Hi’.
Despite the past 4-5 years and a current “vaccine-hesitancy” movement in the midst of a pandemic, people still seem to cling on the illusion that the voter will take one look at the ills and crims done and wake up. I am a foreigner, I am young and I would like, because this is somehow not obvious, to demonstrate the opposite.
This diary will be in three parts: I will illustrate my case, then pseudo-science it, then explain the consequences.
1. A concrete case
The best example of an irrational voter I have at hand is me. And for that, I have to introduce you to completely foreign political topics.
a. The F-35
Switzerland is that tiny country no one should care about that recently voted to buy new military jets because yes, in Switzerland the population get to vote on things like that. Of the four planes available, the F-35 was selected. It is objectively the best, the cheapest, the only Gen 5 of the lot and Switzerland has “always” had American jets, so this purchase should be a formality.
Which is why a federal initiative will seek to prevent it, and is already assured to get enough signatures to force a vote.
Also why my name will be among those signatures.
Let me repeat. The F-35 is the best, cheapest option and any argument about safety or cost is just fearmongering. To top it all off, voting no will only send us in a costly dead end, it is absurd if not downright infantile. Yet eve knowing that full well I will sign this initiative and vote yes to it. No argument whatsoever will change my mind.
To understand why, we need to back up. In 2014, we voted to buy the Gripen, a Swedish jet I was all for, but the population said no. Alright. In 2020, still needing jets, a new votation happens. But this time, the Gripen is eliminated before we vote, and we are not told which plane we will buy. Here I must emphasize how all of this made pragmatic sense, like for example how the Gripen version we wanted to buy didn’t even really exist yet. But I felt tricked, and as if that was a breach of direct democracy. There is more to it but to sum it up, I voted no not on the substance, but to defend a perceived attack on direct democracy, to punish a trick; and this is the exact same reason that will make me vote no on the F-35, despite it being objectively the best option and our sky needing those jets.
It makes no sense, but my mind is made up and cannot be changed.
b. The 99% initiative
Another example of irrationality is the brand new 99% initiative, coming from the Swiss left: currently, dividends are taxed at 50-70% compared to wages. The initiative wants to tax them at 150% (above ~100k) and use the money for welfare or lower taxes for the poor. I may misrepresent its actual content but that’s the gist of it and that’s my point.
I am center-left. In my country. And I know I would normally be torn, on such an issue. I would look for the fine prints, try and understand what exactly is being done, the consequences, yadda yadda. But here, I noticed that I can’t even bring myself to read the arguments against that initiative. I assume I know them, I could probably make the case myself: why risk the Swiss prosperity when we already have a progressive taxation in place, etc.? But while I lie to myself thinking I am on the edge, in truth if I can’t even stand to read one side’s arguments then it’s already settled.
And just like with jets, that decision has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the substance. In this case I don’t even know the substance, I haven’t looked much into the details. I am willingly uninformed. Why? Because I have watched US politics for twelve years, I have seen Trump rise in power, I have seen Brexit, I have witnessed the left collapse in France and Switzerland recently suicided its economic relations with Europe. I am scared, terrified of a Swiss Trump. And I will do anything to prevent it, at any cost.
That’s not reasonable. But it is rational. There is a logic to it. Only, this logic doesn’t apply to the object at all. It applies to a context that may not even be related to the object.
2. A pseudo-scientific case
I have, in my small collection of books, Papert-Christofides’ thesis (1972) where she observes, through experiments, that children age 4-7 can sustain two contradictory statements at the same time. And yes, I know: Fox News. But what she suggested is that knowledge is compartimentalized.
In turn, the Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1989) is a linguistic model on how communication works. Ostensive-inferential communication does away with telepathy and instead, information is first manifested (ostentation) through symbols, cues, etc. But those could be cues to multiple informations: the actual information must be inferred using those cues and pre-existing knowledge. That pre-existing knowledge, or “context”, represents a cognitive effort. Basically you can’t recall everything you know each time you need to parse a word. So it is a limited… compartimentalized… context. The Relevance Theory follows an effort-to-effect ratio where the cognitive effort is minimized as much as possible.
This has one simple consequence. Accessing that context, let alone revising it, is cognitively extremely expensive. That context is fast-accessed, unconsciously, or we would process the information too slowly. To get conscious of it already takes effort, but to revise it, to question that context of prior, well-established knowledge in your head, is a headache. Whereas formal logic makes the elimination of the premise in case of contradiction a simple routine, for our minds it is way cheaper and more effective to write off the newer information, to claim the contradiction never happened.
Here let me underline how I am citing scientific work but I don’t claim that this diary is scientific. I am just too lazy to go back and find all the articles that concur with what I am saying.
Of course, the real killer is Gazzaniga (1989), “Organization of the human brain”. The example I was given was a person with a split brain seeing two pictures, one for each brain hemisphere, and being told to point at a picture (among eight) that (s)he associates with the one picture she sees. The person will point two different pictures and, within tenths of a second, justify to him/herself why (s)he pointed to the second. Never once considering that the second movement was not intended. What I am about to say is not, I think, the conclusions of such experiments, but what I see in there is that instead of information determining the decisions we make, it is the decisions we make that form the information we accept.
From an information standpoint, it at the very least shows our ability to justify/excuse literally everything. But what I want to suggest is that we are not information-driven, at all. We are incentive-driven.
Coming back to Sperber & Wilson, the context used to interpret the information has to be selected. This is where incentives come to bear. We have needs, perceived or real, and we have built compartimentalized contexts around those needs. As those needs evolve, as our priorities change, so do those contexts. They are optimal, in that they take the lowest efforts for tha best effects in our lives. Information is then parsed, interpreted throse contexts. What we call critical thinking is, by then, an unreachable ideal. It requires, for each information, trying to question unconscious contexts built specifically to accomodate our needs — perceived or real.
3. A tragic case
In a Last Week Tonight, John Oliver pointed out that having experts or celebrities tell people to vaccinate would have no effect or even be detrimental. No amount of information — say, an FDA-approval — would sway people. But having family or friends do so could. I suspect it’s because social needs are a thing. Peer pressure can change the context.
Likewise, we have seen how cultistic the GOP has become, with the Big Lie and so on. When you get to the point where 15-30% of a country flatly ignores reality for nearly a year, you have to accept it’s closer to human nature than of any dysfunction.
And that’s where I want to get to.
It’s not just the GOP. Yes, they beat all records by drawing weather maps with sharpies and taking de-wormer to avoid actual medicine, but the cognitive mechanisms that make them so irrational are universal, at least as far as mankind is concerned. I’m not saying everyone is crazy, or society would have long collapsed. I’m saying that the stronger our “needs”, our incentives, the less reasonable someone will be. And as you can guess, US politics are just full of crises of emergencies that leave no room for reason.
We see people rejecting covid on their dead bed. When Biden said “you can't look at that television and say nothing happened on the 6th”, we knew people were doing exactly that.
As Roe v Wade dies, people are observing something factually true: there is nothing to be done, Biden’s administration is already doing all it physically can and Congress, with the Senate filibuster, is hamstrung. But facing that reality, they see winning in 2022, 2024, etc. as the solution. And while it rings true — because yeah, it would be a good thing if democrats won those elections, you know — it’s also mathematically dubious at best. Even with landslides in both 2022 and 2024, there still won’t be the votes to touch the filibuster, meaning every issue including abortion and voting rights (or taxes, health care, guns, statehood, ……...) will be stalled for the next half-decade. And that’s the best-case scenario. History predicts an uglier reality, if one still believes in that.
There are fifteen months left to win 2022.
I can’t ask you to be reasonable.