motives
For more than 20 years now, I’ve been writing occasionally on the theme of motives, always making the same points:
- Because, as Rebecca West famously said, “There’s no such thing as an unmixed motive,” it’s very hard to tell what anyone’s truly dominant motives are;
- What people actually do is more important than what you think their motives are;
- There’s no reason to think you can understand the motives of others if you don’t have a firm grasp on your own.
I was thinking about that third point especially last night while listening to the most recent episode of FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. The hosts prided themselves on looking into the motives of the people who make polls, but it never occurred to them that their own project might be motivated also.
Some writers in the so-called “rationalist community” will preface their posts or essays with some statement of “confidence interval” or “epistemic status” – Scott Alexander does this, for example. I think everyone who writes about the motives of others should append to their discourse a “personal motive estimation” – an account of what they believe their own motives to be. In the spirit of full disclosure.
engagement
All the main social media companies say they don't promote hate on their platforms and take action to stop it. They each have algorithms that offer us content based on things we've posted, liked or watched in the past. But it's difficult to know what they push to each user.
"One of the only ways to do this is to manually create a profile and seeing the kind of rabbit hole that it might be led down by the platform itself, once you start to follow certain groups or pages," explains social media expert Chloe Colliver, who advised me on the experiment.
So Spring set up a fake account: a man called Barry.
Like my trolls, Barry was mainly interested in anti-vax content and conspiracy theories, and followed a small amount of anti-women content. He also posted some abuse on his profile — so that the algorithms could detect from the start he had an account that used abusive language about women. But unlike my trolls, he didn't message any women directly.
Over two weeks, I logged in every couple of days and followed recommendations, posted to Barry's profiles, liked posts and watched videos.
After just a week, the top recommended pages to follow on both Facebook and Instagram were almost all misogynistic. By the end of the experiment, Barry was pushed more and more anti-women content by these sites — a dramatic increase from when the account had been created. Some of this content involved sexual violence, sharing disturbing memes about sex acts, and content condoning rape, harassment and gendered violence.
As I keep saying: for the social media companies, hatred isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It promotes engagement.
mediocrity and acceptance
This reflection by Tim Stillman articulates a lot of what I, as an often unwilling but helpless Arsenal supporter, have been feeling lately. The petro-plutocrat takeover of Newcastle United adds to the list of clubs that Arsenal will simply not have the financial resources to compete with, and in a weird sort of way that’s a relief. It has been some time since Arsenal could plausibly contend for the Premier League title, but we fans have hoped for a return to the Champions League. Now, as Stillman notes, “What is the ceiling of this project? ‘If things go really well this season, we could finish 5th!’ It’s difficult to get excited about that but, unless there is a change in owners or a change in owner MO at Arsenal, qualifying for the Europa League is what success looks like for Arsenal.” Yep. For the foreseeable future Arsenal will simply be a mid-table side – and it’s strangely nice not to have to think about any higher aspirations.
Those circumstances can improve in one way only: If Stan Kroenke sells the club to some massively rich owner or consortium. (Stillman writes of a change in the Kroenke MO but I don’t consider that even a possibility.) And as frustrated as I have been by the Arsenal ownership, new ownership is probably the one thing that would end my Arsenal fandom – because in the current environment it’s hard to imagine any sufficiently wealthy ownership that doesn’t have the problem that Newcastle’s new owners have: deep entanglement with massive corruption. I prefer mediocrity to that.
Hello old friend
bad dispensations
The idea that we must choose between two intolerant illiberalisms, one on the Right and one on the Left, is, it seems to me, increasingly common today. It was also quite common in the 1930s. For instance, in 1937 the British House of Commons was debating whether or how to intervene in the Spanish Civil War, and a number of M.P.s insisted that it was necessary to choose between the Fascists and the Communists. But one Member of the House replied,
I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazi-ism, I would choose Communism. I hope not to be called upon to survive in the world under a Government of either of those dispensations…. It is not a question of opposing Nazi-ism or Communism; it is a question of opposing tyranny in whatever form it presents itself; and, having a strong feeling in regard to the preservation of individual rights as against Governments, and as I do not find in either of these two Spanish factions which are at war any satisfactory guarantee that the ideas which I personally care about, and to which I have been brought up in this House to attach some importance, would be preserved, I am not able to throw myself in this headlong fashion into the risk of having to fire cannon immediately on the one side or the other of this trouble…. I cannot feel any enthusiasm for these rival creeds.
The Member who so refused to make that choice was Winston Churchill. When many thought that liberalism and democracy were unsustainable, were not long for this world, he stood up for liberalism and democracy anyway. That was the wise course then, and it’s the wise course today.
It is not that the documentary hypothesis is necessarily wrong in substance; Genesis is clearly made up of a number of traditions which have been combined at different stages. But is it not the task of the critic to try and come to grips with the final form as we have it, and to give the final editor or reactor the benefit of the doubt, rather than to delve behind his work to what was there before? The inventors of the documentary hypothesis believed that by trying to distinguish the various strands they were getting closer to the truth, which, in good nineteenth-century fashion, they assumed to be connected with origins. But in practice the contrary seems to have taken place. For their methodology was necessarily self-fulfilling: deciding in advance what the Jahwist or the Deuteronomist should have written, they then called whatever did not fit this view an interpolation. But this leads, as all good readers know, to the death of reading; for a book will never draw me out of myself if I only accept as belonging to it what I have I already decreed should be there.
— Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God (1988)