I had a blast talking to Chris Williamson on Modern Wisdom for the second time (you can watch here or listen here). We talked about happiness, arguing, the conscious “self,” opinions, the replication crisis, deepities, and more.
I also gave a scholarly talk on my Alliance Theory approach to politics at the UCLA Marschak colloquium that is now available on Youtube for the five people who might watch it.
Speaking of Alliance Theory, friend of the blog Dan Williams has an excellent post summarizing it and using it to understand Trumpian populism.
And speaking of populism, I used to think that rising inequality was one of its causes. But according to a study I just came across, voters have no idea how unequal their country is, whether inequality has been rising or falling, or where they are in the income distribution. It’s hard to see how rising inequality could shape political outcomes if nobody is aware of it. Am I missing something?
Another friend of the blog Will Storr has a great post on the limits of eastern wisdom, where he writes something I wish I’d written myself:
“Buddhism is a status game. The better the monks play at the game of Buddhism, the higher they climb, the greater their rewards. The reason we don’t think of it as a status game is because of the story it tells of itself, of wisdom, virtue and freedom from ego.”
A lot of AI doomerism is based on so-called “scaling laws.” The idea is that AIs will become more “generally intelligent” (whatever that means) the more data you train them on. One such fear is that LLMs like ChatGPT, if trained on enough text, will acquire powers of “superpersuasion” and take over the world. Fortunately, a new computer science paper throws cold water on this bullshit. As you feed AIs more and more text, their persuasive ability plateaus.
A new study shows that using Twitter/X for just 30 minutes makes people report feeling less "happy," "contended," and "pleasant." And yet, hundreds of millions of people regularly use Twitter/X, often multiple times a day—sometimes for more than 30 minutes. What on earth is going on here? Don’t people want to be happy? Actually no, they don’t.
If you’ve taken an intro psych course, you’re probably familiar with the theory of “cognitive dissonance,” which posits that people feel uncomfortable holding two incompatible beliefs at the same time—for example, “I want to be happy” and “I regularly use Twitter.” The idea came from a quirky experiment conducted in the 1950s that psychologists never bothered to replicate. Well, psychologists finally tried to replicate it last year, and what do you know, it doesn’t replicate. Who’d have thought analogizing the nervous system to a violin concerto was a bad direction for psychology?
Speaking of bad analogies, you might think you have an upwelling of “steam” that you need to “blow off” by shouting. Or you might think there is something “pent up” inside you that you need to “release” by “venting” about your asshole co-worker. But I have an interesting fact to share with you: the human brain is not a steam engine. It is, in fact, an information processing device designed by natural selection to find food, seek status, court mates, and solve other adaptive problems. You see, when you think you’re “venting,” what you’re actually doing is talking shit about your rivals and covering it up with a strained metaphor from the 1800s. Or at least, that’s what a cool new study suggests: “venting” is a clever strategy for saying mean things about people without looking mean.
Also, plenty of studies show that venting doesn’t work in reducing our anger. Why would it? Does ranting feel like a massage? And why would we want to reduce our anger anyways? Anger serves an important function—we don’t want to turn it off. The same thing goes for our other negative emotions: they do useful things for us.
While we’re on the topic of shit talking, here’s another clever excuse for it: “expressing concern.” According to a fascinating series of studies, women spread negative gossip about their rivals by framing it as “concern” for their rival’s wellbeing. “Ohhh I’m so concerned about Stacey. She’s sleeping around so much I’m worried she’ll get an STD.”
A new psychology measure just dropped: the corporate bullshit receptivity scale. It involves rating the “business savvy” of hilarious statements like: “Each day, we help our brand champions thrive in a revolution of frameworks fueled by our augmented business visualization,” and “Our bandwidth comes from the visionary culture-shifting of several new growth-based integrated networks.” According to the study, people who scored higher on the scale were more likely feel inspired by their company’s mission statement.
Here’s one more for the workplace: managers who “fall for flattery,” or who dole out perks to ass-kissers, come out looking bad—naive, incompetent, selfish, unfair, etc. And they make their organizations look bad too, according to this neat study. The authors don’t reflect on the most interesting implication, but I will: ass-kissing and favoritism have to occur underground. The moment people catch on to whose ass is being kissed, and who’s getting ahead as a result, the organizational status game collapses. This creates a social incentive for ass-kissers to disguise their sycophancy as a desire for helpful advice, and for leaders to disguise their trail of ass-kissers as valuable assets to the company. The whole thing might become so subtle that you need Everything Is Bullshit to sort it all out for you.
People rarely say things like: “Murder’s not my thing.” Instead, they’re more likely to say: “Murder is wrong.” Something similar happens with aesthetic tastes. A bookish person might say: “I personally enjoy reading Shakespeare.” But more often, they’ll make a snooty pronouncement like: “Macbeth is a masterpiece. Shakespeare is the greatest writer of all time.” Why do people talk this way? Why do they externalize their feelings and preferences, as if they were outside of their heads and part of the furniture of reality? The answer I gave in Opinions Are Bullshit is that they’re trying to win a war over social norms, and appealing to objective reality is like planting a flag in contested territory:
If I say, “I like Radiohead,” that’s a preference. But if I say, “Radiohead is the best rock band of all time,” that’s an opinion. The difference is that the opinion is externalized—it’s a feature of Radiohead, not me—implying that if you don’t agree with me, you’re missing something. You’re not smart or deep or sophisticated enough.
When we play the opinion game… we downplay the arbitrariness of our preferences. We exaggerate their connection to external reality. We try to make our opinions seem more objective than they really are, so that we can declare them as “right” (i.e., only smart, sane people have them) and others as “wrong” (i.e., only dumb, crazy people have them).
If I’m right, then this entails a clear prediction: the fiercest combatants in the war over social norms, like political activists, will be the most likely to externalize their side’s preferences—to see them as objective facts. Well, in a new paper I just discovered, this prediction has been confirmed: when given a list of politically-loaded statements (e.g., “Diversity helps make America great,” “Government is always wasteful and inefficient”), partisans were more likely to “see their side as holding facts and the other side as holding opinions.” This was particularly true among the fiercest partisans—the ones who really loved their side and hated the other side. Score one point for my theory of opinions! I guess that means it’s an objective fact. ;)
"..according to a study I just came across, voters have no idea how unequal their country is, whether inequality has been rising or falling, or where they are in the income distribution. It’s hard to see how rising inequality could shape political outcomes if nobody is aware of it. Am I missing something?"
Yes, I think you are missing things. I think inequality can easily affect politics without citizens having clear ideas about levels of inequality.
At a macro level, one way it can happen is for inequality to impact on asset prices (super rich people = high demand for assets with good returns). This can in turn make, for instance, house prices more expensive than people think they should be. That can be a political issue in and of itself, and can also trigger overt populism, if populists start blame immigrants etc for rising house prices.
At a micro level, people may not have any clear idea of levels of inequality but they can perceive, even if only tacitly, that some people have much, much more than they do. And they might quickly infer attitudes of snobbery etc even if those attitudes are not actually present. The perception that "they look down on us" can easily impact politics in turn.
Perhaps populism is caused by a combination of rising employment precarity, failure to achieve life goals your parents achieved much earlier in life, and perceived injustice. Favoring blacks, gays, immigrants etc. over poor hardworking citizens can be perceived as injustice and may have a higher weight than inequality.