Comment by TheOtherHobbes
3 days ago
The problem isn't the PERFECT ARGUMENT, it's the argument that doesn't look like an argument at all.
Take anti-vaxxers. If you try to argue with the science, you've already lost, because anti-vaxxers have been propagandised into believing they're protecting their kids.
How? By being told that vaccinations are promoted by people who are trying to harm their kids and exploit the public for cash.
And who tells them? People like them. Not scientists. Not those smart people who look down on you for being stupid.
No, it's influencers who are just like them, part of the same tribe. Someone you could socialise with. Someone like you.
Someone who only has your best interests at heart.
And that's how it works. That's why the anti-vax and climate denial campaigns run huge bot farms with vast social media holdings which insert, amplify, and reinforce the "These people are evil and not like us and want to make you poor and harm your kids" messaging, combined with "But believe this and you will keep your kids safe".
Far-right messaging doesn't argue rationally at all. It's deliberate and cynically calculated to trigger fear, disgust, outrage, and protectiveness.
Consider how many far-right hot button topics centre on protecting kids from "weird, different, not like us" people - foreigners, intellectuals, scientists, unorthodox creatives and entertainers, people with unusual sexualities, outgroup politicians. And so on.
So when someone tries to argue with it rationally, they get nowhere. The "argument" is over before it starts.
It's not even about rhetoric or cleverness - both of which are overrated. It's about emotional conditioning using emotional triggers, tribal framing, and simple moral narratives, embedded with constant repetition and aggressive reinforcement.
I liked your point about tribalism up until you said one tribe is rational and the other not. The distribution of rational behavior does not change much tribe to tribe, it's the values that change. As soon as you say one tribe is more rational than another you're just feeding into more tribalism by insulting a whole group's intelligence.
I think the real problem is that zero friction global communication and social media has dramatically decreased the incentive to be thoughtful about anything. The winning strategy for anyone in the public eye is just to use narratives that resonate with people's existing worldview, because there is so much information out there and our civilization has become so complex that it's overwhelming to think about anything from first principles. Combine that with the dilution of local power as more and more things have gone online and global, a lot of the incentives for people to be truthful and have integrity are gone or at least dramatically diminished compared to the entirety of human history prior to the internet.
>I liked your point about tribalism up until you said one tribe is rational and the other not. The distribution of rational behavior does not change much tribe to tribe, it's the values that change. As soon as you say one tribe is more rational than another you're just feeding into more tribalism by insulting a whole group's intelligence.
That was largely the case until these most recent electoral cycle, where the Great Crank Realignment, driven by the COVID response, pushed conspiracy theorists, health and wellness grifters, supplement hawkers, and many others to the right.
Umm, the COVID response itself was just as much a religion as it was science. There were people walking nature trails with nobody around with their masks securely on their faces. There were requirements for people whose job was to sit in a truck's cab by themselves all day to vaccinate or lose said job. There were unnecessarily draconian shutdowns. There was uncontrolled and unaudited spending on saving nonexistent businesses and buying enough vaccines for several more years of COVID (but with expiry dates within a year).
If the harsh response to COVID had been necessary, the places that didn't do it should have died out. They did not. You simply don't hear about the Great Depopulation of Africa.
And yet you will read the above, label me a crank, and downvote this. Meaning that you are just as tribal as the people you look down upon.
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I’ll push back - the term is rational as in logical.
Rational in the sense that it flows from what emotional choices resonate ? That’s more in terms of faithful to their beliefs. I wouldn’t call that rational per se.
And being scared of tribalism is not necessary, because tribalism is what is currently being highly effective at creating political power.
So some degree of tribalism, is simply matching the competition.
I really think most of these statements apply to both political sides of messaging in a majority of cases. You can't talk about in-group out-group unless you draw a line somewhere, and in your comment you drew a line between people who represent science and rationality and those that are fearful and reactionary, which you'd believe to be a sensible place to draw that line if you habitually consume basically any media. The actual science seems mostly incidental to any kind of conversation about it.
Some people are crippled by anxiety and fear of the unknown or fear of their neighbors. It's sad, but it's not unique to political alignment.
I think that what they were saying was that in-groups are trusted because of familiarity which can be exploited in order to instill messaging which drives emotional decision making over reasoned contemplation. 'Scientists' were part of the exampled used which invoked a contemporary issue (anti-vax). They are attributing these messaging systems to be a component of organized right wing campaigns; an attribution which at this point in time is rather uncontroversial.
That they would see themselves as part of the rational group opposed to a campaign of weaponized social levers which turn people against evidence in order to further the goals of a different group which is not actually aligned with those they are manipulating is not insightful or provocative. It seems to reason they would.
The implication that it means there is some sort of political 'both sides'ism that degrades their point is incredibly weak.
> The implication that it means there is some sort of political 'both sides'ism that degrades their point is incredibly weak.
I didn't intend to imply that, I interpreted their comment in roughly the same way you did and just think it's the same high level kind of messaging being leveraged regardless of which one you align with, and that issue specifically isn't inherently a right or left dividing line.
If you're inclined to be anti-vaxx, the messaging that the right will try to deliver to you will certainly capitalize on whatever they think will compound those feelings. The government is trying to control you, take your job away, your freedoms, and you should be wary of the others who say yes. It's easy to manipulate people if you're chipping away at their sense of reality.
If you're inclined to be pro-vaxx, the messaging was similarly delivered to compound a feeling of paranoia, and people who felt differently were worth considering an enemy, because they didn't care about your kids, or your grandma, or public health in general (is what messaging at the time seemed to indicate).
Regardless of this discussion not being specifically about the pandemic, my actual perception of either group of people, (the ones that absorbed as much as they could and fell down their respective doom holes) was that they were rather annoying and just avoided the topic at all costs. I wore a mask in situations that seemed to call for it, got some of the vaccinations, kept a reasonable distance, etc.. It didn't need to be more than that. I concluded that there were shreds of truth, scientific and otherwise among the feelings that everyone had, but if I accidentally found myself in conversation that had any strong opinion, it wasn't going to go well; that person was just living out their personal hellscape of paranoia that they were vulnerable to and became targets because of.
It was a very divisive and tribal moment that I hope we've learned something from.
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I’d like to mildly point out that this style of caricaturing ideologies is one of the most effective at entrenching those same ideologies. If you can recognize that those critiquing you are doing so in bad faith, not only does it make the critique easy to dismiss, it provides evidence for the prior that all critiques are in bad faith and can be safely ignored.
Bit of a problem when we can see the bad faith factory. As the OP article points out, there are troll farms which are "working" both sides of an argument by supplying bad faith arguments. With the intent of provoking conflict, rather than a victory for either side.
It's also mentioned in "the authoritarians" (search for the book and the short-form essay) - roughly half the population is driven by intellectual curiosity about all kinds of things and don't always agree on much - they just want freedom to be individuals.
The other half is driven by fear, disgust, paranoia, etc.. That second group is much easier to trigger / convince - just play on their fears about their kids, their friends, their church ("will ban Bibles and churches"), etc.. (I was raised in this kind of environment).
Authoritarians WANT a "strong leader" to tell them what to think, how to act, etc. That's how they show they belong to the tribe: they believe everything that is said, they give the most $$ to their church, etc.
A complicating factor when talking about rationality and propensity towards either left- or right-wing authoritarian impulses is brain structure, according to a recently publish study.
"Young adults who scored higher on right-wing authoritarianism had less gray matter volume in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in social reasoning. Meanwhile, those who endorsed more extreme forms of left-wing authoritarianism showed reduced cortical thickness in the right anterior insula, a brain area tied to empathy and emotion regulation."
Not only is it tribalism, it's also individuals fundamental anatomy. This seems like a very challenging problem if the people you are hoping to convince are hardwired against your message.
https://www.psypost.org/authoritarian-attitudes-linked-to-al... (layperson's summary)
https://www.ibroneuroscience.org/article/S0306-4522(25)00304... (actual study)
Exactly. The problem is largely due to biology. Someone might try to change this at some point for future "better" humans (eugenics of a sort), but basically impossible to change in existing adults.
There's an essay on thinking styles: fuzzy narrative big picture culture versus logical detail culture. https://www.someweekendreading.blog/math-illiterate-rulers/
> Take anti-vaxxers. If you try to argue with the science, you've already lost, because anti-vaxxers have been propagandised into believing they're protecting their kids
What do you think causes vaccine injury?
Do you believe in these zoonotic origin theory of Covid, rather than the Wuhan coronavirus Institute accidentally releasing a coronavirus in Wuhan? Why do you think that is?
Why do you think vaccine manufacturers asked governments for blanket immunity from prosecution?
Why does the United States require children to get so many more vaccines than other developed western countries?
Do you think you are assuming which side is rational?
Vaccine injury is a thing that actually happens. It really does.
Also, unvaccinated people die from diseases that vaccines prevent. That happens too.
The problem with the anti-vaxxers is their assessment of the balance of risks is distorted.
The problem with the "vaccine establishment" is that it's so certain that the balance of risks are in favor of vaccines that it's willing to hide the actual risks in order to get more people to take the vaccines. That's not only morally wrong, it also may do more harm than good in the end. (Which is the same thing if you take a consequentialist view of morals.)
Ah yes. People who think like you and agree with you are rational, not prone to fear, disgust outrage, or protectiveness. But people who disagree with you are obviously irrational and can't be reasoned with. You are "educated" and they are "fear-mongers".
> But people who disagree with you are obviously irrational and can't be reasoned with.
You are saying this with sarcasm, but it is a tautology.
If I am factually correct, by definition, everyone who disagrees with me is irrational and can't be reasoned with.
Anti-vax is a great example of this. We have loads and loads and loads of evidence of the harm that not being vaccinated can do (now including dead children thanks to measles) and very scant evidence to the contrary (there is some for specific vaccines for specific diseases like Polio). However, until it hits an anti-vaxxer personally, they simply will refuse to believe it.
Of course, once an anti-vaxxer personally gets a disease, NOW the anti-vaxxers want the vaccine. Thus, demonstrating simultaneously that they actually don't understand a single damn thing about vaccines and that their "anti-vaxx belief" was irrational as well.
> If I am factually correct, by definition, everyone who disagrees with me is irrational and can't be reasoned with.
No, that doesn’t follow at all. Your arguments could be bad or irrational in themselves (right for the wrong reasons), and other people could hold beliefs logically follow from plausible, but wrong, premises.
Ignoring the strawman at the end, you're making their point for them.
Anti-vax is actually a horrible example of this because it can never be proven that vaccines don't harm us. Any non-infinite evidence will never reduce the probability to zero. You even allude to this point. If there is a single case of a harmful vaccine, or even a reasonable probability of one, then it isn't irrational to be cautious of vaccines. Just because the evidence is enough for you doesnt make anyone who disagrees irrational. That line of thinking just makes you irrational.
I say this as a fully vaccinated (including COVID) vaccine enjoyer.
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Just to add a little to the discussion, I suspect that the "not like us" messaging is mostly a right-wing thing, while there's more of a "don't contaminate my fluids" argument from the far-left.
Neither is a rational argument, and still trigger the same disgust and fear, but tend to have different implications for outgroups.
> "don't contaminate my fluids" argument from the far-left
What does this refer to? I assume it has nothing to do with Flint, Michigan ;-)
Probably from one of the crazies in Dr. Strangelove (the movie)