Avoiding Truth

Re: incoherent behavior, the article says:

Most voters lack elementary knowledge of our political system, they hold views that are ideologically jumbled and logically inconsistent, and their opinions change over time in ways that suggest almost random behavior.

My political views have definately changed over time. Should I attribute this to incoherance? I typically attribute it to having learned more about where my previous political views were lacking. What is a reasonable way to discern which explanation is best?

If your views change back and forth, without your obtaining new information or analysis, then that would be incoherent

Well that makes me feel good, but I don’t think it really answers the question, because I’m certain that everyone, including those whose views appear externally incoherant, could take comfort from that statement. For example, if today, I listened to Rush Limbaugh, I have obtained new information and analysis which may sway my view. But tomorrow, I may listen to Air America, and again I have obtained new information and analysis which may sway my view. Not many people are willing to listen to both ends of that radio spectrum. But I think that it’s easily possible that I’m swayed by external inputs in ways that make my beliefs appear incoherent from the outside.

I’d like to think that the difference is that I am able to find issues for which I can disagree with people who mostly hold similar views. I’d like to think that my views are coherant because I take a reasonable effort to understand the counter arguments that are made. But I’m sure that I’m swayed more frequently by my biases and much more likely to become a “motivated skeptic”.

My personal goal is to figure out what’s true, and stand by it. I lean in a particular direction today because I think that direction is closer to the truth. But in 5 years, I may discover that it was all an illusion, and may lean in a different direction. If that appears incoherant to external viewers, I don’t really care. But it makes me wonder how incoherant the “low investment” crowd actually is in comparison to how incoherant they appear.

One of your best essays, Arnold. And you are right on the button about how elites fool themselves through a selective and filtered reading of the data. . .

If I understood the gist of Arnold’s idea (which in Arnold’s view would be a small miracle, since everybody is running away from truth and understanding), there is a parallel between markets and politics, in the sense that both are systems engaged in processing information. Markets process information and express the result in, say, a price, which is true, but political systems process information but their final outcome is a lie.

Fishing out individual samples of information being processed in the political system, say a drunken incoherent statement in a bar or a fine elaborate op-ed in the New York Time, we find that the factual content is either grossly ignorant (bar) or cleverly tendentious and false (the NYT). In all cases there is a clear effort to avoid the truth.

I think Arnold is comparing two different things: price vs information (truth) in the political process. In my opinion, the equivalent of price in the market, is power in the political system. If the outcome of the political process is that Bush sits in the Oval Office and commands four million armed warriors, while Gore writes about climatology, then that outcome is true. Bush commanding the Army is true in the same order of magnitude as the 62 US$/barrel oil quotation.

What I want to say is that the truth content of political statements is irrelevant, meaningless. They are only intermediate products towards the end product, which is who gets the power. Allow me please to quote my favorite politician, General Juan Domingo Peron: “La unica verdad es la realidad” (the only truth is reality) which I interpret as: Everything is lies and nonsense, the only truth is who gets the power.

Regarding the question if the political system can process information efficiently when, by sampling every kind of information and statement and article within it, we find that there is not a grain of truth in anything, I think that the answer is yes, the final outcome is true and represents the actual relation of forces in the field. Bush was stronger than Gore, not because that is the outcome of the process, but because he was stronger before and the true outcome was Bush giving orders to the American Army and its generals. A different outcome would have been, I believe, a lie. Elective systems, as a rule, produce true outcomes.

Arnold Kling has a libertarian take on the fundamental hypothesis that only about 10% of the population invest any real energy in politics. And of that decimal, each of the paired-off opponents tend to give their own predilections an overwhelming bias in sorting out new information. As Kling succinctly sums up:

The masses’ strategy for avoiding truth is to make a low investment in understanding; the elites’ strategy is to make a large investment in selectively choosing which facts and arguments to emphasize or ignore.

So we have Matthew Arnold’s “ignorant armies” on a “darkling plain.” Or do we?

I believe in democracy because I distrust the elites. I distrust the elites because I believe that self-deception is widespread, and the elites are particularly skilled at it. Accordingly, I believe that it is important for those in power to have the humility of knowing that they may be voted out of office.

Others believe in democracy because they are hoping to see the triumph of a particular elite. Many liberals want to see sympathetic technocrats manipulating the levers of government, nominally for the greater good. I see government technocrats as inevitably embedded in a political system that inefficiently processes information. The more they attempt, the more damage they are likely to do.[MY EMPHASIS] Many conservatives want to see government used for “conservative ends.” However, I believe that the more that government tries to correct the flaws of families, the more flawed families will become.

“That government governs best which governs least,” said Honest Abe, before the onset of the colossal catastrophe which post-war American government has become. I thank God daily for Medicare, but a single-payer system would be Iraq times ten, a catastrophe which would make Canadian wait-times move from months to years, just to take one example.

I worked for the US government for over a decade, and dealt with it in one way or another for three on a working basis. The bigger government is, the worse it operates. When I was a Beltway Bandito working with Booz Allen Hamilton, I learned of an unpublished study concerning the Pentagon which had been sponsored and paid for by the military itself. It concerned how best to cut back the size of the military bureaucracy. [This was in the early days of the Reagan presidency.] My fellow consultant-informant told me that the study had suggested that ANY WAY that personnel would be cut back would be preferable to the overpopulation of military technocrats and bureaucrats now functioning in the DC area. Indeed, the suggestion was made in the study [never published] that in the interests of efficiency and economy, it would be better if one out of every three names, regardless of rank or position, would be randomly selected out of the Pentagon phonebook and dismissed from their job than it would be to let the bloated payroll/personnel size be maintained at previous levels. This was obviously meant to make a point and not to be carried out, but the study never saw the light of day. I wonder why and who killed it?

Urban legend?

“And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

Welcome to the post post-modern world.

Two remarks on Arnold’s opening quotation.

(i) It may not be irrational to give views one agrees with an easier time than views one disagrees with. Critical attention is a scarce resource. In light of that a sensible cognitive policy for an individual may be (A) to adopt any new belief we encounter from a prima facie plausible source, so long as it coheres with our present views; but when we encounter a belief that’s inconsistent with our present views, (B) to devote cognitive resources to trying to eliminate the troublesome inconsistency, the obvious place to start being the new belief.

(ii) Individual psychological biases (if that’s indeed what they are) may be less important to good cognitive outcomes than is often thought. Given a community of inquirers,it may turn out that every view gets sceptical attention–from someone; it doesn’t necessarily matter if nobody gives his or her own views sceptical attention.

Andrew M