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Inferential Distance: a Prologue
Over the few weeks I've come a across multiple posts here that have left me wondering "are we looking at the same event?" or less charitably "WTF has this commentor been smoking?", and this has gotten me thinking about something that I've been meaning to do since we made the transition to the new site, and that is to start consolidating the the things I've written under this pseudonym and that are currently spread out over a decade of time, and half a dozen different websites/forums, into something more manageable. This is not that post, but it is something of a prelude.
I see a lot of posts here from ostensible right wingers lamenting the progressives' omnipresence and inevitable victory, and I'm not sure what to make of them because that is not what I see, or what I hear, when I talk to the actual human beings in my life. If anything it's the opposite. The progressives are running scared. For every year since 1972, that's for half a century now, Gallup has run a poll on institutional trust that asks people to what degree they expect the media, the government, academia, etc... to report facts "fully, accurately, and fairly". The available answers are; a Great deal, a Fair amount, Not very much, and Not at all. Well the results for 2022 have just been released and people who answered "not at all" for trust in mass media is at 38%. This has been characterized by the talking heads, and many rationalists as "a crisis of sense making" but I don't really see it that way. Sounds more like healthy skepticism if you ask me.
Those that are familiar with me from my time on LessWrong and /r/SSC may recall that the concept of "inferential distance" has always been something of a hobby horse of mine, and I think this issue in particular illustrates why. You see. there is a lot talk here on theMotte about progressives "controlling the narrative", "twitter being the wellspring of culture", "normies doing whatever the tv tells them", that to me seems absurd, but in light of Gallup's results makes a certain amount of sense. I don't think it's any secret that this forum, as a splinter faction of the rationalist movement skews wealthy, secular, cosmopolitan, college-educated, and frankly Democrat. While I could be wrong, I would be willing to bet that there are way more fans of Cumtown here than there are fans of Rush Limbaugh or Tucker Carlson. And with that in mind I think the fact that trust in the media seems to break pretty cleanly along class and partisan lines (70% of Democrats having a fair amount of trust or greater in the media vs less than 14% of Republicans) explains a lot.
You expect people to believe what you see on the news because that's normal where you're from.
I expect everyone to roll their eyes at the news because that's normal where I'm from.
...and this points to the first of many fundamental disconnects.
This is (aside from the Title VII/IX parts) just a variation of "I'm feeling unsafe". Claiming to be scared is more effective at getting obedience and working up a mob than not claiming to be scared, so people do it. People also are able to work themselves into a frenzy and be sincerely scared, yet if being scared wasn't useful strategically, they would not have been that way.
I'm sure there were people in Nazi Germany who were genuinely scared of Jewish control of the world, as well as a contingent who claimed to be scared of Jews in order to have an excuse to hurt them.
Actually "running scared" would mean being scared enough to obey the right, not being scared enough to have an excuse to attack them in the same way they would anyway. You don't see people on the left saying "the right is so terrifiying that I advise not tearing down any statues because they'd beat us up (or even vote us out of office)" or "you'd better stop making movies with diverse casts, or the right will make your profits tank".
We're already there man. It's already happening.
How's it already happening? I don't see anyone putting statues back up, and the diverse casting trend has only been slightly slowed.
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That's a good point. You can see a clear example with drawings of Mohammed, where people actually are scared to do it because they are afraid of being hurt. Attacking the red tribe imposes almost no costs and in fact often has lots of benefits to those who do it.
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