#issue publics

[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.]

[mythicalcoolkid]

You don't wish your disability was worse or more visible, you wish your disability was taken seriously. Please stop confusing the two, I guarantee you would not get the support you need JUST by being more severe or more visible. Please listen to visibly disabled people when we tell you it isn't better on our side

[tiger-grace]

Gala Woman: your manners are rather good for someone from the... lower class

(Dick Grayson shovels breadrolls into his mouth in the background and Bruce Wayne trips and falls down a flight of stairs to have a getaway for Batman Stuff™)

young Jason Todd, incredulously: ..if theres a rumor being spread about behavior in this family i know damn well its not gonna be me.

[the-heart-of-a-monster]

THoaM Issue 9 PAGE 9

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new to thoam or want to reread the comic but its really awkward to do on tumblr mobile? The official website has got you covered!

[dannyphannypack]

college is supposed to be a new start for danny: one in which his “work” life and personal life stay strictly separate. but when danny moves into his new gotham university dorm for the upcoming semester, his hopes are dashed. gotham is overflowing with lost souls, and they won’t leave him alone long enough for him to finish his damn physics homework.

when mr. and mrs. wayne offer him refuge in their old study, danny thinks he’d be stupid not to take it. he wasn’t expecting their house to still be inhabited, but whatever. he can blend into the background. he’ll do anything for some peace and quiet.

now if only he can convince martha to stop trying to out him to the rest of the family.

[reasonsforhope]

"Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) has vetoed a Republican-led ban on transgender high school athletes, saying that such legislation would needlessly harm the mental well-being of trans youth and make the state less safe for LGBTQ+ people. State Republicans reportedly lack the votes to override his veto.

“This type of legislation, and the harmful rhetoric we get by pursuing it, harms LGBTQ Wisconsinites’ and kids’ mental health, emboldens anti-LGBTQ harassment, bullying, and violence, and threatens the safety and dignity of LGBTQ Wisconsinites, especially our LGBTQ kids,” Evers wrote in his veto message.

“I am vetoing this bill in its entirety because I object to codifying discrimination into state statute and the Wisconsin state legislature’s ongoing efforts to perpetuate hateful and discriminatory rhetoric and policies targeting LGBTQ Wisconsinites including our transgender and gender nonconforming kids…. I will veto any bill that makes Wisconsin a less safe, less inclusive, and less welcoming place for LGBTQ people and kids,” Evers added.

He vetoed the bill in a public ceremony while surrounded by trans advocates, Democratic lawmakers, the mayor of Madison and others, NBC News reported.

The bill would have required public, private, and independent charter schools to designate each team by the gender of its participants, and then require participants to play on teams matching the gender listed on their birth certificates.

The bill would have overruled current policies, established in 2015 by the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association, that allowed trans students to play on sports teams matching their gender identity as long as they provided a personal letter; supporting documentation from parents, teachers, and medical professionals; and proof of any gender-affirming care...

Last September [in 2023], Evers vetoed a Republican-led bill that would’ve banned gender-affirming medical care for minors."

-via LGBTQ Nation, April 2, 2024

[choccy-milky]

Babes you got my foaming at the mouth every time you post or update! This new chapter was so precious!!

Modern AU where the only thing that’s different was instead of an illustration of Sherlock Holmes, it’s a picture of Banana Pumpkinpatch

GIRL THE WAY I GOOGLED "BANANA PUMPKINPATCH CHARACTER" BEFORE REALIZING YOU MEANT BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH LMFAOOO 😭😭😭 but aww THANK YOU💖and this is amazing i had to draw it as soon as u sent it, i love that cloras love for sherlock holmes also works in a modern au setting. CLORAS LOVE FOR SHERLOCK IS ETERNAL

(and yes seb would read/watch it bc of her)

[laststandx3]

When Jesus pretended to be dead for 3 days it's a miracle and everyone is sympathetic. But when I, James Somerton-

[whereserpentswalk]

Reblog this post to send a small fae creature to annoy and haunt someone who plays loud tiktoks in public.

[moontyger]

Testing conducted by the Food and Drug Administration on pasteurized commercially purchased milk has found genetic evidence of the H5N1 bird flu virus, the agency confirmed Tuesday. But the testing, done by polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, cannot distinguish between live virus or fragments of viruses that could have been killed by the pasteurization process.

The agency said it has been trying to see if it could grow virus from milk found to contain evidence of H5N1, which is the gold standard test to see if there is viable virus in a product. The lengthy statement the agency released does not explicitly say FDA laboratories were unable to find live virus in the milk samples, but it does state that its belief that commercial, pasteurized milk is safe to consume has not been altered by these findings.

“To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the statement said.

The document was long on assurances but short on details of what has been undertaken or found. It does not specify how many commercial samples were taken or in how many markets, nor does it indicate what percentage of the samples were PCR-positive for H5N1. The statement did not indicate if the testing suggested the amounts of viral genetic material in the milk were low or high.

Furthermore, the statement did not reveal if the milk products were purchased in parts of the country where outbreaks have occurred, or in areas where cows haven’t been seen to have been infected.

I put this in the tags but I guess it is worth saying here as well: I am not trying to panic anyone, but this definitely seems like something you should know if you are in the US. The milk supply is not definitely unsafe, but they don't know it is safe yet either, so make your own choices based on that.

[visenyaism]

promise?

[i-amusemyself]

me: peer review is an essential part of the scientific process and helps maintain trust in and integrity of the research we publish

also me, the second anyone suggests an edit to my work:

[intothestacks]

A handful of states are eyeing laws that would allow criminal charges against school librarians for distributing books that contain "obscene matter."

Why it matters: GOP state lawmakers have in recent years increased their efforts to ban material they deem inappropriate from schools and libraries.

That material includes books on gender identity and sexual orientation.

Critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia, said the bill "is designed to create confusion for educators about what kinds of materials can be taught or displayed."

The American Library Association said this type of legislation would allow for "advocacy groups and parents to sue or prosecute library workers" for providing books and other materials that present "accurate medical information about sex or puberty, describe sexual behavior, or reflect the experiences of LGBTQ+ persons."

The ALA noted that such legal action would be "based on the false claim that any material that includes information about sex, sexuality, gender identity, or sexual orientation is legally obscene and inappropriate for minors."

[the-heart-of-a-monster]

THoaM Issue 8 Page 5

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new to thoam or want to reread the comic but its really awkward to do on tumblr mobile? The official website has got you covered!

[ghostlyarchaeologist]

Christian Kane twirling props: a series. Part 1/?

Leverage Season 1

[carlyraejepsans]

i unironically block and avoid anyone who interacts with callout posts btw. unless the post contains information about genuine real harm to real people in unequivocal terms, with solid proof and context that cannot be chalked up to misrepresented friendship drama, i go scorched earth on the notes. the amount of potential harassment and harm they can and HAVE caused in the past, especially to minority groups, trans women in particular, is beyond anything that can ever justify their existence. they're a petty, childish—frequently wrong!—thoughtless and cruel way to "spread awareness". grow up.