Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Scott Adams says that Democrats should wake up from their hallucinations:

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.

Read the whole thing. But if you can’t, here are the tl;dr takeaway quotes:

“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.”

“We are terrible at judging how well a stranger performs compared to the imaginary person in our minds.”

“We are dead-certain we are champions of evidence-based mindreading. That is a hallucination.” This is a fallacy that can befall left or right…

Tags: Charlottesville (VA), Democrats, Donald Trump, Scott Adams

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2017 at 9:01 AM and is filed under Democrats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.