Persuasion and the Prestige Paradox (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Persuasion and the Prestige Paradox (2021)

quillette.com

94 pointsrzk65 comments

"In short, people have a mechanism in their minds. It stops them from saying something that could lower their status, even if it’s true. And it propels them to say something that could increase their status, even if it’s false."

This was on full display re covid over the last two years.

Indeed.

This is why Twitter is so vicious.

I've seen this play out over and over in the corporate world--and, yes, the "educated" white-collar people are the worst; 90% of them are sheep. It's why these companies can continue to assert their own meritocracy. No one wants to become that bitter guy who complains about the promotion he didn't get and how unfair the system is--even though he knows the company better than the true believers.

I don't often find myself agreeing with Quillette (it's a conservative publication, and I'm a leftist) but this article is spot-on in its veiled critique of the centrist-liberal ("neoliberal") elite. A small number of people have managed to dominate the culture and economy by convincing us that everything is complex and that we're just not smart enough to understand anything--and, while they're not entirely wrong on the matter of complexity, I've met so many of them I can say with confidence that none of them understand what's going on either (as Covid has proved).

> Dunking on social media tells our monkey brain that we are rising in prominence, even though by next week people will have forgotten and moved on to the next round of gossip. Advanced tech exploits the brains of ideologues, who then create a culture where others spend too much time pledging fealty to ideologies rather than developing new ideas and technology for the benefit of humankind.

The word "ideologue," is key because it's a thought terminating cliche we use as an epithet to describe the people we don't agree with, instead of what it precisely is - a pattern of thinking that iterates the logic of an underlying idea. It may not even be on a chosen belief, but just a symbol for something we picked up and used as a stub for a concept.

I just assume people persecute each other because they love it, and instead, I index on finding people who aren't as addicted to that kind of conflict, as there are enough people in the world that arguing with any one of them is an opportunity cost against living. Maybe this is the real impact of the internet - when your potential Dunbar number and opporutunity now seems infinite, we can replace any person we have a conflict with, with just another more agreeable and validating avatar on the screen.

That fast, swipe-left culture filter not only rewards intolerance, but even imposes opportunity costs on tolerance because tolerance consumes time that could be applied to swiping until you get validation, and exposes you to defending against the infinite persecution of whomever you are tolerating. I'd be concerned about what human quality is atrophying as a result of not exercising the experience the tech has automated and replaced. It's not empathy, it's something more real and consequential like courage, dignity, or compassion.

The article is important, but I don't think there is a back or an undo we can reason ourselves back to as a culture. It's just a matter of finding new minds to equip with freedom and set to building again.

Anecdotally, I've seen this play out at religious communities (though I'm not at all in doubt that this phenomenon is commonplace and prevalent everywhere). I've often noted to myself when core beliefs that were expressed/ leaked, revealed that rather than being rooted in the Bible for instance (interpretations of which are highly debated), many people's beliefs in said community were often about furthering and advancing the self (as in, for the glory and expansion of self, rather than the glory and advancement of God on God's terms according to certain interpretations of the Bible). And often, these beliefs, when called into question, were supported by famous people, celebrities, scholars that confirmed their biases, and also just groupthink.

I know religion, and in particular, Christianity, may not at all be in vogue in this neck of the woods. But I've been thinking from time to time how inconsistent people from certain religious Christian communities are in their core beliefs, and how much they rely on social status, consensus (including the consensus of those who vocally decry Christianity and demonstrate no interest in following or upholding its tenets), and the peripheral method of coming to conclusions about what is true and what is not.

Def appreciate the article and the concepts laid out in a clear way, that rings true for me in a very specific social slice (regardless of what others may think about said social slice).

Discussing Christian Culture (capital C) in the context of this is particularly apt, because it is supposed to be about walking and growing in Christ, yet it often ends up being about...other things. Certain parts of Christian Culture are just downright weird in their emphasis on hypermasculinity ("Jesus is a warrior who is coming back!"), wealth/success ("God's blessings!"), cultural influence ("we need to fight in the culture wars!"), etc. Or, the never-ending dialogue about what it means to be a Real Man (for your wife and children, of course!).

Note that all of those examples I mentioned are status symbols in the secular culture at large. IMO, we've failed at making an alternative, superior culture, despite having the exact model given. Instead, Christians just seem to soft-fork secular culture, change a few things, slap some Bible verses on it, ship it, and then act surprised when non-believers see right through it.

I think similar and related issues come up in most religious communities. But the specifics you name are pretty specific to american evangelical christianity and should probably be labeled as such.

They're doing a good job forging alliances and exporting these values into other branches of christianity too, but that process is just beginning and these specific elements aren't as foundational elsewhere. Yet, anyway.

Agree. We are lucky that there is a lot more to Christianity than the evangelical American take.

I think you can see faith as a fork like this. Because in a world without science and reason people just believed. Magical thinking was the best explanation going. It only became faith when you could effectively disprove it. And Christianity took that lack of proof and made it a defining part of the movement. It became virtuous. And over the years science shined a light into the darker corners of knowledge and left less space for religious explanation. Until finally we are left with the unknowable. Not very satisfying.

There are pervasive ideas preacher "experts" provide that is counter factual to their source- the Bible.

Ex: https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...

A lot of Christian popular ideas are unfortunately stemmed from "money worship"

The good thing about the reformation is that it democratized information - everyone can check and study the source

The bad thing is that everyone can interpret and create their own "truth" with lies and manipulation.

Unfortunately, there is no peer reviewed process as with the scientific method

I have to wonder: isn't this how democratizing information goes in general? In my lifetime I think we did it yet again with the Internet and especially social media. On the good side, people who care enough can check and study the source for just about anything; on the bad side, we see that most people don't care enough and are perfectly OK with consuming lies and manipulation. Then came people who were also perfectly OK with producing any kind of lie and manipulation to get what they wanted. And they largely did get what they wanted, up to and including presidential elections. We now have both: more educated, curious, and well-informed people than ever and more manipulative, toxic charlatans with huge followings than ever. It would be great if we could have the former without the latter, but would that be possible, even in theory? I'm not sure...

That is where ethics/morals come into play: knowledge is power, and power is responsibility.

Ie. It is their responsibility to not lie as it is yours to find the truth

For a while, placards stating something like "In this house, we believe in science" were showing up all over the area I live in. It's very odd because concepts like faith and belief are inherently religious, and don't have any place in scientific inquiry. A notion like 'these are the fundamental truths of our religion, and to be a member of this religion, you must accept them without question' has no place in the scientific world. Any claim can be questioned, if one has the observational or experimental results to support alternative explanations.

I've seen this most often in the strident atheist crowd, many of whom appear to be refugees from strict religious upbringings. They haven't actually adopted the open-minded experimentalist approach that science relies on, but have merely switched their allegiance from 'faith in religion' to 'faith in science'.

This was all spectacularly on display when 'junk DNA' concepts were replaced by the now well-supported notion that there is no junk DNA, instead it plays important structural roles in the genome. The atheist argument that junk DNA proved evolution was a random flawed process (hence no 'intelligent design') had become an article of faith in that crowd, and they reacted to the new data rather like fundamentalists react to heresy.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/feb/24/scientists-a...

> For a while, placards stating something like "In this house, we believe in science" were showing up all over the area I live in. It's very odd because concepts like faith and belief are inherently religious, and don't have any place in scientific inquiry.

Belief is not “inherently religious”, religion is one of many kinds of beliefs. Science is centered on a particular epistemology—a belief about what makes a belief justified—rather than opposed to belief.

According to Popperian epistemology, there are no justified beliefs, only guesses that have been exposed to tests of some sort. I think David Deutsch has even used a formulation of words something similar to: "you shouldn't believe things".

Isn't that a meaningless distinction? If I've tested my hypothesis, isn't "believe" perfectly fine as a label for how you think about it then? It is, but when people use that word they often have in mind that the source of the knowledge is important -- it isn't. I think that is what's behind most of the "I believe in Science" statements. What's really important is rather how vulnerable to attack an idea is.

Edit: "believe in" also tends to get used with the implication that a time needs to arrive where you make a decision that a hypothesis is true. That also goes against Popperian epistemology, which says rather that all ideas remain subject to correction forever.

True enough. This is why the simulation hypothesis is so interesting - i.e. the notion we are all living in a perfect VR simulation that never glitches. Science can't be used to address the veracity of that hypothesis, much to the apparent dismay of the fundamentalist atheists. I really lost interest in Richard Dawkins after he said something like "I won't answer silly questions about whether chairs and tables are real".

Similarly, one could argue that supernatural beings from alternative universes are constantly intervening in local events, but they make sure to do it only when the scientists aren't watching.

Personally I don't really care if we're working out the rules of the simulation or the rules of base reality, as we can't distinguish between the two.

>Similarly, one could argue that supernatural beings from alternative universes are constantly intervening in local events, but they make sure to do it only when the scientists aren't watching.

The atheism catechism already has an entry for this, it's the teapot hypotheses. It goes, "nobody can refute my claim that there is a teapot in the asteroid belt, but nobody should believe it either."

That sounds like a good argument to me although I don't know the metaphysical philosophical details of why. (Occam's razor?) No matter our stances in abstract epistemology we must all agree we can't go around believing every irrefutable claim we or anyone else thinks of, at minimum because many are contradictory.

> Science can't be used to address the veracity of that hypothesis

Thus, it is not a hypothesis but a conjecture. (Or, perhaps more accurately, an omphaloskeptic intellectual autoeroticism.)

> much to the apparent dismay of the fundamentalist atheists

Neither a fundamentalist nor an atheist myself, but I’ve never seen any of the latter “dismayed” by the fact that people can string together words to create a proposition outside of the domain of scientific inquiry.

> Similarly, one could argue that supernatural beings from alternative universes are constantly intervening in local events

One could assert that easily, but to argue it one would need first to establish some framework in which something could be offered to support that conclusion.

> omphaloskeptic intellectual autoeroticism.

You could have made your point without being rude to the parent.

Nothing can be used to address the veracity of that hypothesis. It's the same as saying I have a monster in my closet, which is invisible, undetectable, and never interfere with any object in any manner.

Or that I'm just a cloud of consciousness dreaming about this entire experience, human, earth, the universe all being my imagination.

I don't see why it would dismay an atheist specifically. It's just an untestifiable statement like many other metaphysical thought experiments. Surely anyone with a basic read of philosophy would have encountered some.

> True enough. This is why the simulation hypothesis is so interesting - i.e. the notion we are all living in a perfect VR simulation that never glitches.

That’s not the hypothesis, afaik - we’re beings generated inside the simulation rather than ‘brains in a vat’ experiencing it. Science could address veracity if (say) whatever was running the simulation chose to make it apparent, either directly (by revelation) or by some quirk of how physics operated, for example if we detected some (reflected) method to control how reality was being generated.

Saying that, I’ve pondered that giving every person their own entire universe where they had free will but everyone else was a simulated non-player character was one way of solving the religious problem of evil - nothing evil actually happens to real humans, it’s just a scripted set of tests to see whether the particular individual chooses to be good or bad.

I think that’s just moving the goalposts; evil still exists in the mind of the evildoer.

From your last sentence, it sounds like you agree with Dawkins. Isn't a question that is epistemologically unanswerable a silly question?

I'm not a native English speaker, but I think that the words "believe" and "belief" have diverged in meaning a little bit. "Belief" means any piece of information that a person holds as true (as in justified true belief as what used to be definition of knowledge), and "believe" is a specific way to hold something as true — not through experiment or logic, but usually through submission to someone's expert authority.

Forgive non-professional philosophers their casual misuse of terms like faith, belief, and knowledge. Even so, you know very well what these placard brandishing plebes meant, despite your pedantry.

> I've seen this most often in the strident atheist crowd...

Granted. New Atheists are insufferable. For future, maybe use their moment of conversion as an opportunity to introduce them to Aristotle, Popper, your fave thinker.

> Forgive non-professional philosophers their casual misuse of terms like faith, belief, and knowledge.

I think that's good general advice...

> Even so, you know very well what these placard brandishing plebes meant, despite your pedantry.

... but I don't think it's pedantry in this case but a stupendously important point: I think both me and the GP think "Believe the Science" does very often correspond to some sort of belief in the importance of sources of knowledge or the need to shield ideas from criticism. "The Science" seems often very much "The" with a capital T.

Why stupendously important? If all problems are caused by lack of knowledge, and all knowledge is conjectural, then damaging traditions of criticism is maybe the worst thing anybody can do.

I mean you still have to believe that grasping what is actually going on is preferable to a numb, comfortable lie.

The nature of the world around us obviously doesn't care too much what we consider true about it and continues more or less unimpressed to go its course (unless of course we start to base our actions on these considerations).

You don't have to believe in a factual thing to make it true. Or well, you could, but it would be totally pointless either way.

But what you can believe in is that facts actually matter — and quite frankly there is a huge populus who are in dire need of that believe from at least one standpoint.

I'm frustrated by militarism in a sub-set of Christian culture; blind allegiance to police and military.

Great article. Really applies to so much happening during the covid times, and explains why there seems to be so much cognitive dissonance with the educated population.

There is also another major factor behind why there is so much disagreement between the educated population: there are multiple ways to solve most situations, but there is only one way to tow the line. Republican strategy is to tow the line, whatever that line is, so they are consistent. While the opposition seeks an optimal solution, and that process appears as in-fighting.

in this comment you are doing the exact thing the article talks about, positioning groups as good guys/bad guys and thus signaling your status as either a good guy or someone who at least knows the difference.

Aren't you doing the same thing too?

And you as well, Sir ...

... oh, wait ...

I don't think that it's good vs bad, but that a fundamental part of conservatism is keeping things the same, or returning to some sort of prior tradition. That is going to be more cohesive and consistent by its very definition.

It's not a value statement at all.

One thing I infer is that the college educated are overconfident, sometimes classist. In aggregate they rely on short-cut heuristics like anyone else, with the benefit of believing they are more rational by virtue of class clout (their own, and of pundits they listen to). I've also seen the disdain for the tradesmen and non-educated, not just general misanthropy as alluded to in the article. It's a bit unnerving to see them tip-toe around their in-group society, while being absolutely vicious espousing white-listed thoughts.

> This isn’t a partisan issue, either. Gibson and Sutherland report that, “The percentage of Democrats who are worried about speaking their mind is just about identical to the percentage of Republicans who self-censor: 39 and 40 percent, respectively.”

It may not be partisan in that sense, but today's fear is still coming from one side's extreme.

You obviously don't live in a red state. I was a leftist teacher in a very red state (as in, it was called from Trump within a minute of the polls closing, while half the state still had open polls). There's many times I had to watch what I said around people and not speak my mind for fear of possible backlash if students told their parents or if news got out among the community of some of my beliefs.

> “People are limited in their capacity to process information, so they take shortcuts whenever they can.”

> We are lazy creatures who try to expend as little mental energy as possible.

> And people are typically less motivated to scrutinize a message if the source is considered to be an expert. We interpret the message through the peripheral route.

What are the alternatives though? Dig ever deeper into every piece of information until you get stuck on what fundamental particle/laws is the universe made of? Trust your taxi driver on what is wrong with your health rather than your doctor? Trust neither and spend 20 years in school to understand why your stomach hurts today?

All articles about biases, mental shortcuts, preconceived ideas and so on miss on offering a real alternative. And guess why, because there is none. It's the best we have, as imperfect as these mechanisms are.

My concern is that this can too easily result in disaster like a herd of cattle stampeding over a cliff. Everyone's rushing along together, everyone's safe in the herd, and then, oops, goodbye herd. We need more people willing to say "hey you idiots, you're all heading for a cliff".

The problem is that anyone saying that will become persona non grata... maybe the really smart cattle just extract themselves from the stampede, thinking, "too bad for you fools, it's a Darwin moment, guess that means more grass for me."

Unfortunately that strategy doesn't really work when humans are stampeding for nuclear war and climatic destruction, there won't be any grass left for anyone.

this is why some of us have a natural resistance to going with the flow.

I know I do but it's individually very costly but I like me this way (after many years of feeling bad for having 'poor social skills').

I like to think this strengthens the group even if it's costly to the individual

How do you know you're not the one heading for a cliff? And anyway, that is why we have multiple herds and some individual rebels. Our entire history was this way, when one herd goes of a cliff another herd profits.

Great article, it really focuses on how state/corporate propaganda tends to be most intensely focused on the wealthier and more highly educated segments of society. Additionally, this group (which includes corporate middle managers etc.) is most at risk of losing their position in the social system by expressing contrary opinions. This bit in particular is interesting:

> "In short, people have a mechanism in their minds. It stops them from saying something that could lower their status, even if it’s true. And it propels them to say something that could increase their status, even if it’s false. Sometimes, local norms can push against this tendency. Certain communities (e.g., scientists) can obtain status among their peers for expressing truths. But if the norm is relaxed, people might default to seeking status over truth if status confers the greater reward."

Consider the role of 'cultural fit' in hiring in the software development world as an example of this phenomenon. If we take two people with equivalent technical skills in competition for a job, almost certainly the one with the better 'cultural fit' will be hired. 'Cultural fit' is an eyebrow-raising phrase for those with some knowledge of this phenomenon because the specifics, the desired cultural qualities, are almost never explicitly spelled out. Doing covert surveillance on a prospective employer to determine what their expected cultural norms are is not a bad idea if one really needs a job and is willing to swing like a weathervane.

It's also fun to imagine what political views would cause the most pushback at any given time. Right now, anyone saying that the USA should treat the Russia-Ukraine conflict with the same indifference that the USA treats the Saudi-Yemen conflict, i.e. continuing to do business with both Russia and Saudi Arabia without restriction, is going to be turned on with howls of outrage across the board. Regardless, Putin's behavior is rather similar to that of Saudi prince MBS, they seem quite friendly as well:

https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-mohammed-bin-salman-hi...

If you then point out that Saudi Arabia deposits its oil money in Wall Street banks, while Russia certainly does not, and note that this explains the differential treatment, well, prepare to be excommunicated.

Feels like "likes/upvotes" serve to inform you of what is important, but also causes you to gauge the crowd and censor your dissent.

Though an elegant argument is usually welcome in all quarters...

> We are lazy creatures who try to expend as little mental energy as possible.

but I take this as a virtue, not as a vice.

we are efficient, we (as life) do not like to toil needlessly nor wastefully. (IMO, the viciousness comes from an extreme posture in either direction)

but also I want to remark that efficiency is never the goal. is not even a means to the end (of living), it's merely a choice, a preference, an intelligent style favored by a large variety of living things and physical phenomena.

Why does the article interleave prestige/high-status and intelligent/educated as if they refer to the same thing? Is it trying to say two things that could be related but making one argument?

I was all ready to believe what I thought I already agreed with until I found these patterns of faulty persuasion. Luckily, even if the argument is faulty it doesn't preclude truths being present.

So does good society happen when prosocial truths are high status and antisocial truths are low status?

Edit: and the same for lies I suppose.

I've been saying it forever: prestige is the #1 driver of human motivation, and because of this humans do not scale. The prestige party destroys forward progress with empty displays of acquired crap.

What do you mean by humans do not scale?

I think he was referring to this part of the article:

"The psychology professor Geoffrey Miller suggested that as intelligent species become technologically advanced, they spend more time entertaining themselves than on interstellar space travel. Rather than actually going to Mars, they spend more time pretending to go to Mars via movies and video games and VR."

True, but to a limited extent.

Recent successess of SpaceX, RocketLab etc. seem to have reinvigorated interest of the young engineering generation in space exploration to a degree unseen in the 1990s. Working on a Mars rocket is much cooler than working on user tracking systems in some giant tech corporation.

Watching something like Starship really launching from the Earth beats hundreds of hours of video games squarely.

This sounds a lot like the people at SpaceX, RocketLab, etc are actually building rockets to entertain themselves.

Yes, and the point is that this entertainment isn't virtual and that it actually pushes the entire civilization forward instead of causing a hedonistic stagnation.

Private progress into space shouldn't be celebrated. If rich people get there first, they'll use it for ill. What Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk's forays into space, and the news frenzy around them, show is how embarrassingly we've let our government, with R&D underfunded for decades, fall behind.

It's not impressive that a billionaire can take a space trip. Big fucking deal. We put someone on the Moon in 1969 and haven't been back since the '70s.

Humans in general are capable of evil, not just private actors, and I fail to see how governmental activity in space was, on average, more honorable than whatever Musk or Bezos are planning to do there.

By far the most space-interested arm of a government is the military and plainclothed spies. Neither are particularly morally virtuous.

I mean that as a human group/tribe/corporation grows the organization and preservation of the organization dominates the goals of the organization far more than the original purpose of the organization. Do the Republicans actually want to dismantle democracy and impose a fascist government? Hell no, but the organization is going to have to create a fascist government to continue, or cease to exist in their current form. This situation is present for all dominating organizations.

status is used as a proxy when forced to make a judgement with insufficient time for doing your own research. the more fundamental resource here is limited time. So you can blame the laws of physics for that.

Could this also be applied to politicians? (their status as a proxy)

I don't think many people would dispute that a politician's primary job is to obtain lots of prestige and use it to persuade people. They certainly don't tend to be domain experts on every particular issue they discuss, although that happens from time to time.

Lobsters are over 350_000_000 years old. Their place in the dominance hierarchy gets signalled in the same way in our brain, with serotonin. The parallel to serotonin deficiency in depressed people is intruiging.

What?

Is that 12 rules for life? Great book.

Different people are driven by different motivations. The people most driven by prestige also want to be highly visible because prestige is ultimately a social construct.

You can be actively anti-status seeking by valuing, rewarding, and praising people who are not seeking status. In this way we can be the change we wish to see.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com