be at least as happy to see collapse — climate catastrophism. It too is believed not because there is good reason to think it true but because it is a social truth it is in people’s interest to accept.¹ Unfortunately I see no plausible shock that could bring that one down, not even one as unlikely as a competent Trump administration. The failure of any particular prophecy of doom can always be dealt with by pushing the prophesied date a little farther into the future.

P.S. It occurs to me that the abrupt change in Gavin Newsom’s attitude to the homeless may be another cascade. A lot of people were unhappy about encampments and associated low level crime but as long as there was no simple way of getting rid of them everyone treated them as victims to be protected rather than as free loaders on the public land since nobody wanted to be seen as the villain. The Supreme Court decision was the trigger for the politically popular change.

Once everyone is the villain nobody is.

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1. For my defense of that claim see my past posts on climate, in particular Does Climate Catastrophe Pass the Giggle Test?