[HN Gopher] Elite Biases Make Policy Biases
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Elite Biases Make Policy Biases
Author : sfg
Score : 126 points
Date : 2021-09-19 14:47 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.overcomingbias.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.overcomingbias.com)
| geofft wrote:
| Causation seems wholly unattested, and I would guess that the
| attributed causation is backwards. People who are
| skilled/talented/privileged/whatever enough to meaningfully
| influence policy and the world around them will start by using
| that influence to get themselves to a $210K+ household income,
| because that's the individually-rational thing to do. As the
| article notes, there are a bunch of professions where this is
| median for a single earner and a whole lot of professions where
| this is median for a dual-income household.
|
| The argument about policy influence implies that everyone is in
| theory equally capable of influencing policy. (Note this is
| orthogonal to whether everyone _should be_ equally capable of
| influencing policy.) But you wouldn 't argue that everyone is
| equally capable of earning high salaries (again, orthogonal to
| whether everyone _should be_ ) - you can empirically see that 10%
| of households make over $210K and 90% make under that, for
| whatever reasons. Why wouldn't we expect those reasons to also
| apply to people's empirical capability to influence policy?
| paulpauper wrote:
| >What this says is that, even in a democracy, the ~90th
| percentile rich have the most influence, business interest groups
| have about half as much, and mass interest groups have about a
| third as much. We less rich folks only get what we want, to the
| extent we do, because these elites mostly agree with us, and
| because we sometimes influence mass interest groups.
|
| >Thus elites support harsh, intrusive, and punitive business
| taxes, regulations, and legal liability. Yes when the super-rich
| are taxed, these elites are also taxed, but that may seem worth
| the price to take them down a peg or two. Most ordinary people
| miss this conflict by not distinguishing these two different
| kinds of "rich".
|
| Arne't the super-rich a subset of the elite?
| bonoboTP wrote:
| American libertarians like Hanson want to be pro-private
| business/capitalism and anti-elite at the same time. Hence the
| distinction between the credentialed, academic, govt institute
| and bureaucracy based elites ("bad") and the business owner
| class ("good"). I doubt how much these are actually distinct.
| Rich business owner types still send their kids to be
| credentialed and some will go into more bureaucratic roles than
| others and if you get rich based on govt roles and political
| lobbying etc, you will invest.
| gremloni wrote:
| There is absolutely no reason you can't be a capitalist and
| against elitism at the same time. If the superrich paid their
| fair share I don't think there would be as much animosity
| towards that group.
| dnautics wrote:
| your connection in one direction is "send their kids to be
| credentialed"? That's pretty weak, and I think you might not
| really have a case for an equivalence relation.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| vmception wrote:
| > We less rich folks only get what we want, to the extent we do,
| because these elites mostly agree with us, and because we
| sometimes influence mass interest groups.
|
| The Cambridge Princeton study found the same thing. When "less
| rich folks" get what they want, it was only because of
| coincidence with something elites were already pursuing, with
| sometimes there being mass influence of what the elites were
| doing, but _never_ really influence of the agencies heads or
| representatives.
|
| And so there is neither direct democracy (which, duh, but people
| act like there is at the federal level), nor is there
| representative democracy unless you elevate an amorphous group of
| "elites" as the idea of representatives.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Go hang out at some fundraiser dinners and other places
| politicians, specifically the kind of things that federal
| congresscritters, state representatives and governors speak at.
| Bring a camera and write a blog post about it and they'll often
| let you in as a journalist for free, and might even feed you.
|
| We _do_ have a representative democracy, and a shockingly
| effective one. It represents the people who can drop $50k +
| annually on political donations. My time in that world is some
| time in the past so I 'm probably badly underestimating the
| amount.
|
| Not that these elected representatives don't consider the
| actual constituents and citizenry, but they _listen_ to their
| donor list. With all the goodwill and the best people having
| the best intentions, the system would still have flaws; and
| these people are just people like the rest of us.
| vmception wrote:
| > We do have a representative democracy, and a shockingly
| effective one. It represents the people who can drop $50k +
| annually on political donations. My time in that world is
| some time in the past so I'm probably badly underestimating
| the amount.
|
| Ha! Yes this is true.
|
| I don't find this controversial, I find it sad that poorer
| people were lied to about their ability to participate or
| what the vote means or its weight.
| erikerikson wrote:
| Maybe I missed something written here but very few of the elites
| I've known meet the description of them offered here. This does
| tend to describe what I have observed of the U.S. elite left. I
| would be very surprised to learn that Bezos or Gates were
| socialists, for example.
| carabiner wrote:
| Normal eyes normalize normal lies.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Tallying the wedge issues is terrible methodology that focuses on
| battles and misses the war. Would you rather win at 100 wedge
| issues or would you rather win at 0 wedge issues but the policies
| you wanted were already in place and not under attack?
|
| To avoid this mistake, focus on the status quo of policies that
| facilitate comparison. Taxes are an excellent candidate. Everyone
| would rather have someone else pay the taxes. True power will
| arrange for it to be so. Look for tax privilege (types of income,
| industries, etc) and you will find true power.
| ramblenode wrote:
| > Tallying the wedge issues is terrible methodology
|
| I'm unclear why you think these are wedge issues. I've copied
| what I think is the relevant paragraph describing the sample:
| These 1,779 cases do not constitute a sample from the universe
| of all possible political alternatives (this is hardly
| conceivable), but we see them as particularly relevant to
| assessing the public's influence on policy. The included
| policies are not restricted to the narrow Washington "policy
| agenda." At the same time--since they were seen as worth asking
| poll questions about--they tend to concern matters of
| relatively high salience, about which it is plausible that
| average citizens may have real opinions and may exert some
| political influence.
|
| The authors describe the issues as "high salience" because they
| were deemed worthy of being in opinion polls, and presumably
| because they were part of the national discourse. To the extent
| these are wedge issues, what poll question isn't a wedge issue?
| Polls concern possible changes to society, and that will always
| have opposing sides.
| fwip wrote:
| > Polls concern possible changes to society
|
| The concept of the Overton Window is instructive here.
| Policies like "should local property taxes go up by .5
| percentage points to fund school safety" are safely within
| the range of allowable discussions. These are issues on which
| the "elites" disagree, or don't have particular attachment
| to.
|
| But questions that threaten their status, like "Is it good
| that individuals own the means of production?" are not going
| to be in the Overton Window any time soon, mainly because
| those elites agree that they like the status quo.
| jrexilius wrote:
| By that logic the poor in the US have the most power? As they
| pay generally close to zero direct taxes (indirectly they pay
| the corporate taxes and gas taxes and such as hidden costs in
| their daily consumption)...
| techbio wrote:
| Perhaps? If not individually then collectively, whether as
| motivation toward a cheaper food supply, or as a caution to
| those who are not poor but only a couple of defiant decisions
| from losing what they've gained. It seems counterintuitive,
| but GPs rule of thumb may hold even there. I think the
| problem is in comparing a few wealthy individuals or cabals
| (in control) to an enormous number of real people (each
| without much control at all). Poverty is negative power under
| the same hierarchy responsible for controlling positive
| power.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The poor would be paying more taxes if their income had
| tracked productivity gains and GDP growth. Instead it
| substantially went to the 0.5%.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| We are looking for policy concessions. Not taking money from
| someone who doesn't have money to take isn't much of a policy
| concession.
|
| Also, as you point out, there are tons of indirect taxes on
| the poor, but other aspects of the policy status quo really
| drive it home -- poor social safety net, bad public
| transport, "public" schools funded with property tax,
| policies that make rent go up, shipping the jobs overseas,
| etc, etc. We even allow homeless spikes!
|
| My general point isn't so much that taxes are an ideal
| metric, it's that we should focus on measuring the status quo
| rather than measuring who won yesterday's wedge issue
| battles.
| jejones3141 wrote:
| How is not giving something to someone equivalent to taking
| something from someone?
| techbio wrote:
| They are not equivalent at all, they are almost exactly
| opposite. Each would reverse the other.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| How is this distinction relevant to whether or not
| tallying wedge issues is sound methodology for
| identifying elites?
| pydry wrote:
| >By that logic the poor in the US have the most power?
|
| No:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom.
| ..
|
| >indirectly they pay the corporate taxes
|
| Corporation tax incidence falls squarely on shareholders.
| Profit taxes affect those who are the beneficiary of profits,
| and the vast majority of the stock market is owned by the
| very, very wealthy.
|
| It's not unusual for people to be spoon-fed the exact
| opposite impression, of course.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| The vast majority of the stock market is owned by the very,
| very wealthy because they're very, very wealthy. It's a
| tautology. People don't need to be spoon-fed, because if
| they have any kind of savings, its probably exposed to the
| stock market.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Costs of doing business get baked-in to the sale price.
| pydry wrote:
| ...except for all of the businesses that eat costs and
| post lower profits.
|
| Profits also aren't a cost. They're a residual claim.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Corporation tax isn't a cost of doing business, it's
| calculated after costs have been removed from revenue.
| techbio wrote:
| That seems to be a distinction without a difference, as
| they all are removed from net profits.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> Corporation tax isn't a cost of doing business, it's
| calculated after costs have been removed from revenue._
|
| I think the point being made is that prices have to be
| adjusted to allow revenue to cover taxes along with other
| costs.
|
| Heinlein had a scene in Beyond This Horizon (IIRC) where
| someone is explaining that profits are also an expense
| that have to be accounted for to the bewilderment of the
| other character who was insisting that profits are what's
| left over that you keep after expenses are deducted from
| revenue.
|
| It's more complicated than that of course. For one thing
| supply and demand are usually elastic to some degree,
| substitutions can sometimes be made, concentrations of
| supply and/or demand can provide efficiencies of scale
| (which then results in rent-seeking) and technology is
| always throwing monkey wrenches into the gears to shake
| things up ala Christensen.
|
| Anyway, that taxes are an expense for the individual
| economic entity such as a company isn't really debatable
| unless you want to make some sort of existential argument
| for arguments sake.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >I think the point being made is that prices have to be
| adjusted to allow revenue to cover taxes along with other
| costs.
|
| Profits always cover corporation tax because corporation
| tax is a fraction of profit (of course it's more
| complicated than that in reality). But the essential
| point is if corporation tax is lower then there is more
| money to distribute to shareholders, if the tax is higher
| then there is less.
| jrexilius wrote:
| Because businesses forget every year what taxes are and
| don't factor them into the needed margins for a product?
| jrexilius wrote:
| You are conflating corporate income tax on profits with all
| of the other taxes businesses pay. Those get passed through
| as cost of doing business and ultimately into the cost of
| goods sold. Regarding profit, you are also missing the
| point of profit objectives, which get tacked onto the cost
| of goods sold, because taxes aren't a surprise to
| businesses..
| neltnerb wrote:
| Sales tax is highly regressive (in the technical sense) and
| makes up a larger fraction of the income of a poor person.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It's not that easy, because not all groups are affected equally
| by all policies. With taxes, for instance, the analysis would
| suggest that nonprofits are the most powerful group in the
| country - businesses can occasionally bring their income tax
| down to $0 with tricky accounting, but nonprofits are exempt as
| a matter of right! I don't think that's a reasonable
| conclusion, and I'm pretty sure it's not the one you had in
| mind.
| techbio wrote:
| Let's disentangle the players in this in the following way.
| Because it would be absurd to believe charities are the most
| powerful entities, and "tricky accounting" etc reduces tax
| liabilities to the actual powerful, is there a way to
| discharge the conflict? Yes, there is. The charities are
| created by and funded by the actually powerful. I read
| somewhere that Sierra Club (and Greenpeace?) received
| millions more from the energy industry than in personal
| checks from concerned citizens, and among other things, one
| might consider tax policy a firmer decision making footing
| than organizational altruism.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Of course it's not that easy -- just because taxes are
| relatively easy to compare does not mean that they are easy
| to compare. Good comparisons are always difficult.
|
| Re: nonprofits, I don't think those are the best
| counterexample to the "look at taxes" strategy because they
| are absolutely notorious for playing a part in the tax
| avoidance schemes of the wealthy. That doesn't mean there
| aren't nonprofits that write open source software, shelter
| animals, feed starving kids in impoverished reasons... but
| there are also nonprofits that serve primarily as a mechanism
| for getting money from point A to point B with the lowest
| taxes. The two are difficult to tease apart, and
| unfortunately that is the entire point.
| [deleted]
| epgui wrote:
| I really dislike the conflation of the many different meanings of
| "elite". It's such an emotionally overloaded word. If you define
| elite status as a top X percentile of income or wealth, then just
| use the words "rich people", "wealthy people", or even better,
| "high income people". Using these more specific words get to the
| core of the matter.
|
| The "anti-elite" sentiment, when it becomes overloaded with
| education status or domain expertise, really pushes my buttons
| for getting causality wrong in the world's problems.
|
| I digress here, but in other words: yes, it's a problem that rich
| folks have more opportunities to become educated and to become
| experts in their fields, and that regular folks don't have the
| same opportunities to do so. But the world's injustices and
| problems are not caused by "elites" in the sense of "people who
| have expertise and authority in their fields".
|
| As an analogy, you can blame (in part) society and government for
| your lack of maths skills, but you can't blame "mathematics" (the
| pure science) or even "mathematicians" for your problems.
| Pointing the finger in the right direction is super important if
| you care about accountability and justice.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| There was an earlier comment on a different discussion where
| someone referred to "elites" as basically anyone who worked for
| the government or had a bachelors degree.
|
| It is a lazy way to get people to agree with your argument when
| they wouldn't if you were forced to define who you precisely
| mean.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Exactly. So much politics is done by swearword association;
| "elite", "marxist", "fascist", "corporate", etc. Just stick
| the label on some non-specified group of bad people.
| epgui wrote:
| Indeed, and it's also terribly counter-productive in that it
| borders on anti-intellectualism.
|
| If you care about regular folks having a good life and having
| good opportunities, if you want the American dream (work hard
| and get rewarded) to be true, then a big part of that
| requires "vertical mobility", and that means that you should
| want regular people to be able to achieve "elite status".
|
| It's not the existence of elites that is the problem, it's
| how fairly opportunities are distributed and how fairly
| people are rewarded. Stated in another way, the problem is
| not the elite, the problem is how the elite is made.
| fallingknife wrote:
| But a lot of the world's problems are caused by those "domain
| expert" type of elites, because, in many countries, including
| the US, they run the government. Anthony Fauci, for example is
| probably not particularly wealthy, but has had more power over
| citizens in the US over the last year than any billionaire. Not
| that some man on the street could do a better job, but you have
| to expect that people are going to be pissed at the people
| making the decisions when things go wrong.
| epgui wrote:
| Are you suggesting that Dr Fauci does not deserve to have his
| position, or that somehow the accountability mechanisms that
| govern his office are unjust?
|
| I would submit that Dr Fauci typically holds very little
| power, and that he has had an unusual amount of influence
| lately because there's a pandemic.
| [deleted]
| KarlKemp wrote:
| > Their highest hopes tend to be of gaining positions in, getting
| promoted in, or creating, such organizations. When they have
| dreams for the world, they dream of new versions with higher
| mandates and bigger budgets. (Think socialism.)
|
| What? CEOs (example from the paragraph before, along with
| doctors, judges lawyers etc) want _socialism_?
| h2odragon wrote:
| This fits in with many of the grand old conspiracy theories. What
| the conspiracy theorists miss is there doesn't need to be a
| unified agenda behind this process, simple banal human tribalism
| suffices.
|
| Mr Hanson's "elites" here are just as simple, emotional, and
| irrational critters as any of the rest of us, and their
| kindergarten politics are no more (or less) noble than our "who
| stole my lunch?" bullshit. By being big fish in a smaller pond
| the waves of silliness they slop go further, that's all.
| natemp wrote:
| This essay makes exactly the same points as "Yes Minister",
| except in non-comedic form.
|
| "Yes Minister" is widely regarded as a politician's manual and
| not as a conspiracy theory.
|
| But perhaps if the elite BBC makes a series that is
| surprisingly accurate, it is the truth. If an internet
| commentator makes the same points, it is a conspiracy theory.
|
| Which proves the first paragraph of this very essay.
| vmception wrote:
| From my experience, many conspiracies are manuals.
|
| Like, whether they happened or not, they're good ideas.
| "Good" in that they can be executed successfully. Obviously
| this depends no which conspiracy comes to mind when you hear
| "conspiracy theory", but many can be inspirational.
| hammock wrote:
| >From my experience, most conspiracies are manuals.
|
| Figuratively true, and sometimes literally. Take the
| Operation Northwoods manual for instance:
|
| http://www.smeggys.co.uk/operation_northwoods.php?image=01#
| t...
|
| _> Operation Northwoods was a 1962 plan by the U.S.
| Department of Defense to stage acts of simulated or real
| terrorism on US soil and against U.S. interests and then
| put the blame of these acts on Cuba in order to generate
| U.S. public support for military action against the Cuban
| government of Fidel Castro.
|
| As part of the U.S. government's Operation Mongoose anti-
| Castro initiative, the plan, which was not implemented,
| called for various false flag actions, including simulated
| or real state-sponsored acts of terrorism on U.S. and Cuban
| soil.
|
| The plan was proposed by senior U.S. Department of Defense
| leaders, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
| Staff Lyman Louis Lemnitzer._
| pjc50 wrote:
| Yes Minister is _fiction_. The problem with conspiracy
| theories is that they read as fiction and fail to engage
| adequately with actual evidence. Things happen _like_ they do
| in Yes Minister (or more recently, The Thick Of It), but not
| in identical ways.
|
| On the other hand ..
|
| > What this says is that, even in a democracy, the ~90th
| percentile rich have the most influence, business interest
| groups have about half as much, and mass interest groups have
| about a third as much. We less rich folks only get what we
| want, to the extent we do, because these elites mostly agree
| with us, and because we sometimes influence mass interest
| groups.
|
| .. this is Marxism 101, the most basic set of observations
| about how classes work made over a century ago. I don't thing
| any sensible person would deny that there is such a thing as
| an elite, or that the elite have their agendas, but if you
| want to make specific claims about specific real people then
| you need evidence.
| WJW wrote:
| I don't think anyone in the UK sees "Yes Minister" as a
| manual. Its comedy derives from exposing things that
| everybody perceives to be true (politicians want to have
| morals but are forced to let them go during election season,
| civil servants know they're supposed to be supporting the
| current government but will also need to work with the other
| party when the political tides change again, etc) but saying
| so in public is "not done".
|
| It doesn't _need_ to be a manual because it is accurately
| describing human weakness in the face of a complex world, and
| the results are (as in the real world) often highly absurd.
| mbg721 wrote:
| It (or similar programs) might appear to be a manual if it
| generates a feedback loop: it starts as a comedic
| exaggeration of actual truths; people see it and become
| jaded and cynical, assuming the exaggerations literally to
| be happening; and this expectation enables politicians to
| get away with more corruption.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It is a tribe, but one that can destroy you with more expensive
| lawyers.
| akyu wrote:
| The simplest strategy for "simple, emotional, and irrational
| critters" to adopt is to conspire together. You are just
| proving the point.
| notahacker wrote:
| The detail of the paper, rather than the headline, actually
| undercuts most of the traditional conspiracy theories. The
| views of the 90th percentile "elite" are highly correlated with
| those of the median voter, and largely uncorrelated with
| business lobby groups.
|
| Paper is at: https://sci-hub.tf/10.1017/s1537592714001595
|
| Another quirk is that it appears even supermajorities often
| don't get their way (the graphs show that if 80-90% of the
| elite favour a policy, it is enacted a little under half the
| time. Which is better than the probability if 80-90% of the
| median voters favour it, but still means they usually don't get
| their way...)
|
| The headline finding is their model which essentially suggests
| that the median voter doesn't have much influence _except_
| where their views align with wealthier people and /or interest
| groups, but the thing is, they usually do align with one or
| other and none of the groups actually get their way that often!
|
| It'd also be interesting to see the findings disaggregated by
| administration and by policy area. It is not difficult to
| imagine that some of the most consistent disagreements between
| the median American and the elite American regards issues like
| upper tax brackets (which elites pay and median Americans
| don't). To what extent politicians are seeking the favour of
| 90th percentile Americans when they (sometimes) don't raise
| upper income tax brackets even when the average American
| supports it and to what extent they are simply pleasing
| themselves and following their preferred economic theory are
| open questions. Disaggregation would also help evaluate other
| theories, like _one_ of American 's political parties being
| aligned with the elite, or the reverse causation hypothesis
| where in a political environment where proposed change often
| fails, the 90th percentile American is [incidentally] happier
| with the status quo.
| Zababa wrote:
| > The detail of the paper, rather than the headline, actually
| undercuts most of the traditional conspiracy theories.
|
| > Another quirk is that it appears even supermajorities often
| don't get their way (the graphs show that if 80-90% of the
| elite favour a policy, it is enacted a little under half the
| time. Which is better than the probability if 80-90% of the
| median voters favour it, but still means they usually don't
| get their way...)
|
| I think those two things oppose each others.
| notahacker wrote:
| If political deadlock and politicians having priorities of
| their own means even supermajorities of what the study
| calls the _elite_ don 't get their way, I'm not sure it
| helps the conspiracy theory about the power of the elite.
| (I mean, it leaves open claims about specific billionaires
| and more bizarre theories about shapeshifting lizards,
| freemasons or pizza shops, but they were outside the scope
| of the study)
|
| The second point does lend support to the argument that
| politicians frequently fail to deliver what the public
| want, but that's less a conspiracy theory and more
| established fact :)
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think what's missed is that there doesn't have to be a
| conspiracy behind a unified agenda. People whose goals and
| interests converge can coordinate without actually colluding.
| karaterobot wrote:
| There wasn't anything in this article that made me think he was
| suggesting a conspiracy. In fact the word 'bias' (repeated
| twice in the title) sort of implies it's not a conscious
| process. The way I read it was that everybody acts in their own
| interests, without coordination, and trends emerge, with "elite
| status" being a label you apply to a set of completely
| unrelated people. No conspiracy, just bias.
|
| Looking at the author's CV, he's an economics professor, and
| that's a very Econ view of the world. So, I would not be
| surprised if he doesn't feel like he needs to explain that
| perspective on his blog.
| rrsmtz wrote:
| It's not conspiratorial to believe that humans create
| organizations with common goals and agendas - they exist
| everywhere, from unions to NGOs.
|
| Here's a short list of organizations (off the top of my head)
| who discuss and advocate for policies that benefit the
| extremely wealthy over others:
|
| * Davos
|
| * WTO
|
| * IMF
|
| * World Bank
| retrac wrote:
| > What the conspiracy theorists miss is there doesn't need to
| be a unified agenda behind this process
|
| There doesn't need to be a mind behind a process. Many things,
| including some of society's worst troubles and the confluences
| of malfeasance in politics, are simply emergent properties of
| large social systems. No intent necessary.
| chongli wrote:
| My personal theory (picked up by reading a variety of
| sources) is that people who believe in conspiracy theories
| have some natural propensity to see agency behind every
| random event. It may be some form of pareidolia [1] or
| Apophenia [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
| dnautics wrote:
| honestly, it's not the worst pattern match; because a lot
| of conspiracy theories actually were conspiracy theories.
| E.G. CIA testing LSD, Tuskeegee siphilis study, Polio
| Vaccines used as a spy operation to catch Osama Bin
| Laden...
| pjc50 wrote:
| Quite a lot of conspiracy theories are "exactly wrong";
| that is, they resemble something that happened or is
| happening, but the persons involved are wrong and the
| motives are wrong. Even weirder, the conspiracists _don
| 't_ cite the true events as support of their theories.
|
| "big pharma" => see Purdue
|
| "pizzagate" =>
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Nolan_(politician) "is
| an American registered sex offender and former state
| district court judge, a former leader in the Republican
| Party and a former chairman of Donald Trump's
| presidential campaign in Campbell County, Kentucky. On
| February 9, 2018, he pleaded guilty to 19 counts of child
| sex trafficking and human trafficking; on February 11,
| 2018 he was sentenced to serve 20 years in prison"
|
| and so on.
|
| > Tuskeegee siphilis study
|
| And a lot of conspiracy theories are "what if this thing
| the US did to black people it also did to white people"
| atatatat wrote:
| > pizzagate
|
| Both parties and beyond, everyone must stop the partisan
| squabbling.
|
| No, I don't care about the psyop you read on reddit.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I was using it as an example of a conspiracy theory.
|
| > Both parties and beyond, everyone must stop the
| partisan squabbling
|
| Prisoner's dilemma: the first person to stop being
| partisan loses. And demonstrably hyper-partisanship is
| working for at least one party.
| atatatat wrote:
| Non D or R here: I'm the prisoner.
|
| _I 'm_ losing.
|
| You all suck.
|
| Abolish First Past the Post.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Abolish First Past the Post
|
| I'm not even in the same prison, I'm a Brit, and I
| strongly agree with this. I actually get to vote in a
| non-FPTP election as well and, surprise surprise, it
| produces much better results.
| dnautics wrote:
| I mean, that's a pretty _interesting_ choice for
| pizzagate, you could easily have dropped it on Jeffery
| Epstein, to be charitable to the conspiracy theorists, is
| known to be associated with Bill Clinton.
|
| edit: removed joke about "epstein not killing himself"
| because it distracted from the main point by introducing
| a second conspiracy theory.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The story that Epstein killed himself and it just
| happened that nobody was watching and the camera was
| broken is completely implausible. Something is suspicious
| there.
|
| That doesn't prove any particular course of events _did_
| happen, though. In the meantime the next excitement will
| be Prince Andrew.
|
| The stated person was just the first hit for a republican
| actually convicted of child sex offences.
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| Epstein not killing himself was a great moment, a
| tremendous moment.
|
| For a brief, beautiful period of time, we were united.
| Far left, far right, normies and the fringes of
| cyberculture alike; united in thinking "so the cameras
| magically broke and the guards fell asleep... yea
| right!!!"
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think this is more an illustration and reminder that
| "conspiracy theory" was a term that was workshopped to
| dismiss criticism (about the JFK assassination
| investigations.) _None_ of those were conspiracy
| theories, and were trivially verifiable shortly after
| they happened. They were just aggressively dismissed and
| ignored by anybody who had the authority to punish
| someone responsible. This goes on until everyone
| responsible is dead, or legal clocks have run down.
| chongli wrote:
| Sometimes the rustle in the bushes actually is a tiger.
| But I think some people live in a world haunted by
| tigers. The internet has given these individuals an
| unprecedented ability to connect with others who see
| things in a similar way.
|
| People suffering from something like this may feel
| totally isolated from regular people around them and so
| meeting fellow sufferers online must be a great relief
| and comfort. Unfortunately, from their perspective, the
| affliction is external rather than internal.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| To many people, the malicious, or at least "counter to
| their interests but with forced participation" action
| they have to deal with every day might as well be a world
| haunted by tigers. I have Adtech clients, and the lengths
| that are gone to to track conversions are astounding -
| Sometimes when I'm explaining the pipelines to _myself_ I
| 'm convinced I'm talking about a crazy conspiracy.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I saw a Facebook post recently that I really liked:
|
| "Nobody who believes in conspiracy theories has ever been a
| project manager."
|
| If you've experienced how difficult it can be to cat-herd
| 10-20 people on some web migration project, you know how
| impossible it would be to have a huge group of people
| engaged in some goal _that nearly everyone would find
| objectionable_ , be effective, and somehow manage to keep
| it all a secret.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I enjoyed learning that everyone is skeptical... about
| different things.
|
| It helped add a lot of clarity and understanding for
| different viewpoints, because you can begin an information
| exchange by first trying to parse what someone is skeptical
| about.
|
| One person's skepticism is another person's conspiracy
| theory.
| techbio wrote:
| This is an incredibly important point that I agree with. I
| would take this further to separate "legal person" from
| "mind", as I understand the mind is itself an emergent and
| self-supporting adaptive process[1], very common to find
| among any persistent complex systems. Politicians don't make
| politics, it's the other way around.
|
| [1] I use this phrase to replace "intent", because outside of
| requiring the "intender" to be person who can be held to
| account with punishment or reward, the reward mechanism is
| the same environmental pressure.
| h2odragon wrote:
| There's an interesting other side there too: corporations
| are our "slow AI", if we take a more realistic approach to
| their legal personhood perhaps we can all benefit.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Reminds of research of termite mounds. A researcher mused
| that maybe mounds are best understood as a composite animal
| that in some sense, itself has a soul. One particular
| scientist "imagined that eventually the mound would evolve
| into a being that could move across the veldt - very slowly
| in its dirt skin - a monster hybrid of soil and soul."[1]
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/18/a-giant-
| crawlin...
| teddyh wrote:
| This is a very old idea; see, for instance, the "Aunt
| Hillary" character from _Godel, Escher, Bach_ (written in
| 1979).
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Essentially, elites come from among the people. People generate
| elites, who generate policy. Bias flows the same way. In any
| given nation, the people are very likely biased. Which
| generates biased elites. Who, in turn, generate biased policy.
|
| The problem is not biased elites. The problem is that humans
| are biased, and little can be done to remove their biases. Much
| less to ensure they don't manifest those biases in the results
| of their work.
| rrsmtz wrote:
| > elites come from among the people ... People generate
| elites
|
| That's just false! In every society, the elite class is
| overwhelmingly comprised of families who maintain their high
| social standing and wealth over decades or centuries. The
| lower classes are similarly static over the generations, and
| all classes have a class-specific bias.
|
| If you need proof, take a sampling of the 'Early Life'
| Wikipedia section of any elite you can think of. Even tech
| founders, who are more likely socially mobile than most other
| elites, have overwhelmingly had an upper-middle class
| upbringing at _least_.
| popcube wrote:
| elites become intellectuals, intellectuals have their solid
| bias. whenever someone was converted, they will get same
| bias. e.g., world should be changed to 'better way' by them.
| pjc50 wrote:
| At some point you have to acknowledge that not all "biases"
| are bad; a bias may just be a value you don't agree with.
|
| Being biased against the extermination of all human life is a
| bias, but I think we'd agree it's a good one.
| wussboy wrote:
| I agree with everything except your last sentence. Much CAN
| be done to ensure those biases do not manifest in the results
| of their work. More generally, this is the power of our
| institutions.
| DamnYuppie wrote:
| Which are formed by people with biases who are attracted to
| other people with biases. It is turtles all the way down.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Turtles would be so much simpler, tho. A tortoise will
| copulate with a boot for hours with no pretense about
| what he's doing or why. No justifications or excuses.
|
| Us hairless apes on the other hand, we'll act contrary to
| all our good sense in the firm belief that "the job
| requires it" or "the boss wants it this way" or worst yet
| "the rule book specifies it thus". We can knowingly
| compound our stupidity and decry the results. Then expect
| praise for following the rules.
|
| At least the tortoise gets the idea, at the bottom of the
| hole, "dig _up_ , stupid!"
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Institutions are error correction. We can form a less
| biased system out of constituent parts each of which is
| more biased than the whole.
| [deleted]
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| What a bunch of bullshit. I love that the title of this is
| "overcoming bias", but then the bias in this article is so
| blatantly transparent:
|
| > Their highest hopes tend to be of gaining positions in, getting
| promoted in, or creating, such organizations. When they have
| dreams for the world, they dream of new versions with higher
| mandates and bigger budgets. (Think socialism.)
|
| Must be nice to live in such a cartoon-view of the world.
|
| That said, I didn't have access to the full linked research
| article in the story but the actual scientific research,
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278151684_Testing_T...,
| sounds interesting.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mgh2 wrote:
| American elites have used the free will bias to justify
| everything from inequality, healthcare, and faith; for it is
| easier to blame than to help the unfortunate
|
| https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| If "helping the unfortunate" always worked, why is there still
| homelessness in the west coast?
|
| You can only help those who wish to help themselves. People who
| are in this category are willing to put in work and effort,
| regardless of success. People who are not just want a free
| handout and will quit if things don't go there way. Which
| ironically, is the social institution in much of the midwest,
| whom mostly have some of the lowest homeless populations in the
| US. Because they don't placate people contributing to the
| problem. They make people feel ashamed for contributing to it
| but empower them when they work towards getting out of it.
| geofft wrote:
| Doesn't this analysis miss the fact that homeless people
| migrate around the country to places with better policies? If
| you're going to die in the midwest because there are no
| social institutions to support you and you don't see a
| realistic way for work and effort to keep you alive, you may
| as well use your last couple of bucks to take a Greyhound out
| west to Skid Row and take your chances there.
|
| Or, more brutally, doesn't this analysis miss the fact that
| without a social safety net, homeless people die? If you can
| get nutritious meals at a soup kitchen on Skid Row and you
| have a safe place to keep a tent and some belongings, you're
| going to be alive and contributing to the homelessness
| numbers in LA. If you die in the midwest, you don't
| contribute to their homelessness numbers.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Homeless people move to CA because it has great weather and
| social services and so its great to be homeless there
| compared to other places. Homeless people are rational so
| that's where they go.
|
| The crucial fact, though, is that none of these great
| conditions in CA do anything to actually get people out of
| homelessness, they just subsidize homelessness and make it
| easier to be homeless. So naturally, homeless people being
| rational, the effect of these policies is to increase
| homelessness overall.
|
| There are people who are legit mentally ill and somehow as
| a society we've decided that the best we can do is have
| them live like dogs, scrounging around and shitting in the
| streets.
|
| There are other people who just really like heroin and
| would rather do heroin than anything else and california is
| the probably the best place in the world if that's what you
| want to do.
|
| A truly humane homeless policy would institutionalize
| mentally ill people, not subsidize drug addicts, and help
| people on the edge of homelessness find jobs and housing.
| xondono wrote:
| > free will bias As in the belief to having free will? I find
| it odd to describe that as a bias.
|
| > justify everything from inequality,
|
| No one justifies inequality, because the word by itself is
| meaningless. There's a spectrum from total equality of outcome
| to total equality of opportunity. People find themselves in
| different positions on that spectrum.
|
| > healthcare I'm guessing that by this you mean _socialized_
| medicine, because Americans have a level of healthcare that's
| way above most nations, including european ones.
|
| While there can be a healthy debate about what option makes a
| better medical system, it's pretty obvious that the recent
| attempts have been disastrous, with the government trying to
| solve problems that the government created long ago, only to
| create more problems for the future.
|
| >faith Call me crazy, but I thought that in liberal democracies
| we did not mind police people, so why would they need to
| justify faith?
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Very thought-provoking article. I think the narrative has a
| truthful core but it exaggerates reality, almost to a caricature.
|
| Anyway, a related thought, I've been increasingly noticing one
| phenomenon:
|
| A surprisingly large fraction of human behavior and thinking is
| driven by an often subconscious desire to maintain or advance
| social status and respect, this is true for both individual and
| group identities. I think it's one of the most underrated hidden
| forces behind political preferences. Some examples:
|
| - Obama becoming the president has increased the relative social
| status of black people. Some whites used to have or still have a
| subconscious perception that whites are at the top of the
| hierarchy and Obama was a threat to their position in the ladder,
| that's why they hated him.
|
| - China's growth has lead to a relative decrease in the
| international status of the US. Which is why Trump's anti-China
| rhetoric resonated so well.
|
| - When someone is rude or dismissive to you, they're subtly
| saying that you're not important for them and they don't respect
| you, which is the cause for the anger.
| rrsmtz wrote:
| This is a classic Marxist talking point (cultural hegemony):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony
| mojaaa wrote:
| No policy is the best policy when things get too complex. You
| dont even have to analyse it too deeply.
|
| But you know the chimp troupe will then start crying about how
| timid leaders are and brave leaders get propped up who dig the
| hole deeper.
| mrxd wrote:
| The original paper refers to specifically to economic elites, but
| this article quite strangely redefines this group as a
| credentialist/cultural elite that is motivated by status and
| influence within bureaucracies and favors socialism. This seems
| to be a description of the author's personal experiences within
| his university, but it ends up being a significant
| misrepresentation of the actual paper, which refers to an
| economic elite, where support for socialism is lowest.
|
| It's quite strange to see a paper about economic power exerting
| control over government policy being summarized as "elites
| support harsh, intrusive, and punitive business taxes,
| regulations, and legal liability."
| xondono wrote:
| > where support for socialism is lowest.
|
| Citation needed. The paper does indeed limit the meaning, but
| also concedes that this interpretation of what they are
| measuring is possible.
|
| > Not all "elite theories" share this focus. Some emphasize
| social status or institutional position
|
| > What we cannot do with these data is distinguish definitively
| among different versions of elite theories.
| mrxd wrote:
| > Citation needed.
|
| https://www.cato.org/blog/poll-59-americans-have-
| favorable-v...
| [deleted]
| phreeza wrote:
| In Germany in the 60s there was the concept of the "long march
| through the institutions", implying that the rebels of then would
| become the elites of tomorrow, with the purpose of then putting
| into practice the revolutionary policies. It worked to a certain
| degree, many formerly left-wing policies have now become
| mainstream, but of course a lot of compromises had to be made and
| the ideals got watered down.
| fallingknife wrote:
| The policies may have changed, but the people are the same.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| The more specific criticism in Germany in the 60s was that
| may of the then-current elites had also been in positions of
| power two decades before, as (literal) Nazis.
| WJW wrote:
| Many people alive in the 60s will have died by now, and the
| rest will have had 50-60 extra years of life experience.
| They're hardly the same, except in a very strict "person with
| the same name as then" sense.
| gremloni wrote:
| Ideals getting watered down is a sign of healthy compromise
| while still moving in the right direction.
| VictorPath wrote:
| I read an English language article which I wish I could find. A
| girl was traveling after the DDR collapsed between east and
| west Berlin, or Nuremberg and Chemnitz or the like. She said on
| the old western side there were Turks all over, and red light
| districts and that sort of thing, whereas in the east it was
| still in many ways like the Germany in 1949. That in a number
| of ways, west Germany was more left wing than east Germany.
| brnt wrote:
| It would be interesting to know with whom is being compromised
| and in what direction the watering down happens. Now that is
| the force we fail to illuminate but I believe has tremendous
| power in our society.
| xondono wrote:
| I'm guessing that force is reality.
| gremloni wrote:
| "Reality" the way it is used can be broadly subjective.
| Unless we're referring to physical laws, almost everything
| is an abstraction that can be changed with the right
| societal impetus.
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