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>>BWhen collective beliefs meet new evidence, the most sensible thing to do is often ignore it. If you think the Emperor is naked, and everyone else is acting a
by toss1 5y ago
>>BWhen collective beliefs meet new evidence, the most sensible thing to do is often ignore it. If you think the Emperor is naked, and everyone else is acting as if he isn’t, you get no benefit from stepping out of line. Even if you think everyone else can see the Emperor is naked, it is still risky to say so. Even if you think everyone else thinks that, and also thinks you think so, that is still no help unless you’re sure they are going to act on it.
This is especially true in autocratic regimes (political, corporate, or social).
The repeating of a lie is both a loyalty test and a loyalty builder. Even if everyone knows that it is a lie, to get someone to repeat it both commits them to a risk for 'the cause' or 'the leader', and simultaneously demonstrates their loyalty to the cause and leader.
The bigger the lie, the bigger the commitment needed to repeat it, and the bigger the demonstration of loyalty.
It also has the simultaneous effect of successively isolating the followers from other factions. Eventually, the only ones who will tolerate 'those crazies' or 'the faithful' are the group of followers, which provides further motivation for everyone in the group to stick with the group.
When leaders of any sort ask directly or by implication to do something sketchy or morally compromising, run the other way; the path you're being asked to follow is never good.
- dash2 5y agoVaclav Havel made this point in Living in Truth. The truly political act is the grocer who refuses to put a political slogan up in his window. But I think liberal democratic societies suffer from this problem too. * One way to solve coordination problems is to have a leader, and everyone follows his plan. Advantage: the leader can update the plan in the light of evidence. Disadvantage: the leader biases the group's plan to favour himself. * Another approach is to have no leader but to agree on some collective beliefs as the basis to plan from. (Forms of words like "this house believes...", "this committee resolves" are an example.) Advantage: everyone gets input at the start. Disadvantage: belief-updating gets more complex, because unless we all do it together, we end up miscoordinating. Hence it can become easier to ignore new evidence. In the story, the Emperor can't admit he has no clothes on, because he's constrained by his political rivals. A truly unconstrained Emperor would be able to be honest, but of course that might bring its own dangers....
- toss1 5y agoYes, I'd read about it most recently from Garry Kasparov. That example of the grocer who refuses to put up the slogan is excellent! I'm not so sure the problems you cite for actual liberal (small-d) democratic societies are actually the same, although I agree there are similarities. Trying to avoid the No True Scotsman fallacy, I don't think actual liberal societies are requiring false signalling in order to administer a government. To the extent that they are requiring spreading and repeating of outright lies, I'd say they are failing to behave as liberal democratic societies, and are instead and falling into autocracy.