Those pesky other people and their cognitive biases
Being honest about motivated reasoning
That thing, when you think something and then go off to find all the evidence to justify thinking that in particular. But only certain evidence. The convenient evidence. We all recognise when we see it happening. It's infuriating. Confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, we sagely observe. But it's always those other people doing it.
I'm riddled with that shit. Which is what I noticed when I sat down to write this.
It was actually going to be a story about how some areas of scholarship are rubbish because they've gone woke.
I'd peremtorily decided that a research paper about the mental health impact on certain people of Trump's 2016 win was riddled with faults and smacked of virtue-signalling nonsense. Then I set out to show my readers exactly what was wrong with it.
At this stage I had only read a story about the paper.
But then I read the paper itself and something else happened. I became frustrated because there wasn't really a problem with the paper.
I was even vaguely annoyed by the seemingly good faith of the scholarship.
What the hell am I going to write about now, I wondered. I'll have to find another bad paper on race.
Only then did I realise that this was the story I should tell.
Right there, in my own head, the motivated reasoning that I so disrespect in others.
Good spot, me (pats self on head). But how did it come to this?
It begins with Cardiff University Political Scientist Thomas Prosser and his Substack, called Tom's Curiosity Shop. TP is my favourite kind of public intellectual. Insightful, even-handed, sober, engaging and a bit of a lefty who isn't captured by doctrine. An independent thinker.
Something I was thinking of as 'intellectualised activism' in the social sciences had been bugging me. Published academic work that seemed intended to feed into liberal social justice discourse rather than dispassionately shed light on anything.
Then Thomas Prosser published this piece - Why the crisis of academic credibility may not have a solution - and my suspicions were confirmed. Seems there really is a problem with ideological affirmation and professional/cultural group signalling along with low quality work in general, in the social sciences.
Wehey. I respect and trust Thomas Prosser's views and he's just opened the door for me to rant about woke science, I decided.
Not ah, interesting, I'll have to see what pops up and maybe mention it myself sometime.
Instead I smelled blood and suddenly I was on a mission to dismantle the most recent paper I had seen because it used a wokeish word. Latinx.
From one wokeish word to the assumption that an entire research project must be fatally flawed.
Not that this prejudice arose at random. I've been primed for it by seeing a pattern in the social sciences.
The Psypost weekly roundup of papers in that field often features what looks to me like activist messaging disguised as academic research.
For example, the paper that attributes women having fewer orgasms than men to misogynistic 'gendered entitlement'.
Or papers that look suspiciously like they are published just to publish something. Like one about how people prefer prospective romantic partners to have reasonable personal hygiene and not be 'slimy'. Or one about high heels being generally perceived as feminine. Or that narcissists and psychopaths tend not to have happy, fulfilling relationships. Or that conservatives (always conservatives) feature a whole list of awful character defects.
So, when I saw this headline, I was self-primed to reject it.
I was straight into neo-conservative mode.
Latinx, I thought. Only virtue-signalling white people in universities, media, left wing non-profits or people who cravenly adopt whatever verbal tics the leftish demands to avoid being accused of being a terrible person ever say Latinx, I told myself. Which I think is pretty much true.
Then I thought symbolically disempowered’. This can only be a word salad ingredient.
Instantly I formed my own Big Theory. Maybe it wasn't Trump who was the cause of 'Latinx' people's elevated mental anguish. Maybe it was really the hysterical rhetoric of CNN and MSNBC that was hurting these people, because it was the English-speakers who suffered most. I'll bet the researchers never even considered that.
The thing is that steadily, in the background, I've been developing as strong an antipathy to wokeism as I previously had for Trump.
So that's where I was at.
Determined to pull it apart I read the paper.
I was flummoxed. There's nothing wrong with it. No matter how alert I was for signs of obvious nonsense, I found none. Sure, the word 'Latinx' is in there. But it's only a label. I don't use it and nor, it seems, do most Hispanic people. But there he was, my inner reactionary, fuming like the comments under Daily Mail articles.
The point here isn't that a research paper passes muster as a piece of scholarship. What matters is that I was prejudiced to expect otherwise.
But it gets worse. When I realised I couldn't find anything obviously wrong with the paper I felt vaguely ashamed. It was as if I had failed in some way.
It was as if I had a personal stake in this paper being rubbish. And when it wasn't, that problem was somehow personal.
Being wrong feels vaguely undignified.
Totally captured by motivated reasoning the next impulse was to give up with that particular paper, move on and find another to support my initial prejudices.
It's like the urge to search someone's otherwise innocent tweet history for that terrible one which will justify dragging not just them but everyone with whom they're affiliated.
Being hard on myself here is intentional.
Rarely Certain is about how being morally and intellectually rigid is stupid and not great for your mental health.
But there I was, being as rigid as it gets and feeling kind of frustrated and annoyed, rather than curious and calm. And wanting to pass on that frustration and anger to my readers.
It's been a handy lesson. Noticing how these patterns emerge is helpful and - unless you get off on being right about everything - it actually feels good to settle back into a more humble zone.
The law says you have to have an opinion on Elon Musk, so here's mine
Brilliant, visionary and flawed. That's basically it.
It's amusing that he's announced his intention to become a Republican because the libs were mean to him. This looks a lot like a deep personal need to belong to some group or other. But it's no surprise. A lot of the stuff that is written about him is flat out defamatory as well as just untrue. When the NYT published a dog whistle race-baiting profile about his South African roots, then stealthily edited in some mitigating and highly salient facts later, that exemplified his unreasonable treatment by corporate media.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect here is the human trait of having personal values and then aligning with other people and their different values because those people are nicer to you.
I nearly made Musk's mistake when I realised how censorious and bloated with moral righteousness my Twitter bubble had become. These were not my kind of people, as it was turning out. Did this mean I might be becoming a conservative I pondered. Turns out that I wasn't. But here's the crux. When your ideological group becomes intensely annoying it really does make you question not just their behaviour but their values too. Ridiculous, I know. But probably quite normal.
So I get it and regret it, on Musk's behalf. But it seems pretty stupid to hold liberal values - as Musk certainly seemed to until quite recently - in common with people who are vile to you and then decide that those values aren't valid after all. It's a category error.
But also, slow handclap for the faux leftish bien pensant media clique too. They've managed to alienate the best known figure who is addressing potential solutions to climate problems. Here's hoping that Musk doesn't decide to go all in on fossil fuels now, just to own the libs. It would not surprise me.
Something for the weekend
When I'm not being an incredibly good person, filled with love and understanding for my enemies and generally putting the Buddhists to shame with my exalted level of mindfulness, I like to tinker around making bits of music. Here's a tune I made lately.
If you listen far enough in to wonder who the talking woman is, she's a music teacher being interviewed sometime in the 1950s. I just loved her voice and how aware she is of the affective power of music.
We had an electrical storm on the Cotentin last week. It was like being at a concert with incessant strobe lights for about 30 minutes. This is a still from numerous videos I felt compelled to shoot.
Here’s Thomas Prosser’s Substack. He’s published another piece on likely biases in studies about the impact of immigration on welfare states. I think he’s brave and recommend that you support him by signing up to Tom’s Curiosity Shop.
