The mask ads are produced by the MTA as part of a campaign whose overt (and, I think, real) goal is to get people to wear masks.
Therefore, they are not in fact anti-mask propaganda.
Ben may of course argue, perhaps correctly, that the attitude revealed by the ads is authoritarian and unpleasant and that for some people this makes the ads have an anti-mask effect. But that doesn’t mean the ads are “trying to degrade and humiliate mask-wearers”; maybe they have that effect but for that to be their intention the relevant people at the MTA would have to be moustache-twirling villains plotting “so, we will break their spirits and then they will be easier to control, bwahahahaha”, which is just not plausible.
(Alternatively, it’s possible that the people at the MTA wanted pro-mask ads, and they engaged an advertising agency that’s full of mask-haters who decided to subvert the message they were asked to promote by making superficially pro-mask but more subtly anti-mask advertisements. I do not find this plausible either; I think advertising agencies are too attached to making money to risk pissing off a major customer by doing that.)
If Ben had been complaining that the ads will put a lot of people off and therefore are bad ads and been met with incomprehension—which, to be clear, I think he quite likely would have been—then he’d be right to suggest that something bad is going on in the heads of the people failing to understand him. But I think it’d be something much simpler and less exciting than “regarding the dramatic authoritarianism of making people do things they don’t want to as the principal benefit of masks”. (Namely, that most people are pretty stupid and have trouble understanding any position on a thing X more complicated than “yay X” and “boo X”, and are liable to round everything to one of those or the other.)
In any case, again, that isn’t what Ben said. He said: “Seems like they’re now trying to degrade and humiliate mask-wearers”. Which is obviously wrong, and that rounding-things-off heuristic is particularly likely to happen when faced with someone who seems to be saying something stupid. In this case, though, I don’t think even that is what happened. I think the one person on whose response he seems to be basing this paranoid theory about what ‘the “pro-mask position”’ is really about, was making a perfectly valid point. Ben says, or appears to be saying: look at these ads, they say you should wear a mask and be silent, obviously this is an attempt to degrade and humiliate mask-wearers. She says: no, the “be silent” bit has a simpler and less sinister explanation: there’s an actual public-health benefit. All she’s guilty of here is not picking up on the other things Ben sees as evidence of an attempt to degrade and humiliate.
Again: all this seems like a clear instance of the “explicit X & implicit Y yield Z, therefore those who say X believe Z”. Y is “my interpretation of the subtext of these ads is correct”. Even if Ben is right about the subtext—if e.g. the MTA really is full of moustache-twirling villains, or their ad agency of anti-MTA anti-mask-requirement subversives—I claim it is perfectly possible for a reasonable person to fail to appreciate this, and that this is a much more likely explanation for their not grasping Ben’s point than that they’re part of the Great Authoritarian-Sadomasochistic Collective Conspiracy that Ben is trying to portray.
I don’t think it’s necessary to believe that “the MTA really is full of moustache-twirling villains” in order to believe that sometimes they’re mean to people on purpose. This is a normal thing that normal people do and doesn’t require someone to be totally committed at all times to evil. The interesting problem is not that someone was mean, but that the factional imperative to be pro-mask and anti-anti-mask effectively functions to provides cover for this, so that as part of their display of factional loyalty people refuse to recognize that someone did something mean.
Sure, people can be deliberately mean without being moustache-twirling villains. But the particular kind of deliberate meanness that you seem to be hypothesizing here seems pretty moustache-twirly.
Normally when people are deliberately mean to others without being moustache-twirling villains it’s (1) because they particularly dislike those other people or (2) because there is some concrete benefit to them from being mean.
In the present case, you’re suggesting that the MTA put out advertisements that intentionally had subtexts like “hey you, mask-wearers, eat shit”. Is it plausible that the MTA (or their executives, or the people running their ad campaigns) particularly dislike their customers as a whole, or specifically their customers who wear masks in order to reduce the spread of disease on the trains? Not to me. Is there some other concrete benefit the MTA (or etc.) would get from making their customers (as a whole, or etc.) feel bad? Not that I can see.
What’s the actual psychological process you envisage here, and why do you find it plausible?
I guess people are mean because it moves them up in the pecking order, or prevents them from moving down, and they think it’s safer to be an aggressor than a victim. Since scolding people for maybe not wearing masks is a protected behavior, they can get away with more meanness, with less discernment, than in other contexts. I don’t fully understand why this gives people cover for being mean to mask-wearers in the name of pro-mask propaganda, but it seems to be the case. This seems like part of the same phenomenon: https://reductress.com/post/how-governor-cuomo-once-a-soft-sidepiece-snapped-into-a-dom-daddy-i-would-let-choke-me/
Even a similar focus on allowing the dominator to constrict your breathing!
My best guess is that being mean to people is considered part of the process by which you take care of them, since it’s part of the process of giving orders, as I sketched out in Civil Law and Political Drama, much like frame-controlling them is, as Vaniver pointed out here and here.
I don’t think at any point here you’ve managed to say the thing I think is happening, and you’ve repeatedly avoided it.
This paragraph is a miss at stating what I would say is going on at the MTA (and also what I think Ben would say):
Ben may of course argue, perhaps correctly, that the attitude revealed by the ads is authoritarian and unpleasant and that for some people this makes the ads have an anti-mask effect. But that doesn’t mean the ads are “trying to degrade and humiliate mask-wearers”; maybe they have that effect but for that to be their intention the relevant people at the MTA would have to be moustache-twirling villains plotting “so, we will break their spirits and then they will be easier to control, bwahahahaha”, which is just not plausible.
It’s not hard for me to imagine Tilda Swinton’s character telling her underlings to create wall-ads for sustaining order, and that they pick things like “Keep Order. Know your place. Be a shoe!” In this world would you also be arguing “Well the overt goal is to keep order, why would you assume it’s to degrade and humiliate the people?” I think you’d probably agree that inside their heads they’re looking for slogans that are degrading.
Like, my straw model of you right now is saying “Well either people are good, or they’re bad, and for someone to do something intentionally mean or unkind, must mean they are BAD PEOPLE, and are also bad in that they have mustaches that they twirl. I observe no moustaches, therefore they did not have this bad intention.”
Whereas I’m saying “sometimes groups of advanced monkeys can (amongst them many fine things they do) support false narratives about the group (e.g. companies that think they’re doing great then suddenly fail) and they can also systematically protect the powerful whilst otherwise trying to get on with their lives, and they can also systematically be unfair and kind of unethical to an outgroup whilst otherwise doing lots of fine things in the world.”
People are mixes of emotions and impulses, and people in groups can be especially blind to their impulses. I don’t get why it’s psychologically unimaginable to you to think that the people making mask ads kind of want to degrade the people their coalition is forcing to wear masks, and that they picked a nominally pro-mask slogan because it does so, or that their lack of moustaches all but proves that they cannot have this intention.
If “you’ve repeatedly avoided it” is meant to mean “I think you know what is actually going on and are going out of your way not to say it”, then I deny that charge. I may well be wrong about what is going on, but I promise I am not being insincere about it.
My apologies for popular-culture-ignorance, but I don’t know what “Tilda Swinton’s character” is meant to convey. Am I supposed to imagine a moustache-twirling evil dictator, or a well-meaning dictator, or a faceless bureaucrat, or what? Unfortunately, not knowing what scenario you’re asking me to imagine I don’t think I can usefully comment on whether I would agree that “inside their heads they’re looking for slogans that are degrading”; if they’re saying things like “know your place, be a shoe” then it sure sounds as if they are, but that also sounds to me like some combination of moustache-twirling villainy and deliberate subversion; I don’t think real people who aren’t actively trying to make others’ lives worse say things like “know your place, be a shoe”. But, again, maybe there’s some specific movie I’m supposed to be thinking of here that would make this all clearer?
(I had a look at Swinton’s filmography. The most obviously-relevant thing here is that she played the White Witch in a Narnia movie. That’s pretty much a moustache-twirling role, modulo the absence of moustaches for obvious biological reasons.)
Your straw model of me is indeed made of straw. It’s not obvious to me why you would ascribe the particular stupidities to me that you ascribe to straw-me, so I’m not sure how to respond to them. People don’t divided neatly into Good and Bad, obviously, and my point is exactly that what’s being hypothesized here seems to me like the sort that fictional Bad characters do and real people with real motives generally don’t. Not because real people are Good and never do anything bad; because the particular sort of badness being proposed seems to me fiction-like. “Moustache-twirling” is meant to gesture at that, not to indicate that I think it matters whether they have moustaches. (Duh, obviously. But how else am I supposed to respond to the last couple of sentences in that paragraph?)
I agree, of course, that sometimes people (or groups of people) can be systematically unfair and unethical to an outgroup. But I don’t see what outgroup you have in mind (“all our passengers”? “all our passengers who wear masks”?) and I don’t see what specifically you think would lead to the specific kind of obnoxiousness-to-that-outgroup that’s being proposed here.
It’s not that I think it’s impossible that “the people making mask ads kind of want to degrade the people their coalition is forcing to wear masks”. Of course it’s possible. What I don’t see is why it’s plausible; why that particular hypothesis should be regarded as a good explanation for anything; why it’s better than, say, “the people making these mask ads happen to have a sexual fetish that makes them feel like comparing masks to assholes will be pleasantly exciting for their audience” (which I think is extremely unlikely, even though people not infrequently have fetishes, and seems to me roughly on a par with your proposal in terms of plausibility) or “the people making these mask ads are specifically intending a contrast with the old joke about assholes and intend that ‘everyonie should have one’ will be a pleasant surprise for their audience” (which I think is actually probably correct) or “the people making these mask ads just somehow never thought of the old joke about assholes at all” (which seems unlikely even though people often miss things that you’d think obvious, but no more unlikely than your proposal).
Your straw model of me is indeed made of straw. It’s not obvious to me why you would ascribe the particular stupidities to me that you ascribe to straw-me, so I’m not sure how to respond to them. People don’t divided neatly into Good and Bad, obviously, and my point is exactly that what’s being hypothesized here seems to me like the sort that fictional Bad characters do and real people with real motives generally don’t.
Like, no, what’s being hypothesized here is just that the people at the organization are a part of a broader semi-authoritarian attempt to control a population, and that insofar as that is happening, they’re playing their role, which is to kind of not notice whilst also doing a reasonably good job at their part. This is pretty normal.
The truth is I’m not that confident of this interpretation of this particular ad, I could definitely learn evidence that would change my mind, it’s not that hard to get counter-evidence for such stories. But I feel like you haven’t once entertained this hypothesis and argued against it, you’ve just said “I don’t see it”, this is “obviously wrong”, and “the particular kind of deliberate meanness that you seem to be hypothesizing here seems pretty moustache-twirly”. The story we’re talking about seems to be a super common one to me throughout societies, and I guess I feel like you haven’t made an argument against it happening here other than one based on your own disbelief.[1]
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You seem most hung up on the phrase “anti-mask propaganda”, like when you say “The mask ads are produced by the MTA as part of a campaign whose overt (and, I think, real) goal is to get people to wear masks… Therefore, they are not in fact anti-mask propaganda”.
Why are the ads anti-mask propaganda? Because both ads straightforwardly make me less likely to wear a mask in a public setting or when asked to by someone else. The ad “Masks speak louder than words” suggests to me “This is a signal about what team you are on” and I detest people forcing tribal signals on me. This ad makes me care more about signaling to others that I do not care very much about mask-wearing because otherwise I feel I am being co-opted to signal in a political game. As an ad, it decreases my willingness to wear a mask. And I further think that the cognitive processes that led to these slogans being picked were picking it for tribal reasons and were happy to pick slogans that marginally reduced people’s chance of wearing masks in order to stomp on people more in a plausibly-deniable way.
It seems fairly plausible (i.e. somewhere in 10%-70%) that not one person focused their entire consciousnesses on creating anti-mask propaganda like the moustache-twirling villains you mentioned, but it seems to me quite likely that whatever sub-process ran in their brain essentially searched for an ad that gets away as looking like pro-mask propaganda while in fact just stomping on people, in a way that is functionally anti-mask propaganda.
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One line replies:
If “you’ve repeatedly avoided it” is meant to mean “I think you know what is actually going on and are going out of your way not to say it”, then I deny that charge. I may well be wrong about what is going on, but I promise I am not being insincere about it.
No, I just felt like you kept talking around it, I didn’t mean you seemed obviously insincere.
I don’t know what “Tilda Swinton’s character” is meant to convey
Alas! In my first comment upthread I referenced her character in the movie Snowpiercer and linked to a video of her giving a key tone-setting speech in the film.
An argument could look like, for example: “Here is a nearby institution that has clear markers of being pretty resistant to this sort of authoritarian stuff, which is reason to expect the MTA is too, so your story here doesn’t match my picture of the world.”
So, first of all, my apologies for missing where you said what Tilda Swinton character you had in mind. I remark that said character almost-literally is a moustache-twirling villain: in the scene you link to, we watch her smiling smugly while a man is being tortured for stepping out of his Ordained Place and going on about how she naturally belongs on top and they naturally belong trodden underfoot. All of which is consonant with (although, of course, not proof of the rightness of) my sense that the sort of thing being described here is more characteristic of Movie Bad Guys than of anything common in the real world.
I think part of what is going on here is that to me it looks like you and other-Ben are doing what Eliezer dubbed “privileging the hypothesis”. To be clear, I am sure that it seems entirely otherwise to both of you, and what is actually going here is that we have different underlying models of the world that make different hypotheses seem particularly plausible: to me, your-and-Benquo’s model looks paranoid; to you, my model looks naïve.
It’s true that I haven’t given concrete evidence against the Ben-squared interpretation; but it’s also true that neither of you has given evidence for it, so far as I can see. It’s not really the sort of thing for which concrete evidence is easy to come by. You say “it’s not that hard to get counter-evidence for such stories”, but I don’t know on what basis you say so. You give an example in a footnote of what counter-evidence might look like, but I don’t really know what “clear markers of being pretty resistant to this sort of authoritarian stuff” would look like if present, and it seems like there’s an underlying assumption here that institutions should be assumed malevolently authoritarian unless they have “clear markers of being pretty resistant”, which is part of what I am disputing. I genuinely cannot think of anything I could do that would—even conditional on my being absolutely correct about what’s going on here—take less than say two hours of work and give more than say a 25% chance of providing concrete evidence that my interpretation is better than yours.
You quote me as saying “I don’t see it” and “obviously wrong” and “seems pretty moustache-twirly”. In contrast, you are much more focused on concrete evidence, saying that your interpretation of things “is pretty normal”[1], “seems to be super common”, that “I further think that” [reiteration of the theory], and “it seems to me quite likely that” [reiteration of the theory]”. Benquo, in the OP, mostly just states his interpretation as if it were an obvious matter of fact: “the obvious transitive implication”, “the thinly-veiled message is”, “its explicit content is”[2], “anti-mask propaganda”, etc.
[1] What you say is “pretty normal” is something weaker than what you and Benquo are claiming in the present case, something like “there is an ongoing semi-authoritarian attempt to control a population, and the people involved are kinda-unconsciously-deliberately not noticing this while doing their part to help it”.
[2] No, its explicit content isn’t, any more than saying “actions speak louder than words” and urging someone to act is a form of silencing.
It seems to me as if you and Benquo are making assertions about these people’s motives on the basis of no concrete evidence, and then complaining of my unreasonableness when I say that those assertions seem implausible to me on the basis of no concrete evidence. Shouldn’t we have a consistent standard here?
I think it’s a dirty rhetorical move to take “Ben said X and drew important conclusions from it, and you keep pointing out that the facts are not consistent with X” and express it as “you seem hung up on X”. Be that as it may, I think it is an abuse of language to call something “anti-mask propaganda” when it is intended as pro-mask propaganda merely because it has the effect of making some people less inclined to wear masks.
I remark that your paragraph beginning “It seems fairly plausible” is, stated a little differently, saying that you estimate a 30-90% chance that someone involved in the making of those ads did in fact “focus their entire consciousness on creating anti-mask propaganda like a moustache-twirling villain”. Really?
(One other remark: the contempt you hypothesize at the MTA for the people they’re aiming their ads at seems no greater than the contempt you and Benquo seem to feel for the people you’re criticizing. Maybe I should be taking this as evidence for a general “there’s a lot of contempt around” hypothesis, but in any case it feels like it’s worth drawing some attention to because something seems off to me about saying what amounts to “look how contemptible these people are, for treating other people as contemptible”.)
The mask ads are produced by the MTA as part of a campaign whose overt (and, I think, real) goal is to get people to wear masks.
Therefore, they are not in fact anti-mask propaganda.
Ben may of course argue, perhaps correctly, that the attitude revealed by the ads is authoritarian and unpleasant and that for some people this makes the ads have an anti-mask effect. But that doesn’t mean the ads are “trying to degrade and humiliate mask-wearers”; maybe they have that effect but for that to be their intention the relevant people at the MTA would have to be moustache-twirling villains plotting “so, we will break their spirits and then they will be easier to control, bwahahahaha”, which is just not plausible.
(Alternatively, it’s possible that the people at the MTA wanted pro-mask ads, and they engaged an advertising agency that’s full of mask-haters who decided to subvert the message they were asked to promote by making superficially pro-mask but more subtly anti-mask advertisements. I do not find this plausible either; I think advertising agencies are too attached to making money to risk pissing off a major customer by doing that.)
If Ben had been complaining that the ads will put a lot of people off and therefore are bad ads and been met with incomprehension—which, to be clear, I think he quite likely would have been—then he’d be right to suggest that something bad is going on in the heads of the people failing to understand him. But I think it’d be something much simpler and less exciting than “regarding the dramatic authoritarianism of making people do things they don’t want to as the principal benefit of masks”. (Namely, that most people are pretty stupid and have trouble understanding any position on a thing X more complicated than “yay X” and “boo X”, and are liable to round everything to one of those or the other.)
In any case, again, that isn’t what Ben said. He said: “Seems like they’re now trying to degrade and humiliate mask-wearers”. Which is obviously wrong, and that rounding-things-off heuristic is particularly likely to happen when faced with someone who seems to be saying something stupid. In this case, though, I don’t think even that is what happened. I think the one person on whose response he seems to be basing this paranoid theory about what ‘the “pro-mask position”’ is really about, was making a perfectly valid point. Ben says, or appears to be saying: look at these ads, they say you should wear a mask and be silent, obviously this is an attempt to degrade and humiliate mask-wearers. She says: no, the “be silent” bit has a simpler and less sinister explanation: there’s an actual public-health benefit. All she’s guilty of here is not picking up on the other things Ben sees as evidence of an attempt to degrade and humiliate.
Again: all this seems like a clear instance of the “explicit X & implicit Y yield Z, therefore those who say X believe Z”. Y is “my interpretation of the subtext of these ads is correct”. Even if Ben is right about the subtext—if e.g. the MTA really is full of moustache-twirling villains, or their ad agency of anti-MTA anti-mask-requirement subversives—I claim it is perfectly possible for a reasonable person to fail to appreciate this, and that this is a much more likely explanation for their not grasping Ben’s point than that they’re part of the Great Authoritarian-Sadomasochistic Collective Conspiracy that Ben is trying to portray.
I don’t think it’s necessary to believe that “the MTA really is full of moustache-twirling villains” in order to believe that sometimes they’re mean to people on purpose. This is a normal thing that normal people do and doesn’t require someone to be totally committed at all times to evil. The interesting problem is not that someone was mean, but that the factional imperative to be pro-mask and anti-anti-mask effectively functions to provides cover for this, so that as part of their display of factional loyalty people refuse to recognize that someone did something mean.
Sure, people can be deliberately mean without being moustache-twirling villains. But the particular kind of deliberate meanness that you seem to be hypothesizing here seems pretty moustache-twirly.
Normally when people are deliberately mean to others without being moustache-twirling villains it’s (1) because they particularly dislike those other people or (2) because there is some concrete benefit to them from being mean.
In the present case, you’re suggesting that the MTA put out advertisements that intentionally had subtexts like “hey you, mask-wearers, eat shit”. Is it plausible that the MTA (or their executives, or the people running their ad campaigns) particularly dislike their customers as a whole, or specifically their customers who wear masks in order to reduce the spread of disease on the trains? Not to me. Is there some other concrete benefit the MTA (or etc.) would get from making their customers (as a whole, or etc.) feel bad? Not that I can see.
What’s the actual psychological process you envisage here, and why do you find it plausible?
I guess people are mean because it moves them up in the pecking order, or prevents them from moving down, and they think it’s safer to be an aggressor than a victim. Since scolding people for maybe not wearing masks is a protected behavior, they can get away with more meanness, with less discernment, than in other contexts. I don’t fully understand why this gives people cover for being mean to mask-wearers in the name of pro-mask propaganda, but it seems to be the case. This seems like part of the same phenomenon: https://reductress.com/post/how-governor-cuomo-once-a-soft-sidepiece-snapped-into-a-dom-daddy-i-would-let-choke-me/
Even a similar focus on allowing the dominator to constrict your breathing!
My best guess is that being mean to people is considered part of the process by which you take care of them, since it’s part of the process of giving orders, as I sketched out in Civil Law and Political Drama, much like frame-controlling them is, as Vaniver pointed out here and here.
I don’t think at any point here you’ve managed to say the thing I think is happening, and you’ve repeatedly avoided it.
This paragraph is a miss at stating what I would say is going on at the MTA (and also what I think Ben would say):
It’s not hard for me to imagine Tilda Swinton’s character telling her underlings to create wall-ads for sustaining order, and that they pick things like “Keep Order. Know your place. Be a shoe!” In this world would you also be arguing “Well the overt goal is to keep order, why would you assume it’s to degrade and humiliate the people?” I think you’d probably agree that inside their heads they’re looking for slogans that are degrading.
Like, my straw model of you right now is saying “Well either people are good, or they’re bad, and for someone to do something intentionally mean or unkind, must mean they are BAD PEOPLE, and are also bad in that they have mustaches that they twirl. I observe no moustaches, therefore they did not have this bad intention.”
Whereas I’m saying “sometimes groups of advanced monkeys can (amongst them many fine things they do) support false narratives about the group (e.g. companies that think they’re doing great then suddenly fail) and they can also systematically protect the powerful whilst otherwise trying to get on with their lives, and they can also systematically be unfair and kind of unethical to an outgroup whilst otherwise doing lots of fine things in the world.”
People are mixes of emotions and impulses, and people in groups can be especially blind to their impulses. I don’t get why it’s psychologically unimaginable to you to think that the people making mask ads kind of want to degrade the people their coalition is forcing to wear masks, and that they picked a nominally pro-mask slogan because it does so, or that their lack of moustaches all but proves that they cannot have this intention.
If “you’ve repeatedly avoided it” is meant to mean “I think you know what is actually going on and are going out of your way not to say it”, then I deny that charge. I may well be wrong about what is going on, but I promise I am not being insincere about it.
My apologies for popular-culture-ignorance, but I don’t know what “Tilda Swinton’s character” is meant to convey. Am I supposed to imagine a moustache-twirling evil dictator, or a well-meaning dictator, or a faceless bureaucrat, or what? Unfortunately, not knowing what scenario you’re asking me to imagine I don’t think I can usefully comment on whether I would agree that “inside their heads they’re looking for slogans that are degrading”; if they’re saying things like “know your place, be a shoe” then it sure sounds as if they are, but that also sounds to me like some combination of moustache-twirling villainy and deliberate subversion; I don’t think real people who aren’t actively trying to make others’ lives worse say things like “know your place, be a shoe”. But, again, maybe there’s some specific movie I’m supposed to be thinking of here that would make this all clearer?
(I had a look at Swinton’s filmography. The most obviously-relevant thing here is that she played the White Witch in a Narnia movie. That’s pretty much a moustache-twirling role, modulo the absence of moustaches for obvious biological reasons.)
Your straw model of me is indeed made of straw. It’s not obvious to me why you would ascribe the particular stupidities to me that you ascribe to straw-me, so I’m not sure how to respond to them. People don’t divided neatly into Good and Bad, obviously, and my point is exactly that what’s being hypothesized here seems to me like the sort that fictional Bad characters do and real people with real motives generally don’t. Not because real people are Good and never do anything bad; because the particular sort of badness being proposed seems to me fiction-like. “Moustache-twirling” is meant to gesture at that, not to indicate that I think it matters whether they have moustaches. (Duh, obviously. But how else am I supposed to respond to the last couple of sentences in that paragraph?)
I agree, of course, that sometimes people (or groups of people) can be systematically unfair and unethical to an outgroup. But I don’t see what outgroup you have in mind (“all our passengers”? “all our passengers who wear masks”?) and I don’t see what specifically you think would lead to the specific kind of obnoxiousness-to-that-outgroup that’s being proposed here.
It’s not that I think it’s impossible that “the people making mask ads kind of want to degrade the people their coalition is forcing to wear masks”. Of course it’s possible. What I don’t see is why it’s plausible; why that particular hypothesis should be regarded as a good explanation for anything; why it’s better than, say, “the people making these mask ads happen to have a sexual fetish that makes them feel like comparing masks to assholes will be pleasantly exciting for their audience” (which I think is extremely unlikely, even though people not infrequently have fetishes, and seems to me roughly on a par with your proposal in terms of plausibility) or “the people making these mask ads are specifically intending a contrast with the old joke about assholes and intend that ‘everyonie should have one’ will be a pleasant surprise for their audience” (which I think is actually probably correct) or “the people making these mask ads just somehow never thought of the old joke about assholes at all” (which seems unlikely even though people often miss things that you’d think obvious, but no more unlikely than your proposal).
Like, no, what’s being hypothesized here is just that the people at the organization are a part of a broader semi-authoritarian attempt to control a population, and that insofar as that is happening, they’re playing their role, which is to kind of not notice whilst also doing a reasonably good job at their part. This is pretty normal.
The truth is I’m not that confident of this interpretation of this particular ad, I could definitely learn evidence that would change my mind, it’s not that hard to get counter-evidence for such stories. But I feel like you haven’t once entertained this hypothesis and argued against it, you’ve just said “I don’t see it”, this is “obviously wrong”, and “the particular kind of deliberate meanness that you seem to be hypothesizing here seems pretty moustache-twirly”. The story we’re talking about seems to be a super common one to me throughout societies, and I guess I feel like you haven’t made an argument against it happening here other than one based on your own disbelief.[1]
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You seem most hung up on the phrase “anti-mask propaganda”, like when you say “The mask ads are produced by the MTA as part of a campaign whose overt (and, I think, real) goal is to get people to wear masks… Therefore, they are not in fact anti-mask propaganda”.
Why are the ads anti-mask propaganda? Because both ads straightforwardly make me less likely to wear a mask in a public setting or when asked to by someone else. The ad “Masks speak louder than words” suggests to me “This is a signal about what team you are on” and I detest people forcing tribal signals on me. This ad makes me care more about signaling to others that I do not care very much about mask-wearing because otherwise I feel I am being co-opted to signal in a political game. As an ad, it decreases my willingness to wear a mask. And I further think that the cognitive processes that led to these slogans being picked were picking it for tribal reasons and were happy to pick slogans that marginally reduced people’s chance of wearing masks in order to stomp on people more in a plausibly-deniable way.
It seems fairly plausible (i.e. somewhere in 10%-70%) that not one person focused their entire consciousnesses on creating anti-mask propaganda like the moustache-twirling villains you mentioned, but it seems to me quite likely that whatever sub-process ran in their brain essentially searched for an ad that gets away as looking like pro-mask propaganda while in fact just stomping on people, in a way that is functionally anti-mask propaganda.
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One line replies:
No, I just felt like you kept talking around it, I didn’t mean you seemed obviously insincere.
Alas! In my first comment upthread I referenced her character in the movie Snowpiercer and linked to a video of her giving a key tone-setting speech in the film.
An argument could look like, for example: “Here is a nearby institution that has clear markers of being pretty resistant to this sort of authoritarian stuff, which is reason to expect the MTA is too, so your story here doesn’t match my picture of the world.”
So, first of all, my apologies for missing where you said what Tilda Swinton character you had in mind. I remark that said character almost-literally is a moustache-twirling villain: in the scene you link to, we watch her smiling smugly while a man is being tortured for stepping out of his Ordained Place and going on about how she naturally belongs on top and they naturally belong trodden underfoot. All of which is consonant with (although, of course, not proof of the rightness of) my sense that the sort of thing being described here is more characteristic of Movie Bad Guys than of anything common in the real world.
I think part of what is going on here is that to me it looks like you and other-Ben are doing what Eliezer dubbed “privileging the hypothesis”. To be clear, I am sure that it seems entirely otherwise to both of you, and what is actually going here is that we have different underlying models of the world that make different hypotheses seem particularly plausible: to me, your-and-Benquo’s model looks paranoid; to you, my model looks naïve.
It’s true that I haven’t given concrete evidence against the Ben-squared interpretation; but it’s also true that neither of you has given evidence for it, so far as I can see. It’s not really the sort of thing for which concrete evidence is easy to come by. You say “it’s not that hard to get counter-evidence for such stories”, but I don’t know on what basis you say so. You give an example in a footnote of what counter-evidence might look like, but I don’t really know what “clear markers of being pretty resistant to this sort of authoritarian stuff” would look like if present, and it seems like there’s an underlying assumption here that institutions should be assumed malevolently authoritarian unless they have “clear markers of being pretty resistant”, which is part of what I am disputing. I genuinely cannot think of anything I could do that would—even conditional on my being absolutely correct about what’s going on here—take less than say two hours of work and give more than say a 25% chance of providing concrete evidence that my interpretation is better than yours.
You quote me as saying “I don’t see it” and “obviously wrong” and “seems pretty moustache-twirly”. In contrast, you are much more focused on concrete evidence, saying that your interpretation of things “is pretty normal”[1], “seems to be super common”, that “I further think that” [reiteration of the theory], and “it seems to me quite likely that” [reiteration of the theory]”. Benquo, in the OP, mostly just states his interpretation as if it were an obvious matter of fact: “the obvious transitive implication”, “the thinly-veiled message is”, “its explicit content is”[2], “anti-mask propaganda”, etc.
[1] What you say is “pretty normal” is something weaker than what you and Benquo are claiming in the present case, something like “there is an ongoing semi-authoritarian attempt to control a population, and the people involved are kinda-unconsciously-deliberately not noticing this while doing their part to help it”.
[2] No, its explicit content isn’t, any more than saying “actions speak louder than words” and urging someone to act is a form of silencing.
It seems to me as if you and Benquo are making assertions about these people’s motives on the basis of no concrete evidence, and then complaining of my unreasonableness when I say that those assertions seem implausible to me on the basis of no concrete evidence. Shouldn’t we have a consistent standard here?
I think it’s a dirty rhetorical move to take “Ben said X and drew important conclusions from it, and you keep pointing out that the facts are not consistent with X” and express it as “you seem hung up on X”. Be that as it may, I think it is an abuse of language to call something “anti-mask propaganda” when it is intended as pro-mask propaganda merely because it has the effect of making some people less inclined to wear masks.
I remark that your paragraph beginning “It seems fairly plausible” is, stated a little differently, saying that you estimate a 30-90% chance that someone involved in the making of those ads did in fact “focus their entire consciousness on creating anti-mask propaganda like a moustache-twirling villain”. Really?
(One other remark: the contempt you hypothesize at the MTA for the people they’re aiming their ads at seems no greater than the contempt you and Benquo seem to feel for the people you’re criticizing. Maybe I should be taking this as evidence for a general “there’s a lot of contempt around” hypothesis, but in any case it feels like it’s worth drawing some attention to because something seems off to me about saying what amounts to “look how contemptible these people are, for treating other people as contemptible”.)