posted
-----Pascal's Wager----- When discussing religion, it's a pretty good bet that, if it goes on long enough, someone is going to bring up Pascal's Wager. Granted, it's got a couple of classical and major flaws, but people still seem to like it. But there always seems to be something missing.
Blaise Pascal, unlike many of the people who bring up his wager, was a thinker of the first order. He believed that any person who tries to believe in God only because they were hedging their bets against going to Hell couldn't really be considered a good Christian. This wasn't his end goal. There is a second, more important part to his conversion attempts. Blaise believed that Christian life was superior to living as an athiest. He thought that if people were convinced live like a Christian, they'd realize how much better their life was and realize how real and true the Christian religion was. Thus, people who were wagered into acting like a Christian would soon become Christians in fact as well as in name. All the good reasons would grow up and the old, betting reason would be discarded.
-----Conserving Gas----- There's a concept in selling things or ideas to people called lowballing. This is essentially the practice of presenting a very attractive or justifiable reason for buying or believing something, getting people to commit to buying it, and then removing the initial attractive reason. So, a car salesman will offer you a very good price (often by "not remembering" the correct price) for a car, get you to sign a bunch of papers, and then tell you that his boss won't let him sell the car at that price.
People who lowball are counting on two things to get people to go along with them. One is the strong drive towards consistent behavior in our culture. They get you to commit as much as possible before pulling out the fake reason, knowing that people who have commited to something almost invariably view it as more attractive than people who are thinking about buying it. Second, the use that other part of Pascal's Wager. By getting you to view yourself as someone who is committed to doing something, they trigger a self-justifying process. People always want to have as strong a case as possible for what they do. So, when you initially commit to doing something for one big reason, you will back that up with a lot of other reasons that occur to you after you've decided to buy whatever.
Michael Pallik, a social psychologist, applied this technique towards getting people reduce their natural gas usage. He and his research team found that just visiting people and talking about all the good points of gas conservation and getting a verbal agreement from people to try to cut back rarely led to any change in their habits. Instead, the initially offered to print the names of people who reduced their gas usage in the local papaer in a list of publicly minded, responsible citizens. People jumped at this chance at gtting some publicity and those who agreed used around 12% less gas when looked at a month later.
At the end of this month, the researches kicked out the publicity justification. They told the participating families that they were going to be unable to fulfill their promise of printing them up in the paper. However, removing the only initial reason that people started conserving gas actually led to an increase in their conservation. Analyzing people's usage 3 months later, the researchers found that they used on average 15% less gas than they had for the same months the previous year.
-----Pre-emptive War----- In the mid-90s, there was a large amount of growth in the neo-conservative movement. The neo-cons, many of whom are now part of the current White House, publicly stated that they were pushing specific changes in America's style of foreign policy, all centered around America raising itself to the role of unquestioned world hegemon. One specific change they argued for was the need to for American to embrace a dotrine of pre-emptive or even agressive war. Some of their writings even identified Iraq as the first country that we should attack pre-emptively.
The American people of the 90s were not well-disposed to aggressive wars. There's a sort of semi-isolationism that is always somewhat present in the American character. Also, actively engaging in a non-defensive war is against both long established American principles and the morality of Christianity, which, say what you will, is still the dominant American religion.
However, the tragedy of the September 11th attacks lent themselves to a certain flexibility in the American character. Isolationism, or at least the American style of it, was no longer sufficient to keep violence from our lives. We were attacked and expected and were told to expect to be attacked again. Obviously, we turned to ways to defend ourselves.
This brings up to Iraq. There were many different ways of justifying renewing hostilities in Iraq. However, President Bush and his advisors focused almost exclusively on two different things. The biggest, obviously, was the Weapons of Mass Destruction. The other was Iraq's active involvement with terrorists. Thus, in order to defend ourselves, we needed to attack Iraq. In fact, despite never explictly stating it, the Bush Administration did such a skillful job of implying that, at one point, 79% of the population saw Iraq as directly linked to the September 11th attacks.
Both these defensive reasons have been greatly weakened as of late. However, instead of focusing on how plausible they seemed at the time or shifting to other justifications in line with attacking Iraq being a defensive action, the Bush administration has been playing up the pre-emptive and aggressive justifications. Right now, the primary justification for the war is that "Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and so we needed to stop him."
I'm not saying that the evidence is overwhelming, but, I'm willing to bet that a survey of Amercian attitudes prior to the Iraq war and now is going to show an increase in the prevelance and intensity of belief in pre-emptive and aggressive foreign policy. And that really makes me wonder.
I was going to post a thread, but I'll try here first.
I just read President Bush's decision to appoint a bipartisan commission to research our intelligence on Iraq WMD.
However, President Bush stated clearly and loudly that Hussein needed to be removed mainly because he "was a bad man who was dangerous and killed thousand's of his people."
I would like to see a comparison of other dictatorships in the world, the most reasonable numbers of how many of their own people they have killed (or have gone missing), and where pre-war Iraq stacked up in that list.
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posted
I don't understand. Where is the policy leaning from them mid 80's coming from? We made a monster in Iraq, and maybe conservatives felt responsible for taking down Hussein.
One of Bin Laden's justifications for attacking us was that we had troops in Saudi. But Saudi wanted the troops there as long as Saddam Hussein was in Iraq.
Your construct better suits the evolution of Gay activism in the US. It started out as a way to excercise freedom of choice, and now they say they have no choice, it's genetic.
posted
So, Pooka, we attack Iraq which allows us to move our troops out of Saudi which is exactly what Bin Laden wanted. A case can be made that the war in Iraq was to appease terrorists.
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quote: Well considering Osama did exactly what Dubya wanted...
Do you actually believe that? Or are you trying to score political points? Because if you actually believe that the leader of our country wanted (your word, not mine) 3000 of his fellow citizens to die a horrible death and for billions of dollars of destruction to be reigned down upon one of the financial centers of his country, then you are quite frankly an idiot. George Bush may be a lot of things, and you may not agree with his decisions, but he is not an evil killer of innocents.
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posted
Appease? I guess that is one way of looking at it. Though I though reaching out to the needs of Muslims generally was a valid part of the changes our society wanted to make after September 11.
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posted
pooka, I literaly have no idea what you're talking about or how it relates to what I said. Could you explain in a little more detail?
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posted
Brian, in some of the earlier neo-con literature, they posit that the only way they could galvanize the US populace behind their agenda would be if there was a "Pearl Harbor"-type event.
So looking at it in this way, Osama was playing right into the current administration's hands.
Not saying I believe it, but that's the theory behind the statement.
quote:A case can be made that the war in Iraq was to appease terrorists.
I suspect that was one of the prime unmentioned reasons the Bush administration really wanted this war - and it's a good goal, as I've argued all along. However, I don't think starting wars, setting up semi-puppet governments, and shifting troops to another major Arab nation is a very effective method of curbing Arabic anger towards us, even if it does manage to fix the thing the originally complained about.
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quote:So looking at it in this way, Osama was playing right into the current administration's hands.
I definitely think bin Laden and Bush both help each other politically. They both share similar good vs. evil conservative agendas which, though against each other, strengthen eachother. It's easier to get people to fight when the other side is fighting back.
However, I don't think either of them realize they are helping the other - both think they are somehow destroying the other. So, I think it would be very unfair to accuse them of intentionally helping their enemy.
posted
I definitely think the administration pulled a bait and switch on the war (I might be wrong, but I think bait and switch is what you referred to in your post, not lowballing).
It's amazing to me how many people will never look up your sleeves if you put on a good enough magic show.
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posted
Squick, congrats on a near-perfect opening post.
The manipulations of the neo-con movement are set to become legend in future American history. I find it fascinating how this group has been so effective at taking control of our government while remaining behind the scenes to such a large extent. Almost no one knows about the Project for a New American Century, but these are the people who are largely dictating US foreign policy today. Just look how many signatories to their statement of principles are members of the current administration.
The funny thing is that I agree with them -- the real values at the core of US society do need to be fostered overseas. But the neo-cons have a warped idea about what values these are, supposing they have much to do with Christianity and economics, and little to do with our Constitution. And they are willing to use deadly force to impose their vision on the world, when peaceful cultural exchange would do just as well or better.
Your analogy with Pascal's Wager is apt. The process of acting first and rationalizing later is a well-known feature of the human psyche. The neo-cons have simply applied it to politics more effectively than ever before.
posted
I think I'll post this over at Ornery and see what they have to say. It might be an interesting comparison.
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posted
Slash, You could say it was a bait-and-switch or lowballing. It depends on how you're parsing it. I implied it was lowballing because it fit in better with the example I gave about the gas.
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posted
How come it's laudable to use Pascal's Wager in criticizing the president when Christians get mugged everytime we use it for the intended purpose?
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posted
pooka, I think you missed the point being made by the mention of Pascal's Wager. I believe Squick was arguing that the intention behind Pascal's Wager -- giving people a false or unworthy reason to believe that would eventually be supplanted by a worthy reason to believe -- is similar to our selling of the war; we played up false reasons, and people who bought into those false reasons are now emotionally invested enough in the justification for war that they'll accept any other justifications that aren't demonstrably false.
I don't think Squick was arguing that Pascal's Wager was in fact a great thing, but rather that it's an example of supplanted justification.
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quote: I literaly have no idea what you're talking about or how it relates to what I said. Could you explain in a little more detail?
A manifesto by Bin Laden complained of America's "occupying troops" in the holy land of Saudi Arabia. We had them there ever since Gulf I. (Thus the basis of my stance that this was not a pre-emptive war, merely the beginning of the end of that war). But the resentment of the Saudis was real. We think of Bin Laden as a crackpot terrorist but the Saudis were giving him millions and as you well know, the pilots who executed Sep 11 were Saudis (at least in passport, it's not really easy to get passports in most Arab nations).
Why not just stop protecting those who actually did attack us? Because the Saudi government (as opposed to the Saudi people) was afraid of Saddam Hussein, who had shown a propensity for attempting to gobble up Oil wealthy neighbors. So in a sense it is true that the war was about oil, but not merely the US wanting to go in and own Iraq's oil. If the US were not dependent on foreign oil, we would have been more free to behave morally and rationally in this matter.
Saudi and Israel have in common that no matter how bad they behave, we won't intervene. Saudi, because we need their oil, and Israel, because they are our only real ally in the region. But both have, in their own ways become our worst enemies. Saudis by attacking us directly and Israel by fostering animosity toward the west. So we attack Saddam Hussein so we can get defensive troops out of Saudi, which is one of the first things that was done once the Hussein regime ended.
If we can set up better oil trade with Iraq, which some merely label as greed, it could help reduce our dependence on Saudi, which has been the real source of the terrorism that has affected us so far. At least the Saudis won't be contributing as much of our own money to our direct enemies.
Which of our views is right? Maybe both. Few things can happen just because one group wants it to.
quote:The John L on Ornery and our own Leto are two different people.
But it was Leto who posted this originally on Ornery. Does that mean the Hatrack John L is Leto and the Ornery John L is not?
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posted
I figured I'd bump this at least to find out what problems Leto had with my post, and it kind of works with my other post about the 9/11 hearings too.
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posted
I actually agree with almost all of the post, and for the exact reasons that I do not believe we should have gone to war, the reasons given were weak, and I suspect we still don't know the real reason they were so set on it, I do not plan to vote for Bush. I'm hoping/wishing/praying for a good alternative.
But Squick:
quote:Blaise Pascal, unlike many of the people who bring up his wager, was a thinker of the first order.
posted
I'm telling you, kat, just post a link to the picture! It expresses your sentiment perfectly!
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posted
John, I think Squicky's post was an attempt, from his point of view, to not only predict a political trend but to explain it as a function of psychology.
Now, that latter bit there IS hubristic -- like most psychology, mind you -- but I don't think it's nearly as hostile as you're making it out to be.
To boil it down, Squick is saying that people like to justify the things they already believe, even once the original reason they had for believing it has been removed -- and that this tendency, which is observed elsewhere, also applies to the public reaction to the war.
I don't see anything particularly offensive or presumptive about that.
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In fairness to Squick again, John, I don't think he made that argument to convince HIMSELF; I've never seen anything to indicate that Squicky is ever anything less than perfectly convinced of his own rightness. *grin* I believe he was arguing to convince OTHER people, to perhaps induce them to reconsider the reasons behind their own opinions and the opinions voiced by those around them. That's not particularly hypocritical.
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posted
Holy crap. I'm starting to think that an insult from John should be treated as little more than a salutation. I mean, eventually, if you're mean all the time, no one's going to take your opinion seriously anymore.
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posted
I think Squick was trying to go for more than "Bush is a liar and I don't like him." I think his specific point was "people are saying that we were justified for THIS reason, but that's just the kind of compensation that psychology teaches us to expect." I believe he was making a slightly different case, not just bolstering an old one.
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posted
Wow, it's been a while since I've felt like I had to point by point defend one of my posts. However, I don't really feel like doing that now. I'll get to it later.
I did want to throw out one thing, though. Both Leto and Tom are reading my initial post wrong. For one thing, the theory I was putting out there takes as a given that President Bush and crew were intentionally lying. If you don't accept that (and I'll admit that it's not 100% assured) the rest doesn't really make any sense. That certainly wasn't my point. Neither was it that people's new justifications are a product of the psychological processes that I was talking about, although I'm pretty sure they are. My point was that there is enough evidence to at least consider the possibility that the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration intended to switch justifications from the WMD one, which they knew was weak and likely to be discredited, to the pre-emptive war doctrine from the very beginning and that the reason for this plan was to manipulate the American public into becoming more comfortable with the idea of pre-emptive wars.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
Leto, You misunderstand me. I wouldn't dream of trying to convince you to change you're mind. I reasonably sure I could learn to fly before you would ever admit that you were wrong. I think that your response ironically boils down to "I disagree because I don't like Squicky!" Frankly, the only criticism that I can see that is about my argument and not about how bad a person I am is your mystfying reading that I was somehow saying that all Christians are self-deluding.
Rather, I'm concerned that people have sort of misread me, so I'm going to try to explain point by point. I don't know, it's probably unnecessary, but I'm home sick, so I've got little better to do.
I start out in a classic three-form argument where you start out with a well known example, fill out with a statement of the underyling idea, and then finish with the situation that you're trying to apply the idea to. I chose Pascal's Wager because besides being probably familiar to most Hatrackers, it's one of the initial examples of this sort of thinking. However, it was important that people take the idea seriously, which, the naive, truncated version that we are familiar with here doesn't deserve. So I put in the distancing remark that kat took exception to.
The second part is mostly self-explanatory. The experiemnt I described is standard course material for just about any into to social psychology course out there. Also, it's an interesting read with a not completely unexpected twist at the end. Once you understand that it's actually true that these people are pretty much the same as you are and that they were easily manipulated in this way, I think what I am going to present stops sounding so much like a crazy conspiracy theory. I hoped that it was something that one of the junior members of a PR firm could come up with. By keeping it engaging, I hoped to get people past the ego-defensiveness that comes when people are trying to convince you that you or at least people very much like you can be tricked.
The last part came from me thinking that it was possible that the focus on WMDs then reversal to "Saddam was a bad guy" was possibly more than just political scrambling. Perhaps it was part of a plan. What would the purpose be? Because I obsessively study social psychology and social manipulations in general, that's what I came up with. Ever since the Creel Commission and John Dewey, American politics have included the idea that the average people should and in fact must be manipulated for their own good. Lately, it seems to me that they've been getting good at it. I think that they're probably fianlly tapping into the good (and they are very good) PR firms out there.
This certainly wasn't a partisan hate message. I've no doubt that the Democrats would do the same if they had better advice. I'm just pointing out to people that this could be going on. The best defense is to recognize when people might be trying to manipulate you. Generally, this makes the manipulation lose it's power. I was trying to explain what I thought President Bush's adminstration's strategy might be and also spark interest in these types of social manipulations.
Even if this wasn't a plan by President Bush and his advisors, there are plenty of people and organizations that are trying to use the same sort of manipulations. And they do work, as the experiment I provided shows. That is by no means the only experiment that shows these results. The really scarey thing is that these manipulations operate largely independent of what people are trying to get you to do. By considering it in one case, people are more likely to recognize it in others. I think that's a good thing.
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posted
I don't think that Squick is trying to call anyone an idiot. He's just saying that those who supported the war may be succumbing to a fallacy which is well recognized as a feature of human psychology. If someone is mistaken, they're mistaken for a reason. Pointing out the reason is not the same as calling them stupid.
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posted
err...what the heck happened here? I could have sworn that there was another participant to this thread. Of course, he was being so quiet and agreeable, that maybe I was just imagining it.
Anyway, I wanted to put out one more idea. It's common for people to view people who are saying that they are being manipulated as saying that they are stupid or deluded or in some other way flawed. I certainly don't look at it this way. I think that social manipulations are a lot more like magician's tricks. People aren't fooled by magicians because they are stupid or whatever. It's because the magicians have carefully aimed their tricks at places where people don't look, where their normal experience serves them pretty well. The same is true with social tricks. Many of the mechanisms that underlie these thing are very beneficial in a world where people aren't actively trying to turn them against you. I don't regard people who are manipulated (as I am myself) as stupid. I think that they are people who either don't know the magician's tricks or aren't expecting them.
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posted
Just for the record, I believe it IS called a "bait and switch", not a "lowball". Lowballing is sort of the opposite. When you have someone backed into a corner (i.e. it's the last day of the month, of the slowest month of the year for a car dealer) and you know they HAVE to sell, then you make an offer that is so low (hencs the term) that they would usually refuse it, then that is lowballing.
My dad does it all the time with car dealers......he walks in and hammers out a best price for a truck, and when they are all worked up, THEN he tells them "OK, but I want to lease it at that price...), and watches them froth at the mouth. By law they HAVE to lease it to him, usually for WAY lower than other people lease. He lowballs them with a lease offer they aren't allowed to refuse, by law.
My wife bought a Sunfire before she started dating me. They got her all worked up about a one year old car, then said "We can't finance you for a used car, but over here (for 20,000) we have a brand new one that has all the features you wanted plus...."; that is a bait and switch.
Other than that, I liked your post. Not that I agree completely with it, but I thought it was well thought out and presented. I think you ae giving too much credit to them though. One thing almost all studies involving groups prove is that group behavior is VERY difficult to manage. Often the results that the "manipulators" achieve are different from what they initally attempt.
I think it is much more likely that the current admin is trying to save face. It is always easy to see conspiracies when looking back, even when they weren't any. It makes sense, and humans hate the unknown. The thought that things like 9/11 are partially random is a painful, uncomefortable thought, so it is (in some ways) more comfortable thinking that we could have stopped it but someone somewhere chose not to for gain.
There is a reason that the majority of serial killers are caught due to random traffic violations (or other simple, random violations) than by profilers. The profiles are ambigious at best, and can help, but good old fashioned luck has caught most. And those profiles are of one person, not groups. Group dynamics are too difficult to predict, and the larger the group the more difficult the task becomes.
I simply don't think Bush is bright enough to tie his own shoelaces, let alone do something like what you were implying.
quote:Lowballing is sort of the opposite. When you have someone backed into a corner (i.e. it's the last day of the month, of the slowest month of the year for a car dealer) and you know they HAVE to sell, then you make an offer that is so low (hencs the term) that they would usually refuse it, then that is lowballing.
Actually, that's not lowballing at all. Lowballing: Setting the early price in an arrangement at a low amount to secure business with the intent later to raise the price. In my old line of work, it was common for developers to send in a very low bid (sometimes 10% of our bid) for a system that would not meet the customer's needs, although of course it didn't say that in the proposal. For example, they'd leave out reporting features in a management information system (without which, an information system is useless).
We got around it by breaking our prices into discrete pieces so we could comapre apples and oranges to the customer. Sometimes we were successful, other times not. I was always grateful not to be working for a customer who would fall for it, so I didn't mind.
posted
Kwea, I think you're makinga mistake by assuming that such a plan would have to originate with President Bush. As I tried to point out, neo-cons have been planning for something like this since the mid-90s. Say what you will about them, the neo-cons include some very good thinkers. Also, just like anyone else with a lot of money, they have access to the competant professionals of our country's PR firms. I think that some of the recent conservative campaigns, such as the whole "PC" thing and many of the post-9/11 obstensive anti-terrorist policies have the mark of savvy social manipulation on them. I think that is a mistake to figure, because you think the figurehead of the people doing this wouldn't be able to come up with them on his own, that the appearance of them being purposeful is accidental.
This is an easy plan to come up with. A person who has taken an intro level social psychology course has all the necessary information to come up with it. All you need is a certain subtly of mind. Once I started thinking about ways that this shift could have been planned, it took me about 10 mintues to come up with this scenario. And, despite the high opinion I have of myself, I have to admit that there are people out there whose job it is to manipulate the public who are smarter and better at it than I am. And they had years to plan.
I want to repeat that I am in no way convinced that this is necessarily what happened. However, I think that there is enough reason to at least give the possiblity serious consideration.
posted
Also, as a point of idle curiosity, what happened to Leto? Was he banned or did he just delete all his posts and leave? I'm afraid I must have missed the whole affair.
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posted
Actually, what happened to my wife wasn't lowballing, it was a form of bait and switch, but my original explanation wasn't clear enough....sorry. Thanks for the clarification....it was late, and I was fuzzy-headed....sort of like right now....lol.
Lowballing, as I understand it, can happen from either end, as my father proves. Ususally car dealer is the one who tries to pull it, but you can turn it around on them. In MA, you can force them to lease you a car by arranging for a set price (implying you are purchasing it), THEN telling you want that price broken down as a lease. Usually advertised leases have all sorts of hidden charges, and are really inflated, so this is a good way of circumventing the dealers dishonest tendicies.
I was just kidding (sort of) about Bush and his IQ. I just don't think anyone has that type of contol over group psychology....they are just too unpredictable. PR firms aren't infallible....just look at the Pontiac Aztek....no amount of "spin" changed peoples mind about how ugly it is to most americans.....
Of course it only took you 10 min to put this theory together....after all, it's just a bunch of allegations, without any factual basis....easy enough, compared to proving it factualy.....conspirecy theories are always intertaining....
It is an interesting theory, but not a likely one.
Anyone in pshch 101 could come up with the idea, but putting it into pratice is far more difficult. Public policy is a much harder sell that a car brand, or a cereal.
It's a completely different bill of goods. IMHO, of course.
posted
Kwea, Just to check, you do actually believe that the gas conservation manipulations I referenced happened and were successful right? It seems to me that you're saying that they (and the many other experiements of that nature) could not have happened.
I do believe that those could have been conducted, but those were very simplistic studies, with very small subject populations. It is a lot harder to predict complex behaviors even with individuals, let alone with large cross-sections of the American people.
For every ad campaign that suceeds, another 4 fail, and that is with the best PR money can buy. A lot of research goes into marketing at JC Penney's, where I work, and still we always have clothes that no one buys, because research and marketing isn't infallable.
In order to maniplulate us on that scale, they would have to be infallible, because if we caught them they would be dead in the water.
Just because you define a logical progression of events doesn't mean that they will work in a real life setting. That is why chaos theory is so interesting, as it explains why complex theories are usually false.
Unless you have actual PROOF, which, of course, I'd LOVE to see....
posted
Kwea, That's my bad. I realized as soon as I posted hundreds of studies that I couldn't back that claim up. As far as I can recall, I only know directly of somewhere around 20. So I immediately edited it, but apparently you read it before the edit.
Anyway, I'm not sure I see where you main disagreement comes from. You've admitted that the principles I'm talking about work. You've also admitted that people in fact engage in large scale public manipulations campaigns and that these campaigns can be successful. That's pretty much all I'm saying could have happened here. It really isn't at all complex.
I feel like maybe people aren't understanding my basic perspective. I'm not trying to argue that this is obviously what happened. I don't tend to have a strong black and white orientation. I'm rarely 100% convinced of anything and I prefer to live in a sort of Bayesian way of looking at the world. In this case, I'm saying that it's a possibly to consider and that IF the Bush administration intentionally planned to change their justifications for the war, that this is most likely the reason why they did so. Obviously I think that there is a significant possibility that this is true, but I'm neither saying that it is necessarily what happened nor that, if this is what they did, that it was completely sucessful or that it is the only reason why people now support the pre-emptive war doctrine. I don't have anywhere near as simplistic a worldview as that.
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