Book review: The Despot's Apprentice

In the 2017 book The Despot's Apprentice: Donald Trump's Attack On Democracy, Bryan Klass, an expert on authoritarianism and democracy, argues four plausible outcomes are possible from a Trump presidency. The worst case scenario is a slide into some form of American authoritarianism. Klass sees authoritarianism as the least likely outcome in view of the relative robustness of American institutions that are built to resist demagogic tyrants and despots.

The most likely outcome, democratic decay, leaves democracy weakened after endless attacks in the form of lies, polarizing rhetoric, social divisions and undermining democratic institutions. In this scenario, Trump's administration may mostly succeed or fail, but in any event it leaves millions of Americans with an authoritarian mindset. In that scenario, if the the damage can be repaired, the fixes will take decades.

In another outcome, Klass calls the forerunner, a more intelligent, sophisticated successor to Trump rises to power. This successor, Trump v. 2.0, has some combination of Trump's authoritarian instincts, Obama's rhetorical skill, and Reagan's people skills. The forerunner will benefit from Trump having normalized authoritarian behavior and politics. Klass doesn't say it, but forerunner seems best suited to usher in American authoritarianism. Right now, this observer is aware of no such personality, but some surely exist.

In the last outcome, the “Trump Vaccine” scenario, Trump causes a backlash. People re-engage in politics and civics in a democracy-promoting way. Here, political norms are enshrined in law, e.g., making conflict of interest laws apply to the president. In essence, people rise up to defend and repair their damaged democracy.

Klass has studied the tactics of tyrants, demagogues and kleptocrats. “Demagogues are nothing new. . . . . In ancient Athens . . . . they thrived on division and anger. Enter Cleon in the 420s BCE, a crude but charismatic demagogue. Cleon talked tough, offered simplistic solutions, fabricated claims about his political enemies, and used litigation to attack his rivals.” Referring to Trump, Klass observes that “He has followed in the footsteps of countless autocrats by stoking racial animosity to divide and rule.” Does any of that sound familiar?[1]

“Dictators throughout history have blurred the line between fact and falsehood for three main reasons.” Klass asserts that constant lies (i) help obscure and deflect from a dictator's poor performance, (ii) undermine sources who try to correct the record, and (iii) help build a cult of personality by misrepresenting the dictator's nonexistent virtues, honesty and competence.

Klass argues there is blame to go around. He points out that in the 2016 primary elections, a small proportion of adults voted. Once the primaries are over, the choices are made whether people like their general election choices or not. “Citizen apathy allows politicians to subvert democracy. . . . Democracy is withering from our collective indifference.”

Klass argues more civic engagement and more openness to opposition is needed to combat Trump's attacks on democracy, which he rightly sees as an American problem, not a partisan political problem. “Democracy is worth saving. Right now, in the United States, it needs to be saved -- before it's too late. It's far more difficult to resurrect democracy after it dies than it is to heal it when it's sick.”

Whether one sees this as unreasonably alarmist or reasonably accurate will, of course, depend on one's view of Trump and America's situation.

Footnote:
1. Trump hasn't sued his attackers or political opponents yet, but he threatened lawsuits against women who accused him of sexual assault after the 2016 election. So far, he has not acted on that threat.

B&B orig: 12/10/17

Book Review: The Influential Mind

“The manipulation was so powerful that half of our volunteer's memories are changed forever - they now have inaccurate recollections of the movie and are stuck with the wrong answer. When asked if they thought they were still being influenced by the fake answers we had shown them before, almost uniformly their response was ‘No!’” - Tali Sharot on the power of fake social opinion or, more precisely fake social pressure, to change memories from true to false – implanting false memories in people is disturbingly easy to do

“. . . . facts and logic are not the most powerful tools for altering opinions. When it comes to arguing, our instincts are wrong. . . . . The problem with an approach that prioritizes information and logic is that it ignores the core of what makes you and me human: our fears, our motives, our hopes and desires. . . . . Established beliefs can be extremely resistant to change, even when scientific evidence is provided to undermine those beliefs.” - Sharot’s understated case for the weakness of fact and logic in some social contexts – established political beliefs can be and often are impossible to change

Tali Sharot’s 2017 book, The Influential Mind, focuses on the biology of how and why opinion and behavior can change. The book is written for a general audience. Technical jargon is used sparingly, mainly referring to portions of the brain involved in regulating opinion and behavior. The book is a popular psychology text written at about grade level 12 based on an analysis of a portion of the book using an online text readability consensus calculator (range: 10th grade to college level).

Sharot is an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London. She holds degrees in economics and psychology. She founded and operates UCL’s Affective Brain Lab, which operates at the intersection of psychology and neuroscience. A list of her publications is here. Her main research interests are the biology of dishonesty and lying and the human optimism bias.

Sharot’s book posits ways to influence other minds by playing on the biology of belief change and formation. Despite that intended message, this reviewer’s take-away lesson is basically the opposite. At least when applied to politics, political minds and beliefs are very hard or impossible to change for nearly all people. That is in part because of the separate, competing realities that are now easily available online and via social media. Those separate realities provide all the social context, facts and logic needed to cognitively build and believe in differing world views. There are utterly incompatible world views and beliefs based on utterly incompatible facts and logic, e.g., liberal, conservative, capitalist, socialist, populist, Christian, anarchist, etc. Despite vast differences in perceived political realities based significantly on misinformation and false beliefs, all of those competing world views are very, very real in the believer’s mind.

Sharot does not squarely address the reality of separate political realities as a powerful confounding factor in influencing other minds with fact, logic and biological factors. From this observer’s point of view, that’s a disappointment.

That aside, when it comes to other aspects of life, what Sharot gives useful insight into what leads people to believe and act in certain ways based on biological mental imperatives. Sharot identifies seven biological factors that variably influence whether belief and behavior will stay the same or change in the face of efforts to coax change: (i) existing belief, (ii) emotion, (iii) incentives to change, (iv) perceived agency or perceived personal control of situations, (v) curiosity, (vi) the listener’s state of mind, e.g., relaxed, stressed, bored, angry, etc., and (vii) social context or, as Sharot puts it, ‘other people’.

Regarding existing belief, one can try to find common ground, for example, to convince a parent vaccinate their children by focusing on vaccine benefits. Due to existing beliefs, there is no point in trying to debunk vaccine myths because that approach fails and often makes matters worse.

Regarding emotion, arguments that appeal to emotion are far more effective than fact- and logic-based arguments. This is a significant factor in Donald Trump’s power to persuade. In this regard, Sharot is in agreement with social psychologist Johnathan Haidt, who has argued intuition and morals are major influencers in the context of politics: “. . . . our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife. . . . . Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats don’t. Their slogans, political commercials and speeches go straight for the gut . . . . Republicans don’t just aim to cause fear, as some Democrats charge. They trigger the full range of intuitions [emotions] described by Moral Foundations Theory.”

Implanting false beliefs – the power of lying: The power of social context or Sharot’s ‘other people’ presents examples of how easy it is to implant false beliefs in many or most people. By simply telling people that other people, or even one person, believes X is true, significant numbers of people without any or strong opinions about X, or even a belief that X is false, will tend to believe X is true. That is the biological situation, even if X is false. That false belief can persist even if objective evidence that proves X is false is presented to correct the false belief. In this observer’s opinion, this is probably the most influential human trait that allows changing perceptions of reality simply by asserting real or fake social pressure. The effect is more powerful when it is repeated. It is yet more powerful when a person is told, truly or falsely, that most people X is true.

That is why telling and repeating lies in politics is so popular and effective. Political lies are often accompanied by false assertions that what a partisan or special interest argues is majority opinion. We all know it: Politicians, special interests in fact, often claiming their policy is what “the American people want”, even when that is a blatant lie. It happens all the time in politics because it is an effective tactic that plays on human cognitive biology.

For people who want to gain insight into what cognitive cues or inputs tend to be most influential, this book is the best general audience book in this observer’s experience.

B&B orig: 12/17/17

Book Review: Expert Political Judgment

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along. — Bertrand Russell, philosopher commenting on the incremental nature of progress in human knowledge and understanding

“People for the most part dislike ambiguity . . . . people find it hard to resist filling in the missing data points with ideologically scripted event sequences. . . . People for the most part also dislike dissonance . . . . [but] policies that one is predisposed to detest sometimes have positive effects . . . . regimes in rogue states may have more popular support than we care to admit -- dominant options that beat all the alternatives are rare.”

“The core function of political belief systems is not prediction; it is to promote the comforting illusion of predictability.”

“Human performance suffers because we are, deep down, deterministic thinkers with an aversion to probabilistic strategies that accept the inevitability of error. We insist on looking for order in random sequences.”

“. . . . we have yet to confront the most daunting of all the barriers to implementation [of an objective system to evaluate expert performance]: the reluctance of professionals to participate. If one has carved out a comfortable living under the old regime of close-to-zero accountability for one’s pronouncements, one would have to be exceptionally honest or masochistic to jeopardize so cozy an arrangement by voluntarily exposing one’s predications to the rude shock of falsification.”

“Human nature being what it is, and the political system creating the perversely self-justifying incentives that it does, I would expect, in short order, faux rating systems to arise that shill for the representatives of points of view who feel shortchanged by even the most transparent evaluation systems that bend over backward to be fair. The signal-to-noise ratio will never be great in a cacophonously pluralistic society such as ours.” -- Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment, 2005

Context: For the most part, this channel is devoted to advocacy for a new, science-based political ideology and set of morals that recognize and accept human cognitive and social biology as sources of (i) disconnects from reality (facts), and reason (logic), and (ii) unwarranted inefficiency, unwarranted intolerance, unwarranted distrust, unwarranted conflict and etc. To this observer's knowledge, this book is the single best source of data for proof of the power of political ideology to distort fact and logic. Measuring expert competence (or more accurately, incompetence) is this book's sole focus.

Book review: Social psychologist Philip Tetlock's 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, summarizes about 20 years of his research into the question of whether it is even possible to reliably measure how good expert opinions are, and if so, how good are they. For his research, Tetlock focused mostly on measuring the accuracy of thousands of expert predictions about global events to see if that could afford a way to measure competence of expert opinion.

After a massive research effort, two answers came back: (1) Yes, their opinions can be measured for accuracy, and (2) all experts are dreadful. Tetlock's research shows that a key reason experts rise to the level of expert is because (i) they are fluid in simplifying problems and solutions and (ii) their presentations sound authoritative. But for the most part, they're wrong about 80-90% of the time. In other words, expert opinions are about the same as opinions of average people. In fact, there's barely any statistically detectable difference between most experts and random guessing. That's how good our experts, pundits, politicians and other assorted blowhards really are, i.e., they're worse than worthless. That assessment of more bad than good includes the damage, waste, social discord and loss of moral authority that flows from experts being wrong most of the time. One cannot be fair about this if one ignores mistakes.

Arrrgh!! The computers are coming!: Another mind-blowing observation came from Tetlock's use of several algorithms to see how well computers do compared to human experts. The data was sobering. One simple algorithm performed the same as human experts. No big deal. But, more sophisticated models, autoregressive distributed lag, performed about 2.5-fold better than the very best humans. That is a massive difference in competence. Tetlock commented: “whereas the best human forecasters were hard-pressed to predict more than 20 percent of the total variability in outcomes…, the generalized autoregressive distributed lag models explained on average 47 percent of the variance.” One can imagine that with time, algorithms will be improved to do better.

Tetlock doesn't advocate replacing humans with computers. He is suggesting that when a validated algorithm is available, experts would be well-advised to use it and take what it says into account. That seems perfectly reasonable.

Foxes and Hedgehogs: Tetlock identifies two basic mindsets and their cognitive approach to analyzing issues and making predictions, liberals and conservatives. The liberal mindset, the Foxes, to a small but real degree, does better than the conservative mindset, the Hedgehogs. Hedgehog thinking can be accurate depending on the issue at hand. But over a range of issues, its focus on key values or concepts limit its capacity to do well in the long run. By contrast the Fox mindset is more fluid and less ideologically constrained. Regarding political ideology, Tetlock comments: “The core function of political belief systems is not prediction; it is to promote the comforting illusion of predictablity.”

Regarding motivated reasoning or cognitive dissonance: “People for the most part dislike dissonance, a generalization that particularly applies to the Hedgehogs . . . . They prefer to organize the world into evaluative gestalts that couple good causes to good effects and bad to bad. Unfortunately, the world can be a morally messy place . . . . regimes in rogue states may have more popular support than we care to admit -- Dominant options that beat the alternatives on all possible dimensions -- are rare.”

Does some of that sound at least vaguely familiar? It ought to.

Why do bad experts persist?: Tetlock's data shows that bad experts persist for a range of reasons:
1. No one keeps track of their performance over time and they're never held accountable for mistakes. No one measures and grades experts (except Tetlock).
2. They are expert at explaining away their mistakes, sometimes incoherently, e.g., (i) I was almost right, (ii) I was wrong, but for the right reasons, (iii) that intervening event was unforseeable, it's not my fault, (iv) etc.
3. They appeal to people's emotions and biases that make them appear right, even when there is plenty of evidence that they are wrong.
4. The unconscious hindsight bias leads most experts to believe they did not make their past mistakes, i.e., they deny they guessed wrong and instead firmly believe their prediction was correct.
5. Experts are expert at couching their predictions in language that makes measuring accuracy impossible, e.g., (i) they don't specify by what time their predictions will come to pass, (ii) they use soft language that really doesn't amount to a firm prediction, ‘it is likely that X will happen’ without specifying the odds or what ‘likely’ means.
6. Etc.

Tetlock's book is not easy to read. It could be part of a college course in social psychology or political science. The data is often expressed in terms of statistics. Nonetheless, there is more than enough general language for the lay reader with a high school education to fully understand the book's main point about the discomfortingly rare expert competence in politics.

When it comes to politics, Tetlock isn't naïve: “Human nature being what it is, and the political system creating the perversely self-justifying incentives that it does, I expect, in short order, faux rating systems to arise that shill for the representatives of points of view who feel shortchanged by even the most transparent evaluation systems that bend over backward to be fair. The signal-to-noise ratio will never be great in a cacophonously pluralistic society like ours.”

Remember, that was 2005. This is 2018. The weak signal is fading in the increasing roar of blithering noise in the form of lies, deceit, character assassination, unwarranted fear mongering and other forms of nonsense.

Question: Was Tetlock's 2005 prediction that faux rating systems would arise in ‘short order’ to hype the reputation of inept experts mostly correct, or, has it sufficed for dissatisfied people to simply deny the existing ratings systems are credible?

Note: In 2017, Tetlock published a second edition. The first chapter is here.

B&B orig: 2/12/18

Book Review: Why We Cooperate

Michael Tomasello’s 2009 book, Why We Cooperate, presents in concise terms a hypothesis about what it is that makes humans different from other animals. In this book, Tomasello, a psychologist, summarizes decades of work from his laboratory and he recounts others who are trying to understand the biological nature of human cognition and society. The book consists of two parts. The first is Tomasello’s description of his ‘shared intentionality’ hypothesis. The second consists of short critiques by four leading experts who posit comments, critiques, or competing theories on some or all of the shared intentionality hypothesis, which is based on their own research and data interpretations.

Why We Cooperate gives an appreciation for how far this kind of research has come, especially in the last 25 years, which is when much of the most probative data was generated. It also provides a basis to understand some of the basis for cooperation vs non-cooperation among groups dealing with politics.

Shared Intentionality: Shared intentionality is a hypothesis that a keystone of humanity is the ability of humans to envision the mutual relationship between the self, others, and their shared objectives in goal-oriented activities. This concept is required for even simple activities, such as a role-playing game, wherein a child participates with an adult or other children. This trait develops in humans at about 1.5-2 years of age and it persists throughout life. The activity is characterized by a person’s understanding of the role as well as the other participant's perspective, contingent on the fact that both parties share at least one mutual goal.

Tomasello argues that for joint attentional activities, human intentionality arises from understanding one’s role and the role of others involved. This happens only when there is a shared goal, which is when joint attention would be required from at least two people. Data from research with chimpanzees indicates that they only see their role from a first-person perspective and that of a partner from a third-person perspective. Humans can take a “bird’s-eye view” of the different roles in a group activity and they can easily switch roles, while chimpanzees and other great apes do not appear to display role switching ability. This taken to mean that great apes cannot engage in joint attention.

Evidence for that difference in ability to understand various points of view comes from studies that look at what an individual perceives relative to another individual. A chimp looking at an object of interest such as a mango can lead a second chimp to look at the fruit, but there is no evidence that the second chimp is aware that the first chimp is looking at the object. This is cited as an example that great apes do not have any ‘recursive mind reading’ capacity. Recursive mind reading arises when one individual sees and understands what another individual is seeing. By contrast, humans display evidence of recursive mind reading at an early age.

When infants understand that an adult is gesturing and making eye movements to show they are searching for a relocated or misplaced object, infants point to the item to inform the adult where the object is. Recent laboratory data suggests that when an ape is pointing to an object of interest (e.g., some food) it is not a gesture to inform the human of the food’s location. Instead, the ape is telling the human to get the food so the ape can eat it. This is obviously a difficult distinction. Nonetheless, observation of apes in the wild do not typically reveal gestures that tell other apes in the group where food or an object of interest is. In the wild, apes will look at food, leading others to do the same, but that is where it ends. Evidence of joint attention is generally absent.

Additional evidence of shared intentionality as a human-specific trait is the observation that the whites of human eyes (the sclera) are much more visible than that of all other 200-plus species of non-human primates. Tomasello argues that the whites of non-human primate eyes are mostly dark, which makes it difficult to see where another non-human primate’s eyes are looking. Instead, non-human primates look at where the head of another is pointing. By contrast, human infants engage in a constant process of looking at the eyes of another both to look at where their social partner is looking and to assess their level of attention. Humans are more adept at this presumably because our eyes' anatomies can more easily convey object locations to others.

Combinatorial capacity – increasing language skill increases cognitive capacity: One competing hypothesis championed by Elizabeth Spelke, a ‘combinatorial capacity’ hypothesis, posits that instead of shared intentionality, unique human cognitive and social capacity arises from a combination of processing language as well as five distinct cognitive systems that are present at birth or in months after birth. The five systems are for representing and thinking about (i) inanimate objects and their motions, (ii) intentional agents and their goal-directed actions, (iii) places in the local area and their relations to one another, (iv) sets of objects and their numerical ordering and arithmetic relationships, and (v) social partners who engage with the infant. These systems are universal in all cultures and languages, and these systems remain active throughout life. As a child’s language skills increase, so does the capacity to combine the thought systems to give rise to unique human cognitive skills.

Spelke summarizes this hypothesis as “three hallmarks of uniquely human cognition – tool use, natural numbers and geometry – appear to be consequences of a uniquely human combinatorial capacity that is linked to natural language.” Spelke’s interpretation of existing data lead he to believe that language is the product of unique human cooperation and communication. But she acknowledges that “it is possible, however, that the causal arrow points in the opposite direction.” She argues that the data favors her view that combinatorial capacity and developing language skill is more fundamental than shared intentionality. The book concludes with this by Spelke: “I have focused my comments on two different attempts to explain humans’ unique capacities: Tomasello’s notion of an innate, species-specific capacity for shared intentionality, and the notion of an innate, species-specific capacity for combinatorial capacity expressed in natural language. At this time, we cannot know whether either of these accounts is correct. . . . . Whatever the outcome of [further] studies, Tomasello’s work gives us reason to believe that the next decade of research exploring the minds and actions of infants will be as fruitful as the last. The fundamental questions of human nature and human knowledge, questions that have been outstanding for millennia, are beginning to yield answers, . . . . .”

Human Cognitive Capacity and Politics: Tomasello touches on the relevance of research to politics. He points out that although humans evolved cooperatively, “they also put their heads together to do all kinds of heinous deeds.” He asserts that recent evolutionary models mirror what politicians have known for a long time. He points to politician’s tactic of motivating people to collaborate and think like a group by identifying an enemy and then claim that “they” threaten “us”.

The politics of divide and debase is an common and often successful tactic for winning people over to a politician’s or special interest’s side, and for creating narratives about reality that can diverge from actuality. The tactic is being deployed today on a scale that is arguably unprecedented in recent decades. Tomasello argues that the human capacity to cooperate appears to work best in small groups. He observes that “such group-mindedness is, perhaps ironically, a major cause of strife and suffering in the world today. The solution – more easily described than attained – is to find new ways to define the group.”

One possible way to defining a less divisive kind of group is to look to insights from human cognitive and social science. One possibility is to adopt a mindset or ideology that attempts to downplay sources of biases. As research progresses, insights on the fundamental nature of human cognition and social cooperation is likely to allow refinements in an anti-bias ideology. In that regard, political thinking should track progress in relevant areas of research.

The goal of an anti-bias mindset is to elevate objective reality and less biased reason into more important roles than they currently play in politics. Perfection in this regard is not possible for both human and laws of the universe reasons. Despite the impossibility of perfection, the assumption is that that an anti-bias political mindset will often lead to a better political outcomes in the long run.

B&B orig: 10/6/18