TCS Daily: Two Strategies for Avoiding Truth Every so often, I find an article that crystallizes and articulates things I have learned. This is one of them!
I am going to suggest that democratic politics is a very poor information-processing mechanism. The great mass of people form their political beliefs with little regard for facts or logic. However, the elites also have a strategy for avoiding truth. Elites form their political beliefs dogmatically, using their cleverness to organize facts to fit preconceived prejudices. 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.
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Converse suggested that the political beliefs of roughly 90 percent of the population are incoherent. 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. He suggested that there is a relative sharp fall-off in the coherence of opinions as one goes from the most highly-involved segment of the voting public. Hence, although it is likely that citizens' level of information falls along a continuum, it is a reasonable approximation to speak in terms of elite and mass.
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Ilya Somin, in his contribution to the Critical Review volume, points out that there is no particular reason for citizens to make a large investment in learning facts or forming coherent beliefs about political issues. The low probability that your vote will make a difference makes for an adverse cost-benefit calculation from obtaining information.
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These are two arguments that are commonly made to suggest that in spite of the individual ignorance of the typical voter, the overall decisions of the political process are sound. The political process gives us the wisdom of crowds, as it were.
The argument for macro wisdom is that ignorant individuals either take their cues from informed elites or vote randomly. In either case, the elites become the decisive actors, and the ignorance of the masses has little impact.
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Krugman uses what I call a high-investment strategy for avoiding truth. He puts considerable effort into emphasizing facts and arguments that support his overall position, while ignoring conflicting evidence. However, in this regard, he is far from atypical as an opinion leader.
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Limbaugh and Krugman may not necessarily be wrong (although it is hard for both of them to be right). However, both follow strategies that are designed to reinforce prior beliefs of conservatives and liberals, respectively. They highlight information and arguments that support their prior beliefs. When they encounter contrary evidence, they engage in "motivated skepticism," seeking to undermine the credibility or minimize the significance of the adverse information.
In fact, one could argue that Limbaugh and Krugman do not have wisdom that exceeds that of the ignorant public. However, while the typical individual's rationalizations of his or her beliefs are illogical and ill-informed, Limbaugh's and Krugman's rationalizations are clever and erudite.
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Those who believe in the wisdom of the political process might argue that the competition between political elites–between Democrats and Republicans or between Krugman and Limbaugh–promotes reasonable outcomes. However, I suspect that the net result of this competition is to lead to greater accretion of government power, giving the elites more to fight over. Politics ultimately becomes a competition to promise the undeliverable, whether it be better public education, inexpensive health care, or government suppression of drug abuse or sexual immorality.
Another wrinkle in this analysis, I would add, is the role of the centrist or moderate. Claims of centrism among the electorate (whether in government or within large institutions like the PCUSA) are also often a strategy to avoid the truth. The driving motivation is to appear non-controversial and non-ideological so as to evidence a spirit of “open-mindedness.” It very often elevates style above substance and reason.
Then there is the centrist or moderate among the elite who does know the ends and outs of substantive issues and has positioned themselves in such a way for one of two reasons. First, it is a strategy to keep power by capturing a voting block that they sense is put off by other elites. Second, it is the mindset of people with immense attachment and loyalty to an institution over and above substantive political issues.
Anyway, I think this article ties several pieces together very well.
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