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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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One of the things that alienates educated Westerners from Trump is the way that he talks. He hardly ever talks in abstract terms. He doesn't qualify or hedge; everything is direct and concrete. Rather than say that he was on one of the later episodes of Oprah's show when they were coming to an end, he will say he was on the last episode. He won't just say that one of Lincoln's sons died, but instead he will name that son Tad. He's always including specific details that he misremembers or aren't all that important. He can't just say that people like Liz Cheney send people into warzones but will never face any real danger themselves, but rather he makes that idea concrete by describing [EDITED] her being pushed onto the frontlines to face death against an overwhelming force. One of the worst parts of his interview with Rogan was when he forgot the name of a boxer in his story. Usually, he would just throw in some name that sounded about right and run with it. However, this time, he didn't, and he tried to talk about "the guy" and the whole story fell to pieces in a mess of vague referents.

I think this is why Trump actually has a lot of cross-cultural appeal, because it's the educated Westerners who are strange. Most people aren't very good at thinking and talking in lawyerly abstractions, studiously avoiding any implication that might not hold up in court. For most of human history, people have used stories about specific people, in specific places, and about specific events to communicate general ideas about society, politics, morality, and even science. Most people aren't good at remembering abstract statements about general categories. However, give them a story fleshed out with questionable details, and they'll remember the gist even after they've forgotten most everything else. Educated Westerners are very good at communicating in abstractions, and they expect their audience to infer details from context. For many people, this kind of speaking might as well be in some kind of secret code language.

One of the most charismatic storytellers I know is an old Christian missionary women who would abhor the thought of voting for Trump, but she is very much like him in personality. She has made her entire life out of convincing people to fund her charitable missionary work. She has an incredible capacity to reach across national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries and communicate with so many different types of people, and she talks just like Trump. Her stories are all too good to be true, and that's because they're not, at least not literally. She didn't really escape from a country descending into civil war on the very last flight out of the airport. The miracles and coincidences in her stories were not really quite so serendipitous or unexpected as she makes them sound. She always embellishes with details that are often lazily misremembered or partially fabricated because they make for a better story. I don't think for a moment she is trying to be manipulative or deceitful, because she implicitly expects her audience to extract the general meaning from the particulars. The specific names, times, and places are used as placeholders, either approximately true or for illustrative purposes. She does not seem to know how to communicate in any other way.

What's interesting about Trump is that he can't turn this off either. He can't code switch between the two different ways of communicating, and it continually suprises him when he is misinterpreted. This is, I think, one of the reasons he comes across as stupid to educated Westerners, because to them this kind of communication is associated with stupid people. And they're not wrong--this is how stupid people communicate abstract ideas. However, not everyone who commicates like this is stupid, and perhaps most people in the world prefer this way.

I think honestly it’s one of the things I like about the modern era that’s most bizarre about the current crop of elite. Not only do these guys speak an odd dialect of lawyer, but they’re fantastically uneducated about how anything is actually done or made. And it is off putting to average people because they don’t hide behind statistics and spreadsheets. They do things, make things, and watch or play games.

It’s like if I had a bookie describe the last game of the World Series, and then a plumber from Brooklyn. They’d both be describing the same events but only one guy would have described a baseball game. The other guy is describing a graph describing the baseball game. And I think that’s actually why the elites running the systems cannot fix things. The old deep knowledge of the processes their graphs and lawyered language describe is gone. They’ve never done any of that kind of work, nor, increasingly do they even know anyone who does that work. Without knowing how the game of baseball actually is played, without knowing what is going on on the field, moneyball simply doesn’t work.

And I think this is what people are reacting to. Trump at least comes across as the guy who actually understands baseball instead of baseball statistics. They have plenty of real life experience of working with idiots who only see the world through screens. Those people might be educated, as in having attended a lot of very expensive colleges and having a couple of $100K sheepskins on the wall. But talk to anyone in the trenches of any operation and it’s pretty universal that the spreadsheet jockeys often make arbitrary decisions that make their job harder to impossible. The general problem for a lot of ground level managers is to make it look like they’re following the new, stupid procedures dictated by a spreadsheet jockey, while still getting productive work actually done. They’re used to idiots who talk like Harris, and they know her practical knowledge of the stuff she has policies for is precisely as bad as the local regional manager o& their corporate masters— she looks at graphs and knows the graphs go up if you do a thing.

I’m not sure that it’s a communication problem at all. The problem for the elites is that the culturally coded language they use bespeaks of their ignorance. Nobody takes them seriously because not only do they mistake their maps as territory, but it’s often the case that the6 have no idea there’s a real territory out there being impacted. We can just make fossil fuels a thing of the past, without using nuclear. Just look at my graph.

How to fix the Ivy Leagues: require every student to have held a non-intern job earning no more than 2x minimum wage for their locale for no less than six months.

Wealthy parents will gladly have their kid work at McDonald’s for 6 months to go to Harvard, that wouldn’t stop anyone.

but rather he makes that idea concrete by describing her being fearful in front of a firing squad

He did no such thing.

Here's what he said:

She's a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it when the guns are trained on her face.

Nobody gives the condemned a rifle. Ergo, he was not describing a firing squad.

He was describing her alone and outnumbered in the face of the enemy. Not a firing squad, which is for executions.

You are correct, but it doesn't really change my point very much (ironically).

I don't think for a moment she is trying to be manipulative or deceitful

I mean, she is literally financially incentivized to lie and embellish. I understand why you would give her the benefit of the doubt because you know her and you respect her motives. But a person like this is inherently impossible to fully trust, because one can never be sure which components of a statement she makes are true, embellished, misremembered, or outright intentionally fabricated. This might be an endearing personality type to have a conversation with, but can you understand why this is a very dangerous personality type to entrust with significant power?

Absolutely, but there are also failure modes to other ways of communicating. Almost all Western politicians are comfortable speaking in lawyerly abstractions, but do you trust them? No, you don't, but you're used to reverse-engineering their words, because you know the word game they're playing. If you're smart, then you can even beat them at this game by twisting their words back on them or holding them to an unintended meaning (e.g. malicious compliance). There is no doubt that Trump's communication style can be exploited to mislead people, but that does not make it unique. I think most ordinary people find Trump's style easier to "reverse-engineer", and so they perceive him as being less misleading than the politician who speaks in technically true abstractions.

Okay but if an average politician makes a specific claim, I can at least assess whether I find that claim persuasive. When they quote a figure at me, or speak about some specific action that was taken, I can easily cross-reference that information to discover the context of what’s being discussed; normal politicians rarely just make up figures, or say things happened when in fact they didn’t happen at all. They might not be giving me the whole story, but I can generally be confident that they’re not telling me a made-up story. At worst they are omitting important context and/or alternate interpretations of the facts they’re discussing. They’re not just making up names, dates, events, etc.

Trump, in contrast, sometimes speaks in such an elliptical and non-specific way that it can be impossible to determine what specific event he’s referring to, or what specific claim he’s actually making. The details he brings up might be half-remembered, or mistaken, or he might be conflating two different things. This is tolerable if it’s some personal anecdote, but if he’s discussing an important matter of political fact, it’s actually really important for him to get all the details right, so that his constituents know what he’s actually talking about. I would rather a politician tell me something true but incomplete/misleading, rather than tell me something false but directionally correct.

They might not be giving me the whole story, but I can generally be confident that they’re not telling me a made-up story.

How many examples of "average politicians" telling made-up stories would be required to shift your prior here? "Putin is blackmailing Trump with tapes of him being urinated on by Russian Prostitutes" and "Russia hacked election machines in 2016 to secure a Trump victory" and "The Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian disinformation campaign" are three obvious examples of made-up stories promulgated by those you seem to be classifying as "average politicians", and they were not even "directionally" correct. I am pretty sure that I could add dozens more examples from the last few years with minimal effort.

I would rather a politician tell me something true but incomplete/misleading, rather than tell me something false but directionally correct.

It seems to me that, moving beyond questions of aesthetics, this preference grounds out on quantifiable concrete outcomes. That is, we can actually look at population-level beliefs, and we can track those population-level beliefs to the statements of political actors that formed and broadcasted the message that gave rise to them.

This is one of my favorite graphs. It's a measure of population-level beliefs about an objective, factual question of immediate and undeniable salience to the political realities of our nation. It seems to me that the shape of this graph was directly created by the "normal politician" style of discourse which you are arguing for, and the consequences were likewise quite direct: a massive increase in violent crime nation-wide. More damningly, it seems trivial to me to demonstrate how obvious "made up stories" spun off and achieved virality directly from those "normal politician"-style claims.

What I see in that graph is an obvious example of a completely compromised epistemic environment, one where the center of gravity of the consensus narrative is completely detached from objective reality. And it seems to me that such epistemic compromise is hardly an isolated occurrence, and is in fact the norm across much of the policy space, from foreign affairs to educational policy to gun politics to abortion to the status of the federal bureaucracy and so on. If one accepts that broad epistemic corruption as a given, I'm at a loss to understand why you prefer the style that produces such woeful outcomes.

I would rather a politician tell me something true but incomplete/misleading, rather than tell me something false but directionally correct.

Yes, and I am saying that for a lot of Trump supporters it's the other way around. They feel like the former too often ends up going in the wrong direction altogether.