A thread on the madness of crowds and our old friend 'gender identity'. What explains the scene at a rally for @lisanandy when she argues a child rape should be recorded as being carried out by a woman even though the perpetrator was male?
2./ It's tempting to dismiss Nandy as bonkers but that doesn't do full justice to the strangeness that surrounded the event. The same strangeness marked Elizabeth Warren's suggestion a trans child would interview her prospective Education Secretary.
3./ We're in the grip of a delusion like that Charles Mackay explored in the original 'Madness of Crowds'; punctuating history from witch burnings to alchemy. In a brilliant insight he compared these with the delusions that fuelled financial bubbles.
4. When I made a film for PBS's science strand about irrational financial behaviour we explored how contagious emotions can lead people to take crazy decisions. Here's Robert Shiller on the infamous Dutch Tulip Bubble when tulips became as expensive as houses. Until they weren't.
5./ The applause after Nandy's speech suggests a similar kind of social delusion. This peer pressure can be stronger than we imagine. Here's the classic Candid Camera sketch where people succumb to the cues of others and turn around in a lift.
6./ Nandy behaves like someone in a lift surrounded by people babbling meaninglessly as they spin. To conform, she too must spin and babble. Her colleague the Mayor of London is also busy babbling, in his case about affirming every gender identity.
7./ This is a Mermaids video that explains what he's signed up for. "Pangender is many genders that can extend infinitely". And here's their spokesperson claiming, "there are over 8 billion gender identities." I would set aside some time, Sadiq. That's a lot of affirming.
8./What drives a politician to risk their reputation on such nonsense. Here's @RLong_Bailey on self -ID. She justifies it with references to difficult journeys, pain and suicide stats. The gender identity lobby seem so often to revel in this sadness and faux pity.
9./ And why does that matter? Emotions affect the quality of our decision-making even when we don't realise we're experiencing them. Here's Jennifer Lerner on our PBS show reminding us of a truism: even unconscious emotions shape our decisions
10./ She designs experiments to subtly induce emotions in people who aren't aware of it and explores how this impacts on seemingly unrelated decisions like a financial purchase. Astonishingly people who feel subconsciously sad will pay up to 5 times more for something.
11./ No one knows why. One theory is that unconscious low level sadness throws out of kilter how we value things. Perhaps the strangeness of the delusion we're witnessing is in part driven by the contagious Warren type weepiness that skews her judgement and that of supporters.
12./ Nandy refuses to rationally discuss the dangers of Self-ID but you'd think she might trust her gut instinct. She must know there's no way to stop a non-trans predatory bloke abusing the self-ID process. But you see gut instincts are silenced during a delusion.
13./ Here's a sketch from 'Brain Games' that asked people to choose from three different lines one that matched the length of another on a separate graph. Most people went along with crowd even when it was clear they were choosing the wrong line.
14./ It's an update of the classic Solomon Asch conformity experiment. Over 30% of participants he said could reliably be made to choose the wrong answer by peer pressure. 75% could be made to do it at least once. Sound familiar?
15./ Asch's experiment was a child of its time, the 1950s, but it remains true, as he explained at the time, that "sometimes we will go along because we are apprehensive the group will think we are deviant." And the bigger the group the greater the peer pressure.
16./ In a famous street experiment Stanley Milgram showed the more people who looked upwards on a street the more individuals would feel a relentless need to follow suit. If less people had clapped at the Nandy rally maybe more people would have had the guts to ask questions.
17./ Conformity is even more likely and extreme if authority figures are involved and if people are acclimatised. In his famous Obedience experiment Milgram tested whether people could be persuaded to deliver increasingly powerful electric shocks to a subject
18./ He reported that 65% of all participants would deliver a "fatal" shock. The figure was almost certainly exaggerated by the experiment design since not everyone believed the voltage would really kill but few deny he shed light on how shockingly compliant people can be.
19./ Where does this leave us? It's easy to be worried this delusion may spiral and it's true clinicians, teachers, and policy-makers are proving Miligram prescient as they place kids in danger in their desire to conform. Endless sad stories conspire to undermine their judgement
20./ Some parents are submerging their gut instincts about gender spectrums as they agree to choose wrong answers and nod along with the crowd for fear of ridicule. But here's the irony: the more the other side seem to gain traction the more in truth they lose.
21./For the more the gender lobby advances the more publicity they attract. And that's the one thing they've been trying to avoid. As Denhams laid out in its secret report the only way they can succeed is through stealth. blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/12/the-do…
22./ Nandy's absurd contortions over a child rapist will shock voters. The public may still be trying to work out what's going on but their antennae are picking up signals for the first time. Fresh to this debate they haven't been acclimatised to the delusion.
23./ We're at the point when the price of tulips is still high but no longer rising. Rumours have spread they're way over priced and there's fear in the air. When the crash comes it will be spectacular. It always is. In every delusion the bubble is biggest before it bursts.
