The wrong-about-everything crowd's in a mass hysteria bubble

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UpstateSCHokie
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The wrong-about-everything crowd's in a mass hysteria bubble

Post by UpstateSCHokie »

A few of the Unusuals that post here come to mind - specifically the ones that think the Economist is some kind of unbiased Bible of all things intellectual.

Scott Adams just has a way of distilling everything is a logical & rational way.

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How To Know You’re In a Mass Hysteria Bubble
Posted August 17th, 2017 @ 12:36pm

History is full of examples of Mass Hysterias. They happen fairly often. The cool thing about mass hysterias is that you don’t know when you are in one. But sometimes the people who are not experiencing the mass hysteria can recognize when others are experiencing one, if they know what to look for.

I’ll teach you what to look for.

A mass hysteria happens when the public gets a wrong idea about something that has strong emotional content and it triggers cognitive dissonance that is often supported by confirmation bias. In other words, people spontaneously hallucinate a whole new (and usually crazy-sounding) reality and believe they see plenty of evidence for it. The Salem Witch Trials are the best-known example of mass hysteria. The McMartin Pre-School case and the Tulip Bulb hysteria are others. The dotcom bubble probably qualifies. We might soon learn that the Russian Collusion story was mass hysteria in hindsight. The curious lack of solid evidence for Russian collusion is a red flag. But we’ll see how that plays out.

The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can’t fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.

If you’re in the mass hysteria, recognizing you have all the symptoms of hysteria won’t help you be aware you are in it. That’s not how hallucinations work. Instead, your hallucination will automatically rewrite itself to expel any new data that conflicts with its illusions.

But if you are not experiencing mass hysteria, you might be totally confused by the actions of the people who are. They appear to be irrational, but in ways that are hard to define. You can’t tell if they are stupid, unscrupulous, ignorant, mentally ill, emotionally unstable or what. It just looks frickin’ crazy.

The reason you can’t easily identify what-the-hell is going on in the country right now is that a powerful mass hysteria is in play. If you see the signs after I point them out, you’re probably not in the hysteria bubble. If you read this and do NOT see the signs, it probably means you’re trapped inside the mass hysteria bubble.

Here are some signs of mass hysteria. This is my own take on it, but I welcome you to fact-check it with experts on mass hysteria.

1. The trigger event for cognitive dissonance

On November 8th of 2016, half the country learned that everything they believed to be both true and obvious turned out to be wrong. The people who thought Trump had no chance of winning were under the impression they were smart people who understood their country, and politics, and how things work in general. When Trump won, they learned they were wrong. They were so very wrong that they reflexively (because this is how all brains work) rewrote the scripts they were seeing in their minds until it all made sense again. The wrong-about-everything crowd decided that the only way their world made sense, with their egos intact, is that either the Russians helped Trump win or there are far more racists in the country than they imagined, and he is their king. Those were the seeds of the two mass hysterias we witness today.

Trump supporters experienced no trigger event for cognitive dissonance when Trump won. Their worldview was confirmed by observed events.

2. The Ridiculousness of it

One sign of a good mass hysteria is that it sounds bonkers to anyone who is not experiencing it. Imagine your neighbor telling you he thinks the other neighbor is a witch. Or imagine someone saying the local daycare provider is a satanic temple in disguise. Or imagine someone telling you tulip bulbs are more valuable than gold. Crazy stuff.

Compare that to the idea that our president is a Russian puppet. Or that the country accidentally elected a racist who thinks the KKK and Nazis are “fine people.” Crazy stuff.

If you think those examples don’t sound crazy – regardless of the reality – you are probably inside the mass hysteria bubble.

3. The Confirmation Bias

If you are inside the mass hysteria bubble, you probably interpreted President Trump’s initial statement on Charlottesville – which was politically imperfect to say the least – as proof-positive he is a damned racist.

If you are outside the mass hysteria bubble you might have noticed that President Trump never campaigned to be our moral leader. He presented himself as – in his own words “no angel” – with a set of skills he offered to use in the public’s interest. He was big on law and order, and equal justice under the law. But he never offered moral leadership. Voters elected him with that knowledge. Evidently, Republicans don’t depend on politicians for moral leadership. That’s probably a good call.

When the horror in Charlottesville shocked the country, citizens instinctively looked to their president for moral leadership. The president instead provided a generic law and order statement. Under pressure, he later named specific groups and disavowed the racists. He was clearly uncomfortable being our moral lighthouse. That’s probably why he never described his moral leadership as an asset when running for office. We observe that he has never been shy about any other skill he brings to the job, so it probably isn’t an accident when he avoids mentioning any ambitions for moral leadership. If he wanted us to know he would provide that service, I think he would have mentioned it by now.

If you already believed President Trump is a racist, his weak statement about Charlottesville seems like confirmation. But if you believe he never offered moral leadership, only equal treatment under the law, that’s what you saw instead. And you made up your own mind about the morality.

The tricky part here is that any interpretation of what happened could be confirmation bias. But ask yourself which one of these versions sounds less crazy:

1. A sitting president, who is a branding expert, thought it would be a good idea to go easy on murderous Nazis as a way to improve his popularity.

or…

2. The country elected a racist leader who is winking to the KKK and White Supremacists that they have a free pass to start a race war now.

or…

3. A mentally unstable racist clown with conman skills (mostly just lying) eviscerated the Republican primary field and won the presidency. He keeps doing crazy, impulsive racist stuff. But for some reason, the economy is going well, jobs are looking good, North Korea blinked, ISIS is on the ropes, and the Supreme Court got a qualified judge. It was mostly luck.

or…

4. The guy who didn’t offer to be your moral leader didn’t offer any moral leadership, just law and order, applied equally. His critics cleverly and predictably framed it as being soft on Nazis.

One of those narratives is less crazy-sounding than the others. That doesn’t mean the less-crazy one has to be true. But normal stuff happens far more often than crazy stuff. And critics will frame normal stuff as crazy whenever they get a chance.

4. The Oversized Reaction

It would be hard to overreact to a Nazi murder, or to racists marching in the streets with torches. That stuff demands a strong reaction. But if a Republican agrees with you that Nazis are the worst, and you threaten to punch that Republican for not agreeing with you exactly the right way, that might be an oversized reaction.

5. The Insult without supporting argument

When people have actual reasons for disagreeing with you, they offer those reasons without hesitation. Strangers on social media will cheerfully check your facts, your logic, and your assumptions. But when you start seeing ad hominem attacks that offer no reasons at all, that might be a sign that people in the mass hysteria bubble don’t understand what is wrong with your point of view except that it sounds more sensible than their own.

For the past two days I have been disavowing Nazis on Twitter. The most common response from the people who agree with me is that my comic strip sucks and I am ugly.

The mass hysteria signals I described here are not settled science, or anything like it. This is only my take on the topic, based on personal observation and years of experience with hypnosis and other forms of persuasion. I present this filter on the situation as the first step in dissolving the mass hysteria. It isn’t enough, but more persuasion is coming. If you are outside the mass hysteria bubble, you might see what I am doing in this blog as a valuable public service. If you are inside the mass hysteria bubble, I look like a Nazi collaborator.

How do I look to you?

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/1642976286 ... ria-bubble
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“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” ― Voltaire (1694 – 1778)
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UpstateSCHokie
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Re: The wrong-about-everything crowd's in a mass hysteria bu

Post by UpstateSCHokie »

Great comment in the comments section from Ken Mitchell:
Folks, if you think Nazis and racists are despicable assholes, well, so do I. But even Nazis and despicable assholes have free speech rights in this country. And trying to silence one group of despicable assholes simply indicates that you're in some OTHER group of despicable assholes.

The simple fact of Charlottesville was that the "Unite the Right" group are assholes who came to complain, while Antifa are assholes who came to fight. They're both evil, and Trump was right.
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“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” ― Voltaire (1694 – 1778)
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Re: The wrong-about-everything is in a mass hysteria bubble

Post by Major Kong »

+∞
I only post using 100% recycled electrons.

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Re: The wrong-about-everything crowd's in a mass hysteria bu

Post by awesome guy »

UpstateSCHokie wrote:Great comment in the comments section from Ken Mitchell:
Folks, if you think Nazis and racists are despicable assholes, well, so do I. But even Nazis and despicable assholes have free speech rights in this country. And trying to silence one group of despicable assholes simply indicates that you're in some OTHER group of despicable assholes.

The simple fact of Charlottesville was that the "Unite the Right" group are assholes who came to complain, while Antifa are assholes who came to fight. They're both evil, and Trump was right.
Nailed it
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Re: The wrong-about-everything crowd's in a mass hysteria bu

Post by USN_Hokie »

UpstateSCHokie wrote:Great comment in the comments section from Ken Mitchell:
trying to silence one group of despicable assholes simply indicates that you're in some OTHER group of despicable assholes.
Yep.
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Re: The wrong-about-everything crowd's in a mass hysteria bu

Post by miles »

Brilliant insight there.
My confirmation bias was soothed. :)
Seriously, that was an excellent contribution.
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Re: The wrong-about-everything crowd's in a mass hysteria bu

Post by 133743Hokie »

Good analysis
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Re: The wrong-about-everything crowd's in a mass hysteria bu

Post by UpstateSCHokie »

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“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” ― Voltaire (1694 – 1778)
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Re: The wrong-about-everything crowd's in a mass hysteria bu

Post by UpstateSCHokie »

Scott Adam's follow-up blog posting. Good stuff.

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The Magical Thinking Opposition

Posted August 22nd, 2017 @ 2:03pm in #Trump #charlottesville #Racism

My hypothesis is that the political side that is out of power is the one that hallucinates the most – and needs to – in order to keep their worldview intact. For example, when President Obama was in office, I saw all kinds of hallucinations on the right about his intentions to destroy America from the inside because he “hates” it.

That was a mass hysteria. If President Obama wanted to destroy America, he failed miserably. We’re stronger than ever.

The birther issue started as ordinary political shenanigans to delegitimize the president. I call it ordinary because you see the trick used whenever it is an option, as it was with “Canadian” Ted Cruz in the primaries. Eventually it morphed into a full-blown hallucination that President Obama was a Muslim sleeper cell from Kenya, or something like that. That was mass hysteria.

Now that Democrats are out of power, we should expect them to hallucinate like crazy (literally) because the election results of 2016 shattered their expectations. Do we see signs of their hallucinations? I’ll walk you through a few examples.

Hallucination:

Based on President Trump’s tweets and speeches, I can see into his soul, and it is all darkness and racism in there.

Real:

If the President of the United States tries anything racist in the real world, the Supreme Court, Congress, and the voters would shut him down in a heartbeat. For example, the Courts modified President Trump’s immigration ban to remove even the perception of racism. That’s a sensitive filter for racism, and I think we like it that way.

Society’s standard is that you are judged for what you do, not what you privately think. That’s good because humans are terrible at knowing what other people think, while at the same time we think we are good at it. I know this first-hand because dozens of people misinterpret what I write on social media every day. If you don’t have my type of experience – of being routinely misinterpreted – you might think humans are good at reading minds based on subtle clues. We are not good at that. We might be slightly better than random chance, at best. The problem is that we are dead-certain we are champions of evidence-based mindreading. That is a hallucination.

Hallucination:

I can spot a racist by how long it takes them to properly disavow other racists.

Real:

That isn’t a thing. The first rule of communicating is that people only hear what they think you intend to say. They don’t hear what you actually say. If you think someone is a racist, you will perceive their disavowals of racism as too late and too inadequate. If you think someone is not a racist, you might see their statements as politically incorrect and nothing worse. This phenomenon is most pronounced when strong emotions are involved. The topic of racism stirs our strongest emotions. So according to everything we know about brains, we should expect the highest level of hallucinations when racism is the topic. And that is exactly what we observe.

To be clear, racism itself is very real. The hallucination is limited to seeing it under every bed and behind every couch.

Hallucination:

The president has accomplished nothing!

Real:

The president has accomplished a long list of things.

That said, we are 13% into President Trump’s first term, and Congress has created no major bills worthy of signing. Congress is tasked with working out the details of bills. The president can’t do his job until they do theirs.

We observe that the president has not shown leadership on any major legislation. But keep in mind that Congress produced nothing worthy of leadership. Would any leader be able to fix that? Yes, but I assume it takes longer than simply signing bills that come to your desk. Especially in this hyper-polarized environment.

Hallucination:

President Trump is performing poorly!

Real:

Compared to what? The imaginary president in your head? There is no base case with which to compare any president’s performance. Would Hillary Clinton have passed major legislation with a Republican Congress in less than six months? It seems unlikely. But we can’t know because she isn’t president.

We are terrible at judging how well a stranger performs compared to the imaginary person in our minds. We just think we are good at it.

Hallucination:

If you thought some “fine people” were marching with Nazis and KKK in Charlottesville, you are a racist.

Real:

I condemn all racists and anyone who marches with them. But It turns out that some non-racists were at the event to support the absolute right of free speech, including the worst kinds of speech. In this one case, President Trump passed the fact-checking but failed miserably on the “saying the right thing” dimension.

He wisely left the facts alone after failing on the empathy.

Hallucination:

This country needs moral leadership and we are not getting it!

Real:

The country does not need moral leadership in 2017. Social media has filled that void. The country is unified (let’s say 98%) in condemning the KKK and other racists in Charlottesville. We did that without moral leadership. We want moral leadership, but there is no evidence we need it.

We would also like to know our president has the right intentions. But hallucinations on that topic are nearly unfixable. Obama never fixed it. Trump will not either.

Hallucination:

The way you worded your statement, you made a moral equivalence between the KKK and people protesting the KKK.

Real:

Literally no one but the KKK and other extreme racists has any trouble understanding that Nazis are worse than the people protesting against hate. It is a hallucination (or political tricksterism) to suggest normal citizens can’t distinguish the moral difference between Nazis and those demonstrating against racism.

I could go on, but I think you are starting to see the picture. The party out of power has to hallucinate to make their world make sense. The people who think they are smart and morally pure don’t understand why their side lost an election. The simplest fix for that broken worldview is to imagine there are far more “secret racists” than they first assumed, and those people can be identified by the way they accidentally reveal their “moral equivalence” opinions that look exactly like law-and-order opinions to others.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Cognitive dissonance hits the losing team hardest. It has to, because only the losing side need to make sense of it all. The winning side thinks things are going exactly as expected. They have no trigger for hallucinating.

If our next president is a Democrat, expect the Right to do most of the hallucinating. The Left will think things are going as expected.
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Update: If you are still confident you can read President Trump’s inner thoughts because of the clear pattern of racist acts he has committed, see if this article about the Central Park 5 shakes your confidence in what you thought you knew.

Remember, President Trump is not the only person good at persuasion. The opposition is running on all cylinders

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/1644921677 ... opposition
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“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” ― Voltaire (1694 – 1778)
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