Post Category → Miscellaneous

Politics is unbecoming

Social media has turned us all into politicians.

Everyone now has to behave and talk as though we are public figures, like politicians.

Previously only public figures were ensnared in scandals or generated outrage by being hypocrites or committing peccadillos.

They spoke in carefully rehearsed, focus group tested sound bites: Bland  guarded speech with Dog whistles and indirect speech signaling to allies.

Now most of us speak like this publicly out of fear of giving offense or triggering a Twitter mob other similar Cancel Culture mob.

Others are going all in on wrapping themselves in Munger’s Chains. 

Some are are arguing that we should stop talking about politics entirely

I suspect we will return to more private politics once this latest spate of unrest passes.

  • Our political opinions and choices will be kept for secret and private
  • We will return to a situation where professional politicians will lay out their stalls (ideas, manifestos) and we will vote for them in secret ballots.
  • If we do engage in politics, we will do so privately or pseudonymously to protect against bad faith reputational or professional or social attacks.

The pushback will come that “the private is political” or “the personal is political”, or worse, that silence is consent or even violence. This is itself a form of political compulsion by the currently dominant ideology. Forced attestation and loyalty checks are the hallmark of totalitarianism. It was used by Nazis, Soviets, Khmer Rouge, and Maoists.

You always have the right of exit, the right to refuse participation, the right to privacy, to keep your thoughts and opinions to yourself and to express you political choices in secret.

Einstellung effect

There is a well known bias related to this called the Einstellung effect, a psychological phenomenon characterized by a fixation on the first solution to a problem discovered at the expense of being able to find potentially better solutions. 

This is aggravated by multitasking. William Dershowitz on Multitasking:

“Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing

The Shirky Principle

 “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution” – Clay Shirky

This is also known as Regulatory Capture”

“When a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.”