There is sufficient literature on the Strategy of Tension being enacted however badly by the WH and we need to be reminded again that “...the strategic objective of the regime is to distract and redirect public attention.” Often this comes in tweets meant to direct attention away from other draconian stupidity.
We continually need to address why people persist in believing someone who lies more than half the time. It is of course about the faux-tribalism fostered by racists who don’t even waste time euphemising their hate. We’ve seen it before in Rovean math and Limbaugh logic. Now it’s the WH itself, the amplifier of the RWNJs in Congress and the usual Beltway suspects.
There is massive corruption in crony capitalism and kleptocracy and it is rapidly becoming a legitimately accepted rather than tolerated part of American governance, made more/less difficult by your party allegiance. And facts are neither data nor information when truths are elusive.
This should warn us not to let lie-and-rebuttal take over the news cycle. Several studies have shown that repeating a false claim, even in the context of debunking that claim, can make it stick.
The myth-busting seems to work but then our memories fade and we remember only the myth. The myth, after all, was the thing that kept being repeated.
In trying to dispel the falsehood, the endless rebuttals simply make the enchantment stronger.
In 1995, Robert Proctor, a historian at Stanford University who has studied the tobacco case closely, coined the word “agnotology”. This is the study of how ignorance is deliberately produced; the entire field was started by Proctor’s observation of the tobacco industry. The facts about smoking — indisputable facts, from unquestionable sources — did not carry the day. The indisputable facts were disputed. The unquestionable sources were questioned. Facts, it turns out, are important, but facts are not enough to win this kind of argument.
Mainstream journalists, too, are starting to embrace the idea that lies or errors should be prominently identified. Consider a story on the NPR website about Donald Trump’s speech to the CIA in January: “He falsely denied that he had ever criticised the agency, falsely inflated the crowd size at his inauguration on Friday . . . —” It’s a bracing departure from the norms of American journalism, but then President Trump has been a bracing departure from the norms of American politics.
Tempting as it is to fight lies with facts, there are three problems with that strategy.
- The first is that a simple untruth can beat off a complicated set of facts simply by being easier to understand and remember. When doubt prevails, people will often end up believing whatever sticks in the mind.
- There’s a second reason why facts don’t seem to have the traction that one might hope. Facts can be boring. The world is full of things to pay attention to, from reality TV to your argumentative children, from a friend’s Instagram to a tax bill. Why bother with anything so tedious as facts?
- There’s a final problem with trying to persuade people by giving them facts: the truth can feel threatening, and threatening people tends to backfire
It’s easy to see how this might play out in a political campaign. Say you’re worried that the UK will soon be swamped by Turkish immigrants because a Brexit campaigner has told you (falsely) that Turkey will soon join the EU. A fact checker can explain that no Turkish entry is likely in the foreseeable future. Reifler’s research suggests that you’ll accept the narrow fact that Turkey is not about to join the EU. But you’ll also summon to mind all sorts of other anxieties: immigration, loss of control, the proximity of Turkey to Syria’s war and to Isis, terrorism and so on. The original lie has been disproved, yet its seductive magic lingers.
Even in a debate polluted by motivated reasoning, one might expect that facts will help. Not necessarily: when we hear facts that challenge us, we selectively amplify what suits us, ignore what does not, and reinterpret whatever we can. More facts mean more grist to the motivated reasoning mill. The French dramatist Molière once wrote: “A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one.” Modern social science agrees.
The endgame of these distractions is that matters of vital importance become too boring to bother reporting. Proctor describes it as “the opposite of terrorism: trivialism”.
Terrorism provokes a huge media reaction; smoking does not. Yet, according to the US Centers for Disease Control, smoking kills 480,000 Americans a year. This is more than 50 deaths an hour.
Terrorists have rarely managed to kill that many Americans in an entire year. But the terrorists succeed in grabbing the headlines; the trivialists succeed in avoiding them.
When people are seeking the truth, facts help. But when people are selectively reasoning about their political identity, the facts can backfire.
Liar's poker is an American bar game that combines statistical reasoning with bluffing, and is played with the eight digits of the serial numbers on a U.S. dollar bill. The numbers are usually ranked with a zero counting as a ten, and a 1 being highest as "ace". Each player holds one bill, unseen by the other players. The objective is to guess how often a particular digit appears among all the bills held by all the players. Each guess, called a "bid," must be higher in value or quantity than the previous bid. The round ends when a player challenges the most recent bid. Normally the game is played with random bills obtained from the cash register.
Even Lord Dampnut himself valorizes the use of bluffing as braggadocious, but being crazy and morally flawed doesn’t ensure a winning strategy of unpredictability. Had he better control of his rhetoric and were well-read, he could be formidable, but as a game-show host-president, he’s really all about the common wants of RWNJ, sans reflection.
1. First words: “I’m Donald Trump. I wrote the art of the deal. I say not in a braggadocious way. I’ve made billions and billions of dollars.”
bluff (plural bluffs)
- An act of bluffing; a false expression of the strength of one's position in order to intimidate; braggadocio.
That is only bluff, or a bluff.
(poker) An attempt to represent oneself as holding a stronger hand than they actually do.
John's bet was a bluff: he bet without even so much as a pair.
Game theorists take a different view on bluffing. For Ehud Kalai, a professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at the Kellogg School and founding editor of Games and Economic Behavior, bluffing is primarily computational, not psychological. To win in any strategic game, it pays to be unpredictable, and game theory offers models for how to keep one’s opponent guessing.
“It’s straight mathematics,” Kalai says. “If I bluffed all the time, obviously my bluffing would be ineffective. But it’s not effective to under-bluff, either, because then I’m not making enough use of my reputation as a non-bluffer. If you never bluff, or bluff very rarely, you can use this reputation to bluff more effectively and increase your long-term winnings.”...
Game theorists call this a mixed strategy. “It’s a standard game theory procedure to deal with two-person, zero-sum games,” Kalai says, and it works for playing poker against a machine or running an offense. It is based on the assumption that your opponent is thinking (or computing) as strategically as you are. It also assumes, of course, that a team is able to assess its own advantage.
In a mixed strategy, bluffing is constant, sustained, and systematic—it takes one’s advantage into account but randomizes just enough to keep that advantage working effectively. Randomization is common practice in any number of “games,” from the predator–prey scenario of a squirrel fleeing a hawk to a government’s approach to airport security or tax auditing. In most cases, success depends on more than a single dramatic bluff. For game theorists, the way to win is to guarantee long-term unpredictability.
speaking of bluff-calling...