Terrorist Threats: Limits of Rationality

There's a rather famous quote by D. S. Wilson, the prominent evolutionary biologist.

If there is a trade-off between the two forms of realism [factual & practical], such that our beliefs can become more adaptive only by becoming factually less true, then factual realism will be the loser every time. … Factual realists detached from practical reality were not among our ancestors. 

For context, here's how he frames the two forms of realism:

What do I mean by factual and practical realism? A belief is factually realistic when it accurately describes what’s really out there (e.g., there are no people up there sitting on clouds). A belief is practically realistic when it causes the believer to behave adaptively in the real world.

This has some rather important implications in properly analyzing relative threat levels from domestic right wing vs. Islamic terrorism.

First off, we have to ascertain what type of threat is imposed: existential or conventional (eg. money, lives, freedom, etc.).  While I don't know of studies that directly answer this, there are a fair number that circle around the bush.  I'll amalgamate these into a simple function:

threat = damage per event * frequency * potential growth rate * probable damping curve

Upper bound represents in-group orientation metrics.
Lower bound represents out-group orientation metrics. 

However, this leaves out a key aspect from yesterday's discussion: risk vs. cost metrics.  As mentioned, early intervention toward an out-group has minimal direct negatives. In disproportional scenarios, at worst you lose some unknown future potential benefits (retaliation risks vary directly with out-group strength & penetration potential).  Late intervention toward an out-group has potentially severe direct negatives, including uncertain existential threat levels.  Thus a better threat
function is:

threat = (damage per event x event frequency x potential growth rate x probable damping curve) x power law cost-benefit curve

The power law cost-benefit vs. intervention point time curve shows why good people often talk past each other in terms of right-wing vs. Islamic terrorism.  Path future is more a function of one's own out-group in-group bias than it is a function of rational judgment.  Error rates swamp precision/validity; complexity rules and reductionist rationality is naive fiction.

While future prediction is bounded by complexity recognizing historical patterns definitely facilitates bayesian heuristics. In other words if history shows that immigration (which includes some violent elements) hasn't caused existential problems before, it probably won't again.  This is an out-group position.  The in-group position is sensitive to black swan events;  Sometimes, out-group positions cause complete existential destruction. Tension between these two positions accentuates the role of minor clues. 

threat = (damage per event x frequency x potential growth rate x probable damping curve x power law cost-benefit curve) x black swan frequency x black swan damage

In regard to the role of minor clues, researchers like Haidt would add that the emotional tail wags the rational dog. Kauffman leverages this ex post facto rationality limit by suggesting our emotions are optimally primed to pick up fuzzy signals.  When operating at the edge of chaos, this leads to better-than-rational predictions. This means we shouldn't be so quick to discount "naive" prejudicial out-group heuristics. It simply means good people will disagree on the weighting they apply to short-term history vs. genetic-term history.  Out-groupers may favour a combination of the short-term history & risk-reward.  In-groupers may favour genetic-term history & risk-aversion-cost-aversion.  (Obviously long-term group survivability in competitive landscapes requires both positions and their dynamic tension.)

Turchin's cliodynamic work on secular cycles throws in some interesting data points.  His work suggests ideological conflict is correlated as a pre-cursor to societal collapse.  While this seems obvious, it throws a useful wrench into the right-wing vs. Islamic terror equivalency debate. Which is more ideological foreign & incompatible? 

Turchin's work also highlights the evolutionary fitness of practical rather than factual weightings.  Thus, even if right-wing terrorism were to be perfectly equivalent to Islamic terrorism the main deciding factor is whether, over a long-average, an out-group will treat you better than an in-group? Societal collapse happens when elites split into one group and commoners into another. Each serve their own interests at the expense of the other. Unfortunately for the plebes, the elites have the power (they still excel while societal collapse progresses)!  Eventually even a strong rule of law can't handle the polarization nor its Malthusian trap.

This illustrates some of the unique dynamics occurring in the debate. People within society who appear to favour out-of society actors over in-society actors raise people's freeloader heuristics (specifically, traitorous dynamic heuristics).  This is especially true of people in elite and quasi-elite roles.  Treachery in these groups can have especially nasty consequences for the middle class and non-aligned elites & quasi-elites. This exaggerates the importance of out-group in-group framing.  

For elites, a little out-group entry has: 

• minimal immediate costs to moderate immediate benefits (more slave-like labour & taxes),
• potential good pay-offs if out-group swamping occurs (keep status & grow wealth)

On the other hand, for the middle class, out-group entry has:

• minimal long-term pay offs with out-group swamping (only some will excel during destabilization)
• moderate negative immediate costs to minimal positive immediate benefits (now the slave or more work)

One doesn't have to be a game theory expert to see the preferred solution for both parties. Add in Turchin's findings that in societal collapse most of the middle gets seriously screwed, and bigoted xenophobes can appear like risk averse bankers.  

Additionally, the middle class should be especially sensitized to actions which appear to devalue historic in-groups.  This is a pending signal that elites, quasi-elites, and your own peers will screw you. Once social contract binding loses effectiveness those on the margins are disproportionately impacted (say via simple rent increases which push you into poverty and then into serfdom due to evaporation of income buffering).

The net result is the addition of a non-linear "non-rational" factor into the threat function.  Wilson might suggest calling this a "practical reality over factual reality weighting".  As potential discrepancy between the two increases, practical reality is weighting more heavily.  This is due to the costs of missing a false negative versus the cost of missing a false positive. So,

threat = (damage per event * event frequency * potential growth rate * probable damping curve * power law cost-benefit curve * black swan frequency * black swan damage) * treasonous elite freeloading probability * disproportional socio-economic impact * nonlinear non-rational sensitivity

Now if you're like me, this function is getting pretty messy.  So messy in fact, that rational choice theory application is non-sensical.  Rational choice theorists (of which I'm not one) suggest people group terms.  Here's one way grouping:

threat =  event frequency * disproportional socio-economic impact * probable damping curve * damage per event * power law cost-benefit curve * black swan damage * black swan frequency* potential growth rate * treasonous elite freeloading probability * nonlinear non-rational sensitivity

One way to interpret this grouping is: 

threat = minimization of out-group threat * rational judgment * maximization of out-group threat * non-linear sensitivity

How conservatives and liberals differ in this weighing seems straight forward.  Confounding simplistic us=good them=bad polemics is the fact that people on different ends of the political spectrum simply switch in-group out-group demographics.  For many on the left, right-wingers are the out-group.  For many on the right, most of Islam is the out-group.  Thus, the real distinction is the non-linear sensitivity term. As Wilson illustrates, history selects against factual realists detached from practical reality. Thus people clue into the potential each group has to cause existential extinction.

Progressive leftists are legitimately concerned about the extinction of progressive society.  A status quo is simply not acceptable.  It represents real disintegration of what the West is to them.  Conservatives are legitimately concerned about the extinction of Western values and culture. A status quo is acceptable. Social progression is valued less than status quo freedoms.

Thus the only seemingly valid metric (which is not paradigm based) is the propensity of right-wing and Islamic terrorists group to infiltrate and attack other states/socieites.  This reveals the worst case level of existential threat (at some far future time).  Islam is clearly different here. San Bernadino type events suggest a non-zero infiltrate and leverage tendency. Insurgencies in many Islamic population centres re-enforce this idea. Fears of localized submission walls within a growing demography are cited.  Right-wing terrorists just have not shown a tendency to go to other countries (unless you count national military as an example of right-wing terrorism, which is certainly a logical position to take - it just legitimizes criticisms about freeloader treachery risks).

Domestic vs. Foreign Terrorism: Why they key different existential threat levels

I had a quick twitter exchange on the false (or potentially false) equivalency of domestic right-wing terrorism and Islamic terrorism.  

I take the position that Islamic terrorism present a real, albeit nascent, existential threat to Western society. I consider domestic right-wing terrorism a minor existential threat to current Western society.  I do however, concede them to be a definite threat to Western governments which (rapidly) phase change to fascist-socialism.

The main distinguishing factor between "domestic" and "foreign" terrorism is the in-group out-group heuristics they prime.  

Domestic right-wing terrorism is, for many Westerners, an in-group issue. These domestic groups' conservative nature ties them to a specific (albeit usually out-dated or blindly idealized) aspect of nationalism. So, while both domestic and Islamic radicals have government overthrow/change in mind, the former is somewhat grounded to the nation state's past while the later is uncertainly grounded to one of many possible futures. 

Islamic overthrow/change presents an unknown future.  It certainly could be that an Islamized West is a part of a happy pluralistic future.  However, because Islamic (radical) groups are considered by many to be an out-group, motives are viewed as harder to understand, more uncertain, less trustworthy and potentially more harmful.  Because of this, worst-case futures are primed.  The cost of early intervention is relatively minimal (in the direct sense). Because of uncertain growth rates, late intervention is potentially devastating. Think Hitler in '32 vs. '40.

On the other hand, domestic terrorism is perceived as better understood.  When in-group heuristics are primed, people tend to feel they have a better grasp on potential growth rates and ideological penetration depth.  This makes them seem less scary.  The actions of these groups tend to elicit crime/crazy categorization.  They are a known aberration rather than a signaller of unknown existential competition.

Additionally, early false-positive intervention with an out-group has minimal in-group costs. Falsely rejecting an out-grouper has the potential loss of an unknown future benefit and zero immediate costs.  A false-negative lack of intervention also has zero cost, but comes with an uncertain future cost.  As long as you're surviving, we've been evolutionary selected for (varying degrees of) false-positive conservatism. 

However, groups tend to do well with some risk-takers.  That's why hetero-orthodoxes, like myself, consider tension between out-group orientation and in-group orientation necessary.  Full isolation is an equally poor long-term strategy as full open-doors. Thus it is more than a little naive to bash in-group or out-group orientations. While ideological homogeneity may "feel" good, this is probably just a proximate reaction to the benefits of periodic freeloader purging (see Sigmund for some ground-work).  Of course optimal in-group to out-group orientation ratios are environmentally determined. Is competitor group size growing? Increase via out-group orientation. Or, go small and strong and shoot for niche positioning.

Now all this changes based upon in-group out-group priming.  Those on the far left are probably more likely to see potential domestic terrorists as an out-group and immigrants as an in-group.  Conservatives are just the opposite.  How you view each group probably tells you more about your own biases than it does about the rationality of either position.  Neither position is inherently "bad". They are just different approaches to solve the in-group vs. out-group fitness riddle.

The far left tend toward out-group oriented universalism.  That is to say, the far left tend to minimize ultra-nationalism in favour of inter-nationalism.  In evolutionary sense, they're putting their bets on the returns offered by a larger adaptive group (ie. nation state vs. chiefdom).  This is a good strategy. Larger groups tend to outcompete smaller groups. Out-group orientation also tends to minimize inter-group conflict frequency.  This is one reason religion and universalist oriented religions have been so successful: they enable the formation of larger groups (see Norezayan for the causal arrow of religion->civilizaiton).

Similarly in-group oriented conservatives are oriented to minimize out-group swamping problems and favour in-group coherence.  Haidt's moral foundations work gets at some of this. This is a good strategy. Coherent groups tend to outcompete incoherent groups. In-group orientation also tends to minimize freeloading costs.

The mathematical mean should be equally balanced between seeing domestic terrorists as an out-group and potential Islamic terrorists as an out-group. Where this mean is, is certainly debatable. 

The US constitution certainly enshrines power to domestic purges of a technocratically detached & oppressive elite. As mentioned, domestic terrorism also has some ties to the average nation-stater's zone of reference, in the sense that it represents a plausible connection back-in-time rather than a potential connection forward-in-time. Pluralism and the marginalization of in-group oriented nationalism have certainly shifted traditional balances.  My sense, is that progressive pluralism represents a super positioning facilitating a potential change to a higher adaptive group level which supersedes current nation state groupings.  Its potential to minimize inter-national conflict is certainly real.  Nonetheless, the strain on in-group coherence is also very real. Backlashes are endogenous not exogenous responses. However, all this depends on what level of immigration is considered fundamental to one's group.  On this point, good people will disagree. Further more, they should disagree: group orientation heterogeneity is essential for adaptive group survival!

Lessons from the Rise of Religious Toleration

In the mid 1700's the rise of religious toleration had become firmly entrenched.  However full operationalization of religious liberty had not yet occurred.  Those familiar with today's progressive debates will recognize parallel issues of trust, power dynamics and linguistic misinterpretation.

Anglican's wanted to increase their organizational level by getting a Bishop for the country.  Presbyterians did not want to concede the implied Anglican universality this could entail.  According to Beneke,

neither side could frame their arguments in the traditional language of toleration, nor yet fully concede to their opponents the religious liberty that they desired for themselves. (pp. 126)

Bennett goes on to say, "with the rise of religious liberty, there might be no more innocent words."

This scenario sounds eerily familiar to today's culture wars.  The battles around literal fact vs. perceived intent also parallel what is happening today.  Today something can be factually accurate, but still be speech which is banned (or de-facto banned): just think about the sociology vs. science of race & culture.  In the 1700's the tension surrounded labels of sinful behaviour/belief thrown from one religious tradition onto a different religious tradition.  While such accusations were technically correct, the intent of such messaging and the likelyhood of offence overwhelmed technical considerations.  Tolerance wasn't just about accepting others, it was about minimizing friction on non-essential issues.

In 1700's America, the key to eventually overcoming this conundrum was purposeful statements from both sides that they did not want to change the other: that they were both part of a larger national body.  The rise of religious migrants (converts from one sect from another) enabled deep insight into a given creed's hidden messages and agendas.  People became so sensitive about hidden agendas that trust broke down.  Society started to fracture.  It was saved by a heterogeneity.

Heterogenous interaction enabled people to see that their neighbour from another sect wasn't really the spawn of Satan, like perhaps their over zealous minister was suggesting. A large group oriented society had benefits that surpassed that offered by within-group purity.  A new cultural group level emerged.

Applications

So how would the evolution outlined by Beneke above play out for a resolution of today's culture wars?  The first step would involve both sides truly accepting the internal logic and internal value of opposite positions.

Opposites need not be seen as "right".  They do, however, need to be seen as plausible (within the assumptions of an alternative paradigm).  Large group moves to universalism generally require a commensurate surge to the value placed on commonalities.  In the progressive battles of today, this could mean a surge in nationalism or a surge in "human right" type thought.  I suspect"human right" universalism opens the gate to wide for large group survivability.  However, this will likely raise existentialist hackles. The end game of true universalism is the loss of the UN styled nation state.

What to Watch For

Costly display rituals/tests are an adaptive way of seeing who is and is not a group freeloader.  Acts which go against your own individual level self interest are unlikely to be done by group members who function on the group's periphery.  Neither are they likely to be done by those who are not very committed to group function.  Thus seemingly counter-adaptive acts actually function adaptively provided they purify group membership and strengthen group function.

Current examples of self-hate of privilege (i.e. upper middle class white people saying people like themselves deserve to be targeted by oppressed ethnic groups due to their inherit privilege) are hard to rationalize with anything other that costly display commitments against one group (a socio-economic group) and for another group (ideological based group).

This becomes very interesting when you look at the changes in adaptive grouping and group levels which are occurring.

The Ed Reform Scale-up Problem

Scale is one of the major challenges in educational reform. Extending localized successes has proved to be an intractable problem.  Broad reforms can sometimes change superficial institutional structures (i.e. principals as instructional leaders rather than business managers).  Usually, however, reforms simply change the practice of small clusters of teachers, perhaps even the practices within a few schools or charter school-networks.

Elmore in his insightful School Reform from the Inside Out book says,

The good news about existing reform strategies is that they tend to galvanize commitment among the already motivated by concentrating them in small groups of true believers who reinforce each other.  The bad news is that these small groups of self-selected reformers apparently seldom influence their peers.

It's hard not to interpret ideas like this in terms of multi-level selection theory: people tend to be drawn to self-reinforcing, adaptive groups which have evolved protection from freeloader and dictatorial abuse.

What Elmore is getting at is that educational reforms can delve into core practice change at a small-group level but can only broach superficial change at the large-group level.  The large-group level of education is a juggernaught.

Rampages

Peter Turchin has a good (albeit old) blog  series on mass shootings / rampages, that is unfortunately very timely this week.  Instead of commenting directly on that series, here's a quote that sent me off on some tangents.

The only difference between a rampage shooter and a terrorist bomber (such as Timothy McVeigh) is in the weapon used to kill. Both aim not at individual people but at groups, social or political institutions, or entire societies. 

The thing that strikes me as important is the loner vs. group dynamic.  One thing that is certainly happening in western societies is the concerted engineering of more multicultural societies.  While there are certainly many reasons why this (and it's associated resistance) is occurring, I suspect the multi-level selection lens is a fairly productive paradigm from which to look for deep causes.

Multi-level selection can posit that western moves to broader multi-culturalism reflect an evolutionary drift to large group orientations.  Large group orientations can be adaptive.  For example pluralistic societies tend to have lower levels of inter-state warfare.  Some of this comes from their focus on rule of law.  Some of it comes from increased propensities to see other state's citizens as "non-others".

An increase in group level can be very advantageous.  For example the brotherhood of Western Civilization certainly has the potential to minimize strifes between internal parties; after all we're linked by common values.  While the evolution to nation state sized groups certainly isn't finalized, the nation state group level has a fairly robust adaptiveness with a strong history of outcompeting lower levels.

The next level up, pan-national state groups (such as the Eurozone, NAFTA zone, etc.), haven't settled into robust adaptive group roles.  However, the seed is obviously on the table (& science fiction writers always fantasize about the inevitability of regional mega-states).

Fringe multiculturalism may portend even grander experiments.  Just what does western propensity for fanatically broad multicultural truly facilitate (from the multi-level selection lens).  The 1st millennial rise of universalist religion presents one potential parallel trajectory.  Larger group orientation may be signalling the attempted rise of an alternative world universalizing religion; however this one operates under the banner of secular progressivism/humanism rather than the quaint flying spaghetti monster mold.  But every (religious) push creates its own demons...

Which brings me rather circuitously to Peter Turchin's blog series on rampages.  If there is a felt push to higher adaptive group levels (which by definition outcompete lower group levels), then it seems natural to have blowback against this.  I'd suggest some of the surge in rampages may be due to non-group loners raging against the machine of groupishness.  Not only is there too much groupishness, current formulations amorphously portray everyone embracing everything.  This absolutely smothers the maladjusted lone rampager. Groupishness explicitly says you have to belong.  There is no safe space for non-belonging because everything is (amorphously) accepted/owned.  You absolutely will be part of our group.

Most, but certainly not all mass shootings/attacks seem focussed on venues and populations that portray strong group attenuations.  Has the pressure for groupishness become so substantial and pervasive that socially maladjusted loners vent their nihilism purely to destroy sacrosanct groupings? Purely to destroy group adaptiveness in order to save space for the loners that can't function at any group level?  I'd strongly suggest that the rise in rampages is tied to a rage against groupishness by those for whom groupishness will never work.

Summer Reading

This summer I got away for four weeks down to Belize and Mexico.  Unfortunately I don't think well in the heat: I go into survival/suffer mode. This trip was no different.  However, I did pick my way through a good biography of Mao.  He was so atrocious I had to digest it in bits (and I normally consider myself a fairly jaded fatalist!).  I'm just no good with sociopathic bullies.

It was interesting to learn a bit about the context of the Korean war (Mao wanted to sucker US into an engagement to get Russian arms, tech and industry into the country).  It was also interesting to see the group dynamics Mao relied on in his road to tyranny.  My main lesson was that in conditions of scarcity (mental or physical) people's response to group dynamics tend to bifurcate: sheeple vs. rebels.  This makes it easy for tyrants to suss out purges.  You also want to desensitize system responses and leverage the power of "big brothers".

I also made it through a number of educational reform history books.  The only one that stands out is Larry Cuban's How Teachers Taught.  He grabbed primary sources to record snapshots of observed teaching practices from 1880 to 1990.  I think I appreciated the primary data in this book more than I do the overarching observations in his Tinkering to Utopia book (based on the insights from the How Teachers Taught data).  Tinkering to Utopia, is however a must read for anyone needing to situate the problems of ed reform.

My big take-away from Cuban's book was to re-elevate the hybridization problem of ed reform.  The basic issue is that most every reform (large or small) gets hybridized.  50 year phase transitions, while  pervasive, are not fully so.

Classification Problems

This summer I'm back trying to find suitable experimental methods to prove/disprove Education-as-an-adaptive-group theory.  In that vein, some possible approaches involve trying to code individual orientations (small-group/individual vs. large-group/institutional).  There are a ton of problems with this class of approach.  Foundational, its far-removed from multi-level selection theory's ontology (MLS): MLS measures are based on fitness not orientation!

Here's an example that highlights some of practical problems with an orientational approach.  It comes from the New American School's large whole-school reform initiative of the late 90's.  It comes from a teacher in a lower-socioeconomic school who was part of a whole school reform design.

She stated that many [students] came from unstructured home environments and thus needed more orderly classroom experiences. 

[I]t would work probably better with a group of kids that are on grade level, that have a lot of self-control...If the come from a home where there is no structure, [and] they come into a classroom where there is no structure...that's the problem.  But I really feel, and I might be wrong, that this works with a different population much better than what it has worked with our students. 

Teachers at a CON [specific reform design type] school stated that their design units had to be "modified" to address their student's basic skill needs. (Berends, et. al. 2002, pp. 114)

So, does this represent a small-group orientation which is concerned about customizing/optimizing things for the contexts of a particular group - say the disadvantaged students in the class.  Or, does it represent a large-group orientation which is concerned about the hidden curriculum of institutionalized education - say student should learn the value of order and structure?

Obviously such dichotomous questions are ill-formed.  First off, intentions matter much less than behaviour.  Behaviour matters much less than fitness.  Short-term fitness matters much less than long-term fitness which incorporates anti-fragility concerns.


References

Berends, M., Bodilly, S., Kirby, S. (2002).  Facing the Challenges of Whole-School Reform: New American Schools After a Decade.  RAND, Santa Monica California.

Ruling Things Out

If education is sensitive to the adaptive group contexts, then it stands to reason that you wouldn't see "total" reforms working in groups lacking characteristics of a strong coherent (adaptive) group.  Thus one should see total reforms working in conditions where groups have strong norms, strong leaders, strong sense of purpose, etc.

Indeed this is what one finds.   The large, ambitious New American School Reform project of the late 90's found that total reform depth was correlated with strong principals and high levels of teacher self-efficacy (I feel I can succeed with any student).

This fits with what would expect from a multi-level selective perspective.  While this is certainly not evidence of the necessity of multi-level selective framing, it does show that yet another small piece of  the empirical world doesn't negate such framing.

Ontology

A nice, fairly concise summary of the ontology of multi-level selection theory which touches on the slippery slope issues surrounding MLS1 vs. MLS2 approaches (Michod & Roze, 2000)

The basic problem in an evolutionary transition is how and under what conditions a group becomes a new kind of individual. Initially, group fitness is taken to be the average of the component lower level units, but as the evolutionary transition proceeds, group fitness becomes decoupled from the fitness of its members. Indeed, the essence of an evolutionary transition is that the lower level units must in some sense “relinquish” their “claim” to fitness, that is to flourish and multiply, in favor of the new higher level. This transfer of fitness from lower to higher levels occurs through the evolution of cooperation and conflict modifiers that restrict the opportunity for within group change and enhance the opportunity for between group change. Until eventually, the group becomes an evolutionary individual in the sense of having heritable variation in fitness at its level of organization and in the sense of being protected from the ravages of within group change by adaptations that restrict the opportunity for non-cooperative behaviors. 


On the sociology side, this begs the question how robust specific aspects of human groups need to be in order to be well-interpreted as units of selection rather than sets of individuals.

References

Michod, R. E., & Roze, D. (2000). A Multi-level Selection Theory of Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality. In Artificial Life 7 Workshop Proceedings ed. Maley, CC and Boudreau, E.