Thread by @asymmetricinfo

I meant to respond to some of the questions about this column washingtonpost.com/opinions/bias-… this morning. But then Paul Ryan announced he wouldn't be seeking re-election, and I had to get a column in the hopper. So here we go, better late than never.

1) How can you compare political beliefs to being an underrepresented minority? Political beliefs are chosen. URMs are excluded based on immutable characteristics.

The is a sensible question given the classical liberal idea that our beliefs are something that we come to after calm and deliberate reasoning, carefully weighing the evidence without fear or favor, and that those ideas then contest in the arena until truth wins out.

This idea is lovely. And false.

For one thing, political beliefs are heritable. And strongly influenced by your environment. Not perfectly so--I grew up in Manhattan, the child of Democrats, and somehow ended up as a right-libertarian. But there's a strong correlation between what your parents and friends think

You can see this in the fact that beliefs about political issues cluster in obviously irrational ways. Animal rights and abortion rights should be on the opposite sides of the political spectrum. Instead they're bundled.

(True story: when I was in college, I was a vegetarian. One of my vegetarian friends decided to become a vegan. Then changed his mind because he decided that this would logically commit him to becoming pro-life.)

There's no reason that your views on gay rights and the environment should be correlated. But they are. So are views on taxes and women's lib. And on and on--these are not some systematic framework worked out from first principles.

They look a lot more like cultural beliefs: socially transmitted, vehemently and emotionally defended. Tribal. And of course, they have strong demographic correlations.

Second, for you science-lovers out there, this is not how psychology tells us that we actually reason to political conclusions. As Jonathan Haidt says, our reason is a tiny rider on the vast elephant of our emotions. We decide what to believe, and then reason backwards to "Why?"

That's not to say that argument is fruitless, that society can't have better and worse ideas, that we cannot reason together. But that this process is difficult, and has a heavy, heavy cultural and tribal element to it.

That tribalism cannot be handwaved away, or banished by clicking your heels and repeating "Markeplace of ideas" three times.

In fact, we all know this is true. Because we can see all those people on the other side of the political spectrum doing it *all the time*! They don't even really reason, do they, just check their tribal identity.

I have some bad news for you guys: your side reasons the same way

You reason this way. No one is immune. You have a fleshy brain in your head, not a supercomputer.

So first of all, conservative/liberal is indeed an identity characteristic as much as a set of beliefs. Which means that yes, excluding people on the basis of the beliefs that identity expresses is indeed cultural tribalism, not Logic Wins.

And second of all, even if that were all not the case, how would you go about changing your beliefs? I ask you know to perform this excercise: believe, really and truly, that the sky is red.

It's nonsense, right?

Or okay, you can't just decide to believe something different about a fact you can see. Okay: if you're liberal, try to believe, really and truly, that gay marriage is wrong. If you are conservative, try to imagine that abortion is morally fine.

Still nonsense. You might be able to jettison a few views you don't care about much anyway. You cannot decide to unbelieve something you hold to be deeply true.

Sufficient pressure *can* influence what we think. This is basically the crux of 1984. But we tend to think that the extreme tactics necessary to brainwash someone into suddenly rejecting their core beliefs are not all right. Also, they don't work all that well.

What you can do is be forced to lie about what you think. But again, forcing people to "pass" has a rather bad odor in polite society these days, and with good reason.

Question 1A) is "What about Nazis". Somehow, on the internet, it always comes down to Godwin's Law.

Yes, Nazis are wrong. They believe vile things. We exclude them. "Abortion is murder, and should be treated accordingly" is not morally on the same plane as "We need to exterminate the lesser races"

Question 2) Doesn't the fact that I, a right libertarian, write for a mainstream newspaper, refute my claim that there is a skew in media that is alienating to, and exclusionary of, conservatives?

Number one, surveys of journalists, particularly elite journalists, routinely show that they are overwhelmingly skewed towards Democrats/the left. So empirically, teh skew exists.

Number two, saying "but look, I counted a dozen conservative writers at mainstream publications" does not refute the possibility that there is systemic exclusion. It only means that the exclusion is not complete.

It's sort of like telling a hedge fund manager "You're excluding women" and hearing back, "But we've got Peggy in accounting!" The very fact that you can name all the right-leaning folks writing for the mainstream in a single tweet is evidence against your argument, not for it.

Question 3, by request: "How come you don't want National Review to hire liberals?"

This question is a category error.

National Review, like the Nation, or Mother Jones, is an explicitly ideological political magazine. Major newspapers, and magazines like the Atlantic, aim for diversity of thought.

I think that a lot of people on the left are starting to see mainstream outlets as explicitly left-wing political projects. I think that this would be a tragic mistake on any number of levels. And it wouldn't get the left what they want

The point of excluding conservatives is presumably to wield the cultural power of those outlets to shape American opinion in a direction more congenial to the left. But making mainstream pubs a broadsheet version of The Nation would destroy the cultural power they want to wield.

Question 4) Have you considered the possibility that the right is just wrong about everything?

Answer: Every day! But turnabout is fair play: what if you're wrong about a bunch of stuff? If you chase all the people who disagree with you out, how will you ever find out?

Question 5) What about all the research showing that conservatives are more close-minded, authoritarian, etc? Maybe conservatives are just not the right temperament to work in empriical fields like journalism and academia!

Interesting question! So it turns out that whether conservatives look more authoritarian, etc, depends heavily on the sort of questions you ask.

If you ask people "Should you defer to police/ministers/the military", conservatives look super authoritarian, and liberals are all a bunch of raging rebels.

But then if you ask people things like "Should you defer to environmental experts", it turns out that liberals are all "Respect mah authoritah", and conservatives are all "Freedom!"

In other words, if a bunch of liberals to write surveys to find out whether one side is more authoritarian, it turns out they will write questions which "prove" conservatives are more authoritarian. Given academia's heavy left-skew, be very skeptical of these kinds of results.

(Paper on this here, by the way: rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/Duarte…)

So all in all, when I see massive skews, I tend to immediately look for social and systemic factors that explain the skew, rather than asking if the excluded folks aren't all too dumb and mean and wrong to justify inclusion.

And just generally, when members of a majority rush to tell you that minority group members aren't excluded because of bias, but because they're all too stupid and evil to deserve a place ... well, guys, you're not really helping me rule out bias, here.

In closing, I'll just repeat what I said at the end of my column: conservatives are half the country. You can't make them go away by banishing them from elite magazines.

And in fact, the left generally think that conservatives seceding from mainstream culture has been bad for conservatism, and bad for America. Banishing conservatives entirely would make that worse.

When you picture a future in which pro-lifers have been pushed off of the opinion page, you should not picture a future in which abortion is legal, subsidized, and uncontroversial.

You should picture half the country consuming nothing but Fox News and Breitbart, forever.