But within two days, the genuine shock faded, and concern-for-image regained total control of the political discourse. Then the spiral of escalation took over completely. Once restraint becomes unspeakable, no matter where the discourse starts out, the level of fury and folly can only rise with time.
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111
The Robbers Cave Experiment
Did you ever wonder, when you were a kid, whether your inane “summer camp” actually had some kind of elaborate hidden purpose—say, it was all a science experiment and the “camp counselors” were really researchers observing your behavior?
Me neither.
But we’d have been more paranoid if we’d read “Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment” by Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, and Sherif.1 In this study, the experimental subjects—excuse me, “campers”—were 22 boys between fifth and sixth grade, selected from 22 different schools in Oklahoma City, of stable middle-class Protestant families, doing well in school, median IQ 112. They were as well-adjusted and as similar to each other as the researchers could manage.
The experiment, conducted in the bewildered aftermath of World War II, was meant to investigate the causes—and possible remedies—of intergroup conflict. How would they spark an intergroup conflict to investigate? Well, the 22 boys were divided into two groups of 11 campers, and—
—and that turned out to be quite sufficient.
The researchers’ original plans called for the experiment to be conducted in three stages. In Stage 1, each group of campers would settle in, unaware of the other group’s existence. Toward the end of Stage 1, the groups would gradually be made aware of each other. In Stage 2, a set of contests and prize competitions would set the two groups at odds.
They needn’t have bothered with Stage 2. There was hostility almost from the moment each group became aware of the other group’s existence: They were using our campground, our baseball diamond. On their first meeting, the two groups began hurling insults. They named themselves the Rattlers and the Eagles (they hadn’t needed names when they were the only group on the campground).
When the contests and prizes were announced, in accordance with pre-established experimental procedure, the intergroup rivalry rose to a fever pitch. Good sportsmanship in the contests was evident for the first two days but rapidly disintegrated.
The Eagles stole the Rattlers’ flag and burned it. Rattlers raided the Eagles’ cabin and stole the blue jeans of the group leader, which they painted orange and carried as a flag the next day, inscribed with the legend “The Last of the Eagles.” The Eagles launched a retaliatory raid on the Rattlers, turning over beds, scattering dirt. Then they returned to their cabin where they entrenched and prepared weapons (socks filled with rocks) in case of a return raid. After the Eagles won the last contest planned for Stage 2, the Rattlers raided their cabin and stole the prizes. This developed into a fistfight that the staff had to shut down for fear of injury. The Eagles, retelling the tale among themselves, turned the whole affair into a magnificent victory—they’d chased the Rattlers “over halfway back to their cabin” (they hadn’t).
Each group developed a negative stereotype of Them and a contrasting positive stereotype of Us. The Rattlers swore heavily. The Eagles, after winning one game, concluded that the Eagles had won because of their prayers and the Rattlers had lost because they used cuss-words all the time. The Eagles decided to stop using cuss-words themselves. They also concluded that since the Rattlers swore all the time, it would be wiser not to talk to them. The Eagles developed an image of themselves as proper-and-moral; the Rattlers developed an image of themselves as rough-and-tough.
Group members held their noses when members of the other group passed.
In Stage 3, the researchers tried to reduce friction between the two groups.
Mere contact (being present without contesting) did not reduce friction between the two groups. Attending pleasant events together—for example, shooting off Fourth of July fireworks—did not reduce friction; instead it developed into a food fight.
Would you care to guess what did work?
(Spoiler space . . .)
The boys were informed that there might be a water shortage in the whole camp, due to mysterious trouble with the water system—possibly due to vandals. (The Outside Enemy, one of the oldest tricks in the book.)
The area between the camp and the reservoir would have to be inspected by four search details. (Initially, these search details were composed uniformly of members from each group.) All details would meet up at the water tank if nothing was found. As nothing was found, the groups met at the water tank and observed for themselves that no water was coming from the faucet. The two groups of boys discussed where the problem might lie, pounded the sides of the water tank, discovered a ladder to the top, verified that the water tank was full, and finally found the sack stuffed in the water faucet. All the boys gathered around the faucet to clear it. Suggestions from members of both groups were thrown at the problem and boys from both sides tried to implement them.
When the faucet was finally cleared, the Rattlers, who had canteens, did not object to the Eagles taking a first turn at the faucets (the Eagles didn’t have canteens with them). No insults were hurled, not even the customary “Ladies first.”
It wasn’t the end of the rivalry. There was another food fight, with insults, the next morning. But a few more common tasks, requiring cooperation from both groups—e.g. restarting a stalled truck—did the job. At the end of the trip, the Rattlers used $5 won in a bean-toss contest to buy malts for all the boys in both groups.
The Robbers Cave Experiment illustrates the psychology of hunter-gatherer bands, echoed through time, as perfectly as any experiment ever devised by social science.
Any resemblance to modern politics is just your imagination.
(Sometimes I think humanity’s second-greatest need is a supervillain. Maybe I’ll go into that line of work after I finish my current job.)
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1. Muzafer Sherif et al., “Study of Positive and Negative Intergroup Attitudes Between Experimentally Produced Groups: Robbers Cave Study,” Unpublished manuscript (1954).
112
Every Cause Wants to Be a Cult
Cade Metz at The Register recently alleged that a secret mailing list of Wikipedia’s top administrators has become obsessed with banning all critics and possible critics of Wikipedia. Including banning a productive user when one administrator—solely because of the productivity—became convinced that the user was a spy sent by Wikipedia Review. And that the top people at Wikipedia closed ranks to defend their own. (I have not investigated these allegations myself, as yet. Hat tip to Eugen Leitl.)
Is there some deep moral flaw in seeking to systematize the world’s knowledge, which would lead pursuers of that Cause into madness? Perhaps only people with innately totalitarian tendencies would try to become the world’s authority on everything—
Correspondence bias alert! (Correspondence bias: making inferences about someone’s unique disposition from behavior that can be entirely explained by the situation in which it occurs. When we see someone else kick a vending machine, we think they are “an angry person,” but when we kick the vending machine, it’s because the bus was late, the train was early, and the machine ate our money.) If the allegations about Wikipedia are true, they’re explained by ordinary human nature, not by extraordinary human nature.
The ingroup-outgroup dichotomy is part of ordinary human nature. So are happy death spirals and spirals of hate. A Noble Cause doesn’t need a deep hidden flaw for its adherents to form a cultish in-group. It is sufficient that the adherents be human. Everything else follows naturally, decay by default, like food spoiling in a refrigerator after the electricity goes off.
In the same sense that every thermal differential wants to equalize itself, and every computer program wants to become a collection of ad-hoc patches, every Cause wants to be a cult. It’s a high-entropy state i
nto which the system trends, an attractor in human psychology. It may have nothing to do with whether the Cause is truly Noble. You might think that a Good Cause would rub off its goodness on every aspect of the people associated with it—that the Cause’s followers would also be less susceptible to status games, ingroup-outgroup bias, affective spirals, leader-gods. But believing one true idea won’t switch off the halo effect. A noble cause won’t make its adherents something other than human. There are plenty of bad ideas that can do plenty of damage—but that’s not necessarily what’s going on.
Every group of people with an unusual goal—good, bad, or silly—will trend toward the cult attractor unless they make a constant effort to resist it. You can keep your house cooler than the outdoors, but you have to run the air conditioner constantly, and as soon as you turn off the electricity—give up the fight against entropy—things will go back to “normal.”
On one notable occasion there was a group that went semicultish whose rallying cry was “Rationality! Reason! Objective reality!” (More on this later.) Labeling the Great Idea “rationality” won’t protect you any more than putting up a sign over your house that says “Cold!” You still have to run the air conditioner—expend the required energy per unit time to reverse the natural slide into cultishness. Worshipping rationality won’t make you sane any more than worshipping gravity enables you to fly. You can’t talk to thermodynamics and you can’t pray to probability theory. You can use it, but not join it as an in-group.
Cultishness is quantitative, not qualitative. The question is not “Cultish, yes or no?” but “How much cultishness and where?” Even in Science, which is the archetypal Genuinely Truly Noble Cause, we can readily point to the current frontiers of the war against cult-entropy, where the current battle line creeps forward and back. Are journals more likely to accept articles with a well-known authorial byline, or from an unknown author from a well-known institution, compared to an unknown author from an unknown institution? How much belief is due to authority and how much is from the experiment? Which journals are using blinded reviewers, and how effective is blinded reviewing?
I cite this example, rather than the standard vague accusations of “Scientists aren’t open to new ideas,” because it shows a battle line—a place where human psychology is being actively driven back, where accumulated cult-entropy is being pumped out. (Of course this requires emitting some waste heat.)
This essay is not a catalog of techniques for actively pumping against cultishness. Some such techniques I have said before, and some I will say later. Here I just want to point out that the worthiness of the Cause does not mean you can spend any less effort in resisting the cult attractor. And that if you can point to current battle lines, it does not mean you confess your Noble Cause unworthy. You might think that if the question were “Cultish, yes or no?” that you were obliged to answer “No,” or else betray your beloved Cause. But that is like thinking that you should divide engines into “perfectly efficient” and “inefficient,” instead of measuring waste.
Contrariwise, if you believe that it was the Inherent Impurity of those Foolish Other Causes that made them go wrong, if you laugh at the folly of “cult victims,” if you think that cults are led and populated by mutants, then you will not expend the necessary effort to pump against entropy—to resist being human.
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113
Guardians of the Truth
The criticism is sometimes leveled against rationalists: “The Inquisition thought they had the truth! Clearly this ‘truth’ business is dangerous.”
There are many obvious responses, such as “If you think that possessing the truth would license you to torture and kill, you’re making a mistake that has nothing to do with epistemology.” Or, “So that historical statement you just made about the Inquisition—is it true?”
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence: “If your current computer stops working, you can’t conclude that everything about the current system is wrong and that you need a new system without an AMD processor, an ATI video card . . . even though your current system has all these things and it doesn’t work. Maybe you just need a new power cord.” To arrive at a poor conclusion requires only one wrong step, not every step wrong. The Inquisitors believed that 2 + 2 = 4, but that wasn’t the source of their madness. Maybe epistemological realism wasn’t the problem either?
It does seem plausible that if the Inquisition had been made up of relativists, professing that nothing was true and nothing mattered, they would have mustered less enthusiasm for their torture. They would also have been less enthusiastic if lobotomized. I think that’s a fair analogy.
And yet . . . I think the Inquisition’s attitude toward truth played a role. The Inquisition believed that there was such a thing as truth, and that it was important; well, likewise Richard Feynman. But the Inquisitors were not Truth-Seekers. They were Truth-Guardians.
I once read an argument (I can’t find the source) that a key component of a zeitgeist is whether it locates its ideals in its future or its past. Nearly all cultures before the Enlightenment believed in a Fall from Grace—that things had once been perfect in the distant past, but then catastrophe had struck, and everything had slowly run downhill since then:
In the age when life on Earth was full . . . They loved each other and did not know that this was “love of neighbor.” They deceived no one yet they did not know that they were “men to be trusted.” They were reliable and did not know that this was “good faith.” They lived freely together giving and taking, and did not know that they were generous. For this reason their deeds have not been narrated. They made no history.
—The Way of Chuang Tzu, trans. Thomas Merton1
The perfect age of the past, according to our best anthropological evidence, never existed. But a culture that sees life running inexorably downward is very different from a culture in which you can reach unprecedented heights.
(I say “culture,” and not “society,” because you can have more than one subculture in a society.)
You could say that the difference between e.g. Richard Feynman and the Inquisition was that the Inquisition believed they had truth, while Richard Feynman sought truth. This isn’t quite defensible, though, because there were undoubtedly some truths that Richard Feynman thought he had as well. “The sky is blue,” for example, or “2 + 2 = 4.”
Yes, there are effectively certain truths of science. General Relativity may be overturned by some future physics—albeit not in any way that predicts the Sun will orbit Jupiter; the new theory must steal the successful predictions of the old theory, not contradict them. But evolutionary theory takes place on a higher level of organization than atoms, and nothing we discover about quarks is going to throw out Darwinism, or the cell theory of biology, or the atomic theory of chemistry, or a hundred other brilliant innovations whose truth is now established beyond reasonable doubt.
Are these “absolute truths”? Not in the sense of possessing a probability of literally 1.0. But they are cases where science basically thinks it’s got the truth.
And yet scientists don’t torture people who question the atomic theory of chemistry. Why not? Because they don’t believe that certainty licenses torture? Well, yes, that’s the surface difference; but why don’t scientists believe this?
Because chemistry asserts no supernatural penalty of eternal torture for disbelieving in the atomic theory of chemistry? But again we recurse and ask the question, “Why?” Why don’t chemists believe that you go to hell if you disbelieve in the atomic theory?
Because journals won’t publish your paper until you get a solid experimental observation of Hell? But all too many scientists can suppress their skeptical reflex at will. Why don’t chemists have a private cult which argues that nonchemists go to hell, given that many are Christians anyway?
Questions like that don’t have neat single-factor answers. But I would argue that one of the factors has to do with assuming a productive posture toward the truth, v
ersus a defensive posture toward the truth.
When you are the Guardian of the Truth, you’ve got nothing useful to contribute to the Truth but your guardianship of it. When you’re trying to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry by discovering the next benzene or buckyball, someone who challenges the atomic theory isn’t so much a threat to your worldview as a waste of your time.
When you are a Guardian of the Truth, all you can do is try to stave off the inevitable slide into entropy by zapping anything that departs from the Truth. If there’s some way to pump against entropy, generate new true beliefs along with a little waste heat, that same pump can keep the truth alive without secret police. In chemistry you can replicate experiments and see for yourself—and that keeps the precious truth alive without need of violence.
And it’s not such a terrible threat if we make one mistake somewhere—end up believing a little untruth for a little while—because tomorrow we can recover the lost ground.
But this whole trick only works because the experimental method is a “criterion of goodness” which is not a mere “criterion of comparison.” Because experiments can recover the truth without need of authority, they can also override authority and create new true beliefs where none existed before.
Where there are criteria of goodness that are not criteria of comparison, there can exist changes which are improvements, rather than threats. Where there are only criteria of comparison, where there’s no way to move past authority, there’s also no way to resolve a disagreement between authorities. Except extermination. The bigger guns win.
I don’t mean to provide a grand overarching single-factor view of history. I do mean to point out a deep psychological difference between seeing your grand cause in life as protecting, guarding, preserving, versus discovering, creating, improving. Does the “up” direction of time point to the past or the future? It’s a distinction that shades everything, casts tendrils everywhere.
Rationality- From AI to Zombies Page 41