Scissors Statements for President?
(Epistemic status: I spoke simply / without “appears to” hedges, but I’m not sure of this at all.)
I’m confused why we keep getting scissors statements as our Presidential candidates, but we do. (That is: the candidates seem to break many minds/communities.)
A toy model:[1]
Take two capacities, A and B. Ideally anti-correlated.
Craft two candidates:
Candidate X, who seems acceptable if you’re A-blind (if you have a major gap in your situation awareness near A).
Candidate Y, who seems acceptable if you’re B-blind (if you have a major gap in your situation awareness near B).
Now let voters talk.
“How can you possibly vote for X, given how it’ll make a disaster on axis A?”, asks Susan. (She is B-blind, which is part of why she is so confused/irate/loud here.) Susan inquires in detail. She (accurately) determines the staunchest X-voters don’t understand A, and (understandably, but incorrectly) concludes that this explains their X-voting, that they have nothing to teach her, and that she should despair of working well with anyone who voted for Candidate X.
““How can you possibly vote for Y, given how it’ll make a disaster on axis B?”, asks Robert. He, too, inquires in detail. And he (accurately) determines the staunchest Y-voters have a key basic blind spot where he and his friends/neighbors have sense… feels a sense of closure (“okay, it’s not that they know something I don’t know”), and despairs of working well with anyone who voted for Y.
The thing that annoys me about this process is that, in the wake, it is harder for both sets of voters to heal their own blind spots. “Being able to see A accurately” is now linked up socially and verbally with “being one of the people who refuse to acknowledge B” (and vice versa). (This happens because the ontology has been seized by the scissors-statement crafters – there is a common, salient, short word that means both “A matters” and “B is fake,” and people end up using it in their own head, and, while verifying a real truth they can see, locking in a blind spot they can’t see.)
- ^
This is a toy model for how the “scissors-ness” works, not for why some process is crafting us candidates like that. I don’t have a guess about that part. Though I like these articles.
If we can get good enough models of however the scissors-statements actually work, we might be able to help more people be more in touch with the common humanity of both halves of the country, and more able to heal blind spots.
E.g., if the above model is right, maybe we could tell at least some people “try exploring the hypothesis that Y-voters are not so much in favor of Y, as against X—and that you’re right about the problems with Y, but they might be able to see something that you and almost everyone you talk to is systematically blinded to about X.”
We can build a useful genre-savviness about common/destructive meme patterns and how to counter them, maybe. LessWrong is sort of well-positioned to be a leader there: we have analytic strength, and aren’t too politically mindkilled.
X and Y are cooperating to contain people who object-level care about A and B, and recruit them into the dialectic drama. X is getting A wrong on purpose, and Y is getting B wrong on purpose, as a loyalty test. Trying to join the big visible org doing something about A leads to accepting escalating conditioning to develop the blind spot around B, and vice versa.
X and Y use the conflict as a pretext to expropriate resources from the relatively uncommitted. For instance, one way to interpret political polarization in the US is as a scam for the benefit of people who profit from campaign spending. War can be an excuse to subsidize armies. Etc.
I wrote about this here: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/discursive-warfare-and-faction-formation/
IDK, but I’ll note that IME, calling for empathy for “the other side” (in either direction) is received with incuriosity / indifference at best, often hostility.
One thing that stuck with me is one of those true crime Youtube videos, where at some stage of the interrogation, the investigator stops being nice, and instead will immediately and harshly contradict anything that the suspect Bob is saying to paint a story where he’s innocent. The commentator claimed that the reason the investigator does this is to avoid giving Bob confidence: if Bob’s statements hung in the air unchallenged, Bob might think he’s successfully creating a narrative and getting that narrative bought. Even if the investigator is not in danger of being fooled (e.g. because she already has video evidence contradicting some of Bob’s statements), Bob might get more confident and spend more time lying instead of just confessing.
A conjecture is that for Susan, empathizing with Robert seems like giving room for him to gain more political steam; and the deeper the empathy, the more room you’re giving Robert.
Electoral candidates can only be very bad because the country is very big and strong, which can only be the case because there’s a lot of people, land, capital and institutions.
Noticing that two candidates for leading these resources are both bad is kind of useless without some other opinion on what form the resources should enter. A simple option would be that the form of the resources should lessen, e.g. that people should work less. The first step to this is to go away from Keynesianism. But if you take that to its logical conclusion, it implies e/acc replacement of humanity, VHEM, mass suicide, or whatever. It’s not surprising that this is unpopular.
So that raises the question: What’s some direction that the form of societal resources could be shifted towards that would be less confusing than a scissor statement candidate?
Because without an answer to this question, I’m not sure we even need elaborate theories on scissor statements.