Fear and fairness: Impediments to knowledge

Most issues in politics are more complicated than most partisans think. It is usually hard to know enough to make a truly informed decision among competing policy choices. To make matters more complex, competing policy choices are almost always backed by either by (i) different sets of facts and spin, and/or (ii) insufficient information for a reasonably informed decision. 

Most voter opinions on most issues are based on a combination of false facts and personal political ideology or morals. Personal political ideology-morals, e.g., liberalism and conservatism, fosters false fact beliefs in most people. That is an inherent aspect of the largely intuitive biology of human cognition. Most policy choices are therefore overwhelmingly subjective-emotional and error prone relative to what's best for the public interest.

To be more objective-rational than subjective-intuitive, personal policy choices need to be based as much or more on unbiased, unspun facts and reason, than on subjective personal ideology or morals. Unfortunately for average citizens there are several major barriers that make access to unbiased facts difficult or impossible. Two barriers are fear and fairness.

The fear barrier

For people with deeply held political beliefs or ideology-morals, it can be frightening or impossible to honestly face facts. Unbiased facts are independent of personal beliefs and they often undermine personal beliefs. An excellent way to avoid facing facts is to block the work or research needed to obtain relevant facts about an issue. That is a tactic that conservatives have used, sometimes to great effect. It is not clear if liberals resort to this fact-blocking method.

Examples of research killing include a very successful effort by pro-gun politicians, mostly conservatives, gun manufacturers and the pro-gun lobby to squelch federal funding for research into the public health impacts of gun ownership. That coordinated effort began in 1996, three years after an article in The New England Journal of Medicine showed that gun ownership was a risk factor for homicide in the home. Groups such as the NRA continue to block federal funding for research.

Conservatives have also blocked or tried to block federal funding for (i) independent, objective analysis of various technical issues to inform congress and (ii) NASA’s research on climate science based on false arguments.

Efforts to block research that conservatives believe would undermine their ideology are based more on fear of what unbiased facts would show than anything else. There is no other obvious credible explanation.

The fairness barrier

Obtaining unbiased data often requires controlled experiments with different groups, control and/or experimental groups, being subject to different conditions. Controls are usually needed for comparing the effect of one test condition with another. Without controls, it is hard or impossible to objectively measure and compare one condition or policy choice with another. Despite the need for controls in experiments or policy option tests, resistance sometimes crops up because it is perceived to be unfair to treat different groups of people differently.

The Wall Street Journal reported an example of fairness barrier interference with research and how it can be overcome at least sometimes. A researcher was interested in seeing if there would be academic and attendance differences between students attending an urban high school who received a free lunch compared to students who didn’t. The researcher wanted to randomly pick students who would get the free lunch but the school blocked the research arguing it was unfair to not give all students a free lunch. Fairness blocked research.

A few months later the researcher went back to the same school but informed administrators that he had only enough money to give half the students a free lunch and the administrators could pick who got the free lunches. The administrators suggested randomly picking which students got the free lunches and which didn’t. The researcher got his experiment because it was framed as sufficiently fair from the point of view of the people with the power to allow or block the research.

Again, the relevance of the subjective-intuitive nature of human cognition to politics makes itself abundantly clear. The open question is whether American society is ready to accept the basic nature of how our brains see and think about the world and conclude it is time for a different, smarter way of doing politics.

One year anniversary; A progress summary

The widely known and feared but respected Dissident Politics (DP) political juggernaut celebrates its one-year anniversary on February 10. What year it has has been! The DP project continued building on 10 years searching for answers with the search driven by discontent with the two-party system and curiosity about why American politics is so irrational and disconnected from reality. How to fix it was the other driving inquiry. Great strides in understanding were made (the epiphany). Progress on how to fix things hit a massive brick wall.

The rational politics epiphany

DP's early years of looking for answers eventually made it clear that if there were any answers, they were to be found in the social sciences. The biology and psychology of human cognition and, to a lesser extent, political science. After reading and thinking about the social science, it became clear in July of 2015 that a simple political ideology or set of morals can be stated that are designed to reduce the reality (fact) and common sense (logic) distorting power of normal subjective or intuitive human cognition.

The objective ideology or morals concept is simple: People can adopt a belief in reliance on (i) unbiased facts and (ii) unbiased logic to find and implement the political policies that best serve (iii) an objectively defined conception of the public interest. Based on current understanding of how the human mind sees and thinks about the world and issues it faces, there is no insurmountable biological or legal barrier that blocks adopting a political ideology that strives for greater objectivity and grounding in unbiased facts. Of course, perfect objectivity is impossible for most or all human to ever attain in politics. Humans are intrinsically intuitive-emotional and morally intolerant and judgmental creatures. The objective politics concept is described, e.g., here, here and here. Some of the supporting social science is described in DP book reviews here and here.

Humans are biologically incapable of perfect objectivity or rationality because that's just how we evolved. Nonetheless, there is no reason to believe that American society couldn't move in that direction if there was a will to do so. Of course, that assumes one believes that politics based at least somewhat more on reason and unspun reality would be an improvement over the current irrational, fantasy-based nonsense that passes for political thinking and rhetoric under our current two-party system. It all depends on how one sees these things.
 

The vicious and the civilized right

In the early years, DP's belief in the vacuous, reality-detached basis of American politics came from many hours of interaction with the fine folks who spend time at hard core conservative websites such as National Review Online, Breitbart, The Blaze, The Federalist and Washington Times. In that time, DP interacted with hundreds or maybe several thousands of different people in an exchange of views on dozens of different issues. Dealing with those playful conservatives was enlightening.

The fine folks at those websites tended to characterize DP personally, or DP's pragmatic, rational take on issues, with insightful observations such as stupid, liar, idiot, brain washed by the left, intentionally uninformed, anti-Semite, racist, communist, fool, heartless and, from one puzzlingly irate libertarian, Nazi. DP learned very little from those folks. There were some thoughtful conservatives who could rise above emotion and engage in a sustained civilized discussion. Despite the occasional civility and sometimes reasonable rationality, it was clear that for the civilized, facts and logic were both trapped by conservative, anti-government ideology or morals.

What about the uncivilized? Well, for that crowd, there's no point trying to discuss anything unless one agrees with what they know to be true and right. For them politics is akin to religion. It is infallible and not open to question or debate.

Overall, policy choices that were liberal or otherwise not considered conservative were simply unacceptable to essentially every conservative at every site for every issue. Non-conservative solutions to problems received little or no consideration whatever. The degree of lockstep uniformity among conservatives was astounding. Of course, that comes from an objective pragmatist and seeing a narrow ideology at work. To conservatives, there is nothing remarkable about it at all. DP stopped spending much time at conservative sites, having learned what there is to know and tiring of either getting kicked off of websites (National Review, twice) or being called really nasty names, usually for no particular reason (Breitbart was the clear winner in that hotly contested category).

All in all, no subset of conservatives would buy into the objective or rational politics concept. To the extent they understood the issue, they uniformly believe that they already were objective and fully grounded in facts and logic. The only issue from their point of view was the sheer irrationality and self-delusion of liberals and independents who disagreed with them. In other words, the intuitive biology of human cognition applied only to the political opposition, not themselves. In short, conservative ideology doesn't let most conservatives understand the concept.

Observations that American politics is ideologically narrow is not unique to DP. DP sees American political ideology (liberal, conservative, capitalist, socialist, Christian, etc) as generally too small to accommodate unbiased facts and unbiased logic, which are what they are without regard to anyone's ideology. Because of that American political ideology or morals are seriously logic- and reality-distorting. Again, that's just how the biology human cognition coupled with ideology and a morally judgmental nature works in the real world with real people. Its all about the biology.

The restrained independents

In August 2015, a few weeks after the July rational politics epiphany, DP began submitting articles for the online site IVN. IVN graciously accepted DP's essays for publication. IVN is focused on independent voters, voter registration and electoral reform. DP frequently comments there on articles by other authors and in response to reader's comments on DP essays, which IVN publishes under the clever pseudonym "Dissident Politics." Many of the folks at IVN are more familiar than most with the concept on rational politics and its biological basis.

The response to the concept has been polite but restrained. Many of the people there appear to be relatively open minded and seem to understand the subjective-intuitive nature of politics and undesirable aspects thereof. Nonetheless, they cannot see any way to make it work in practice, possibly because they understand at some level the difficulty of getting people to be more rational about politics. Despite their skepticism, they are a polite, informative bunch of folks and pleasant to deal with.

The liberals

In mid-2015 DP began spending serious time interacting with people at liberal websites such as Daily Kos, Salon, Mother Jones and Crooks and Liars. DP blogs on Daily Kos under the pseudonym pragmatic1, e.g., describing how to make politics objective and arguing that reason (logic) can be compatible with our inherently intuitive-irrational nature. So far, the liberal crowd has been much more polite than the conservatives, more or less like the independents, but harder to engage in sustained back and forth than civilized conservatives (one anarchist has been the exception so far). So far, the concept of objective politics isn't resonating with liberals any more than it is with independents.

The early going suggests that most liberals, like conservatives, see problems with ideologically-based fact and logic distortion as being confined to conservatives. Nonetheless, liberals are generally more open minded and a few seem to be concerned or puzzled about what it is that DP keeps going on about. For some, something seems to feel not quite right, but they just can't put a finger on it.

The brick wall

To complete the round up of DP's first year, DP's quest to fix politics hit a massive brick and concrete wall. First, fixing politics means convincing people to reject the ideology and/or morals of the left and right in favor the ideology and/or morals of objective politics. resistance to questioning one's own ideology or morals is no surprise, but it isn't encouraging either. This is an aspect of human cognitive biology - we dislike challenges to our deeply held beliefs and resist serious self-questioning.

Unfortunately, American society continues to drift away from reason and toward intuition, subjectivity and emotion-based moral judgment. Fear, anger, hate, distrust and misinformation continue to dominate calm, intelligent reason and cold, hard fact. That's good for both parties and the special interests who fund them. Unfortunately, it's a very bad thing for the public interest from an objective point of view. DP holds an objective point of view.

The brick wall consists of the bricks of human cognitive biology and the unconscious biases and unconscious, intolerant moralistic judgments that flow therefrom. The concrete that holds the bricks together is constitutionally protected free speech including the relentless pander and spin (as previously defined and analyzed) that dominates political world views and policy choices.

Thinking about this led to a surprising question about the net value of free speech in American politics.

The surprising question

The unexpected question that DP's inquiries led to was whether free speech in the two-party system is actually more harmful than helpful to the public interest. To DP's knowledge, no one has seriously asked that question of American politics in recent times. Everyone simply, especially the federal courts, assumes that free speech has to be more good than bad.

However, there is no evidence to prove that point is true. By contrast, there is evidence that spin in politics can be at least potentially more harmful than beneficial to the public interest, e.g., (i) fact check organizations suggest that there is a lot of untrue speech and shaded truth in two-party political rhetoric, and (ii) hundreds of millions of special interest anonymous money in political elections. Answering the relative harm vs. benefit question is beyond DP's capacity. The answer depends on how one defines the "public interest", which is currently a meaningless, purely subjective concept in American politics.

The year ahead

DP is aware of the adage, allegedly Einstein's: "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Trying to convince people to reject subjective political ideology-morals in favor of objectivity may be insanity. Maybe DP is years or generations too early for the objective politics message to resonate. Maybe DP is the wrong messenger. Maybe American politics under the Constitution and free speech can never rise above its current overwhelmingly irrational basis. The arguments between the left and right today, or variants, do sound an awful lot like the arguments between (1) the Founding Fathers who never came close to resolving their differences in their lifetimes and (2) competing politicians, tribes, societies and nations from the beginning of recorded human history. In DP's opinion, that latter concern is unnecessarily defeatist or pessimistic. 

Despite the difficulties, it's worth another year of effort to float the objective politics concept to see if it resonates with any segment of American society. The religious community seems unpromising, but there's no sense prejudging everyone in a broad group. A few initial contacts with online atheist-agnostic communities have not been encouraging. One small but seemingly exceptionally open-minded and receptive group is at Something to Consider. Exploring those folks merits is on the agenda.

Well politics fans, that wraps up another (OK, the only) year in review for the explosive DP juggernaut.

The irrationality of Iowa first

NPR and some other media outlets have aired interviews with Iowans on why Iowa always gets to go first. Who goes second get far less coverage, but the same logic presumably applies. If what some Iowans say is representative of at least half of its residents, most are an arrogant bunch. More disturbingly but not surprisingly, Iowans are not logical.

The Iowa is best “rationale”

Like most empty political rhetoric, there is usually a big disconnect between rhetoric and the real world. The rational for why Iowa and New Hampshire should always go first and second fits that pattern. For Iowa first, one politically active Iowan argues this: “The real reason we're first in the nation now is because of what we do. We take this real seriously . . . . You know, we ask really good questions. We ask follow-up questions . . . . We look them in the eye like I am you right now. It's real. It's one-on-one vetting of candidates. Are you for real? Not a TV spot, not money — what's in your heart?" Ah yes, that’s the good old, tried and true, being serious, asking questions and follow-ups and looking into someone’s eyeballs to see their hearts rationale.

Looking into eyes and hearts falls short of former president Dubya’s more sophisticated analytic technique of looking into eyeballs and souls tactic, but it’s a good start. As Dubya put it regarding his tactic as applied to the murderous Vladimir Putin: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul.” That worked out well, didn’t it? Anyway, eyeball and heart looking is one reason for Iowa first.

Among other things, that vacuous drivel ignores the fact that candidates don’t spend nearly as much time in other states. Most residents (maybe 99.999%) in most other states have essentially no chance to look any candidate in the eye and ask anything. In states other than Iowa or New Hampshire, there is nothing to take seriously in person or any candidate eyeballs and heart to stare into. How many cozy town hall meetings have all major candidates held in California, Texas, Colorado, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Montana, Ohio, Nebraska or dozens of other states since last June? None is much closer to the mark than 20. Zero is probably the correct answer for every one of those of states.

Obviously, the feeble “Iowa is best rationale” says that since Iowans pay attention, that implies that no one else does and thus no other state deserve to go first. That’s sheer nonsense. And offensive.

Another Iowa first rationale rejects the obvious differences between Iowa and the rest of the country. An Iowan rebuttal to that argument is this: “Is it fair that Iowa goes first? What's fair in politics? I mean, seriously. Yeah, OK, we're like 97 percent white, and we're really rural, and we don't look like a microcosm of America. But so what?”

Ah yes, that’s the good old rock-solid “but so what” rationale coupled with the “politics isn’t fair” sucker punch. At least the admission of unfairness strikes a chord of reality. That’s one plucked string of the harp that rings true.

Yet another rationale is the good old, “if not Iowa then who?” argument. The obvious answer to that non-rationale is easy: Anyone but Iowa and New Hampshire. Who goes first and second could rotate among one or more states or regions of the country.

An indefensible, irrational process

The enormous impact of Iowa and New Hampshire on selecting presidential candidates is indefensible and irrational. In Iowa, it skews the process at the national via an indefensibly arcane caucus process. For Iowa, only 20-25% of the voting age population usually participate in its caucuses. With a population of 3.1 million and about 2.1 million registered voters, a grand total of about 420,000 to 525,000 Iowa voters get to significantly decide who the rest of us get to support or not. Some of those lucky few out of the over 150 million registered American voters have a chance to look into candidate’s eyes, see candidate hearts, ask their questions, follow-up questions and then decide in their cozy, small state comfort who the rest of us gets to vote for.

To be fair, many or most Iowa and New Hampshire residents may not feel superior about their unwarranted role. Americans are not always blinded by their ideology or morals. Some understand the unfairness inherent in our system of politics. With America’s corrupt two-party system, things usually are the way they are because that serves the two parties’ perceived needs. If Iowa forever goes first and New Hampshire forever second, that is because the two parties see that serves their own interests. Rationality and fairness have nothing to do with it.

Reason can be compatible with intuition in politics

At least since Greek philosopher Plato’s time (427-327 BC), people have considered the roles of intuition and reason in human thinking and cognition or perception. Intuition and reason are different biological processes. Intuition is defined as a rapid understanding or cognition of something without conscious reasoning or thinking. Intuition includes making moral judgments and eliciting personal emotions or passions. By contrast, reason is defined to be a conscious application of logic or analytical thought to situations or problems. Reason is a necessarily conscious process or something within our awareness. Sometimes an intuition or desire and reason conflict with either one capable of shaping a person’s ultimate judgment, decision and behavior.

The question is what are the roles, approximate or precise, that intuition and reason play in shaping our thinking, beliefs and behavior? Over the centuries, the tree basic theories arose. Plato believed that reason, being superior to our intuition and passions, ought to generally dominate our thinking and passions. Later, the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) argued that intuition or passion governs human behavior with reason playing only a subordinate role. Hume argued that reasoning based on premises (inductive reasoning) and resulting causality cannot be justified rationally. He believed that human belief in causality results from experience and custom, not logic. Finally, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) concluded that intuition and reason were and should be more or less in balance, with either one having a similar or equal capacity to decide our beliefs and actions.

One social scientist, Johnathan Haidt, criticized Plato’s perception of our cognitive biology. He argues that as “an intuitionist, I’d say that the worship of reason is itself an illustration of one of the most long-lived delusions in Western history: the rationalist delusion.” Available evidence argues that Hume was more right than Plato and Jefferson. Social science research strongly suggests that humans are fundamentally intuitive, with reason usually playing a role largely limited to defending or justifying personal morals, intuitions or beliefs. For politics, personal judgments and beliefs are mostly matters of intuition, while morals are personal, hard-wired beliefs that shape our intuitions and beliefs.

Assuming that intuitionists such as Haidt are correct, what does that say about the role of reason and conscious logic in politics? Are humans forever doomed to endure politics and unavoidable conflict because our thinking is dominated by personal morals and passions, with only a limited role for conscious reason? Haidt argues something like that. He asserts that because we evolved to be “narrowly moralistic and intolerant . . . . our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife.”

Despite that bleak picture, Haidt argues that we should “at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.” In his 2012 book The Righteous Mind, Haidt asserts that “my goal . . . . is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with awe, wonder, and curiosity.” He asserted that Hume “went too far” by arguing that reason is the “slave” of the passions. In addition, Haidt argues that although intuition dominates, it is “neither dumb nor despotic” and it “can be shaped by reasoning.”

Collectively, those statements sound much more like an appeal for reason than an assertion that it is delusional to want a bigger role for reason in politics. Haidt’s assertion that we “will always be cursed by moralistic strife” is his explicit moral judgment that our intuitive, righteous nature is a curse, not a blessing or a source of wisdom. In this regard, he is closer to Plato’s moral judgment about how things ought to be than Hume or Jefferson.

Reason and intuition are compatible

It is reasonable to believe that by acknowledging our inherently intuitive nature, Haidt is being rational and advocating for a more prominent role for rationality in politics. He is explicit about this: “I’m not saying we should all stop reasoning and go with our gut feelings. Gut feelings . . . . are often disastrous as a basis for public policy, science, and law.” Although human cognition is fundamentally intuitive, that does not mean that reason has no significant role to play.

Nor does it mean that ways to enhance the role of reason and/or decrease the error-proneness in our political thinking and judgments can never be found. It is not reasonable to conclude that all people will be the same. The cognitive science that Haidt and others rely on is new. Well-defined biological limits have not yet been proven. There is no data to prove that reason can exert no more than, say, 1-5% of anyone’s cognitive power or influence.

Social science is not even at a point where it can conclude with reasonable confidence that all people are cognitively alike. Given the vast differences in individual talents, interests, morals and personal motivations, it is entirely possible that some people can be found whose thinking is closer to Jefferson’s postulated 50:50 intuition-reason power split than Hume’s postulated ~99:1 power split in favor of intuition being served by the rational slave. It may even be the case that a few people are closer to Plato’s vision of cognition where reason can dominate intuition. Data from Philip Tetlock’s Good Judgment Project and the discovery of a few superforecasters of future events strongly suggests that reason plays a much larger cognitive role in some people than Hume postulated.

What about the rationalist delusion?

How can square Haidt’s assertion that one of the most long-lived delusions in Western history is the rationalist delusion with an assertion that reason can and should play a bigger role in politics? Wasn’t Haidt’s comment a direct repudiation of a hope for more rationality in politics? If taken out of context, that is a reasonable way to see his comment.

But, for context, Haidt also said this in The Righteous Mind:

“Western philosophy has been worshipping reason and distrusting the passions for thousands of years. . . . . I’ll refer to this worshipful attitude throughout this book as the rationalist delusion. I call it a delusion because when a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds. The true believers produce pious fantasies that don’t match reality, and at some point somebody comes along to knock the idol off its pedestal. That was Hume’s project, with his philosophically sacrilegious claim that reason was nothing but the servant of the passions.”

Asking for a greater degree of rationality in politics in the face of our acknowledged intuitive nature isn’t necessarily delusional. Wanting more reason doesn’t elevate reason to the level of being either sacred or requiring cult-like moral rigidity. It is just a simple, common sense plea for a bigger role for reason in politics, nothing more. As asserted before, Haidt is being a rationalist in asking for more rationality in politics. He does that while being fully cognizant of the danger of distorting or denying our innate intuitive nature.

Does morality always bind and blind?

From my point of view as a rationalist or objectivist, Haidt’s most interesting assertion is that “morality binds and blinds.” Is that necessarily always true? It apparently has always been in the past, so it’s tempting to assume it has to be that way in the future. The problem with that is that it ignores what we now know about our cognitive biology. Mankind has never used a political ideology or set of morals that are (1) based on modern science in light of all of mankind’s relevant knowledge, and (2) designed to increase the role of reason in politics, while decreasing the power of our morals and biases to distort fact and logic.

Since the cognitive science is so new, such an ideology could not have existed until now. It is possible in theory at least that a political ideology or morals can be selected that are intellectually freeing and foster both undistorted perception and reason. To deny the possibility of rationalizing morals is irrational because there has never been a direct test of any unblinding and unbinding political morals hypothesis. Who knows, Jefferson may yet turn out to be closer to the mark than Hume at least for some individuals, if not entire societies.