Author: Milan

Intolerance and the alignment of identities

The gradual sorting of partisans into the “correct” parties during the last fifty years has transformed a nation of cross-cutting political identities into a nation of increasingly aligned political identities. As Democrats and Republicans grow socially sorted, they have to contend not only with the natural bias that comes from being a partisan but also with their own growing intolerance, sharpened by the shrinking of their social world. A conservative Democrat will feel closer to Republicans than a liberal Democrat would. A secular Republican will feel closer to Democrats than an evangelical Republican would. The sorting of our parties into socially distinct groups intensifies the partisan bias we’ve always had. This is the American identity crisis. Not that we have partisan identities, we’ve always had those. The crisis emerges when partisan identities fall into alignment with other social identities, stoking our intolerance of each other to levels that are unsupported by our degrees of political disagreement.

Mason, Lilliana. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. University of Chicago Press, 2018. p. 62-3

Open thread: global tax coordination

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has raised the idea of a coordinated global minimum corporate tax, with the aim of disrupting ‘race to the bottom’ dynamics in taxation and the shift of assets to tax havens.

Global coordination is likely a necessary prerequisite to effective wealth taxation.

It could also help to improve the tolerability and effectiveness of carbon taxes, as domestic producers would be less able to use inaction elsewhere as a way to resist decarbonization policy proposals.

The psychological significance of groups

Even in the most basic definition of a group, [social psychologist Henri] Tajfel and his colleagues found evidence of ingroup bias: a preference for or privileging of the ingroup over the outgroup. In every conceivable iteration of this experiment, people privileged the group to which they had been randomly assigned. Ingroup bias emerged even when Billig and Tajfel in 1973 explicitly told respondents that they had been randomly assigned to two groups, because it was “easier this way.” The ingroup bias still appeared, simply because the experimenters distinguished the two groups. These respondents were not fighting for tangible self-interest, the money they allocated went to other people, not themselves. They simply felt psychologically motivated to privilege members of their own imaginary and ephemeral group—a group of people they had never met and would never meet, and whose existence they had only learned of minutes earlier. People react powerfully when they worry about losing group status, even when the group is “minimal.”

Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. University of Chicago Press, 2018. p. 11

Waiting for my Lego shuttle

In part because of housing uncertainty — and mindful of George Monbiot’s excellent advice about true freedom arising from low living expenses “If you can live on five thousand pounds a year, you are six times as secure as someone who needs thirty thousand to get by” — I have been avoiding and minimizing taking on new physical possessions.

Nonetheless, with my interest in space and the Space Shuttle program specifically, I could not resist ordering Lego’s new Space Shuttle Discovery and Hubble Space Telescope set on the day of its release.

The Hubble is arguably the greatest scientific achievement of the Space Shuttle program and certainly one of the most powerful instruments humanity has ever created for understanding the vastness and history of our universe. The dimensions of the Hubble also did a lot to dictate the final size and configuration of the shuttle (less for the telescope itself, and more for the secret Earth-observing versions operated by the National Reconnaissance Office). Those design decisions, in turn, did much to shape the shuttle’s operational characteristics and history, including the design choices that contributed to the Challenger and Columbia losses.

The set will be fun to put together, and I should be able to find somewhere to display it even if I end up living in a tiny space.

The just world assumption and our inbuilt vulnerability to scams

But the Patten con [an evangelical congregation cultivated and exploited for self-enrichment of the preachers] wasn’t just any scam. It was the scam of all scams—the one that gets to the heart of why confidence games not only work but thrive the world over, no matter how many expert debunkers and vocal victims there may be. It was a scam of belief, the most profound yet simple belief we have: about the way the world works, why life is the way it is. We want to believe. Believe that things make sense. That an action leads to a result. That things don’t just happen willy-nilly no matter what we do, but rather for a reason. That what we do makes a difference, however small. That we ourselves matter. That there is a grand story, a higher method to the seeming madness. And in the heart of that desire, we easily become blind. The eternal lure of the con is the same reason religions arise spontaneously in most any human society. People always want something to believe in.

…

The crux of the belief doesn’t matter, [cult infiltrator David] Sullivan thought. “It doesn’t matter if it’s Vishnu, Jesus, or a new way to get rich quick. It’s immaterial to me,” he had said. The techniques and basic psychology remained the same. “They’re being profoundly—subtly but profoundly—manipulated at their great expense, at the expense of their lives in some cases.”

And the reason it happens—and often happens to the most intelligent of people (note, Sullivan would say, the typical cult recruit: young, smart, sophisticated, savvy)—is that human nature is wired toward creating meaning out of meaninglessness, embracing belief over doubt. “There are certain essential things we all have in common,” Sullivan said. “There’s a deep desire for faith, there’s a deep desire to feel there’s someone up there who really cares about what’s going on and intervenes in our life. There’s a desire to have a coherent worldview: there’s a rhyme and reason for everything we do, and all the terrible things that happen to people—people die, children get leukemia—there’s some reason for it. And here’s this guru who says, ‘I know exactly the reason.'” It’s the reason behind all cons, from the smallest to these, the deepest.

Konnikova, Maria. The Confidence Game. Why We Fall for It… Every Time. Penguin Books, 2016. p. 307, 310-1

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Eye direction and pilfering group photos

Along with people trying to light enormous spaces with tiny on-camera flashes, a photographic peeve of mine is when I’m working as a paid or official photographer, have put together a large group shot, and then one or more people sneak up behind to try to take it themselves with their cell phone.

The inevitable result is that a good fraction of the people will be looking at them, not me, thus giving the photo a confused and jumbled look because of how sensitive we are to the direction in which people’s eyes are pointing.

You can see some evidence of what I mean in this shot, though I put in a significant effort to draw people’s attention to my lens and shoo away the amateurs (who are always so wounded and pained about being denied, perhaps especially after being told why there is a good reason for it). Here is one where I made sure it did not happen, and you can see the unity of gazes which is generally desirable in a shot of a large group.

If you want a copy of a group shot being done by a professional, please wait until they are done and politely ask where it will be posted or if they will send it to you. That way, you won’t spoil the official record through the process of creating your own low resolution cell phone derivative which nobody will see.