The Inner Ring

I sometimes regard C.S. Lewis' non-fiction as elegantly false; a dangerous combination. But one of the best and true things he has ever put out is The Inner Ring.

The inner ring is the social circle to which people conform to the center. People are groupish. Their instincts tell them to do things that knead them deeper into groups. They often do this with multiple groups at the same time. Lewis warns that we do things to become part of the inner ring which we wouldn't do otherwise, sometimes immoral things. And it's not like we do it deliberately, Our perception of right and wrong becomes skewed by ingroup/outgroup biases.

What counts as an inner ring? According to Psychologists' Minimal Group Paradigm, pretty much everything. The minimal conditions required for discrimination to occur between groups is in fact, very minimal. Anything can trigger ingroup discrimination, even the most trivial distinctions, like whether you over or under estimated the number of dots on a page. The distinction merely needs to be an object of our attention in order to trigger team based thinking.

So finish the sentence, "I am..." An evangelical? Working class? A liberal? A parent? There's your inner ring. There's your tribe. Now you will do things to protect your tribe from outsiders and prove to your tribe that you really are one of them. We... whatever it is... stick together, even when we're wrong.

"There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may be designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration: it may be called “You and Tony and me.” When it is very secure and comparatively stable in membership it calls itself “we.” When it has to be expanded to meet a particular emergency it calls itself “all the sensible people at this place.” From outside, if you have dispaired of getting into it, you call it “That gang” or “they” or “So-and-so and his set” or “The Caucus” or “The Inner Ring.” If you are a candidate for admission you probably don’t call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present conversation goes well, would be madness."

The best predictor of Trump support is...

The best predictor of support for Donald Trump is...

Drum roll...

authoritarianism! (according to an article on Vox)

Which is defined by a cluster of tendencies...

"Individuals with a disposition to authoritarianism demonstrate a fear of "the other" as well as a readiness to follow and obey strong leaders. They tend to see the world in black-and-white terms. They are by definition attitudinally inflexible and rigid."

First of all, aren't you just asking for your liberal readership to get the wrong idea with the phrase, "black and white?"

Secondly, authority and ingroup (loyalty) values, which Vox just calls authoritarianism, are big predictors of conservatism. It ain't got nothing to do with trump.

What about the other moral foundation connected to conservatism? Purity. I can't help but think of Trump calling people he doesn't like, "disgusting".

The article also states,

"These results should be a big red flag to those who argue Trump’s support is capped. It is not."

Only to the same extent that conservatism isn't capped, which of course it is. Yes, people become more authoritarian as they feel threatened, but that doesn't mean each subsequent scare doesn't get diminishing returns. It's not like more and more threats just keeps working forever. Fear may have already done pretty much everything it can do.

The article fights fire with fire, that is, fear with fear. Be afraid, Donald Trumps has unlimited potential. He hasn't even reached his final form!

Heterodox Academy

Here is where psychologist Jonathan Haidt and many other people promoting intellectual diversity are blogging.

HeterodoxAcademy.org

Haidt says that lack of intellectual diversity handicaps academia. Most notably is the lack of conservatives in social science. While conservatives have biases, liberals hold certain ideas sacred too, Unfortunately, academia is filled will liberals who, like the rest of us, don't do a very good job of entertaining or criticizing the sacred ideas of their tribe.

Good job Heterodox Academy

Nate Silver - Conversations with Tyler

There's a lot of good stuff here. A lot of how to think not what to think.



I find it interesting when they agree that the best chance an individual voter has of moving a presidential election is in Virginia, where it's about 1 in 10 million. If you like those odds, maybe you should play a $2 lottery with those odds and win a million dollars?

Obama on Trump and the GOP race

Here's the video

Those Crazy Republicans

I'm generally very receptive to this. Republicans have an unwarranted anti-muslim streak, and they deny the reality of climate change.

Parties often have good points when criticizing each other. They're more often delusional when they talk about themselves.

I could also paint a picture of leftists and their hateful and anti-science views. We just wouldn't be talking about muslims and climate change, we'd be talking about CEOs and evolutionary psychology.

 He made the emphasis of his talk that he trusts that the American people will do the right thing. I also think that the Democrats will get the nomination. But he didn't give any probabilities. If the Repubs are as bad as he says they are, then isn't a 20% chance of trump winning very scary? Shouldn't that undermine his faith in democracy and government relative to their alternative, the private sector?

I also appreciate the Obama didn't devolve his speech with a lot of the same name calling as his party uses. The names that are used to slander Republicans, and especially trump, are vicious and horribly fail the intellectual empathy test. Obama always carries himself as one with high character, He treats his opponents with respect, even when his opponents did exactly the opposite.

Powerball Redistribution Meme

1) Poverty: the $4 problem

If you haven't noticed, the math doesn't add up, but that didn't stop 904,000 people on Facebook from liking the meme anyway. Judging from the most recent comments, a lot of people take away that math education has gone down the tubes.

 I actually don't think so. I think that if the math was posed without the ideological content people wouldn't have made the mistake. Once the error is pointed out, almost anybody can figure out that each person receives a very small number. The problem is not that people couldn't do the math, but that only some were motivated to check it.

The way it works is as follows: if you favor redistribution then you like this meme, it seems right, and you don't have to exercise the least bit of skepticism towards it. You "like" and "share" it on Facebook so that the world can know that the end of poverty is one simple step away from greed and selfishness.

If you're opposed to redistribution then your first instinct is to find out what's wrong with it. Of course you double check the math, hazzah! it's wrong! now you can tell those redistributionist how stupid they all are.

If you're a redistributionist you read the comments criticizing the math of the meme. You double check it for yourself. Oh God, they're right! You conjure up a face-saving post in the comments about what it was really about.

"Clearly the lady that created this post picture was off.. But the point she was trying to make .. Spot on my people. Shed a tear like normal lol have a laugh for once ! Duhhhh the math doesn't equal out..you guys want a correction award.

Point she was attempting to make is simple.. There's enough money to feed the people... Why is the world like it is. Her math was incorrect but I get it.

And then you get a few thousand Likes from others who were also caught not being careful around ideas they like. Good God that's an awful comment. Shed a tear? Feed the people? What nonsense.

2) Reasoning until we get what we want

Underlying my interpretation is an enormous amount of research on motivated reasoning. We humans  are apt to take confirming evidence at face value while subjecting disconfirming evidence to critical evaluation. We give evidence that confirms our biases the benefit of the doubt, and give evidence the disconfirms the burden of proof. When we don't want to believe it we ask why, and when we want to believe it we ask why not.

In one study subjects were preselected for their attitudes toward capital punishment, and then asked to read fictitious studies on the deterrence effect of capital punishment. Of course, when fictional pro-deterrence studies were used, people who were pro-capital punishment assessed that they were persuasive, and people who weren't were critical. When the same fictional study was presented with the opposite, anti-deterrence conclusion, opposite groups thought the study was well done or had methodological errors.

Too small of sample size, nonrandom sample selection, or inadequate controls for important variables were problems only when people wanted them to be.



Man that's a really bad comment. I can't get over that.

Hungry? Grab a Link

• My brother and his gang of nerds find the mass radius relations for these dark matter bosonic stars, their density profile as well as the maximum mass they can support. Those whacky characters and their shenanigans.
  
• Bryan Caplan argued with a senator about ending drug prohibition. I've seen intellectuals argue with politicians before, and the clean shaven face always ends up having to be scraped up from the street curb.
  
• Scott Alexander defends the Myers-Briggs Personality Test. 

...you answer a lot of personality questions on a test, like “Do you like spending time around other people?”, and you say “no”, and then later the test tells you “You’re an introvert”, and then you think “Oh my god, this is amazing, it’s like it’s known me my whole life!”

The claim that MBTI gives you new information would be a bold scientific claim and would require bold scientific evidence. I don’t know to what degree the MBTI people make this claim, but I don’t think it’s necessary for me to enjoy the test and consider it useful. All it needs to do is condense the information you put into it in a way that makes it more relevant and digestible.

• Lots of people are talking about Scott Sumner's new book, The Midas Paradox. The complicated world of monetary policy and business cycles is something I don't know very much about. And every time I try the words become gibberish about a sentence and a half into it. From what I hear though, Mr. Sumner is pretty good. although it might just be that the high cost of entry (knowing what their talking about), keeps that complicated world monopolized.
  
• Hive Mind by Garrett Jones is about why the IQ of the society you live in matters so much more than the IQ of your own.