Predictable Ideology is Predictable for a Reason
Joshua Foust’s CJR critique of blog commentary on the Russia-Georgia conflict makes some good points. One failing, though, is that it doesn’t put its complaints in any kind of perspective — the newspaper punditry on the conflict was mostly uninformed and the cable news coverage, as usual, was actively misleading. But more interesting to me is the complaint that “big blogs . . . retreated to their comfortable and predictable ideological corners.”
You hear complaints of this form being leveled all the time and not just against blogs. Something happens that’s politically relevant. And most-but-not-all conservatives see it one way, and most-but-not-all liberals see it another way. Then we bemoan everyone’s predictable ideological responses. It’s as if we’re supposed to believe that in an ideal world, folks would walk around with these ideologies in our heads, but then when things happen in the world our understanding of those events would not at all be impacted by our large set of pre-existing beliefs about how the world works. But why would that happen? And why would that be a good thing? After all, the reason it’s predictable that most liberals will react to a given politically-relevant occurrence is that most liberals have a lot of beliefs and principles in common. Similarly, most conservatives have a lot of beliefs and principles in common. So, again, it’s predictable that people who share many background beliefs will usually have similar responses to new events. But how else could things possibly go?
A lot of the journalistic ideal and bien pensant critiques of partisanship implicitly partakes of some very naive ideas about empiricism whereby if we just all somehow cast aside the blinders of pre-existing prejudice we could see things as they are and our unmediated perception of them would lead to consensus. But nobody who thinks seriously about these issues has believed anything of the sort for a long time — fact and theory are interdependent and all that would happen if we looked at new events without any pre-existing commitments is that we’d have no way whatsoever to make sense of things.
34 Responses to “Predictable Ideology is Predictable for a Reason”
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August 26th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Thank goodness the major news producers always tell us the story in a simple, empirical manner, without crunching situations down into easy-to-swallow, common narratives which themselves are produced by cultural assumptions or powerful sources who tell a story as they are familiar with it, rather than as is simply based on facts.
They are so, so superior to us crazy fringe ideologues.
That’s why we’re so driven to read sources from other nations, including the local press or the BBC etc., because we’re so addicted to our parochial ideologies that we are frightened of facts which emerge outside that narrative.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Ah, but aren’t the complaints about predictable ideology also predictable?
That’s the human condition. We perceive the world through blinders that we’d swear we’ve removed, while we are shocked and dismayed by the tunnel vision of our opposites. By the time history repeats itself, we’ve long since forgotten.
We are all Carrie Fisher in When Harry Met Sally, repeatedly rediscovering the truth: “He’s never going to leave her!” And then it fades.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Oh bullshit.
Neither the Mainstream News Media –nor many of the blogs — provided information of much value on this event.
Little to no mention of the long time interest major US political figures like Dick Cheney have had in this area.
Or the huge investments committed to exploiting Caspian Sea oil. Much less any description of possible options available to the US and Russian governments — and the consequences to us if those options are exercised. No reasonable debate of what is in the national interest –as opposed to Chevron’s interest –in this area.
For good reason — the news media is a pack of lying shitheads who exist to con us. To fool us into believing that $Trillions of our tax dollars — and the lives of thousands of our sons –are being spent “in the national interest” –whereas in reality they are being spent for private profits.
4100 plus Americans are dead in IRaq because of these deceitful motherfuckers — and have you seen any sign of remorse? The major TV anchors earn millions for saying the right thing — have any of them donated money to help those badly crippled in the war?
There is one bright spot — Tim Russert’s fat ass is finally screaming in a Catholic Hell somewhere.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
I takes a maverick.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Re Matthew’s comment “fact and theory are interdependent and all that would happen if we looked at new events without any pre-existing commitments is that we’d have no way whatsoever to make sense of things.”
————–
Gee, I think that’s what those CIA Intelligence Analysts said when they wrote up those reports about Saddam’s nukes. And they probably made the same bland, smug butt-covering excuses
when told there was no nukes.
FIRST you try to discover the Truth, the WHOLE Truth, and nothing but the Truth. ALL the Major Facts. THEN you can argue what is in the national interest — and , yes, honest people can disagree. But you should ALWAYS be ready to sacrifice ideology and partisan goals if they conflict with the national interest — i.e., with what is best for American citizens. Otherwise you are no better than a Republican Whore.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Matt,
I don’t think Joshua’s point maligns the existence of worldviews as much as it does the extent to which the opinions of some seem predetermined by those worldviews. We all, as you say, have ideologies. A point of difference, however, is the *degree* to which those ideologies determine our response to a given issue. Hacks are criticized, fairly in my opinion, for relying on ideology to the exclusion of investigation and consideration of the unique instance. Being open-minded is not the same as being empty-minded.
- rob
August 26th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
People are more likely to retreat to their respective corners in cases like the Georgian thing because there wasn’t a lot of good information about what was happening, and people didn’t know a lot about the background.
In an ideal case, though, there would be diversity in ideas, but not necessarily along a left-right continuum. Who cares if you have the left idea, the right (i.e. wrong) idea, and the centrist idea? There’s no magic to being in the middle. It’s better to have high altitude ideas, ground-level ideas, and subterranean ideas in each ideological corner.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
The interdependence of fact and theory!
Did you ever take a class with Peter Gordon? He taught most of the intellectual history courses in my time, but you were three or four years ahead of me.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Certain kinds of events should bring you to reconsider your assumptions. A Russian quasi-invasion then pullout of Georgia does not qualify (unless you’re a Georgian voter). Economic desperation after 8 years of ruinous policy-making by the Bush administration? Maybe some people should be rethinking what constitutes economically beneficial tax/spend policy. But to think that this event should encourage any substantial rethinking is just to fall prey to the McCain trap of needing to launch yourself into a hysterical fit at every minor provocation.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
The political world is messy and ideologies don’t describe it very well: but the alternative would be knowing an enormous amount, using many heuristics while remembering their limitations, relying on honest, small-scale experimentation, etc etc: a lot harder than remembering a theory that can be inscribed on a 3 x 5 card. It’s a lot less emotionally satisfying as well, since that approach naturally can’t reinforce your tribal identity. There are millions of fans of particular baseball teams, but only one Bill James.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Policy analysts with statistical training often use something called Bayesian analysis, which may have a (non-math-soaked) lesson that applies here. Briefly, in Bayesian analysis, you use everything you think you know (e.g., your ideology and previous observations) to develop a model of the world (probabilities of certain events occurring). Then you see what happens. Then you revise your model of the world.
What is cool (and relevant) about Bayesian analysis is that you can set it up to give little weight or prohibitively great weight to what you think you know at the outset. Put another way, how many events that are how far out of alignment with what you thought would occur do you need to change your model of the world?
People whose ideologies are so strong and so wrong that they are always predicting wrong and never changing their predictions are people with prohibitively weighted “prior distributions”. Those are the people Joshua (and we) should direct our scorn toward. But Joshua’s phrasing suggested (wrongly) that anyone with expectations and an existing model of the world was the equivalent of those who never change their views based on new data. And the rebuttal is Matt’s: If you have no prior expectations, then in Bayesian analysis, you can’t make analyze the new events, because you’re missing an essential part of the analysis. (In statistical practice, what you end up doing is putting too much emphasis on the new events, as if everything else that ever happens will happen exactly as the newest event happened. Or in this case, the small country will always provide a provocation, the big country will always invade, then always withdraw, etc.)
The moral is: You need an ideology (or more generally a model of the world) to make sense of what happens, but at some point, if you keep shrugging off contrary evidence and reality checks, you are disconnected from reality and deserve to be treated accordingly. Any resemblance to the neo-cons would not surprise me at all.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Sure, but the point isn’t whether we have pre-existing commititments (of course we do), but whether we are willing to change and/or abandon those commitment in the face of contradictory evidence/facts. But the fact that on most things, people with different ideologies tend to react predictably in similar ways suggest that either all those occurences are factually similar, or that they are letting their pre-existing commitments taking priority over the facts.
I find the former to be less plausible than the former, since it is unlikely that a whole range of occurences on different issues are factually similar. So I’m inclined to go with the latter explanation.
August 26th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
The biggest failure was the American prestige press’s, which failed to make clear who sent the tanks rolling first.
The government of Georgia, which is made up of young people with classy educations in the West and in Israel, has done a wonderful job of manipulating the American media. What they haven’t done a wonderful job of, however, is running their country, since they did the single dumbest thing of the decade: they started a tank war with Russia! That makes America’s Iraq Attaq seem Solomonic.
August 26th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
I think that’s an uncharitable reading of Foust’s article.
In context, the criticism implied by the line “…retreated to their comfortable and predictable ideological corners…” is not aimed at the fact that people with a shared ideology responded to events in a predictable way, but at the perception that most bloggers linked to a narrow, predictable coterie of like-minded brethren instead of seeking out information from a more diverse set of sources and entertaining viewpoints from both sides. Thus, the headline: “echo chamber”.
I don’t think this criticism is entirely fair. In my opinion, several of the left-leaning blogs did a solid job of analyzing the situation fairly (Robert Farley in particular), whereas the right-leaning blogs were universally idiotic. This disparity could have easily predicted by anyone who has any experience with the blogosphere. But then again, I’m a lefty, so my viewpoint is obviously filtered through my own ideology. And is probably quite predictable. Around and around we go…
August 26th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
And now having said that, I must concede that Steve Sailer gets the situation exactly right in the above comment.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Foust’s piece has other problems (the Barnett piece it criticizes is good, “Even Instapundit”?). He wrote a much better one (by which I mean it’s more ideologically congenial to me) here.
August 26th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
1) The idea that the world is too chaotic for poor intellectuals to figure out is bullshit. It results from the fact that most of our highly educated pundits are really deeply ignorant.
2) Paredo pointed out a long time ago that:
a) Most people don’t matter — a small percentage have most of the wealth and make most of the campaign campaign donations
b) Most countries don’t matter — a small percentage have most of the military power
c) Most countries don’t matter — a small percentage have most of the economic power. Usually they’re same as the military powers in (b) but not always (e.g., Japan vice Turkey vice heavily subsidized Israel)
d) Key resources are held by a few countries
e) Key terrain (e.g., naval chokepoints) are held by a few countries
3) So to cut through the bullshit, focus on the actors who make up 2a-e. Their goals and agendas.
Unfortunately, most of our pundits don’t know shit about 2 a-e. That’s because our $Trillion K12 system and our Universities are committed to creating docile, IGNORANT corporate drones — NOT informed citizens.
4) So we have some of the stupidest fucking citizens on the planet — and a national debates conducted by shameless whores who merely read the scripts they are given.
That’s why our Whore-in-Chief could tell people on Sept 12, 2001 that “they attacked us because they hate our freedom” and KNOW that NO ONE would point out what a fucking lie that was.
And our nation’s decline has all followed from that.
August 27th, 2008 at 5:57 am
Another “duh!” post from Matt.
Anybody with a brain should know that it’s easy to make the sort of criticism that Matt is referring to. It’s a nice, safe way to establish yourself as “better than the next asshole” – which is the human primate’s primary occupation in life.
“how many events that are how far out of alignment with what you thought would occur do you need to change your model of the world?”
None, so far. Everything is going exactly as I expected, or at least is not going against what I expected. Some things may be taking longer than I expected, but that’s actually to be expected – I should just revise my time perception.
Take the Iran war, for example. Some idiots think it won’t happen because it hasn’t happened yet. I didn’t really expect it until October. It ain’t October yet. When we get through October, and then through the elections, and McCain doesn’t win, and then we get through December, and we STILL don’t have an Iran war, then I’ll admit I was wrong for thinking Bush would start one.
Which still leaves plenty of time for Obama to start one in the next couple years or so, since he’s an idiot on Iran.
August 27th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
On naive empiricism
“Your mind’s so open your brain fell out.”
A line from a right wing christian rocker (member of a musical movement that never got far which started when the Clash were new and ended IIRC in around 1980). I never actually listened to Christian Rock, but I remember that line.
By the way, when was naive empiricism not yet refuted ? David Hume clearly understood the problem.
Looks to me like you are a bit nostalgic for Emerson hall. This post on naive empiricism and the blogginheads point on how ignoring consequences is not the height of morality but actually imoral are unusual as they seem to show the influence of concentrating in philosophy (OK I honestly guess you had gotten that far in high school if not in junior high).
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