unweaponizing confirmation bias (part 2 of series)

breaking the cycle of "two to tango"

yesterday, i published this piece on the weaponization of confirmation bias.

if you have not read it, you should start here: (this will make a lot more sense if you do)

this piece laid out a sort of simple cycle/spiral.

it’s one sided to initiate. i do not even need to know you or speak to you or have you trust me to drag you into it. you’ll never even see me of know that i was there or even that i exist. i just need to convince someone with whom you are going to interact that you hate them. it’s a fire and forget missile.

then, they come interact with you braced for hatred, you sense it, the cycle of antipathy spirals, and you wind up disliking one another.

and each of you feels justified and wronged.

you’re both now all pissed off at one another, the “person like X” has no idea that i even exist and blames the credulous person who was told to expect hatred and therefore found it and worst of all, the credulous person found just what they were told to expect and so i, evil feline that i am, gain stature and credibility in their eyes making them even more susceptible to whatever hostility engendering payload of garbage i drop into their heads next. i get to keep shaking the jar and making the bugs fight and the bug i send out to foment this thanks me for it and asks me with whom to start static next.

it’s deeply destructive cycle the path out of which is at once difficult to discern and even more so to walk.

looking back, what follows would have been a great inclusion with yesterday’s missive, but, honestly, i just had not thought it through thoroughly enough yet and sometimes you need a little prompting to think a little further.

these were some comments to yesterday’s piece. i put them here not as criticism or to pick on anyone, but because they were useful. they got me thinking. (this is why i leave the comments open, no cat is an island and we all need muses)

this seems to be a common view and is well presented. i suspect a lot of people feel this either consciously or unconsciously. and i think the “two to tango” framing is useful, so let’s use that.

shall we dance?

it does indeed take two to tango, but there are two ways to look at that.

the first is (as seen above) that if they are going to be a jerk why should i not be offended and jerk back?

this sets the frame of “if they want to be friends, then they need to act friendly or why should i?” it takes two to tango and i cannot dance with jerky mcjerkerson over there who keeps calling me a nazi.

and looked at that way, this is true.

but one can look at this another way: “if they want to be enemies, it also takes two to tango.” they can try to start a fight, but if i don’t want one, perhaps we don’t have to have one.

but here’s the tricky pivot:

indeed “it's kinda hard to not take umbrage at people telling me that I'm literally a Nazi,”

but that’s the whole point, no?

someone told them you were a nazi and they went out and confirmed the bias. their beleif about you was supposed to offend you. and it did. and in getting offended, you made them think they were correct. now consider what that means:

1. you’re mad at them (as intended) and

2. they think that they were right about your goose stepping tendencies and

3. they now trust the source that told them so more than ever.

that third one is the real doozy and the pivot upon which the game turns.

it just sets up the next stupidity and you cannot escape the trap or even interact with what causes it.

how can you win that game?

you can’t. not by those rules.

the one who wound them up with perceptive bias WANTS you to take umbrage. it’s what makes the cycle spin and if you stop getting mad, they’ll just find something more outrageous and insulting to say until you once more get angry.

this is just an endless cycle of rolling in the mud with pigs and the pigs just liking it with a nasty layer of abstraction piled on top where the more i wreck people’s lives and community by telling them that their neighbors are nazis, they more they go out and find (and create) the hate they were told to expect, the more hate and division we get, and the more they trust me to do it to them again.

your umbrage enhances my stature.

and you cannot win if you are doing that.

they who come and bring offense may be credulous and ill informed, but one must keep sight of the simple salient:

this is predominantly MY fault, not theirs.

i’m the one winding them up and setting up the scuffle. i’m the one shaking the jar, not the bugs and i can always shake harder and so long as they trust me, they will keep coming to you and causing you to take umbrage.

in this scenario, they are the symptom, i am the problem.

and until you handle me, it’s never going to stop.

i can do this all day and it costs me nothing and you everything.

the genius of charlie kirk was breaking this cycle without giving ground, of being decent and hearing people out and letting them speak, of surprising them with listening but not caving in and agreeing or going against principles. that was incredibly effective and it was really working.

it’s why the bias injectors hated him so much. it’s why they feared him so much. it’s why they attacked him so cruelly and in such outlandish and dishonest fashion. i’m not sure i have ever seen such unjust vitriol heaped upon a human being, often by otherwise reasonable people who were whipped up into a frenzy by the folks they chose to trust.

he got called a racist, a misogynist, a bigot, an anti-semite. not a whiff of it was true. he was seeking to create a big tent.

and he was succeeding.

and there’s a lesson in there.

no thank you, i’m tangoed out.

the trap is insidious: provoke until they respond and then vilify them and their response and make the story about that. rules for radicals works through media and message manipulation and confirmation bias.

and if you play by those rules and in that frame, you will lose.

the path is simple. but walking it is not.

to escape this trap, you need to discredit the source of the lies and the only way to do that is to fail to confirm the bias their adherents are told to seek.

“that guy is a nazi!” “i dunno, i spoke to him and he’s actually pretty chill. he was nice to me and listened.”

then the godwin accuser explodes and gets angry and doubles down and discredits themselves.

they show true colors and lose a follower. you do the same and gain a friend.

cultural consensus must be accretive, not subtractive.

this is what i meant by

“i think “america” goes to the first group that figures out how to gather the middle around something positive and communal and pulls us out of the endless scabbling over “you need to let our jerks take power because the other side are bigger jerks” jerktopian jerktocracy.”

charlie did that. and they killed him for it, the ultimate provocation.

and when they did, i said THIS.

and i was astonished by the response i got from some longstanding acquaintances. i got accused of being a racist, a white supremacist, an anti-semite. it was sobering. it was like watching the branch covidians howl about mask orthodoxy.

but a thing i learned in the times covidian was this: you cannot change the mind of a mask devotee by calling them an idiot. you can change their mind by engaging on data and this starts with listening.

why do you think that?

based upon what?

so i asked. i got a whole pile of wild accusations and some truly horrendous and false alleged transcriptions of the “dream city” speech and so i challenged people in return.

“it looks to me like you have never actually heard this speech. here it is. see what you think about it in context. happy to discuss, but let’s do it based on the facts, not a straw man portrayal of them.”

“it seems like you have never heard charlie speak to people or to his own views. here are several videos. see what you think about this in context.”

what is really so objectionable here? where is the evil, the menace? can you point to literally one figure opposing him who engages with those he disagrees with so honestly, generously, and openly, who platforms them and lets them speak their piece in their own words? just one who is anything like this tolerant. can you name them? are you sure you have the right bad guy here?

you’ll never win every one of those. i certainly did not. but, it does show you the nature of the people with whom you are seeking to converse. if they will not even look at such things or consider evidence put forward in the simple vein of “well, let’s look at the source material” then you are dealing with an ideologue. if you are, you need to step back and ask them why they are afraid to see the base facts or why, if they will not take 10 minutes to learn them, they feel a need to have such a strong opinion about a topic? surely if this is a matter of such import it warrants 600 seconds to check the facts?

even if you cannot convince them, you’re planting seeds, starting the itch that one day they might scratch by asking “hey, why are the people who keep telling me what to think about what others think so anxious to prevent me from ever hearing those others tell me their views in their own words?”

because that’s a deeply untenable position and the simple question of “if you’re so sure this is true, why won’t you look at the data, at the source material, why won’t you listen to the speech and the speaker? after all, it’s just going to show you how right you are, right?”

this is how minds are changed. not by meeting the expected hate with hate, but by surprising them, by being willing to speak, by being the opposite of what they expected.

you become trustworthy, those who said you were not are revealed to be “the other guy.” but you cannot do this by living down to expectations.

i’m not sure i have ever insulted someone into changing their mind on a topic, but from covid to global warming to politics and even to charlie, i have changed a lot of people’s minds by getting people to engage with data and with speakers.

i have taken people from thinking that the rise of the radical and violent white-supremacist christian nationalist racism industrial complex is the greatest threat to america to seeing that there mostly is no such thing and that to the extent there is, it’s a tiny, marginal group who very few people like or support and that when one really looks at US politics it is, in fact, the right that has moved left, it’s just that the far left has moved left so much faster.

it’s what makes videos like this so powerful.

this was the center left of the 90’s and they are the same people who now call the same policies literally hitler. and i’ll tell you something: this stuff convinces people. they see it and they realize, they see it and they see the nature of those now telling them that anyone who says the very things that they themselves used to say is “literally worse than hitler.”

and trust shifts.

and that breaks the cycle.

this is how you generate memetic immunity.

they suddenly see that they were lied to.

the sources they trusted to tell them who the jackbooted thugs are lose credibility, hoist by their very own petard.

it’s innoclation that you can never accomplish by taking umbrage, only by reaching out, by being the bigger person, by meeting their suspicion and antipathy with engagement.

yeah, it’s hard, but it gets easier and honestly, what’s the useful alternative?

so long as you’re trying to shout down each individual mole in a nation state sized game of whack a mole where each time you do, the mole becomes more likely to trust the next vilification of you and pop up again angrier and more distrustful than ever, you’re cooked.

you have to unplug the game.

when the narrative is “that guy is a jerk/nazi/hates you” you can only break it by not being those things.

the fact this this is emotionally difficult is why they choose this means to attack you. it’s why it works.

stop being the second tango partner in the argument and offer up a different dance.

that is how you build a society worth living in.

yeah, it’s hard, being the bigger one is.

none of us will be perfect at this, but that’s no reason not to seek to be better.

a society worth living in must aggregate around a positive, not a negative.

someone has to start, someone has to win the trust somewhere and venting anger at those sent to provoke you only perpetuates to cycle of provocation.

obviously, there are limits to this and a point past which provocation or attack simply cannot be borne, but while it certainly exists, it is not most people and let’s remember the way home which is getting all the reasonable and decent people into a big tent and then marginalizing the actually marginal and excluding the problem people on both sides who live for and profit from the strife.

that has always been the real america.

and it’s still out there.

we just need to remember.

“ammi right?”