Thinking, Fast and Loose

There are only 3 certainties in life: death, taxes, and left-wing progressives intellectually pleasuring themselves in public—like a cat that sits way too close to you while proudly grooming itself, leg flung in the air, purring creepily.1

One of my all-time favorite philosophers, , had in large part managed to resist this deep-seated masturbatory urge—until now. Heath2 recently wrote a piece called “Populism fast and slow” in which he analogises the difference between modern progressivism and right-wing populism to the difference between System 1 and System 2 thinking.

Heath essentially argues that right-wing populism (or populism broadly though he doesn’t discuss left-wing iterations) relies entirely on System 1 thinking (fast, intuitive, more prone to error, susceptible to misinformation, etc.), whereas modern progressivism is broadly based on System 2 thinking (slow, complex, analytical). This is despite the fact that the dual process theory of cognition (the tidy System 1 vs System 2 model) is great for narrative building in this way, and for capturing audiences with interesting, intuitively pleasing “examples” and fun little number games, it is built on research subject to incredibly poor replicability.

To describe how System 1 thinking can lead to intuitive but erroneous conclusions, Heath takes a quick detour into another uncharacteristically poor argument—that the phenomenon of regression to the mean shows that common beliefs about the efficacy of punishment for bad behavior and reward for good behavior are illusory and misguided.

He presents no evidence or data supporting the notion that bad behaviour and deviancy is subject to regression to the mean, nor that people are led by this phenomenon to erroneously decide that rewarding good behavior is counterproductive, or that punishing bad behavior is unduly productive.

He bases this notion on an equally terrible quote from Kahneman, in which he lets an interesting statistical artefact massage his progressive sensibilities [yes I know he’s a Nobel prize winner, doesn’t mean I don’t know a bad argument when I see one]: “This was a joyous moment, in which I understood an important truth about the world: because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.”

Heath says,

“Because of this, people who actually study behavioural change, by keeping records, tracking performance, and analyzing the relation to reward/punishment, wind up developing beliefs that contradict common sense. This is true not just of social scientists, but even animal trainers. They all tend to agree that reward is at least as effective as punishment, and in some cases more so. This generates an important décalage between expert opinion and public culture.”

However, he is missing a huge argument against using rewards as the basis for incentivizing good behavior, in that we can’t afford to pay everyone every time they don’t do something bad. Society can’t reward me every time I get angry and don’t beat my girlfriend—how would that even work? How can society reward me every time I choose not to do something wrong? Or does rewarding me for a good thing I did in one realm somehow prevent me from doing evil in some other realm? Can rewarding me for being nice to my girlfriend prevent me from stealing? How does a society based on rewards even work? Constraints dictate that society must largely be set up around punishing people when they transgress, regardless of whether rewards work better when training a dog to “shake”.

Therefore this is a terrible example for Heath’s thesis, and shows that very often the super smart System 2 people do discover interesting and unique factoids about the brain or intuitions or animal training or whatever, but these do not in any way discredit us poor dummies’ intuitions about how to structure society.

Heath himself admits as much, saying

“there are many cases in which the people are right to distrust elites. Analytical reasoning is sometimes a poor substitute for intuitive cognition. There is a vast literature detailing the hubris of modern rationalism.”

However, this is just serves as an obligatory, dismissive, due-diligence admission that elites are not perfect (but rest-assured, they’re closer to perfection than you). He goes on to claim that the various “consensuses” among the so-called “cognitive elite’, makes non-elites feel left out which “generates anger and resentment, which grows over time”.

But he simply takes it as a given that where you find a consensus among this holy elite, you can rest assured that said consensus has arisen purely through rational, analytical, System 2 thinking rather than simply arising from the intuitions and sensibilities of people who ascribe to a particular worldview, and who just happen to have aggregated in certain institutions and taken a grip on the narrative (many of these “elites” have repeatedly been found to be profoundly wrong on many issues, as well as frauds, liars, and Machiavellians—and have created entire fields of erroneous, ideologically-motivated bullshit. But never mind that).

In his view, right wing-populism is not a rebellion ”against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function.”

Hilarious. In this view, the simple populists are literally rebelling against brain function.

He goes on:

“it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control… Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world. (Try opening a bank account, renting an apartment, or obtaining a tax refund, without engaging in analytical processing.) The left, to the extent that it favours progress, is essentially committed to intensifying the features of the modern world that impose the greatest burdens of self-inhibition on individuals.”

Does he think that opening a bank account or getting a tax refund has gotten substantially harder in the time that right-wing populism has risen, and that this is, in large part, what right-wing people are pissed about? First of all, that’s unbelievably condescending. Second, this goes against the whole narrative of progress—wasn’t progress making all our lives easier? Doesn’t the digital ID make signing in and creating accounts so easy compared to before when we needed to go somewhere, get ID, answer questions, file paperwork, etc.? Are you cognitive elites and your “progress” making life easier or not?

This is just an expansion of the racist progressive notion that voter ID laws are bad cause poor dumb black people don’t know how to get ID’s. Likewise, the notion that getting a bank account is hard for dumb conservatives and that’s partly why they have turned on “elites” is just as insulting and ignorant.

Regardless, a cursory look at many of the central claims of right-wing populists is that progressives are making too easy those exact things which Heath claims are too hard for dumb populists. Populists are actively campaigning on more restrictions and hurdles around voting, ID, renting, banking, etc. They argue that progressives are making so much of civic life so open and easy that it is prone to corruption and abuse, and thus society is being undermined.

This brings us to the absolute doozey of bad arguments in his piece though: That conservatives/right-wing populists (it’s hard to really even know who the target of his article is at this point) don’t like progressive language-policing and neo-pronouns because it hurts their brains too much. They’re literally too dumb for a change in terminology and it makes them angry and, in Heath’s view, that’s the extent of their analysis.

I’m not kidding. That’s his argument:

Seeing things in this way makes it easier to understand why people get so worked up over seemingly minor issues, like language policing. The problem with demanding political correctness in speech, and punishing or ostracizing those who fail, is that it turns every conversation into a Stroop test, allowing elites the opportunity to exhibit conspicuous self-control. It requires the typical person, while speaking, to actively suppress the familiar word that is primed (e.g. “homeless”), and to substitute through explicit cognition the recently-minted word that is now favoured (e.g. “unhoused”).

Elites are not just insensitive, but positively dismissive of the burdens that this imposes on many people. As a result, by performing the cognitive operation with such fluidity, they are not only demonstrating their superiority, they are rubbing other people’s faces in it. (From this perspective, it is not surprising that the demand for “they/them” pronouns upset some people even more, because the introduction of a plural pronoun forces a verb change, which requires an even more demanding cognitive performance.)

As with another ideological piece I recently took issue with, he provides absolutely no evidence whatsoever for his claim that catering to the language police requires a serious amount of brain power, though I suppose I can see how that’s feasible. But, worse, he asserts with absolutely no supporting evidence whatsoever that this cognitive difficulty is the fundamental issue right-wing people have with language policing, and it’s the extent of their thinking on the issue: “hurts my brain—makes me angry”.

It’s the most simplistic, self-serving take on the whole issue I have seen in a long time.

In reality, for conservatives, it’s not that the language change is “too hard” and we get pissed off at how easy it is for our superior “cognitive elites”; it’s that it is performative, artificial, forced, and harmful in a range of ways which, actually, most right-wingers could discuss more intelligently than most left-wingers (watch any interview at a left-wing protest, watch the clips of “cognitive elites” testifying and struggling to answer questions about the logic underlying such language changes—posing simple questions to “elites” and watching them stumble and stutter was one of the slam-dunk tactics of the populist right).

But this whole argument veers into the realm of leftist masturbation when he says that by performing such woke-language substitutions with ease and fluidity, cognitive elites are “demonstrating their superiority”.

He takes their “superiority” as a given—again without evidence—but he does at least think that signaling one’s superiority is “insensitive” to us dummies. How kind. In reality, this undeserved belief in their own “superiority”, and the unwillingness to engage in debates on the terms of the actual arguments, is what is partly driving the rebellion against “elites”.

As Sowell said:

The vision of the left is not just a vision of the world. For many, it is also a vision of themselves — a very flattering vision of people trying to save the planet, rescue the exploited, create “social justice” and otherwise be on the side of the angels. This is an exalting vision that few are ready to give up, or to risk on a roll of the dice, which is what submitting it to the test of factual evidence amounts to. Maybe that is why there are so many fact-free arguments on the left — and why they react so viscerally to those who challenge their vision.

And it’s very appropriate that his book The Vision of the Anointed is subtitled “Self-congratulation as the basis for social policy”.

Heath finishes his essay by presenting a list of phenomena which he claims prove his point, but which are mostly simply aesthetic critiques of populists, about tone and communication style. This despite his claim that “Elites typically focus on the content of what is said and ignore the manner in which is it is said.” Really? Is that why we’ve all been tone-policed and hounded for years about “implications”, “dog-whistles”, and “microaggressions” by the so-called “cognitive elite”?

All in all, Heath makes the tired case that right-wing populists, anti-wokes, conservatives—whatever—rely on System 1 thinking. Fast, simple, intuitive, prone to error. And that the superior cognitive elites (Richard Banania’s “elite human capital”) are more rational and analytical, not prone to jumping to conclusions or making silly errors.

Never mind that much of leftist analysis is simple, fast, fact-free, intuitive, stoner logic—analysis based on simple oikophobic heuristics.

Never mind that for years now, these elites have seen patterns where none exist (indeed, Heath himself wrote one of the best pieces on the conspiracy theories so popular among the cognitive elite); they have jumped to conclusions; seen any easily-explained disparity and mindlessly, instinctively shouted “DISCRIMINATION”; and stampeded towards hurried and insane social reforms based largely on emotion and intuition.

In fairness, I don’t think it’s only progressives who do this stuff, we’re all probably equally prone to error and motivated cognition.

But leftist academics are uniquely prone to this kind of public self-congratulation, this self-serving intellectual-ideological masturbation—and we’re tired of being made to partake in their fantasy.

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