Guest post: The re-enforcement mechanism is very clear
Originally a comment by latsot on Where are the skeptics?
Harald Hanche-Olsen@22ish
Your point reminds me of the characterisation of social media as Skinner Boxes, which I’ve written about here before. The re-enforcement mechanism is very clear and obviously designed to encourage people to take increasingly outspoken positions in the everlasting hunt for likes as returns diminish.
And of course once you’ve gone down one trouser leg of validation, it’s rather hard to come back. I don’t think the sunk cost fallacy is quite up to describing this effect because the increasing apparent conviction is based on diminishing returns for increasingly wild claims.
This is the only explanation I can come up with for the constant over-reaching of gender identity ideology and politics. If activists were to say, for instance, that TWAW is a linguistic argument; that we should change what “woman” means because of some greater good, then we’d have something to talk about. I wouldn’t agree, but we’d have the basis of a good argument about how to determine public policy, at least.
But that doesn’t happen. If arguments like that are ever made, they are motte-and-bailey’s or switched bait.
To make an actual, coherent, evidenced, logical argument, the proponent would have to inch back up toward the… er.. crotch of the trousers of validation (I now regret making that analogy). Every step in that direction loses more in terms of validation than even the decreasing returns gain in heading to the turn-ups (these are 80s trousers, in my analogy).
This is an obvious weakness of human brains. Arty talked about it in the latest Mess as brains being hacked by arseholes. The way it’s done could well be as simple as diminishing returns in likes, I reckon.
I think you were being a bit too glib about this, NiV; it’s easy to see what PZ does as a performance now that we have reason to condemn it. Of course there was always an element of performance, but the questions have always been about the crowd to which he was performing and whether and how that changed. And to what extent he was complicit in it.
My silly abstract model might be right as far as it goes. It might help us gain some insight into how people of conviction can so quickly and easily forget what they were actually convinced about in the first place and embrace the opposite. Or it might not.
But it’s not enough.
Good comment.
I wonder if the internet forum itself involves another means of reinforcement: the need for regular and dependable content.
A popular atheist blog usually puts up 2 to as many as 10 posts per day. It can’t be easy coming up with that fresh material day after day, sometimes for years. There are clearly tried-and-true methods of finding topics, one of which seems to be clicking links and looking at what the fundamentalist Christian sites are doing. If they’re complaining about anything in “secular culture,” there’s a story. If the complaint specifically involves 1) atheists or 2) gay people, that’s a juicy story. And once the issue is one of your “atheist’ issues, there it stays. It pops up on other atheist blogs.
And there’s considerable overlap between movement Atheism and movement Skepticism.
There are rational, reasonable, secular arguments against many of the claims of Genderism and Gender Medicine, yet so many of the proponents seem stuck with the conviction that these arguments are a thin cover for religious prejudice. It’s how it was introduced and reinforced.
Or, to use the analogy, their arguments don’t inch up towards the “crotch of the trousers of validation” because they bought those pants at Hot Topic, and they know the kind of content that store is selling.