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I have a very smart friend who is also a talented decoupler, who could easily be a very quality contributer here if dealing with Culture War issues didn't make him bleed from the eyes. He is literally the only person I know whose Facebook posts about politics did not make me lose respect for him. Over the years, we have had a number of conversations about contentious CW topics that flirted with the border of Adversarial Collaboration, long detailed discussions handled with fairness, civility, and mutual respect.
Until the topic of student loan forgiveness came up. That discussion was unusually heated. He seemed almost frantic, heated about PPP loan forgiveness hypocrites and just not giving the expected degree of decoupled consideration for arguments about how the loan forgiveness was an overall terrible policy. He seemed personally invested, felt personally attacked, in a way he hadn't in conversations about abortion or gun control.
The thing is, my friend is a teacher. Education is a big factor in his identity. He has taught maybe a thousand students who might benefit from the forgiveness plan. Attacks on that plan are an attack on his class identity. Politics is the mind-killer, and it is a sad fact that a rationalist's Art is most likely to abandon him when he needs it most (or, rather, he will fail the Art). And so my arguments sparked an uncontrolled emotional response that was missing from other, less identity-laden topics.
The second thing is, I've been on the other side of that coin, back when we had our multi-day deep dive into the gun control literature. Gun control hits me emotionally as an attack on my class identity. When I hear a gun control proposal, before I hear a single specific detail or spend a second considering merits, some lizard part of my brain interprets it as "Fuck you, your father, your father's father, and your father's father's father". (Does the word "father" still mean anything to you?) I've begged off having spontaneous discussions about it in person, even with close family, because I don't want to spike myself into rage and other unpleasant feelings. During that deep dive, my excellent friend was so calm, fair and rational that he overrode that concern, and I ended up learning a lot and having a great time.
And I'm thinking about this now, because I notice a similar reaction to the trans discussion downthread. The idea that my children might be brainwashed into taking evolutionarily self-destructive choices, and I can't even attempt to oppose it without facing the full wrath of the modern State, kindles a pre-rational, animal panic/fury response. I find myself getting heated to an unusual degree just thinking about it. I don't think I'm particularly "anti-trans". I was willing to be accepting two decades ago, when I first learned it was even a thing. But something about the thought that the phenomenon might hit my kids triggers an atavistic survival instinct. That reaction doesn't trigger when I consider my son dressing like David Bowie, or my daughter playing sports. It doesn't happen when a peer goes trans. It triggers at the thought of one of the two corporeal incarnations of my DNA and memes getting sucked into a fraught psychological memeplex, and particularly at the thought of them being medically sterilized.
Imagine an alternate world where any time a kid expressed suicidal ideation, government employees would firmly nudge them towards euthanasia, and would jail you as a parent for protesting. That's roughly the level of emotional hit - some part of me considers this an existential threat.
But what are the odds? 0.3%? That's not that much worse than the odds of childhood cancer, or other kind of unexpected death that a healthy mind doesn't overmuch worry about, and deals with gracefully if it comes. But now it's apparently something more like nearly 2%? That hits me in the Papa-Bear-Who-Wants-Grandkids-In-Space-Forever. And it seems very likely that a lot of that is social contagion or could otherwise be wildly reduced with a minimal degree of skepticism towards youth fads.
So, two points. One, I think it might behoove activist types (assuming we're not in pure conflict theory) to try to notice when one of their pushes is hitting this sort of reaction and figure out a path to undermine or alleviate it.
Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify? What CW issues feels like molten hot war to the hilt, where your instincts fight to throw aside all reason and charity? Any thoughts about why?
Just to note, this isn't really a hypothetical anymore. Canadians are nudged towards euthanasia after being told how much they cost the healthcare system and a survivor of the Belgium airport ISIS attacks in 2016 was euthanized this year after expressing suicidal ideation. The only difference is that this is not happening to kids and people protesting it are not jailed by governments. Not yet, at least.
Interesting. But economics taught me that these Canadian healthcare workers aren't dealing with their own money, but rather taxpayer money, so why should they care about costs? They have soft budget constraints.
As for nudging, is there any such thing as merely making people aware of their options, or is that actually impossible? Any option you make people aware of you've necessarily nudged them toward?
Nudging is a technocratic concept of giving pretense of choice, but then “highlighting” the one preferred in order to manipulate the result. It is the difference between opt-in and opt-out model and similar concepts. It is named after the 2008 book The Nudge by Richard Thaler, the 2017 economic “nobel” prize winner for behavioral economics
While there is probably some argument to be made for it, the equilibrium is ultimately unstable, often due to Lucas Critique. If you try to force people that clicking large green button to “accept” as opposed to small grey button of “reject”, over time your “psychological” tricks will lose efficacy over random choice. Nevertheless “nudging” became pop-psych concept used by your cookie-cutter PMC class wannabes to show their dominance. Which by my estimation exactly reflects the late oughts thinking from elites when it comes to public policy and similar issues.
That seems like a highly uncharitable description of nudging. The whole point of them is to preserve choice for anyone who actually cares. But in many cases most people either don't seem to care, or don't know about the decision they're trying to make, and therefore just stick with the default. Knowing this, it is inescapable that whoever is providing the choice (a company offering a 401k, the government asking if you want to be an organ donor, etc.) is creating quite a large impact on the outcome simply by the way in which choices are presented. There is no "neutral" way of doing it for most people.
Sure, that is "the argument" I have mentioned to be made for this idea. The question that remains is who gets to construct the "default" choice. And technocrats thought that they can use some simple psychological tricks to "nudge" people to their preferred option. And this is where the "pretense" comes into play. If you agree to something devastating just by impulse of clicking the bright green button as opposed to hidden white button, you can pretend that the target made the choice. Like "nudging" natives to write X on some paper in exchange for some beads in order to save their immortal souls of course - as all learned people know. What a novel, Nobel prize winning idea we have here. Until you are proven otherwise by getting a bullet in your head by some outraged individual at the most extreme.
Of course the idea is that the enlightened elite will "nudge" the plebs toward the policies and options that will make them happy. And then everybody will sing kumbaya together with plebs praising their overlords for their wise leadership and the lords humbly accepting the praise and sending 10% of their excess income to buy malaria nets for Africa as an indulgence for some nagging feeling of something being wrong there.
And again, I am not saying that there is nothing like some arbitrary choices. You can have just some multipliers of chicken wings in your order at one natural extreme, or maybe there is an option to opt into three choices that have to be designed in some way. However the Nudge theory in its core is about ability to shape population by some decisionmaker to specifically design the choice to get what he wants. Which is of limited possibility. To use another "neoliberal" theories, we are talking about Public Choice Theory and Principal Agent Problem
And I am sure that there are some rationalists who have beaten that all to death, but this is not what is meant when you randomly read about "nudging" in New York Times in the context of a new "nudging" anti-racist department of social justice, or maybe alternatively by Daily Wire regarding some new DeSantis proposal of life affirming care program for prospective mothers.
This is an utterly wild leap of logic. Is there any actual connection here? Tricking or coercing natives into signing treaties they didn't understand (or had a different conception of) is absolutely nothing like the economic idea of nudging people by having a 401k plan be opt-out.
It is “like it” because you are “tricking” people to select the option designer prefers speciffically assuming they they do not know any better. The only difference between “nudging” and “tricking” lies in supposed “good” or “bad” result for the subject - of course as is viewed by the “nudger”. Who himself can engage in certain level of self-deception, using euphemism for tricking people being the very first step.
Even to use your example of pension plan, one of the moves Orban did in his quest to nationalize private pension plans was declaring that unless savers specifically opt into the plan again, the default option will be read as agreement with nationalization of their savings and promise of state pension. Was he nudging or tricking people?
They are not remotely the same.
The whole point of a nudge is to be small, and for there to be a legitimate choice. If you actually care about your 401k or organ donation, you absolutely can decide. By revealed preference, most people either don't care, or don't know anything about it. The alternative is plainly there, most people just don't bother. A treaty for large amounts of land, probably with each side operating under a different legal framework (not that anyone in history bothered to keep treaties), by people who would take the land by force anyway, is just not even remotely comparable. If you can't see there's a difference between nudges and "lie through your teeth and murder anyone who disagrees" then I don't know what to tell you.
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