Cooperative vs Competitive vs False Balancing Argumentation

The empty neighborhood in the fog

In a short 2018 Scientific American article and a 2017 research paper published in the journal Cognitive Science, a team of cognitive scientists and psychologists describe their research findings on the effects of modes of engagement on how people perceive political issues and truth itself, including moral truth. Modes of engagement can be thought of as the mindset that a person in disagreement brings to the table when they are in disagreement with others about political issues.

The cooperative mindset

People who engage with a cooperative mindset tend to seek to learn from a person or people they disagree with. In that mode of engagement, people tend to try to learn from people they disagree with. They also tend to be more open to the idea that there is no objective truth about an issue such as abortion. This mode of engagement was found to influence how people view truth, which tends to be seen as mostly subjective and personal. Absolute or objective truth is not what people with this mindset usually see in various issues. The authors comment in their Cognitive Science paper:

“One form of social reasoning consists of a group of people searching together for the solution to a problem. Groups pursuing this strategy reap cognitive gains such as quickly identifying problems (Hill, 1982) and discovering the best solutions (Schwartz, 1995). These characteristics allow the performance of the group to go above and beyond the sum of its individual members (Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010). 

However, group reasoning does not always involve finding solutions to problems. Some group reasoning consists instead of argumentation (Walton, 1998). In group reasoning using argumentation, people start out with opposing views on a given question, and each individual proceeds by offering reasons or evidence in favor of his or her own view and against the opposing one.”

The competitive mindset

By contrast, when people are competitive and engage to win arguments, their view of truth tends to be more objective and absolute. It also affects their social behaviors, beliefs about people they disagree with and how truth and the issue at hand is understood. The competitive mindset leads to unfavorable views of, and increased animosity toward, people they disagree with. The researchers associate the rise of political tribalism with increases in competitive engagements relative to past years. This tendency to tribalize and weaponize politics is exacerbated by social media. The researchers comment in the SciAm article:

“At the same time, the rise of social media has revolutionized how information is consumed—news is often personalized to one’s political preferences. Rival perspectives can be completely shut out from one’s self-created media bubble. Making matters worse, outrage-inducing content is more likely to spread on these platforms, creating a breeding ground for clickbait headlines and fake news. This toxic online environment is very likely driving Americans further apart and fostering unproductive exchanges. ..... And although plenty of evidence suggests that contemporary political discourse is becoming more combative and focused on winning, our findings do not elucidate why that change has occurred. Rather they provide an important new piece of information to consider: the mode of argument we engage in actually changes our understanding of the question itself. The more we argue to win, the more we will feel that there is a single objectively correct answer and that all other answers are mistaken. Conversely, the more we argue to learn, the more we will feel that there is no single objective truth and different answers can be equally right. So the next time you are deciding how to enter into an argument on Facebook about the controversial question of the day, remember that you are not just making a choice about how to interact with a person who holds the opposing view. You are also making a decision that will shape the way you—and others—think about whether the question itself has a correct answer.”

As noted here in a recent discussion, political discourse has been weaponized by injecting moral absolutism into politics. Politicians, partisans and special interests have discovered that increasing irrationality and decreasing social trust lies in manipulating the moral framework of politics and fomenting competitive discourse over cooperative discourse. In my opinion, the point of increasing irrationality and decreasing social trust is to deceive and distract members of society, thereby draining both power and wealth from the masses and accumulating it at the top.

False balancing

False balancing is a complicating but important factor in political discourse. This arises when disagreements over a certain topic do not make much sense in view of actual objective knowledge. For example, enough objective knowledge exists to render moot disagreements over whether the Earth is flat, humans are causing climate change or vaccines are safe or effective. The evidence is overwhelming and there is not enough basis for rational debate. Engaging in false balancing debates tends to elevate the status of the contrary evidence and arguments to a level that is not socially or rationally merited. Such debates tend to foment and maintain false beliefs, confusion and distrust. That is much more socially damaging than beneficial.

False balancing and the president

Based on my recent online engagements with various Trump supporters or apologists, I now believe that trying to debate whether the president is a chronic liar, a crook, grossly incompetent, self-centered and maybe also a traitor engages in false balancing. In my opinion, the scant evidence that the president’s supporters sometimes raise does not come close to balancing contrary objective evidence of his character flaws and his bad behavior and failures in office. Of those topics, the allegation that he is a traitor is supported by less direct and circumstantial evidence than the other assertions of truth, which are backed by far more relevant evidence, much of it based on undeniable facts.

Holy Crap-a-roni!

A reporter, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, was threatened with the Secret Service coming in and forcibly moving her to the back row of yesterday’s White House press briefing on the Coronavirus.  Evidently, the fellow in the back row refused to give up his chair also.  Here’s a link to the short video.

Yeah, another failure, among many, likely perpetrated by our illustrious POTUS, by going to the “totalitarian lengths” to rig his game.  [Can I hear a Sieg Heil??]  Is anyone surprised?  He's been doing this kind of self-preservation "me, me, me" thing all his life.

Acosta tells us that Trump’s personal aides are advising him that these nightly briefings are bringing “diminishing returns,” and he has more to lose by them, than to gain by them.  I personally see it that way too.

From my point of view, while Trump is already a loser, a wrecking ball par excellence, these briefings showcase his spectacular ignorance and still childlike thinking.  So I’m a bit bummed that he won’t be showing up and rambling on, with the same old-same old repeat phrases and (tremendous) "best words," night after night, implosion after implosion.  While I grant that it might be a dangerous game for us never-Trumpers to play ourselves, I want him out there making a fool of himself, so we can prove his ineptitude, showing how he really doesn't “know more than the generals,” and how he “alone can[not] fix it.”

Questions: What do you think?  Should Trump continue showing up at these briefings, force feeding us his word salad?  Is it good or bad for the country?  How so?

Thanks for posting and recommending.

Coronavirus Update 8

“The financial contributions will stop” if the GOP failed to pass its tax cuts. -- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC); “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.'” -- Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY); “Get Obamacare repealed and replaced, get tax reform passed. “Get it done and we’ll open it back up.”-- wealthy Texas GOP political donor Doug Deason referring to the “piggy bank” being closed by GOP donors; “The most excited group out there are big CEOs, about our tax plan.” -- Trump's National Economic Director Gary Cohn; “You all just got a lot richer.” Trump speaking a few hours after he signed the bill into law to happy patrons at Mar-a-Lago

--- GOP comments about the December 2017 GOP tax cut (discussed here)

Trying to grasp what is going on is now is like trying to take a drink from a firehose. It will slap your lips around, like dog lips in the breeze, but you'll still be thirsty. 😲

The New York Magazine Intelligencer section writes on the increasingly obvious disconnects between conservative and populist rhetoric and behavior (CPRB) compared to actual contradicting reality. One crumbling bastion of CPRB ideology is the lie that “undocumented immigrants are a scourge of American society, a nefarious invading army that’s depriving native-born workers of precious jobs, filling our cities with crime, and leeching off our welfare programs.” That lie is made obvious by the government declaring many immigrants working in essential functions such as food production and distribution as “essential workers” doing work that the Department of Homeland Security considers such people to be, e.g., “critical to the food supply chain.”

The NYM article points out that, while the current administration has done a lot to go after undocumented immigrants, it has done almost nothing to go after the illegal employers who hires them, including the president himself.

The invisible hand vs visible rich people’s hands

Another pillar of CPRB ideology that has crumbled under the weight of obvious contradictory reality is the lie that the market is an apolitical thing that the impartial invisible hand governs. According to this vicious lie, (1) wealthy people and interests earn their gains fair and square, and therefore government usually (~always) cannot justify redistributing wealth from the top to lower levels, while (2) the working poor contribute no more value than what they are worth to the impartial invisible hand.

The contradictory reality is that wealthy people and interests use their undeniable political power to favor themselves and their interests. They buy influence in our corrupt pay-to-play political system. The market and its workings do not constitute a meritocracy. Governments, shaped by self-interests of donors, create and control markets, money, and corporations and the rules of operation.

Of course, this lie will die hard. CPRB on this point was obvious when the GOP’s initial cash relief proposal was less assistance to Americans too poor to pay federal taxes than to earners making  $75,000 a year. Recent data indicates that most tax cut and bailout benefits are going to the rich. That isn't invisible hand and meritocracy. It is bought and paid for government service by the wealthy for the wealthy. The marketplace is immoral and political, not amoral and apolitical.

We still do not know much about this virus - it is getting creepier

The Washington Post reports that doctors are starting to report new complications associated with SARS CoV-2. This is unsettling, but the reporting is still anecdotal. WaPo writes that some patients, about 20-40%, develop blood clots despite being given anticoagulants that should prevent clots. Also, anecdotal reports of damage to kidney, heart, intestine, liver and brain continue to come in. Initial thinking was that the virus would attack the lungs like similar respiratory viruses. The damage to other organs is tentatively linked to a damaging inflammatory reaction (a cytokine storm) the virus causes in some people. Nearly half the hospitalized people have blood or protein in their urine, which indicates kidney damage.

WaPo writes: “Autopsies have shown some people’s lungs fill with hundreds of microclots. Errant blood clots of a larger size can break off and travel to the brain or heart, causing a stroke or heart attack. ..... ‘The problem we are having is that while we understand that there is a clot, we don’t yet understand why there is a clot,’ Kaplan said. ‘We don’t know. And therefore, we are scared.’”

Other bizarre, almost impossible symptoms in some patients, are being reported as anecdotes. WaPo writes: “Increasingly, doctors also are reporting bizarre, unsettling cases that don’t seem to follow any of the textbooks they’ve trained on. They describe patients with startlingly low oxygen levels — so low that they would normally be unconscious or near death — talking and swiping on their phones. Asymptomatic pregnant women suddenly in cardiac arrest. Patients who by all conventional measures seem to have mild disease deteriorating within minutes and dying at home.”

When it comes to the pathology of this virus, we do not yet know what we are dealing with.

Tracking the virus

America is still woefully incapable of large scale testing for current infections (swab up the nose) and for antibodies in the blood people who have recovered from an infection, which sometimes they may not have known they had. The New York Times reports that data from California strongly suggests that the virus had been spreading for weeks in the US public weeks before there was any evidence of this. That raises the possibility that the same thing could have been happening in other states. It has taken until now to test the body of an infected woman who died on Feb. 6.

The NYT writes: “The unexpected new finding makes clear that the virus was circulating in the Bay Area of California as early as January, even before the federal government began restricting travel from China on Feb. 2. It also raises new questions about where else the virus might have been spreading undetected. ..... The new test results made public late Tuesday show that even this timeline failed to reveal how long the virus had been circulating. Ms. Dowd had not recently traveled outside the country, the authorities said, and yet she died a full 20 days before the earliest recorded case of community transmission. Another previously unconnected death in Santa Clara County, on Feb. 17, has also now been linked to the coronavirus. ‘Each one of those deaths is probably the tip of an iceberg of unknown size,’ Dr. Sara Cody, Santa Clara County’s medical officer, said in an interview.”

Incompetence and corruption

The president’s handling of this at the federal level has been incompetent and literally corrupt. The corruption includes his now-abandoned attempts to foist a possibly lethal hydroxyquinoline treatment on people, presumably in return for campaign contributions. In a different article, the NYT writes:
“In a scorching statement, Dr. Bright, who received a Ph.D. in immunology and molecular pathogenesis from Emory University, assailed the leadership at the health department, saying he was pressured to direct money toward hydroxychloroquine, one of several ‘potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections’ and repeatedly described by the president as a potential ‘game changer’ in the fight against the virus.

‘I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the Covid-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit,’ he said in his statement. ‘I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way.’”

This definitely is not going well, despite contrary claims from the president, his enablers and propagandists, and his deceived rank and file supporters. The last group is one that is going to pay the biggest price in all of this. The kleptocrats and blowhards at the top will be just fine, except for the few that get infected and die from it.

A Post-News World

Why are most of the media misquoting Trump?

Right. And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number (INAUDIBLE) interesting to check that so that you are going to have to use medical doctors with but it sounds interesting to me so we will see but the whole concept of the light the way it kills it in one minute that's--that's pretty powerful. Steve, please.

I had to go to RealClearPolitics to find this because so many of the "news" sources are eliminating the bolded bit.

Now, I don't feel it changes the statement too much, but it sure makes me look foolish if I'm misquoting him to people I'm arguing this statement with.

What the hell is wrong with the "news?"

This is why I've mostly unplugged from it all.

Run RealClearPolitics against your favorite "bias checker" - and if I'm right it comes out as right wing.

While almost every left leaning or traditional media source misquotes him.

Now, call me crazy, but even minor misquotes like this being run by nearly everybody in the "news" gives Trump ammunition against the press.

The press has every reason to avoid this nonsense right now. They need the moral high ground here and they can't get it by taking shortcuts, like aggregating each other from a single source instead of sitting and transcribing his actual words independently. I'm assuming this happened that way, out of expedience rather than malice but how did one misquote get such wide circulation without the press being lazy?

Earth Day at 50: 'There is no Planet B'

COVID-19 makes this year's day of action different, but also is a reminder that a concerted response is still needed. 

In fall 1968, the first Whole Earth Catalog reproduced on its cover a NASA composite photograph never before seen in public — Earth floating in the arid blackness of space, beautifully blue and alone and fragile.

In January 1969, a runaway oil rig blowout in the Santa Barbara Channel in California devastated local wildlife and alarmed the nation with images of oil-soaked beaches, seabirds and seals. Then in June, the Cuyahoga River, an industrial sewer running through downtown Cleveland, caught fire. In fact the river had combusted many times before, and some of these fires were bigger, but Time magazine reported on this one and the story went national.

In 1969, U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, flying back to Washington from an inspection of the California spill, read an article about “teach-ins” created by activists opposed to the Vietnam War and thought: Why not create a teaching event for the environment? He hired young organizer Denis Hayes to run a national environmental teach-in out of his D.C. office. He and a handful of staff organized what became, on April 22, 1970, an estimated 20 million people taking action for what was by then firmly labeled “Earth Day.”

Citizens and their representatives in Washington were galvanized, the policy results transformative. President Richard Nixon deserves credit for proposing, on July 9, 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency, and later signing pioneering environmental legislation protecting clean air and water, although he did so in part to outflank potential Democratic opponent Sen. Henry Martin “Scoop” Jackson of Washington — both were consummate politicians who heard the citizenry’s howl and responded.

This April 22, the 50th anniversary of what is now the largest secular holiday worldwide, it is useful to recall these founding stories: an inspirational image of fragile earth, omnipresent now as the “big blue marble” photograph taken from Apollo 17; fossil-fueled calamities, now all too familiar; Earth Day’s organized citizen action, and determined political response.

The 50th anniversary will be the strangest, as the COVID-19 pandemic will require most citizens to demonstrate at home and online. Yet this is an all-hands-on-deck moment, requiring the urgent, game-changing response COVID-19 received. This year is forecast to be the hottest on record, after 2019’s frightening and costly fires, floods and storms that devastated the Australian bush and Midwestern farms. The melting of the ice caps and glaciers accelerates as temperatures soar, a record 64.9 degrees Fahrenheit recorded in Antarctica on Feb. 8, the same temperature as Los Angeles that day. Already 90 American cities experience some flooding, while officials in low-lying cities like Manila consider how to move.

Yet good news is also plentiful. Wind and solar energy are booming at a scale and cost unimaginable even a few years ago, with electric cars, buses, trucks and charging stations rolling out fast around the world. In September, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power accepted a bid for electricity produced by renewable energy, including storage capacity for round-the-clock supply, at 2 cents a kilowatt-hour, far cheaper than any other source. And Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands are building an island to house 7,000 wind turbines to provide electricity for 80 million Europeans. The green-energy revolution is now.

Meanwhile, the global fossil-fuel industry is reeling from falling demand, a price war and withdrawal of the global finance system from further investment. The fossil-fuel divestment movement begun in 2012 has surpassed $12 trillion in public commitments to divest from fossil-fuel stocks and investments. And in January the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest financial firm, wrote to global CEOs that his company will be considering climate change in investment decisions: “I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.”

Still, none of these changes is moving remotely fast enough given the pandemic of fossil-energy excess. On a typical day, the global economy still dumps the heat equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs into the atmosphere.

Yet the Trump administration, abetted by coal-state Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other fossil-fueled representatives and talk show advisers who reflexively denied the severity of COVID-19 just as they derided the climate “hoax,” daily unravels not only longstanding environmental protections but subverts any responsible clean climate policy, most recently cutting clean car-mileage standards against the wishes of much of the auto industry.

But it is fair to remember that, 50 years ago, the nation was also facing a wide swath of environmental calamities and did not despair. Citizens raised hell, took action, changed practices and elected leaders who enacted strong, effective laws that produced dramatic improvement in health and quality of life, all without the economic calamity forecast by naysayers — in fact, with major economic benefits. Modern industrial America has blue skies and clean lakes and rivers not by accident but by design, a legacy of 50 years of Earth Days.

Today’s global response to the COVID-19 pandemic offers a valuable lesson in concerted action. The formerly unimaginable $2.2 trillion in federal funding is an example of what support the climate crisis also calls for. Meanwhile, the air over China is temporarily clear and breathable due to COVID-19’s forced reduction in fossil-energy intensity.

Will that lesson be learned? Or after the pandemic passes will fossil-fueled economies again fire up all cylinders of their 19th-century internal combustion machine, leaving in its exhaust today’s vision of a cleaner, safer planet?

“There is no Planet B” is a phrase that has appeared spontaneously on placards waved at climate crisis demonstrations around the world and is now the title of a book. Its wisdom is twofold. Earth, that “beautiful blue marble” floating in space, has the water, air and renewable energy we need. And there is a viable green economic future.

As the nation fights through the COVID-19 pandemic toward the November elections, voters need to remember two facts. When asked in a Democratic debate if climate change is an existential crisis, every candidate answered yes without hesitation. Meanwhile, the Trump administration and its allies, including Russia and Saudi Arabia, do everything they can to prop up the struggling fossil-fuel industry while undoing regulations aimed at curbing the climate crisis. Planet Earth is on the ballot this November.

James P. Lenfestey is a former editorial writer for the Star Tribune covering education, energy and the environment.

https://www.startribune.com/earth-day-at-50-there-is-not-planet-b/569742012/

Coronavirus Update 7

Various sources, e.g., CNN and the Washington Post, are reporting about a small pilot study to test the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus infection. Hydroxychloroquine is approved for use to treat malaria, a parasite infection. The reported data is not from a randomized clinical trial. It is also not yet peer-reviewed. This data is only anecdotal, not the kind of evidence that constitutes solid evidence of safety or efficacy.

Two critically important thoughts to keep in mind are these:

1. Randomized, double- or triple-blinded, placebo controlled clinical trials are needed to assess safety and efficacy.

2. That an approved drug is safe enough for treating a specific disease does not mean that it is safe to treat a different disease. I will explain this in the context of hydroxychloroquine and coronavirus.

The data

The study included 368 male VA patients with coronavirus infections. That is considered to be a small study by experts, not a large study as Fox News is falsely reporting. This study is larger than past studies reported so far, but that doesn't make it a large study. Ninety-seven patients received hydroxychloroquine, 113 received hydroxychloroquine in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin, and 158 did not not receive hydroxychloroquine.


As reported by the WaPo, rates of death in both drug-treated groups were worse than the 158 who did not receive the drugs. The drugs produced no benefit for patients who were on ventilators in either drug-treated group.

The observed death rates were as follows:

No drug treatment: 11.4%

Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin treated: 22%
Hydroxychloroquine treated: 27%

Failed pandemic politics

The president has politicized an weaponized the pandemic to serve his personal political re-election agenda. CNN's broadcast last night played about six short clips of the president repeatedly urging people to use hydroxychloroquine because he claims that ‘he heard good things about the drug’, or that ‘he heard very good things about the drug’. His ‘scientific rationale’ is based on posing questions such as, ‘what do you have to lose?’ and ‘why not try it because you have nothing to lose?’.

Unfortunately, it may turn out to be the case that people have their lives to lose.

Presumably, some people took the president’s idiotic advice and doing so could have killed some of them. If that turns out to be true, the president should be impeached and jailed for medical malpractice, gross incompetence and inexcusable arrogant stupidity. Dr. Trump’s unsound medical advice would have literally killed some people.

How hydroxychloroquine might be lethal in coronavirus infections 

The following is personal speculation about why it might turn out to be the case that hydroxychloroquine is lethally toxic for some coronavirus-infected patients. One study reported that when hydroxychloroquine is used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus, it appears that it works by inducing a form of immune suppression, i.e., “down-regulation of the immune response against autoantigenic peptides.” Other research indicates that hydroxyquinoline modulates biological pathways that regulate immune responses by other mechanisms including  blocking inflammatory responses, e.g., “there is some evidence that antimalarials decrease secretion of monocyte‐derived pro‐inflammatory cytokines, such as tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNFα).”

Based on that, I speculate that it is possible that hydroxychloroquine-induce causes an immune suppression that (1) unleashes the virulence or replication capacity of coronavirus in lungs to a point that it becomes lethal, and/or (2) allows bacteria in the lungs to replicate and cause a lethal bacterial pneumonia. Anecdotal evidence for that is in the different death rates of the two drug-treated groups. People who also received the antibiotic azithromycin may have had a lower death rate than the group treated with hydroxychloroquine alone. If that turns out to be true, then the azithromycin may have prevented a lethal pneumonia in some of the patients, leading to a lower death rate. Azithromycin is used to treat various bacteria, including ones that that can cause pneumonia.

Again, all of this is personal speculation. I'm not an expert and thus my speculation may turn out to be completely wrong, e.g., because we still do not know much about coronavirus pathology at the molecular level.