America’s Slide Into Authoritarianism: Another Step Along The Way

Many sources have written on the resignation letter that Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis submitted to President Trump a few days ago. Mattis planned to retire at the end of February, but Trump fired him effective immediately, two months early. The reason Trump fired Mattis is because in his resignation letter, Mattis criticized Trump and his policies. The Washington Post writes this about the firing: “President Trump, who aides said has been seething about news coverage of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s pointed resignation letter, abruptly announced Sunday that he was removing Mattis two months before his planned departure and installing Patrick Shanahan as acting defense secretary.”

Clearly, Trump is not concerned about a smooth transition. He moves to eliminate people who are not fawning sycophants or other forms of ‘yes’ people without regard for consequences beyond himself. Independent thinkers are obviously not welcome.

Mattis included the following comments in his December 20 letter of resignation:

One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies.

Similarly, I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours. It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model gaining veto authority over other nations' economic, diplomatic, and security decisions to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies.

My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues.

Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.

The accusations -- true or false?: In essence, Mattis accuses Trump of not maintaining America’s alliances or showing respect our allies, and not defending America, its allies and the rest of the world against aggressive authoritarianism from China and Russia. Trump and most of his supporters will reject that as nonsense or lies. Others will see it as true.

For those who see the Mattis allegations as true, Trump’s response can be seen as another step by Trump toward authoritarian government because he is moving to establish his own authoritarian brand in America. If Mattis is speaking truth to Trump and American authoritarian populists, they have no choice but to (1) reject the allegations as false, or (2) concede that Mattis is basically right, authoritarianism is better than liberal democracy and American policy and alliances need to be changed.

Since truth and sound reason are antithetical to authoritarians whenever they get in the way, there is no reason to think that Trump or most (~95%?) of his supporters including congressional republicans will accept what Mattis alleges as basically true. The failure of Trump supporters fail to condemn Trump’s policies enables Trump to keep building his authoritarian kleptocracy. In itself, that is another step toward authoritarianism, and another step away from liberal democracy.

B&B orig: 12/24/18

How the Media Needs to Respond to Trump’s Lies

Despite constantly being called out by the professional media for constant lying, President Trump persists. In an interview with Vox, cognitive linguist George Lakoff proposes a ‘truth sandwich’ tactic that would make Trump’s lies less effective. The tactic is designed to lessen the cognitive effectiveness of lies. The truth sandwich brackets a lie with truth and ends with a description of the consequences of the lie.

Standard media response: Repeat the lie → State that it is a lie → Tell the truth

Truth sandwich: Tell the truth → State the lie → Repeat the truth → Explain consequences of the lie

Lakoff argues that the standard response is ineffective in reducing the powerful cognitive effect of repeating a lie. Repeating a lie instantly and unconsciously activates a mental frame that reinforces the perception of truth in the lie.

What Lakoff is arguing is a matter of cognitive biology, not just facts and logic. Facts and logic alone are ineffective at persuasion for people who hold a worldview where lies are seen as truth. Lakoff briefly discusses the same criticism of liberal messaging that he has been voicong for over 20 years: Stop using just facts and logic because that alone doesn't work. Start using communication methods that are effective based on human cognitive biology.

The Vox article and interview:

President Donald Trump has hacked the media.
As Vox’s Ezra Klein argued recently, the press is in a lose-lose situation — and we all know it. Trump thrives on opposition, and often the media plays right into his hands, feverishly chasing every lie and half-truth he utters or tweets.

George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at UC Berkeley and the author of the 2004 book Don’t Think of an Elephant, recently published an article laying out the media’s dilemma. Trump’s “big lie” strategy, he argues, is to “exploit journalistic convention by providing rapid-fire news events for reporters to chase.”

According to Lakoff, the president uses lies to divert attention from the “big truths,” or the things he doesn’t want the media to cover. This allows Trump to create the controversies he wants and capitalize on the outrage and confusion they generate, while simultaneously stoking his base and forcing the press into the role of “opposition party.”

I reached out to Lakoff to talk about Trump’s media strategy, but also, more importantly, about solutions. If the president has indeed turned journalistic conventions to his advantage, how can we, the media, respond constructively?

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Can you lay out for me in simple terms how President Trump manipulates the media?

George Lakoff
He manipulates the media by constantly tweeting and saying more and more outrageous things. The media says, “Well, we have to cover the president. We have to repeat what he says.” But there is no real reason this has to happen. Journalists could, if they choose to, ignore the president’s tweets.

Sean Illing
What, then, would you have reporters do? Ridiculous or not, what the president of the United States tweets or says has real-world consequences, so it’s not quite that simple.

George Lakoff
I wrote a book called Don’t Think of an Elephant, which makes the point that if you negate a frame, you activate the frame. When Trump says something and people working in the media deny it, they’re helping him. But they don’t realize that they’re helping him.

There’s another possibility. Journalists could engage in what I’ve called “truth sandwiches,” which means that you first tell the truth; then you point out what the lie is and how it diverges from the truth. Then you repeat the truth and tell the consequences of the difference between the truth and the lie.

If the media did this consistently, it would matter. It would be more difficult for Trump to lie.

Sean Illing
So you’re saying that instead of amplifying the president’s message by repeating it in the course of debunking it, we should focus on his tactics and talk about the truths he’s trying to suppress.

George Lakoff
Well, not just talk about the truth he’s trying to suppress. The truth sandwich is more than that. It shows the difference between the truth and what he’s saying — putting the truth first, and then putting it afterward, and talking about its consequences.

People say, “Oh, well, here’s the real fact.” That doesn’t really matter because Trump is getting his frame out there first. What he’s trying to do in each of the tweets he sends out is to frame something first and then repeat it.

Notice that when you repeat something, you’re strengthening it in people’s brains. The more a neural circuit is activated, the stronger it gets. Trump is using certain communicative tactics that are very sophisticated and he doesn’t realize it.

“DEMOCRATS BELIEVE IN WHAT IS CALLED ENLIGHTENMENT REASONING — THAT IF YOU TELL PEOPLE THE FACTS, THEY’LL REACH THE RIGHT CONCLUSION. THAT JUST ISN’T TRUE.”

Sean Illing
I take your point, but I wonder if Trump is just kryptonite for a liberal democratic system built on a free press. If someone is truly indifferent to the consequences of lying, if they welcome negative coverage and are backed by a base primed to disbelieve inconvenient facts, I’m not sure there’s much we can do to contain that person once they’ve ascended to power.

George Lakoff
It’s difficult; I know it’s difficult. But I don’t think it’s impossible. It has to do with the media not being willing to be manipulated by Trump, not being willing to say, “Oh, we have to report everything he says.” If his tactics didn’t work, he wouldn’t be able to manipulate people the way that he has.

Sean Illing
So you’re saying that the president has created a situation in which journalists, by merely doing their jobs, are reinforcing his entire communications strategy.

George Lakoff
Right. That’s where we’re at, but you see, there’s still a question of what the media’s job is.

Many journalists still assume that language is neutral, that you can just repeat language and it’s completely neutral. In fact, language is never neutral. Language is always framed in a certain way, and it always has consequences.

If in the process of reporting, you simply repeat the language Trump is using, you’re missing what’s going on.

Sean Illing
But if the president spreads malicious lies, those lies have consequences. Take the recent shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue. Trump helped popularize a conspiracy theory about George Soros funding a caravan of illegal immigrants, and an extremist took that claim seriously and acted on it.

Isn’t that a strong case for why we have to expose or challenge lies?

George Lakoff
I totally understand, but simply exposing the lie about the Soros conspiracy theory doesn’t work, because to call it a lie is to repeat it, to repeat the content, which strengthens it in people’s brains. If I say don’t think of an elephant, you think of an elephant.

Sean Illing
So how exactly should the media have responded in this case to the Soros conspiracy theory tweeted by the president?

George Lakoff
By not reporting it.

Sean Illing
At all?

George Lakoff
Not one bit. 

Sean Illing
The president has 55 million Twitter followers and a vast conservative media-industrial complex that will happily amplify his comments. Nothing the rest of the media does will change this. Is there a solution to this problem?

George Lakoff
Well, it’s not a simple solution, and your point about the conservative media is a good one. But you have to have a media that is engaged with what I call truth sandwiches and that repeats them — that’s all you can do.

“LANGUAGE IS NEVER NEUTRAL. LANGUAGE IS ALWAYS FRAMED IN A CERTAIN WAY, AND IT ALWAYS HAS CONSEQUENCES.”

Sean Illing
Why do Republicans seem to be doing much better in terms of framing the debate?

George Lakoff
A lot of Democrats believe in what is called Enlightenment reasoning, and that if you just tell people the facts, they’ll reach the right conclusion. That just isn’t true.

People think in terms of conceptual structures called frames and metaphors. It’s not just the facts. They have values, and they understand which facts fit into their conceptual framework. You can’t understand something if your brain doesn’t allow it, if your brain filters it out in terms of your values.

Democrats seem not to understand this, and they keep trying to employ reason as a persuasive vehicle. I wish Enlightenment reasoning was an accurate model for how most people think and judge, but it isn’t, and we better acknowledge that fact.

Sean Illing
So on some level, you’re saying that Democrats have to accept that they’re playing a different kind of conversational game, in which truth and falsity are irrelevant. If that’s the case, what use is there for a free press, or for discourse at all?

George Lakoff
Well, that’s why the truth sandwiches are important. Let me say one more thing that’s really crucial in this respect. Kellyanne Conway talked about alternative facts at one point, so the phrase comes from her. When I heard that, it occurred to me that there’s a sense in which she’s right.

If you’re someone who shares Trump’s worldview, there are certain things that follow from that worldview. In other words, certain things have to be true, or have to be believed, in order to sustain that worldview. The things that aren’t actually true but nevertheless preserve that worldview are “alternative facts” — that’s what Conway was getting at, whether she knew it or not.

The conservatives use those alternative facts all the time, and so does Trump. If he’s talking to his base, he’s talking to people who have already bought into a picture of the world, and his job is to tell them things that confirm that picture — and he knows they’ll believe it for that very reason.

I think we have to understand “alternative facts” in this way, and understand that when Trump is lying, he’s lying in ways that register with his audience. So it may be lying, but it’s strategic lying — and it’s effective.

Sean Illing
Do you think the media is going to be able to adapt and figure this out, or do you think it’s going to persist in aiding Trump in the way it has?

George Lakoff
I’m an optimist. I think the media can get out of it. But I don’t know if it will.

Journalists don’t study the field of cognitive science. They don’t study how brains actually work and how the mind works. Cognitive science is a field that is not widely reported on, but it needs to be, because journalists cannot serve the public if they don’t understand basic facts about the human mind.

The sorts of things I’m saying have to be repeated over and over — it has to be argued. The evidence has to come forth.

B&B orig: 12/25/18

Science Continues Working To Improve Error Correction

Two prominent scientists working in the area of error and fraud detection and correction, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, write on the state of the art in the Washington Post. Marcus and Oransky founded the organization Retraction Watch, which maintains a database of over 18,000 retracted scientific publications. They write that the rate of retractions seems to be now plateauing at about 1 retraction for each 1000 published papers (0.1% retraction rate). The rate grew significantly between 2000 and a few years ago, which raises the question of why that rise occurred. The overall rate of bad papers in the vast scientific literature is much higher, probably about 2-3%.

Marcus and Oransky find that about half the retractions are due to fraud and data manipulation and the other half is due to honest errors with no misconduct. Some workers has devised new methods to spot problems. Publishers now routinely submit each submitted paper to a computer check for plagiarism. That old trick won't work any more. Also, tests for statistical rigor are being applied to spot anomalous results. When good answers about strange statistical results from researchers are not forthcoming, fraud spotters are beginning to out cheaters to various media sources. In one case, ars Technica published results of two skeptics about suspicious-looking data that a psychologist published in a paper.

Another tool that is in use to spot fraud is a The False Claims Act, which allows whistleblowers to collect rewards for reporting faked data in grant applications and reports. Maybe most importantly, another major tool in increasing reliability is a change in attitude among scientists themselves to no longer tolerate either bad behavior or sloppiness. Marcus and Oransky write “put another way, fraud fighters have many more weapons in their armory than they did even 20 years ago, and a growing army appears more willing to use those tools.”

Not surprisingly, the process is imperfect. It reflects the complicated messiness of being human: “And for every whistleblower who sees his or her work lead to a retraction, we hear from several who are met with silence or retaliation. The work is just beginning.” With any luck, what is happening is a generational mindset change to one that is less tolerant of both honest mistakes and intentional misconduct.

B&B orig: 12/27/18

From democracy to tyranny

According to Freedom House, a democracy and civil liberties monitoring organization, 2015 marked the 10th straight year (pdf) of declines in global freedom. The report, Anxious Dictators, Wavering Democracies: Global Freedom under Pressure observes: “The world was battered in 2015 by overlapping crises that fueled xenophobic sentiment in democratic countries, undermined the economies of states dependent on the sale of natural resources, and led authoritarian regimes to crack down harder on dissent.”

Given a decline in respect for democracy in the US and more tolerance for a more autocratic form of governance, it makes sense to consider how democracy can slide into some form of a populist autocracy, a potential precursor to dictatorship. Writing for Bloomberg Businessweek (Nov. 28 - Dec. 4 issue, pages 6-7), Joshua Kurlantzick describes the growth and nature of some recent autocracies that have arisen from democracies. In recent years, transitions toward autocracy have occurred in a number of democracies including the Philippines, Thailand, Poland, Hungary, Ecuador, Italy, Russia and Turkey.

Kurlantzick makes the following observations.
1. The new autocrats usually have little or no government experience, instead they build cults of personality centered on themselves and their personal images.
2. The new autocrats usually win elections with less than 50% of the vote.
3. Autocrat political elections are often accompanied by unusual impacts on the press-media, e.g., (i) they sometimes directly own major media outlets, (ii) they tend to bypass the traditional press via social media, (iii) they generally attack the press-media, sometimes suing for libel, and (iv) they stoke press-media distrust by their attacks on the press.
4. The new autocrats build administrations that are dependent more on the leader’s personal influence than on political operational precedents.
5. Once in office, the new autocrats tend to begin to “slowly suffocate the civil service, military bureaucracy and other government networks that are supposed to be apolitical”, e.g., they seed civil service, police and military posts with family, friends and loyalists.
6. Once in office, the new autocrats tend to attack the courts and work to undermine judicial independence.
7. By being surrounded with unqualified family, friends and sycophants, the autocrats foster corruption and graft for personal and loyalist gain by disabling oversight mechanisms that are supposed to keep corruption in check.
8. Once out of power and the personality cult collapses, autocrats can leave their countries economically weaker and with weaker legal institutions.

Some or all of that sounds quite familiar.

B&B orig: 12/3/16

The neuroscience of religion

By definition, science is concerned with natural phenomena that can be tested or detected in some way. Also by definition, religion, or more broadly supernatural spirituality, is concerned with supernatural phenomena that cannot be tested or measured.

There can be grey areas. When Einstein proposed the existence of gravity waves in 1916, there was no way to test or detect gravity waves until a large detector came online in 2016. Gravity waves were detected almost immediately and Einstein’s belief in gravity waves went from something akin to both science and spirituality to real science. The same can be said of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. The Higgs particle was suspected beginning in the 1960’s but it was not detectable until a big atom smasher was built and went online and 2008 and the particle was detected in 2012.

Is the neuroscience of religion an oxymoron?: Since supernatural spirituality or religion is never detectable or testable, can there ever be science of any kind that’s directed to testing or detecting it? There’s two answers to that, no and yes. No because true supernatural spirituality, including all formal religions that hold belief in supernatural events will never be testable or detectable at least for the supernatural parts. Known laws of the universe, e.g., mathematics and entropy, help define the outer limits and contours of what’s knowable and what isn’t. What's outside the realm of the knowable is the realm of the supernatural.

On the other hand, all natural human phenomena are subject to analysis and understanding by science. From a pure science point of view, anything detectable that goes on in the human brain when a spiritual event is perceived to occur are subject to research, analysis and data interpretation. That’s no different than ongoing studies of all sorts of mental experiences.

The neurobiology of spiritual experience: It turns out that spiritual experiences are detectable. The results weren’t surprising. Researchers exposed devoutly religious people to several different religion-related experiences that were intended to elicit a spiritual response. The study participants were asked "Are you feeling the spirit?" Response choices ranged from "not feeling" to "very strongly feeling." At the same time, participants’ brains were scanned to determine areas of the brain that were active during various degrees of spiritual response.

Human brain during a spiritual experience

The brain scan data showed that spiritual experiences activated brain reward or pleasure circuits about the same way that love, sex, gambling, drugs and music do. In other words, responses to, or perceptions of, supernatural beliefs or experiences operate through the same or similar brain circuits that other pleasurable experiences trigger.

Questions: Since supernatural phenomena cannot be detected or tested, is brain scan data showing a more or less normal pleasure or happiness response real science or mere coincidence? If supernatural phenomena are real, why should they elicit any detectable biological response at all? Or, is it perfectly obvious to think that since humans are sentient biological beings, all spiritual experiences must operate through the biological mechanisms that all other sentience experiences operate through?

B&B orig: 12/4/16

The Case Against Objective Reality

After the fire

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine argues that what humans believe they see is more illusion than reality. An article published in The Atlantic discusses Hoffman's conclusions from 30 years of research.

His conclusions are stark: “The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.”

From the cognitive science point of view, the aptly named “hard problem” is understanding how a human brain operating with ordinary laws of physics gives rise to first-person conscious experience. From the physicist's point of view an object doesn't have an objective independent existence until an observer comes along and observes it. Physicist John Wheeler puts it like this: “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”

The Atlantic article observes that “getting at questions about the nature of reality, and disentangling the observer from the observed, is an endeavor that straddles the boundaries of neuroscience and fundamental physics. . . . . So while neuroscientists struggle to understand how there can be such a thing as a first-person reality, quantum physicists have to grapple with the mystery of how there can be anything but a first-person reality.”

Hoffman points out that “evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger [an evolutionary threat] would eat you.”

The bit about hiding stuff from us refers to the process discussed in The User Illusion by which the unconscious mind discards information such that our conscious minds and reason are aware of only a small trickle of reality.

Hoffman's comments on objective reality: “I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind.”

Implications for politics: For the most part, modern civilization doesn't present the same survival threats that humans faced in evolution. Americans rarely have to run away from predators and they usually buy food and clothing in stores instead of hunting and gathering those things to survive. The cognitive capacities that supported early human survival aren't necessarily the same as what might be needed for peaceful, stable societies and nations. Despite that, we have what evolution gave us and that's all there is.

If our cognitive abilities routinely yield perceptions of reality that are little or nothing like objective reality, then it's reasonable to believe that fact and reality distortion applies to politics as much as it applies to other human endeavors.

Questions: If humans evolved to distort reality and to apply distorted or biased reason to what we think we see, is there any point in attempting to separate truth from falsity or to try to apply less biased conscious reason to the distorted realities we think we see? Is truth even relevant to politics or to long term human survival?

B&B orig: