Fabulous article (I actually printed it out so that I could spend more focused time on it).
I'm curious about the inclusion of the example of potential harms of young people taking cross sex hormones, not because the issue hasn't been ignored by traditional left-leaning media (it absolutely has with a few recent exceptions in the NYT), but because I don't see that the taboo on discussing this has been broken yet. Even most of the in-depth reporting that does show up in the NYT is consigned to the Opinion page. That said, anecdotally from my center-left friends, I think there is a huge amount of preference falsification around this topic and that there's a very good chance we will see that dramatic pivot you referred to sometime in the next 2-3 years.
I like your theory but I think you aren’t covering the determinants of what is acceptable at a dinner party. For example, my guess is that a dinner party of pathologists would have been less likely to dismiss the lab leak as an anti-Chinese conspiracy theory.
The problem with journalists is that they have exceedingly shallow understandings of their beats. So instead of using knowledge to separate fact from fiction, they use ideology instead.
This might not have been bad a hundred years ago when economics, biology, and psychology, were Marx, Darwin, and Freud, none of which need any knowledge of math or chemistry and so on. But science has advanced since then. It’s become more complicated and more specialized and journalists have not been able to keep up.
A persuasive article, nicely argued. But my wife suggests an additional factor behind journalistic "groupthink switching." We like to be correct, and most of the time we aren't actually sure what's true (or even what we believe). Since we all have limited knowledge and understanding, agreeing with consensus opinions is likely to yield more accurate conclusions on average.
I think this is a very important additional factor. Similarly, misinformation is and another. These are additional reasons we (Yascha's followers) should organize to fill the information gaps keeping woke beliefs in place. See below.
There is another factor at play when complicated issues of social science and STEM are involved. Journalists rarely have the expertise to proceed with a healthy skepticism about the information that they are provided and on which they will be reporting. This problem is further compounded when the journalist is assigned to interview a spokesperson whose knowledge may not go very far beyond talking points that the sponsoring organization has provided.
I'm surprised you didn't reference Jon Stewart's appearance on The Late Show, where his hilarious skewerimg of those who dismissed the Lab Leak theory coupled with Colnert's pathetic attempts to silence him played a massive part in allowing the discussion to enter the mainstream.
This is really good, Yascha. I wonder if you could develop a shortened version that could be shared widely. Also, as I write this, I think that there may be virtual dinner parties that have some influence. Specifically I'm thinking of Facebook, and although it's more like a block party, Twitter (perhaps no so much its successor, X). Certainly there's a fear of saying the 'wrong thing' among many folks (myself included, and some of my closest friends) 'in public', like on FB.
The implausibility of conspiracies and the importance of groupthink I've known for some time, but the preference cascade is interesting and useful. Thank you.
I don't think you discussed, though, why distrust of experts seems to have reached such heights of late. Dinner parties have been around for a long time and groupthink predates even dinner parties. I suggest that an important factor is the acceptance in elite circles of the idea that professional ethics and ideals like the search for Truth are suspect, to be largely replaced by activism for social goals. That idea is related to the theme of your recent book.
I really wonder how much the increased amount of educated women in these fields has affected the level of groupthink in journalism and other comm heavy professions that are (American) leftist in orientation.
This is all good and right, but for the dismissal of the point that journalists face professional risk from the boss for drifting from the preference narrative. That boss is the conspiracy.
The boss is Wall Street and by proxy the global billionaires. I think the bosses are pushing a globalist, corporatist agenda. The irony for the low-paid activist masquerading as a real journalist is that supporting the boss for this agenda is likely not at all good for their financial well being in the long-run. But yes, in the short run it s all greed-driven.
Yascha, a very erudite and interesting theory, which you have explained well. However to the simplistic minded sceptic, this dinner partyism also takes place between like minded individuals who are thrust together, in this instance, on account of their shared love of and training as reporters and journalists. What is not even mentioned in this article is why there is an undeniable biased of the MSM reporters and journalists, to be left of centre in their politics. The question that needs addressing and explaining is "why?" All the examples you quote could be construed as those of the ruling classes, instructing their MSM editors to ensure a propaganda narrative was followed by all NEWS and Broadcasting outlets and succeeded because 80% of the editors, reporters and journalists were of the same political persuasion, which was the cause of there being an overwhelming consensus to change course in unison, and to not only condemn but to smear those who disagreed with their utterances, as conspiracy theorists, or to be the far right, or "deniers" (vax-deniers, climate change deniers) of the substance of their proclamations. One struggles with these contradictions to you theory of dinner partyism, solid as it might seem at first reading.
I'm curious how long it will take for it to become acceptable to argue that the Covid vaccines did more harm than good.
The problem here is more than social. Direct-to-consumer drug advertising accounts for something like 1/8 of total TV ad revenue. Media conglomerates literally can't afford to allow their people to antagonize the pharmaceutical companies by questioning the "safe and effective" narrative. So the public hears only one side of the story.
Thanks! This is such an important key, not just to how social change works, but how we can influence it. As I’ll argue, one great answer is this substack!
First, a warning. My economist friends and I analyzed Trump this way from the start. Even when he won, they kept predicting a preference cascade would remove him from office within months. Using the same theory, I came to the reverse conclusion.
The lesson, as you explain with “subtly different distribution of views,” is that this theory is terrible at predicting WHEN a preference cascade will occur. However, it says a great deal about HOW to increase the chances of regime change: (1) Protect those who are canceled, (2) Broadcast counter-regime evidence.
How this substack might be ideal: You’ve already gone public with wrong-think, plus your followers are quite protective with their subscriptions and even hanging out at that pub (dinner party). But there’s way more work than you can handle to accomplish #1 & #2. With a bit of support and encouragement from you, your followers could play this role. I’ve seen their skills, even brilliance, and enthusiasm long ago in the Slack-room discussions. Some of the same was shown on the old weekly zooms. And the comments here are proving this once again.
But we are not yet much of a persuasion community. To build community, look to (the positive side) of small rural towns. They worked together because they needed to and as a way to socialize. Your followers are an ideal group for building a community by working together to take advantage of Kuran’s preference cascade.
The web is perfect for spreading information and for allowing followers to work on group projects anonymously when needed. And there’s no better place to organize such an effort than among 1,000 people who share a common perspective and interact constructively. And yes, there are a ton of info-broadcasting projects that desperately need doing and are not out of reach. Such a community might even find a way to support those canceled, thereby lowering the “revolutionary threshold.”
So, I have a request: Would you write a follow-up article on the implications of Kuran's theory for how to hasten social change and include some discussion of a substack follower community?
Mounk’s Razor: “Never attribute to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by not wanting to be singled out at your next dinner party.”
I think this is the piece I have been waiting for.
Fabulous article (I actually printed it out so that I could spend more focused time on it).
I'm curious about the inclusion of the example of potential harms of young people taking cross sex hormones, not because the issue hasn't been ignored by traditional left-leaning media (it absolutely has with a few recent exceptions in the NYT), but because I don't see that the taboo on discussing this has been broken yet. Even most of the in-depth reporting that does show up in the NYT is consigned to the Opinion page. That said, anecdotally from my center-left friends, I think there is a huge amount of preference falsification around this topic and that there's a very good chance we will see that dramatic pivot you referred to sometime in the next 2-3 years.
I like your theory but I think you aren’t covering the determinants of what is acceptable at a dinner party. For example, my guess is that a dinner party of pathologists would have been less likely to dismiss the lab leak as an anti-Chinese conspiracy theory.
The problem with journalists is that they have exceedingly shallow understandings of their beats. So instead of using knowledge to separate fact from fiction, they use ideology instead.
This might not have been bad a hundred years ago when economics, biology, and psychology, were Marx, Darwin, and Freud, none of which need any knowledge of math or chemistry and so on. But science has advanced since then. It’s become more complicated and more specialized and journalists have not been able to keep up.
A persuasive article, nicely argued. But my wife suggests an additional factor behind journalistic "groupthink switching." We like to be correct, and most of the time we aren't actually sure what's true (or even what we believe). Since we all have limited knowledge and understanding, agreeing with consensus opinions is likely to yield more accurate conclusions on average.
I think this is a very important additional factor. Similarly, misinformation is and another. These are additional reasons we (Yascha's followers) should organize to fill the information gaps keeping woke beliefs in place. See below.
There is another factor at play when complicated issues of social science and STEM are involved. Journalists rarely have the expertise to proceed with a healthy skepticism about the information that they are provided and on which they will be reporting. This problem is further compounded when the journalist is assigned to interview a spokesperson whose knowledge may not go very far beyond talking points that the sponsoring organization has provided.
I'm surprised you didn't reference Jon Stewart's appearance on The Late Show, where his hilarious skewerimg of those who dismissed the Lab Leak theory coupled with Colnert's pathetic attempts to silence him played a massive part in allowing the discussion to enter the mainstream.
As I recall, you are correct. Jon Stewart made the Lab Leak theory "mainstream".
This is really good, Yascha. I wonder if you could develop a shortened version that could be shared widely. Also, as I write this, I think that there may be virtual dinner parties that have some influence. Specifically I'm thinking of Facebook, and although it's more like a block party, Twitter (perhaps no so much its successor, X). Certainly there's a fear of saying the 'wrong thing' among many folks (myself included, and some of my closest friends) 'in public', like on FB.
This is something, we (Yascha's followers) could do (with his oversight), so he could keep pushing the envelope. See below.
The implausibility of conspiracies and the importance of groupthink I've known for some time, but the preference cascade is interesting and useful. Thank you.
I don't think you discussed, though, why distrust of experts seems to have reached such heights of late. Dinner parties have been around for a long time and groupthink predates even dinner parties. I suggest that an important factor is the acceptance in elite circles of the idea that professional ethics and ideals like the search for Truth are suspect, to be largely replaced by activism for social goals. That idea is related to the theme of your recent book.
A very interesting article. I hope you won't mind two nit-picking comments:
1. You're mistaken about the murder of the Russian royal family. That happened more than a year after the tsar was deposed.
2. It looks to me like the average subjective revolutionary threshold is the same for Regime A and Regime B. It's the median that's different.
5-star essay.
I really wonder how much the increased amount of educated women in these fields has affected the level of groupthink in journalism and other comm heavy professions that are (American) leftist in orientation.
This is all good and right, but for the dismissal of the point that journalists face professional risk from the boss for drifting from the preference narrative. That boss is the conspiracy.
The boss is responding to the same incentives as the journalist.
The boss is Wall Street and by proxy the global billionaires. I think the bosses are pushing a globalist, corporatist agenda. The irony for the low-paid activist masquerading as a real journalist is that supporting the boss for this agenda is likely not at all good for their financial well being in the long-run. But yes, in the short run it s all greed-driven.
Yascha, a very erudite and interesting theory, which you have explained well. However to the simplistic minded sceptic, this dinner partyism also takes place between like minded individuals who are thrust together, in this instance, on account of their shared love of and training as reporters and journalists. What is not even mentioned in this article is why there is an undeniable biased of the MSM reporters and journalists, to be left of centre in their politics. The question that needs addressing and explaining is "why?" All the examples you quote could be construed as those of the ruling classes, instructing their MSM editors to ensure a propaganda narrative was followed by all NEWS and Broadcasting outlets and succeeded because 80% of the editors, reporters and journalists were of the same political persuasion, which was the cause of there being an overwhelming consensus to change course in unison, and to not only condemn but to smear those who disagreed with their utterances, as conspiracy theorists, or to be the far right, or "deniers" (vax-deniers, climate change deniers) of the substance of their proclamations. One struggles with these contradictions to you theory of dinner partyism, solid as it might seem at first reading.
I'm curious how long it will take for it to become acceptable to argue that the Covid vaccines did more harm than good.
The problem here is more than social. Direct-to-consumer drug advertising accounts for something like 1/8 of total TV ad revenue. Media conglomerates literally can't afford to allow their people to antagonize the pharmaceutical companies by questioning the "safe and effective" narrative. So the public hears only one side of the story.
Thanks! This is such an important key, not just to how social change works, but how we can influence it. As I’ll argue, one great answer is this substack!
First, a warning. My economist friends and I analyzed Trump this way from the start. Even when he won, they kept predicting a preference cascade would remove him from office within months. Using the same theory, I came to the reverse conclusion.
The lesson, as you explain with “subtly different distribution of views,” is that this theory is terrible at predicting WHEN a preference cascade will occur. However, it says a great deal about HOW to increase the chances of regime change: (1) Protect those who are canceled, (2) Broadcast counter-regime evidence.
How this substack might be ideal: You’ve already gone public with wrong-think, plus your followers are quite protective with their subscriptions and even hanging out at that pub (dinner party). But there’s way more work than you can handle to accomplish #1 & #2. With a bit of support and encouragement from you, your followers could play this role. I’ve seen their skills, even brilliance, and enthusiasm long ago in the Slack-room discussions. Some of the same was shown on the old weekly zooms. And the comments here are proving this once again.
But we are not yet much of a persuasion community. To build community, look to (the positive side) of small rural towns. They worked together because they needed to and as a way to socialize. Your followers are an ideal group for building a community by working together to take advantage of Kuran’s preference cascade.
The web is perfect for spreading information and for allowing followers to work on group projects anonymously when needed. And there’s no better place to organize such an effort than among 1,000 people who share a common perspective and interact constructively. And yes, there are a ton of info-broadcasting projects that desperately need doing and are not out of reach. Such a community might even find a way to support those canceled, thereby lowering the “revolutionary threshold.”
So, I have a request: Would you write a follow-up article on the implications of Kuran's theory for how to hasten social change and include some discussion of a substack follower community?