The Republican Commitment to America

The Republicans are planning to exercise power in the House starting next January. Kevin McCarthy is likely going to be the next House Speaker. In advance of his new power and extremism, he released a short thing called The Republican Commitment to America. Four areas of focus are the economy, national security, freedom, and government accountability. There’s almost no detail in the commitment. That leaves McCarthy and House Republicans almost unlimited freedom to do whatever they want without the public knowing what is on their minds. 

Most of the commitment, deceptive propaganda actually (it feels mostly like empty promises), is contained in this one-page summary:

The commitment does not mention climate change. The generic fluff in the section on the economy mentions energy. The closest thing there is to hinting at how radical right House Republicans will deal climate change is this bit of deceptive fluff:

Make America Energy Independent and 

Reduce Gas Prices

Not long ago, America was the largest energy producer in the world and gas was affordable. The Biden Administration then halted energy projects, shut down pipeline construction, and took every step to discourage the production of American energy resources. Americans shouldn’t have to choose between driving to work and putting food on the table.

At this point, one should understand that the Biden administration supported boosting clean energy, mainly solar and wind. So it is a flat out Republican Party lie to say that Biden took every step to discourage the production of American energy resources. Once again, we see the contempt that radical right Republicans have for fact, truth and sound reasoning whenever any of it is inconvenient. 

In addition, the Republicans pose a false dilemma here. Americans do not have to choose between driving to work and putting food on the table. They have to decide whether to take climate change seriously or ignore it as the Republicans are clearly arguing. Taking it seriously does not mean not being able to drive to work. That lie is pure propaganda.

As pointed out here before, Republicans in power, profit motive-driven businesses and external factors are at least as responsible for inflation as the Democrats. So blaming just Biden and the Democrats is another lie embedded in this piece of deceptive propaganda. 

The main point of this post is to make clear that the Republican Party and its main donors have no intention of trying to deal honestly or seriously with climate change. They are loathe to even acknowledge it exists at all. America and the world will have to save themselves despite ferocious, divisive Republican Party opposition, lies, slanders and crackpottery.

News bits

The saga of MAGA: 

It’s still raining Republican felons

The WaPo writes:

GOP operative found guilty of funneling Russian money to Donald Trump

A Republican political strategist was convicted of illegally helping a Russian businessman contribute to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

Jesse Benton, 44, was pardoned by Trump in 2020 for a different campaign finance crime, months before he was indicted again on six counts related to facilitating an illegal foreign campaign donation. He was found guilty Thursday on all six counts.

Trump and the fascist GOP both vehemently deny there was any Russian influence in the 2016 election. Well, this is more evidence that the Russians were involved. Bigger Russian influence came from the release of stolen emails by Wikileaks after Trump publicly asked the Russians to help him smear Clinton. Never forget Trump’s open invitation: “Russia, if you're listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” US intelligence found Russian efforts to intervene on Trump’s behalf, which is another inconvenient fact that Trump and the fascist GOP both vehemently deny. 

In 2018, a Department of Justice press release commented:

Grand Jury Indicts 12 Russian Intelligence Officers for Hacking Offenses 

Related to the 2016 Election

The Department of Justice today announced that a grand jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment presented by the Special Counsel’s Office. The indictment charges twelve Russian nationals for committing federal crimes that were intended to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. All twelve defendants are members of the GRU, a Russian Federation intelligence agency within the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian military. These GRU officers, in their official capacities, engaged in a sustained effort to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, and released that information on the internet under the names "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0" and through another entity.

According to the allegations in the indictment, Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, Boris Alekseyevich Antonov, Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov, Aleksey Viktorovich Lukashev, Sergey Aleksandrovich Morgachev, Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek, Pavel Vyacheslavovich Yershov, Artem Andreyevich Malyshev, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk, Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin, and Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev were officials in Unit 26165 and Unit 74455 of the Russian government’s Main Intelligence Directorate.

It’s just raining Republican felons, e.g., the traitors who participated in the Republican 1/6 coup attempt. It’s not projected to stop raining until Republicans take control of state and federal law enforcement. Then the rain will stop.

The rule of law, the Republican way

It is not the case that Republican elites are anarchists who operate without regard for the rule of law. They just do not want the law turned against themselves. They are enthusiastic about using the law to go after Democrats and political opposition. The NYT writes:

Republicans Lay Out Biden Investigations, but Democrat-Aligned 

Groups Promise Counteroffensive

The Biden administration has been bracing for congressional investigations, cognizant of the serious political threat posed by even a narrow Republican majority in the House.

Hours after winning control of the House, Republicans began laying out plans on Thursday for investigations of President Biden, his administration and his family, and were met with promises of a multimillion-dollar counteroffensive from a network of groups allied with Democrats.

On Capitol Hill, the incoming Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, said the panel would focus on trying to link Mr. Biden to the business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden, continuing an effort begun in 2018 that never established the elder Biden’s complicity in any wrongdoing but led to former President Donald J. Trump’s first impeachment.

Mr. Comer told reporters his aim was “to show you this is an investigation of Joe Biden,” and not just his son.

For the fascist Republican Party, the rule of law has degenerated into  partisan weapon to be used against political opposition. It raises the question of when will the GOP sink to the level of fabricating evidence when there isn’t enough to prosecute and convict enemies. 

I had thought that line would be crossed when the Republicans did their witch hunt audits of the 2020 Arizona election. Remember the Cyber Ninjas and their clown car performance pretending to be an audit? But the republicans did not cross the line on that occasion. It is reasonable to think that the temptation to fabricate evidence is just as great today as it was then. 

Sooner or later, that line will probably be crossed. Most likely within the next two years.

Although it goes without saying, if the people the Republicans target with their investigations did commit crimes, they need to be prosecuted if and only if there is enough evidence to get a conviction in a fair and professional court of law. Of course, a different shoe could drop. If the judge is an unfair and unprofessional Republican extremist, e.g., a corrupt Trump judge like pro-Trump federal judge Aileen Cannon, the evidence needed to convict for crimes could be dropped by the judge. That would be the true and final end of the rule of law.  

And, as we all know, a Republican impeachment by the House will not need to be based on sufficient evidence or sound reasoning. Unless there is sufficient evidence, a GOP impeachment will be an obvious partisan witch hunt.

This is America’s new political normal for the foreseeable future, maybe until the end of the Republic. It is best we get used to it because we cannot stop it.

From the rut roh! files:

The Amazon River is drying up

This one is scary. Well, OK, the bit about the rule of law was scary too. There is just so much scary to go around these days. The WaPo writes:

For years, scientists have been warning that the Amazon is speeding toward a tipping point — the moment when deforestation and global warming would trigger an irreversible cascade of climatic forces, killing large swaths of what remained. If somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of the forest were lost, models suggested, much of the Amazon would perish.

About 18 percent of the rainforest is now gone, and the evidence increasingly supports the warnings. Whether or not the tipping point has arrived — and some scientists think it has — the Amazon is beginning to collapse.

More than three-quarters of the rainforest, research indicates, is showing signs of lost resilience. In fire-scorched areas of the Rio Negro floodplains, one research group noted a “drastic ecosystem shift” that has reduced jungle to savanna. In the southeastern Amazon, which has been assaulted by rapacious cattle ranching, trees are dying off and being pushed aside by species better acclimated to drier climes. In the southwestern Amazon, fast-growing bamboo is overtaking lands ravaged by fire and drought. And in the devastated transitional forests of Mato Grosso state, researchers believe a local tipping point is imminent.

No, this isn’t alarmism or politics. It is not lies, socialism, communism, pedophilia, cannibalism, blue space lasers or microchips in the vaccine. It is science based on data. Lest we forget, the Republican anti-science attitude toward climate change is clearly and undeniably stated in these words from radical right Republican Rick Scott’s disastrous plan for America:

The weather is always changing. We take climate change seriously, but not hysterically. We will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs.

That means that the fascist, staunchly pro-pollution Republican Party takes seriously any attempt by government or business to deal with climate change. The GOP is saying that it will oppose all attempts to slow or reverse climate change. 

In other words, Republican elites see all policies to try to deal with climate change as “hysterical, nutty polices.” After all, one cannot change the weather. Right? /s

June 2022 poll data

Unfortunately, most people can’t feel 

it until they feel it hard 

News bits

Filibuster of same-sex marriage bill broken

This is a shocker. NPR writes: “All 50 Democrats and 12 Republicans voted to advance the bill, clearing a 60-vote threshold. .... In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas noted that the landmark 2015 case that legalized same-sex marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges, rests on the same legal principles that underscored Roe. No case challenging the right to marry has yet made it to the Supreme Court, but advocates feared Thomas was setting the stage for Obergefell's reversal.” 

The 12 Republican treasonous traitors are now presumably targeted for RINO hunting unless they are not running for re-election. The traitors did not include Ted Cruz. No surprise there. He’s as hard core Christian nationalist as Sam Alito. But his 13-year old daughter came out as bisexual recently. One joker commented on that hypothetical conversation with daddy:

Daughter: Dad, I'm bisexual

Dad: Honey, you're going to go to hell if you stay like that
Daughter: Will you be in hell?
Dad: Of course not
Daughter: Sweet, I’m fine with that then

Interestingly, also in that filibustered bill are provisions that protect interracial marriage. Mitch McConnell voted to keep the filibuster in place to block the bill from being passed in the Senate. McConnell, like Clarence Thomas, is in an interracial marriage. His wife is Asian. 

Republicans retake the House

We all know what that means. Gridlock accompanied by vengeful Christian nationalism and a ruthless brass knuckles capitalism. Those two will happily continue their relentless march toward kleptocracy, The gridlock will extend as far as the eye can see on a clear day from a large window of an airplane flying at 37,000 feet. How far is that? Until the outcome of the 2024 elections become clear.

Republicans and their propaganda Leviathan, e.g., Faux News, will probably call their new control of the House something along the lines of a ‘massive landslide victory’. (/s ?) They will likely claim a ‘gigantic mandate’ to remake America in the image of God and robber barons of the 1800s and early 1900s, although they won’t call their robber baron agenda that. (not /s) They will call it something like reducing the size of government and reducing regulations. They certainly will not point out that the robber baron agenda amounts to a major transfer of power and wealth from government and the people to wealthy people and powerful special interests, including the Republican Party. 

The state of democracy

Voting data from the 2022 elections is still being analyzed, but a couple of observations are probably going to be confirmed. They are good news.

• More Democrats than Republicans were motivated to vote out of fear for the fate of democracy in America
• A significant number of voters were driven by fear or anger about loss of abortion and other rights such as same-sex marriage (maybe that is why those 12 Republican Senators voted to break the filibuster of the same-sex marriage bill)
• Americans generally voted against the Republican candidates who were among the more extreme of the crackpot stolen election liars

But the real test of democracy will come in 2024. By then the Supreme Court will have decided the Moore v. Harper case on whether elections can be nullified by state legislatures. Wikipedia comments on the pending Moore case: Moore v. Harper is expected to have a significant impact on future federal elections in the U.S. should the court support the independent state legislature theory. Three of the current Justices—namely, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch—had stated in the dissent to the Court's March 2022 order denial that they believed the state argued correctly on employing the independent state legislature theory. Should the court rule in the state's favor, the ruling would likely impact the 2024 United States elections.

Thinking about abortion: What a rational and an irrational judge sound like

A rational judge

This is a footnote a rational judge in Georgia wrote in a recent abortion case. The Dobbs case is the recent radical right Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. This bit of reasoning is worth consideration.

The state argues that Dobbs reflects no change in constitutional law “because there was never a federal constitutional right to abortion.” (Defendant’s response at 2. Emphasis in original.) Except there was. For 50 years. And we know it because the very same Supreme Court told us so. Repeatedly. Those prior pronouncements carried no lesser effect and were entitled to no lesser deference in Georgia or anywhere else in the Republic than that which we all must afford the Dobbs decision. Dobbs is now the law of the land; this court and every other court in America are bound to apply it faithfully and completely. The Dobbs majority is not somehow “more correct” than the majority that birthed Roe or Casey. Despite its frothy language disparaging the views espoused by previous Justices, the magic of Dobbs is not its special insight into historical “facts” or its monopoly on constitutional hermeneutics.* It is simply numbers. More Justices today believe that the U.S. Constitution does not protect a woman’s right to choose to do with her body than did in that same institution 50 years ago. This new majority has provided our nation with a revised (and controlling) interpretation of what the unchanged words of the U.S. Constitution really mean. And until that interpretation changes again, it is the law.

* Hermeneutics: the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts

This reasoning reflects a doctrine called American Legal Reasoning (ALR). Radical right Republicans and conservatives hate it and vehemently reject it. In short, ALR stands for the proposition that since laws usually cannot be perfectly clear (true) and that society and technology change over time (also true), judges need to interpret ambiguity and newly arising incoherence in laws that arise from changing circumstances. Is ALR mostly rational or not? It’s imperfect, but I think it is. Human laws and legal systems cannot be perfect. 

An irrational judge

The current crop of radical right Republican Christian nationalist judges apply various tactics to reach decisions. But the Christian-capitalist radical right’s core argument is that the US Constitution and most laws can be unambiguously interpreted (not true) and thus their meaning are fixed and cannot change over time. These judges make new things up to arrive at decisions dictated by either (i) literally infallible fundamentalist Christian nationalist dogma, and/or (ii) brass knuckles capitalist profit motive. 

The League of Women Voters summarized some of the “reasoning” that the hyper-radical right Christian nationalist judge, Sam Alito used to overturn Roe v. Wade in his Dobbs decision. The LWV wrote:

On June 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court released its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning the constitutional right to abortion.

Writing for the majority, Justice Alito stated, “procuring an abortion is not a fundamental constitutional right because such a right has no basis in the Constitution’s text or in our Nation’s history.” In so doing, he and four other conservative justices turned back the clock — not only essentially sending Americans back to a time before Roe v. Wade was decided, but also looking almost exclusively at reproductive rights from the lens of the mid-1800s and earlier to determine whether the Constitution confers a right to abortion today.

Justice Alito maintained that, contrary to the fears of many civil rights advocates, this decision had no bearing on other unenumerated rights (rights not specifically spelled out in the Constitution but nevertheless recognized as fundamental) such as marriage equality, same-sex intimacy, and contraception access. However, Justice Thomas undermined this assertion by penning a concurrence calling for a new look at the decisions protecting all the above rights, and more.

The crux of Dobbs is a highly constrained and antiquated view of what constitutes a fundamental constitutional right. Specifically, Justice Alito wrote that for a right to be protected by the Constitution, it must be either explicitly spelled out in the text or “deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition.”

Essentially all experts on American history believe that the US Constitution had no rationally discernable original intent or meaning. It always meant different things to different people, including the people who wrote it and argued for its ratification. Those people bitterly disagreed on a lot of what is in the Constitution. Many or most of those disagreements, or close variants, remain bitterly contested today. That shows the ambiguity that ALR thinking was trying to address for modern times and circumstances. The Roe v. Wade decision arguably flowed from ALR reasoning and the state of society and medical technology in the 1970s when Roe was decided.

Alito’s “deeply rooted in history and tradition” test is not explicitly described in the Constitution. He just made it up so he could cherry pick some history that allowed him to overturn Roe v. Wade in his Dobbs decision. What does deeply rooted in history and tradition mean? It means whatever the judge says it means for each contested constitutional right. 

Right now, radical right cherry picking and dogma-constrained legal theories completely dominate US law, e.g., Alito’s deeply rooted in history and tradition test. Christian nationalist and capitalist dogmas have won. We can expect to see many more major decisions that give decisions what Christian nationalism and capitalism both demand. In that regard, the law has become fairly predictable. The Christian fundamentalists and ruthless capitalists are going to get most of what they want, probably nearly all of it.

On the persistence and effectiveness of climate science denials and propaganda generally

Over at the Neurologica blog, Steve Novella occasionally writes posts on climate change. The science and data in those posts are then attacked by a swarm of climate science deniers. From time to time, he writes on the power and effectiveness of constant climate science propaganda and lies. The same applies to all other topics that get demagogued by people who will not or cannot accept inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning. Novella writes:

The lies of climate change denial

Whenever I write about climate change here, the deniers show up spouting dubious (to say the least) claims. In my opinion, this is a manifestation of a deliberate political strategy, one that we see with other topics. The strategy is to make up blatant lies, or at least claims without the slightest regard for whether or not they are true, and then spread them through ideologically friendly outlets. .... Just keep throwing crap against the wall, and some of it will stick. When these notions make their way into the mainstream media, they are quickly debunked. But by then it’s too late – the damage is done. Long after the false claims are soundly refuted, the rank and file believers will still be quoting them. They are now part of the narrative. 

Volcanoes emit more greenhouse gas than human activity.

This is an old one, but has remarkable persistence. These claims go through a selection process. Claims survive not because they are true, but because they resonate. In this case, the volcano claim fits the overall narrative that meager human activity is nothing compared to the awesome scale of nature. They want to portray the very idea that we can alter the climate as ridiculous. Fact, however, get in the way of this narrative.

According to the US Geological Survey:

Published scientific estimates of the global CO2 emission rate for all degassing subaerial (on land) and submarine volcanoes lie in a range from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year.

That sounds like a lot, but human activity releases 35 gigatons of CO2 each year. That means that human activity releases more than 100 times the CO2 as does all volcanic activity. When I pointed this out in the comments, these easily verifiable scientific facts were dismissed as a liberal conspiracy. Another strategy is to simply shift to another claim, without ever admitting that you were wrong on the first one. In this case just shift over to methane – but that is a loser argument also. Of all the methane released into the atmosphere each year, 60% is due to human causes. All natural sources amount to only 40%, and volcanoes are a minority of that. Most methane on Earth comes from biology.

I do admit it still surprises me when this one is trotted out, because these are easily checkable basic facts. This is a good way to completely squander one’s credibility. I think this says something meaningful about the intellectual process that is being employed by those dedicated to the denial of global warming.

Climate models are simplistic and wrong.

Dismissing climate models is a more complex matter to refute, because this is more than just looking up a couple of numbers. First there is the notion that climate scientists, in producing their models which predict anthropogenic global warming, did not consider natural factors. This is, of course, absurd, and represents non-experts criticizing an entire world-wide community of experts from a profound level of relative ignorance – and doing it with confidence and arrogance. This almost always comes without citations, or by citing only known outliers.

Climate models, from the beginning, have sought to include the latest science available and account for all possible factors. Over the last 50 years climate models have been steadily modified, to account for new scientific data as it comes in. In addition, models have to account for future behavior, such as how much CO2 will the world emit in the future. So they can only give ranges of outcomes based upon explicitly stated assumptions about human behavior in the future. Often models are used to project what will happen under various scenarios – continuing our current trends vs changing course.

One of the best ways to determine how well models predict the climate (how “skillful” they are, in the jargon) is to see how past models predicted later climate change. This has been done multiple time. Here is a 2019 review of 17 climate models. They found:

We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model-projected and observationally estimated forcings were taken into account.

That last bit means the difference between projections of CO2 emissions vs actual CO2 emissions. The bottom line is that the model basically work, and they are continuously getting better as they incorporate the latest science. Computers are also getting more powerful, allowing for more complex climate simulations. But still you will frequently hear things like, “Maybe it’s the sun. All those scientists never thought of that.”

Yeah, maybe it’s the sun and all those scientists never thought of that blatantly obvious factor that only climate science deniers thought of. 

Novella goes on to discuss the debunked argument that CO2 causes greening which absorbs excess CO2. 

To me, the key points are:

• Just spouting lies, deceit and crackpottery and spreading that online causes irreparable damage to truth and democracy because minds rarely change in the face of inconvenient facts, truths or reasoning (IMHO, lies, deceit and crackpottery are usually (~97% of the time?) inherently anti-democratic)

• The burden is usually greater for the side that defends truth and sound reasoning because lies and crackpottery can be short and sound reasonable, while debunking a lie or crackpottery is usually more complicated and harder to boil down to something simple

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; DP 8/7/19