It seems to me that what Albratross is describing there is simply "conformism". There is a difference.
Conformism: I believe X because other people believe X.
Preference falsification: I privately believe X while publicly making it appear as if I believe Y.
Using the legalization of gay marriage as an example of "preference falsification" would imply that people were privately in favor of legalizing gay marriage but misrepresented their belief as not favoring it, and then, at some point, stopped misrepresenting their true belief (which supposedly explain the legalization). Is this really the dynamic that took place?
Conformism illustrates that our belief-formation mechanisms do not function exclusively to represent reality and that they are sensitive to the consequences of belief acquisition. The reality of conformism implies that some of those consequences are social ones. More here: https://triangulation.substack.com/p/how-beliefs-become-signals
As to Albratross' claim that the debate made it common knowledge that Biden was "naked" (i.e. mentally incompetent) which supposedly explains Democrats' change of hearts regarding Biden's candidacy, here's a different take: the debate and its aftermath made it clear to key players that with Biden around they could not control the conversation: everyone would talk all the time about Biden's gaffs. Even if he is elected once again, everybody would talk about it. He would be a laughing stock. So in that sense, Biden stepping aside was not about Democrats suddenly realizing that Biden's cognitive state was not up to the task of the second mandate--it is about realizing that they would not be able to control the conversation. By making Biden step aside, the Democrats are effectively eliminating the Schelling point around which the opposition and the critics can coordinate and mobilize. In a corrupt country, a government does not fire its corrupt minister necessarily because the prime minister is not corrupt and because the corruption scandal has been unearthed, but because as long as the minister is in that government, the media and the opposition have a lot of ammunition to attack them.
I know I'm a bit late to this, but I do think you are right about the distinction.
With preference falsification, you're in a situation where people believe X but say not-X, because everyone else says not-X and deviating has a cost. Timur Kuran talked about the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. You think Communism is bad, but you believe you are in the minority and so say Communism is good. But in reality, everyone thinks Communism is bad but says Communism is good. There's a coordination problem. Then there's a signal that, in fact, others might agree with you, so you express that Communism is bad, which intensifies that signal to others. The cascade rapidly changes social reality.
It would be like if you worked with a bunch of judgmental vegetarians and you love hamburgers. You might lie and tell people you hate hamburgers and order Tofu, which you prefer less, and signal that you're a judgmental vegetarian, too. But then you find out your boss has a Slim Jim in their purse, and everyone admits they only ordered Tofu because they thought everyone else was vegetarian. Everyone is better off now that they can order hamburgers without being judged.
But if you, and everyone, were indifferent between hamburger and tofu, no cascade would take place because there's no individual reward for 'defecting' and getting to eat hamburgers.
The collapse of Biden's support fit preference falsification because, privately, everyone thought Biden was too old but wouldn't express it publicly until a signal (the debate) changed how acceptable it was to express your private belief.
The gay marriage story is an information cascade, but not a preference falsification (again, as you noted, unless people's private beliefs contradicted their public statements). Preference falsification *includes* an information cascade, but that information cascade has to be driven by people expressing their true preferences. It's really hard to distinguish between the two looking only at revealed preferences, though.
Yes, your and Timur Kuran's examples seem to me as clear cases of what I associate with the notion of "preference falsification," unlike some of the cases used by Albatross and David (some of which are simply cases of conformism without any meaningful "falsification" going on).
"The collapse of Biden's support fit preference falsification because, privately, everyone thought Biden was too old but wouldn't express it publicly until a signal (the debate) changed how acceptable it was to express your private belief."
Privately believing that Biden is unfit to be POTUS while publicly making opposite claims would be a case of preference falsification, although do note that in David's model those people _believed_ that Biden was fit to be president:
"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."
I think preferences falsification, or perhaps just belief falsification, is a bit applicable here, although I agree that many people simply believe whatever others say because it is what is normal and high status to believe. If the question is why people who should know better don't, then falsification seems to be appropriate. I don't think anyone with exposure to actual high functioning leaders or executives would look at Biden and say "Yea, he is totally on top of things." Now, if a person just never sees the videos of Biden wandering off, shaking hands with ghosts, asking if people who are dead are currently in the audience, it makes sense they are just not bothering to find out and saying what others say, but when people who pay attention see these videos and say "No, he seems fine to me," there is something more going on as their brain tries to rationalize (consciously or unconsciously) their current preferences and new information, and how to avoid the cognitive dissonance.
I think you hit the nail exactly on the head on the common knowledge point. So long as they could hide the more egregious Bidenisms they were fine, but once it was obvious the puppet wasn't running the show and was in no way able to do so even if he tried he had to go. It wasn't that no one in positions that matter didn't know he was well over the horizon of senility, it was that suddenly everyone else could blatantly see it, and it would all be downhill from there.
As far as the acceptance of gay marriage goes, I don't think the guy David Friedman quoted was saying people previously believed in it but were waiting for the in crowd to make it socially acceptable. I think he was saying that this was a case in which people held no really strong beliefs and were thus easily able to switch positions once it became the norm. But I also think that people of both sexes want to be sure no one thinks they're gay, so to be against gay marriage is a way of affirming that you're not gay yourself. I think there were a lot of gay people in the media and in politics who made a mighty effort to be understood as real people with ordinary lives. For the rest of us, it didn't cost much to go along once this case was made so clearly. The media may have led the charge because they either had many gay friends or because they are able to embrace many sides of an issue. Open-mindedness is necessary to their craft. So their tolerance became ours because they were so good at explaining it.
" I don't think the guy David Friedman quoted was saying people previously believed in it but were waiting for the in crowd to make it socially acceptable. I think he was saying that this was a case in which people held no really strong beliefs and were thus easily able to switch positions once it became the norm. "
Also, note the the potential problem with saying "people switched positions once it became the norm". What is the "norm"? Presumably, something like "most of people behaving in a certain way". But that is precisely what is in need of explanation. You need a definition of the "norm" that avoids tautological explanations such as "People switched positions once people switched positions".
'Using the legalization of gay marriage as an example of "preference falsification" would imply that people were privately in favor of legalizing gay marriage but misrepresented their belief as not favoring it, and then, at some point, stopped misrepresenting their true belief (which supposedly explain the legalization). Is this really the dynamic that took place?'
It's more accurate to state that support shifted intergenerationally. Gen X are probably the most politically apathetic generation in history- university professors used to bemoan the fact that we weren't interested in going to protests. We were interested in going to raves, and far from being apolitical, with hindsight, our defining feature was probably civic libertarianism. In this sense, the real problem for conservatives was that the government had gradually encroached into what was essentially a religious institution.
I also think there was a shift in the older generation, which wouldn't have happened if LGBT had shifted into authoritarian mode earlier (and is now reversing back, somewhat, especially amongst the young, because of said authoritarianism and the way intersectionalism plays favourites). This came about from knowing homosexuals who were perfectly sensible in every other respect. Our local publican was gay as a three bob note, and my dad mellowed considerably as a result (the guy was hilarious- people used to come from 30 miles away to experience his caustic wit). Sadly, this demographic seems to be on the decline.
Part of it may be that when most homosexuals are closeted, you don't have as many opportunities to see that they are normal people. I am pretty sure that one of my parents' closest friends was a lesbian. She was someone who I and my sister knew and liked, but it just didn't occur to me at the time what the pattern of her life implied.
The assumption is not that people were privately in favor of legalizing gay marriage but that most of them didn't really have an opinion, never having thought seriously about the issue, so expressed what they saw as the respectable view of the subject. I think Albatross makes that pretty clear.
If they didn't have an opinion (or preference), what exactly was "falsified" (i.e. misrepresented)? The very concept of "preference falsification" assumes that there is a private belief/preference that is being altered for public consumption.
Albatross' claim was not so much that they did not hold a (pro-gay marriage) belief; rather, it was more that the belief wasn't deeply-thought-out. The claim concerns *how* the belief was formed, not whether there was a belief or not.
This is why I stated government encroachment above, It's in Lady Liberty's nature to not bother others, if they're not bothering you. If they had attempted to FORCE churches to perform gay marriage ceremonies, it would have been a bloodbath.
If something were able to bring down climate catastrophism, my money would be on the removal of subsidies for "green" technology, and possibly recycling. I think once people actually have to pay the full price of renewable energy, recycling things that make no sense, and all of the other so called solutions to climate catastrophe, the desire to go through the rituals will drop significantly. People will rationalize why they don't want to pay through the nose for such things accordingly.
I haven't seen the obvious argument being made by the Republicans — that there is a connection between a party that says it wants to cut the use of fossil fuels and gasoline becoming very expensive. That's a case where people are paying, and object to it, but I don't think the link to climate issues is clear to them.
That's a good point... I wonder if they just figure people understand that? It always seemed obvious to me, too, but I suppose now that you mention it the connection might not be obvious to non-economists, or people with a certain bent in how they think about this stuff.
Yes, fiscal reality. Current energy bills are already exorbitant (I live in northern CA and prices on my last bill are 54/64 cents per kwh; it was 12 cents in April 2007, the oldest statement I have), and trying to pay trillions a year just won't be acceptable.
People are quite willing to get free stuff if someone else pays for it, but when they get the bill themselves, it suddenly doesn't look free any more.
Reliability is another brick wall. Two winters ago, I had to run my generator 19 times November-April. "Oh, you live in the boonies, what do you expect?" Unfortunately for city folk, when power has to be shut down simply because it doesn't exist, there's a lot more people in cities, and it's hard to imagine all those apartments running generators on their balconies.
Indeed. Caring about things for social status is common when it is cheap, but once it starts to cost money people start to look real hard at the science.
The problem is that there is no incentive to get it right since how I vote has no perceptible effect on policy. My optimal tactic is to go along with the current orthodoxy for social reasons, however much it raises my energy bill, since I can control what I say, cannot control what the state or federal government does.
The mechanism you describe works only to the extent that people believe in the democratic myth, that if I change how I vote the government will change what it does. In that context it is a useful myth, since if many people believe it and vote accordingly what the government does may change.
Yes, admittedly killing the climate cult by removing the subsidies for green tech is pretty close to assuming the metaphorical can opener. Which is to say the subsidies are probably the point of the cult for the leaders (that and power) so getting rid of the subsidies before getting rid of the cult is going to be rather difficult.
If it could be done, and remain as such for a while, I think thinks like solar panels up north would be such obvious bad ideas financially that people would walk away from the notion that they are morally superior. There is a limit to how much nonsense and cost people will put themselves through for something they don't deeply believe in, and "look, we just can't afford this anymore" is a pretty good excuse for not doing the accepted ritual. I think it would pretty quickly come down to just a few die hard believers in the catastrophe cult and a whole lot of "luke warmers" saying "well, I dunno, maybe it is true, but it seems fine, and who wants to spend five times as much for wind turbine power?"
But yea, that does require getting the legislation/regulation to remove the subsidies through FIRST. That might be a neat trick.
The case I was pointing at doesn't involve subsidies. The government does various things that make gasoline more expensive, doesn't subsidize it, and individuals pay the higher price.
Subsidizing it would destroy the objective of getting people to use less fossil fuel.
I'm sorry, I thought the comment on gas prices and the one on voting was separate. I agree, subsidizing fuel use would ruin the incentive to use less fossil fuel. Likewise, people would stop the ethanol nonsense and apparently change their minds about it being a good idea once it stopped being subsidized. Although it seems that many people have already done that, so it may be that those that are left are exactly the sort of low information voters who are not likely to bother to find out the difference, or are even much aware that there is something to find out about.
Recycling gets a bad rap because it's generally poorly run. On the local news, there was one campaigner who claimed that a 3p tax on each plastic bottle was all that was needed to recycle plastic bottles in local industrial units. It would probably be cheaper for the smaller bottles.
I've been following Michael Shellenberger on the progressive homelessness disease. For a start, the system the progressives are using in no way resembles the Portuguese system. The Dutch actually give people who use drugs on the streets a choice between treatment and prison, and also utilise 'intervention' techniques.
Most people wouldn't be in favour of this, but most people with experience in the field would know from the literature and practical examples, like Sweden or Switzerland that it could work. Offer a third option. A voluntary workhouse system paired with legally authorised and supervised drug use. In the Swedish heroin program 70% of users held down a job of some description. Pairing this type of system to a centralised location like a recycling plant, allows for cheap prefab housing, food provision and a legal safer outlet for drug use. I only argue it because the success rate on treatment/rehab is pretty abysmal. It doesn't tackle the underlying problem of people wanting to check out of their own lives.
A voluntary workhouse system would give people a routine, stability, a sense of satisfaction from work, would be relatively cost neutral and have the benefit of stealing a huge amount of money from the gangs and cartels, potentially forcing them to somewhat raise the price of their products. Itinerant frequent users are a huge market for cartels- removing this market fucks with their business model. The Swedish system didn't force treatment on people, but all of the sites had a room set aside for the users to speak with a professional, if they wanted to get clean.
I'm not absolutely confident in Kling's hypothesis, but I was quite surprised when I heard that Biden's team accepted a June 2024 debate, and Kling's post is still the only thing I've read that seems to explain that timing.
Seeing stories about Newsom pressuring California cities to clear homeless camps, I wonder if this is another cascade, if everyone wanted to drive the homeless out of their state but nobody would say so, with the result that California spent a lot of money on the homeless. The trigger was presumably the Supreme Court decision. As long as there was no obvious way of pushing the homeless out nobody admitted to wanting to, everyone treated them as victims to be helped not as freeloaders to be gotten rid of. When that changed ...
After 2024 there's 2028, and Newsom is not Harris, he needs at least some achievements. This could be something very small number of people would be opposed to (who would vote Dem ticket anyway at the end) and now that the courts no longer block it, it seems like a very cheap and prudent move.
I believe that, as of a month ago, practically all ideological leftists would say that they were against what he is now doing. My memory of the left wing response to the Supreme Court decision is that it was very negative.
If all ideological leftists are against him he probably can't be nominated, so your interpretation only works if my conjecture is correct, if leftist views of homeless people and how to deal with them are rapidly changing.
I don't think the ideological leftists would ban him on that single issue. Harris did much worse in her work as a prosecutor and nobody even mentions it now. If it will be decided that Newsom is the most suitable candidate (not a given of course, but he has a strong position), this would be easily forgotten by the left. The homeless aren't a strong voting bloc one has to be afraid of. However, since Presidential election is not held only in California, he will also need to show something to the moderates, and "cleaning up California" would be a nice thing to show (conveniently forgetting he was also presiding over the time that led to California being in the dire need of cleaning in the first place, but triumphantly solving the problems they themselves created is a common business for politicians, and here he can also shift the blame for the past problems to the courts).
This seems like a good theory, and it explains why I was so wrong about the debate. When I saw the debate I thought “this is just Biden being Biden”. There was no new information revealed in that debate about his mental health that wouldn’t have been obvious to anyone paying attention to his gradual decline, especially for the past 12-24 months, so I thought this debate wasn’t going to change anything.
But, knowing that everyone else knew and had seen the same thing made it very hard for Democrats to maintain the ex-ante “social truth” equilibrium. I wasn’t within that equilibrium, so I didn’t realize this was the game everyone was playing.
Trump's victory seemed to further empower DEI and other far-left garbage the first time around. We've seen more criticism of this stuff from outside the right during Biden's term than we did while Trump was in office. I would speculate that this is due to the perceived need to present a unified front against the bad orange man so long as he is occupying the White House. Republicans having any power is an all-hands-on-deck emergency for the left so they have no time to waste policing their own coalition while it's going on.
There was a similar dynamic with QAnon, which liberals simply didn't want to admit. Mostly, QAnon loyalty was about whether the Democrat party machine was composed of bad people. Support for QAnon might've elicited a 41% positive response at its height. But if one bothered to quiz people about specific aspects of the QAnon Conspiracy, support was generally closer to 4%
A similar story unfurls when one polls Democrats on whether they are willing to be trans inclusive in their dating. Women in particular are less likely to be willing to be trans inclusive in their dating...
RE Climate Alarmism - (catastrophism is too difficult to type and say) - I think the materials do not exist to arm the non-conformists with something to defend their beliefs. For example, when I see someone being a climate alarmist on X, I would not want to respond with a simple assertion or telling them to read a book (e.g. False Alarm, Fossil Future). Really just need a website that clearly and calmly presents the non-alarmist point of view, addressing the obvious objections. Does such a thing exist?
Energy Talking Points (https://energytalkingpoints.com/) is somewhat close (or maybe some specific posts on it would do the trick?) but that seems focused on energy policy and not on specifically addressing climate alarmists. Alex Epstein does do great work on that front though.
I start with not trusting liars. Point out all the failed predictions: no snow, no Arctic ice, extinct polar bears and penguins, Pacific Islands gone instead of larger, dead coral reefs. People with truth on their side don't need to lie so much so often.
Then there are the several glaciers whose melting retreat uncovered forests and tools which show it was warmer 1500 years ago, Romans growing olive trees higher up mountains than now, and record crop yields and shrinking deserts due to more CO2.
Climate science is inexact, and trying to explain any of it leads to eyes glazing over. I show people wattsupwiththat.com if they want to know more, but discussing the science in detail is not useful.
Yes, climate catastrophism is going to hang on. It is more than the result of a preference cascade and has taken on several qualities of religion. The only way it is likely to be downgraded in attention is if its place is taken by another form of environmental catastrophism. Climate catastrophism also seems designed to be help expand government power.
I don't think it's a coincidence that climate catastrophism took off after the Soviet Union fall apart and the movers and shakers wanted a new existential crisis. Keeping the rubes riled up and panicking has been a tried and true political method for a long long time. It's just another reason to hate monopoly government.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” (Mencken)
To be fair, I think that Western thinkers paired it with trade involvement policy- the idea that uniting behind a global cause might help prevent wars (plus, it was a convenient cudgel with which to threaten Russia). The problem is they were completely wrong- as they were about any number of subjects. If anything, the Western insistence on prioritising climate change over economic development is a key consideration in the Thucydides Trap- if anything more likely to cause WWIII, than prevent it.
The problem with climate is that is has an inbuilt flawed availability heuristic- weather. It's why every single BBC article one reads on the subject contains a very specific chose of words- MAY be related to climate change. Most people haven't been reading the IPCC reports or know that the RCP 8,5 model was always implausible, and has long since become obsolescent through technological and economic changes.
There is also the problem with confirmation bias. People start out fairly rational when they first form a belief on a particular topic, but from that point onwards they are motivated to find more proof to support what is essentially a belief with a little evidence to support it. They don't subject further proof to healthy standards of scepticism.
AR5 was still quite rational for at least some of the sections. The economics summary is particularly hilarious- admitting that climate change was a long-term problem, that it would have noticeable effects by 2100, but then going onto to state that regulatory environments, trade, demographic change and aging populations, etc would all have more significant impacts!
The Honest Broker (the Roger Pielke one) is a pretty good source on Substack.
Ordinary liberals are already pivoting away from the extreme elements of the woke faith. I predict that this would be accelerated by the defeat of Trump and slowed by his victory. For liberals, it is easier to gradually forget they ever heard of Kendi and took him seriously than to be forced into a loyalty dilemma.
The one useful thing we might get from the current SCOTUS is progress toward the end of discrimination and clarification that enforcement of equity is unconstitutional. Less party politics would help that.
Wokeism became more dominant when George Floyd was killed and such events override who's in the White House. These days, people are witnessing men getting gold medals at the Olympics for beating up on women, and it's not lost on people, either. I still think that ordinary liberals can save face better when they feel in charge. However, it's also possible that the equivalent of my feeling about Republicans applies: we have to hope that Republicans will abandon their autocracy-and-lies platform after they lose the next election and dump Trump. The analogy would suggest that the Democrats just need to get whooped or they won't learn their to lesson, either. I'm not sure it's equivalent, though.
If I correctly understand the story, the main case of what you are describing as men beating up on women was a "man" who was morphologically female, had a female body, but turned out to be genetically male. That's a much less clear case than a man who claims to be a woman or even a man who has been surgically altered to a facsimile of a woman. Given the existence of people who are not unambiguously male or female, it's unclear how they should be classified for athletic purposes.
I loved Timur Kuran's book, but I'm not sure that many people actively, consciously falsify their preferences. It seem more likely that people are just conformist and sincerely start believing what those around them believe and what the social consensus seems to be. Or a "self-deception" situation a la Robert Trivers where people "lie" while being convinced that they are not doing so
It's also hard to go back and rethink something you've already settled; when have conditions changed enough to invalidate the old result? Like changing oil in my car: I changed it already, now I gotta do it again? The tires I can eyeball every time I walk out to it. The oil takes an effort, which is acceptable when filling the tank, or I can rely on some dash idiot light.
I think comparing the press to dash idiot lights is pretty realistic.
Except in the Biden case, it didn't happen this way. There were a significant time after the disastrous debate where Biden claimed only Lord Almighty may force him to resign (July 6) and at the same time, a number of press propagandists (I am not using the term "journalist" here, reserving it to rare people who still do what once was the journalistic work) wrote a long, well argued articles about how anybody who thinks Biden is about to resign in a complete fool, ignorant in basics of American politics.
What was happening is not that the press have had some kind of truth revealed to them simultaneously, and could not deny it any longer. What happensd is that there was a power struggle in the top of Dem party, and once Biden group lost, and Biden has been forced to resign, the press propagandists switched from serving Biden, who was in power, to serving the next group, who is in power now. The concept of "truth", social or otherwise, has never even entrered in the equation. They didn't realize anything, they just received the new directives. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia not because some spectascular event revealed it and caused some kind of preference cascade, but because this is what the Party tells is the truth, and there's no other possible truth and never has been.
It would be very interesting to figure out why so many people voluntarily surrendered their mental facilities to the service of the Party, but the mechanism of "changing the social truth" that has been described does not seem to be describing what actually happened.
In the strictest sense he was, of course, "persuaded" - nobody put a gun to his head or held him in a headlock while others typed the famous Xwitter announcement under his account. But this persuasion was of the sort of the "offer he can not refuse" - if he didn't let himself be persuaded, the consequences would be dire - his campaign would be completely ruined and he would likely be subject to 25 amendment removal. I do not see any indication that it was a result of some soul-searching process on Biden's side - rather, the other side has been steadily escalating the level of threats and pressure to the point where Biden could not bear it anymore. The press started making threatening noises and notice his cognitive state, the donors turned their backs, and in private, as I heard, very pointed threats (including the mention of the number of doom - 25) were surely heard. Can it be called "forced"? I think it can - before this massive pressure was applied, Biden had zero intent to get out, neither did his team. After, he was out. I think "forced" is an adequate description of that.
If you have arguments, make them. What is your explanation of the sudden shift in Democrats' view of Biden? Was his condition much worse on June 27th than in the previous months? If not, was a problem obvious to viewers of the debate not seen by high status Democrats who observed Biden at first hand over the previous months and knew others who did so?
If it wasn't a preference falsification cascade, what was it? Most the leadership of a party reversing their view of who should be president in less than a month requires an explanation.
The problem I have is with your conclusion paragraph that asserts things about woke orthodoxy and DEI being merely a social contagion.
We have the records of right wing activists themselves, Rufo mainly just outright detailing how he would weaponize various terms like Critical Race Theory and DEI and broadly associate the entire left with a very loose mish mash of just stuff that is kind of meh.
Your usage of those terms is a social contagion phenomenon although it is very much contrived. No one even cared about DEI until like 2 years ago and now it is one of the core problems of our time. How real the issue is in your mind is totally manufactured.
I have another explanation for the current gnashing of teeth about the oppressor/oppressed framework and woke in general that people on your side hardly grapple with. It is a natural and atavistic framework. I see people generate these large tweet threads about oppressor/oppressed framework at the core of wokism and we utterly evil/destructive it is. Then, a couple of tweets later they will use the same framework implicitly to cheer on the Denver Nuggets to beat the Lakers or Jon Snow to kick Ramsey Bolton's ass because they are underdogs.
I checked my old blog for references to DEI and Woke. No references to DEI more than two years ago but multiple negative references to "woke" going back more than four years. References to "affirmative action" and "diversity," earlier euphemisms for racial preferences, go back more than seventeen years. So I don't think my concern with these issues is due to Rufo.
Are you arguing that support for DEI is not, as Albatross described it, a position that rose very rapidly to orthodoxy? That it doesn't have significant effects? That it did rise fast but the reason was new and convincing arguments for it? I'm not sure what substance of my argument you are disagreeing with.
DEI effects are assertions. No one has ever done any work to demonstrate a material impact on the economy. My general intuition of a white male having to go to BU versus Columbia is of insignificant importance to the economy. It mostly hits on our animal fairness/justice instincts.
Yes, I am claiming this is a contrived issue with very little effect on the "economy". It is in a class of things like, "whatever happened to MS-13" right wing issues.
So you are not disagreeing with anything either I or Albatross wrote. The post wasn't about DEI, it was about preference falsification and its collapse.
You just want to record your disagreement with his, and my, opposition to DEI.
Aside from the effect on college admissions, do you think the existence of an orthodoxy in college employment, requiring that one hold certain political views in order to be hired as a professor, might have undesirable effects, in particular make it harder to discover errors in the current orthodoxy?
It seems you are describing more than preference falsification in you are characterizing aggregate preferences, what is weakly believed, what is true/false, and which ones can be falsified... Your characterization is wholly different than mine. I see very little importance in the world of affirmative action, DEI, or woke. I consider those issues trivial.
I don't think political views are that important for professordom. I don't think they are that important to firms as well. In your abstract version of errors and orthodoxy; I want all this demonstrated first. The claims on DEI and woke; your side is making the extreme claims with almost no evidence and mostly sounds like "I just don't like it".
Bryan Caplan just made some post about DEI has been working because firms have the "slack" to implement bad policy. There's been a litany of posts attacking him with some argumentation that he would use liberally when it fits stuff he likes: which border on EMH the market has spoken, the easiest explanation is it is efficient, you aren't smarter than firms or the market
I think people hate change and cling to traditions but the media loves it. They hate the rise of Google unless there's the fall of Google. They publicized the war on drugs ad nauseam until they got sick of it, so they next started publicizing attempts at legalization. At first they seemed anti Uber and Lyft, then dropped that pose. They're pushing transgender issues hard because there is still a lot of tradition to reverse. After the health craze came a magazine cover story "Butter is back!" They promoted smoking for decades after scientists knew it was deadly. Reversals make good news copy, the controversial is everything. Especially now.
The model as presented is too simple: what causes a few dissenters voices starting from a position of total minority to start such a cascade? Why don't the few who truly support the status quo speak out as well such as to stem the tide, such as to reach an uneasy equilibrium. Why doesn't it swing like a pendulum? With Biden you will say it's the Schelling point of the debate, but what about gay marriage?
If the model was true the world would look different to what it does.
There has to be some change such that the status quo is no longer an equilibrium. In Albatross's account it was the debate, which made Biden's condition common knowledge — everyone knew it and everyone knew that everyone knew it.
It seems to me that what Albratross is describing there is simply "conformism". There is a difference.
Conformism: I believe X because other people believe X.
Preference falsification: I privately believe X while publicly making it appear as if I believe Y.
Using the legalization of gay marriage as an example of "preference falsification" would imply that people were privately in favor of legalizing gay marriage but misrepresented their belief as not favoring it, and then, at some point, stopped misrepresenting their true belief (which supposedly explain the legalization). Is this really the dynamic that took place?
Conformism illustrates that our belief-formation mechanisms do not function exclusively to represent reality and that they are sensitive to the consequences of belief acquisition. The reality of conformism implies that some of those consequences are social ones. More here: https://triangulation.substack.com/p/how-beliefs-become-signals
As to Albratross' claim that the debate made it common knowledge that Biden was "naked" (i.e. mentally incompetent) which supposedly explains Democrats' change of hearts regarding Biden's candidacy, here's a different take: the debate and its aftermath made it clear to key players that with Biden around they could not control the conversation: everyone would talk all the time about Biden's gaffs. Even if he is elected once again, everybody would talk about it. He would be a laughing stock. So in that sense, Biden stepping aside was not about Democrats suddenly realizing that Biden's cognitive state was not up to the task of the second mandate--it is about realizing that they would not be able to control the conversation. By making Biden step aside, the Democrats are effectively eliminating the Schelling point around which the opposition and the critics can coordinate and mobilize. In a corrupt country, a government does not fire its corrupt minister necessarily because the prime minister is not corrupt and because the corruption scandal has been unearthed, but because as long as the minister is in that government, the media and the opposition have a lot of ammunition to attack them.
I know I'm a bit late to this, but I do think you are right about the distinction.
With preference falsification, you're in a situation where people believe X but say not-X, because everyone else says not-X and deviating has a cost. Timur Kuran talked about the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. You think Communism is bad, but you believe you are in the minority and so say Communism is good. But in reality, everyone thinks Communism is bad but says Communism is good. There's a coordination problem. Then there's a signal that, in fact, others might agree with you, so you express that Communism is bad, which intensifies that signal to others. The cascade rapidly changes social reality.
It would be like if you worked with a bunch of judgmental vegetarians and you love hamburgers. You might lie and tell people you hate hamburgers and order Tofu, which you prefer less, and signal that you're a judgmental vegetarian, too. But then you find out your boss has a Slim Jim in their purse, and everyone admits they only ordered Tofu because they thought everyone else was vegetarian. Everyone is better off now that they can order hamburgers without being judged.
But if you, and everyone, were indifferent between hamburger and tofu, no cascade would take place because there's no individual reward for 'defecting' and getting to eat hamburgers.
The collapse of Biden's support fit preference falsification because, privately, everyone thought Biden was too old but wouldn't express it publicly until a signal (the debate) changed how acceptable it was to express your private belief.
The gay marriage story is an information cascade, but not a preference falsification (again, as you noted, unless people's private beliefs contradicted their public statements). Preference falsification *includes* an information cascade, but that information cascade has to be driven by people expressing their true preferences. It's really hard to distinguish between the two looking only at revealed preferences, though.
Yes, your and Timur Kuran's examples seem to me as clear cases of what I associate with the notion of "preference falsification," unlike some of the cases used by Albatross and David (some of which are simply cases of conformism without any meaningful "falsification" going on).
"The collapse of Biden's support fit preference falsification because, privately, everyone thought Biden was too old but wouldn't express it publicly until a signal (the debate) changed how acceptable it was to express your private belief."
Privately believing that Biden is unfit to be POTUS while publicly making opposite claims would be a case of preference falsification, although do note that in David's model those people _believed_ that Biden was fit to be president:
"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."
Hence, no "falsification".
I think preferences falsification, or perhaps just belief falsification, is a bit applicable here, although I agree that many people simply believe whatever others say because it is what is normal and high status to believe. If the question is why people who should know better don't, then falsification seems to be appropriate. I don't think anyone with exposure to actual high functioning leaders or executives would look at Biden and say "Yea, he is totally on top of things." Now, if a person just never sees the videos of Biden wandering off, shaking hands with ghosts, asking if people who are dead are currently in the audience, it makes sense they are just not bothering to find out and saying what others say, but when people who pay attention see these videos and say "No, he seems fine to me," there is something more going on as their brain tries to rationalize (consciously or unconsciously) their current preferences and new information, and how to avoid the cognitive dissonance.
I think you hit the nail exactly on the head on the common knowledge point. So long as they could hide the more egregious Bidenisms they were fine, but once it was obvious the puppet wasn't running the show and was in no way able to do so even if he tried he had to go. It wasn't that no one in positions that matter didn't know he was well over the horizon of senility, it was that suddenly everyone else could blatantly see it, and it would all be downhill from there.
As far as the acceptance of gay marriage goes, I don't think the guy David Friedman quoted was saying people previously believed in it but were waiting for the in crowd to make it socially acceptable. I think he was saying that this was a case in which people held no really strong beliefs and were thus easily able to switch positions once it became the norm. But I also think that people of both sexes want to be sure no one thinks they're gay, so to be against gay marriage is a way of affirming that you're not gay yourself. I think there were a lot of gay people in the media and in politics who made a mighty effort to be understood as real people with ordinary lives. For the rest of us, it didn't cost much to go along once this case was made so clearly. The media may have led the charge because they either had many gay friends or because they are able to embrace many sides of an issue. Open-mindedness is necessary to their craft. So their tolerance became ours because they were so good at explaining it.
" I don't think the guy David Friedman quoted was saying people previously believed in it but were waiting for the in crowd to make it socially acceptable. I think he was saying that this was a case in which people held no really strong beliefs and were thus easily able to switch positions once it became the norm. "
Yes, of course, but there is no "falsification" going on in that case. See here for clarification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
Also, note the the potential problem with saying "people switched positions once it became the norm". What is the "norm"? Presumably, something like "most of people behaving in a certain way". But that is precisely what is in need of explanation. You need a definition of the "norm" that avoids tautological explanations such as "People switched positions once people switched positions".
Great point.
'Using the legalization of gay marriage as an example of "preference falsification" would imply that people were privately in favor of legalizing gay marriage but misrepresented their belief as not favoring it, and then, at some point, stopped misrepresenting their true belief (which supposedly explain the legalization). Is this really the dynamic that took place?'
It's more accurate to state that support shifted intergenerationally. Gen X are probably the most politically apathetic generation in history- university professors used to bemoan the fact that we weren't interested in going to protests. We were interested in going to raves, and far from being apolitical, with hindsight, our defining feature was probably civic libertarianism. In this sense, the real problem for conservatives was that the government had gradually encroached into what was essentially a religious institution.
I also think there was a shift in the older generation, which wouldn't have happened if LGBT had shifted into authoritarian mode earlier (and is now reversing back, somewhat, especially amongst the young, because of said authoritarianism and the way intersectionalism plays favourites). This came about from knowing homosexuals who were perfectly sensible in every other respect. Our local publican was gay as a three bob note, and my dad mellowed considerably as a result (the guy was hilarious- people used to come from 30 miles away to experience his caustic wit). Sadly, this demographic seems to be on the decline.
Part of it may be that when most homosexuals are closeted, you don't have as many opportunities to see that they are normal people. I am pretty sure that one of my parents' closest friends was a lesbian. She was someone who I and my sister knew and liked, but it just didn't occur to me at the time what the pattern of her life implied.
The assumption is not that people were privately in favor of legalizing gay marriage but that most of them didn't really have an opinion, never having thought seriously about the issue, so expressed what they saw as the respectable view of the subject. I think Albatross makes that pretty clear.
If they didn't have an opinion (or preference), what exactly was "falsified" (i.e. misrepresented)? The very concept of "preference falsification" assumes that there is a private belief/preference that is being altered for public consumption.
Claiming to hold a belief when you really don't is also a form of falsification.
Albatross' claim was not so much that they did not hold a (pro-gay marriage) belief; rather, it was more that the belief wasn't deeply-thought-out. The claim concerns *how* the belief was formed, not whether there was a belief or not.
This is why I stated government encroachment above, It's in Lady Liberty's nature to not bother others, if they're not bothering you. If they had attempted to FORCE churches to perform gay marriage ceremonies, it would have been a bloodbath.
If something were able to bring down climate catastrophism, my money would be on the removal of subsidies for "green" technology, and possibly recycling. I think once people actually have to pay the full price of renewable energy, recycling things that make no sense, and all of the other so called solutions to climate catastrophe, the desire to go through the rituals will drop significantly. People will rationalize why they don't want to pay through the nose for such things accordingly.
I haven't seen the obvious argument being made by the Republicans — that there is a connection between a party that says it wants to cut the use of fossil fuels and gasoline becoming very expensive. That's a case where people are paying, and object to it, but I don't think the link to climate issues is clear to them.
That's a good point... I wonder if they just figure people understand that? It always seemed obvious to me, too, but I suppose now that you mention it the connection might not be obvious to non-economists, or people with a certain bent in how they think about this stuff.
Yes, fiscal reality. Current energy bills are already exorbitant (I live in northern CA and prices on my last bill are 54/64 cents per kwh; it was 12 cents in April 2007, the oldest statement I have), and trying to pay trillions a year just won't be acceptable.
People are quite willing to get free stuff if someone else pays for it, but when they get the bill themselves, it suddenly doesn't look free any more.
Reliability is another brick wall. Two winters ago, I had to run my generator 19 times November-April. "Oh, you live in the boonies, what do you expect?" Unfortunately for city folk, when power has to be shut down simply because it doesn't exist, there's a lot more people in cities, and it's hard to imagine all those apartments running generators on their balconies.
Indeed. Caring about things for social status is common when it is cheap, but once it starts to cost money people start to look real hard at the science.
The problem is that there is no incentive to get it right since how I vote has no perceptible effect on policy. My optimal tactic is to go along with the current orthodoxy for social reasons, however much it raises my energy bill, since I can control what I say, cannot control what the state or federal government does.
The mechanism you describe works only to the extent that people believe in the democratic myth, that if I change how I vote the government will change what it does. In that context it is a useful myth, since if many people believe it and vote accordingly what the government does may change.
Yes, admittedly killing the climate cult by removing the subsidies for green tech is pretty close to assuming the metaphorical can opener. Which is to say the subsidies are probably the point of the cult for the leaders (that and power) so getting rid of the subsidies before getting rid of the cult is going to be rather difficult.
If it could be done, and remain as such for a while, I think thinks like solar panels up north would be such obvious bad ideas financially that people would walk away from the notion that they are morally superior. There is a limit to how much nonsense and cost people will put themselves through for something they don't deeply believe in, and "look, we just can't afford this anymore" is a pretty good excuse for not doing the accepted ritual. I think it would pretty quickly come down to just a few die hard believers in the catastrophe cult and a whole lot of "luke warmers" saying "well, I dunno, maybe it is true, but it seems fine, and who wants to spend five times as much for wind turbine power?"
But yea, that does require getting the legislation/regulation to remove the subsidies through FIRST. That might be a neat trick.
The case I was pointing at doesn't involve subsidies. The government does various things that make gasoline more expensive, doesn't subsidize it, and individuals pay the higher price.
Subsidizing it would destroy the objective of getting people to use less fossil fuel.
I'm sorry, I thought the comment on gas prices and the one on voting was separate. I agree, subsidizing fuel use would ruin the incentive to use less fossil fuel. Likewise, people would stop the ethanol nonsense and apparently change their minds about it being a good idea once it stopped being subsidized. Although it seems that many people have already done that, so it may be that those that are left are exactly the sort of low information voters who are not likely to bother to find out the difference, or are even much aware that there is something to find out about.
Recycling gets a bad rap because it's generally poorly run. On the local news, there was one campaigner who claimed that a 3p tax on each plastic bottle was all that was needed to recycle plastic bottles in local industrial units. It would probably be cheaper for the smaller bottles.
I've been following Michael Shellenberger on the progressive homelessness disease. For a start, the system the progressives are using in no way resembles the Portuguese system. The Dutch actually give people who use drugs on the streets a choice between treatment and prison, and also utilise 'intervention' techniques.
Most people wouldn't be in favour of this, but most people with experience in the field would know from the literature and practical examples, like Sweden or Switzerland that it could work. Offer a third option. A voluntary workhouse system paired with legally authorised and supervised drug use. In the Swedish heroin program 70% of users held down a job of some description. Pairing this type of system to a centralised location like a recycling plant, allows for cheap prefab housing, food provision and a legal safer outlet for drug use. I only argue it because the success rate on treatment/rehab is pretty abysmal. It doesn't tackle the underlying problem of people wanting to check out of their own lives.
A voluntary workhouse system would give people a routine, stability, a sense of satisfaction from work, would be relatively cost neutral and have the benefit of stealing a huge amount of money from the gangs and cartels, potentially forcing them to somewhat raise the price of their products. Itinerant frequent users are a huge market for cartels- removing this market fucks with their business model. The Swedish system didn't force treatment on people, but all of the sites had a room set aside for the users to speak with a professional, if they wanted to get clean.
That's part of the story, but, cui bono? https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/current-thing-the-biden-entourage
I'm not absolutely confident in Kling's hypothesis, but I was quite surprised when I heard that Biden's team accepted a June 2024 debate, and Kling's post is still the only thing I've read that seems to explain that timing.
Seeing stories about Newsom pressuring California cities to clear homeless camps, I wonder if this is another cascade, if everyone wanted to drive the homeless out of their state but nobody would say so, with the result that California spent a lot of money on the homeless. The trigger was presumably the Supreme Court decision. As long as there was no obvious way of pushing the homeless out nobody admitted to wanting to, everyone treated them as victims to be helped not as freeloaders to be gotten rid of. When that changed ...
After 2024 there's 2028, and Newsom is not Harris, he needs at least some achievements. This could be something very small number of people would be opposed to (who would vote Dem ticket anyway at the end) and now that the courts no longer block it, it seems like a very cheap and prudent move.
I believe that, as of a month ago, practically all ideological leftists would say that they were against what he is now doing. My memory of the left wing response to the Supreme Court decision is that it was very negative.
If all ideological leftists are against him he probably can't be nominated, so your interpretation only works if my conjecture is correct, if leftist views of homeless people and how to deal with them are rapidly changing.
I don't think the ideological leftists would ban him on that single issue. Harris did much worse in her work as a prosecutor and nobody even mentions it now. If it will be decided that Newsom is the most suitable candidate (not a given of course, but he has a strong position), this would be easily forgotten by the left. The homeless aren't a strong voting bloc one has to be afraid of. However, since Presidential election is not held only in California, he will also need to show something to the moderates, and "cleaning up California" would be a nice thing to show (conveniently forgetting he was also presiding over the time that led to California being in the dire need of cleaning in the first place, but triumphantly solving the problems they themselves created is a common business for politicians, and here he can also shift the blame for the past problems to the courts).
This seems like a good theory, and it explains why I was so wrong about the debate. When I saw the debate I thought “this is just Biden being Biden”. There was no new information revealed in that debate about his mental health that wouldn’t have been obvious to anyone paying attention to his gradual decline, especially for the past 12-24 months, so I thought this debate wasn’t going to change anything.
But, knowing that everyone else knew and had seen the same thing made it very hard for Democrats to maintain the ex-ante “social truth” equilibrium. I wasn’t within that equilibrium, so I didn’t realize this was the game everyone was playing.
Trump's victory seemed to further empower DEI and other far-left garbage the first time around. We've seen more criticism of this stuff from outside the right during Biden's term than we did while Trump was in office. I would speculate that this is due to the perceived need to present a unified front against the bad orange man so long as he is occupying the White House. Republicans having any power is an all-hands-on-deck emergency for the left so they have no time to waste policing their own coalition while it's going on.
Ah, the "cornered animal" effect.
There was a similar dynamic with QAnon, which liberals simply didn't want to admit. Mostly, QAnon loyalty was about whether the Democrat party machine was composed of bad people. Support for QAnon might've elicited a 41% positive response at its height. But if one bothered to quiz people about specific aspects of the QAnon Conspiracy, support was generally closer to 4%
A similar story unfurls when one polls Democrats on whether they are willing to be trans inclusive in their dating. Women in particular are less likely to be willing to be trans inclusive in their dating...
It's tribal loyalty.
RE Climate Alarmism - (catastrophism is too difficult to type and say) - I think the materials do not exist to arm the non-conformists with something to defend their beliefs. For example, when I see someone being a climate alarmist on X, I would not want to respond with a simple assertion or telling them to read a book (e.g. False Alarm, Fossil Future). Really just need a website that clearly and calmly presents the non-alarmist point of view, addressing the obvious objections. Does such a thing exist?
Energy Talking Points (https://energytalkingpoints.com/) is somewhat close (or maybe some specific posts on it would do the trick?) but that seems focused on energy policy and not on specifically addressing climate alarmists. Alex Epstein does do great work on that front though.
It's not a web site, but I have discussed a lot of it here:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Sorted_Posts.html#Climate
Oh wow this is great, thanks for sharing
wattsupwiththat.com has lots of resources
I start with not trusting liars. Point out all the failed predictions: no snow, no Arctic ice, extinct polar bears and penguins, Pacific Islands gone instead of larger, dead coral reefs. People with truth on their side don't need to lie so much so often.
Then there are the several glaciers whose melting retreat uncovered forests and tools which show it was warmer 1500 years ago, Romans growing olive trees higher up mountains than now, and record crop yields and shrinking deserts due to more CO2.
Climate science is inexact, and trying to explain any of it leads to eyes glazing over. I show people wattsupwiththat.com if they want to know more, but discussing the science in detail is not useful.
Yes, climate catastrophism is going to hang on. It is more than the result of a preference cascade and has taken on several qualities of religion. The only way it is likely to be downgraded in attention is if its place is taken by another form of environmental catastrophism. Climate catastrophism also seems designed to be help expand government power.
I don't think it's a coincidence that climate catastrophism took off after the Soviet Union fall apart and the movers and shakers wanted a new existential crisis. Keeping the rubes riled up and panicking has been a tried and true political method for a long long time. It's just another reason to hate monopoly government.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” (Mencken)
To be fair, I think that Western thinkers paired it with trade involvement policy- the idea that uniting behind a global cause might help prevent wars (plus, it was a convenient cudgel with which to threaten Russia). The problem is they were completely wrong- as they were about any number of subjects. If anything, the Western insistence on prioritising climate change over economic development is a key consideration in the Thucydides Trap- if anything more likely to cause WWIII, than prevent it.
The problem with climate is that is has an inbuilt flawed availability heuristic- weather. It's why every single BBC article one reads on the subject contains a very specific chose of words- MAY be related to climate change. Most people haven't been reading the IPCC reports or know that the RCP 8,5 model was always implausible, and has long since become obsolescent through technological and economic changes.
There is also the problem with confirmation bias. People start out fairly rational when they first form a belief on a particular topic, but from that point onwards they are motivated to find more proof to support what is essentially a belief with a little evidence to support it. They don't subject further proof to healthy standards of scepticism.
AR5 was still quite rational for at least some of the sections. The economics summary is particularly hilarious- admitting that climate change was a long-term problem, that it would have noticeable effects by 2100, but then going onto to state that regulatory environments, trade, demographic change and aging populations, etc would all have more significant impacts!
The Honest Broker (the Roger Pielke one) is a pretty good source on Substack.
Ordinary liberals are already pivoting away from the extreme elements of the woke faith. I predict that this would be accelerated by the defeat of Trump and slowed by his victory. For liberals, it is easier to gradually forget they ever heard of Kendi and took him seriously than to be forced into a loyalty dilemma.
The one useful thing we might get from the current SCOTUS is progress toward the end of discrimination and clarification that enforcement of equity is unconstitutional. Less party politics would help that.
Maybe. Unfortunately we don't get to observe two worlds, in one of which Trump won, in one lost.
His first term vs Biden's might be some evidence. Did wokeism become more or less dominant 2016-2020? 2020-2024?
Wokeism became more dominant when George Floyd was killed and such events override who's in the White House. These days, people are witnessing men getting gold medals at the Olympics for beating up on women, and it's not lost on people, either. I still think that ordinary liberals can save face better when they feel in charge. However, it's also possible that the equivalent of my feeling about Republicans applies: we have to hope that Republicans will abandon their autocracy-and-lies platform after they lose the next election and dump Trump. The analogy would suggest that the Democrats just need to get whooped or they won't learn their to lesson, either. I'm not sure it's equivalent, though.
At a tangent...
If I correctly understand the story, the main case of what you are describing as men beating up on women was a "man" who was morphologically female, had a female body, but turned out to be genetically male. That's a much less clear case than a man who claims to be a woman or even a man who has been surgically altered to a facsimile of a woman. Given the existence of people who are not unambiguously male or female, it's unclear how they should be classified for athletic purposes.
But was there something special in Floyd case?
Seems like normal "criminal dies in confrontation with police"-case, worse things probably happening every year.
It was more like someone was searching for an excuse to start a fight, and this was best they found quickly.
It's a nice idea, but 2020 argues just the opposite.
I loved Timur Kuran's book, but I'm not sure that many people actively, consciously falsify their preferences. It seem more likely that people are just conformist and sincerely start believing what those around them believe and what the social consensus seems to be. Or a "self-deception" situation a la Robert Trivers where people "lie" while being convinced that they are not doing so
It's also hard to go back and rethink something you've already settled; when have conditions changed enough to invalidate the old result? Like changing oil in my car: I changed it already, now I gotta do it again? The tires I can eyeball every time I walk out to it. The oil takes an effort, which is acceptable when filling the tank, or I can rely on some dash idiot light.
I think comparing the press to dash idiot lights is pretty realistic.
You have to explain the collapse of such beliefs, as in the Biden case. Your point explains why they don't collapse.
Except in the Biden case, it didn't happen this way. There were a significant time after the disastrous debate where Biden claimed only Lord Almighty may force him to resign (July 6) and at the same time, a number of press propagandists (I am not using the term "journalist" here, reserving it to rare people who still do what once was the journalistic work) wrote a long, well argued articles about how anybody who thinks Biden is about to resign in a complete fool, ignorant in basics of American politics.
What was happening is not that the press have had some kind of truth revealed to them simultaneously, and could not deny it any longer. What happensd is that there was a power struggle in the top of Dem party, and once Biden group lost, and Biden has been forced to resign, the press propagandists switched from serving Biden, who was in power, to serving the next group, who is in power now. The concept of "truth", social or otherwise, has never even entrered in the equation. They didn't realize anything, they just received the new directives. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia not because some spectascular event revealed it and caused some kind of preference cascade, but because this is what the Party tells is the truth, and there's no other possible truth and never has been.
It would be very interesting to figure out why so many people voluntarily surrendered their mental facilities to the service of the Party, but the mechanism of "changing the social truth" that has been described does not seem to be describing what actually happened.
In what sense was Biden forced, rather than persuaded, to resign? He had the delegates from the primaries to nominate him.
In the strictest sense he was, of course, "persuaded" - nobody put a gun to his head or held him in a headlock while others typed the famous Xwitter announcement under his account. But this persuasion was of the sort of the "offer he can not refuse" - if he didn't let himself be persuaded, the consequences would be dire - his campaign would be completely ruined and he would likely be subject to 25 amendment removal. I do not see any indication that it was a result of some soul-searching process on Biden's side - rather, the other side has been steadily escalating the level of threats and pressure to the point where Biden could not bear it anymore. The press started making threatening noises and notice his cognitive state, the donors turned their backs, and in private, as I heard, very pointed threats (including the mention of the number of doom - 25) were surely heard. Can it be called "forced"? I think it can - before this massive pressure was applied, Biden had zero intent to get out, neither did his team. After, he was out. I think "forced" is an adequate description of that.
I'm sorry, but this whole post was just boomer conservative in a nutshell.
You are talking about others as if they are totally empty vessels, but I think you are.
If you have arguments, make them. What is your explanation of the sudden shift in Democrats' view of Biden? Was his condition much worse on June 27th than in the previous months? If not, was a problem obvious to viewers of the debate not seen by high status Democrats who observed Biden at first hand over the previous months and knew others who did so?
If it wasn't a preference falsification cascade, what was it? Most the leadership of a party reversing their view of who should be president in less than a month requires an explanation.
The problem I have is with your conclusion paragraph that asserts things about woke orthodoxy and DEI being merely a social contagion.
We have the records of right wing activists themselves, Rufo mainly just outright detailing how he would weaponize various terms like Critical Race Theory and DEI and broadly associate the entire left with a very loose mish mash of just stuff that is kind of meh.
Your usage of those terms is a social contagion phenomenon although it is very much contrived. No one even cared about DEI until like 2 years ago and now it is one of the core problems of our time. How real the issue is in your mind is totally manufactured.
I have another explanation for the current gnashing of teeth about the oppressor/oppressed framework and woke in general that people on your side hardly grapple with. It is a natural and atavistic framework. I see people generate these large tweet threads about oppressor/oppressed framework at the core of wokism and we utterly evil/destructive it is. Then, a couple of tweets later they will use the same framework implicitly to cheer on the Denver Nuggets to beat the Lakers or Jon Snow to kick Ramsey Bolton's ass because they are underdogs.
I checked my old blog for references to DEI and Woke. No references to DEI more than two years ago but multiple negative references to "woke" going back more than four years. References to "affirmative action" and "diversity," earlier euphemisms for racial preferences, go back more than seventeen years. So I don't think my concern with these issues is due to Rufo.
Are you arguing that support for DEI is not, as Albatross described it, a position that rose very rapidly to orthodoxy? That it doesn't have significant effects? That it did rise fast but the reason was new and convincing arguments for it? I'm not sure what substance of my argument you are disagreeing with.
DEI effects are assertions. No one has ever done any work to demonstrate a material impact on the economy. My general intuition of a white male having to go to BU versus Columbia is of insignificant importance to the economy. It mostly hits on our animal fairness/justice instincts.
Yes, I am claiming this is a contrived issue with very little effect on the "economy". It is in a class of things like, "whatever happened to MS-13" right wing issues.
So you are not disagreeing with anything either I or Albatross wrote. The post wasn't about DEI, it was about preference falsification and its collapse.
You just want to record your disagreement with his, and my, opposition to DEI.
Aside from the effect on college admissions, do you think the existence of an orthodoxy in college employment, requiring that one hold certain political views in order to be hired as a professor, might have undesirable effects, in particular make it harder to discover errors in the current orthodoxy?
It seems you are describing more than preference falsification in you are characterizing aggregate preferences, what is weakly believed, what is true/false, and which ones can be falsified... Your characterization is wholly different than mine. I see very little importance in the world of affirmative action, DEI, or woke. I consider those issues trivial.
I don't think political views are that important for professordom. I don't think they are that important to firms as well. In your abstract version of errors and orthodoxy; I want all this demonstrated first. The claims on DEI and woke; your side is making the extreme claims with almost no evidence and mostly sounds like "I just don't like it".
Bryan Caplan just made some post about DEI has been working because firms have the "slack" to implement bad policy. There's been a litany of posts attacking him with some argumentation that he would use liberally when it fits stuff he likes: which border on EMH the market has spoken, the easiest explanation is it is efficient, you aren't smarter than firms or the market
Por que no los dos?
I think people hate change and cling to traditions but the media loves it. They hate the rise of Google unless there's the fall of Google. They publicized the war on drugs ad nauseam until they got sick of it, so they next started publicizing attempts at legalization. At first they seemed anti Uber and Lyft, then dropped that pose. They're pushing transgender issues hard because there is still a lot of tradition to reverse. After the health craze came a magazine cover story "Butter is back!" They promoted smoking for decades after scientists knew it was deadly. Reversals make good news copy, the controversial is everything. Especially now.
Something along these lines is the solution to the “blue eyed islander” puzzle. Something can be known by everyone and yet not common knowledge.
The model as presented is too simple: what causes a few dissenters voices starting from a position of total minority to start such a cascade? Why don't the few who truly support the status quo speak out as well such as to stem the tide, such as to reach an uneasy equilibrium. Why doesn't it swing like a pendulum? With Biden you will say it's the Schelling point of the debate, but what about gay marriage?
If the model was true the world would look different to what it does.
There has to be some change such that the status quo is no longer an equilibrium. In Albatross's account it was the debate, which made Biden's condition common knowledge — everyone knew it and everyone knew that everyone knew it.