Mob and Bailey
Epistemological status: Moderately confident that this is a more useful way to use a concept that has been expanded upon by others.
Previous building blocks: See Logical Rudeness and All Another Brick in the Motte and for the foundations, as well as Against Accusing People of Motte and Bailey for the direct predecessor.
If you haven’t read the previous building blocks, the core idea is called the Motte and Bailey. A Motte and Bailey argument is what you call it when someone makes a clearly supported and uncontested claim, then makes an outrageous but advantageous claim, then swaps between these two claims whenever it’s useful to them. It draws from the medieval tactic of having an easily farmable bailey right next to a heavily fortified motte, then moving your peasants and troops back and forth between them whenever raiders come or leave.
I
Amy and Bob would like to have a civil discussion about a philosophical difference they have. Their conversation goes something like this:
Amy: I don’t understand why you think tautologies are important. I mean, you can’t get any extra information out of them, right?
Bob: There are actually a number of different kinds of tautologies. For example, a logical tautology might say “either X equals Y or X does not equal Y” and while you might be correct that no new information is gained from this, I find it helps me organize my thoughts.
A: Ah, I didn’t know that. I’ve mostly seen them used as rhetorical devices.
B: They can be used that way, but it’s far from the most interesting thing about them for me.
A: As long as people are going to keep using tautologies to win arguments though, how do we help those who don’t understand them well enough to defend against tautology based arguments?
B: Oh go soak your head. I think if you learned more about them you’d be able to actually counter them when people did use them in arguments.
A: Even if I studied tautologies enough to do so, I worry that making a general rule of needing to study all potential rhetorical devices to be able to defend against them might be prohibitively difficult.
B: As much as I love tautologies, I do think tautology proponents should be more careful in their usage.
B: At least as long as we have to deal with idiots who try to ban anything they don’t understand.
This conversation disintegrated quickly. Bob seems to be moving between the position that tautologies are one way to organize information, and the position that if you don’t understand them there’s something wrong with you. This looks like a straightforward example of Motte and Bailey.
II
Imagine Bob is the vice-president of the Tautologies club at a well respected college, and he has just been invited into a very nice conference room by some campus authority.
Authority: We’ve had some complaints about the behavior of your club. Apparently proponents of tautologies are disruptive, disrespectful, and frankly prone to outrageous acts.
Bob: What? That catches me completely by surprise: one of our members, Carol, has a perfect behavioral record- no infractions at all in the entire four years of her time here at the university.
Authority: Yes but-
Bob: Also, our secretary Dean just got a commendation last semester for Showing Proper Decorum. Isn’t he going to the Competitive Decorum Displays next fall? Surely you aren’t saying that he’s disrespectful!
Authority: No but-
Bob: In addition, I happen to know that our treasurer Evan is on the boards of several charities with you. Really, I think the Tautology Club is full of wonderful people!
Authority: Then what do you have to say about your club president screaming “B is B, motherf**kers!” in the middle of a class before running up to the front of the room to spray paint your club slogan onto the professor’s chest?!
Bob: I recognize that Bella may have made a few poor choices, but I do hope you’ll consider leniency. After all, Tautology club members are really good people.
An organization is not a person, but it contains people. Membership in an organization usually suggests things about a person, and there are correlations to be found between members of a group, but very few groups can be treated as a singular entity. This is a best case scenario where the Tautology club is a defined organization with memberships and presidents! If this was something larger and more diffuse like a political party or a fandom, Bob might not even know who Bella is.
III
Let’s try that first conversation again.
Amy: I don’t understand why you think tautologies are important. I mean, you can’t get any extra information out of them, right?
Bob: There are actually a number of different kinds of tautologies. For example, a logical tautology might say “either X equals Y or X does not equal Y” and while you might be correct that no new information is gained from this, I find it helps me organize my thoughts.
Amy: Ah, I didn’t know that. I’ve mostly seen them used as rhetorical devices.
Bob: They can be used that way, but it’s far from the most interesting thing about them for me.
Amy: As long as people are going to keep using tautologies to win arguments though, how do we help those who don’t understand them well enough to defend against tautology based arguments?
Bella: Oh go soak your head. I think if you learned more about them you’d be able to actually counter them when people did use them in arguments.
Amy: Even if I studied tautologies enough to do so, I worry that making a general rule of needing to study all potential rhetorical devices to be able to defend against them might be prohibitively difficult.
Bob: As much as I love tautologies, I do think tautology proponents should be more careful in their usage.
Bella: At least as long as we have to deal with idiots who try to ban anything they don’t understand.
Oh. Oops. This isn’t a conversation between a reasonable person and someone committing Motte and Bailey; this is a conversation between one reasonable person and two separate people. Bob and Bella are both being consistent, and while Bella is kind of rude Amy would still have a much more productive discussion if she can talk to either of these people one-on-one rather than trying to address both of them at once.
IV
Amy, Bob, and Bella’s conversation is somewhat contrived, but less than you might think. I have had conversations where two people had the same user icon in a system where you had to pick from a short list of icons and I had to keep double-checking which of them said something. I’ve been in fast moving IRC conversations where there weren’t user icons, just handles, and mistakenly skimmed over the handle. There were mass texts where everyone was a string of numbers instead of a name. Mixups happen.
Then there are conversations where you know, intellectually, that you’re talking to different people, but it doesn’t feel like it. Twitter and Facebook seem to create these conversations a lot but you can get the same impression when talking to a crowd. If every inch of concession you make to Bob is immediately leapt upon by a dozen Bellas who demand a mile, then Bob starts to look like a Trojan horse and you stop wanting to concede anything.
I call this pattern the Mob and Bailey. It’s not a fallacy or doctrine, and it’s not committed by any individual: it can happen with people who are perfectly consistent and arguing in good faith. Even if Bella wasn’t abrasive the basic problem remains; she and Bob are on the same side for different reasons, and will be convinced by different things. Neither Bob nor Bella need to be trying to mess things up for this to create a problem, the argument will get mired quite naturally through the process of Amy trying to argue with both of them at the same time.
I still don’t have a solution to the Motte and Bailey problem, but the solution to the Mob and Bailey is straightforward once you realize what you’re dealing with. Pick one person, ask what specific thing they believe, and talk about that. Ignore everyone else. Once that one conversation concludes, pause, clear your head, and if you want to go again then sit down to pick another person.
V
You cannot argue with a group. You cannot convince a group of things or change a group’s mind.
I’m not saying that doing so is hard. I am saying that The Tautology Club is not a single thing. It does not have ears to hear or a mouth to speak. The idea of arguing with The Tautology Club is ill-formed in the way that performing knee surgery on The Tautology Club is ill-formed. You can argue with the people in the group. That’s not impossible, it’s only as difficult as arguing with someone usually is. Most of the time, distinctions like the one between arguing with The Tautology Club and arguing with the members of The Tautology Club is pedantry. In this case, I think it’s useful to make that distinction deliberately in your mind.
You cannot argue with The Tautology Club.
You can argue with Bob and Bella, who are in The Tautology Club. I claim that the process of doing this will be more successful if you argue with one of them at a time instead of trying to argue with both at once. I also claim that the process of arguing with a chimeric combination of both of them which you treat as one entity will be less successful than either one at a time or both at once. If you ever find yourself going “Aha! You say tautologies are for organizing your thoughts, but your ally just said anyone who doesn’t understand tautology is an idiot” you are having a bad problem and you are unlikely to have a productive discussion today. This gets more and more true the larger and less coordinated the group is.
If you argue with the Pope, you are not actually arguing with Catholicism. I predict if you are not a religious scholar of some kind that you will be surprised at the breadth of opinion and diversity in the Catholic Church. If you argue with the U.S. Secretary of Defense, you are not actually arguing with the U.S. Military. I predict if you are not in or adjacent to the military somehow that you will be surprised at the breadth of opinion and diversity in the U.S. Military. If you argue with the U.S. President, you are not actually arguing with the United States of America. Those are the easy ones where there is a structure and you’re talking to the acknowledged head of it!
If you argue with a random anarchist, you can’t conclude that all anarchists hold the same beliefs! Of course anarchists disagree with each other and have different ideas of what their philosophy is, that could practically be the definition of anarchism except obviously there’s lots of different definitions of anarchism! If you try to argue with “liberals” or “conservatives” by talking to whoever is most vocal about their political beliefs at the thanksgiving dinner table, you are actually arguing with that specific person. Don’t argue with The Tautology Club, argue with Bob or Bella.
You cannot argue with The Tautology Club, but you can debate things with individuals. It isn’t Motte and Bailey if two different people genuinely hold different views, even if they’re in some sense on the same side as each other. If you find yourself arguing with a group that seems to hold different views where some of their claims are unobjectionable and others are outrageous, you may be dealing with Mob and Bailey. Try keeping track of which person holds which positions, or just talking to one person at a time.
Good post. I see that I’ve encountered this, and been part of the mob, many times with frustrating results.
This isn’t helpful or probably really relevant, but I did enjoy the example, and I do want to remind everyone that the first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club.
Somehow I completely failed to think of the line “the first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club” and I want you to know that reading it made me laugh. Thanks :)
This is a fantastically good point. I’ve often seen this failure mode and not had a name for it, such as when someone I know complains about his political opponents having a self-contradictory ideology—I always have to correct him that in fact, different people in roughly the same camp are contradicting one another, but each individual perspective is self-consistent. Now I have a name for that phenomenon!
Thank you for writing this post. This is a phenomenon I’ve also noticed, and it applies not just to arguing but to anything to do with reasoning about groups of people. Mistakes of the type “mistakenly attributed characteristic of group to person” are common. As you said in a comment, the way that we group people is usually very lossy. This is especially frustrating for those who have to deal with the same mistaken assumption being made about them often. Making inferences about specific people based on group generalizations is useful sometimes, but acting on them wrongly often has steep costs in misunderstanding and conflict. It’s good to be reminded to keep close track of where you’re making this type of inference.
This is a great point, and very nicely made—but I do think it avoids the topic of why people end up in these styles of argument in the first place.
I think there would be more value in discussing How to deal with Mob & Bailey situations once they arise rather than How to stop Mob & Bailey situations from arising.
You point out, correctly, that Mob & Bailey situations tend to occur when one is overly anthropomorphising a group of people, as though that group were an individual person.
The real problem is, that there are situations where it really is useful to act that way for pragmatic reasons.
At least in my experience, Mob & Bailey arguments tend to happen in fairly broad discussions about group behaviours—perhaps about ideologies, or social practices between groups.
These are situations where it is very useful and important to be able to try and address an entire group’s collective behaviour, moreso than addressing how individuals act and rationalise their decisions.
In these cases, what we’re really trying to discuss is the mechanics of how groups are organised, rather than any one individual’s beliefs.
If we’re arguing with a Tautology Club which breaks university rules, then talking with the club president does make sense. If we’re arguing with a military, then talking with the Secretary of Defense isn’t a bad place to start—but perhaps investigating middle-management positions would be more practical.
I’d love to read further ideas more along the lines of “How to deal with Mob & Bailey situations”, because I think the results can be quite different depending on which structure of social group you’re arguing with.
I think I disagree with the prevalence of situations where it’s really useful to act like a group is an individual person, but I’m not sure that’s your claim exactly. It’s possible we’re in agreement. Step one of this essay is to crystalize the idea of the Mob, this crowd that can look united but is actually different once you look closer. The conversation between Amy, Bob, and Bella is a caricature but I have seen conversations that resembled it. Sometimes it feels like Twitter is designed to create them.
Once the idea of the Mob & Bailey is in your toolbelt, then yeah, dealing with them once they’ve started is a useful topic (though on the small scale, you can catch yourself midway through an argument and go “Okay, hang on, I’m going to specifically address Bella for a moment here-”) and it can segue into how organizations are structured. I claim the platonic Mob & Bailey is seen when there isn’t a clear structure or where there are lots of people aligned but outside the formal structure, like a political party or a religious group. If I need to convince the United Nations to do something then maybe I start by drawing up their org chart (both formal and informal) but like, I don’t think investigating the social structure of Deists as a group is going to be helpful.
Which, again, we might just agree on. If I want to talk the U.S. Military (a group) into doing something, then I might start by talking to the Secretary of Defense (a person) or I might start by talking to a middle-manager in charge of trainings (a person) or talking to an inventory manager (a person). The reductio ad absurdum version of talking to The U.S. Military (a group) might be standing on the front lawn of the Pentagon with a megaphone. That’s unlikely to get me what I want. I’ve got some ideas on how to deal with talking to things like the U.S. MIlitary (not great ideas, but ideas) but the megaphone thing just doesn’t work.
Yep this feels right to me! I think we agree on pretty much everything about this.
My main concern is that your post as-is could be misinterpreted as being along the lines of “Don’t try to influence groups—only try to influence individuals manually, one at a time”. It’d take a pretty extreme misinterpreter to take this to the full extent, but it could still be a negative influence on peoples’ ability to deal with groups of people in effective ways.
Perhaps a good way of putting this is;
Mob & Bailey scenario: I am talking with X social group, which can consistently be modelled as a person-esque agent
Potential misinterpretation of your post: I am talking with individuals one at a time, and modelling these discussions as being part of a broader social structure is bad
A modelling I’d propose: I am talking with X social group, which can be modelled as a machine, with components of varying functions, comprised of people
“You cannot argue with a group. You cannot convince a group of things or change a group’s mind.”
Forgive me if this comes across as trollish, but whose mind are you trying to change with this essay?
To me it seems like your point is either self-refuting (in form, if not meaning) or, at best, incomplete.
The target audience is people who feel like their interlocutor is using Motte and Bailey, when what’s actually happening is they’re trying to talk to a group and not separating out the individuals. Each individual person who knows what Motte and Bailey is who adds Mob and Bailey to their mental toolbelt is a point scored for this post, and every frustrated argument someone would have had of the form “You all said Y, but five minutes ago you all said X! Argh!” which instead has the form “You Bob said Y, and five minutes ago you Bella said X. I’m going to respond to Bob first, then I’ll respond to Bella after” is a victory for this post.
I’m going to type up a longer version in response to Ben’s reply here, but I think it’s fine to argue with one person and have others be convinced as “splash.” Another way to put this is if you start by responding to a specific argument, then you can maybe convince everyone who holds the original argument. E.g. “Lots of people think whales are fish, because they live in the ocean. I think this is wrong because whales have warm blood and fur, making them mammals, and that’s more important.” If someone thinks whales are fish because of a different reason, you may need different arguments. Though beware the idea that just because people make the same argument that they do so for the same reasons!
Alice is a feminist activist who is pro-choice. Bob is an environmentalist who is pro-choice because he thinks the human population is too high and anything to reduce it is a good thing. Charlie is pro-choice because he is a very conservative Christian who thinks god will punish countries that allow abortions, but he hates his country and wants to see it burn.
All three agents have a mind, that could in principle be changed.
The group {Alice, Bob, Charlie} doesn’t have a mind it can change.
You send the same text to Alice, Bob and Charlie. But if the essay is written with the understanding that these are three different people with wildly different views it is likely to be more successful than if you write the essay while modelling them as some kind of combined super-agent, who is a feminist, environmentalist, conservative Christian, anti-patriot.
The difference is a matter of how you model reality while constructing your arguments.
Still, you may have a point. Screwtape was plausibly modelling some kind of “median lesswrong user” in their head while writing their post. (I am curious if this is true?). And if they were doing that it was very likely a useful tactic. So maybe the subtlety is noticing when you are clumping people into averages, and being aware of the errors that can result in if the underling group is inhomogeneous in important respects.
Mu.
There’s a concept in software design called Personas. A persona is a stereotype of a user; “Bill, a veteran mechanical engineer who uses our software for work” is one persona, “Alex, a novice hobbiest who saw our software on a youtube video” is another persona. I like working with personas since they’re good intuition pumps. I can guess that Bill wants keyboard shortcuts and compact buttons, while Alex wants tooltips or even to have the buttons labeled. The way I’ve worked with personas is that the ideal persona is contemplated as a singular person, and it works best if they are actually a real person. Do a survey, find a median user, get their contact info and actually have a conversation with them. If you solve a problem for that median user—a person who, again, ideally isn’t just a hypothetical but is a human being whose hand you can shake—then it’s pretty likely you solved a problem that other people have as well.
For this essay, my first target persona is “Screwtape, but from five years ago.” I’m pretty confident if I handed this to past!me, past!me would go “oooh yeah that makes sense, I’ll do that instead.” My second target is a relative of mine who keeps arguing with “democrats” without much success. “Democrats believe X, because Y, but Y is false!” ”. . . You know that you can be a Democrat and think X is false, right?”
Lets say you agree with Mob and Bailey, but you still want to convince a group of something. Stop, think for a couple of minutes by the clock. What does that actually look like?
Some of the time for me, I want a big organization to do something or change what it does; maybe I want the U.S. Military to invade Albuquerque or something. Convincing random people that Albuquerque is full of bad vibes isn’t very productive. Because the U.S. Military is fairly solidly structured, I can talk to specific people and ask who has decision-making power, then talk to those people (or their influences in a Themistocles’ Infant Son approach) and then if I win Albuquerque gets invaded. Note that you could describe this as “convince the U.S. Military” but that other things which also get described as “convince the U.S. Military” wouldn’t work; if one by one I talk every single boot camp sergeant into thinking Albuquerque is a den of scum and villainy then Albuquerque probably doesn’t wind up invaded.
Sometimes the goal looks like more and more of the group members being convinced. There’s maybe a tipping point where the group starts reinforcing the new belief, but if every individual in the group is convinced that’s kind of a win. Like, if tomorrow every single U.S. Senator woke up convinced that polyamory was obviously correct and the importance of our found families was an applause light, that would probably be a self-reinforcing state the way that the traditional family was an applause light for a long time. Here, I think it’s important not to get so distracted by the forest that you miss the trees. Senators want different things for different reasons and have different starting conditions. Maybe you split up the senators into personas and make arguments to each of them; here’s an argument based on individual rights, here’s an argument with historical or biblical premise, here’s an argument based on sociological outcomes.
I am not proposing to go full symmetric weapon rationalist dark arts here. Tying it back to the original post, I’m noting that people can believe something for different reasons and the way that we group people is usually very lossy. If Dean believes that zoning boards and current housing policy are bad because it’s an infringement of rights, and Emma believes zoning boards and current housing policy are bad because it drives up housing prices, trying to write one argument that will convince both of them seems needlessly hard.
Looking at your example of Alice, Bob, and Charlie who are all pro-choice, I wouldn’t try and send them all the same text. That sounds needlessly hard. If I did have to send them all the same message, that message might say “Alice, I think you should change your mind because X. Bob, I think you should change your mind because Y. Charlie, I think you should change your mind because Z.” Is there a reason you have to do it the hard way?
That last bit was a mistake on my part. My comment origionally said that “If you are for some reason operating under the constraint that you have to send the same text to them all (maybe posting on a forum they all, and others, read then.” I tried shortening it and ended up with the current nonsense.
Gotcha, that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying!
Internally, though, people are not monolithic. In some ways, they are more like a mob. Even debating with one person, you can run into the same type of difficulty.
Yeah, I do think the original Motte and Bailey can exist. If you’re sitting across a table from one person and they seem to equivocate between two positions, this post is not really addressing that problem. The art of Internal Family Systems meets Double Crux is left as an exercise for another day I guess.