Being Bayesian About Beliefs

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an OP, What Happens when Trust is Lost, about my initial reaction to the reason that the president chose to kill an Iranian general when he did. I concluded he did it for personal political reasons, not due to imminent threat to US or other lives or interests. The facts and logic behind that OP were these:

1. The president’s has a public track record of making over 15,000 false and misleading statements to the public;
2. That fact-based record constitutes an empirical basis to not trust anything the president says about anything related to his politics;
3. The president claimed he killed the Iranian general due to an imminent grave threat the general posed against Americans or their interests;
4. Despite the president’s claim of self-defense to justify the killing when it happened, it is reasonable to believe that he intentionally timed the killing to divert public attention from damaging information that had just come from information from federal courts related to his impeachment; and
5. Therefore the president lied about the reason for the killing occurring when it did.

Being Bayesian

For political beliefs, being Bayesian means that one changes one’s opinion or prediction and/or their level of confidence in it as new information comes in that would logically support or contradict the opinion or prediction. Social science research strongly suggests that people best grounded in political reality and logic are Bayesian about their political opinions (beliefs) and predictions. When new contradictory information comes to their attention, Bayesians tend to either (1) reduce their confidence in their opinion or belief that something is true or will happen, or (2) completely reverse their opinion. Similarly, awareness of when supporting evidence or logic arises, confidence in the opinion typically increases. 

People are often not Bayesian when cherished political beliefs are challenged by contrary or undermining information or reasoning. Such beliefs are simply impervious to change in the face of contrary evidence and logic. That is not uncommon in politics. It is a common basis for political beliefs and reasoning being irrational to some extent.

New evidence about killing the general

On hearing of the killing of the Iranian general, my initial logic and conclusions (beliefs) were that (i) the killing is was timed to deflect public attention from bad news about impeachment of the president, and (ii) that the general presented no imminent threat at that time. But since the story was new, it was possible that evidence could come out showing that there really was an actual threat. Thus, my level of personal confidence was pretty low, about 55% certain, that the president was lying about why the general was killed when he was killed.

In the days since the killing, evidence has come out that there was no imminent threat from the general. Comments by the president, his defense secretary and secretary of state and others in his administration were vague, contradictory, inconsistent and not accompanied any solid evidence of any real threat. People in congress, including some republicans, were unconvinced that any real threat existed at the time. Administration efforts to buttress the imminent threat argument were absurd.

Trump administration’s best people getting it’s story straight

Being Bayesian in view of the evidence to date, I have had no choice but to revise my confidence that the president lied about why he killed the general from about a 55% level to about a 95% level. 

allusion/illusion/delusion

CHOOSE YOUR WORDS:

Novelists, magicians, and other tricksters keep these words busy. Novelists love an allusion, an indirect reference to something like a secret treasure for the reader to find; magicians heart illusions, or fanciful fake-outs; but tricksters suffer from delusions, ideas that have no basis in reality.

Blink and you'll miss it: an allusion is a quick indirect mention of something. It's a literary device that stimulates ideas, associations, and extra information in the reader's mind with only a word or two:

Littlemore was not quick at catching literary allusions. (Henry James)

Thomas Paine's writings contain several affectionate allusions to his father, but none to his mother. (Daniel Moncure Conway)

Magicians love to create illusions, or visual tricks, like making a tiger disappear or sawing a person in half. Your eye can be fooled by an optical illusion, and Dorothy and the gang get to the bottom of the Wizard's illusion and discover he's just a regular guy. Illusions aren't always glamorous; sometimes they're just hiding the man behind the curtain:

"We have no illusion that these credits are going to create lots of new jobs," the editorial said. (New York Times)

But while investing in your company's stock might feel safer than betting on the stock market as a whole, that is usually an illusion. (Seattle Times)

Delusions are like illusions but they're meaner. A delusion is a belief in something despite the fact that it's completely untrue. Hence the phrase is delusions of grandeur. People with delusions often wind up on the shrink's couch. Whether you are trying to deceive yourself or someone is trying to deceive you, if you believe the false idea, you have a delusion about reality:

Delusions are closely allied to hallucinations and generally accompany the latter. (Samuel Henry Prince)

Two medical experts had concluded then that the accused gunman suffered from schizophrenia, disordered thinking and delusions. (Reuters)

"Basically, I think he's suffering from delusions of grandeur," he said. (Chicago Tribune)

An allusion shows up in art, while illusions love kids' parties. If you believe something despite reality, you have a delusion.

https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/allusion-illusion-delusion/

SO HELP ME OUT HERE FOLKS, if I understand the meanings of the above words,  would it be fair to say:

Trump has allusions of grandeur, that his followers have been victims of his illusions, and that they suffer from delusions that he really cares about them?

HMM??

More Evidence that Inconvenient Truth Is Irrelevant to the Tribe

The Washington Post article, Doctored images have become a fact of life for political campaigns: When they’re disproved, believers ‘just don’t care’, adds to evidence that dark free speech[1] continues to poison the minds of Americans. The WaPo observes that we are experiencing an explosion of online disinformation from politicians. Despite the immorality of deceit, politicians know that deceit works and there’s not enough social repercussion to deter the tactic.

The brazenness of politicians called out for asserting lies to the public is evidence of how far morality has fallen in American politics. A key goal of even blatantly obvious lies is to reinforce existing beliefs, not necessarily convincing anyone of the asserted truth of the lie. That tends to make compromise with political opposition impossible. The deceiver’s audience already believes or feels a certain way about a politician and their tribe. When they discover the lie many people don’t care. Their rationalization tends to be along the lines of ‘people say it could have been true’ or ‘that actually reflects who the attacked person really is.’ In some cases tribe members just do not care at all that they were lied to because it was their lie and thus morally neutral or good.

The WaPo writes:

To back his assertion that President Barack Obama had coddled the world’s top sponsor of terrorists, Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), cited an unusual source: a clumsily altered image of a nonexistent handshake between Obama and the Iranian president. The doctored photo, once used in TV ads supporting Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, had been repeatedly debunked since it first surfaced on an Egyptian Islamist political website in 2013. 

But when critics last week chided Gosar for showing hundreds of thousands of people a faked image of an imaginary event, the fifth-term congressman said they, the “dim witted” ones, were in the wrong. “No one said this wasn’t photoshopped,” he declared. “The point remains … The world is better without Obama as president." 

For ginning up political resentment and accentuating your rivals’ flaws, nothing quite compares to a doctored image. It can help anyone turn a political opponent into a caricature — inventing gaffes, undercutting wins and erasing nuance — leaving only the emotion behind. 

On Monday, Trump, who has more than 70 million Twitter followers, retweeted a fake image of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) cartoonishly altered to show them in a turban and hijab. The tweet, which falsely claims that the two most powerful Democrats in Congress have “come to the Ayatollah’s rescue,” has been retweeted more than 17,000 times.

Clearly, the GOP leadership sees lies, deceit and irrational emotional manipulation as acceptable tactics. There is no obvious resistance from America's political right to being lied to, deceived and emotionally manipulated. The ends, maybe a republican-populist utopia of some sort, justify the means. The degree to which democratic politicians have sunk to this new low level of immorality isn't clear.

Does immorality ever fade into evil?

In her book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, moral philosopher Sissela Bok argued that lies and deceit are usually immoral to some extent. Some circumstances may exist that some people see as justifying politicians who deceive the public for its own good. However, she convincingly argues that those are rare situations. Other writers point to the standard use of dark free speech against societies as a powerful, necessary tool in the rise to power of tyrants, oligarchs, murderers and kleptocrats. The path and tactics the modern GOP is following fits the standard pattern in the rise of authoritarianism and corruption and the fall of democracy and the rule of law.

Does the current intensity and quantity of dark free speech the GOP leadership uses against American society, in particular the president, rise to evil or something close to it? Do the ends that the president and his party aim for justify means that rely heavily on a constant stream of lies, deceit and irrational manipulation?


Footnote:
1. Dark free speech: Constitutionally or legally protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse, polarize and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide inconvenient truths, facts and corruption (lies and deceit of omission), and (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism. (my label, my definition)

Food Stamps: Do Unemployed Workers Deserve to Live Hungry?

Work requirement changes to the Food Stamp program will lead about 700,000 people to lose food stamps. Some data from states that imposed a work requirement several years ago is now available. GOP lawmakers who imposed a work requirement in West Virginia claim the change has been a success. People who run shelters and food pantries in the state claim it has been a failure.

The New York Times writes: “While around 5,410 people lost food stamps in the nine counties, the growth in the labor force in these counties over the ensuing three years significantly lagged the rest of the state. Average monthly employment growth in the counties actually slowed, while it nearly doubled in the rest of West Virginia.

‘We can prove it from the data that this does not work,’ said Seth DiStefano, policy outreach director at the center. The state Department of Health and Human Resources initially acknowledged as much. ‘Our best data,’ it reported in 2017, ‘does not indicate that the program has had a significant impact on employment figures.’

One of the first signs of the change came in the dining hall of the Huntington City Mission, about half an hour’s drive from little Milton. Suddenly, the hall was packed. ‘It was just like, ‘Boom, what’s going on here?’ said Mitch Webb, the director of the 81-year-old mission. In early 2016, the mission served an average of around 8,700 meals a month. After the new food stamp policy went into full effect, that jumped to over 12,300 meals a month. ‘It never renormalized,’ Mr. Webb said.

[A GOP lawmaker comments:] “The information I have is that there’s been significant savings over all,” he said, coupling that with a low unemployment rate as evidence that the policy was working.

‘If a person just chooses not to work, which those are the people that were targeted, they’re not going to get a free ride,’ he said. Of people who are facing concrete obstacles to steady work, like a lack of transportation, he added: ‘If there’s a will, there’s a way.’”

A 2018 federal study came to the conclusion that work force participation didn't change much after the work requirement was imposed:

We perform a regression discontinuity analysis of the impact of work requirements for able bodied adults without dependents (ABAWDs) on labor supply and participation, exploiting the fact that the work requirement applies only to individuals under 50 years old. Using a novel dataset containing ABAWD work requirement waiver information merged with SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] administrative records and American Community Survey (ACS) data, we find the work requirements have no impact on labor force participation and the number of hours worked. We do find that the work requirements reduce participation in SNAP. There is some evidence that those with worse job prospects are especially less likely to participate in SNAP as a result of the work requirements.

It’s their own fault

A common human trait to shut compassion down is to blame shift. People deserve their unhappy situation. The data indicates that even when there is a will to work, there isn't always a way to do so. If there aren’t jobs, there just aren’t jobs. Nonetheless, blaming people for laziness or whatever else works nicely to justify work requirements and the increase in hunger that can lead to. Even people receiving food assistance fall back on this tactic.

The NYT writes: “At dinnertime at the city mission, men complained about people who were too lazy to work, who were sponging off the system. ‘Not giving people food stamps because they don’t work is probably the best course of action,’ said Zach Tate, who had been at the mission before, but now, with a place to stay, was just back for a meal. ‘It’s like training a puppy.’ He returned to his turkey Alfredo for a few moments and then clarified. ‘But taking it away indefinitely doesn’t work either,’ he said. ‘It creates a sense of despair.’”

Even poor people without enough income to feed themselves attack food stamps as undeserved. It doesn't matter that most working-age adults on food stamps have a job or are between jobs, and often don't even have transportation to get to a job. Realities like that just don't intrude on the blaming mindset. One man lost his job when his employer checked and found he had a bad credit rating. he wound up on food stamps. Some disabled adults are dependent on relatives but are still not considered dependents for food stamps. It’s all their own fault. Let ’em starve because they deserve it.

Human compassion is a fragile, very easy thing to shut down. All it takes is some rigid ideology or a little ignorance of the logistics of poverty and, poof! Like magic, compassion is gone. Contrary data be damned.