1. A series of tweets on my interview with @hugoreasoning about his new book which suggests that people are far less gullible than we think. Interview at washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/… and book at amzn.to/3c5NZTN (nb that Hugo is a friend, and someone who I am writing with).
2. The argument of the book is straightforward - that human beings are far less likely to believe crazy things than most commentary presumes. Hugo is a cognitive psychologist, and draws on work there and across the social sciences to make what seems to me to be a compelling case.
3. His basic claim is straightforward - that if we take cognitive psychology and evolution seriously, it would be bizarre to expect that people would be consistently gullible. We have a variety of mental tools that allow us to assess the likely validity of claims made to us.
4. And there is a host of social science supporting this. Political scientists find that it is really hard to shift people's voting preferences. Marketing academics find that ads mostly have tiny effects. And so on. So why do we still see fake beliefs like Pizzagate circulating?
5. The answer is that few people actually _believe_ them in the sense that they are willing to take the action that we would expect them to take if they really believed that there was a pedophile ring operating underneath a DC pizza restaurant.
6. The crazies who go into Comet Pizza with a gun, or take out a mafia boss because they bought into Q&Anon are the tiniest of minorities. Most consumers of Pizzagate, Q@Anon etc aren't really bought into the belief system. Instead they serve as a means of social signalling.
7. If you are a full-on subscriber to these theories, you are burning bridges, and committing to a social group. You probably aren't (unless you have deeper psychological problems) going to believe them in the same way as you believe something that profoundly shapes your behavior
8. There are four important implications to this argument as I read it. First - that the people on the other side aren't nearly as crazy as they seem. Their commitment to these beliefs is shallow, which explains why most don't behave as if they believe them.
9. There were some Tea Party people who prepped for the concentration camps that Obama's FEMA was preparing to house them - but not that many. Instead they are publicly asserting what Hugo describes as an "unfounded reflective belief."
10. Second - that even if these beliefs are not profoundly held, they can be profoundly consequential for both society and politics. They provide coordination points around which different coalitions coalesce. The US in which Obama-as-secret-Jihadist can serve as such a point
11. is very different from the US in which it is not. Crazy beliefs, even if they are not internalized, can serve as public justification for various forms of action and social coordination that have real consequences. The obvious case for this is authoritarian societies.
12. Few people in North Korea believe in the semi-divine powers of the ruling dynasty - but the fact that it is generally publicly asserted, and rarely publicly denied set in train a variety of dynamics, some of which can be grotesque and horrible in their consequences.
13. Third - that much of the current panic about social media is fundamentally mistaken. Its plausible consequences are not that it changes people's inner beliefs very much, causing them to believe improbable things, but that it changes the beliefs that they _publicly profess_
14. People remain pretty resistant. There's some interesting new evidence of this that just came out yesterday - a paper suggesting that the effects of #deepfakes on people's political beliefs is minimal - psyarxiv.com/r5yun/
15. Fourth, that the second order problem of panic over social media may be as significant as the first order problems of social media itself. If we believe - or if we coordinate around the belief - that social media is brainwashing everyone, this damages other collective beliefs
16. And here, I am trying to articulate something I haven't quite straightened out in my own head. Przeworski and other rationalists suggest that democracy depends on shared and self-reinforcing beliefs about alternation of government, force of elections etc.
17. It also seems plausible to me that democracy only works if you believe in some minimal degree of small-r rationality on the part of other citizens. If you believe that they are systematically prone to passing madnesses, it is hard to believe that democracy will work.
18. So I wonder whether much of the panic about how social media is undermining democracy may itself be undermining democracy, by spreading the belief that people are fundamentally irrational and prone to being reprogrammed by bots and manipulation.
19. Rather than looking at the more specific (and in principle at least, solvable) problem of publicly important but weakly internalized unfounded reflective beliefs, we are treating people as programmable zombies.
20. (as an aside - much of the pessimism that drives very interesting new @greatdismal novel, Agency seems rooted in this kind of theory of readily manipulated people - how much Gibson himself believes it, and how much it is novelist's negative capability, I don't know).
21. But in conclusion - Not Born Yesterday is an excellent book. I would go so far as to say that it is urgently important. If you care about these issues, it presents a very different understanding than the rapidly congealing collective wisdom, and you should read it. Finis.
