You Have A Terrible Track Record In Guessing My Motives

So I should re-read all your previous blog posts with this in mind? :)

Learning to understand this is arguably a reason everyone should spend some time pretending to be a different person online.

You’re only writing this because commenters have been correctly deducing your true motives and you just want to keep denying it

Are you ok?

One reason I keep telling people about the amazing, life-changing power of assuming, unless there's strong and overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that people believe the things they say they believe and have the motives they claim.

(And this is part of why I so despise "Power" based analysis, because they're basically nothing but assigning all sorts of beliefs and motives to others based on, basically, nothing.)

It's really too bad this is a subscriber-only post. I think this is something everything needs to read. (I also felt this way about the Karen post.)

As for me, I've learned this lesson a bunch of different ways, but the main one was all the people accusing me of being a shill for the Communists every time I say anything about China that doesn't stick to the US party line.

I had not heard the term bulverism before, but it's neat. It immediately made me think of the public perception of psychoanalysis and Freud - that the psychoanalyst traces every psychological problem back to the patient's relationship to the mother, with no other sources considered.

Not having any genuine knowledge of psychology or psychoanalysis beyond Woody Allen movies and Saul Bellow novels, I can only assume that is an accurate description :)

In my experience, such attempts at guessing someone's motivations for having an opinion are usually a tactic for dismissing someone's opinion without having to have a coherent argument against it.

I think very few people actually have arguments for the opinions they hold, but they know it is important that they be seen to strongly hold those opinions, so if someone presents them with an alternative opinion, it is important that they have a way to dismiss it without needing to have an argument.

It's not quite the same thing, but a possible confounding factor is that, as a widely-read writer, you act however inadvertently as a spokesperson for any group you might be a member of. So naturally any characteristic X of your life is informing the perceptions that people have of people with the same characteristic. After your moving to the bay area I might retroactively diagnose your pre-move posts as having all the typical traits and Weltanschauung of a bay area blogger, because well you're the only bay area blogger I read.

As an IT person, a client knowing one or two "things" about technology leads to the worst and most bizarre outcomes. I always try to talk myself down, "it looks like this problem. Is it? How can I make sure?" I think it’s a good fit for working with people as well.

I noticed this trend in myself a while back, (early-mid 20’s maybe?) and traced it to a bad heuristic: "X looks like Y; X = Y." In conversations this would look like the phenomenon you describe.

I realized I could turn,"I is," to, "is it," and not only spark conversation but be less wrong. couple that with a decent memory (train yourself to remember names for an eXtreme power up) people often enjoy talking to you and you barely even need to say anything back.

Elizabeth Loftus is a famous researcher who studies the inaccuracies of memory. It’s a huge rabbit-hole but recently The New Yorker did a write up/interview with her and her family over Zoom. There’s a moment when discussion shifts to the possibility that her own life’s work at describing the creation of false memory formation might stem from a need for her to escape a painful childhood memory of her mothers suicide - her research manifestly allows her the possibility that the memory could be false. And since her family all has different recollections of the event, it’s muddled enough to seem inaccurate in many ways.

Psychoanalytically that’s sort of interesting because it represents a circular logic that her work is fundamentally in service to her own desires to have had false memories, but her work wouldn’t exist if she hadn’t have wanted the memory to be false in the first place. (M. Knight Shyamalan where you at?)

That also makes it sort of un-interesting at the same time because you can’t falsify her motives if she’s fundamentally unaware of them. Psychoanalysis would say that it’s still possible though - that she’s simply enacting a childhood fantasy.

Idk exactly why I’m writing this; perhaps there’s a common thread in that, in both cases, people are trying to explain things that one party is convinced is there to be found, and another party that isn’t convinced.

So now I know that Bulverism and Boulwarism are distinct concepts.

I think it was reading history that convinced me that it's completely pointless to speculate about motives at all, and all that matters is actions.

You’re not Alexander of Glycon or whatever? That guy was such a loser.

Before I learned the word "Bulverism", I called this "How to argue LIKE STALIN" based on the observation that Stalinism replaced all arguments about truth or falsity with arguments about motive.

FWIW, people who decided to do this guff always lose in the long term.

https://skepticink.com/prussian/2014/03/21/how-to-argue-like-stalin/

A bias argument is a weak way of explaining why a particular person believes something. But it can be a good way of explaining why lots of people do.

The example I am thinking of is the controversy over the origin of Covid. Past attempts to argue that it was almost certainly natural often quoted scientists in the field as expressing that belief. But it's clear that if you are virologist, you have strong reasons to want to believe that the kind of work you and your colleagues do was not responsible for a pandemic that killed millions of people. That doesn't tell us why any particular virologist offered that opinion — to explain that you would want to look at the arguments offered to see if they appeared to be special pleading. But it explains why, if you were looking for a virologist to dismiss a lab leak as a plausible source, you have no trouble finding some.

I see this phenomenon a lot in fandoms of content creators of all kinds. Just look in youtube comments sections and you'll see super fans (I guess they'd be called Stans now) who have clearly collected, as trivia facts, every detail the creator has ever let slip about their personal life, and then they use those scraps of information as fuel for speculation and explanation of everything.

I think if there's a solution, maybe it would have something to do with helping the afflicted realize that the body of information self-published by a person is only a small minority of the relevant information about them, subject to huge selection bias, etc.

You are a screen onto which people project themselves - their ideas, connections, hopes, fears, needs. Probably makes you a better mental health worker.

Is it really untrue to say that your opinions are unusual, because you're unusual?

Maybe everyone is 100% right about you and you just have very poor insight into your own motives. Especially about the logically impossible motives.

You are writing as though you ate a bad sandwich today.

Well, Scott, I have no idea what makes you tick, but I like your mind.

I'm not sure if it's quite the same, but I get this experience quite a lot simply by reading the writing of not-terribly-thoughtful people who disagree with me on political or culture-war issues. I routinely find hilariously inaccurate theories for why I believe the things I believe. I know for a fact that this happens on both the left and the right.

The problem isn't that people don't have these experiences, but rather that they fail to generalize from them. The takeaway is usually "They don't get me at all, but I have them totally figured out."

Sorry if this is OT, and I only bring it up because you mention 'premature pattern matching', but...

How do we know if there is really a 'culture war'? I guess I'm not sold on that. I get that it's a metaphor, and that makes it by definition impossible to prove/disprove, but would anyone come to this conclusion who wasn't making a daily habit of reading curated online news feeds? If you're just a guy who's working at the BP refinery, and who's not spending a lot of time on Vox or whatever, are you really waking up every morning thinking 'wow, this country has become SO divided?'

I bring that up because I think that for this notion of a 'war' (even at the metaphorical level) needs, at a minimum, to have a critical number of possible combatants agree that the 'war' is actually taking place. What that # is, exactly, I guess I don't know, but it probably needs to be substantial for the metaphor to be appropriate, and I'm not convince we've reached anything near that critical mass.

I'm more just baffled that people care that much about *why* something is written. If people spent even half as much time considering the actual contents of what gets written instead of speculating about why it was written, public discourse would probably be no less fraught but at least it would be more about policies and questions that stand a chance in heck of being able to solve real problems.

The reason for it is fairly depressing. We are mostly just sophisticated social monkeys and after we have a full belly and are out of the rain the thing we care about most is figuring out whose team everybody else is on.

"One does best to separate an artist from his work, not taking him as seriously as his work. He is, after all, only the precondition of his work, the womb, the soil, sometimes the dung and manure on which, out of which, it grows—and therefore in most cases something one must forget if one is to enjoy the work itself" Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, essay III.

Scott, isn't actively and inventively fueling the flames the obvious thing to do here?

Make a game of it, and either ignore them or take a certain wry amusement in their misapprehensions.

Could this not be an effect of everyone being, say, 95% accurate at pattern matching, with 5% false positives, but if falsely ascribing motives only the 5% would post as why would you post about no motive being detected? In any large group this 5% error plus differential posting would lead to an apparent large bias in overpredicting motives.

"This is one reason I'm against bias arguments, against dog-whistle arguments, and skeptical of actual literal psychoanalysis"

Agreed. Also, literary criticism. Your post reminded me of how, while Tolkien was still alive, lots of literary critics thought the One Ring was meant as a metaphor for the atomic bomb, and continued to say this even after he insisted it wasn't.

To nitpick a bit it's clear you thought these things before substack etc and I doubt it's directly about monetizing clicks but your remarks certainly make it sound like you would have been more reluctant to publish them as they are in a batch without the change to a situation (partly bc of substack) you are less vulnerable at.

This that you complain of has long been the same, see C.S. Lewis' essays On Criticism (not published until 1975 but must have been written earlier, probably sometime in the 50s) https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=9115 and an address in 1959 to Cambridge theological students (which has been published under various names) https://orthodox-web.tripod.com/papers/fern_seed.html

(A) from "On Criticism"

"1. Nearly all reviewers assume that your books were written in the same order in which they were published and all shortly before publication. There was a very good instance of this lately in the reviews of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Most critics assumed (this illustrates a different vice) that it must be a political allegory and a good many thought that the master Ring must `be' the atomic bomb. Anyone who knew the real history of the composition knew that this was not only erroneous, but impossible; chronologically impossible. Others assumed that the 'mythology' of his romance had grown out of his children's story The Hobbit. This, again, he and his friends knew to be mainly false. Now of course nobody blames the critics for not knowing these things: how should they? The trouble is that they don't know they don't know. A guess leaps into their minds and they write it down without even noticing that it is a guess. Here certainly the warning to us all as critics is very clear and alarming. Critics of Piers Plowman and the Faerie Queene make gigantic constructions about the history of these compositions. Of course we should all admit such constructions to be conjectural. And as conjectures, you may ask, are they not, some of them, probable? Perhaps they are. But the experience of being reviewed has lowered my estimate of their probability. Because, when you start by knowing the facts, you find that the constructions are very often wholly wrong. Apparently the chances of their being right are low, even when they are made along quite sensible lines. Of course I am not forgetting that the reviewer has (quite rightly) devoted less study to my book than the scholar has devoted to Langland or Spenser. But I should have expected that to be compensated for by other advantages which he has and the scholar lacks. After all, he lives in the same period as I, subjected to the same currents of taste and opinion, and has undergone the same kind of education. He can hardly help knowing—reviewers are good at this sort of thing and take an interest in it—quite a lot about my generation, my period, and the circles in which I probably move. He and I may even have common acquaintances. Surely he is at least as well placed for guessing about me as any scholar is for guessing about the dead. Yet he seldom guesses right.

...2. Another type of critic who speculates about the genesis of your book is the amateur psychologist. He has a Freudian theory of literature and claims to know all about your inhibitions. He knows what unacknowledged wishes you were gratifying. And here of course one cannot, in the same sense as before, claim to start by knowing all the facts. By definition you are unconscious of the things he professes to discover. Therefore the more loudly you disclaim them, the more right he must be: though, oddly enough, if you admitted them, that would prove him right too. And there is a further difficulty: one is not here so free from bias, for this procedure is almost entirely confined to hostile reviewers. And now that I come to think of it, I have seldom seen it practiced on a dead author except by a scholar who intended, in some measure, to debunk him. ...It is in fact quite clear that there is one impulse in your mind of which, with all their psychology, they have never reckoned: the plastic impulse, the impulse to make a thing, to shape, to give unity, relief, contrast, pattern. But this, unhappily, is the impulse which chiefly caused the book to be written at all. They have, clearly, no such impulse themselves, and they do not suspect it in others. They seem to fancy that a book trickles out of one like a sigh or a tear or automatic writing."

(B) From the 1959 address:

"What the value of such reconstructions is I learned very early in my career. I had published a book of essays; and in the one into which I had put most of my heart, the one I really cared about and in which I discharged a keen enthusiasm, was on William Morris. And in almost the first review I was told that this was obviously the only one in the book in which I had felt no interest. Now don't mistake. The critic was, I now believe, quite right in thinking it the worst essay in the book; at least everyone agreed with him. Where he was totally wrong was in his imaginary history of the causes which produces its dullness.

Well, this made me prick up my ears. Since then I have watched with some care similar imaginary histories both of my own books and of books by friends whose real history I knew. Reviewers, both friendly and hostile, will dash you off such histories with great confidence; will tell you what public events had directed the author's mind to this or that, what other authors had influenced him, what his overall intention was, what sort of audience he principally addressed, why - and when - he did everything.

Now I must record my impression; then distinct from it, what I can say with certainty. My impression is that in the whole of my experience not one of these guesses has on any one point been right; that the method shows a record of 100 per cent failure. You would expect that by mere chance they would hit as often as the miss. But it is my impression that they do no such thing. I can't remember a single hit. But as I have not kept a careful record my mere impression may be mistaken. What I think I can say with certainty is that they are usually wrong.

And yet they would often sound - if you didn't know the truth - extremely convincing. Many reviewers suggested that the Ring in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was suggested by the atom bomb. What could be more plausible. Here is a book published when everyone was preoccupied by that sinister invention; here in the centre of the book is a weapon which is seems madness to throw away yet fatal to use. Yet in fact, the chronology of the book's composition make the theory impossible. Only the other week a reviewer said that a fairy-tale by my friend Roger Lancelyn Green was influenced by fairy-tales of mine. Nothing could be more probable. I have an imaginary country with a beneficent lion in it; Green, one with a beneficent tiger. Green and I can be proved to read one another's works; to be indeed in various ways closely associated. The case for an affiliation is far stronger than many which we accept as conclusive when dead authors are concerned. But it's all untrue nevertheless. I know the genesis of that Tiger and that Lion and they are quite independent."

Could make this a prediction market, assuming Scott is in touch enough with his own motives.

I really want to eat something fried and sweet right now, and I blame this post.

Interesting. Thank you for bringing it up expressly.

"I wish I could convince other people of this, but there's no shortcut to writing a blog, telling people about your personal life, and then letting them all make wildly incorrect inferences."

I'll be honest, this sentence confused me a bit! Did you mean to write "and then preventing them from making wildly incorrect inferences" / "and then letting them all make only correct inferences" (i.e. there is no shortcut to preventing people from making the wildly incorrect inferences, which was what I thought you wanted to say here)?

Or is the shortcut to the experience that other people do that (i.e. that people will have to accrue blogging experience themselves before they know it's true that other people do this)?

I guess it's got to be latter, but I wanted to put this comment here just in case it's not. :)

Thanks for writing this up! Echoing the sentiment that it's a bit of a shame this is subscriber-only, this seems like the sort of post that would be great to link people to for a primer into this bias (quite independent of your person).

I think this is a more general problem for all of us. We tend to be arrogant, acting as though we are clairvoyant. It's not just your readers, but every pundit, politician, belligerent tweeter and ordinary person. Most people think they know other people's thoughts, motivations, and beliefs.

This also happens, as you point out, in the culture wars. I can't remember the number of times that people have been accused of deliberately using white supremacist hand signals. It seems also entirely plausible to me, that a hand was simply sitting idle on somebody's lap, coincidentally looking like some hermetic symbol (most of which correspond to fairly anodyne uses of our hands)

I also think about all the times that politicians use various turns of phrase, perhaps signalling something (dog whistle) -- but also possibly entirely ignorant of a sub-cultural meaning to one or another minority group.

I am usually clueless. My minority friends tell me the "obvious' meanings of these comments. But even as I belong to certain groups, for example, as a woman, or a jew, I am often caught unaware of how certain terms or idioms are perceived as bigoted.

Despite my "ignorance" people around me are certain in their interpretations.

By the way, I'm not positive the malign interpretations are wrong. It just seems to me that it's a leap from seeing a casual use of one's hand to the conclusion that they are a member of a secret cabal.

We also do the same in our intimate or casual relationships. We believe we know what our partners meant, what our bosses think, and why that asshole did something or other.

It would be really useful for all of us to embrace more humility. No one knows what goes on in anyone else's mind or heart. In fact, even when people tell us what they believe or think or feel, do we really know what they mean?

I wish you'd unlock this post; it's an important one to reference. I'll also comment that while readers have performed incredible feats of Watsonian analysis on HPMOR - like that one person who read through Ch. 28 and decoded the Pettigrew story on the first try from the mere fact that the author had taken time to comment on the existence of Metamorphmagi in nearby proximity - not a single person correctly analyzed any of the Deep Literary Themes that I had meant to be blatant, like Hermione representing the Plight of the Secondary Character in Fanfiction, or even that she was a Deconstruction of Standard Wrong Beliefs About What Constitutes a Mary Sue.

This is known as the illusion of asymmetric insight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_asymmetric_insight

I am actually somewhat conflicted on this subject. The thing about unconscious bias is... you don't realize you're being biased because it's not conscious. Thus, it doesn't strike me as being particularly suspect, at least in theory, that people might be able to tell stuff about you that you may not realize about yourself, in the same way that someone might pull you aside and tell you you've got a bat in the cave you need to flush out. Think of Robin Hanson's The Elephant in the Brain, where he says

"Our brains, therefore, are designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The less we know about our own ugly motives, the better - and thus we don't like to talk or even think about the extent of our selfishness. This is 'the elephant in the brain.' Such an introspective taboo makes it hard for us to think clearly about our nature and the explanations for our behavior."

This makes sense to me, and I would point out that it would also make sense that our brains would evolve to be able to sniff out other people's ugly motives, moreso than our own.

Nonetheless, the point remains true that, given sufficient information about your interlocutor, you can probably use this principle as a justification to dismiss just about any argument he/she might make, unless maybe it's some obvious argument against interest, like a priest making an argument against religion or an oil company executive arguing for high carbon taxes. Again, I remain conflicted on this subject.

And yet, you say here:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/

"In other words, if a fight is important to you, fight nasty. If that means lying, lie. If that means insults, insult. If that means silencing people, silence.

It always makes me happy when my ideological opponents come out and say eloquently and openly what I’ve always secretly suspected them of believing."

You know what's funny? I believe the folks who psychoanalyze you are mostly incorrect. And I believe what you say here about your secret suspicions regarding your opponents is almost certainly correct.

It's pretty difficult to distill a general principle from this. I mean, "Don't attempt mind-reading unless you're able to read minds," doesn't really get the job done, does it?

What I want to know is, are these types of predictions usually used as a way to dismiss the opinion or preference you are expressing? Along the lines of 'you only think that because you live in the Bay area, if you had more experience of life elsewhere/more exposure to non-Bay opinions ... you'd never think that'?

In the cases where that is how the prediction is used, I'd actually consider it not a prediction but a (very pathetic) form of argument.

Could our blogger's experience in this regard be applied to theories of human behavior that make assumptions about human motive? Does his experience, for example, suggest one should be cautious about game-theory approaches, which seem to assume that almost all humans are almost always motivated by rationalistic advantage-maximization (especially the maximization of obvious material advantage)?

Given the gosh-darn amount of quoting I've been doing recently from Humphrey Carpenter's "Selected Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien", it's amusing to find that it's going on for seventy years now that the New York Times has been making a hash of interviews:

Introduction to Letter No. 165

On 5 June 1955 in the New York Times Book Review, the columnist Harvey Breit devoted part of his weekly article 'In and Out of Books' to an account of Tolkien and his writings. It included this passage: 'What, we asked Dr [sic] Tolkien, makes you tick? Dr T., who teaches at Oxford when he isn't writing novels, has this brisk reply: "I don't tick. I am not a machine. (If I did tick, I should have no views on it, and you had better ask the winder.) My work did not 'evolve' into a serious work. It started like that. The so-called 'children's story' [The Hobbit] was a fragment, torn out of an already existing mythology. In so far as it was dressed up as 'for children', in style or manner, I regret it. So do the children. I am a philologist, and all my work is philological. I avoid hobbies because I am a very serious person and cannot distinguish between private amusement and duty. I am affable, but unsociable. I only work for private amusement, since I find my duties privately amusing." '

These remarks were apparently taken from a letter written by Tolkien in answer to enquiries by a representative of the New York Times. On 30 June 1955, Tolkien wrote to the Houghton Mifflin Co., his American publishers: 'Please do not blame me for what Breit made of my letter!.... The original made sense: not a quality, however, of which Harvey B. seems perceptive. I was asked a series of questions, with a request to answer briefly, brightly, and quotably. .... Out of sheer pity [for another enquirer wanting information] .... I do enclose a few notes on points other than mere facts of my "curriculum vitae" (which can be got from reference books).' What follows is these 'few notes'. The text is taken from a typescript apparently made by the Houghton Mifflin Co. from Tolkien's original; this typescript was sent to a number of enquirers at different times, some of whom quoted from it in articles about Tolkien. Tolkien himself was given a copy of the typescript, and he made a number of annotations and corrections to it, which are incorporated into the text which is here printed.