#396 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Wednesday July 6)
Good morning,
Movies, books and sports are on hold, in order to continue addressing the serious issues we face. Today is something uplifting and something troubling, both of which were from the Aspen Ideas Festival last week. This is the first of several dispatches regarding ideas from the festival.
WHEN OUR POLITICS WAS KINDER
One of the sessions was a tribute to Madeleine Albright, quite a woman, with a distinguished career and personal story. She passed away earlier this year. Ms. Albright had the distinction of having been driven from Czechoslovakia by the Nazis, returning only to then be driven away by the Soviets. She served her country admirably in various capacities, including as our first female Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton and Stephen Hadley were invited to provide comments on her life and accomplishments. Seeing these two politically divergent people discussing Ms. Albright’s accomplishments and commitment to our society and our role in the world was heartening—particularly at a time of deep political division. Hadley quoted Ms. Albright liberally. The best was his recitation of the six words Albright said she would use to describe herself:
Worried optimist
Problem solver
Grateful American
One can only hope these values can find resonance among our leaders today.
QUOTATIONS FROM ASPEN IDEAS SESSION ON “THE STUPID DECADE”
One of the more interesting discussions at the Aspen Ideas Festival was “Our Uniquely Stupid Decade,” featuring Jeffrey Goldberg and Jonathan Haidt. The session was is described as follows:
Americans aren’t dumb—at least individually—but something changed in the last ten years that made the country-as-a-whole stupid in an unprecedented way. And yes, it was social media. What was once a place to share cute kid pics became a place to score hits on enemies and undermine institutional trust, and the viral nature of social media empowered the far political extremes, misinformation networks, and an unholy number of trolls. Can a country afflicted by structural stupidity survive?
Here are some nuggets from that conversation:
“Stupid is an inability to meet your own goals due to cognitive limitations.” So said Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business and author.
“Stupid is a structural problem when people won’t challenge their own confirmation bias.” And that’s so true. It seems everyone is trapped inside a bubble of confirmation bias, continually being fed what they want to hear from sites and sources that are limited in their perspective.
STUPID IN REPEATING THINGS THAT DON’T WORK
“Stupid is acquiescing to doing things we know don’t work, just because activist kids want them,” said Haidt. An example is the diversity and inclusion sessions to which many organizations subject their boards, staff, and stakeholders. While the goal is critically important, the format is one that isn’t particularly effective and doesn’t “stick.” This apparently is confirmed by data. This is a good point—we need to develop means of better addressing diversity and inclusion that goes beyond mere lecturing on being an anti-racist and, instead, find processes that might actually work better—increasingly dialog and encouraging action items and concrete follow-up.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND FACTIONS
The session noted that much of the descent to stupid began with Facebook and Twitter adding buttons in 2009 to allow likes and, in doing so, creating a race for likes and avoidance of public reputational risk. The problem with Facebook and its ilk are how they fractionalize people and pit them against each other. Haidt referenced Federalist No. 10, written by James Madison, which warns of the type of problem we have today: “The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare.” He notes that social media enhances the “innate human proclivity toward ‘faction,’ by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with ‘mutual animosity’ that they are ‘much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.’”
Haidt described our current situation as a “post-Babel world.” At one point we shared values, facts, and a means of speaking with each other civilly. This is not to say that there wasn’t disagreement and myriad voices, but there was a sense of order. “The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”
Before Trump, the voices of the mob were moderated. Unreasonable, poorly-reasoned, and hateful views would have been filtered-out. But now we are in a world that is “post-Babel,” when anything can be said and is immediately spread far and wide. As was the case with the Tower of Babel, everything fell apart and was left in a morass of disorder. And everyone is speaking a different language and is not understood by others, with whom in a prior time they might have engaged and with whom they might have legislated and found common ground. What has emerged is a mob that is shouting and ready to disembowel anyone with a view with which they disagree. As such, fear of the mob will affect what reasonable people are comfortable saying. This, in turn diminishes democratic processes.
OUR LEADERS MAY BE THE WORST
One would hope that calmer minds might reduce the heat in the room but we are in an environment where leadership isn’t leading—rather, it is attempting to appeal to a mob trapped in confirmation bias. The mob (and its subsets) know what they think and don’t want to be persuaded that there might be another view or that they should consider moderating their views. Meanwhile, many of our leaders increasingly are motivated by the number of clicks on their posts and the immediate responses they receive from an adoring public. The mob is in control.
The metaphor of B.F. Skinner was invoked, where he said that with tiny bits of immediate gratification, pigeons can be taught to play ping-pong. But delayed gratification, with greater rewards for deferring gratification, doesn’t motivate them. Immediate gratification is the currency of the day, with politicians tweeting out quickly and often. But in this case, the mob are the scientists and the politicians are the pigeons. And long-term solutions, with potentially significant gratification, are not the desired outcome.
Here is Jonathan Haidt’s article from The Atlantic. I think it is “must” reading: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
Have a great day,
Glenn
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