I saw two stories today that, for me, speak to how poor heuristics and motivated reasoning are used to evaluate trustworthiness.
1) https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/12/politics/video/bill-maher-trump-dinner-meeting-sara-fischer-nr-digvid <https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/12/politics/video/bill-maher-trump-dinner-meeting-sara-fischer-nr-digvid> 2) https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/private-jets-awkward-convos-and-kazakh-vodka-my-most-memorable-interviews/ <https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/private-jets-awkward-convos-and-kazakh-vodka-my-most-memorable-interviews/> Why are people like Maher so easily tricked by the conman-meritocracy? Why does it matter if he thinks there is some “person” there? I have no doubt Trump can change personas in a convincing way. He’s lived a long time and met many people. With people like Maher there is lots of data available on his inclinations, so not hard for Trump to anticipate what he would want to hear. It doesn’t come as a surprise to me that Maher would say something like this. He’s defended his “friend” Ann Coulter too. That tells me he has a category for his friends, and another category for what he thinks is fair and that these don’t need to be reconciled, even in public. The relevant part of the second story (interesting on its own), is the discussion about meeting Musk. I think it is obvious these people aren’t cartoon characters. They are different variants of the BCG consultants. They have succeeded because they are adept at manipulating people. Why this urge to feel comfortable with a personality? Rather be punched in the face than shivved in an alley? Doesn’t it even matter IF there is a track-record of shivving people? A person that is standoffish (e.g. Harris not taking interviews) was automatically going to get you in an alley? She must be “up to something” for being careful in her words? It is the job of politicians to integrate many divergent wishes into policy. Some standoffish behavior is what one should expect from such a person. But too much familiarity is a play and cannot be real. From: Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of Santafe <[email protected]> Date: Saturday, April 12, 2025 at 3:44 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] ‘A huge cudgel’: alarm as Trump’s war on universities could target accreditors | US universities | The Guardian This is a rerun. I watched the original airing as a kid. I was a lot smarter then than I am now, and had a better memory, so I have a pretty good image of the attitudes in the house. But I had no life experience, so I didn’t put meaning to things that happened. The event was of course Reagan’s domino strategy for union busting, and the marks were my parents. They had things they didn’t like about union bosses and organizers. They felt they were demagogues and probably self-dealing. I would guess they were probably right about the incidence of that at about the 60% level. They were both decent judges of character, and very good judges of how to do their jobs well. But they were also company people. They had grown up through the 1950s, when there was still something like a patronage relation between companies and workers, and you could get a decent living and retirement out of that arrangement. So they were a bit too inclined to buy the company’s version of the story, at the expense of being better judges of the local union people they could see. And of course they were applying a picture of how things work that they internalized during the 1950s to the 1980s, when the companies were already unilaterally abandoning it, and workers in self-defense (and with the collaboration of money) were inventing new instruments to try to cover for themselves (IRAs in general, following Jack Bogle’s increase in regulatory transparency of mutual funds, making the “open-end fund” possible, and then later Roth IRAs, etc.) The workers would abandon it altogether in the coming decades, and we are now in a full-scale fight between companies and labor, with only meager islands of collaboration here and there. My parents were also unsophisticated judges of the con. They would not have appreciated Angelica Houston’s line in The Grifters “If he’s not stealing a little, he’s stealing a lot.” So they could spot the small-time conmen recruited into unions from the worker population, but not the ones who had been filtered by a conman-meritocracy to become the Boston Consulting Group consultants (and eventually, all the CEOs) of the companies. Apparently, though, the union organizers must have been doing something else in addition to demagoguing and self-dealing, as the pay-productivity gap after they were gone flatlined worker wages for more than 20 years — surely one of the major macroeconomic features of the late-20th century: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ <https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/> This is again the kind of system-level effect they wouldn’t have seen, just like the Spanish-speaking Catholics in Texas don’t see the public-health effects of sexual-health-ed, and are readily recruited as a choir to defund it, so they can go back to hammering their daughters with abstinence-only guilt, which apparently doesn’t work, since their daughters age into adulthood with much higher prevalence of HPV than the kids who got sexual-health-ed in the appropriate window. (I have interviewed in schools of public health, so I know people who know this and much other data about the most under-valued institution in the society.) Also, I wasn’t reading economists at the time, and I don’t even know if they were writing for the public back then (I mean real economists interested in economic things; not the financial-market gurus who have been a stable on broadcast media since the pleistocene at least). That may have been a thing that grew up as more macroeconomic hardship hit people and there was a more visible readership. So maybe ordinary working people like my parents would not have had avenues to hear anybody forecasting the pay-productivity gap and saying “fix the problem, but spot and don’t fall in with the conmen who aren’t fixing anything”. And of course bad-faith actors don’t fix problems. They use marks like my parents as ballast to run rackets. The thing about trump and his (institutional) enablers is that with them causation isn’t hard to understand at all. It’s _always_ about turning whatever the target is into a racket that feeds back to him (and somewhat to them). It’s the vanity of the power of cruelty, of course, and not only material greed, but effectively the structure is just that of a racket for whichever. I know a younger mathematician in NYC, who seems to me to have an outsized fraction of his motivation coming from ressentiment and something like bitterness. He is plenty smart, but also free in passing judgment (generally negative) on any of the groups of which he was once a sort-of member but not now. I often agree down to details on his assessments of which things are problems, but my assessment of their relative weights is usually the opposite of his. I think he would happily match DaveW’s assessment of the relative magnitudes of baby and bathwater in current accreditation systems, whereas I would more-than-reverse it. But then I work in departments, and with cohorts of students, who _all_ can read, who mostly can either do math or run biological instrumentation, either of which is a good skill, and many of whom can code and thus think algorithmically. The accreditation systems have, as far as I can tell, had the equivalent of a public-health effect on the institutions that educated these kids, and done a tolerable job of giving them skills to be needed by and useful to somebody. Some of them, because they are good kids, also use the skills to recognize meaningful things in their general lives and the world around them. I can _easily_ imagine a world where all that is gone, and the kinds of people who would come through the alternative. We all remember Trofim Lysenko, though he didn’t end up lasting all that long, as such things go. It can be much wider and much worse, and could become so. Eric > On Apr 13, 2025, at 1:38 AM, Prof David West <[email protected]> wrote: > > As a retired university professor who participated in six different > accreditation reviews (and led two), I have some pretty strong, and > vehemently negative, opinions of accrediting agencies. This was before they > mandated standards, policies, and procedures for DEI—Trump's target. Like > HOAs, Accreditors have absolute power to set arbitrary (or worse, faddish) > standards that have nothing to do with quality of educators or education. > Compliance requires the addition of administrative staff, exacerbating the > imbalance between admin and faculty. A compliance visit is hugely expensive, > from $100,000 to $500,000 per visit—every four years, and that is just what > you have to pay the accreditors. It does not include the time for faculty and > staff to gather data and prepare reports; effort that had no value other than > to "check a box." > > I do not agree with the motives for attacking accreditors, and will admit > that there might be a tiny baby in an ocean of bathwater, but I will not > mourn their demise. > > davew > > > On Sat, Apr 12, 2025, at 10:44 AM, Tom Johnson wrote: >> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/11/trump-war-on-universities >> <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/11/trump-war-on-universities> >> >> ======================= >> Tom Johnson >> Inst. for Analytic Journalism >> Santa Fe, New Mexico >> 505-577-6482 >> ======================= >> .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / >> ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom >> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam <https://bit.ly/virtualfriam> >> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >> <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com> >> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >> <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> >> archives: 5/2017 thru present >> https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ >> <https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/> >> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ >> <http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/> >> > > .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... > --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,bNMQVLXGy9r1i-Ls4jYE7GFnTTdDNSmsXCi_xeP0wdtVTeh6WW98ryQZRNDXVUbuutF4c6Pi7D_ii3bFjQRufQMvPz9vOtbIKPO4kaETiyFxu6nFlD4c0w,,&typo=1 > > <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,bNMQVLXGy9r1i-Ls4jYE7GFnTTdDNSmsXCi_xeP0wdtVTeh6WW98ryQZRNDXVUbuutF4c6Pi7D_ii3bFjQRufQMvPz9vOtbIKPO4kaETiyFxu6nFlD4c0w,,&typo=1> > to (un)subscribe > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,9bwBomyevzpHdmre32Z1XDu4HK7epGfYV17Pecoky_F1Is0DghTouVepAAf0Amj404PuRUvHefKTgAhKlbRNwND3Uh6migMuuXQPwEivFJkQjsjORqMY53U,&typo=1 > > <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,9bwBomyevzpHdmre32Z1XDu4HK7epGfYV17Pecoky_F1Is0DghTouVepAAf0Amj404PuRUvHefKTgAhKlbRNwND3Uh6migMuuXQPwEivFJkQjsjORqMY53U,&typo=1> > FRIAM-COMIC > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,wnSzjwajzVSeZZALkeXcpm45N1C-0yNB1YzVQSB3FlbkpnyJ2A9ZEPx361nmC3u4VM1PFNidgY5dbZ5CWtNAs3Arr2VbUo5QxZsv6nyN5g,,&typo=1 > > <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,wnSzjwajzVSeZZALkeXcpm45N1C-0yNB1YzVQSB3FlbkpnyJ2A9ZEPx361nmC3u4VM1PFNidgY5dbZ5CWtNAs3Arr2VbUo5QxZsv6nyN5g,,&typo=1> > archives: 5/2017 thru present > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fpipermail%2ffriam_redfish.com%2f&c=E,1,MrGqgBetrdclALhvJCUlvSHg5lM_NvUy36-0nkjKo82HWx6iitiPMpRBGCHSNGJj0rms9XCnvLSmy560g4zFlN0zmHp9uDotCuHZVvu6&typo=1 > > <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fpipermail%2ffriam_redfish.com%2f&c=E,1,MrGqgBetrdclALhvJCUlvSHg5lM_NvUy36-0nkjKo82HWx6iitiPMpRBGCHSNGJj0rms9XCnvLSmy560g4zFlN0zmHp9uDotCuHZVvu6&typo=1> > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ > <http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/> .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. 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