The Fallacy of Mind Reading + The Ladder of Misinference

 In his book Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America, Scott Adams (creator of the Dilbert cartoon series) says: “We humans think we are good judges of what others are thinking. We are not. In fact, we’re dreadful at it. But people being people, we generally believe we are good at it while also believing other people are not.” (I highly recommend Adams’ book.)

Today’s edition of Coffee & COVID newsletter provides a typical example of mind reading.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal defecated a hurt-feelings story headlined, “Alarm Spreads Among U.S. Allies Over Trump’s Demand for Greenland”

In short, the Journal’s ‘news’ article reported that Trump is being mean to European élites, again, and it is making them feel unsafe, again. “Europeans are afraid of Trump,” said Pascal Boniface, director of the Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, a think tank in Paris. The Journal’s inelegantly implied theme, or thrust, was that European leaders’ fear of Trump explains why they didn’t criticize the recent arrest of Venezuelan narco-terrorist Maduro.

This is journalistic misdirection, and I’ll tell you why. The Journal was imputing a motive (fear of Trump) on all European leaders, without admitting that it was editorializing, [NOTE: emphasis added] to diminish the significance of the leaders’ apparent agreement with the move and thereby prevent it from legitimizing Trump’s actions. They only went along because they were afraid, was the Journal’s implied argument, which was dressed up as ‘news.’

Mind reading is one of the most common cognitive errors I see in critical thinking and news reporting.

On a related topic Alex Edmans points out two other common errors in his excellent book May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do about It. As he says in the Introduction: 

We’ll take a deep dive into two psychological biases – confirmation bias and black-and-white thinking – that are the two biggest culprits in causing us to misinterpret information.

Edmans, professor of Finance at London Business School, introduces his Ladder of Misinference. This paragraph in the Introduction summarizes this ladder.

We accept a statement as fact, even if it’s not accurate – the information behind it may be unreliable and may even be misquoted in the first place. We accept a fact as data, even if it’s not representative but a hand-picked example – an exception that doesn’t prove the rule. We accept data as evidence, even if it’s not conclusive and many other interpretations exist. We accept evidence as proof, even if it’s not universal and doesn’t apply in other settings.

May Contain Lies takes a different approach than many of the books I’ve read on critical thinking. Those other books talk about common fallacies and cognitive biases. Edmans plows new ground by offering a new way of looking at statements and claims. Highly recommended!

Loserthink and May Contain Lies are two of my favorite books on critical thinking and being objective. They will help prevent us from falling into thinking traps.

Scott Adams on Censorship and Voting

Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert and host of daily video blog Coffee With Scott Adams on YouTube and Locals) posted this tweet with a provocative thesis.

Censorship determines the narrative. The narrative determines public opinion. Public opinion determines the vote. The vote determines who runs the country.

We have replaced voting with battles over who gets censored.

In response I posted this:

Behind the censorship is the postmodern idea that those who have the most power can decide and determine what is true.

Although I agree with Adams, I think he doesn’t go back far enough to the source of the censorship. The censorship Adams talks about doesn’t spring out of nothing like the Big Bang. We need to identify the beliefs that people use to justify imposing censorship that prevents certain ideas from being expressed or facts from being uncovered.

I believe postmodernism plays a role in many issues. I summarize postmodernism as the belief that there is no objective truth. Therefore, “truth” is determined by those who have the most power over the tools of communication such as social media, news media and over our language which includes the meanings of words and what is considered acceptable uses of these words. (There are some who claim that even silence can be oppressive because if you don’t vocally repudiate something that means you secretly support the “offensive” idea.)

Therefore, I now use the term “partial news” when referring to the news media. (I know, it's not as catchy as Trump's "fake news." I’m also thinking of using “skewed news.”) Here the word “partial” has two meanings. The first meaning refers only part of the story being told so that leads us to the conclusion they want us to reach. The second meaning refers to our news outlets as being partial rather than being impartial (i.e., objective). Postmodernism lies behind this because postmodernists believe there is no objective truth. When the truth and facts no longer serve as a yardstick, your political agenda takes over. News stories can then be crafted to steer us to a predetermined conclusion rather than presenting other sides of the story. 

'Loserthink' by Scott Adams - Narrative Corrections

'Loserthink' by Scott Adams - Narrative Corrections

One of the people I follow on Twitter and locals.com is Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon Dilbert and trained hypnotist who specializes in persuasion. Adams runs a daily video blog where he offers his unique perspective on current events. He is one of the few people who predicted that Trump would win the 2016 presidential election based on what Adams saw in Trump’s methods of persuasion.

I’ve been meaning to review his most recent book, Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America, but the post by Joseph Caskey in the link above does a nice job covering the key points.

What exactly is Loserthink? Per Adams, “Loserthink isn’t about being dumb, and it isn’t about being underinformed. Loserthink is about unproductive ways of thinking.” An example of Loserthink: mind-reading where we claim to know what another person is thinking then “refuting” that thought or intention.

Caskey’s review mentions a couple others such as the slippery slope argument but doesn’t mention one that I see all the time: using analogies to make predictions. Adams gives an example in this interview with Sharyl Attkisson.

I highly recommend Caskey’s review as well as Adams’ Loserthink and his other books. Check out Scott’s Twitter feed (@ScottAdamsSays) and his locals.com community (https://scottadams.locals.com/).

Left vs. Right = Empathy vs. respect?

One of the people I follow closely is Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert and author of several books such as his latest, Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America. Adams was interviewed recently by Hotep Jesus about the protests and riots triggered by the death of George Floyd. I found the interview to be filled with fascinating insights by both Scott and Hotep. While they didn’t agree 100% I liked how the respected each other’s viewpoint. I also was impressed with Scott’s reaction when Hotep said something that Scott didn’t necessarily agree with or didn’t understand the point Hotep was making. Instead of going on the defensive Scott asked Hotep something like “What does that look like?” which got Hotep to flesh out in clearer terms what he was truing to say. It was more like a true conversation than a traditional interview.

Scott commented on Hotep’s claim that Republicans’ and conservatives’ lack of empathy doesn’t resonate with blacks. If I recall correctly Scott said the right emphasizes respect more than empathy and that they suspect those who talk about empathy because it could be used to subvert the rule of law (which the right says protects civilization from collapsing into barbaric chaos).

This comment reminded me of an article Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, posted:  “Where microaggressions really come from:  A sociological account” which comments on a paper titled Microaggression and Moral Cultures by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning. Their paper claims there are three moral cultures: honor which people have to earn, dignity which we have inherently, and victimhood in which people claim to be easily hurt by slights, real or imagined. Haidt posts parts of the paper with key text emphasized.

Here is a quote from the conclusion of the paper, which Haidt provided in his post.

“What we are seeing in these controversies is the clash between dignity and victimhood, much as in earlier times there was a clash between honor and dignity. … One person’s standard provokes another’s grievance, acts of social control themselves are treated as deviant, and unintentional offenses abound. And the conflict will continue. As it does each side will make its case, attracting supporters and winning or losing various battles. But remember that the moral concepts of each side invokes are not free-floating ideas; they are reflections of social organization.”

Why am I bringing up? I might be stretching things a bit too much to force fit into a theory I’m mulling: a parallel between Arnold Kling’s three languages of politics and these moral cultures. Kling claims conservatives explain things in terms of civilization versus barbarism and therefore defend law and order. (Look at how many of Trump’s tweets consist of “Law & order!” in response to the riots. Tucker Carlson has regularly harped on the breakdown of civilization threatened by the riots.) Liberals, on the other hand, see everything in terms of oppressors and the oppressed. Libertarians (who are the smallest and least visible group) focus on freedom versus coercion and advocate protecting individual rights. I’m thinking that conservatives gravitate toward the respect of the “honor” culture (and somewhat to the “dignity” culture) while liberals empathize with the victims of oppression. (Although I think it’s interesting that liberals claim most oppression comes from capitalism, not from the government which they see as the tool to abolish oppression.)

I would admit that conservatives don't fall neatly into the respect culture. I think there are elements that fall into the dignity culture and some into honor. I'm also using honor in a broader sense than personal honor such as honoring tradition, law, the constitution, the family unit, etc.

This leads me to Integral philosopher Ken Wilber who proposes that humans (and cultures) go through stages of mental evolution; he uses colors adopted from Spiral Dynamics, created by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, who based their work on Clare Graves, professor of psychology at Union College in Schenectady, New York. This model describes each stage of evolution. Red refers to gang culture (as in red in tooth and claw), blue for traditional culture with a clearly established hierarchy or pecking order (some conservatives) and laws, orange for Enlightenment values of reason, individualism and hierarchies based on meritocracy (libertarians and some conservatives) and green for liberals and the Green movement in which they denounce hierarchies in favor of egalitarianism. Wilber claims each stage, if it is to be a healthy evolution, should transcend yet include the previous stages. Pathologies set in when the next stage rejects the former stages entirely.

This might sound like New Ago woo-woo stuff but I think there is some merit to these distinctions that can help with the current situation. The trick is to find a way that integrates all of them. If the right wants to make progress with the black community they need to find a way to express their ideas and concerns in terms of empathy or in terms of fighting oppression. The same goes the other way too. If the left wants to be more convincing to those on the right they could coach their ideas more in terms of protecting traditions and civilization or, for libertarian, in terms of protecting rights. (Notice I said “if” in both cases. The problem is that it’s easier to band together with our selected tribe and tut-tut about how bad the other side is rather than making the effort to find ways to explain your position in terms that the other side is more likely to accept.)

I’m sure someone could come up with better ideas but here is a first attempt.

For the right they could say something like, “What happened to Floyd should not occur in a civilized society that recognizes the inherent worth of every person’s life regardless of their race or ethnic background. Just as racism oppresses blacks, excessive use of force by the police AND in response to the police oppress too, neither of which we do not condone.”

Liberals could say something like; “Excessive force does not protect us and, as the resulting riots have shown, contributes to the breakdown of law and order, the very thing we on the left and the right value.” When both sides talk with a libertarian they could say; “What the policeman did to George violated his right to life and due process. The failure of the authorities to protect the people who live or have businesses in the areas ravaged by the riots amounts to violating their rights too.”

I’m not saying this attempt to translate your language into a form that the other side uses will always work. I do think you stand a better chance of being heard than what is happening now which is a cacophony of outrage and demonization of the opposing sides.