I’m not construing “do not invite someone to speak at events” as cancel culture.
This was an invite-then-caving-to-pressure-to-disinvite. And it’s not just any old pressure, it’s a particular sort of political tribal pressure. It’s one faction in the culture war trying to have its way with us. Caving in to specifically this sort of pressure is what I think of as adopting cancel culture.
Got it, I must have misunderstood you! I think it’s a little difficult for me to understand how much people were talking about the general principles vs the specific example in Munich, and/or how much they believe the Munich example generalizes.
I think this discussion can benefit from more rigor, though it’s unclear how to advance it in practice.
Yeah, I wasn’t super clear, sorry. I think I basically agree with you that communities can and should have higher standards than society at large, and that communities can and should be allowed to set their own standards to some extent. And in particular I think that insofar as we think someone has bad character, that’s a decently good reason not to invite them to things. It’s just that I don’t think that’s the most accurate description of what happened at Munich, or what’s happening with cancel culture more generally—I think it’s more like an excuse, rationalization, or cover story for what’s really happening, which is that a political tribe is using bullying to get us to conform to their ideology. As a mildly costly signal of my sincerity here, I’ll say this: I personally am not a huge fan of Robin Hanson and if I was having a birthday party or something and a friend of his was there and wanted to bring him along, I’d probably say no. This is so even though I respect him quite a lot as an intellectual.
I should also flag that I’m still confused about the best way to characterize what’s going on. I do think there are people within each tribe explicitly strategizing about how the tribe should bully people into conformity, but I doubt that they have any significant control over the overall behavior of the tribe; instead I think it’s more of an emergent/evolved phenomenon… And of course it’s been going on since the dawn of human history, and it waxes and wanes. It just seems to be waxing now. Personally I think technology is to blame—echo chambers, filter bubbles, polarization, etc. I think that if these trends are real then they are extremely important to predict and understand because they are major existential risk factors and also directly impede the ability of our community to figure out what we need to do to help the world and coordinate to do it.
This study looked at nine countries and found that polarisation had decreased in five. The US was an outlier, having seen the largest increase in polarisation. That may suggest that American polarisation is due to US-specific factors, rather than universal technological trends.
Here are some studies suggesting the prevalence of technology-driven echo chambers and filter bubbles may be exaggerated.
Please note that this study does not measure “polarization”—but instead “polarization between the top two parties”! See: > “We analyze the sensitivity of our findings to restricting attention to the top two parties in each country and focusing on periods in which this pair of parties is stable”
This does not work for any country with proportional electoral systems. I can speak to the German case, since I live there:
The two big parties are CDU/CSU (christian democrat / conservative) and SPD (social democrat). Both parties have become more similar to each other over the decades, and SPD in particular has bled voters like crazy for it. Here you can see current and historical polling data: CDU/CSU in black, SPD in red.
The most notable events here may be the “Energiewende” and the response to the mass migration in context of the Syrian civil war 2015 for the CDU/CSU, and the “Agenda 2010″ and the continual “great coalition” as the junior partner with the conservatives with the SPD.
This has opened up space to the right of the conservatives (the AfD has taken this space), and to the left of the SPD (taken up in parts by the far left party PDS / DIE LINKE and the green party BÜNDNIS 90 / DIE GRÜNEN). The SPD is now arguably not in the top two anymore, the greens seem to have taken that spot, possibly for good.
So, indeed, the polarization between CDU/CSU and SPD may have gone down, but this does not generalize. Germany has also become more polarized.
Figure 2 looks at the top two parties, but the legend to Figure 1 doesn’t say it’s restricted to the top two parties. And Figure 1 also shows decreasing polarisation in Germany. However, I haven’t looked into this research in depth.
Interesting that one of the two main hypotheses advanced in that paper is that media is influencing public opinion, but the media is not the internet, but TV!
The rise of 24-hour partisan cable news provides another potential explanation. Partisan cable networks emerged during the period we study and arguably played a much larger role in the US than elsewhere, though this may be in part a consequence rather than a cause of growing affective polarization.9 Older demographic groups also consume more partisan cable news and have polarized more quickly than younger demographic groups in the US (Boxell et al. 2017; Martin and Yurukoglu 2017). Interestingly, the five countries with a negative linear slope for affective polarization all devote more public funds per capita to public service broadcast media than three of the countries with a positive slope (Benson and Powers 2011, Table 1; see also Benson et al. 2017). A role for partisan cable news is also consistent with visual evidence (see Figure 1) of an acceleration of the growth in affective polarization in the US following the mid-1990s, which saw the launch of Fox News and MSNBC.
(The other hypothesis is “party sorting”, wherein people move to parties that align more in ideology and social identity.)
Perhaps campaigning for more money to PBS or somehow countering Fox and MSNBC could be really important for US-democracy.
Also, if TV has been so influential, it also suggests that even if online media isn’t yet influential on the population-scale, it may be influential for smaller groups of people, and that it will be extremely influential in the future.
Some argue, however, that partisan TV and radio was helped by the abolition of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987. That amounts to saying that polarisation was driven at least partly by legal changes rather than by technological innovations.
Obviously media influences public opinion. But the question is whether specific media technologies (e.g. social media vs TV vs radio vs newspapers) cause more or less polarisation, fake news, partisanship, filter bubbles, and so on. That’s a difficult empirical question, since all those things can no doubt be mediated to some degree through each of these media technologies.
I think that if these trends are real then they are extremely important to predict and understand because they are major existential risk factors and also directly impede the ability of our community to figure out what we need to do to help the world and coordinate to do it.
This seems like an interesting line of reasoning, and I’d maybe be excited to see more strategic thinking around this.
Might eventually turn out to be pointless and/or futile, of course.
I agree! I’d love to see more research into this stuff. In my relevant pre-agi possibilities doc I call this “Deterioration of collective epistemology.” I intend to write a blog post about a related thing (Persuasion Tools) soon.
I’m not construing “do not invite someone to speak at events” as cancel culture.
This was an invite-then-caving-to-pressure-to-disinvite. And it’s not just any old pressure, it’s a particular sort of political tribal pressure. It’s one faction in the culture war trying to have its way with us. Caving in to specifically this sort of pressure is what I think of as adopting cancel culture.
Got it, I must have misunderstood you! I think it’s a little difficult for me to understand how much people were talking about the general principles vs the specific example in Munich, and/or how much they believe the Munich example generalizes.
I think this discussion can benefit from more rigor, though it’s unclear how to advance it in practice.
Yeah, I wasn’t super clear, sorry. I think I basically agree with you that communities can and should have higher standards than society at large, and that communities can and should be allowed to set their own standards to some extent. And in particular I think that insofar as we think someone has bad character, that’s a decently good reason not to invite them to things. It’s just that I don’t think that’s the most accurate description of what happened at Munich, or what’s happening with cancel culture more generally—I think it’s more like an excuse, rationalization, or cover story for what’s really happening, which is that a political tribe is using bullying to get us to conform to their ideology. As a mildly costly signal of my sincerity here, I’ll say this: I personally am not a huge fan of Robin Hanson and if I was having a birthday party or something and a friend of his was there and wanted to bring him along, I’d probably say no. This is so even though I respect him quite a lot as an intellectual.
I should also flag that I’m still confused about the best way to characterize what’s going on. I do think there are people within each tribe explicitly strategizing about how the tribe should bully people into conformity, but I doubt that they have any significant control over the overall behavior of the tribe; instead I think it’s more of an emergent/evolved phenomenon… And of course it’s been going on since the dawn of human history, and it waxes and wanes. It just seems to be waxing now. Personally I think technology is to blame—echo chambers, filter bubbles, polarization, etc. I think that if these trends are real then they are extremely important to predict and understand because they are major existential risk factors and also directly impede the ability of our community to figure out what we need to do to help the world and coordinate to do it.
This study looked at nine countries and found that polarisation had decreased in five. The US was an outlier, having seen the largest increase in polarisation. That may suggest that American polarisation is due to US-specific factors, rather than universal technological trends.
Here are some studies suggesting the prevalence of technology-driven echo chambers and filter bubbles may be exaggerated.
Please note that this study does not measure “polarization”—but instead “polarization between the top two parties”! See:
> “We analyze the sensitivity of our findings to restricting attention to the top two parties in each country and focusing on periods in which this pair of parties is stable”
This does not work for any country with proportional electoral systems. I can speak to the German case, since I live there:
The two big parties are CDU/CSU (christian democrat / conservative) and SPD (social democrat). Both parties have become more similar to each other over the decades, and SPD in particular has bled voters like crazy for it. Here you can see current and historical polling data: CDU/CSU in black, SPD in red.
The most notable events here may be the “Energiewende” and the response to the mass migration in context of the Syrian civil war 2015 for the CDU/CSU, and the “Agenda 2010″ and the continual “great coalition” as the junior partner with the conservatives with the SPD.
This has opened up space to the right of the conservatives (the AfD has taken this space), and to the left of the SPD (taken up in parts by the far left party PDS / DIE LINKE and the green party BÜNDNIS 90 / DIE GRÜNEN). The SPD is now arguably not in the top two anymore, the greens seem to have taken that spot, possibly for good.
So, indeed, the polarization between CDU/CSU and SPD may have gone down, but this does not generalize. Germany has also become more polarized.
Figure 2 looks at the top two parties, but the legend to Figure 1 doesn’t say it’s restricted to the top two parties. And Figure 1 also shows decreasing polarisation in Germany. However, I haven’t looked into this research in depth.
Thanks! This is good news; will go look at those studies...
Interesting that one of the two main hypotheses advanced in that paper is that media is influencing public opinion, but the media is not the internet, but TV!
(The other hypothesis is “party sorting”, wherein people move to parties that align more in ideology and social identity.)
Perhaps campaigning for more money to PBS or somehow countering Fox and MSNBC could be really important for US-democracy.
Also, if TV has been so influential, it also suggests that even if online media isn’t yet influential on the population-scale, it may be influential for smaller groups of people, and that it will be extremely influential in the future.
Some argue, however, that partisan TV and radio was helped by the abolition of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987. That amounts to saying that polarisation was driven at least partly by legal changes rather than by technological innovations.
Obviously media influences public opinion. But the question is whether specific media technologies (e.g. social media vs TV vs radio vs newspapers) cause more or less polarisation, fake news, partisanship, filter bubbles, and so on. That’s a difficult empirical question, since all those things can no doubt be mediated to some degree through each of these media technologies.
This seems like an interesting line of reasoning, and I’d maybe be excited to see more strategic thinking around this.
Might eventually turn out to be pointless and/or futile, of course.
I agree! I’d love to see more research into this stuff. In my relevant pre-agi possibilities doc I call this “Deterioration of collective epistemology.” I intend to write a blog post about a related thing (Persuasion Tools) soon.