Persuasion through status rather than argument

That's a scary number. And it's probably not wrong.

The human species is first divided into tribes, and much latterly, individuals. ie., Individual human psychology is governed principally by tribal logic -- though 'thinking for oneself' in the broadest sense is always available, it is rarely exercised outside of certain kinds non-social problem environments.

Intellectuals are of course those who choose non-social problem environments. Consider Aristotle placing the purpose of life within Reason, rather than the survival and prosperity of the tribe (the only empirically defensible answer). This should, on the face of all evidence, seem outright absurd.

So, it's no mystery that tribal logic is absent from the academic presentation of human activity. This becomes extraordinarily dangeours when academies find themselves in power or otherwise academic projects (eg., the neocon inclination to democractise) find themselves elevated to tribal practice.

There ought be more explicit presentation of this in our education system -- it is a shame it has to be rediscovered so late.

> This means we can be more easily manipulated through the peripheral route.

This is only true if you're qualified to reason through the information yourself. Pseudointellectuals are easily manipulated (consider the CIA pushing a UFO conspraicy).

By not understanding the tribal logic of our psychology, this article repeats the mistake: thinking for oneself is not an inherent virute, nor is it inherently feasible or purposeful in most cases

> High-status people are more preoccupied with how others view them. Which means that educated and/or affluent people may be especially prone to peripheral, as opposed to central, methods of persuasion.

There is a hidden assumtion in the above part. Did you spot it?

It is that educated people are also high status people, are also (overly) concerned about their reputation.

If this assumptions breaks, all the following about perpetuated ideology stands on a weak basis. After all, more educated people could tend to be more rational too.

To be fair, i would my left leaning ideology be based more on reason and not on my educational sociotope. May be just my bias.

Ethos: appeal to authority

Pathos: appeal to emotion

Logos: appeal to logic

I found the post's added description of more recent psychological studies interesting though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_persuasion

Here is that paper. No SSRN Javascript required.

https://academic.oup.com/psq/advance-article-pdf/doi/10.1093...

"Smart and successful people don't express their true opinion because they fear a loss of status"

The author explains, that the more status people gained in their life, the more they try to stick to the common sense of opinions people of their status hold. This behavior really stabilizes the status quo.

For me this also explains why the consequent climate change protests are mainly supported by young people. They presumably have acquired less status yet and therefor don't feel the fear of status loss if they express a new opinion.

The author claims "peripheral route" opinions are becoming more common because of information overload and the need to be parsimonious when forming opinions. He also claims that peripheral route opinions are more weakly held than central route opinions.

How does that account for increasing ideological polarization, when you would expect people's opinions to shift more with the breeze?

It’s not his wealth, objectively a good thing, that prevents a rich man from getting into heaven, it is his prioritization of it over superior goods, his idolatry even. And riches come in many forms.

https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm

Not that I agree with it, just another wittingly-written take on the topic.

I can't pretend to understand everything, I need some experts for that, however I can gather information. Intellectual laziness from my side leads to heartbreaking dread if I didn't attempt to understand what an expert was saying.

“The masses can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

If the position is such that any central route reasoning would lead to a rejection of the position, than the next best option is to overwhelm the critical faculties with peripheral route persuasion

> Likewise, in a fascinating study on the collapse of the Soviet Union, researchers have found that university-educated people were two to three times more likely than high school graduates to say they supported the Communist Party. White-collar professional workers were likewise two to three times more supportive of communist ideology, relative to farm laborers and semi-skilled workers.

Alternative explanation: university-educated people and white-collar professional workers personally benefitted more from the Communist Party, so of course they supported the party more.

> Educational divides within the US today are consistent with these historical patterns. The Democratic political analyst David Shor has observed that, “Highly educated people tend to have more ideologically coherent and extreme views than working-class ones. We see this in issue polling and ideological self-identification. College-educated voters are way less likely to identify as moderate.”

Alternative explanation: highly educated people spend more time and effort thinking about politics, indeed are forced to spend more time and effort thinking about politics by their teachers and peers, so of course they have more highly developed views and stronger opinions about politics.

> Research by Caitlin Drummond and Baruch Fischhoff at Carnegie Mellon University found that people with more education, science education, and science literacy are more polarized in their views about scientific issues depending on their political identity. For example, the people who are most concerned about climate change? College-educated Democrats. The people who are least concerned? College-educated Republicans. In contrast, less educated Democrats and Republicans are not so different from one another in their views about climate change.

Alternative explanation: again as above with regard to politics, highly educated people are forcibly confronted with the issue of climate change and are forced to think about it, discuss it, and form opinions about much more than less educated people.

Let's do a poll to see which group has more highly polarized opinions about sports, for example.

https://youtu.be/3O9FFrLpinQ?t=16

Now Americans apparently also have a weird relationship with education (highly status correlated and rejected by certain bands of society) and often appear to interpret the world through the lens of their binary political divide.

Coincidence?

Formalizing and naming templates of fallacies and dirty tricks... it's kind of a fallacious trick in itself.

Logically valid, convincing, and the way we actually think a completely different. There are places where these come together, often requiring a lot of effort.

The reality that we, all of us, way through the slush. None rise above it.

To take the least noxious example, stories work on us. Stories. Narratives. They're very central to communicating, central to how we make sense of things. Who is what in which story.

Telling the story, is unanimously agreed by all practitioners.. primary to convincing people, or even getting them to listen to you in the first place.

Is this logically sound? Is it conducive to keeping track of one's assumptions, presumptions and biases? Of course not. It is, how we work though.

The way formal logic works, and the way we think, talk and convince one another.. they are very far apart. That doesn't mean we can't grasp logic. We can. It does mean, that we don't employ it on its own very often.

The argument that would take, this post is the "central" path. The other half of this dichotomy. The assumed default state.

People say things for a lot of reasons, and then argue their way back.

More generally, it seems like the recipe of this breed of substack author is to take a basic object level opinion e.g. "I don’t like pronoun people" or "AI people are dumb" and turn it a whole pseudo intellectual rant without ever getting to the point.

I was surprised he didn't include this Dalrymple quote, "propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control."

It captures the issue more succintly, but it would also have limited the reach of the article. I'm sure he's familiar with it, but the author was probably just being smart.

Perhaps some feel uncomfortable with the official assessments of the current wars.

Fortunately, everyone is capable of learning. Today's dogma is tomorrow's stupidity.