Thread by @doctorow

You know how "#realist" is a synonym for "#asshole?" As in, "I'm not a racist, I'm just a #RaceRealist?" That same "realism" is used to discredit democracy, among self-styled "#LibertarianElitists," who claim that social science proves democracy doesn't work - and can't work.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/ana…

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You've likely encountered elements of this ideology in the wild. Perhaps you've heard about how our #CognitiveBiases make us incapable of deliberating, that "reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments."

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Or maybe you've heard that voters are "#RationallyIgnorant," choosing not to become informed about politics because their vote doesn't have enough influence to justify the cognitive expenditure of figuring out how to cast it.

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There's the #BackfireEffect, the idea that rational argument doesn't make us change our minds drives us to double-down on our own beliefs. As if that wasn't enough, there's the #Asch effect: we will change our minds based on majority pressure, even if we know they're wrong.

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Finally, there's the fact that the public Just Doesn't Understand Economics. When you compare the views of the average person to the views of the average PhD economist, you find that the public sharply disagrees with them.

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The public rejects such "obvious truths" as "we should only worry about how big the pie is, not how big my slice is?" These fools just can't understand that an economy where their boss gets richer and they get poorer is a good economy, so long as it's growing overall!

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Noted "realist" #PeterThiel thinks women shouldn't be allowed to vote, because moms are apt to sideline the economic "science" for the sentimental idea that kids shouldn't starve and vote to tax rich people. Thus do we walk #TheRoadToSerfdom:

cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/pet…

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Other realists go even further, suggesting that anyone who disagrees with orthodox (#ChicagoSchool) economists shouldn't be allowed to vote: "[a]nyone who opposes surge pricing should be disenfranchised. That’s how we should decide who decides in epistocracy."

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Add it all up and you get the various "libertarian" cases for abolishing democracy. Some of these libertarian elitists want to replace democracy with markets, because "markets impose an effective 'user fee' for irrationality that is absent from democracy.

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Others say we should limit voting to "Vulcans" who can pass a knowledge test about the views of neoclassical economists.

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If it means fewer Black people and women are able to vote because either is "negatively correlated" with "political" knowledge, then so mote be it. After all, these groups are "much more likely than others to be mistaken about what they really need":

bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2015/03/the-de…

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These arguments and their gaping errors are rehearsed in an excellent @DemJournal article by @henryfarrell, @hugoreasoning, and #MelissaSchwartzberg (Mercier's research is often misinterpreted and misquoted by libertarian elitists):

democracyjournal.org/magazine/68/th…

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The article is a companion piece to a new academic article in @apsrjournal, where the authors propose a new subdiscipline of #PoliticalScience,
#AnalyticalDemocracyTheory:

cambridge.org/core/journals/…

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What's "Analytical Democracy Theory?" It's the systematic study of when and how collective decision-making works, and when it goes wrong. Because the libertarian elitists aren't completely, utterly wrong - there *are* times when groups of people make bad decisions.

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From that crumb of truth, the libertarian elitists theorize an entire nihilistic cake in which self-governance is impossible and where we fools and sentimentalists must be subjugated to the will of our intellectual betters, for our own good.

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This isn't the first time libertarian political scientists have pulled this trick. You've heard of the "#TragedyOfTheCommons," which claims to be a "realist" account of what happens when people try to share something - a park, a beach, a forest - without anyone owning it.

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According to the "tragedy," these commons are inevitably ruined by "rational" actors who know that if they don't overgraze, pollute or despoil, someone else will, so they might as well get there first.

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The Tragedy of the Commons feels right. We've all experienced a version of it - the messy kitchen at your office, the litter in the park. But the defining "Tragedy" paper, published in 1968 by #GarrettHardin in @ScienceMagazine, was a hoax:

memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the…

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Hardin didn't claim some commons turned tragic - he claimed tragedy was *inevitable*, and *every commons* underwent tragedy. But Hardin made it up. What's more, Hardin - an ardent #WhiteNationalist - used his "realist"'s account to justify colonization and genocide.

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After all, people who lived in colonized places didn't have property rights to keep their commons from tragifying, so those commons were already doomed. Colonizers who seized the land and murdered the peoplethere were actually *saving* the colonized from their own tragedies.

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Hardin went on to pioneer the idea of #LifeboatEthics, a greased slide to mass-extermination of "inferior" people (Hardin was also a #eugenicist) in order to save our planet from "overpopulation."

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Hardin's flawed account of the commons is a sterling example of the problem with #economism, the ideology that underpins neoclassical economics:

pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/eco…

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Economism was summed up in by Ely Devons, who quipped ""If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

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Hardin asked himself, "If I were reliant upon a commons, what would I do?" And, being a realist (that is, an asshole), Hardin decided that he would steal everything from the commons because that's what the other realists would do if he didn't get there first.

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Hardin didn't go and look at a commons. But someone else did.

#ElinorOstrom won the Nobel for her work studying the properties of successful, durable commons. She went and looked at commons:

onthecommons.org/magazine/elino…

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Ostom codified the circumstances, mechanisms and principles that distinguished successful commons from failed commons.

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Analytical Democratic Theory proposes doing for democratic deliberation what Ostrom did for commons: to create an empirical account of the methods, arrangements and systems that produce good group reasoning, and avoid the pitfalls that lead to bad group reasoning.

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The economists' term for this is #microfoundations: the close study of interaction among individuals, which then produces a "macro" account of how to structure whole societies.

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Here are some examples of how microfoundations can answer big questions:

* Backfire effects: The original backfire effect research was a fluke. In most cases, people presented with well-sourced facts and good arguments change their minds:

link.springer.com/article/10.100…

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* Rational ignorance: Contrary to the predictions of "rational ignorance" theory, people who care about specific issues become "#IssuePublics" who are *incredibly* knowledgeable about it, and deeply investigate and respond to candidates' positions:

tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.108…

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Rational ignorance is a mirage, caused by giving people questionnaires about politics *in general*, rather than the politics that affects them directly and personally.

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* #Myside bias: Even when people strongly identify with a group, they are capable of filtering out "erroneous messages" that come from that group if they get good, contradictory evidence:

hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…

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* Majority bias: People are capable of rejecting the majority consensus, when the view is implausible, or the majority is small, or when the majority is not benevolent.

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The Asch effect is "folklore": people may *say* that they hold a majority view when they face social sanction for rejecting it, but that doesn't mean they've changed their minds:

alexandercoppock.com/guess_coppock_…

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Notwithstanding all this, democracy's cheerleaders have some major gaps in the evidence to support their own view. Analytical Democratic Theory needs to investigate the nuts-and-bolts of when deliberation works and when it fails, including the tradeoffs between:

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* "social comfort and comfort in expressing dissent":

sci-hub.se/10.1016/S0065-…

* "shared common ground and some measure of preexisting disagreement":

sci-hub.st/10.1037/0022-3…

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* "group size and the need to represent diversity":

nicolas.claidiere.fr/wp-content/upl…

* "pressures for conformity and concerns for epistemic reputation":

academic.oup.com/princeton-scho…

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Realism is a demand dressed up as an observation. Realists like #MargaretThatcher insisted "#ThereIsNoAlternative" to #neoliberalism, but what she meant was "stop trying to think of an alternative."

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Hardin didn't just claim that some commons turned tragic, he claimed that the tragedy of the commons was inevitable - that we shouldn't even bother trying to create #PublicGoods.

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The Ostrom method - actually studying how something works, rather than asking yourself how it would work if everyone thought like you - is a powerful tonic to this, but it's not the only one.

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One of the things that makes #ScienceFiction so powerful is its ability to ask how a system would work under some different social arrangement.

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It's a radical proposition. Don't just ask what the gadget does: ask who it does it *for* and who it does it *to*.

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That's the foundation of #Luddism, which is smeared as a technophobic rejection of technology, but which was only ever a social rejection of the specific economic arrangements of that technology.

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Specifically, the Luddites rejected the idea that machines should be "so easy a child could use them" in order to kidnap children from orphanages and working them to death at those machines:

pluralistic.net/2023/03/20/lov…

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There are sf writers who are making enormous strides in imagining how deliberative tools could enable new democratic institutions. @R_Emrys's stunning 2022 novel "A Half-Built Garden" is a tour-de-force:

pluralistic.net/2022/07/26/ais…

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I like to think that I make a small contribution here, too. My next novel, "The Lost Cause," is at root a tale of competing group decision-making methodologies.

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It's a fight between post-Green New Deal repair collectives, seafaring anarcho-capitalist techno-solutionists, and terrorizing white nationalist militias (it's out in November):

us.macmillan.com/books/97812508…

eof/