I was just going through one of the Cultural Evolution Society's podcasts on Cognitive Biases in Folklore.
They don't raise many points you wouldn't already have heard from Scott Atran's In God We Trust. But, they do mention that it is stories as a whole and not elements within a story upon which cultural selection for minimal counter-intuitiveness operates.
That has some implications for the current voter fraud debate.
Right now we're getting tonnes of "just so" voter fraud and voting extra-legality (back dated time stamps, observer exclusion, 100% Biden vote batches, programmed hardware bias, etc.). Each one is a bit hard to believe, but is certainly plausible. But, as a whole, people around me tend to think the sum of all of it is definitely conspiracy theory land.
The narrative as a whole has too many slightly counter-intuitive ideas.
If the cultural evolution theory is right, what should happen is that the narrative should change so that only a few slightly counter-intuitive ideas are present. Thus the narrative should predictably evolve into something like "systemic voting bias which slightly favours Biden". This seems to be happening.
But, what is also interesting, is that along this way, you should have voters thinking either:
- All this is just too coincidental to be true. Trump is grasping at straws to stay in power. This could occur due to post hoc rationalization (I hate Trump, or I don't want to disbelieve that all media are fairly fake). Or it could occur due to a rational assessment of the probability of so many "just so" stories all being true. This reflects analysis at the elemental level.
-All this is just too coincidental to be true. Biden must really have pulled some strings to play as unfair as he thought Trump would. After all, what could people who believe Trump's literally Hitler justify as fair. This could occur due post hoc bias. It could also occur due to rational assessment of the evidence (each actor has a slight probability to do something within their control to slightly influence results, none of which is extra-ordinarily unusual. Or, the big guy & Hillary said "unleash the hounds" within their political machines). This reflects selection at the story level.
This leaves one with two competing stories. Trump is an aspiring dictator. Biden reflects or enabled systemic extra-legality. Both are slightly counter-intuitive to swing people. What I expect we should see for detail is that the elements told in each retelling then get switched based on the audience one talks to. After all, believers within one camp wouldn't find either of these narratives hard to believe. For the story to be meme-orable, you'd need a better level of counter-intuitiveness.
In religion this is "putting your pearl's before swine" logic. It reflects the ideas in the side-bar on lynch-pin signalling.
No comments:
Post a Comment