Prof David West wrote circa 10-10-14 03:06 PM: > Another dimension -- various watchdog groups report on the veracity > of the attack ads, and these get reported on the news occasionally. > It would also be interesting to see if this kind of "objective > reporting" influences the degree to which people believe the attacks > and/or how it affects the relative credibility mudslinger and > muddied.
Yes, definitely. I often see (repeated) references to factcheck.org and such in various political forums. But it never seems to make much difference. And I wonder how one would test this sort of thing. I have seen the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Yale/Santa Clara experiments on torture. It seemed in those cases like the accredited people in the white lab coats had a pretty big influence. But those involve heavy face-to-face influence. It seems like there are two sides to the coin. One side is: "You can't believe anything you read." And the other side is: "You shouldn't believe everything you read." "Facts" are abstract, noetic things and seem to have little influence compared to the visceral presence of an authority figure. Perhaps this is also related to the blurring between personal and national finances and the ascription of the former to the latter. I heard a radio program this morning talking about how some politician somewhere believes homosexuality is a choice. The program subsequently played some "man-in-the-street" interviews of people asking them if they thought homosexuality was a choice. Of those that said they thought it was a choice, a follow-up question was: "When did you choose to be a heterosexual?" You could _hear_ the wood burning as they worked out their intellectual conflict. But many of them actually talked out their answer... it was as if them hearing their own progression of proto-answers lead them in a direction. My inference is that the feedback loop of speaking and listening to yourself is a (at least one) way to knead contradiction out of your ideological position. It's less clear how abstract "facts" would help and more clear how being forced to _act_ and _sense_ hammers it out. lrudo...@meganet.net wrote circa 10-10-14 04:28 PM: > On 14 Oct 2010 at 14:56, glen e. p. ropella wrote: > >> I suppose the former is _useful_ in the sense that it decreases >> Lee's credibility (because he calls things he dislikes "shit") and >> may, in fact, make Joseph's work more attractive. > > Why in the world should my calling things I dislike "shit" > decrease my credibility? Excellent question! I can't really answer for others, short of doing the research Nick suggests (attempting to explain why negative ads drag the shooter down, albeit less down than the shot). But for myself, I see explanatory statements as the minimum of respect. For example, in your first response, you merely called that periodical a piece of shit during some overlap of Epstein's tenure editing it. But in your second response, you gave a partial explanation by pointing out an apparent non sequitur. Even though merely pointing out that non sequitur is not very explanatory, it's at least _some_ finer detail. That finer detail is what I typically think of as "constructive" criticism. It's something the author might be able to use to make future product better. Those of us who continually offer opaque comments like "it's a piece of shit" without significant hints as to how to improve the work (regardless of whether the producer is in the audience or not) are less credible than those who offer such hints. However, it's important to separate out a simple "X is useful as a collaborator or sounding board" versus "X is credible". There are lots of examples of people being constructive without increasing their credibility. So, what I say above is necessary (for me) but not sufficient. The _character_ of the finer grained explanations also have to carry some density or depth. For me, this tends to show up when a critic shows that they've read what I've written "with empathy", i.e. they spent enough time reading and thinking for their criticism to target what I'm actually talking about rather than whatever convenient basin of attraction their mind might have been in at the time they read it. Such deeper/denser criticism increases the credibility of the critic. And empty, useless criticism decreases the credibility of the critic. Your first response was empty; hence it decreases your credibility. Your second response, identifying the non sequitur, increased your credibility, somewhat, but only in proportion to the density of that criticism. Merely identifying a non sequitur isn't very deep; but at least it's something. >> Because this discussion is about credibility, > > So, if you are willing, I invite to describe or define your notion of > "credibility", how it functions in communication, and so on. I do > think it's potentially interesting (and it seems clear that what you > mean by it is not what I think I'd mean by it, if I were pressed to > accept the invitation I just gave you. Well, I provided some of that in a previous post in this thread. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.region.new-mexico.santa-fe.friam/13725 If that's inadequate, which it likely is, I can throw more words at it. > A distinct and (I think) very important difference between > advertisements (political or not) and conversations (including > asynchronous ones on mailing lists) is that advertisements are > all push, no pull. This suggests (I think correctly) that any > such dynamic as you identify in advertisements is very unlikely > to exist in the same (or even a highly similar) way in conversations. > I'm more interested in the case of conversations but I understand > that many people are interested in advertisements too. I'm not sure there is such a stark distinction between push media like TV or newspapers or, even, books. Being naive, I tend to think others are like me. When I watch TV or read something with no opportunity to talk back, I have this (these?) little voice(s) in my head that continually comments on what I'm reading/seeing. Sometimes I even write down what that voice says. This is why I typically buy (important) books rather than check them out from the library. I tend to write in the margins... in pencil... but still. ;-) The "conversation" in such contexts isn't with the author so much as it is with myself, my future self, and anyone who happens to tolerate later discussions around a pint at the pub. I've even been known to bring some of my annotated papers and books _back_ after a thorny conversation at the pub. So, although I agree with you that these negative ads are push with little chance for feedback, I still think they are part of a larger "conversation". Nicholas Thompson wrote circa 10-10-14 05:42 PM: > If you look at poling figures in realclearpolitics.com you can see > the effect of extensive advertising on the public. Assume that > everybody is using negative adds in the last two weeks. Watch the > curves move. > > The conventional wisdom is that negative advertising drags the > shooter down with the target, but that it drags the target down > more. > > Don't know if its true. There must be some data somewhere on this sort of thing. Perhaps this is an effect of, or at least related to, the rise of electronic media? I know there are studies of abstraction (e.g. anonymity) and the tendency for abstraction to allow (or even reward) insults, harsh empty rhetoric, etc. In what sort of scientific journal would this sort of thing be published? "Journal of Sociology"? Psychology? Or is it one of those (suspect) domains of "new media" or somesuch? Vladimyr Ivan Burachynsky wrote circa 10-10-15 01:06 PM: > now that I watch political debates without sound, I realize why > Americans are acting like idiots. Everyone one debates sub vocally by > condemning eachother "Saying someone's work is a piece of shit" > > Television has ruined discourse, thank god for the mute button. I love > watching Anne Coulter I swear we could analyze her body gestures and come to > some fascinating conclusions about the superior communication style she is > hailed as representing. "Saying someone's work is a piece of shit" is the > new standard. Hm. My knee-jerk reaction is to agree with you wholeheartedly. But because I couldn't reply immediately, I had time to think it over. (How appropriate, eh? ;-) It seems to me that you're right in saying that modern communication skills are somehow different from those of the past. Abstracting media like Facebook or TV definitely change the way we communicate. But I'm not sure it's reflective of idiocy or that it's _ruined_ discourse. Perhaps it's just changed it and older people will see the change more negatively than younger people? The idea of Ann Coulter as a highly skilled performance artist is repulsive to me; but I'm open-minded enough to consider it. (You know what they say: "If you're mind is too closed, nothing gets in. If you're mind's too open, nothing stays in.") Of course, those of us steeped in the old ways are going to look at the new ways as foreign... those of us with the ability/energy will give constructive commentary and may even try to engage. Those of us without such ability/energy will just yell "You kids! Get off my lawn!" and return to whatever it was we'd been doing for the last hundred years. I tend to think, however, that what you're talking about is a very old trick practiced by confidence men and gurus everywhere. The judicious use and interpretation of body language is probably of the same genus as baring one's teeth, pounding one's chest, or puffing out your fur. We've been doing it as long as we've had eyeballs. That Ann Coulter succeeds in her confidence trick is the amazing part to me, just as it is amazing that people get away with flat out calling other peoples' work "shit" or calling other people "idiots". That Vizzini line from The Princess Bride comes to mind: "Have you ever heard of Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? ... Morons!" That statement clearly lowers Vizzini's credibility more than it would ever lower the credibility of Plato, Aristotle, or Socrates. ;-) > I have been fascinated by a similarity of body gestures of Muslim clerics > versus American fundamentalist preachers. I have not worked out those > details but will let you know what I learn. Interesting! I used to love listening to preachers on the radio. In some ways, probably because our ears are such fine-grained devices, oration is more powerful than body language. But I'd never really thought of watching for similar tricks in TV preachers. Of course, listening to a voice on the radio is powerful for the same reasons reading can be more powerful than movies. Your mind has more freedom to fill in the blanks. Of course, it also has more freedom to be critical of what's actually there, only what's observable. As with the fiction vs. fact part of the thread earlier, what we do with our mind _while_ engaged in the reading, TV watching, radio listening, or during a conversation is what determines what we take home from such things. I think the same is probably true of e-mail and Facebook. > So just what does it mean to be "Credible" when it can be dismantled as > easily as making a "Stinky Face" or "Saying someone's work is a piece of > shit"? Credibility is very fragile and delicate. I lean toward critical rationalism (Popperian falsifiability). Credibility comes at the _end_ of our evaluation, not at the beginning. It's become important to me to let anyone bring any idea or any object to the table with as little pre-judice as possible. Anything is allowed to enter the competition. It's what comes out the other end that matters. So, for me, credibility doesn't come at the _start_ of anything. It only builds (or degrades) over time and through effort.... at least that's what I like to _think_. ;-) -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
