Interpretative Frameworks

Do you see what I see?

I have two wonderful (but difficult, at times) autistic children. If there is one thing that allows people to realize just how vastly different worldviews can be, it is autism. In fact, I could presume here and now that almost none of what we take for granted is justified. Because in order to form a picture of the world, we inevitably need the eyes and ears and hands of other people, to understand just how subjective most of our judgements are.

In the above picture by Marc Chagall, you may see nothing more than some wild circus frenzy. An art history major could see something far more profound, a child could see a funny picture of a woman standing on a horse. Depending on our perspective, our own contexts, we will see a vastly different picture. Objectively, then, what is this picture about?

We can’t say, because whatever terms we could use here would be our own, derived solely from our cultural background and our affinity with art. Some of us might just want to look at the piece of art to see what the rage is all about and come out with a very simple and short-sighted analysis (if analysis there is). In the end, is there really a proper way to analyze this painting? If you were to speak with someone who studied the arts or is an artist themselves, they would tell you there’s some fashion in which we should appreciate art, and that some people just do not have the intellect or the mind to see the fullness of a piece and its beauty.

Interpretation is but one part in the whole of the communication process, and this process occurs both with objects and with people. It occurs both verbally and non-verbally. There can be signal errors as well: is something beautiful necessarily artistic? Likewise, can something ugly BE beautiful symbolically? These questions are not meant to be answered here, because they tell a story of the varieties of subjective experiences we can get from speaking about something as simple as a painting.

What happens however, is that everyone has their own bias, and these are created by interpretative frameworks. Although we put a negative connotation to bias, it is as inescapable as breath. You can simply have “less” of it than others, given certain circumstances apply. So when someone tells them they have no bias, you should be very skeptical of that. A bias is not for example reducible to one side or the other – that is a bias in itself: To think that any which issue can be reduced to two sides.

The reason why we have these biases is because of a nasty little psychological thing called “anchoring”. It happens when we use references to judge things given to us. We do that through intuition. So if I give you a number right now, say… 72, and then I ask you a question of some nature or other.

How old was Gandhi when he died?

As a reflex, if you don’t know that number by heart, you’ll likely have given a higher number than 72. If I were to tell you a lower number, and then do a similar experiment, you’d give a lower number than you probably should. Now, if bias can occur as simply as with random numbers being shown to us, imagine what happens when it comes to worldviews and interpretation of more complex subjects?

It gets messy, that’s what

When someone communicates a message to another, they transmit information from their own mind. It starts as a concept, then it gets “encoded” in words that make sense to the person and can be put into a vocal transmission. That information then reaches the other person, who starts first by receiving the message, DECODING it and then interpreting it. The decoding part is crucial, because that is when most people let their intuition run free.

As our brains are fairly outdated tools, they still function as if we were playing prey and predator, so when we’re presented with a concept, it needs to pass through our filters of intuition. Now, that intuition is often wrong, contrary to what we might believe. We just use it so often that we don’t realize when it fails. If we’re discussing something complex, and in a situation of confrontation, it is much – MUCH – more likely that the information will be decoded with a fair amount of bias.

So if what I am trying to communicate is “diluted” by my own bias and I transmit it to another person who then dilutes it further with theirs, what is going to be their interpretation? It’s going to be a gross misrepresentation of what I am telling them. Even under optimal conditions, it is likely that complex ideas will take more than one attempt to be completely concretized, partly because of these obstacles and partly because the interpreter may be getting the wrong information.

How can we resolve something like this? How can we overcome bias in any meaningful fashion?

No single solution

There is no single solution to the problem that interpretation poses. When it comes to internet skepticism, for example, we are faced with the phenomena of “fake news”. These dreaded news articles that twist words in order to make certain things seem worse than they are. What is definitely of help in these cases is being capable of analyzing idiosyncratic structures. For example, a use of qualitatives when reporting on something, can indicate that the paper expects a certain emotional reaction from the person reading.

Let’s take two papers and compare them:

http://www.breitbart.com/sports/2017/12/28/poll-mark-cuban-could-beat-president-trump-2020-texas/

“The left-leaning Public Policy Polling released findings from a poll on Thursday, which showed Dallas Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban beating President Trump in a prospective 2020 race.”

Although the words themselves are not from BreitBart, it does seem like the intent here is to highlight that the fact that PPP is left-leaning as if to give the poll diminished value. BreitBart particularly despises left-leaning politics and makes a habit of committing itself politically in their articles, and will often choose specific things to report upon and often omitting key pieces of stories.

This is all the more obvious when one reads the comments in the BreitBart article, with Texans claiming that the poll cannot possibly reflect reality, and must have been made with citizens from Austin, among other things. The intent is clear and those who follow BreitBart are swept by the interpretative framework that is imposed to them through the filters of the newspaper.

When I did a search for Reuters and this same poll, I could not find any articles related to it from that news agency, but plenty of politically-minded newspapers had included their take on it.

The Washington Examiner, for example, makes no mention at all of PPP being left-leaning.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/mark-cuban-leads-trump-in-texas-2020-presidential-race-poll/article/2644535

A new poll predicts billionaire businessman Mark Cuban would beat President Trump in a 2020 contest in Texas if he were to run as a Democrat.

A Thursday poll from Public Policy Polling released to Business Insider has Cuban ahead of Trump 47 percent to 44 percent in Texas where he owns the Dallas Mavericks.

In this case, the idiosyncratic structure is much less evident. When I investigated the possible biases of Washington Examiner, I found that its owner has supported Republican administrations in the past (Bush’s 2001 administration, for example). The owner himself is definitely right-leaning, with a report in his Wikipedia article saying:

 In 2009 Anschutz purchased the conservative American opinion magazine The Weekly Standard from Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corporation.^[48]

So, if a right-leaning paper managed to not accuse the PPP of being left-leaning, why did BreitBart do so? Because one of the two papers is trying to tell a story, while the other is reporting upon the facts as they are. It would be worth mentioning that while the Examiner speaks only of Texas, the BreitBart article seems to be a bit more loose, leaving it up to interpretation whether this poll would be representative of the country as a whole, then attempting to reassure its audience by saying it is unlikely he would run.

Whereas Washington Examiner simply takes from what Cuban HAS said in the past: He would run only as a Republican, not a Democrat.

The point I’m making here is that there is a clear difference in how this story is being reported by two different yet similarly-minded papers. Both papers are working with a right-leaning agenda, yet only one reported the facts adequately. If I was naive and had read the Breitbart snippet and left it at that, I would have walked away thinking that the PPP makes biased polls to spite Republicans, whereas such is not the case.

In 2010, the PPP correctly predicted the win of a Republican candidate in a Senate race.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Polling#2010

“PPP was the first pollster to find Scott Brown with a lead over Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate special election; Brown ultimately won in a major comeback, and PPP’s final poll in that race predicted Brown’s winning margin exactly.”

The message being sent by the Business Insider and BreitBart is clear: “We want you to think that if something is left-leaning, it will obviously be ill-conceived and have been made with an outcome bias.”

BreitBart, although a newspaper website, has a vastly different interpretation of a story from other papers. That is how you can find fake news, not in that they are either left or right-leaning or center… But in the way that the news is being reported. Now, here’s where things get a little bit more complicated.

Why did I choose BreitBart? Am I biased against BreitBart? Yes, I definitely am. That is why I chose them as part of my example on fake news. Yet, contrary to what I could have done, I didn’t simply take the article and give it my own interpretation without double-checking with other sources. Not only that, I picked a random newspaper from a Google Search: I didn’t go for a paper that I knew would give me the result I expected. In fact, I initially found an article on a Russian rocket launch failure on Breitbart to be quite objectively written, but by a different author. Odd, then, that Breitbart would not be capable of keeping their objectivity when it comes to polling?

More peculiar still, the author who wrote the Russian Rocket failure article was identified as working specifically on online censorship and free speech issues: Not Russian space missions. Typically, when someone in a newspaper is stuck in a box, they will write only about their subject. For example, you don’t see me writing my personal critique of the theory of evolution, because I know fully well I cannot give an analysis worth anyone’s time on it.

At this point, what do you choose to do? Do you verify what I’m saying or take it at face value?

Personally, I would want you to do your own research rather than just accept what I’m saying as wisdom incarnate. As I said, I -AM- biased against BreitBart, but I also do find that my bias is sound, because I have confirmed what I thought to be true by verifying sources that I expected to falsify my belief: They did not.

Critical Thinking + Falsification

This is what the above section of my article refers to. In order to defend yourself against ideologically-minded papers, you need to exercise both critical thinking and falsification. If you find yourself thinking: “This is most likely false.” Try to find evidence to the contrary, not something that confirms your belief. I could have easily gone to InfoWars or some such other paper that I have an active bias against, and said: “See, BreitBart and InfoWars are both biased papers, so this is what fake news means.”

But I did not.

What I thought was more important than finding BreitBart to be doing unethical journalism, was to explain how newspapers, regardless of their lean, can be both accurate and misleading. It is very possible that a conservative paper will give you a much better coverage of a story than a progressive one. It all comes down to who reports the facts most accurately and who has a history of reporting them accurately more often.

Reputed papers are therefore authoritative sources that you can rely upon, but those who stir controversy are those you should avoid. I would daresay that you should avoid BreitBart just like you should avoid certain parts of BuzzFeed, because both can be just as biased and have lesser-quality journalism under given circumstances.

Sovereignty of self begins first and foremost with being capable to think for yourself, so that when a newspaper reports on something with insufficient data, you withdraw your judgement until sufficient data has been gathered. A way to do so, is to look for other reputed sources to back up the first one. If  there is a lack of articles on the subject at hand from reputed sources, you can rest assured that either:

A. The facts as they are presented probably never happened.

B. Whoever wrote the initial article did it with maligned intent, in order to mislead and spark controversy.

La Meute and The Mosque

Recently, in Quebec, the news network TVA reported upon an alleged situation in Montreal, where a Mosque had demanded that maintenance work from a construction contractor should be halted, because of the presence of women on the construction site. Most of us in Quebec who know TVA to play fast and loose with facts, withdrew their judgement immediately, but the group La Meute which distinguishes itself with having nationalistic and ethnocentric activism, immediately called for a protest against the Mosque in question.

During the same day, both the Mosque and the construction contractor released statements stipulating that they had no idea where the reports came from. The Mosque itself said they had never requested such a thing, and the contractor had not heard of any such complaints from the Mosque or anybody else. Work had not been halted, in fact.

A few days later, TVA had to release an apology statement with a thinly veiled accusation toward their sources. La Meute’s swift reaction to the news also drew suspicion and some people have been claiming that the group might have faked the complaint to TVA, in order to spring the local chapter into action over non-news. The damage has been done, however. During the small amount of time where the news was out and people were undecided as to its validity, social media was ripe with comments from concerned citizens complaining about the “islamization” of the province, and that our government did not have balls.

This situation repeats itself very often in different scenarios. It is up to us as citizens to be informed enough to know when we are dealing with “fake” news and “real” news. If some people with ill-intent are going to hurt the industry of journalism as a whole, it’s up to the consumers to put a stop to it and think before acting.

You can find another such problem with how feminism is reported and perceived on social media.

A vegan cafe reportedly demanded men to pay 18% more than women when coming in as paying patrons to their establishment.

That turned out to be false: The owners are using one week per month to “ask” male patrons that if they so desire, they can pay a symbollic 18% extra for the services received, in order to donate that money to a non-profit and also to raise awareness about the wage gap.

This news was reported as is, but the interpretation that a lot of people got was that men were being forced to pay 18% more than women by virtue of being men. Such was not the case.

In conclusion

Our takeaway here is this:

Everyone is biased, everyone has blind spots but it’s up to everybody else to help us see where we refuse to see.

When something seems so outrageous as to be difficult to believe, usually, it’s because it is. 

Post-Truth and The End of a Political Era

Journalism’s end?

It would appear that with an increase in disillusion of public opinion toward governments and media outlets, brought in by the cynicism of progressives and left-wingers as well as right-wingers toward their respective political representatives, we’re soon going to stop seeing such widespread respect for journalism. Rather, we will probably give more respect to independent journalism and if need be, individual reporting of events.

It might be that by ushering in a new era of anti-democratic institutions, the new establishment brought in by Trump might actually unwittingly beget a new era of information proliferation. I’m thinking of the democratization of journalism, as being the affair of every citizen in the civilized world. This would be in tune with democratic principles of the ancient city-states of Greece. It may not be branded as such when it will start to occur, but as corporate journalism is finally being pointed at for its incongruities and its bias toward specific political playgrounds, we are likely to see that happen more and more.

Take with that the diminished interest in mass-media, such as televised talk-shows and the rise of platforms like Netflix, which encourage the personalization and customization of what we, as individuals wish to see, without the constant advertisements permeating our screens. I can see the arrival of a device like HoloLens as being part of this democratization, where we will be capable of seeing things other people are doing live, in front of us. It won’t be the same as demanding expert opinion: You’ll literally have other people weighing in WITH you on the legitimacy of this or that subject.

Something a website like Wikipedia is already doing, by pitting various different points of view to give a bit more pep to its objectivity angle. As I said above, with the end of mass-media, and the reliance on social media by most people, the World Wide Web will have to become this new platform for democracy, managed by the people, for the people. A forum not unlike that of the Athenian assemblies. Those with the most information and the best arguments will orient the people, not individual experts being put on air on CNN.

A sentiment of true equality among citizens may actually emerge out of such an ideal.

Left vs Right?

If my estimation is correct, there is going to be a dissolution of political identifications as “left” and “right”. Simply because the many ideas that will be discussed will have to reach across both ends of the aisle, to be given creedence. In these times of great unrest, bridges simply must be built across the spectrum. We no longer can afford to sit on our positions and be closed to one another. While the left is concentrating on the facts, which is rationally the best thing to do in order to make decisions, the politicians on the right know this and let the left bother with facts, while they bother with values.

What value do facts have when you can shove moral statements down people’s throats? While Hillary Clinton was making a poorly-worded statement about switching to clean energies, Trump capitalized on the part of her speech which held the words: “I’m going to put the Coal Business and Coal miners out of a job.” When all that was really meant was that she’d move those businesses and miners to green energy jobs. Yet, that is all that the right need to get votes, because they go on moral values, not ethics or indeed facts (not strictly, anyway).

It’s self-evident that the left can resort to similar thought-processes, it works much better with the right than it does the left, and the left tends to look at things on an intellectual basis, something the right does not. In America, left vs right tends to be “intellectual vs anti-intellectual”, and when you look at the economic circumstances between both, you find yourself unsurprised to see who has the most anti-intellectual stances.

The coal workers have steadily been put out of a job over the last years, as green energy rolled through, but they were never given a switch by any of the governments that came through. So, when Trump went with the “nearest” solution, which was to bring their coal jobs back, of course these people voted for him. The moral thing is to get these people out of poverty, not let them stay in it. That’s why the left’s facts pale in comparison to the galvanizing and perfectly articulated right-wingers’ speeches.

We can give figures, we can tell the right that so and so is as it is because of specific phenomena… But in the end, what they really want to hear is that their problems are genuine and need to be addressed. It’s not the facts that will sway, not the facts that disagree with right-wing ideology. Similarly, the right cannot make the left sway toward its own end, because the left views things in collectivist worldviews, while the right focuses on the individual.

Whatever short-sightedness the left has, the right compensates through traditional morality. In this article from the group Salon, George Lakoff, one of the founding fathers of cognitive linguistics, outlines why left-leaning talking points don’t appeal to right-leaning listeners. He opposes two moral dialectics.

Strict or Nurturing Parent?

What we are missing, Lakoff says, on the left, is the idea of “values” – rather, traditional moral values. Quoting from the article:

They’re missing the idea that many Americans who depend on health care, affordable health care, for example, have strict-father positions and voted for Trump against their interests. And this is something has been known for ages, that a lot of poor conservatives vote against their material interests, because they’re voting for their worldview. And the reason for it is that their moral worldview defines who they are. They are not going to vote against their own definition of who they are. 

src: http://www.salon.com/2017/01/15/dont-think-of-a-rampaging-elephant-linguist-george-lakoff-explains-how-the-democrats-helped-elect-trump/

Taking this simple quote, what can this say about the strict-parent position? Values shape political opinions of those who voted for Trump. It is not about the facts, it is about someone who votes according to their values. Facts cannot change this lean in opinion, it must be done via demonstration that Trump’s values do not in fact align with theirs. They want someone who acts strongly against injustice, not a sooth-sayer. So, when you have a man like Trump facing off against a known sooth-sayer like Clinton, the result is that those who are unfortunately looked down upon by the left will vote for the man they identify with.

It’s quite hard to identify with someone who speaks from a position of academia for them, as because they haven’t got the same luck Clinton has had, they feel she is in a better position to obscure the landscape and stab them in the back. Trump, on the other hand, promises clear-cut things that cannot be interpreted. They are what they are, he speaks the truth they want to hear. It does not matter whether this truth is true or not, at this point. It resonates with them. Politics, in general is a matter of opinion, in America and much of the Western world.

What about the nurturant parent?

When applied to politics it goes like this: Citizens care about other citizens, they have empathy for other citizens, and the work of the government is to provide public resources for everybody.

If you see here, there is a detachment of self-identity, which the right capitalizes upon to criticize the left. It claims that the left is there to destroy cultural values through opening borders to foreign cultures and letting potentially dangerous illegals inside the country, which would weaken the sense of cultural pride. Of course, sociologically speaking, mutual cooperation is better, but in the political sense, arriving at the dinner table with such a hefty meal is going to make any right-winger skeptic. Questions may go around how is this funded; will my taxes go up; what if other citizens DON’T have empathy for me; what if they don’t want to share?

The thing is, this worldview is a given to the left, but not to the right. “Public” infrastructures have existed since the inception of the U.S., but rarely are they named by progressives when defending public funding programs like the ACA, for example. This lack of explanation of what public services currently DO for the right-wing voter and have done since the beginning of the U.S. apparently goes unmentioned in most cases, says Lakoff.

People don’t see the role of public resources, which are there to run the world economy, to help you in your everyday life, to give you communications, like this interview right now. This is just something that’s never said. When I say this to progressives, they say, “Well, of course that’s true, isn’t that obvious?” The answer is no. It is not obvious, because the next question I ask is, “Have you ever said it?” And the answer is no. The question after that is, “Will you go out from now on and say it?” And I don’t get enthusiastic “Yes!” answers.

Clearly, the difference between the nurturant parent and the strict father approach to morality shape political opinion. It is not enough to provide evidence, actually it may be counter-productive, because you then have to defend why that evidence supports your claim, and then the debate devolves into defending THAT claim henceforth. No, what needs to be said has to be said on philosophical grounds.

My answer to this issue that George Lakoff presents to progressives is to learn once again the art of debating like the sophists of Greece. It is best to question another’s belief than to challenge them with evidence, when it comes to politics, because America has been repeatedly indoctrinated by various presidents to hate specific ideologies that worked contrary to its own institutions. (see: Wilson’s Creel Commission and McCarthyism’s Red Scare propaganda)

They were not facts, they were simply ideas that were being fed to the people, with the threat of a good smacking if they stepped out of line. That sort of reliance on authority is what has shaped Republican politics and it is what has helped Trump get in office, despite the left’s sharpened appeals to evidence. Even now, while Trump is making decreet after decreet, those who elected him are still asking that we wait and see. Why? Because they have faith in him. He represents the strict father avatar they seek. Things will be alright, we all just need a good old kick in the butt and a slap upside the head.

The Socratic Method

It appears to me that the Socratic Method is an ideal tool to bring this to light. Not to convert people to the left, as I believe Lakoff has clearly demonstrated here that resorting to “leftist” argumentation to convince “right-wingers” that they are wrong will only perpetuate the issue further. As America gets poorer and less educated, it is obvious that more and more populations will go the “strict father” route and stop listening to facts and evidence.

Socrates’ method implies to sit down and converse with the person, while hiding your end-goal from them. Ask them questions while aiming them toward that goal. Never reveal your intentions and if they say something utterly false, do not fact-check them on it. Instead, appeal to their cultural identity, appeal to their problems and then question them on that philosophy.

Ex.:

A: “I think Trump is the best candidate because he’ll bring back jobs.”

B: “What jobs are those, exactly?”

A: “They’re coal-mining jobs. I’m out of work and him bringing that back would put me back on the rails. I’ve been cashing in cheques for the last three years.”

B: “Do you think that if green energy contractors came and built a factory in your town, you would still go work there?”

If you see above, B is not trying to alter A’s world-view. He’s just using his own philosophy to make him realize that there are other ways to get A their job back. Now, this is obviously an incomplete fly-over the Method, but if it can help you come up with examples of your own, I’d advise you to practice them next time you come into an argument with someone.

I’ll not hide that I absolutely do not endorse Trump, but I believe this Salon article was an eye-opener for me, as I found most of the time that speaking numbers, figures and evidence hardly ever convinced anyone. It actually made the debate grind to a halt. I’ve had some successes using this sort of mirroring technique, more than I’ve had using fact-checking.

In a way, think of fact-checking as preaching to the choir. What you need to do instead is interrogate and push the boundaries of another person’s beliefs or instead make them realize what they believe to be true is actually uncertain, to the point where they’ll have to think of new possibilities, which are those you may give to them, but never – ever reveal your true intentions.

The Art of Controversy, by Arthur Schopenhauer : Stratagems.

If you want to draw a conclusion, you must not let it be foreseen, but you must get the premisses admitted one by one, unobserved, mingling them here and there in your talk; otherwise, your opponent will attempt all sorts of chicanery. Or, if it is doubtful whether your opponent will admit them, you must advance the premisses of these premisses; that is to say, you must draw up pro-syllogisms, and get the premisses of several of them admitted in no definite order. In this way you conceal your game until you have obtained all the admissions that are necessary, and so reach your goal by making a circuit.

My personal advice is to first get your “opponent” into a position of civil dialogue, so that mutual trust can be created. It is important for me to stress that you should never sound as if you are teaching them something, because they will be able to tell that you are doing what you are doing (see above).

In Conclusion

Philosophy is an art, an art Russell said of “rational conjecture”. As most of moral philosophy is conjecture, I find no method more appropriate than philosophical questioning in order to resolve the left and the right’s false dichotomy. There needs not be a left and a right anymore. I would encourage my readership to try to recognize only humanitarianism vs anti-humanitarianism, as these are the only two positions worth holding in a multicultural world.