OK, back to all the efforts now under way to combat “voter fraud” just for a minute. We’ve said before that the frequency of actual voter fraud —at least of the kind these measures are purportedly intended to prevent — is so small as to be statistically insignificant, and that remains true. From Mother Jones;
While defending its precedent-setting photo ID law before the Supreme Court, Indiana was unable to cite a single instance of voter impersonation in its entire history.
A 2005 report by the American Center for Voting Rights claimed there were more than 100 cases of voter fraud involving 300,000 votes in 2004. A review of the charges turned up only 185 votes that were even potentially fraudulent.
In support of a voter ID law, Kansas Secretary of State (and the legal brains behind a slew of anti-immigration laws) Kris Kobach cited 221 incidents of voter fraud in the state between 1997 and 2010. Yet those cases produced just 7 convictions—none related to impersonating other voters.
Last December, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus declared that Wisconsin is “absolutely riddled with voter fraud.” In fact, the state’s voter fraud rate in 2004 was 0.0002 percent—just 7 votes.
In 2008, John McCain said fraudulent registrations collected by ACORN were “one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” The Congressional Research Service found no proof that anyone improperly registered by ACORN tried to vote.
Federal convictions for election fraud, 2002-05
- Voting while ineligible: 18
- Voting multiple times: 5
- Registration fraud: 3
And this, to add a little context;
Between 2000 and 2010, there were:
649 million votes cast in general elections
47,000UFO sightings
441 Americans killed by lightning
13 credible cases of in-person voter impersonation
And now this little demographic snapshot, which should be considered in the context of the new voter laws being overwhelmingly the result of GOP pressure;
There’s more at the MoJo link, all involving new rules about ID requirements, registration restrictions, early voting, felony records and etc. etc. Every single demographic group most likely to be inconvenienced is a group statistically more likely to vote democrat.
Any questions?
“Any questions?”
Yes, but I’m Thinking Big(tm) today, so I’ll call it a meta-question. Does anybody here think that anybody’s beliefs about this matter can be changed by exposure to facts?
I don’t. I think people are already more or less split between those who have looked it up and those whose minds were made up the instant they heard someone holler “Breaking News!”
And I’m not inclined (this morning) to limit the latter to Bill O’Reilly fans and Drudge-ites. Mother Jones may be a source of hard facts on this one, but they’re more than capable printing story after story based entirely on what All Good People Just Know To Be True (in, say, what I’ve come to think of as the Naomi Wolfiverse.)
Here, to me anyway, is the problem in a nutshell — from CNN, The Worldwide Leader in News. (The link, in case you miss it, is called “Linking the ‘God particle’ to Bieber.”)
Gunnison & Natasha:
Wow, you guys are cynical. (Which is why I’m here.)
The God Particle:
More interested myself in the God Article: Is it “A” or “The”? Do “No” and “Those” (as in “those people”) count?
Nat, they’ve come up with a new label for your Big(tm) Thought. They’re calling it Motivated Reasoning<® now.
Goes like this: all of us sentient humans think that we see a problem (especially a social problem), find out the facts surrounding the problem, then make a decision about the wisest and most efficient way to address that problem.
In fact, apparently almost none of us do that.
What we do is look around, make a visceral, intuitive and unwitting judgement about which group, among those we can identify, with which we want to be associated and hang out. Then we only 'see' the 'facts' that tend to help us agree with the stance that group has already staked out.
Which suggests that if you want to change people's minds, you're right, don't bother arguing with them. They aren't listening. Instead make your group more alluring to the viscera of the members of the other group who seem most loosely attached. It's not about convincing them with stats and logic and history and numbers, it's about making them feel like they want to come hang out with you. Once you've done that, their brains will do all the rest of the work.
that was not supposed to be all in italics!
Bluth,
We’ll, I think there are maybe three respectable species of idiocy at work here, and then there’s a fourth I’ve lazily sold myself on.
It’s almost a century and a half since Josh Billings defined one of them by saying, “I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so”, and set off an orgy of misquoting that shows no signs of slowing down yet. (He also said. “wisdom don’t consist in knowing more that is new, but in knowing less that is false” and “what little I do know I hope I am certain of,” but those are clearly inferior variants or they’d have been stolen far more than they have been.) He was speaking to the element of subjective certainty that is always present when social views are simply self-evident.
Then there’s the technique of searching for facts to bolster one’s already implacable views, which probably started in Eden but which was well documented by the 5th century BCE. You couldn’t be a Sophist or argue against one if you didn’t see that practice for what it is (or at least for how it works). Fooling oneself in this way may not be human nature itself but it might as well be.
This Motivated Reasoning ™ of yours seems to date back no later than the ’90s, which confuses me. I could have sworn kids were asking themselves what the popular crowd wanted them to think, say and do even a decade or more before then, but maybe that just shows how the mind wanders when we get old. But shame on us if we didn’t register the trademark back when we still could.
I accept all of it but I have a much easier, private explanation that I find myself relying on more and more. It’s very simple.
Doing pushups when we’re out of shape hurts. Running half a mile when we’re out of shape not only hurts but is in fact impossible. Making a decent Béarnaise sauce when we’ve forgotten how is not only impossible but is likely to get exceedingly painful the more we persist in trying. And trying to think after years of one’s retirement from thinking is the most painful thing of all, and utterly useless to boot without a long course of patient and hurtful rehabilitation.
So when somebody tells me that they know some allegedly fact-based thing to be true without examining it in the slightest, I tend to take it for granted that they’re admitting to falling back on the only kind of mentality they’ve left themselves in their voluntary decrepitude.
Nat,
Only thing ‘new’ the Motivated Reasoning ™ crowd have added is an evo-devo twist. They’re asserting that humans do not refuse to think for themselves out of fear or because of laziness or lack of practice at all, but rather that the human brain has evolved this kind of selective willful blindness because humans who are better at Motivated Reasoning ™ tend to get more offspring into the next generation and establish them in good positions in that generations breeding hierarchy.
Interesting article in the mid-July New Yorker about a company called Oxitec which has developed a genetically modified version of the Aedes aegypti mosquito to combat dengue virus (which is a seriously nasty and often enough fatal disease for which there is no known treatment). They insert a gene that makes any offspring die before they reach maturity, along with another gene that turns off the first gene so long as they mosquito gets tetracycline in its diet. They breed them, discard the females (only sex that bites) and release the males. Which impregnate as many wild type females as they can before they die. Eggs hatch and young, not finding any tetracycline in the wild diet, die before they reach the biting or breeding stage. If all goes well no genetically modified mosquito will bite any human. And, in the Americas at least, Aedes aegypti is an introduced exotic species, so killing it off doesn’t mess with any indigenous food web, etc.
Where we get back to Motivated Reasoning ™ is the contrast between the attempts to use the genetically modified mosquitoes in two different communities: one is a poor Brazilian backwater, the other is Key West. Both places have dengue now (though there have only so far been scores of cases in Key West). In Brazil, the scientists talk to the villagers, who seem to be able to weigh up the pros and cons with calm deliberation. They get that there is always a risk of unknown unintended consequences, but that the chemicals otherwise used to spray for the mosquitoes are not made of mud and daisies, and aren’t effective enough, and they plump for releasing the altered males.
In Key West, however, many of the the much richer, presumably far more ‘educated’ residents, only have to see the words ‘genetically modified’ and ‘science’ and they go ape shit. Assume it’s all about giant multinational Monsanto type evil-for profit trying to use them for guinea pigs. (Oxitec is, apparently, a very small company dependent entirely on charitable grants).
But thinking about Motivated Reasoning ™ sheds a slightly different light, to my eyes in any case, on the granola grumpies. Yes, I think they are being stupid. Perhaps even suicidally stupid (or at least murderously stupid, because odds are dengue will hit their tourist clientele as hard or, given the numbers, harder than it will hit their own community if an epidemic takes off, which it could do at, really, any moment.) But look at it from their eyes. Most of them probably have ended up in Key West not just to get away from The Man, but to hang out with other people who wanted to get away from The Man. Agreeing to release FrankenBugs® into their own little patch of (simulated) anarchica is just… not the kind of thing people like themselves would do. So they risk not only cognitive dissonance, anxiety about who they are and what they stand for, they risk getting kicked out of the group they have taken so long to find and cultivate. So of course they can’t hear the calm and reasoned and fact-based sense that the nice man from Oxitec, who only wants to stop them and their guests (and source of livelihood) from dying.
But then maybe the guy from Oxitec was the the stupid one. Maybe he needed to approach the Key West community differently from the Brazilians. Maybe he needed to identify one or two tastemakers/opinion shapers among the granola grumpies and give them a chance to understand the science without the threat of having to be seen to make a decision about it in front of their community. Maybe the way to change people’s minds with facts isn’t just about presenting the facts to them, but also to do so in such a way as they have time and space to absorb the facts without feeling that they are betraying their group, or even seeming to betray their group by not immediately jumping up and down and shouting BAD BAD BAD GO AWAY!
(Also maybe the Oxitec guy should have worn flip flops. He was an Oxford geek, he probably wore strange shades of beige and greasy black-strapped leather sandals with thin polyester blend strangely beige socks.)
If the Motivated Reasoning ™ people are even partly right, even if it’s about an evolved, hard-wired adaptation to get us more young’uns, those of us past breeding age would still be in on the game. By allowing our powers of thinking to become sclerotic we reinforce the group imperative, even on our still fecund younger members, to put group cohesion above individual independent thought.
Of course we may then all end up dead from dengue. Or a global heating. Or -seen from the other side- from being overrun by dark hordes. Or put up against the wall and shot by Kenyan commie fascists who hate our freedoms.
I’m also thinking there comes a point in life where a body has to choose between Bearnaise sauce and jogging. Not that there is any rational reason why that should be so, it’s just, well…. what happens.
Why bother? Sounds like a weaponizing technique.
BTW Bluthner – MR fits CiF and just about every other blog site to a T
Expat, if they don’t turn the gene off the male mosquitoes will die soon as they are hatched. Need to keep the genetically implanted arsenic tablet uncrunched until he has grown up had his way with as many wild females as possible. His sperm passes on the arsenic tablet to his offspring, who hatch and, not finding any tetracycline in the wild diet, soon drop dead.
So it is a weapon, yes, directed against Aedes aegypti, but surely that’s a good thing.
As for Motivated Reasoning ™, it fits to a T just about every human activity involving argumentation I can think of, except of course us here on Gunny’s site. This place being one of the most rare and beautiful examples of ongoing, pure and untainted-with-preconception Socratic inquiry extant on the planet.
Doh! Thanks for that Bluthner. It’s still early here. More coffee needed
Bluth,
I suppose I should look a little further into this Motivated Reasoning™ of yours. The few minutes I’ve spent so far aren’t enough to distinguish it from the hottest bugaboo of my (’65 – ’69) college days, which we knew as “groupthink.” The main difference I get is mostly one of tone: groupthink-heads tended to concentrate explicitly on policy making, while MR™ seems to use a broader brush.
Groupthink was announced in 1952 by William H. Whyte (author of “The Organization Man”) in an article in Fortune. He said of it,
In 1972 (way too late, because I’d already been declared forever and fully educated) a man named Irving Janis more or less took groupthink over. Here’s a short quote, which doesn’t hint at the extent of his speculations:
He went on to describe several disastrous policy decisions (Pearl Harbor, The Bay of Pigs and the Viet Nam war) as examples of groupthink in action.
This ain’t a bad overview at all.
By coincidence I saw a couple of great examples concerning mosquitoes when I was contracting to an ag-chem company in the late ‘70s. They had some really nasty plant and bug killers and some safer ones they found harder to license (if it killed people outright, you could just slap a skull-and-crossbones on the label and sell away; if it might take 20 years of eating a gallon a day to kill you, no warning was good enough.)
But they also had a couple of really innovative studies going relating to mosquito control. One explored spraying ponds and such with mosquito growth hormone. This led to premature adulthood, and the adults were sterile. The other concerned synthesizing female mosquito pheromones and embedding them in wax blocks, which could be scattered about. These blocks would flood the air with mosquito love potion; the males, aroused beyond control, would thrash about helplessly, unable to follow the trail to a waiting mosquito wench: what a truly horrible way to die…
The EPA tried (so they said) for years to dream up a test they could use on these ideas, but they never could think of one and both projects died. Their problem, you see, was that neither mosquito growth hormones nor mosquito pheromones pose the least danger to anything but mosquitoes, and so their relative degree of threat to humans and animals was simply impossible to quantify.
I like the idea of this to zap mosquitoes
Nat,
Groupthink is something your Mr Whyte identified as malign and counterproductive.
Motivated Reasoning is posited (I think the book is called The Righteous Brain) as an impulse with a use, ie favoring reproduction of those who do it, and the better survival of their offspring.
Both describe the same impulse, of course, but the Motivated Reasoning people are looking for driving cause. Presumably in a spirit of ‘if we can understand why we behave this way we might be able to think of a way to stop doing it for fuck’s sake.’
And that growth hormone idea: I’m sure I saw a 10 little indians type B horror flick about a hundred years ago where a group of attractive young people go for a weekend to a house in the middle of a swamp where exactly that kind of stuff is being tested.
You know what happens, right? Yup: giant insects of all kinds munch them up one by one (but usually the women’s shirts come off first, sort of thing).
Bluth,
Re: the documentary you saw. That’s probably what happened and the company covered it up. They were always doing stuff like that. The president, totally deadpan, once asked the EPA whether he could get a maybe-possibly-carcinogenic-if-you-took-a-bath-in-it product licensed if he put enough poison in it to kill people on contact (like some products we had no problem selling). The EPA, equally deadpan, replied that you only get to do that if the poison you add is what actually kills the bugs.