Preference falsification hides what people really believe

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:22:58

   Yeah. Like maybe we can get back a little bit more. I thought it was that book is a very positive step forward. It's just a little bit of a calmer approach on these things. And then, by the way, the other book I'd promote on that is the Ezra Klein book on abundance. Yeah. Which I think is I think is, you know, somebody who support a lot of Democrats for a long time. I think it's like the most positive, you know, kind of manifesto that's come out basically saying, you know, no, like we need, you know, whether you're on the right or the left, like we need to actually build things. And I think that's also a healthy moment. So sort of related to this topic a little bit adjacent. But I saw you talking about preference falsification recently.

2. 1:23:27

   And I think this is like a super interesting topic in general, but particularly in the last, I don't know, call it five-ish years, I think a lot of preference falsification became made apparent. So I'd be curious first to hear a little bit about what you think happened over the last some number of years where these changes happened. Maybe we can start there and then I've got to follow up on it. Yeah, so preference falsification, just a sketch and outline, it's when people, it's actually, there's two different elements of it.

3. 1:23:55

   it's when people are required to say something in public that they don't actually believe or they are prohibited from saying something in public that they do believe, right? So again, so commission, omission issues. And then the theory of it, there's this great book by Timur Karan on it. The theory of it basically is it's easy to think about what this happens in the case of a single person, which is, are you telling the truth?

4. 1:24:14

   Or is there your public statements mirroring what you actually think or not? The thing that gets complicated is when that happens across a group or across a society. And the thing that happens is if there's widespread preference, falsification of society, you not only have people lying about what they actually think or hiding it, but you also, everybody loses the ability to actually know what the distribution abuse are.

5. 1:24:32

   Yeah. Right? And he says, basically, if you look at the history of political revolutions, a political revolution happens when a majority of the country realizes that a majority of the country actually agrees with them. And they didn't realize it, right? So that whatever system they were in had convinced them that they were in a very small minority. And then you get, at some point, there's, you know, the boy who points out- It's like a catalyst.

6. 1:24:51

   There's a catalyst, catalytic moment. And then basically, there's what's called a preference cascade. Right. And then all of a sudden- It's like the correct prisoner's dilemma's box to live in. all of a sudden flips everybody realizes that at once yes exactly and and he said you can see this in um you can see this like in a crowd with like a speaker controversial speaker where basically like you'll have a controversial speaker and then there'll be silence in the crowd and then one brave person will start clapping and that person is like at severe peril because if they're the only asshole standing up clapping yeah that's it they might get killed yeah but then if if it cascades then a second person starts clapping and then a third and a fourth and a fifth and then you get the snowballing effect and then the entire auditorium is clapping and then and then that's

7. 1:25:27

   everybody realizing that they actually are on the side of the majority which they didn't realize yeah for by the way this is what comedy this is actually why comedy so much is what comedy does well because people can't control the involuntary response right yeah exactly so when you get an entire group of people in a room laughing out loud at something that individually they will all swear they can't help that funny they can't help that's a great point and then the stress relief from that because they all know that they're part of it they've rebonded the community right you're you're actually back and being a part of a community and it's just such an incredibly powerful feeling yeah yeah okay so so it's very easy to apply this theory to like the soviet union right or like the you know the the the you know the eastern europe you know um in the

8. 1:26:05

   cold war or whatever yeah um you know mao is china it's a lot you know trickier to apply this theory to you know your current society i believe that you know we've lived in an era of like intense preference falsification i think the last five years yeah probably the last 10 years were like way more intense preference falsification than the preceding yeah 40 at least um you know probably going back to i don't even know i have to go for sure back to the 60s if not like the 1920s or something to find an analogous period i think this period was characterized both by people who were saying things they didn't believe but critically not saying things they didn't believe yeah i think there are many reasons this happened um and look this has happened many times in history and so a lot of people want to say this is caused by social media right well when you

9. 1:26:43

   phrase it the way that you said it actually makes a lot of sense when it's just if people are going to be in a part of this prisoner's dilemma matrix it actually just gets caused by nothing other than itself like it doesn't really need an outside catalyst for people to get into the wrong box that's true although there needs i know it's a good question or does there need to be some kind of oppression does there need to be some kind of motivation for for the for the cascade to have started where people end up in that box it's a social pressure so yeah specifically i think the thing that happened the last five years was i guess it needs to be a high stakes enough issue for it to matter otherwise it's just like who cares whether you think like the clouds are pretty or not yeah that's right so at least has to be that yeah and the way i think team mccrion would

10. 1:27:22

    describe it is it needs to have like political social cultural salience yeah like it needs to get to something fundamental about how the community is organized you know we call we call that politics but you know this this predates even the concept of politics right and so um and by the way look like you don't even necessarily want to say that all preference falsification is bad because like you know i don't know that you want everybody out telling the truth about everything I don't think you do. I think at least in like a social, like a lot of social graces come from people saying it's great to meet you when I didn't feel like saying it was great to meet you.

11. 1:27:48

    Your baby, I believe your baby is very effective. Yeah, exactly. So some of it's good. So, yeah, but yeah, as your point, you get wedged in this box. And so I think the specific thing that happened, so the good news is preference falls. in a lot of totalitarian societies was administered at the point of a gun. You say the wrong thing, they shoot you. That, for the most part, is not what happens in our society.

12. 1:28:07

    What happens in our society is the sort of nonviolent version, which is ostracized, canceled, ostracized, reputation is ruined, fired, become unhirable, lose all your friends, lose all your family, can't ever work again. Still really bad. Still really bad. That's what you said. It sounds pretty bad. Very bad. And it just turned out, I think part of, you know, the optimistic view would be part of adapting to the existence of social media was social media just turned out to be, among other things, a very effective channel to destroy people reputationally, right?

13. 1:28:34

    And this is the social media mobbing effect, right, that we're now all familiar with. And you think that helped create basically more false preferences? Yeah, big time. Do you think it also unwound them? Well, so this is the thing. This is maybe the thing that happened in the 2024 election, right, which is just like, oh, okay, we don't have to live this way anymore. You know, certain certain views become safer to say out loud. Also, the censorship regime, like we lived under a very specific censorship regime.

14. 1:28:56

    Even in tech for 2024, election versus 2016, regardless of what you think and who you wanted, at least everybody can agree that it was taboo to support Trump in 16 and it was not taboo to support Trump in 2024 in tech. And so something changed there. Something changed. Peter had this great line in 2016. He said, because he was one of the only people, you know, maybe the only person in tech who was actually pro-Trump in 2016.

15. 1:29:18

    And he said, he said, this is so strange. He says, this is the least controversial contrarian thing I've ever done. He's like, half the country agrees with me. He's like, I've never had a point of view on anything else in my entire life where half the country agrees with me. Yeah. And yet somehow this is such a heresy that I'm like the only one. Yeah. Right. And so, yeah. So, so, so there was that, that, that definitely changed. And then I just think in general, like I said, I think they're optimistically just say there's a process of adaptation, right. Where it's just like, all right, we're just like, if, if we all just decide that we're just not going to like live life by mobbing and scapegoating and personal destruction. And just because somebody is offended by something doesn't mean it's going to destroy it. You know, somebody says one thing, it's going to destroy their lives. Like we don't, you know, you don't have to do that.

16. 1:29:56

    Do you think it's basically been unwound now or do you think there are still a lot of falsified preferences? I would say it's radically different than it was two years ago. I would say there's still a lot of falsified preferences. But again, I would say I think probably in any healthy society there's lots of falsified preferences. Do you have any guesses for something that is currently falsified that will become unfalsified or is too hard to call it?

17. 1:30:17

    Sure. Yeah. Sure. Okay, great. But it's far too dangerous to say. We'll move on. Yeah. Dang. Gosh. But again, when you ask that, that is a very key question. here's what i encourage break the fourth wall yeah here's what i would encourage people to do here's the thought experiment to do just write down two leaves in the middle of the night with nobody around doors locked write it down a piece of paper and let's pull it out in 10 years well write down a piece of paper two lists what are the things that i believe that i can't say and then what are the things that i don't believe that i must say and just write it down yeah and i bet you know if you're a reasonably introspective person that you know the quote-unquote npcs can't do this but like if you're a reasonably introspective person yeah um you know most of us

18. 1:30:56

    probably have 10 20 30 things on both sides of that ledger right and again most of those are things where you gotta you know i don't know like you don't want anybody ever see that piece of paper maybe five or ten years from now we'll be back and everybody can reopen their papers and we'll see and it'll be safe to say whatever people wrote down at that point exactly okay um a few