weaponizing confirmation bias

and going back to picking our own friends

there is an old adage: if everyone you meet all day is an asshole, the problem is not the world.

there is a phenomenal amount of truth to that.

i suspect it breaks down into two key components that wind up reinforcing one another:

1. confirmation bias: we see what we expect to see

2. response bias: the responses of others to us key off of how we behave toward them

confirmation/expectation bias is so strong that it needs to be consciously removed from science for the science to have any validity. it’s why clinical trials have to be double, even triple blinded. the patient cannot know if they got drug or or sham for fear of a 2 sided placebo effect. the researcher cannot know either because they will (even if inadvertently) communicate outcome expectations to the patient. they do not need to say a word, just expectation driving decision making, voice, and body cues does it.

pollsters (at least the good ones) are always incredibly wary of this. there have been dozens of experiments where just the act of telling the pollster making calls to expect a 70% positive or a 70% negative response rate skews the results into alignment with expectation. women who went into interviews thinking they were wearing facially disfiguring scar makeup (but who were not) reported discrimination against them for being disfigured. we see what we expect and find what we look for. it’s wired at a neurological level. there’s no fixing it, humans are just like that.

we also get back what we put out into the world. most human communication is non-verbal. confidence, posture, smell, movement, speech speed and tone, mirroring, you name it: it all drives perception of like/dislike, friend/foe, ingroup/outgroup. this is not some flaw, it’s massively adaptive. “hey, does this approaching human seem like a friend who wants to share berries or an enemy that wants to stab me in the liver with a pointy stick” is one of the more acutely critical discernments in reproductive fitness. get it wrong, your genes are no longer with us.

it’s easy to see how this forms feedback loops from base perception:

if i convince you that “people like X hate you” you’ll see people like X and expect hatred. your bearing and tone, your words and even your smell will convey this and the person like X who you encounter will perceive it, sense your apprehension and possible hostility, and will become likely to grow hostile themselves.

you will then detect this (even if it’s not there as you are hyper aware and pre conditioned) and see it as “exactly what you expected” and therefore become more hostile. lather, rise, repeat.

you were just two people with no reason to feel any particular way about one another, but now you’re enemies because someone told one of you to expect to be.

it’s bad enough that we probably all inadvertently do this to ourselves from time to time, but for the would be fomenter of societal strife, this represents a highly weaponizable mechanism.

and boy-howdy have they done so.

a couple core aspects of this idea:

first: 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 were just minding your own business and then someone came up and was a jerk to you. of course you’re indignant.

but the person who was hostile to you? they think it’s your fault. “man, that guy really did hate me! what a jerk!”

the two wind up working like reciprocals:

you got elicited into hatred and they got bias confirmed into it.

this is the functional essence of “shake the jar and make them fight.”

bad part:

now you’re both pissed off and sure you were right and have lost the ability and desire to communicate with one another.

worse part:

neither of you has any idea that it’s all my fault. you blame each other.

worst part:

the person who i told that you hated them will come back to me and say “wow gato, you sure were right!” and then trust me more as i fill their head with other nonsense and weaponize them further and send them out infected with other self-fulfilling prophecies underpinned by biases they will unknowingly confirm.

one keen to play such a game can play it all day and it’s being played out across the world right now.

and it’s a disaster curve because, quite literally, the more times i fool you, the more you trust me and this is turning once functional minds into hyper-credulous banana pudding.

this image was going around twitter and the number of people screaming “trump is a dictator! child abuse! no kings!” over it was pretty special.

those old enough to remember the days of y2k were all laughing. this image is elian gonzales, a child refugee from cuba whose mother died on the crossing. he was taken in by family in miami until the clinton admin sent federal agents to grab the poor niño pequeño and, wait for it, sent him back to cuba.

i literally saw people on twitter claiming that that story was and had to be fake. they could look right at it and not see it. wild times. this led to what i think may hold the world record for “most awesome tweet that literally no human saw” from gatopal don wolt. 306 views, 3 likes (one of them mine).

ridiculous. this is great stuff.

we all keep asking:

CNN has done nothing but lie to you. the UN, the IPCC, the NYT, the WHO, FOX news, they all keep lying to you. why can’t you see it? why won’t you wake up?

we start thinking they must all be stupid or indoctrinated past sanity and discernment.

and sure, some are and always were. there’s not a helluva lot you can do for a person like this:

but what if it’s mostly something else? this huge swathe of america did not just become hopelessly stupid and hostile for no reason.

what if it’s, quite literally, that the TV and media and whatever else told them:

global warming! and then every time it was hot, they said OMG! see! they were right! they get pulled into the confirmation and then see the lie as the truth.

the people who flooded the US with illegals to an extent that can only be handled with widespread and aggressive action then started calling trump a fascist and a police state dictator. they did it knowing damn well that ICE in the streets would serve as confirmation and have used every image as “proof.”

they told their faithful that “conservatives hate you and want to induct you into handmaid’s tale dystopia.” leaving aside the deep (and telling) irony of this claim being made by a group of people who all already seem to own the handmaid outfit, it’s just another setup for inducing belief when roe v wade falls.

this is weaponization of confirmation bias. and it works.

if you never actually go out in the real world and meet real people and you get 90% of your sense of “what people like X are like” from “people like you” and the other 10% from having your bias mirrored back to you by the few people like X you actually do meet as they sense your hostility and return it, you get a societal divorce on irreconcilable terms.

and both sides are doing it. self styled “informed conservatives” talk about san francisco like it’s some tim burton horror of needles and feces and crime with no redeeming graces whatsoever. i was just there in january. it’s lovely. the food is 20 times better than just about any other city in the US. i had a great time. if you want to go focus on the 16th st BART station, yup, you could film a zombie movie there, but it was like that in the 90’s too. 6th and mission used to be about as bad a block as you could find in america. it’s pretty much fine now. yeah, the tenderloin is dodgy, always was. pac heights remains gorgeous. you can go find whatever you’re looking for. and people do. but that’s not “being informed;” it’s being perception shaped.

the internet is the final form of this pokemon.

when you have two groups always expecting the worst of one another and sending their most egregious edgelords, loudmouths, and jerk-as-a-service (JaaS) support reps online to fling poo at one another and rage bait their views up because that’s the money maximizer, you get a hate spiral and the worst 10% of each side get to dictate to the 80% in the middle that there is no middle ground between andrew tate and that dude in a dress who steals luggage. and this is obviously stupid

most of us are americans and happy to be. we ought to be proud to be. and if you want to find perhaps the worst lie and bias injection that media from both sides has injected into the debate it’s (predominantly from the left) that we should be ashamed to be americans and of the american way of life and (increasingly from both sides) that the world hates america and americans.

both of these are unadulterated horse pucky.

america was, is, and shall be the beacon, the city on the hill. yeah, we lose our way sometimes, we make mistakes, but this is fricking america and we deal with it and we move on. we create like no place else in the world ever has. our culture is everywhere. name a chinese movie. name a european tech company of any innovational relevance.

and most of the world loves us.

and when you actually travel, it’s fricking obvious. i hear these sourpuss anti-american liberalistas say “nuh-uh! they hate us! ever since trump i go to paris and they hate us now!” but it’s just nonsense. it’s the preconception and expectation they brought with them running into the general snootiness of parisan waiters and falling prey to attribution bias. i have traveled quite a lot. i NEVER run into this. most people love americans. my friends travel a ton. they report same. i hear the conservatively constipated say that africa is too dangerous for us to even go see. but mostly, it’s lovely. people in south africa will roll right up to you and ask about trump and justin beieber and whether texas is real and people really talk like that.

honestly, very little of the rest of the world is anything like as politically obsessed as the US is at present. this impression of “they all hate us” is mostly coming from a media made up of out of ste elites who profit from shaking the jar to make the bugs fight and political “elites” who seem like nothing so much as the completely out of step english nobility who all spoke french after the norman conquest and used it as a means to exclude everyone else from law and “high culture.” it’s just a bunch of puffed up popinjays pontificating about their transnational davosian worldview as though it were gospel.

they’re masking the fact that no one likes them behind a screen of “you all hate each other.”

but a funny thing happens when you break down those walls and start actually getting a little human contact.

there was this big, weird outpouring of commonality on X this weeked as the new autotranslate feature rolled out and japan and america crashed into each other, started reading one another’s stuff and discovered, hey, you know what, we fricking like each other. it went on all weekend.

where people expected anger, they found humor.

and people rapidly got to the meat of what turns out to be mutual fascination and respect.

i’m not gonna lie, this was super fun. it had a whole aspect of “this is what the internet is for” to it.

BBQ isn't just meat to Americans.
It's family, community, weekends, the scent of their own land.

Showing that to Japan is, in a slightly exaggerated sense,

like "showing the living room of our country."

And the Japanese side probably isn't seeing it just as food terror either.

They're somehow picking up on the boldness, the cheer, the hospitality, the pride of place beyond it.

So while it's a back-and-forth of photos, it's actually become cultural exchange.

read the whole thing, it’s great.

but in essence, what it’s showing us is that, when you drop the preconceptions, allow a little charity and room for misunderstanding and give people some benefit of the doubt, all kinds of fun commonality can emerge.

politics is poison. food is food.

this runs across everyhting.

community, vast, inclusive community and big tent big life humanity lies in sharing the things we love rather than the incessant and insufferable nitpicking and differentiation of the false status of aggrievement theater.

obviously, sure, there are differences that really matter and we do need to care about that, but there are also just a lot of good people running around out there and you’re never going to find them if you wander around thinking they hate you.

and honestly, 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.

why allow the thieves of joy to define your world and your interactions when you can have actual joy instead?

why pick at your differences like unhealing scabs when you can relish them and like each other more instead?

why be offended when you can laugh?

and give the rest of the world a chance too.

here’s a quick acid test: if you find the video that follows offensive, ask why. i find it awesome. as an american, i find it hilarious, flattering even. no other country gets this kind of outpouring of cultural engagement. none.

accept it as the compliment that it is.

are you really so fragile that a chinese guy in a cowboy hat saying “god bless superbowl!” can damage you?

because that seems like a “you” problem.

“oh, it’s culturally insulting!” grow up.

say “ni howdy” instead.

that guy is not offensive, he’s fantastic.

i’d get a cheeseburger. with him anytime. (especially if he can bring that tony guy who makes LED signs)

hell, maybe we could teach him how to not throw a football like a girl.

i’ll bet he’d like that.

now apply this lesson to our domestic situation.

do we really all hate each other this much (or at all) or were we just all told that we do and are we all just out finding the worst in one another because that’s what we expected?

we’re being outrage farmed and worse, we’re being conditioned to trust the very asshats who do it to us.

this does not seem like a practice that has much of a future.

let’s go decide who our own friends should be and decide for ourselves how to feel about one another.

let’s just go be americans again. we’re good at it.

and it’s fun.

seriously, what do you have to lose?

your JaaS subscription fees?