Miscellaneous linkage

Andrew Sullivan's blog (one of several I try to skim daily) steers me to a couple of items of interest:

1. Here Sullivan ponders the firing of various media personnel, most recently Octavia Nasr, CNN's Middle East editor -- fired for an impolitic Tweet (http://www.businessinsider.com/the-real-issue-2010-7).  Is he right to see a pattern of enforcement of ideological conformity?

2. Here he notes some recent discussion of the difficulties of deciding which experts and which studies we should pay attention to when we try to figure out what's going on in the world. He refers to these posts:

Ezra Klein of The Washington Post says, "Fairly few political commentators know enough to decide which research papers are methodologically convincing and which aren’t. So we often end up touting the papers that sound right, and the papers that sound right are, unsurprisingly, the ones that accord most closely with our view of the world."

In "Confirmation Bias in Policy Debate" Will Wilkinson of the libertarian Cato Institute agrees that it is difficult:  "This is one of the reasons I tend not to blog as much I’d like about a lot of debates in economic policy. I just don’t know who to trust, and I don’t trust myself enough to not just tout work that confirms my biases."

And this leads me to cast my eye over Wilkinson's blog and find:

3.  "Ignorance and Ideology" , a rumination on the ignorance of the masses and the dogmatism of the relatively well-informed, which might make one think that democracies are doomed to bad policies and disastrous decisions.  Here is a quote relevant to our previous discussion: 

[Phillip] Converse’s most disturbing and under-remarked finding is that the relatively well informed compensate in dogmatism for their greater knowledgeability. …

The selective (constrained) ideological perception and retention displayed by the well informed would seem to confront us with a Hobson’s choice. We can either be ruled by a mass of ignoramuses or – to the extent that the ignorant public takes its cues from relatively knowledgeable elites, or is simply ignorant of the policies that elites enact – we can be ruled by a coterie of the doctrinaire.

Following the link to the source for this quote I find:

4.  "Popper, Weber, and Hayek: The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance ” (PDF), by Jeffrey Friedman. This is a long scholarly paper, and I have not had time to read it all yet.  But it looks to have a lot of illumination to offer on our subject of 'citizen's epistemology'. 

Noting that political scientists have long known that most people are shockingly ignorant of basic political facts, Freidman says:

one of the “research traditions” in political science—the tradition of public-opinion research—has accumulated an ocean of findings about political ignorance that are potentially lethal to the pro-democracy normative consensus in political science, in economics, and in our culture at large. As John Ferejohn (1990, 3) has put it, “nothing strikes the student of public opinion and democracy more forcefully than the paucity of information most people possess about politics.” Indeed, public-opinion researchers sometimes seem to compete with each other to come up with the best adjective to describe the breadth and depth of public ignorance: is it “jaw-dropping” (Luskin 2002, 4)? Or merely “astonishing” (Converse 1975, 79)? In one instance, two out of three Americans failed to recognize the Bill of Rights when it was read to them (Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991, 15). At any given time, about one in four don’t know who the vice president of the United States is (Luskin 2002, 6). Two in five were found to believe that Israel is an Arab nation (ibid.). Meanwhile, “the most commonly known fact about George [H. W.] Bush’s opinions while he was president was that he hated broccoli. During the 1992 presidential campaign ... 86 percent of the public knew that the Bushes’ dog was named Millie, yet only 15 percent knew that both presidential candidates supported the death penalty” (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996, 101).

Whether the topic is the absence of weapons of WMD in Iraq; who is on the Supreme Court; which side Russia led during the Cold War (Page and Shapiro 1992, 10-11); or the meaning of such elementary concepts in political discourse as liberalism and conservatism (Converse 1964), the public’s political ignorance is so immense that one cannot help wondering how effective democratic politics can be at achieving good ends, and at avoiding the inadvertent achievement of bad ones.

Friedman describes a couple of theories that are supposed to reconcile us to these facts.  One is the theory that voters' ignorance is "rational ignorance."  People recognize (correctly) that it is very unlikely that their vote will be the deciding vote in an election, and they decide (rationally) that time and energy invested in becoming well-informed voters is time and energy that is wasted.  They rationally decide to tune out and leave politics to others.  They may tune in again if things get bad in a way that drastically impacts their own lives, but otherwise, they'll stay tuned out.  Friedman argues that this is not a satisfactory theory:  lots of these badly informed people do vote, do care about politics and elections, and do have strong opinions about political affairs. But their opinions have been formed in the absence of even the most basic knowledge of the facts.

Another comforting theory says that voters may be ignorant of basic political facts, but they are able to make reasonably good decisions about who to vote for by deploying 'heuristics' -- mental shortcuts that steer them towards one candidate or another.  One such heuristic is what Converse called "the nature-of-the-times" heuristic.  If I look around and things seem to be going well, I vote for the incumbents.  If things seem to be going badly, I vote to throw the bums out.  The problem with this rule, is that the current office-holders may have little responsibility for the whatever is producing 'good times' or 'bad times'.  Right now, for example, most observers expect the Democrats to lose a large number of seats in Congress next fall, because many voters will look around, see high unemployment and slow economic growth, and vote against the mainly Democratic incumbents.  But it is at least possible (some would say probable) that these economic conditions are mainly the fault of the policies of the previous administration and have been made worse by the refusal of Congressional Republicans to go along with the Democrats' efforts to address the problems. (For example, it is clear that, if the Democrats had not been prevented by Republican filibusters in the Senate from bringing their preferred bills to a vote, the government would have done much more to stimulate the economy last year, and would be doing more now -- extending unemployment benefits, sending aid to state governments so they don't have to lay off government employees, funding more work on infrastructure projects, etc.  If the Democrats' Keynesian economic theories are correct, as most economists believe, then this would do a lot to bring down unemployment and stimulate economic growth.)  This may or may not be true, but the 'heuristic' theory tells us that voters aren't trying to find out whether it is true.  They are 'reasoning' in  more simple way.  Their heuristic doesn't even consider the possibility that current problems may be left over from previous administrations or may be caused by forces beyond the control of the government.  As Friedman points out, this is actually an instance of a logical fallacy, traditionally called 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc' and called 'false cause' in our textbook.  There is no reason to think that voters who are using this kind of mental shortcut will get what they want from their political choices.

Another heuristic is what we might call the 'my kind of guy' heuristic. (I just made up that name, but Freidman describes the pattern).  Voters absorb media stories and images that persuade them that particular politicians either are or aren't 'their kind of guys (or gals)'.  Friedman relays a story told by Richard Popkin in his book The Reasoning Voter:  When Gerald Ford was running against Jimmy Carter in 1976, he stopped at a restaurant in Southern California and tried to eat a tamale without removing the corn husk wrapper.  This evidently persuaded many Hispanic voters that he was not their kind of guy.   More recently, George W. Bush scored points with the same community by displaying some familiarity with their culture and language.  And it became a cliche that one of the reasons for Bush's victories over Gore and Kerry was that they seemed 'stiff' and 'elitist,' and he seemed like 'somebody you would like to have a beer with.'  But this sort of mental shortcut seems to me to be a very near neighbor of the 'plain folks' propaganda technique, not a helpful way to identify the politicians most likely to represent your interest or your values.

There's more good stuff in Freidman's article, but that's enough for now -- I need to mow the lawn!