The marketplace of rationalizations | Hacker News Reader

The marketplace of rationalizations

cambridge.org

46 pointsPhithagoras17 comments

Happy ideas for sale. Mediums and palm readers have always known what western politicians only recently grasped - that people don't care about truth, they care about feeling good about what they believe.

"Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail, blue skies from pain" [1]

Did you exchange cold comfort for change? You can believe anything you like for a price.

Williams proffers that bullshit, and believing crazy things is a mutual stroking behaviour of a mass huddled together in the comfort of collective ignorance, and that within that group there are rewards for dreaming up the most soothing stories. He extends this beyond Harry Frankfurt's position to say that an entire "economy of bullshit" exists. and that its trade could be "an economic good".

This is why in Plato, Shakespeare, Cicero and so many luminaries, it is always the _mad_ (the fool) who deliver the truth. Only despised outsiders who have no skin in the collective self-delusion game are able to break the norms and deliver the unwelcome message. Further, (Foucault, Cassandra etc) there's a market in silencing truth speakers who rock the boat of profitable rationalisation.

[1] Pink Floyd [2] On Bullshit: Harry Frankfurt

> that people don't care about truth

I care, it allows me to build on ideas. One of the cooler truths I've seen is the law of large numbers (and similar ideas, like positive and negative expected value) and how it has shaped my life in taking chances. That idea alone improved my quality of life by a lot.

Ideas that are true are like building blocks that can lead to a better life (or at least do damage control on the current one). And that makes me feel good and reinforces my belief system.

> they care about feeling good about what they believe.

Oh wait...

:-)

Regardless of how you feel about the objective truth, it exists. Naturally, it follows that people who engage with what exists ought to have better outcomes than those who engage in fantasy. Admittedly, when the majority of people engage in fantasy and even the mere mention of truth is seen as an existential threat, it takes on the opposite dimension. In particular, as mentioned above, the truth-tellers are reviled, feared, mocked, and made to suffer. It should be obvious that a value system that prioritizes fantasy over truth is unsustainable. As more people shift from truth to fantasy, whatever functional or pragmatic underpinnings civilization has erode until nothing fundamentally true remains. Civilization is subordinate to the truth and without it there is no civilization.

“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” ― T.S. Eliot

"To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil." - Nietzsche, the mad fool of the West.

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.

>>Mediums and palm readers have always known what western politicians only recently grasped - that people don't care about truth, they care about feeling good about what they believe.

Maybe in the west-- Indian astrologers delight in horror stories-- certain death and or complete financial ruin, unless you can pay for expensive prayers and/or jewels.

Although it does help strengthen peoples belief, as they can blame their misery on that evil Saturn, rather than the corrupt system or their own poor choices.

I've also seen-- people stuck in extreme situations, doing anything, even if they know it is stupid, helps them a little , as it gives a feeling on control in an otherwise helpless situation

That's still an example of a feel-good story being sold: your family didn't die in a car crash because of bad luck, it was because you didn't pay the astrologer/priest/whatever to appease the gods. For many people, the idea of that they can't control what happens at all is way worse than the idea that something is in control of the universe but they simply have not yet found the way to influence that something.

Coincidentally, this blog post[0] on Chomsky's propaganda model is related.

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/03/chomskys-propaganda...

Huh, very interesting. Quote from the twitter thread linked in a sibling comment:

> When preferences for beliefs are widespread, this constraint gives rise to rationalization markets in which agents compete to produce justifications of widely desired beliefs in exchange for money and social rewards such as attention and status.

As an example: when people would really like to believe in an afterlife due to fear of death but cannot find evidence for such an afterlife themselves, people and organisations will pop up to cater to this belief in various ways and the most "believable" offer will win out in the long term. This seems obviously true, though I had never considered it in these terms before. I wonder what the other obvious occurrences are (climate change beliefs and Ukrainian war propaganda seem like obvious examples) and/or if there are any direct applications of this principle other than becoming a better propagandist.

I think it's not so much the absence of evidence but the desire for more evidence that creates a vulnerability to false rationalizations.

We have lots of evidence about what's going on in Ukraine, or the reality of climate change, but for various reasons people feel a deep hunger for more information on these issues. That hunger drives a the demand side of the market which in turn motivates a supply.

Economically speaking, it's the marginal utility of a new justification for a belief that's important. In competitive idea driven landscapes like politics, VC, war, or crypto white papers there'll likely be an immense economic incentive for new justifications almost regardless of the existing supply.

Part of the challenge with finding direct applications is that this principle seems apply to both sides of the argument in most domains.

Atheists don't want there to be a god almost as much as theists want one to exist, same with climate change deniers/activists, or NoSQL/SQL advocates.

Rationalism took over in the mid-twentieth century and now it's the lingua franca of pretty much any activity that requires resource allocation. Any idea you may have, regardless of how mundane or obvious, must be expressed in analytical/economic terms. Have a qualitative aspect that can't be measured? It doesn't exist. Can't predict the future? Pretend like you do and give us some numbers. Arbitrarily create numbers and make them grow. Find studies, regardless how dubious, to support your claims. It's a trap everyone must abide by.

The fantasy is people analyzing data and making the right decision, the truth is people have their assumptions and then back into data to give their assumptions legitimacy. That's the bread and butter of the rationalization market: legitimacy.

Overview by the author: https://twitter.com/danwilliamsphil/status/15007689157979914...

Ok so this is social-psychology in an economic framework. That is what it is, and I think we should view such articles as rhetoric rather than science.

That said... there are some good, pertinent ideas here.

From author on twitter:

Second, an influential idea in social science is that the main thing that is wrong with political media is misinformation or fake news. This idea is wrong. The share of misinformation in most people's information diet is minimal.(11/16)

Misinformation, and I think this is intuitive to observers of the current misinformation/censorship dynamic is not really about misinformation or any kind of information. It's much more about rhetoric, argumantal frames or "rationalisations," where the author places emphasis.

Information (true or false) itself is like an crappy commodity market. It's ubiquitous, evergreen , relatively vendor neutral, and too cheap to produce for profit.

Rhetoric otoh, has a fine market. It has a literal economic market and a social/informal market.

The information FWIW is often true. The FWIW is often low worth, and the inferences drawn worthless. Two outlier scientists self publish a radical theory does not make the sentence "scientists prove x" high value.

Is this actually saying anything new, except for putting it in the language of economics and markets?

How does this differ from say Hitler's "Big Lie" or advertising or propaganda generally or 1984's memory hole.

I'm not sure the weasel words around "fake news" are required. If someone is misinformed by their news source, are we really splitting hairs that it isn't misinformation if they just don't mention certain things because that's not a false fact?

Wasn't the whole point of Newspeak that you couldn't mention or discuss certain ideas?

I think that intent matters. Misinformation is dissemination of information that may be misleading but wasn't necessarily intended to be misleading. Perhaps the author themselves lacked the pertinent data (or really believed what they were saying). That is distinct from disinformation, which would be intentionally deceptive. Regarding material omissions, it would only be misinformation if the person disseminating the information did so unknowingly. And hypothetically it would only take one person to inform the author of the material omission and naturally further publications with the same material omission then count as disinformation.

I think the hair-splitting is due to the fact that majority of memes associated with one side or the other are not outright false, but are conditioning people to a particular pre-determined conclusion. In other words, if you're interested in battling mis/dis-information, you have to recognize the over-arching agenda and attack that, not rebut/censor every meme and thought internet randos and robots see fit to post.

It feels avit like the 'carbon footprint' thing. These arent propagandists telling lies to male moneu from human suffering, no theyrr just meeting a market demand for lies about clinate change.

But then you have to ask, why did conservative politicians and voters switch suddenly to not believing it after initially accepting it as a fact.

Tge obvious answer is that the fossil fuel interests paid then to lie. And so this 'market demand' was crested intentiobally by bad actors.

Russia is currently acting as a live demonstration of right-wing thought gone wrong, so if we apply this lens to that situation then apparently all the people on state media lying about stuff are just responding to a market demand from Russian people to justify their nation being the good guy. But wouldn't it be cheaper to fill that need by actually being the good guy?

So the propaganda is only needed when the populace want to believe one thing, but it's better for those in power to not do that, but deliver BS instead

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