Fashion seems to be the most effective form of obedience-conditioning for humans. It blends obedience with vanity. Fashion appeals to vanity and self-esteem to inculcate compliance with capricious directives of some faceless power (of fashion experts), a celebrity, or a group you would like to belong to. It makes you feel special and privileged to be able to diligently follow their commands. It coats blind obedience with the veneer of your own vanity. It gives you social proof: ‘you are onto it, you get it, I seeee you’. And it tastes sexy. Yum. Just like the luscious stars who seduce everyone with… whatever role they were paid to play.
In relation to the opening premise of the essay, I would characterise a perfectly rational society somewhat differently, although perhaps both takes could be interpreted the same way. In a perfectly rational society people are aware of the fundamental laws of sense and do not violate them, they are therefore perfectly consistent and their reasoning is sound (which I argue is implicit in the formal criteria of consistency). It seems that the most common error of logic is when people take confidence for certainty, preponderance of available evidence for a proof, the opinion of influencers as their own rational judgement, and opinion as evidence. Consistency demands that if we cannot ourselves prove P then we cannot claim to know that P, even if under existential pressure we must make an assumption about P. Another way, people seem unaware that most of their beliefs are uncertain and even the probability of their beliefs being true is uncertain. It is easier to believe that everything is obvious.
I think you left out an important bit. It gives you permission to despise others, to denigrate them, make fun of them and treat them badly. There is a lot of demand for this sort of opportunity. Especially if you can immediately claim that those you hurt just 'shouldn't take my opinion so seriously, because it's just fashion' .
When ’my reality’ hinges on obviousness and certainty, everyone who disagrees is guilty of treason against being itself. On the other hand, when people express opinions they are instrumentally referring to others but testifying only about themselves. Opinions amount to talking about ourselves.
I Like'd the scepticism in your original comment above, Michael.
Perhaps the following question should be under one of your own posts, but how do you square "when people express opinions they are instrumentally referring to others but testifying only about themselves. Opinions amount to talking about ourselves" - a form of ethical subjectivism and moral anti-realism - with your 'metanormative realism' https://philpapers.org/archive/KOWODO.pdf?
Not every subjective statement is an opinion (an assertion of fact or norm we do not know to be true); we can subjectively express a priori provable truths, and commonly meaningful ideas. In the use of langue, even when we express only opinions, we are already committed to common meanings, to the objective rules of sense, and some kind of discourse ethic. Opinions do not in general entail ethical subjectivism (which would not make sense: our judgement cannot be subject to a normative principle if the principle is subject to our judgement).
Here is a relevant snippet from a book I am working on:
Every phenomenal experience (perception) is also an instance of sense, intrinsically structured according to the laws of sense: a universal meta-language we know insofar as anything makes sense to us as a definite something ‘being there’ or ‘appearing’. This knowledge is intersubjectively affirmed by the intention to communicate a sense to others and is presupposed in the use of language. Based on this universal constant, common to all conscious agents, a range of logical properties can be deduced a priori from the idealised content of experience.
Yes, we understand each other, and even when we misunderstand each other, further discussion can usually make ourselves understood. For example, I went shopping with my wife and said I wanted some "drawstring pants" because that's what we called them in Oz, but she, being an Irish-Brit, thought that meant underpants until I explained.
Nevertheless, because of your point about our common use of language, I suggest that you omit the "only" from "when people express opinions they are [] testifying only about themselves". If you agree with metaethical realism, they will also be expressing truth-apt statements. They may also sincerely believe they are expressing propositions that refer to objective features of the world, although I would argue they are deluding themselves, which returns us to Fashionable Ideas, because when people express opinions, they also be: emoting; attributing qualities to an object as if those qualities actually belong to it; evaluating; demanding with an imperative; and so on, all subjective anti-realism, and because of that, all changeable, like the drawstring trousers I liked and took off the rack. Until my wife told me to put them back.
Good objection about “only”, but I am not sure whether this is right. I understand ‘opinions’ to be assertions or propositions made without an argument from which the assertion follows as a conclusion. If there is an argument then it is no longer an opinion but a conclusion of an argument. Whereas an opinion refers to meanings held in common, it “testifies” (provides evidence) of our subjective inclination to hold a particular view. It does not testify about what the opinion is nominally about because it is not a form of ‘knowledge’ but only an unsupported claim or proposition. Even though an opinion is expressed in language, the element of opinion does not of itself testify about the common sense of language (this is implied by speech irrespective of content). Perhaps i am splitting hairs here, so I am not strongly committed to this interpretation. It perhaps suffices to say that the subjective content testifies primarily about the subject, and the objective content testifies primarily about the object.
I think that may be too charitable an explanation. At least, I keep meeting people who appear to treat others badly for the fun of it. Why they justify their behaviour may be along these lines you mention, but why then the glee?
I think that if you are in the striver class -- as Vance and Henderson are, by Renn's definition -- and you argue against destructive policy positions at Yale and Cambridge and get told that this marks you as a yokel, you will end up thinking that the elite is at least indifferent to the fact that their policies surely would hurt others more than themselves. But I suspect that the problem here is that members of the striver class tend to argue with each other about such things. Thus anxiety about their social status -- which Henderson was surprised to find the Yale student body being really worried about -- is a striver worry. I suspect there were a lot of people at Yale who weren't strivers, nor socially anxious, who also don't care all that much about what other people think, especially about social matters. But they wouldn't be the people who were having conversations with Henderson about their beliefs and their (possibly non-existent) anxieties: if you find status-competitions boring or irritating, or simply have better things to do with your time you might put Henderson on the list of people to avoid socially. I think 'not caring about the fashionable' is strongly correlated with not being socially anxious. If Henderson became in some way a magnet for the socially anxious, then his convenience sample ought to contain a disproportionate number of people who believe things for the social signalling value alone. But, of course, this is just my opinion, and I have the same convenience sample problem as Henderson -- and no experience with Cambridge or Yale.
Adding to the problem with the 'luxury belief' debate,i think the issue with elites in universities is assuming their expertise in a certain area can transfer to different settings.Sowell has a snarky quote saying intellectuals stay at universities because their ideas don't work.A person with high IQ and a degree in psycology or neuroscience doesn't have the knowledge to manage a basketball team or decide how resources should be allocated at a police station.This probably happens with politicians too and is a reason many socialist economies failed
I really don’t have a dog in this fight but may have an interesting contribution. Socialism enjoyed a successful run in Milwaukee, Wisconsin until the early 1950’s. It succeeded principally because politicians understood that effectively managing infrastructure was key to the growth and broad prosperity in that city. These “Sewer Socialists” received some criticism because their socialism was less than ideologically pure but the city ran smoothly and prosperously in that regime. It failed principally due to its success. While the sewer socialists simply came to work each day to effectively and efficiently run the city they were boring. Milwaukees voters who ultimately came under the spell of demagogues and populists voted them out of office. Socialism failing due to its success is a concept that may rarely come to mind but it also illustrates an emotional tribal adoption of elite concepts being generally socially detrimental. The lesson I suppose is that if you want pragmatism to work, make it sexy.
I’m not deep into the history but as far as I know there are many examples within communism where the problem was pretty much the opposite of what you’re describing. Important positions were usually given to party loyalists or relatives instead of those with education. In Maoist China there was often a suspicious of “bourgeois education”. A lot of mismanagement can plausibly be attributed to this. I think it was usually closer to a belief in pure ideology as a replacement for education than an excessive belief in education. The little red book is all you need. (Pol Pot being the most extreme example)
Very interesting post as usual Dan. Many thoughts come to mind.
The literature on preference falsification, self-censorship, and the spiral of silence suggests that many beliefs are easy to fake or at least disguise. But then they will have limited signalling value. If there is a high level of conformity in a community (pronouns in bios for example) the act starts to signal very little.
This suggests that signalling may take the form of tone rather content of expression. JD Vance is currently being mocked for his comments about cat ladies being mentally unstable, when he could have made pro-natalist arguments in a much less strident and disparaging way. But he was speaking to a different crowd at that time, online influencers on the right, and his meanness perhaps signalled the sincerity of his views.
In general I think the sincerity of beliefs and the choice of tone are interesting extensions to this line of reasoning.
I suspect another dynamic that shapes belief fashions is the continual discovery of the fact that they are in fact fashions—as opposed to genuine beliefs. This discovery yields two different reputational costs for the fashionable believers: they lose epistemic credibility and also look like uncool status seekers. Since there is always an incentive to point out how your rivals’ beliefs are mere fashions, the engine keeps humming and the beliefs keep changing. Perhaps a similar thing happens in clothing: once a style becomes sufficiently common and popular, it becomes easy to infer that the only reason people are wearing it is out of conformity or status-seeking. Thus people stop wearing it lest they look like conformists and status-seekers. And the people who wear it after others have moved on become cringe—they’re not only outed as players of a status game; they’re outed as being bad at it.
All this might create an incentive for fashionable believers to disguise the fact (even from themselves) that they are fashionable believers (“my beliefs are genuinely insightful”), and for fashionistas in the clothing world to disguise the fact (even from themselves) that they are mere conformists and status-seekers (“these clothes genuinely look amazing”). All the status-seeking and conformity and mental gymnastics happens underground, as it nearly always does in our species.
Yes - very good point. Your "social paradoxes" insights here provide another layer. In another post, I wrote about the funny slogan "dress to express, not to impress" - as if the point of spending ages caring about fashion is to express one's inner self, rather than to maximise status. The silliness of that really confirms your analysis, I think.
At the same time, there do seem to be other cases where people know they care about fashion, status-seeking, impression management, etc., and aren't at all embarrassed by it. The kind of world depicted in "Succession" - I'm sure you've seen it - seems like a good example? I'm inclined to think status-seeking must only be disguised under conditions where there are strong egalitarian norms. So there will be quite a bit of cultural and subcultural variability in whether people care about hiding the fact they are status seekers.
Yes, agreed there is likely cultural variability in the degree to which overt status-seeking is socially penalized, and that cultures with greater penalties will exhibit more paradoxical behavior. But I think it’s plausible that there is at least some penalty for it in most societies (it’s an empirical question, obviously). My intuition is that the variation is more intracultural than intercultural. I think the people we call “assholes” are more motivated by overt status-seeking, and/or more willing to admit they’re motivated by it, than the people we think of as nice, and part of the reason we avoid overt status-seeking is to avoid looking like an asshole. Succession is about asshole characters, but I don’t think assholes are so common that they could compose an entire society and shape its norms to be assholish. I’ve yet to find any real-world examples of assholish cultures where self-interested dominance and superiority is prized for its own sake, without any sacred or religious or moralistic justification. Occasionally you might get a small group of sociopaths to coalesce (like in Enron), but my hunch is that these sorts of cultures are very rare.
Yeah, you're probably right. I think what you describe is definitely the norm. It would make for a cool empirical research project to systematically survey lots of cultures and subcultures and identify variation, if any, and if there is variation, what best explains it. Perhaps the closest case I can think of where overt status-seeking and self-aggrandisement occur would be among, say, Mohammed Ali, or many rappers, who are extremely boastful and self-aggrandising, and yet not straightforwardly viewed as "assholes." But you're right that these are strange cases and couldn't form the basis for an entire society.
Thanks. Yea rap is a good counterexample (though it’s of course condemned by conservatives, which might explain why it’s stylish among progressives). Maybe rappers can get away with it because they’re seen as oppressed, and their boastfulness is seen as a kind of bold defiance of racial subordination. Or maybe they get some kind of artistic license in the same way Succession does. Or maybe part of it emerges from gang culture, and gangs self-select for sociopathic types. Not sure.
I think rap and boxing are (in part) dominance games. Boxing is probably the better example of the two In any sport, especially one involving physical combat, trash talking and self aggrandisement are a way of showing dominance over an opponent. It signals the following traits:
1. Fearlessness - trash talking and boasting could motivate your opponent and would make a loss embarrassing (and perhaps more physically painful) so it shows that you are confident you will win and unafraid of your opponent.
2. Superiority over rivals - the fact that you are willing to disrespect your opponent while they may not be willing to disrespect you shows you are above them in the dominance hierarchy. It shows social dominance on top of the physical dominance displayed in the ring.
3. High position within the tribe - a mediocre boxer (or martial artist, american football player, etc.) would face a social penalty for boasting. Better fighters might physically put him in his place, and he may be socially shunned from the group. However, the top dog can handle any physical challenge and is respected enough to be included socially regardless of his personal behavior. From this standpoint, boasting and trash talking a signal of status.
It may be that dominance contests based on individual formidability are less collapsable bc one does not need to mobilize and coordinate with other people to be victorious. Politics is different. You need to rally a winning coalition, and merely seeking dominance or superiority is not a very inspiring message—and it’s a message that is easily attacked by rival coalitions. So politics needs moralistic cover stories in a way that boxing does not.
Yes, there really is nothing more embarrassing and uncool, in either fashion or opinions, then enthusiastically touting/wearing whatever was cool 5 years ago, while not realizing all the cool people have moved on. The good news is that if you just stick with your guns for 25 years until the cool people have all been thoroughly retired and replaced by a new batch who wasn't alive for the first time the fashion came around, they'll rediscover whatever you've stuck with and make it cool again, in a retro manner. These cycles are fairly predictable.
My response was too long to include a note about "pluralistic ignorance," but it seems a rather appropriate mention along your vector here.
What is an especially fun/terrifying dynamic, is the reason people remain unaware about the magnitude of the majority opinion within their own ingroup. The stronger they think the group opinion is AND the farther away their own individual opinion is from that strength, the HARDER they signal and the more awkwardly it comes across. That strength of signaling then plays directly into the reason why everyone thinks the majority have strong opinions, and around it goes until something finally shakes loose.
Another aspect of fashion in the realm of socio-psychological insights and beliefs is the excessive association of particular insights with particular thinkers. For example, I frequently come across on Substacks in this field, comments referenced with "as so-and-so said" where the insight that "so-and-so" (a currently fashionable thinker) is credited with, you could quite likely have heard from your Granny or Grandad reflecting on what their long life has taught them about human behaviour. Or an expansive conversation with friends down the pub after a few drinks. It is one thing to credit Einstein with The Theory of Relativity but socio-psychological insights are of a different, more widely diffused kind. I think Henderson is a case in point. He is an impressive young intellectual (I subscribe to his 'stack) but I first came across the essence of the 'luxury beliefs' thesis in a book written in the early 1990s.
Yes, very good point. I encounter this all the time. There is a tendency to treat thinkers as prestigious gurus. Academics will often take some banality put preface it with “As Foucault said…” or something similar.
The initial contrast doesn't quite work in my opinion. It's not rational to rely solely on one's own rational belief-forming mechanisms. Much more rational to cooperate, trust, defer and so on.
Of course, all these things do come with their own problems!
Thanks. And yes, I agree. But even when we rely on social learning and deference, there are more or less rational ways of doing these things - and I think people reliably fall short for the kinds of reasons I mention in the post.
I tend to resist the idea that deference and trust (which is functionally deferring deference) can be anything but rational at the local, "should have done otherwise" level. It may be because I tend to reify "rational" towards middle-out "proportionate," which leaves people essentially rational by default. I tend to the think that the ask of the individual is to instead be "sensible," the downstream effect of which other sensible people will naturally recognize as rational.
I think the idea of using beliefs to signal allegiance with some group is very true and holds a lot of similarity to fashion. That seems like the only reasonable explanation for large groups who hold similar yet unrelated ideas, such that if someone believes in A, you can predict they also believe in B, although A and B are intellectually unrelated
using ideas to signal that we're close to the source of information I am not sure is true. Can't think of much evidence of that
I feel it's a lot more a case of association as you described. If I want to associate myself with whatever group I think is cool, I am more likely to embrace their fashion and ideas. At the same time, the reason I think they are cool probably has something to do with how their ideas resonates with me in the first place. So I think it's a bit of a cycle, where I think group A are cool because their ideal 1 is cool, so I end up embracing their idea 2 and 3 as well, just now I think 2 and 3 are cool bevause group A holds them, not the other way around
Another element worth exploring is the particular aesthetic and intuitive appeal of these beliefs and ideas in their own right, totally aside from social considerations. Some lists of criteria for what constitutes a good scientific theory have included the criterion that it be beautiful or aesthetically compelling. Similarly, there might be relationships between the fashionableness of certain ideas in a social context, and the aesthetic quality of their more structural features.
I'm not so sure that luxury beliefs as elaborated by Henderson (or even Mounk) is the best example of aesthetics, though. As someone who grew up in an Ivy League town and spent decades in and around that culture - and feel intimately familiar with its more obnoxious and privileged elements - I find this framework reductive and unsatisfying. First of all, there's a crucial difference between positive social incentives around *expressing* certain beliefs, and negative incentives around possible costs of any hypothetical *policies* based on those expressed beliefs. The first is immediate and concrete in its consequences, but only concerns yourself; whereas the second is distal and abstract, with consequences that concern both yourself and others. So these respective motivational structures (direct consequences of expressing beliefs vs. downstream consequences of policies implied by the beliefs) function quite differently and reflect an inherent asymmetry whether one is elite or non-elite, which the luxury beliefs account tends to gloss over when it mashes them together. Hence, Dan's observation that "the relationship between lived experiences and consequences of policies is extremely complex and opaque."
Second, I don't see what the luxury beliefs framing really adds that can't be explained more parsimoniously with general principles. Clearly there is a basic truth that being very privileged tends to mean less "skin in the game," since you're likely to be more insulated from the effects of just about *any* policy you hold forth about, which puts you at risk for bias and motivated reasoning. If the belief in question also happens to be popular among your social circles, then you are doubly at risk. But to me, this merely indicates two potential sources of non-epistemic motivation, not a fundamentally polluted class of beliefs cohering as a distinct social kind. Thoughtlessly adopting socially convenient but superficial beliefs, while blithely disregarding some of the implications, is certainly something that immature college students do - but so what? Skin-in-the-game (Taleb etc.) is a powerful principle that applies to all sorts of phenomena.
If anything, "luxury beliefs" seems like a good example of something that has become popular in some circles as much by dint of its fashionable appeal as its substantive claim (and maybe also appeals to our negative stereotypes of narcissistic rich kids).
The point about ideas having a kind of intrinsic aesthetic appeal of the sort that is relevant to scientific theory evaluation is a very good one. I don't know why that didn't occur to me when writing this piece. This would be really interesting to explore in non-scientific contexts. (I'm not aware of anyone who has done that).
Also: "....two potential sources of non-epistemic motivation, not a fundamentally polluted class of beliefs cohering as a distinct social kind." - Yes, that is a very good way of putting it.
To be fair, I finally read Yascha Mounk's article more carefully, and he does refine the concept in a way that is a big improvement, while insisting it still qualifies as a distinct, coherent social kind. But I see lingering issues even with his version. The core of the concept making it distinctive remains a specifically *moral* critique; the relationship of this to the epistemic component is complex and deserves to be parsed better.
Relatedly, I think any robust account of luxury beliefs needs to engage with (or at least acknowledge) the much older concept of standpoint epistemology, which has been around in feminist thought for decades and speaks to a second feature having more to do with knowledge than motivation: lack of personal experience and expertise around the belief in question, i.e. not knowing what the hell you're talking about. For instance, Henderson speaks with a degree of epistemic authority by virtue of having grown up experiencing firsthand the realities of poverty and instability, witnessing negative impacts of well-intentioned policies, and other lived wisdom (like having to navigate Yale as an outsider). Now that he is successful, he's probably insulated from the material effects of many beliefs - but his life experience might help buffer against luxury beliefs.
I suspect that the fashion analogy is even more fitting because some of these beliefs are attractive because of the aesthetics. The aesthetic of fascist uniforms are appealing to a lot of young men (I think they look ridiculous, but I'm a woman with very distinct aesthetic) and there are beliefs that come along with clothes. You can see something similar with the punk rock subcultures: there are far left and far right punk subcultures, but if you're wearing a shirt with an anarchy symbol it makes sense to at least sot of buy into it.
That's just the fashion aesthetics. I would guess that there are plenty of people who adopt odd beliefs because they like the intellectual aesthetics of the argument for those beliefs -- the new atheism movement of the '00's appealed to a lot of people because the beliefs, some of which were not very popular at all, were supposed to have been arrived at via reason unlike normal people's beliefs. I'm on the US West Coast and the proponents of "defund the police" saw this as a reimagining of public safety. Unlike the police reform movements that focused on fixing the system, defunding meant finding new (and in my view naive) ways of thinking about the basic concept of public safety. There is something appealing about the intellectual aesthetics of viewing public safety as a DIY project. I'm not sure if "aesthetics" is the right term for this phenomena, but it's something similar to aesthetics.
Great points. I think “aesthetics” is probably the right word in these cases - and you’re right they’re different from what I had in mind in the piece. In general, the “aesthetics” of epistemology just seems like an under-studied area.
What you are calling intellectual aesthetics captures a lot of what I was trying to get at in my own comment about the inherent aesthetic qualities of the belief itself, as opposed to the social and fashion aesthetics Dan was highlighting. I totally agree that "defund the police" had an additional connotation of visionary re-imagining of the very conditions for society. Perhaps the term for the phenomena you're looking for relates to this "imagination" piece.
Is the "apparent absurdity" of "defund the police" Henderson's stance or yours?
Because afaik, the full demand is "defund the police and invest the money in other approaches to the problems for which police are called, e.g. addiction treatment, mental health care, social workers, food banks etc.", with the expectation that that then avoids overpolicing, racial profiling, and unarmed people of color killed for no reason except a police person's fear. And in that case, it's only absurd if throwing more police, armed police, militarized police, at the problem is more effective than the other interventions. (which would surprise me, tbh)
Which then incidentally connects nicely to your writing about why people believe certain things: especially in a US context, I suspect that "vulnerable poor person(s) in crime-ridden neighborhood(s)" have mainly or only seen police as "solutions" (and if police is the only game in town than more police probably improves things somewhat) and are being told by law-and-order politicians in both parties that more police = better. So of course, this is what they'll believe.
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Somewhat separate from that, do you have an example for "ordinary people commonly endorse socialist policies that make their lives worse; at the same time, they also often exhibit hostility to generous forms of welfare and subtler forms of state intervention that would make their lives better."? Because I couldn't come up with something based on my experience as a left-winger and with left-wingers.
Re. defund the police: You raise a really important point here. I thought about going into that in the essay (similar to the nuance I tried to add to the "drug criminalisation issue"), but decided it was too long already and didn't want to get too bogged down. (One wouldn't know it from the length of these posts but I actually cut a lot from them...) You're completely right the charitable interpretation of "defund the police" involves a policy preference that is not absurd (even if some people - maybe a minority - who endorse the slogan do have absurd policy preferences or simply don't think carefully about the issue at all).
Re. socialist policies and opposition to welfare: For the former, I had in mind popular support for left-wing populist ideas throughout Latin America that end up having negative consequences. For the latter: in the UK, a considerable number of working class and poor people favour "austerity" policies because they dislike "benefits scroungers." Similar to how white working class people in the US have favoured right-wing quasi-libertarian economic policies that have hurt their material interests.
Of course, one could contest any of these examples (based on one's views about what policies have good/bad effects) but I think the more general point that people frequently endorse policies that hurt their interests is pretty uncontroversial, whatever one's first-order political views are.
Absolutely agree re: the austerity "paradox". Guess that one also goes back to the question of why people believe certain things (and how much mainstream media writing is misinformation ;)), and, of course, Marx' "false consciousness".
I was just surprised by your claim that there are people who are in favor of socialist policies but against social-democratic ones, and your examples *do* in fact mention different populations.
Yes, I was thinking that "defund the police" has often been interpreted very literally as "eliminate all police" or "eliminate 100% of police funding," when just as often it's a coded way of expressing opposition to excessive funding that mostly goes toward toxic militarization of police. Of course, there is a separate conversation about the degree of responsibility to say exactly what we mean and not apply misleading slogans. But sometimes the actual meaning and implication of a professed belief is not identical to its linguistic form. The "All Lives Matter" objection to "Black Lives Matter" is another example of taking the semantics too literally.
The problem is of course that a slogan needs to be pithy - "Defund the police" can be chanted during a protest, with "defund the police and invest the money in other approaches to the problems for which police are called, e.g. addiction treatment, mental health care, social workers, food banks etc." one probably loses the crowd. ;)
Dan, If I might be so bold, I think the elements in play may benefit from a particular reference frame, but I likely need to over-set the table with a few familiar, yet subtly different tools. I have mentioned before treating confirmation bias and "conformation bias" as two lenses which together form a kind of binocular vision. Below is my attempt at demonstrating the subtle differences, what I am calling the Susan B. Linda problem:
Susan is a human. Humans have confirmation bias. Susan wants to believe a thing.
Which is more likely to be true of Susan:
A. Susan has confirmation bias.
B. Susan has confirmation bias and is wrong about the thing.
Assuming you are familiar with Kahneman & Tversky's Linda problem, you likely recognized that B was going to automatically be the answer before you had even fully processed the information of what was being asked. This predisposition is what I will claim is the "real" confirmation bias in action, a sort of structurally applied learning toward an initial leaning. However, processing the content might cause a bit of dissonance as if, instinctively, wanting to believe a thing + confirmation bias = more likely to be wrong about that thing, making option B strangely attractive. I speculate that most scientists that are familiar with the original Linda problem would answer A when asked, but implicit in their behavior is that B is true.
I suggest that the reason this would be true is because conformity to scientific culture includes pushback against confirmation bias, as indeed, it is the favored tool of every pseudoscientist and conspiracy theorist. What becomes of the conception of confirmation bias, however, is akin to AI eating its own tail: wanting and believing converge to rhetorical equivalence with confirmation bias.
The original Linda problem was thought to operate according to the representativeness heuristic, and that is at least compatible with increasingly favoring the description of Linda by what is anticipated to be socially representative of what others would also favor. The Susan problem, on the other hand, might be considered as much "anchored" by the original Linda problem as representative of it. Conversely, the attraction to B as being more likely may include implicit, representative conformity with a science-oriented peer group. Most importantly, both types of bias are presumed to be both dialectically opposing and always present, akin perhaps to bilateral hemispheric specialization and integration.
Attempting some modicum of nominal brevity, I will rapidly cycle through first approximation (and not entirely fair) summaries of the presented perspectives from this frame of reference:
1. Henderson's conception of "luxury beliefs" effectively accuses elites of both confirmation and conformation biases, with hints of "willfulness."
2. Teslo rightly counters with her rule of thumb summary of "Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to conformism," highlighting the equivalent of the more subtle, "primordial" role of the active ingredient that I call "conformation bias."
3. Mounk's response effectively lightens the load again by pointing out that insulation from the effects also comes with natural lack of consideration, which is effectively (through some rather generous self-interpretation) noting the lack of would-be confirmation biasing that would come with real exposure to negative effects.
4. Dan, your response rounds this out by pointing out (effectively and with generous reinterpretation) that confirmation bias alone is insufficient.
What I want to point out is that seen this way, these biases appear to be dialectically formative before we get our conscious mitts on their products, and our dialectical negotiations of those products include dialectically untangling, which is a rather remarkable reverse engineering process.
I will resist the urge to go further, except to mention three wrap-up syntheses:
1. A perspective mired in confirmation bias will see a perspective mired in "conformation bias" as "conspiratorial," but the products of unchecked conformation bias are by no means any less convergent with the products of actual conspiracy on account of a real lack of intent.
2. A perspective mired in "conformation bias" will see a perspective mired in contrarian confirmation bias as "willfully ignorant." If both biases are dialectically formative, the magnitude of one will always be locally justifiable by the contrary magnitude of the other.
3. As regards the rest of the post, it may be worth recognizing that "trending" has a more organic implication of pre-intentional influences, while "fashion" seems to have a more intentional implication, at least of an inflection point, whereafter "trending fashion" might best describe the dynamic interplay.
I've always considered "being trendy" as closely analogous to the peacock's tail. The trendy person is demonstrating that he has is strong and successful enough to have spare time and resources for this non functional pursuit. And as you suggest it takes similar time and resources to become fluent in fashionable beliefs, whether that's the minutiae of Qanon or Post structuralism or New Age Goopiness. Striving to believe stuff that is objectively true is a minority taste.
"Striving to believe stuff that is objectively true is a minority taste."
The True.
Intellect is a voluntary tax on our more instinctive needs and desires, which only a small percentage of Homo sapiens are willing to pay to achieve some level of membership in the Erudition, Reason, and Discernment Club.
And most of those that do, do so in specialized areas, rather than in relatively holistic breadth required to address and overcome all the problems we Homo sapiens create.
The overwhelming majority - and often far more - instead rely on oft impoverished, destructive heuristics. Such as emotion, tradition, groupthink (tribalism, nations, political parties, politicians, superstition / mythology, very large informal groups with similar absurd and abusive sexual beliefs), violence, apathy, evasion, denial, social norms, instinct, ignorance, etc.
Yes us members of the ERD clique do more for humanity. BUT members of the Christianity clique and the MAGA cult will say exactly the same about their grouping too. For myself I do find the intellectual coherence and ingenious fact checking personally satisfying apart from the social side of it all in terms of group coherence.
Just one issue with the narrowness of politicults, mythology, and other beliefs, is well summarized by an attribution to German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860:
"Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world."
He is incredibly insightful for a dead person, wouldn't you say? More so than most all now living, in my experience.
Last night I wandered down the rabbit hole of several of your essays, and note your love of hiking and (at least appreciation for) climbing. Perhaps you find nature and physical exercise more fulfilling than listening to humanity's endless nonsense? Terrific for physical fitness and nature appreciation. Your enthusiasm makes me want to do some hiking.
As I am more cerebral than physical, I focused on your Plus fours post to expand my vocabulary regarding often antique attire. Plus twos, plus sixes, plus eights. Also: knickers, knickerbockers, pedal pushers, capris, and what I somewhat now desire: man-pris. I l-o-v-e that essay of yours!
Yes pretty sharp that Schopenhauer. Glad you're enjoying my rabbit hole 🐰... Not all verbiage is worthless this Dan Williams whose discussion we're coat tailing in has sensible things to say ( well he's a Cambridge UK philosopher looks like). I'm prone to a bit of verbiage myself. Hills yes former climbing times yes but lover of the language as well
> And the misunderstood-by-outsiders aspect may not be just a coincidence, but part of a mechanism of action. Like with slang or inside jokes, if you only have a shallow or partial understanding you may end up engaging awkwardly or disfluently, which marks you as an outsider or low-status neophyte to the insiders. Being able to tell who is who and where they stand can be useful to a social animal. The garish and gaudy Donald Trump is famously derided as “the poor person’s idea of a rich person”, since the typical member of the upper class tends toward understated elegance. Thinking that conspiracy theorists or believers in the supernatural ought to be acting outlandishly may be an analogous “outsider’s idea of an insider” – a not-quite-accurate over-extrapolation from limited information.
I was going to expand on that idea by using fashion as an example, it establishes a hierarchy: you have people on the bottom who can be scorned for not "following the rules" (presumably because they don't know them), people in the middle who have some complicated mix of following rules and having "rules" enforced on them, and people at the top who are allowed to transcend rules. I was originally going to say that this is more complicated than the Thorsten Veblen model of luxury goods but as I was pondering I realized that the classic luxury goods thing isn't as simple as I first thought. The rich people who are actually purchasing the goods aren't the only participants in the system, you can also participate in the system by adopting a subordinate role: "That is a nice thing *for rich people* and it is my place to admire it from afar". And the *relative costs* of luxury goods is also complicated: the super-rich can basically afford anything so monetary costs are irrelevant to them -- the costs matter more in the aspirational tiers below the top where it's a more complicated tradeoff game. There are similar things in fashion: "that looks good on that beautiful/stylish person but I couldn't pull it off myself". But there are also fashion misfires: looks that seem ridiculous rather than aspirational even when they're on super-attractive people. I think this is analogous to beliefs that end up in little bubbles (conspiracy theories, flavor-of-the-month progressivism, etc.) -- they're status markers without broad agreement about the polarity of the axis.
I find the comparison between clothing fashion and fashionable beliefs interesting. It's a useful analogy but there are at least two key differences:
1. Everyone acknowledges that clothes are designed to look good. While they can serve functional purposes as well, no one denies that looking good is a major reason you wear the clothes you wear. People often admit they wear clothes because they are in style. For example, 10 years ago long baggy gym shorts and swim trunks were in style so I wore them. Now gym shorts and swim trunks tend to be shorter so I started wearing shorter ones. I don't feel bad saying that. On the other hand, I would never admit to holding a belief because it's fashionable and it would be embarrassing if I did.
2. Beliefs are ostensibly about describing the world accurately and making society better. There is a clear tension between this ostensible purpose and the social purpose of gaining acceptance and status with your peers. I just don't see a similar tension when it comes to clothing fashion.
Fashion seems to be the most effective form of obedience-conditioning for humans. It blends obedience with vanity. Fashion appeals to vanity and self-esteem to inculcate compliance with capricious directives of some faceless power (of fashion experts), a celebrity, or a group you would like to belong to. It makes you feel special and privileged to be able to diligently follow their commands. It coats blind obedience with the veneer of your own vanity. It gives you social proof: ‘you are onto it, you get it, I seeee you’. And it tastes sexy. Yum. Just like the luscious stars who seduce everyone with… whatever role they were paid to play.
In relation to the opening premise of the essay, I would characterise a perfectly rational society somewhat differently, although perhaps both takes could be interpreted the same way. In a perfectly rational society people are aware of the fundamental laws of sense and do not violate them, they are therefore perfectly consistent and their reasoning is sound (which I argue is implicit in the formal criteria of consistency). It seems that the most common error of logic is when people take confidence for certainty, preponderance of available evidence for a proof, the opinion of influencers as their own rational judgement, and opinion as evidence. Consistency demands that if we cannot ourselves prove P then we cannot claim to know that P, even if under existential pressure we must make an assumption about P. Another way, people seem unaware that most of their beliefs are uncertain and even the probability of their beliefs being true is uncertain. It is easier to believe that everything is obvious.
I think you left out an important bit. It gives you permission to despise others, to denigrate them, make fun of them and treat them badly. There is a lot of demand for this sort of opportunity. Especially if you can immediately claim that those you hurt just 'shouldn't take my opinion so seriously, because it's just fashion' .
When ’my reality’ hinges on obviousness and certainty, everyone who disagrees is guilty of treason against being itself. On the other hand, when people express opinions they are instrumentally referring to others but testifying only about themselves. Opinions amount to talking about ourselves.
I Like'd the scepticism in your original comment above, Michael.
Perhaps the following question should be under one of your own posts, but how do you square "when people express opinions they are instrumentally referring to others but testifying only about themselves. Opinions amount to talking about ourselves" - a form of ethical subjectivism and moral anti-realism - with your 'metanormative realism' https://philpapers.org/archive/KOWODO.pdf?
Not every subjective statement is an opinion (an assertion of fact or norm we do not know to be true); we can subjectively express a priori provable truths, and commonly meaningful ideas. In the use of langue, even when we express only opinions, we are already committed to common meanings, to the objective rules of sense, and some kind of discourse ethic. Opinions do not in general entail ethical subjectivism (which would not make sense: our judgement cannot be subject to a normative principle if the principle is subject to our judgement).
Here is a relevant snippet from a book I am working on:
Every phenomenal experience (perception) is also an instance of sense, intrinsically structured according to the laws of sense: a universal meta-language we know insofar as anything makes sense to us as a definite something ‘being there’ or ‘appearing’. This knowledge is intersubjectively affirmed by the intention to communicate a sense to others and is presupposed in the use of language. Based on this universal constant, common to all conscious agents, a range of logical properties can be deduced a priori from the idealised content of experience.
Yes, we understand each other, and even when we misunderstand each other, further discussion can usually make ourselves understood. For example, I went shopping with my wife and said I wanted some "drawstring pants" because that's what we called them in Oz, but she, being an Irish-Brit, thought that meant underpants until I explained.
Nevertheless, because of your point about our common use of language, I suggest that you omit the "only" from "when people express opinions they are [] testifying only about themselves". If you agree with metaethical realism, they will also be expressing truth-apt statements. They may also sincerely believe they are expressing propositions that refer to objective features of the world, although I would argue they are deluding themselves, which returns us to Fashionable Ideas, because when people express opinions, they also be: emoting; attributing qualities to an object as if those qualities actually belong to it; evaluating; demanding with an imperative; and so on, all subjective anti-realism, and because of that, all changeable, like the drawstring trousers I liked and took off the rack. Until my wife told me to put them back.
Good objection about “only”, but I am not sure whether this is right. I understand ‘opinions’ to be assertions or propositions made without an argument from which the assertion follows as a conclusion. If there is an argument then it is no longer an opinion but a conclusion of an argument. Whereas an opinion refers to meanings held in common, it “testifies” (provides evidence) of our subjective inclination to hold a particular view. It does not testify about what the opinion is nominally about because it is not a form of ‘knowledge’ but only an unsupported claim or proposition. Even though an opinion is expressed in language, the element of opinion does not of itself testify about the common sense of language (this is implied by speech irrespective of content). Perhaps i am splitting hairs here, so I am not strongly committed to this interpretation. It perhaps suffices to say that the subjective content testifies primarily about the subject, and the objective content testifies primarily about the object.
I think that may be too charitable an explanation. At least, I keep meeting people who appear to treat others badly for the fun of it. Why they justify their behaviour may be along these lines you mention, but why then the glee?
Aaron Renn, writing about J D Vance tosses off a line about distinguishing between 'the middle class' and 'the striver class'. https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/how-jd-vance-rejected-evangelicalism
I think that if you are in the striver class -- as Vance and Henderson are, by Renn's definition -- and you argue against destructive policy positions at Yale and Cambridge and get told that this marks you as a yokel, you will end up thinking that the elite is at least indifferent to the fact that their policies surely would hurt others more than themselves. But I suspect that the problem here is that members of the striver class tend to argue with each other about such things. Thus anxiety about their social status -- which Henderson was surprised to find the Yale student body being really worried about -- is a striver worry. I suspect there were a lot of people at Yale who weren't strivers, nor socially anxious, who also don't care all that much about what other people think, especially about social matters. But they wouldn't be the people who were having conversations with Henderson about their beliefs and their (possibly non-existent) anxieties: if you find status-competitions boring or irritating, or simply have better things to do with your time you might put Henderson on the list of people to avoid socially. I think 'not caring about the fashionable' is strongly correlated with not being socially anxious. If Henderson became in some way a magnet for the socially anxious, then his convenience sample ought to contain a disproportionate number of people who believe things for the social signalling value alone. But, of course, this is just my opinion, and I have the same convenience sample problem as Henderson -- and no experience with Cambridge or Yale.
Adding to the problem with the 'luxury belief' debate,i think the issue with elites in universities is assuming their expertise in a certain area can transfer to different settings.Sowell has a snarky quote saying intellectuals stay at universities because their ideas don't work.A person with high IQ and a degree in psycology or neuroscience doesn't have the knowledge to manage a basketball team or decide how resources should be allocated at a police station.This probably happens with politicians too and is a reason many socialist economies failed
I really don’t have a dog in this fight but may have an interesting contribution. Socialism enjoyed a successful run in Milwaukee, Wisconsin until the early 1950’s. It succeeded principally because politicians understood that effectively managing infrastructure was key to the growth and broad prosperity in that city. These “Sewer Socialists” received some criticism because their socialism was less than ideologically pure but the city ran smoothly and prosperously in that regime. It failed principally due to its success. While the sewer socialists simply came to work each day to effectively and efficiently run the city they were boring. Milwaukees voters who ultimately came under the spell of demagogues and populists voted them out of office. Socialism failing due to its success is a concept that may rarely come to mind but it also illustrates an emotional tribal adoption of elite concepts being generally socially detrimental. The lesson I suppose is that if you want pragmatism to work, make it sexy.
I’m not deep into the history but as far as I know there are many examples within communism where the problem was pretty much the opposite of what you’re describing. Important positions were usually given to party loyalists or relatives instead of those with education. In Maoist China there was often a suspicious of “bourgeois education”. A lot of mismanagement can plausibly be attributed to this. I think it was usually closer to a belief in pure ideology as a replacement for education than an excessive belief in education. The little red book is all you need. (Pol Pot being the most extreme example)
Very interesting post as usual Dan. Many thoughts come to mind.
The literature on preference falsification, self-censorship, and the spiral of silence suggests that many beliefs are easy to fake or at least disguise. But then they will have limited signalling value. If there is a high level of conformity in a community (pronouns in bios for example) the act starts to signal very little.
This suggests that signalling may take the form of tone rather content of expression. JD Vance is currently being mocked for his comments about cat ladies being mentally unstable, when he could have made pro-natalist arguments in a much less strident and disparaging way. But he was speaking to a different crowd at that time, online influencers on the right, and his meanness perhaps signalled the sincerity of his views.
In general I think the sincerity of beliefs and the choice of tone are interesting extensions to this line of reasoning.
Yes, very good point - completely agree.
I suspect another dynamic that shapes belief fashions is the continual discovery of the fact that they are in fact fashions—as opposed to genuine beliefs. This discovery yields two different reputational costs for the fashionable believers: they lose epistemic credibility and also look like uncool status seekers. Since there is always an incentive to point out how your rivals’ beliefs are mere fashions, the engine keeps humming and the beliefs keep changing. Perhaps a similar thing happens in clothing: once a style becomes sufficiently common and popular, it becomes easy to infer that the only reason people are wearing it is out of conformity or status-seeking. Thus people stop wearing it lest they look like conformists and status-seekers. And the people who wear it after others have moved on become cringe—they’re not only outed as players of a status game; they’re outed as being bad at it.
All this might create an incentive for fashionable believers to disguise the fact (even from themselves) that they are fashionable believers (“my beliefs are genuinely insightful”), and for fashionistas in the clothing world to disguise the fact (even from themselves) that they are mere conformists and status-seekers (“these clothes genuinely look amazing”). All the status-seeking and conformity and mental gymnastics happens underground, as it nearly always does in our species.
Yes - very good point. Your "social paradoxes" insights here provide another layer. In another post, I wrote about the funny slogan "dress to express, not to impress" - as if the point of spending ages caring about fashion is to express one's inner self, rather than to maximise status. The silliness of that really confirms your analysis, I think.
At the same time, there do seem to be other cases where people know they care about fashion, status-seeking, impression management, etc., and aren't at all embarrassed by it. The kind of world depicted in "Succession" - I'm sure you've seen it - seems like a good example? I'm inclined to think status-seeking must only be disguised under conditions where there are strong egalitarian norms. So there will be quite a bit of cultural and subcultural variability in whether people care about hiding the fact they are status seekers.
Yes, agreed there is likely cultural variability in the degree to which overt status-seeking is socially penalized, and that cultures with greater penalties will exhibit more paradoxical behavior. But I think it’s plausible that there is at least some penalty for it in most societies (it’s an empirical question, obviously). My intuition is that the variation is more intracultural than intercultural. I think the people we call “assholes” are more motivated by overt status-seeking, and/or more willing to admit they’re motivated by it, than the people we think of as nice, and part of the reason we avoid overt status-seeking is to avoid looking like an asshole. Succession is about asshole characters, but I don’t think assholes are so common that they could compose an entire society and shape its norms to be assholish. I’ve yet to find any real-world examples of assholish cultures where self-interested dominance and superiority is prized for its own sake, without any sacred or religious or moralistic justification. Occasionally you might get a small group of sociopaths to coalesce (like in Enron), but my hunch is that these sorts of cultures are very rare.
Yeah, you're probably right. I think what you describe is definitely the norm. It would make for a cool empirical research project to systematically survey lots of cultures and subcultures and identify variation, if any, and if there is variation, what best explains it. Perhaps the closest case I can think of where overt status-seeking and self-aggrandisement occur would be among, say, Mohammed Ali, or many rappers, who are extremely boastful and self-aggrandising, and yet not straightforwardly viewed as "assholes." But you're right that these are strange cases and couldn't form the basis for an entire society.
Thanks. Yea rap is a good counterexample (though it’s of course condemned by conservatives, which might explain why it’s stylish among progressives). Maybe rappers can get away with it because they’re seen as oppressed, and their boastfulness is seen as a kind of bold defiance of racial subordination. Or maybe they get some kind of artistic license in the same way Succession does. Or maybe part of it emerges from gang culture, and gangs self-select for sociopathic types. Not sure.
I think rap and boxing are (in part) dominance games. Boxing is probably the better example of the two In any sport, especially one involving physical combat, trash talking and self aggrandisement are a way of showing dominance over an opponent. It signals the following traits:
1. Fearlessness - trash talking and boasting could motivate your opponent and would make a loss embarrassing (and perhaps more physically painful) so it shows that you are confident you will win and unafraid of your opponent.
2. Superiority over rivals - the fact that you are willing to disrespect your opponent while they may not be willing to disrespect you shows you are above them in the dominance hierarchy. It shows social dominance on top of the physical dominance displayed in the ring.
3. High position within the tribe - a mediocre boxer (or martial artist, american football player, etc.) would face a social penalty for boasting. Better fighters might physically put him in his place, and he may be socially shunned from the group. However, the top dog can handle any physical challenge and is respected enough to be included socially regardless of his personal behavior. From this standpoint, boasting and trash talking a signal of status.
It may be that dominance contests based on individual formidability are less collapsable bc one does not need to mobilize and coordinate with other people to be victorious. Politics is different. You need to rally a winning coalition, and merely seeking dominance or superiority is not a very inspiring message—and it’s a message that is easily attacked by rival coalitions. So politics needs moralistic cover stories in a way that boxing does not.
Yes, there really is nothing more embarrassing and uncool, in either fashion or opinions, then enthusiastically touting/wearing whatever was cool 5 years ago, while not realizing all the cool people have moved on. The good news is that if you just stick with your guns for 25 years until the cool people have all been thoroughly retired and replaced by a new batch who wasn't alive for the first time the fashion came around, they'll rediscover whatever you've stuck with and make it cool again, in a retro manner. These cycles are fairly predictable.
Ha - sticking with one’s guns for 25 years and being deemed uncool throughout much of that period is quite a high cost, though.
My response was too long to include a note about "pluralistic ignorance," but it seems a rather appropriate mention along your vector here.
What is an especially fun/terrifying dynamic, is the reason people remain unaware about the magnitude of the majority opinion within their own ingroup. The stronger they think the group opinion is AND the farther away their own individual opinion is from that strength, the HARDER they signal and the more awkwardly it comes across. That strength of signaling then plays directly into the reason why everyone thinks the majority have strong opinions, and around it goes until something finally shakes loose.
Good times.
Another aspect of fashion in the realm of socio-psychological insights and beliefs is the excessive association of particular insights with particular thinkers. For example, I frequently come across on Substacks in this field, comments referenced with "as so-and-so said" where the insight that "so-and-so" (a currently fashionable thinker) is credited with, you could quite likely have heard from your Granny or Grandad reflecting on what their long life has taught them about human behaviour. Or an expansive conversation with friends down the pub after a few drinks. It is one thing to credit Einstein with The Theory of Relativity but socio-psychological insights are of a different, more widely diffused kind. I think Henderson is a case in point. He is an impressive young intellectual (I subscribe to his 'stack) but I first came across the essence of the 'luxury beliefs' thesis in a book written in the early 1990s.
Yes, very good point. I encounter this all the time. There is a tendency to treat thinkers as prestigious gurus. Academics will often take some banality put preface it with “As Foucault said…” or something similar.
Thank you. Unfortunately it's a difficult point to make without the chance of giving offence.
Enjoyable and interesting as ever, thanks.
The initial contrast doesn't quite work in my opinion. It's not rational to rely solely on one's own rational belief-forming mechanisms. Much more rational to cooperate, trust, defer and so on.
Of course, all these things do come with their own problems!
Thanks. And yes, I agree. But even when we rely on social learning and deference, there are more or less rational ways of doing these things - and I think people reliably fall short for the kinds of reasons I mention in the post.
I tend to resist the idea that deference and trust (which is functionally deferring deference) can be anything but rational at the local, "should have done otherwise" level. It may be because I tend to reify "rational" towards middle-out "proportionate," which leaves people essentially rational by default. I tend to the think that the ask of the individual is to instead be "sensible," the downstream effect of which other sensible people will naturally recognize as rational.
very interesting and well written
I think the idea of using beliefs to signal allegiance with some group is very true and holds a lot of similarity to fashion. That seems like the only reasonable explanation for large groups who hold similar yet unrelated ideas, such that if someone believes in A, you can predict they also believe in B, although A and B are intellectually unrelated
using ideas to signal that we're close to the source of information I am not sure is true. Can't think of much evidence of that
I feel it's a lot more a case of association as you described. If I want to associate myself with whatever group I think is cool, I am more likely to embrace their fashion and ideas. At the same time, the reason I think they are cool probably has something to do with how their ideas resonates with me in the first place. So I think it's a bit of a cycle, where I think group A are cool because their ideal 1 is cool, so I end up embracing their idea 2 and 3 as well, just now I think 2 and 3 are cool bevause group A holds them, not the other way around
>I feel it’s a lot more a case of association as you described.
I agree.
Yes, exactly - I agree
Another element worth exploring is the particular aesthetic and intuitive appeal of these beliefs and ideas in their own right, totally aside from social considerations. Some lists of criteria for what constitutes a good scientific theory have included the criterion that it be beautiful or aesthetically compelling. Similarly, there might be relationships between the fashionableness of certain ideas in a social context, and the aesthetic quality of their more structural features.
I'm not so sure that luxury beliefs as elaborated by Henderson (or even Mounk) is the best example of aesthetics, though. As someone who grew up in an Ivy League town and spent decades in and around that culture - and feel intimately familiar with its more obnoxious and privileged elements - I find this framework reductive and unsatisfying. First of all, there's a crucial difference between positive social incentives around *expressing* certain beliefs, and negative incentives around possible costs of any hypothetical *policies* based on those expressed beliefs. The first is immediate and concrete in its consequences, but only concerns yourself; whereas the second is distal and abstract, with consequences that concern both yourself and others. So these respective motivational structures (direct consequences of expressing beliefs vs. downstream consequences of policies implied by the beliefs) function quite differently and reflect an inherent asymmetry whether one is elite or non-elite, which the luxury beliefs account tends to gloss over when it mashes them together. Hence, Dan's observation that "the relationship between lived experiences and consequences of policies is extremely complex and opaque."
Second, I don't see what the luxury beliefs framing really adds that can't be explained more parsimoniously with general principles. Clearly there is a basic truth that being very privileged tends to mean less "skin in the game," since you're likely to be more insulated from the effects of just about *any* policy you hold forth about, which puts you at risk for bias and motivated reasoning. If the belief in question also happens to be popular among your social circles, then you are doubly at risk. But to me, this merely indicates two potential sources of non-epistemic motivation, not a fundamentally polluted class of beliefs cohering as a distinct social kind. Thoughtlessly adopting socially convenient but superficial beliefs, while blithely disregarding some of the implications, is certainly something that immature college students do - but so what? Skin-in-the-game (Taleb etc.) is a powerful principle that applies to all sorts of phenomena.
If anything, "luxury beliefs" seems like a good example of something that has become popular in some circles as much by dint of its fashionable appeal as its substantive claim (and maybe also appeals to our negative stereotypes of narcissistic rich kids).
Very good insights as always.
The point about ideas having a kind of intrinsic aesthetic appeal of the sort that is relevant to scientific theory evaluation is a very good one. I don't know why that didn't occur to me when writing this piece. This would be really interesting to explore in non-scientific contexts. (I'm not aware of anyone who has done that).
Also: "....two potential sources of non-epistemic motivation, not a fundamentally polluted class of beliefs cohering as a distinct social kind." - Yes, that is a very good way of putting it.
To be fair, I finally read Yascha Mounk's article more carefully, and he does refine the concept in a way that is a big improvement, while insisting it still qualifies as a distinct, coherent social kind. But I see lingering issues even with his version. The core of the concept making it distinctive remains a specifically *moral* critique; the relationship of this to the epistemic component is complex and deserves to be parsed better.
Relatedly, I think any robust account of luxury beliefs needs to engage with (or at least acknowledge) the much older concept of standpoint epistemology, which has been around in feminist thought for decades and speaks to a second feature having more to do with knowledge than motivation: lack of personal experience and expertise around the belief in question, i.e. not knowing what the hell you're talking about. For instance, Henderson speaks with a degree of epistemic authority by virtue of having grown up experiencing firsthand the realities of poverty and instability, witnessing negative impacts of well-intentioned policies, and other lived wisdom (like having to navigate Yale as an outsider). Now that he is successful, he's probably insulated from the material effects of many beliefs - but his life experience might help buffer against luxury beliefs.
I suspect that the fashion analogy is even more fitting because some of these beliefs are attractive because of the aesthetics. The aesthetic of fascist uniforms are appealing to a lot of young men (I think they look ridiculous, but I'm a woman with very distinct aesthetic) and there are beliefs that come along with clothes. You can see something similar with the punk rock subcultures: there are far left and far right punk subcultures, but if you're wearing a shirt with an anarchy symbol it makes sense to at least sot of buy into it.
That's just the fashion aesthetics. I would guess that there are plenty of people who adopt odd beliefs because they like the intellectual aesthetics of the argument for those beliefs -- the new atheism movement of the '00's appealed to a lot of people because the beliefs, some of which were not very popular at all, were supposed to have been arrived at via reason unlike normal people's beliefs. I'm on the US West Coast and the proponents of "defund the police" saw this as a reimagining of public safety. Unlike the police reform movements that focused on fixing the system, defunding meant finding new (and in my view naive) ways of thinking about the basic concept of public safety. There is something appealing about the intellectual aesthetics of viewing public safety as a DIY project. I'm not sure if "aesthetics" is the right term for this phenomena, but it's something similar to aesthetics.
Great points. I think “aesthetics” is probably the right word in these cases - and you’re right they’re different from what I had in mind in the piece. In general, the “aesthetics” of epistemology just seems like an under-studied area.
What you are calling intellectual aesthetics captures a lot of what I was trying to get at in my own comment about the inherent aesthetic qualities of the belief itself, as opposed to the social and fashion aesthetics Dan was highlighting. I totally agree that "defund the police" had an additional connotation of visionary re-imagining of the very conditions for society. Perhaps the term for the phenomena you're looking for relates to this "imagination" piece.
Bertrand Russell is uncool and "cringe"?!? What a tragedy.
Is the "apparent absurdity" of "defund the police" Henderson's stance or yours?
Because afaik, the full demand is "defund the police and invest the money in other approaches to the problems for which police are called, e.g. addiction treatment, mental health care, social workers, food banks etc.", with the expectation that that then avoids overpolicing, racial profiling, and unarmed people of color killed for no reason except a police person's fear. And in that case, it's only absurd if throwing more police, armed police, militarized police, at the problem is more effective than the other interventions. (which would surprise me, tbh)
Which then incidentally connects nicely to your writing about why people believe certain things: especially in a US context, I suspect that "vulnerable poor person(s) in crime-ridden neighborhood(s)" have mainly or only seen police as "solutions" (and if police is the only game in town than more police probably improves things somewhat) and are being told by law-and-order politicians in both parties that more police = better. So of course, this is what they'll believe.
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Somewhat separate from that, do you have an example for "ordinary people commonly endorse socialist policies that make their lives worse; at the same time, they also often exhibit hostility to generous forms of welfare and subtler forms of state intervention that would make their lives better."? Because I couldn't come up with something based on my experience as a left-winger and with left-wingers.
Re. defund the police: You raise a really important point here. I thought about going into that in the essay (similar to the nuance I tried to add to the "drug criminalisation issue"), but decided it was too long already and didn't want to get too bogged down. (One wouldn't know it from the length of these posts but I actually cut a lot from them...) You're completely right the charitable interpretation of "defund the police" involves a policy preference that is not absurd (even if some people - maybe a minority - who endorse the slogan do have absurd policy preferences or simply don't think carefully about the issue at all).
Re. socialist policies and opposition to welfare: For the former, I had in mind popular support for left-wing populist ideas throughout Latin America that end up having negative consequences. For the latter: in the UK, a considerable number of working class and poor people favour "austerity" policies because they dislike "benefits scroungers." Similar to how white working class people in the US have favoured right-wing quasi-libertarian economic policies that have hurt their material interests.
Of course, one could contest any of these examples (based on one's views about what policies have good/bad effects) but I think the more general point that people frequently endorse policies that hurt their interests is pretty uncontroversial, whatever one's first-order political views are.
Absolutely agree re: the austerity "paradox". Guess that one also goes back to the question of why people believe certain things (and how much mainstream media writing is misinformation ;)), and, of course, Marx' "false consciousness".
I was just surprised by your claim that there are people who are in favor of socialist policies but against social-democratic ones, and your examples *do* in fact mention different populations.
Yes, I was thinking that "defund the police" has often been interpreted very literally as "eliminate all police" or "eliminate 100% of police funding," when just as often it's a coded way of expressing opposition to excessive funding that mostly goes toward toxic militarization of police. Of course, there is a separate conversation about the degree of responsibility to say exactly what we mean and not apply misleading slogans. But sometimes the actual meaning and implication of a professed belief is not identical to its linguistic form. The "All Lives Matter" objection to "Black Lives Matter" is another example of taking the semantics too literally.
The problem is of course that a slogan needs to be pithy - "Defund the police" can be chanted during a protest, with "defund the police and invest the money in other approaches to the problems for which police are called, e.g. addiction treatment, mental health care, social workers, food banks etc." one probably loses the crowd. ;)
Ha - very true.
Yes - good point.
Dan, If I might be so bold, I think the elements in play may benefit from a particular reference frame, but I likely need to over-set the table with a few familiar, yet subtly different tools. I have mentioned before treating confirmation bias and "conformation bias" as two lenses which together form a kind of binocular vision. Below is my attempt at demonstrating the subtle differences, what I am calling the Susan B. Linda problem:
Susan is a human. Humans have confirmation bias. Susan wants to believe a thing.
Which is more likely to be true of Susan:
A. Susan has confirmation bias.
B. Susan has confirmation bias and is wrong about the thing.
Assuming you are familiar with Kahneman & Tversky's Linda problem, you likely recognized that B was going to automatically be the answer before you had even fully processed the information of what was being asked. This predisposition is what I will claim is the "real" confirmation bias in action, a sort of structurally applied learning toward an initial leaning. However, processing the content might cause a bit of dissonance as if, instinctively, wanting to believe a thing + confirmation bias = more likely to be wrong about that thing, making option B strangely attractive. I speculate that most scientists that are familiar with the original Linda problem would answer A when asked, but implicit in their behavior is that B is true.
I suggest that the reason this would be true is because conformity to scientific culture includes pushback against confirmation bias, as indeed, it is the favored tool of every pseudoscientist and conspiracy theorist. What becomes of the conception of confirmation bias, however, is akin to AI eating its own tail: wanting and believing converge to rhetorical equivalence with confirmation bias.
The original Linda problem was thought to operate according to the representativeness heuristic, and that is at least compatible with increasingly favoring the description of Linda by what is anticipated to be socially representative of what others would also favor. The Susan problem, on the other hand, might be considered as much "anchored" by the original Linda problem as representative of it. Conversely, the attraction to B as being more likely may include implicit, representative conformity with a science-oriented peer group. Most importantly, both types of bias are presumed to be both dialectically opposing and always present, akin perhaps to bilateral hemispheric specialization and integration.
Attempting some modicum of nominal brevity, I will rapidly cycle through first approximation (and not entirely fair) summaries of the presented perspectives from this frame of reference:
1. Henderson's conception of "luxury beliefs" effectively accuses elites of both confirmation and conformation biases, with hints of "willfulness."
2. Teslo rightly counters with her rule of thumb summary of "Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to conformism," highlighting the equivalent of the more subtle, "primordial" role of the active ingredient that I call "conformation bias."
3. Mounk's response effectively lightens the load again by pointing out that insulation from the effects also comes with natural lack of consideration, which is effectively (through some rather generous self-interpretation) noting the lack of would-be confirmation biasing that would come with real exposure to negative effects.
4. Dan, your response rounds this out by pointing out (effectively and with generous reinterpretation) that confirmation bias alone is insufficient.
What I want to point out is that seen this way, these biases appear to be dialectically formative before we get our conscious mitts on their products, and our dialectical negotiations of those products include dialectically untangling, which is a rather remarkable reverse engineering process.
I will resist the urge to go further, except to mention three wrap-up syntheses:
1. A perspective mired in confirmation bias will see a perspective mired in "conformation bias" as "conspiratorial," but the products of unchecked conformation bias are by no means any less convergent with the products of actual conspiracy on account of a real lack of intent.
2. A perspective mired in "conformation bias" will see a perspective mired in contrarian confirmation bias as "willfully ignorant." If both biases are dialectically formative, the magnitude of one will always be locally justifiable by the contrary magnitude of the other.
3. As regards the rest of the post, it may be worth recognizing that "trending" has a more organic implication of pre-intentional influences, while "fashion" seems to have a more intentional implication, at least of an inflection point, whereafter "trending fashion" might best describe the dynamic interplay.
Cheers!
Great insights as always, William - very interesting.
Lucid and illuminating.
I've always considered "being trendy" as closely analogous to the peacock's tail. The trendy person is demonstrating that he has is strong and successful enough to have spare time and resources for this non functional pursuit. And as you suggest it takes similar time and resources to become fluent in fashionable beliefs, whether that's the minutiae of Qanon or Post structuralism or New Age Goopiness. Striving to believe stuff that is objectively true is a minority taste.
Yes - that seems right
"Striving to believe stuff that is objectively true is a minority taste."
The True.
Intellect is a voluntary tax on our more instinctive needs and desires, which only a small percentage of Homo sapiens are willing to pay to achieve some level of membership in the Erudition, Reason, and Discernment Club.
And most of those that do, do so in specialized areas, rather than in relatively holistic breadth required to address and overcome all the problems we Homo sapiens create.
The overwhelming majority - and often far more - instead rely on oft impoverished, destructive heuristics. Such as emotion, tradition, groupthink (tribalism, nations, political parties, politicians, superstition / mythology, very large informal groups with similar absurd and abusive sexual beliefs), violence, apathy, evasion, denial, social norms, instinct, ignorance, etc.
Yes us members of the ERD clique do more for humanity. BUT members of the Christianity clique and the MAGA cult will say exactly the same about their grouping too. For myself I do find the intellectual coherence and ingenious fact checking personally satisfying apart from the social side of it all in terms of group coherence.
Just one issue with the narrowness of politicults, mythology, and other beliefs, is well summarized by an attribution to German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860:
"Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world."
He is incredibly insightful for a dead person, wouldn't you say? More so than most all now living, in my experience.
Last night I wandered down the rabbit hole of several of your essays, and note your love of hiking and (at least appreciation for) climbing. Perhaps you find nature and physical exercise more fulfilling than listening to humanity's endless nonsense? Terrific for physical fitness and nature appreciation. Your enthusiasm makes me want to do some hiking.
As I am more cerebral than physical, I focused on your Plus fours post to expand my vocabulary regarding often antique attire. Plus twos, plus sixes, plus eights. Also: knickers, knickerbockers, pedal pushers, capris, and what I somewhat now desire: man-pris. I l-o-v-e that essay of yours!
Cheers.
Yes pretty sharp that Schopenhauer. Glad you're enjoying my rabbit hole 🐰... Not all verbiage is worthless this Dan Williams whose discussion we're coat tailing in has sensible things to say ( well he's a Cambridge UK philosopher looks like). I'm prone to a bit of verbiage myself. Hills yes former climbing times yes but lover of the language as well
I think this "fashion" lens a useful way of looking at things. A few months ago I was considering some similar ideas when I was composing my post "An Outsider's Idea of an Insider" https://ttrpgteleology.substack.com/p/an-outsiders-idea-of-an-insider
> And the misunderstood-by-outsiders aspect may not be just a coincidence, but part of a mechanism of action. Like with slang or inside jokes, if you only have a shallow or partial understanding you may end up engaging awkwardly or disfluently, which marks you as an outsider or low-status neophyte to the insiders. Being able to tell who is who and where they stand can be useful to a social animal. The garish and gaudy Donald Trump is famously derided as “the poor person’s idea of a rich person”, since the typical member of the upper class tends toward understated elegance. Thinking that conspiracy theorists or believers in the supernatural ought to be acting outlandishly may be an analogous “outsider’s idea of an insider” – a not-quite-accurate over-extrapolation from limited information.
I was going to expand on that idea by using fashion as an example, it establishes a hierarchy: you have people on the bottom who can be scorned for not "following the rules" (presumably because they don't know them), people in the middle who have some complicated mix of following rules and having "rules" enforced on them, and people at the top who are allowed to transcend rules. I was originally going to say that this is more complicated than the Thorsten Veblen model of luxury goods but as I was pondering I realized that the classic luxury goods thing isn't as simple as I first thought. The rich people who are actually purchasing the goods aren't the only participants in the system, you can also participate in the system by adopting a subordinate role: "That is a nice thing *for rich people* and it is my place to admire it from afar". And the *relative costs* of luxury goods is also complicated: the super-rich can basically afford anything so monetary costs are irrelevant to them -- the costs matter more in the aspirational tiers below the top where it's a more complicated tradeoff game. There are similar things in fashion: "that looks good on that beautiful/stylish person but I couldn't pull it off myself". But there are also fashion misfires: looks that seem ridiculous rather than aspirational even when they're on super-attractive people. I think this is analogous to beliefs that end up in little bubbles (conspiracy theories, flavor-of-the-month progressivism, etc.) -- they're status markers without broad agreement about the polarity of the axis.
Great insights, Dan.
I find the comparison between clothing fashion and fashionable beliefs interesting. It's a useful analogy but there are at least two key differences:
1. Everyone acknowledges that clothes are designed to look good. While they can serve functional purposes as well, no one denies that looking good is a major reason you wear the clothes you wear. People often admit they wear clothes because they are in style. For example, 10 years ago long baggy gym shorts and swim trunks were in style so I wore them. Now gym shorts and swim trunks tend to be shorter so I started wearing shorter ones. I don't feel bad saying that. On the other hand, I would never admit to holding a belief because it's fashionable and it would be embarrassing if I did.
2. Beliefs are ostensibly about describing the world accurately and making society better. There is a clear tension between this ostensible purpose and the social purpose of gaining acceptance and status with your peers. I just don't see a similar tension when it comes to clothing fashion.