#backfire effect

[cerebraldischarge]

The misandrist custody system provides the perfect excuse for misogynistic men to justify their actions.

Think about the implications of that regarding AA and all other violent methods of enforcing "equality".

I'll wait.

[kimyoonmiauthor]

“But conflict and problem can be different, you misunderstand conflict. All stories need a problem.”

Is that what Lit profs are teaching you? ‘cause ummm... that is load grade A retconning there. Those are Lit profs that are scared that their knowledge might be *gasp* wrong, which it is. I’ve covered this multiple times and even found the origins of the conflict narrative.

Seriously, I think they need to do some studying of Writing Advice Books and Writing Theory itself before making such assertions. Honestly, it’s poor study of literature, from my POV, but I understand why the assumption was made. So let’s get into it.

Academics basically functions like this

You have a summer, usually, to read a bunch of books, but you don’t have time to read those books, so what do you do? You find other people who have read those books and find their takes on those books. The thing is that Writing Advice books, as I’ve griped over and over and over are traditionally poorly sourced. So if you find one, and read it, but only part of it, its’s really difficult to back trace where the ideas came from. But you have say, 3-4 months.

This leads to copy errors and so often the fallacies continue, until someone comes along and challenges the entirety of the copy errors (There is a great paper, for example, which I linked in the master post about Short Story Advice manuals and the origin of Writing Advice manuals started with short stories--if you’re thinking that’s after Poe, that is correct.)

So is it your teacher’s fault they listened to professors who couldn’t back trace and read all of say, Freytag and find out that he was really racist, ethnicist, etc? No. It isn’t. But the blind worship of him is. Because reading him took me with free time to spare a week because frankly he’s an asshole. (There is no milder way to put it.) He’s not a genius, BTW, because he didn’t publish that much. Nor is he lauded for those works in Germany because honestly, genocide and Germany no longer mix.

So basically people were picking and choosing without citation. Which is where I say, !@#$ Cite your works kids, it makes the academics happy. It’s not all about plagiarism. It’s also because people don’t want to call you ut for being an a-hole later and doubting your motives.

So forgive your teachers and take it from me that Writing theory is very poorly cited. And it took me forever and a day to figure out what I’m about to lay down. (And yes, I’m still working on connecting it.)

Conflict, from Percy Lubbock Craft of Fiction 1921

BTW, later attributed wrongly to Shakespeare, Aristotle, Brecht and a bunch of straight guys (Lubbock was gay, and came out much later, but tried to appear straight passing.)

I should note I pulled a lot of teeth tracking down this book and triangulating it. I read through the Aristotle to the 19th century, couldn’t find it, read through the 1940′s, couldn’t find it, took a few blind stabs, couldn’t find it, and then guessed after World War I, and using those previous points finally found it with the type of argument you expect from someone making a pioneering argument.

Complete text to check my work is here: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18961/pg18961-images.html

“What is the story? There is first of all a succession of phases in the lives of certain generations; youth that passes out into maturity, fortunes that meet and clash and re-form, hopes that flourish and wane and reappear in other lives, age that sinks and hands on the torch to youth again—such is the substance of the drama. The book, I take it, begins to grow out of the thought of the processional march of the generations, always changing, always renewed; its figures are sought and chosen for the clarity with which the drama is embodied in them.“

Because I had an extreme amount of time, I actually looked for reasons he might have thought this way. He’s described mostly as a reluctant modernist. He was gay, as I cited, but not out. He did write this after WWI, and if you remember, the world was basically in chaos then. People thought the world was ending. There was a massive world war. War was no longer “fun” as LM Montgomery put it (Rilla of Ingleside covers this--BTW, still one of my favorite, if not my favorite WWI account books.). People saw the cost of war. There was also a big plague of 1918 prior. People were staring at a ton of sudden industrial flurry too. And so, by 1921, of course the world looks like a bunch of conflict. Of course people think things need to change.

But the question is in what direction?

Modernists

The Modernists, unlike what was taught to me, already had a start long before 1921. It wasn’t all in reaction to WWI. Some of it was people getting tired of the endless wars and making commentary on social conditions of industrialization. Édouard Manet is credited with starting the art version of it. And on the writing side, Gertrude Stein is mostly credited with the start, but you can see roots in other 19th century writers, such as John Ruskin George Elliot, etc. (She didn’t take it from nowhere.)

Yes, yes, some of the ideology was Marxism, though not formalized until later, but some of it was asking questions which were viewed as highly offensive. (I kinda of think Waldemar Januszczak's documentary series probably does the best job to lay down the principles for you in ways my art profs would approve of. I could cite snobby books for you, but Waldemar is fun to watch.) 

If you want to look at the early modernists, and paintings like the Gleaners, it’s all questions about industrialization and its effects. The Modernists are by definition, anti-structuralist because industrialization feels like a lot of constraint, and the WWI part is a “See, I told you moment.” Modernists are also popular outside of Europe because of the destruction colonialism and imperialism has done to the rest of the world. (Also, not usually covered by Lit professors). Because Modernism questions industrialization and power structures, it’s not particularly popular with the elite beyond knowing of its existence, but it is popular with people who feel oppressed by those systems: Gays, Lesbians, Women, People of Color, etc.

Modernists embraced the flurry of activity from lower classes and the invitation to literature from the Rotary Printing Press.

But then you had...

The Structuralists

These are basically the opposite end of the Modernists--how do you make Capitalism work for you? Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) is usually credited for the start of Structuralism and Functionalism. (BTW, neither of which should be taught to you in the social sciences as anything more than long debunked, but so seductive to think about. I’ve covered over and over though how the writing community loves to hang onto theories from other fields that have long been debunked.) So you should be thinking Levi-Strauss, Durkheim, and a bunch of French Philosophers.

In this corner, you have Freytag (Germany needs to exterminate all of the Polish people and anyone outside of Germany is backwards and not worth your time because English Lit has gone down the drain compared to German Lit. And Freytag is the greatest writer of all time--greater than Shakespeare, even though he’s written far less plays. --;; This is basically the summary of his book.)

Structuralism is sexy because it says there is a formula to life: You just have to find it. And if you find the formula to control, manipulate, and put everyone into tiny little boxes, then you can beat the entire system, and in fact, help build the system. 

Say like Michel Foucault did by sexually assaulting a bunch of boys https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/french-philosopher-michel-foucault-abused-boys-in-tunisia-6t5sj7jvw and had philosophy about the Panopticon, also scarring a bunch of French boys and girls at the same time. Or his theories about the mental health wards, which to my mind, made them worse, but you are free to disagree by reading his essays, which, to be clear, he made harder to access on purpose so he could sound like a rich academic. (I’m not a fan. And no, it’s not because he’s gay, but because his ideas went to scar generations of people and sexual assaulters being worshipped isn’t my favorite thing in the world.)

Levi-Strauss is mostly a dick, but I do like his essay on the Raw and the Cooked philosophy that was is not culture is often seen as “Nature” (Only works pretty much for Europe, because these French guys never really ventured outside of France). And anything in between is seen as Taboo good or Taboo Bad, but it’s an exercise in patience reading his work, because he tries to sound more academic, again, also because he’s pro-imperialism in a lot of ways and sounds absolutely racist.

But if there was a formula to control people and social structures, it might also work for books, and this is the side that your Lit Profs are usually taught as “Commercial” and “correct” writing, even superseding the actual philosophies of the Modernists, even if the Modernists, over and over objected to the Structuralists. You have both EM Forster and Virginia Woolf hating the fact that Percy Lubbock is breaking away from Modernism.

Likewise the Structuralists hated the Modernists--the amount of hate towards Gertrude Stein is high, which starts with Rowe, and continues with Lajos Egri and she gets snubbed by Syd Field when he boasts about knowing Modernist artists, and skips her over.

In the writing theory corner, the structuralists came late as theorists, So you’re looking at Roland Barthes, somewhat Bertolt Brecht, etc. Mostly the structuralists like to call on the powers of Shakespeare and Aristotle retcon them hard. It’s a tradition, you see, because Freytag started it. It’s a false call to authority (which BTW, people don’t understand the fallacy for). Because Shakespeare never said anything about his own writing. And most of the time it’s a decontextualization and misunderstanding of Aristotle (Whom I carefully cited on his ideas one by one.)

Honestly, though Barthes was writing in the 1960′s, and was only translated sometime probably in the 1980′s, (My loose theory is that the US wasn’t interested in Structuralism in the 1960′s, but the backlash in the 1980′s fit very well with the ideals. See Satanic Panic) by the 1980′s, in the US, Structuralism, as an idea in Sociology, Anthropology and History was losing a foothold (Along with the Great Man theory, which fed into the idea of Character-Driven v. Plot-driven. Both based in Imperialism, BTW.)

But as I said, the writing community loves, loves to hang on to old ideas and so, it gained steam and played well with the other writing advice books, which publishers had carefully selected to be, and I wish I was kidding, mostly White cishet abled men. Women got to publish in the 1980′s, sure about theory, but not quite in that section of the bookstore, so most of the writing advice is located either in academic texts out of the public eye, i.e. inaccessible, or in Memoirs, which people won’t read unless they are interested in the author.

This means, in the public eye, who aren’t questioning this, the Structuralists have won.

But what does that have to do with Conflict v. Problem?

Since conflict was invented in 1921, by structuralist/Modernist Percy Lubbock, whom again, needs to get more credit for his actual work (and preferably read in tandem with Forster and Woolf when examining writing theory), he actually did mean it to be conflict. Because that’s the word he uses over and over again. He did not mean problem. He meant it as the central driver of the story: Story Driver. This was his intention, which is picked up later by Rowe (no credit. !@#$ I have so many curse words for Rowe’s plagiarism. He was a university professor who got Shakespeare and Aristotle wrong and was called on it by Lajos Egri, dammit.), and mainly Syd Field, who popularized the Three Act (though it got away from him in the 1970′s-1980′s. I’m still working out how).

This was doubled down by Brecht (1898- 1956), because the “proper” model is that the climax is the main character’s lowest point. The discourse is that it “Makes the story interesting” But Brecht’s first assertion was that it would show what the character was truly made of. If you notice the dates, he lived through a ton of trauma. SO of course he’s going to think that. I should note he hated Aristotle. (Aristotle got the credit later for his ideas. --;; It’s not completely wrong on one hand to make them join together, but the motivation for both is very, very different.)

Brecht absolutely, and positively did mean conflict. I mean look, he lived through 2 world wars, several other wars, a pandemic, and of course he’s going to think that conflict could show the worth of a person. What do you think? But unlike Aristotle who is using it as negative reinforcement, Brecht is viewing it as a way to uplift, because what? The person gets out of the conflict.

If you don’t believe me, then let’s look at Romance as an example (Note that most Romance authors know this is not a healthy relationship.) You have introduction, cutemeet (Inciting incident), and the climax is what? Let’s say it together: The couple breaks up. This is following the Brecht model. The conclusion is that the characters get back together.

Is this healthy? No. Do people encourage you to do it in real life? Hell no. In fact therapists say if you are in a cycle of doing this, it’s unhealthy and to find better conflict resolution.

Action movies? What’s the worst fear for the main character? Let’s make it become true.

Horror movies: Highest anxiety is met by making the worst become true.

This was the accepted formula.

Saying it was always problem, is retconning Literary history without the text support, in which case, you shouldn’t do that, and often Lit profs lecture heavily against it.

Then why does my teacher say problem?

Honestly, the education system is poor. Your professor/teacher should be teaching Shakespeare like the Historians do and talking about Morality. As they put it bluntly: Honor the Monarchy, or get your head chopped off. 

They should be talking Emotionality with the Gothic writers and John Locke.

They should be talking about Discovery.

About Naturalism, and all of the ideas that flooded the 19th century, but the truth is they weren’t really taught those things, and working from one formula, hearing someone talk about “But not every story has conflict” it’s hard to switch ideologies when it’s rooted that hard into your psyche.

So then, you start with, “Well, if not conflict, then problem.” Because the later thought is, if there is no problem then will not be interesting.

But let’s challenge that thought.

Is human motivation purely conflict? This is the question the Modernists actually rose, if you bother to look at them.

Do humans not also cooperate? 

Gleaners, again. Art. But it asks a lot of questions about human cooperation.

I mean if you’ve watched reality TV shows and read the comments on Youtube, the same comment pops up over and over--they are sick of the conflict in reality TV shows and applaud the cooperation narrative and rat on the US for being terrible and manufacturing such things, even going so far as saying the judges are better when they aren’t doing that and comparing regionalities of shows with each other. Even “It’s Me or the Dog” has taken down most of the These are terrible owners” aspects of the show, because people like compassion too. 

People actively complain when they feel like the conflict is created by the producers. Do humans not have points of fascinating discovery about the world and themselves? 

This is where the Futurists and the eventual Speculative Fiction roots actually come from. The exploration of this question.

Do humans not have systems by which they need to teach the next generation how to live?

What are Children’s books for? But generally, a lot of folktales, either cautionary or not are talking along this line. Apache stories, BTW, from my looking at own voices talk about their stories say that their stories also teach parents and adults too. Because they design it so it means different things at different stages of your life.

Do humans not have questions about morality? 

I mean the whole of Star Trek, if you think about it. Star Wars? Rashomon? Should that morality enforce the given powers or challenge it? (And you can see why Privileged Elitists hate this one. OMG, you’re challenging the structuralists powers.) Adam Bede? Most of George Elliot’s writing.

Might be unintentional, but Tolkien had a ton of morality in his work. And you have to be kidding me if you seriously think CS Lewis can’t be examined through this lens. He put Jesus. Figurative Jesus and bragged about it in his novels for children. And he tried to get Tolkien to embrace Christianity too. (Which drove Tolkien up the wall sometimes... since Tolkien was pro-Science they had quite the up and down friendship.)

Do we lack emotions? What separates us from animals? Are humans robots?

Every robot story ever. But the fundamental of this is always what separates us from being terrible people?

But is the greatest part of humanity its ability to remember?

Regret stories are often like this. Not a surprise that Foucault hated Confession Stories since they operated on memory and regret. If you view What Dreams May come through memory, the story transforms.

And the thing is that stories are flexible enough to encompass all of these. There may be some we don’t know or have lost along the way. They can drive the story forwards. There’s stories there the events are selected around themes or tone as well.

Backfire Effect and why call it a problem?

But the actual problem is that when you’re taught one way, and suddenly challenged there is another way, you think everyone hates your way, but that’s not what’s happening and you’re shown alternatives, so you often have what would be called “selection bias” and “correlation bias”. You might be challenged like I just demonstrated that Brecht and Lubbock were wrong. There isn’t one way and we shouldn’t be boiling stories down that way, so you need to preserve your base belief (This, folks, is called the Backfire effect). 

Of course every story has a problem, even when faced with child stories like: I saw a dog. The dog licked me. I liked it. The dog was fun.

If you were to try for correlation and selective bias it would look like this.:

The problem clear is that there is a dog, see... and and...uhhh, the inciting incident is that the dog licked the kid. And see.. the climax is that the kid liked it. OK, it doesn’t fit the Brechtian model, but see that’s tension, right there. And the “Denouement” is that the kid found the dog is fun. The other tactic is to state: This is not a story. Look, the kid doesn’t face any problems. It’s not that interesting. Sure it has a narrative set of events that are strung together by a central theme, but is it a story? (And then loose canon, no.) But will the kid themselves call it a story? Probably. Are you going to tell a little kid to their face that it doesn’t pass academic rigor, therefore it’s not a story? If you say yes, I’m going to ask what is wrong with you?

BTW, Japanese would call that a story that fits Kishotenketsu. The I saw a dog is the introduction. The “The dog licked me” is development. The “I liked it” is the emotional height/twist and a discovery. The result is “the dog was fun.”

But if you want to see it, without looking at the paratext, you’ll always find what you’re looking for, but this is super true if you don’t read the entire text. (Say Bible Thumpers who don’t read the entire passage before waxing on and on, until you contextualize it for them.)

And so, they need to put it down to “Problem”. They see the story of Spirited Away, which is about self discovery and memory as boiling down to problem. But I’d beg, beg people who watched the movie this way to go back, read up on Kishotenketsu, and look specifically for where the memory and discovery parts are and pause and think which model works best? Is there really a problem? Chihiro doesn’t remember everything that happens by the end of the movie. Her problem of moving to a new town isn’t solved like it would be in a Syd Field formula. How she approaches it, also isn’t solved. But there is some core to the movie that grabs your emotions: And that is discovery of memory and questions of how it works. If you watch it this way, then the movie opens up a lot more. (Also, makes me cry more because I’m less invested in feeling anxious or expecting depression.)

And this is where I say, that saying there is more than conflict or problems isn’t a threat to Conflict as a Story Driver. I loved Wandavision for using Discovery and Conflict as the story drivers.

Conclusion  

Percy Lubbock’s original treaties was hated for being too reductive: I side with Woolf and Forster on this one. But I also side on Percy Lubbock’s side that it’s good to have academic discourse and tools to talk about the academic discourse. Selden Whitcomb, BTW, demonstrates this very, very well in Study of a Novel (1887). He goes over several novel types in his PoV and looks at the macro and microcosm of the novel. So it’s not saying that the conflict narrative is never true. It’s saying that maybe add more tools to your toolbox and refine your toolbox so you can sort like Selden Whitcomb did. I mean he managed to delineate between braided essays, the main plot, the plot chain, and examine different novel types enough to impress Esenwein, a school teacher and then have Kenneth Rowe plagiarize from both of them. (Still cursing Rowe. You seriously thought you wouldn’t be caught?) If academia can do that and teach signs and reasons, then wouldn’t we achieve Lubbock’s goals better than he imagined?

Knowing about different story structures and ways of doing things helped me to read Aristotle better. I understood where the error about 3 act began because I understood I was originally reading the text wrong. The main points are at the end, because of the QED model. You give lines of evidence, and then the main thesis is at the end. And this is an error a lot of people make when reading Greek texts. But thinking about that, don’t you want to reread the texts in that light and have better discourse? Because the Five Paragraph essay wasn’t invented until the 19th century where the thesis and topic sentence is near the beginning. It’s also saying that humanity is far, far richer than inducing depression and anxiety in people like the Functionalists and Structuralists wanted for people. Sometimes, we want that as storytellers, yes--but why not explore the awesome breath of humanity itself and give yourself more options to explore it when one is writing story?  This is what I beg of you and your teachers. Think of humanity as better than only creating problems and conflict. Some of the other stuff are humanities’ greatest weapons and ponders the nature of humanity a lot deeper than saying that humans are all conflict or cooperation (via the 1980′s docs on chimps v. bonobos. They do both, BTW.)? So why not take that journey?

[fallingsunflower]

Hey! Can I share share something that I've been realising and that pisses me off with those shippers and how illogical they are? Just need to get it out of my chest and then promise we are moving on haha:

First of all, those shippers were supporting this "relationship" for their egos and egos only because fuck sake how can you support a "relationship" that was so one-sided? Harry only mentioned public O by "his director" and never defended her from those so called "misogynistic" PR fans! He kept his distance so far from her to the point that in a joint interview, he stated that he never has been in a public relationship with anyone and his demeanor was always closed off around her. So many times their appearances looked very much calculated and she went to so many shows and never once he did acknowledge her but will shout out other friends and family! And they're supporting that??? Excuse me but they kept calling 'misogyny' left and right when other fans would point out the problematic behaviours of O or how this "relationship" seemed fake. These shippers perceive themselves as "feminists" but are ok with a woman being dogpiled and trashed everyday and her "boyfriend" letting it happen? Never have their questioned why they had to do Harry's job meaning THEY went above and beyond to defend a woman and a "relationship" they didn't know shit about and they are now sad it's over? No, they are sad their egos got hurt because their "support" to this relationship was purely egotistical from their part and just wanting to prove they were right! Because if they are such feminists they should be celebrating the break up that is taking O out of a one sided situation and an embarrassment Harry and his team put her through by letting her being torn apart by H's fans! But no, they're sad and clinging onto the idea the breakup is PR because they can't face they were wrong about things they were defending! Like I said, those shippers never "supported" this "relationship", they fed their egos by enjoying seeing the fandom being mad he was still with this problematic woman. Fake feminists who can't even question Harry's behaviour who in 2 years never claimed or acknowledged a "girlfriend" who did everything to link herself to him! They're seriously pathetic in their stance and I hope they keep crying because they sound dumb and selfish asf!

Hi love. Feel free to rant :)

Something I've noticed about most shippers is that they're so incapable of thinking outside of their own head. They get irrationally angry when their views are questioned and they go out of their way to try and convince people they're right or bully other people who have opposing views to them.

We learned about something similar recently, called the backfire effect (or backfire perseverance). It is when people maintain beliefs despite learning new information that contradicts it. Typically I'd describe this effect when describing political examples, but it sounds like it could be applicable here. At least parts of it are.

The backfire effect is something that happens in our brains when we're challenged with new information. We all have it in regards to different things. And when this effect is triggered, it affects the emotional part of our brain which means we get angry, upset, or "triggered" as people say.

The thing is, this isn't uncommon. It's very natural and human for us to experience this. But it's what happens next that a lot of people don't know how to cope with. After this effect is triggered in our brains, we need to learn to stop and think. It's balancing our emotional and logical sides. So when we get super angry about something, instead of spewing out hate and attacking other people, we should stop and say "okay what is making me so angry? why is it affecting me in the way that it is?". And eventually, when we learn to listen to that part of our brain and understand what's happening, we can adapt and change need be.

So when shippers are questioned or hear other people saying holivia isn't real, something goes off in their brain that puts them in fight or flight mode. They feel super protective, almost to a fault. They attack other people instead of reflecting or thinking logically. And if shippers still came to the conclusion that holivia is real after reflecting on it (and I mean genuinely reflecting on it - not taking 2 seconds to form a conclusion), then that's perfectly acceptable. But those are the shippers who aren't attacking other people. Those are the shippers who you can actually have a conversation with. I've talked to several of them. They're very nice.

There's this cartoon you can read if you're interested. I'll link it down below. It explains the backfire effect in a little more detail.

[spankymerve]

What I've Been Reading: April 2, 2023

April is now upon us, and with that comes links! Links to articles! Articles that you should read! Let’s talk about COVID, Kirby, and E3 (RIP). (more…) “”

[emmavakarian-theirin]

garrus is the answer

[talesfrommedinastation]

If I see any more homophobic nonsense in the Star Wars fandom then I'm drawing Tech on a romantic date with Garrus Vakarian.

ON THIS, A BLESSED TECH TUESDAY AND A BAD BATCH EVE.

YOU. HAVE. BEEN. WARNED.

[natjennie]

watcher announcement is insane. I don't have anything insightful or important to say but like. whoaoahh that's crazy.

[nerdie-faerie]

If the Doctor isn't a timelord then that means they potentially have different reactions to substances than they previously thought, ergo I just know that Thirteen, in all of her feral glory, runs around testing their reactions to things upon learning about their Timeless Child origins without her companions finding out

[kionani]

Alright but what if Guillermo's secret is revealed during the manor episode in a Clue-like mystery game style? And then he gets yoinked into a secret bookcase entrance or something and that's how he goes missing.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ostromizing democracy

Friday (May 5), I’ll be at the Books, Inc in Mountain View with Mitch Kapor for my novel Red Team Blues; and this weekend (May 6/7), I’ll be in Berkeley at the Bay Area Bookfest.

You know how “realist” has become a synonym for “asshole?” As in, “I’m not a racist, I’m just a ‘race realist?’” That same “realism” is also used to discredit the idea of democracy itself, among a group of self-styled “libertarian elitists,” who claim that social science proves that democracy doesn’t work — and can’t work.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

You’ve likely encountered elements of this ideology in the wild. Perhaps you’ve heard about how our cognitive biases make us incapable of deliberating, that “reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.”

Or maybe you’ve heard that voters are “rationally ignorant,” choosing not to become informed about politics because their vote doesn’t have enough influence to justify the cognitive expenditure of figuring out how to cast it.

There’s the “backfire effect,” the idea that rational argument doesn’t make us change our minds, but rather, drives us to double-down on our own cherished beliefs. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s the Asch effect, which says that we will change our minds based on pressure from the majority, even if we know they’re wrong.

Finally, there’s the fact that the public Just Doesn’t Understand Economics. When you compare the views of the average person to the views of the average PhD economist, you find that the public sharply disagrees with such obvious truths as “we should only worry about how big the pie is, not how big my slice is?” These fools just can’t understand that an economy where their boss gets richer and they get poorer is a good economy, so long as it’s growing overall!

That’s why noted “realist” Peter Thiel thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Thiel says that mothers are apt to sideline the “science” of economics for the soppy, sentimental idea that children shouldn’t starve to death and thus vote for politicians who are willing to tax rich people. Thus do we find ourselves on the road to serfdom:

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

Other realists go even further, suggesting that anyone who disagrees with orthodox (Chicago School) economists shouldn’t be allowed to vote: “[a]nyone who opposes surge pricing should be disenfranchised. That’s how we should decide who decides in epistocracy.”

Add it all up and you get the various “libertarian” cases for abolishing democracy. Some of these libertarian elitists want to replace democracy with markets, because “markets impose an effective ‘user fee’ for irrationality that is absent from democracy.

Others say we should limit voting to “Vulcans” who can pass a knowledge test about the views of neoclassical economists, and if this means that fewer Black people and women are eligible to vote because either condition is “negatively correlated” with familiarity with “politics,” then so mote be it. After all, these groups are “much more likely than others to be mistaken about what they really need”:

https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2015/03/the-demographic-argument-for-compulsory-voting-with-a-guest-appearance-by-the-real-reason-the-left-advocates-compulsory-voting/

These arguments and some of their most gaping errors are rehearsed in an excellent Democracy Journal article by Henry Farrell, Hugo Mercier, and Melissa Schwartzberg (Mercier’s research is often misinterpreted and misquoted by libertarian elitists to bolster their position):

https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/68/the-new-libertarian-elitists/

The article is a companion piece to a new academic article in American Political Science Review, where the authors propose a new subdiscipline of political science, Analytical Democracy Theory:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/analytical-democratic-theory-a-microfoundational-approach/739A9A928A99A47994E4585059B03398

What’s “Analytical Democracy Theory?” It’s the systematic study of when and how collective decision-making works, and when it goes wrong. Because the libertarian elitists aren’t completely, utterly wrong — there are times when groups of people make bad decisions. From that crumb of truth, the libertarian elitists theorize an entire nihilistic cake in which self-governance is impossible and where we fools and sentimentalists must be subjugated to the will of our intellectual betters, for our own good.

This isn’t the first time libertarian political scientists have pulled this trick. You’ve probably heard of the “Tragedy of the Commons,” which claims to be a “realist” account of what happens when people try to share something — a park, a beach, a forest — without anyone owning it. According to the “tragedy,” these commons are inevitably ruined by “rational” actors who know that if they don’t overgraze, pollute or despoil, someone else will, so they might as well get there first.

The Tragedy of the Commons feels right, and we’ve all experienced some version of it — the messy kitchen at your office or student house-share, the litter in the park, etc. But the paper that brought us the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons, published in 1968 by Garrett Hardin in Science, was a hoax:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin didn’t just claim that some commons turned tragic — he claimed that the tragedy was inevitable, and, moreover, that every commons had experienced a tragedy. But Hardin made it all up. It wasn’t true. What’s more, Hardin — an ardent white nationalist — used his “realist’s account of the commons to justify colonization and genocide.

After all, if the people who lived in these colonized places didn’t have property rights to keep their commons from tragifying, then those commons were already doomed. The colonizers who seized their lands and murdered the people they found there were actually saving the colonized from their own tragedies.

Hardin went on to pioneer the idea of “lifeboat ethics,” a greased slide to mass-extermination of “inferior” people (Hardin was also a eugenicist) in order to save our planet from “overpopulation.”

Hardin’s flawed account of the commons is a sterling example of the problem with economism, the ideology that underpins neoclassical economics:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Economism was summed up in by Ely Devons, who quipped “”If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”

Hardin asked himself, “If I were reliant upon a commons, what would I do?” And, being a realist (that is, an asshole), Hardin decided that he would steal everything from the commons because that’s what the other realists would do if he didn’t get there first.

Hardin didn’t go and look at a commons. But someone else did.

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel for her work studying the properties of successful, durable commons. She went and looked at commons:

https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons

Ostom codified the circumstances, mechanisms and principles that distinguished successful commons from failed commons.

Analytical Democratic Theory proposes doing for democratic deliberation what Ostrom did for commons: to create an empirical account of the methods, arrangements, circumstances and systems that produce good group reasoning, and avoid the pitfalls that lead to bad group reasoning. The economists’ term for this is microfoundations: the close study of interaction among individuals, which then produces a “macro” account of how to structure whole societies.

Here are some examples of how microfoundations can answer some very big questions:

Backfire effects: The original backfire effect research was a fluke. It turns out that in most cases, people who are presented with well-sourced facts and good arguments change their minds — but not always.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-019-09528-x

Rational ignorance: Contrary to the predictions of “rational ignorance” theory, people who care about specific issues become “issue publics” who are incredibly knowledgeable about it, and deeply investigate and respond to candidates’ positions:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08913810608443650

Rational ignorance is a mirage, caused by giving people questionnaires about politics in general, rather than the politics that affects them directly and personally.

“Myside” bias: Even when people strongly identify with a group, they are capable of filtering out “erroneous messages” that come from that group if they get good, contradictory evidence:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237827

Majority bias: People are capable of rejecting the consensus of majorities, when the majority view is implausible, or when the majority is small, or when the majority is not perceived as benevolent. The Asch effect is “folklore”: yes, people may say that they hold a majority view when they face social sanction for rejecting it, but that doesn’t mean they’ve changed their minds:

https://alexandercoppock.com/guess_coppock_2020.pdf

Notwithstanding all this, democracy’s cheerleaders have some major gaps in the evidence to support their own view. Analytical Democratic Theory needs to investigate the nuts-and-bolts of when deliberation works and when it fails, including the tradeoffs between:

“social comfort and comfort in expressing dissent”:

https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/S0065-2601(05)37004-3

“shared common ground and some measure of preexisting disagreement”:

https://sci-hub.st/10.1037/0022-3514.91.6.1080

“group size and the need to represent diversity”:

https://www.nicolas.claidiere.fr/wp-content/uploads/DiscussionCrowds-Mercier-2021.pdf

“pressures for conformity and concerns for epistemic reputation”:

https://academic.oup.com/princeton-scholarship-online/book/30811

Realism is a demand dressed up as an observation. Realists like Margaret Thatcher insisted “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism, but what she meant was “stop trying to think of an alternative.” Hardin didn’t just claim that some commons turned tragic, he claimed that the tragedy of the commons was inevitable — that we shouldn’t even bother trying to create public goods.

The Ostrom method — actually studying how something works, rather than asking yourself how it would work if everyone thought like you — is a powerful tonic to this, but it’s not the only one. One of the things that makes science fiction so powerful is its ability to ask how a system would work under some different social arrangement.

It’s a radical proposition. Don’t just ask what the gadget does: ask who it does it for and who it does it to. That’s the foundation of Luddism, which is smeared as a technophobic rejection of technology, but which was only ever a social rejection of the specific economic arrangements of that technology. Specifically, the Luddites rejected the idea that machines should be “so easy a child could use them” in order to kidnap children from orphanages and working them to death at those machines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/20/love-the-machine/#hate-the-factory

There are sf writers who are making enormous strides in imagining how deliberative tools could enable new democratic institutions. Ruthanna Emrys’s stunning 2022 novel “A Half-Built Garden” is a tour-de-force:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/26/aislands/#dead-ringers

I like to think that I make a small contribution here, too. My next novel, “The Lost Cause,” is at root a tale of competing group decision-making methodologies, between post-Green New Deal repair collectives, seafaring anarcho-capitalist techno-solutionists, and terrorizing white nationalist militias (it’s out in November):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Mountain View, Berkeley, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A lab-coated scientist amidst an array of chemistry equipment. His head has been replaced with a 19th-century anatomical lateral cross-section showing the inside of a bearded man's head, including one lobe of his brain. He is peering at a large flask half-full of red liquid. Inside the liquid floats the Capitol building.]

[termagax]

i do think cyberwizard drugs is a funny trait for victor. ostensibly this is for his magic and to maintain his connection to his cybernetics but its kind of like a guy who gets a medical card for back pain and then makes weed his primary personality trait.

[glimpsesofeuterpe]

been glancing at 2023's stuff for a moment, now wondering if it wasn't as bad as it seemed or was it

...did anything even happen at all? gotta try to take a look at bites

- have realised i have developed an ability to experience romantic interest or mb it was always there, failed to notice under layers of trauma and denial

- nearly every night i cried my eyes out about my ex friend in question (we broke up in the end of 2k22)... first weird exp or not, by now i know i should have known better and escape earlier. tbh it's been a struggle to move on fully, i still kinda miss that attention x ignoring combo and blunt wannabe guru "lessons", at least thanks to him i know what one shouldnt be doing if they wanna be a better friend

- i managed to make more friends and met one irl ... all just to fail later and avoid almost all interactions esp personal chats as apparently i am really scared of getting abandoned again, it's way easier for me to avoid and stay mostly alone... besides i still don't have enough energy to provide new ppl with anything more useful than basic enertainment

- despite stuff mentioned above, i figured out i love talking to ppl and i really wanna do good, i wanna love and be loved even even if it could be too much to wish for

- finally became a massagist!

- somehow nailed to help some ppl (wat)

- learned how to bake without setting everything on fire

- computer's video card died, so had to deal with a very laggy ol laptop

- fixed computer parts, switched from windows 7 to windows 10

- improved drawing skills, started to figure backgrounds out

- started to discover clip paint studio

- lots of rp madness was going on! felix and pals my beloved <3

- started to return back to actual writing

- spent most of summer in parks

- kinda started listening podcasts again ... this reminds i should resume woe dot begone, ty popping up in person when

- simon petrikov and elliot stardew valley taking the top spot on my list of comfort muses

[millythegoat]

The match already started??

[jeniffercheck]

Do either Audrey or Talia get Karolina's migraines?

i could see Talia getting them since it would just be another reason for her to hate Karolina

[retiredcultistredux]

I think the reason Kirby is so dull is smth o do with the friend heart. It was broken by Ester. An why have no idea on how to fix it. - Lollipop anon

Kirby: "...I know why, poyo. But...can't say it."

Prince Fluff: "What do you mean you can't say it? Look, if you know why he broke it and turned you into...this...you need to tell us."

Kirby paused for a moment before taking a deep breath.

Kirby: "...Fine. Breaking the Friend Heart, poyo...turned me negative. I'm giving off negative energy...they're draining the energy...into the Jamba Heart, poyo. To make it...stronger. And...it makes me...feel numb. I...don't care, poyo. And they...plan to use that...against you."

Prince Fluff: "And you're just gonna let them?!"

Hearing that shocked Prince Fluff, causing him to raise his voice. Kirby paused again, blinking but otherwise not showing any signs of emotion before continuing.

Kirby: "...I heard Ester in my head, poyo. He said...'no use in trying to stop us'. A stronger Jamba Heart...means a stronger Void Termina, poyo. And...I don't have all the help that I did to beat him the first time, poyo. So...no matter what...we're not strong enough."

Prince Fluff: "...Kirby..."

He looked at Kirby with a genuinely concerned expression. The puffball was usually so cheery and kept an optimistic outlook on things, but this? This felt completely unnatural, seeing his friend in such a state.

[pebblezone]

who’s up making sound effects ☝️☝️☝️