This isn't something I normally do, but I need a little help, and this is easily the best place to look for it.

I'm writing a piece about conspiracy-theory thinking, propaganda and radicalisation. I had thought I could cover the ground in one post, but it quickly became apparent that it was too big, so I've decided to break it up into a series, with the first part being about how we train ourselves to believe bullshit.

I've covered most of the bits about the mechanisms by which we end up following Alice, but I want to make sure I haven't missed anything critical, and that I haven't dropped a bollock somewhere. I think that any eyes on this particular project will be useful.

I've posted a first-pass draft, and I'd really appreciate some feedback. I'm not looking for style or grammar points or other corrections at this point, just thoughts on any critical points I haven't covered so far.

White Rabbit (draft)

I may ask for help on part two as well, when I move on to strategies for finding a way out. Future posts in the series will take a look at specifics of radicalisation, from creationism to incels. In fact, I'm hoping to draw a thread that will explain an ultimate hypothesis, namely that the foundation of all of this kind of thinking, to the degree that it's found prominence in modern culture, can be tracked back to the root of all counter-scientific thought in the mainstream; corporate creationism.

Hope to pull the trigger on this post in the next day or so.

Warning: I was aiming for 3,000 words, but got to well over 4,000 before I realised I hadn't even finished laying out the problem.

wish i could help, pal, but even the everyday threads on here make my brain fizz...the one bit i could help with is the part you don't need...

Mate, brain fizz is my permanent state. What, you think this shit's easy?

Seriously, though. Cheers, brother.

Hi hackenslash, I may be off-topic here, just expressing a current enthusiasm. I’ve only recently come across Richard Wrangham’s suggestion that modern humans’ capacity for resisting the tyranny of alpha males (which rule the roost in most social primates) may be the direct result of being capable of intra-group conspiracy mediated by language. Ganging up successfully on bullies requires the ability to conspire.

In your article, you point out, rightly, that rhetoric and propaganda are not to be regarded as necessarily bad-in-themselves, but rather as tools which can be used to further the truth or to undermine it. In the same spirit, conspiracies may be regarded as not entirely a bad thing, but rather as a feature of human behaviour which can be channelled in favour of the truth as well as against it? The same would go for conspiracy-theory thinking and propaganda? - that keeping an eye out for conspiracies in ruling groups or elsewhere is probably sensible, it's the losing touch with reality which becomes a problem.

A 2019 article by Richard Wrangham “Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication” is here, and there’s a 2018 book “The Goodness Paradox”, which I haven’t read. The abstract of the article (with my bolding of the main conclusion) is:

Parallels in anatomy between humans and domesticated mammals suggest that for the last 300,000 years, Homo sapiens has experienced more intense selection against the propensity for reactive aggression than other species of Homo. Selection against reactive aggression, a process that can also be called self-domestication, would help explain various physiological, behavioral, and cognitive features of humans, including the unique system of egalitarian male hierarchy in mobile hunter-gatherers. Here I review nine leading proposals for the occurrence of self-domestication in H. sapiens. To account for the domestication syndrome, proposals must explain what led to a decline in fitness of highly aggressive males, and why the explanatory factor applies only to H. sapiens and not to other species of Homo. The proposed explanations invoke genetic group selection; group-structured culture selection (also known as cultural group selection); social selection by female mate choice; social selection by male partner choice; increased self-control; cooperative breeding; high population density; use of lethal weapons; and language-based conspiracy. Most of these proposals face difficulties in accounting for the origins and/or maintenance of reduced reactive aggression. I conclude that the evolution of language-based conspiracy, which is a form of collective intentionality, was the key factor initiating and maintaining self-domestication in H. sapiens, because it is the most convincing mechanism for explaining the selective pressure against individually powerful fighters. Sophisticated language enabled males of low fighting prowess to cooperatively plan the execution of physically aggressive and domineering alpha males. This system is known today as a leveling mechanism in small-scale societies. Group-structured culture selection possibly accelerated the process.

Those are good points. I did wonder whether to talk about the nature of conspiracy, but a part of me thinks that's probably a post in and of itself. It's certainly the case that the whole in-group/out-group dynamic is inherently conspiratorial by nature.

Interesting thoughts.

I want to read and give feedback, but I just saw this on Sunday evening and have a slew of shenanigans to deal with next week. Not sure I'll get there in time before you publish.

Just to note I enjoyed Zoon's post above - I always appreciated the concept of the gossiping primate, especially as you see some similar behavior in other hominids.

Just reading through it. I got to this bit ...

I won't relitigate the history of the anti-vaccine movement here, as it's been amply covered elsewhere, but it begins, of course, with children

... and wondered whether you meant reiterate rather than relitigate, the latter relating to arguments in court rather than on the internet

Spearthrower wrote:I want to read and give feedback, but I just saw this on Sunday evening and have a slew of shenanigans to deal with next week. Not sure I'll get there in time before you publish.

I haven't pulled the trigger yet, and I still have work to do firming things up. I also realise that I've been more prolific in publishing in recent times than at any time since I launched the blog in (checks notes...) 2016. Also, I promised a really good mate I'd write something about quantum decoherence (I have the framework for that nicely laid out in my head; as soon as I find a title to hang it all on, I'm off to the races).

Just to note I enjoyed Zoon's post above - I always appreciated the concept of the gossiping primate, especially as you see some similar behavior in other hominids.

Indeed. It's a cracking post.

n a side note, is it just me, or has the forum really slowed to a crawl since I've been away? Even waiting for the page to update after clicking like leaves me room to write a few hundred words if whatever I'm working on.

chairman bill wrote:Just reading through it. I got to this bit ...

I won't relitigate the history of the anti-vaccine movement here, as it's been amply covered elsewhere, but it begins, of course, with children

... and wondered whether you meant reiterate rather than relitigate, the latter relating to arguments in court rather than on the internet

Good spot, but I meant relitigate. In the vernacular, it serves as a synonym for 'debate again'.

Some excellent work here Hackenslash.

Thank also to Zoon for the fantastic link.

Picking up on the theme of language, there is a quote from the founder of Conversation Analysis, Emmanuel Schegloff, that I think is apposite. He states that quotidian, multi-party spoken interaction is "a/the prime locus of human sociality." (1987, p. 101)

As Spearthrower notes, the gossiping primate is what we are. (There has been the suggestion that our binomal classification would more properly be 'Homo loquens'.)

Before we can get into forming the conspiratorial coalitions detailed in the paper linked by zoon, we have to establish mutuality, trust and we have to achieve sociality. This is all done with language. The main function of language is not the 'mental operations', 'mentalese' and other cognitive aspects so loved by the likes of Saussure, Chomsky, Pinker, et. al. Rather, language is primarily phatic. It is used to create and maintain social bonds and is deployed in a cooperative endeavor to achieve social ends that are mutually agreed on by participants.

You mention the role of skilled orators in your paper, which I think is an important point. If we take spoken, face to face interaction as the basic mode of sociality, then we observe the ways in which people apply the cooperative principle (Grice, 1975) to make sense of each other.

As is stated by Firth and Wagner (1997, p.290)

“Contrary to Lockean principles of communication, people cannot say what they mean in an absolute sense; meaning is ineluctably negotiated. Moreover, in order to make sense, people are obliged to do ceaseless interpretive work.”

Now, when a skilled orator engages in public speaking, sermonizing, etc. even though the participation framework (Goffman, 1981) is radically different from face to face interactions, the recipients of talk still apply the cooperative principle. They tend towards behaving as if they are involved in the negotiation of meaning, that there is mutuality and intersubjectivity, when in fact they have very limited agency. They see themselves, in Goffman’s terms as fully ratified participants, but are not. Their participation rights are, in fact, sharply limited.

As you mention, people who are good with crowds know how to work a crowd. I think part of what ‘working a crowd’ means is to produce a simulacrum of a face to face conversation, even though things like topic nomination and turn-taking which are mutual in face to face conversation are completely controlled by the orator in ‘one to many’ interactions. It appears that your normal participatory rights are in place, but in fact, they have been suspended. This is neither good nor bad in and of itself. When used for moral, constructive ends it can be a way to distribute social cognition widely and efficiently. However, when used for immoral, self-serving and unjust ends....

Anyways, I’ve rambled on enough. Rereading it, it seems a bit tangential to the main thrust of your essay, but as it says in my user name, don’t get me started!

References.

Firth, A., & Wagner, J. (1997). On discourse, communication, and (some) fundamental concepts in SLA research. The Modern Language Journal, 81(3), 285-300.

Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P.Cole, &J. Morgan, J. (Eds.), Syntax and semantics. 3: Speech acts. New York: Academic Press. pp. 41–58.
Schegloff, E. A. (1987). Analyzing single episodes of interaction: An exercise in conversation analysis. Social Psychology Quarterly, 50(2),101-114.

Cheers, dude. Some useful stuff there. I could easily include all of it, but I'd run almost to book length before I was done.

I think I'm going to do a quick edit and pull the trigger. Lots of good stuff here to inform future work on this, but I think I've covered the necessary hit points on entry to the rabbit-hole.

On the gossiping primate, I always loved how Terry Pratchett dealt with this. He coined the binomial Pan narrans (the story-telling ape).

Live now:

Trail of the White Rabbit

Picking a small nit...

, we have to establish mutuality, trust and we have to achieve sociality. This is all done with language.

our social animal brethren do the same without language. And giraffes make do socially despite lacking vocal chords.

Macdoc wrote:Picking a small nit...

, we have to establish mutuality, trust and we have to achieve sociality. This is all done with language.

our social animal brethren do the same without language. And giraffes make do socially despite lacking vocal chords.

Language is not just spoken.

Macdoc wrote:our social animal brethren do the same without language.

Can't wait to see some flesh put on this assertion. Good luck.

Macdoc wrote:Picking a small nit...

, we have to establish mutuality, trust and we have to achieve sociality. This is all done with language.

our social animal brethren do the same without language. And giraffes make do socially despite lacking vocal chords.

A good nit to pick, and an interesting point to raise. As Beatrice notes, language is much more than speaking. In my research field, conversation analysis, the go-to term for what we are referring to is ‘talk-in-interaction’.

I’m afraid I can’t get into the nuts and bolts of it here- to echo Hackenslash, we’d be in book length territory. But I’ll try to give a brief overview of what language is and does in this interactionalist perspective.

Back in the 60’s a certain Noam Chomsky outlined his view of language. He divided the human language faculty into two areas. Competence and performance. In this view, the competence part is the ‘head-internal’ private, individuated, innate knowledge of language that allows a native speaker to construct grammatically correct sentences and to notice when a sentence is not grammatically correct. The performance part is the actual language is use, which Chomsky, referring to the perceived fragmentary and chaotic nature of speaking, its hesitations, restarts, misspeakings and whatnot, dismissed as ‘degenerate’ and not worthy of study by the ‘serious’ linguist (his terms). Innate ability to throw switches and put words in the correct order…hey presto, you are good to go. That is language.

This all seemed a bit reductive to some, and in the early 70’s Del Hymes countered with the view that these internal, mentalistic processes were not even half the story. In addition to acquiring the vocabulary and grammar of the language the child also has to learn:

…when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about and with whom, when, where, in what manner. In short, a child becomes able to accomplish a repertoire of speech acts, to take part in speech events, and to evaluate their accomplishments by others. (p.277).

This is communicative competence. It is the notion that language involves more than just coming up with a thought, encoding it according to the rules of a language and transmitting it towards some recipient. The many and varied components of language that people use to interact became a focus of much research. For CA practitioners the concept was refined to what has come to be termed ‘interactional competence’ (IC) and it is a complex, multi-modal, intersubjective and context-dependent set of resources that interactants have at their disposal to deploy (or not deploy). IC is described thus:

…the context specific constellations of expectations and dispositions about our social worlds that we draw on to navigate our way through our interactions with others…Also included is the ability to deploy and to recognize context-specific patterns by which turns are taken, actions are organized and practices are ordered. And it includes the prosodic, linguistic, sequential and non-verbal resources conventionally used for producing and interpreting turns and actions, to construct them so that they are recognizable for others, and to repair problems in maintaining shared understanding of the interactional work we and our interlocutors are accomplishing together. (Hall and Doehler 2011. pp 1-2)

Things like gesture, gaze direction, facial expression, speed, pitch, tone, volume, pausing, body orientation and utilization of objects, documents, pictures and other items are used purposefully, contingently and in an orderly manner in interaction. As one prominent CA practitioner put it, “No order of detail can be dismissed a priori as disorderly, accidental, or irrelevant.” (Heritage 1984, p.241)

When I said that “This is all done with language.” I think I was meaning language in this expanded, interactionally-based viewpoint, rather than just the physiological apparatus for sound production and the mental wherewithal to apply rules of grammar. The human language system is, first and foremost, an interactional system and human sociality is of a completely different order to even the most social of animal species. This view is taken up in Bregman (2020) and also by Henrich (2015).


Anyways, this is seriously O/T. Sorry to derail your thread Hackenslash.

(I have been thinking of opening a thread in the linguistics sub forum where I get into the details of pragmatics and conversation analysis… Another one for the ‘works in progress folder, methinks)

References

Bregman, R. (2020). Humankind: A hopeful history. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Hall, J. K., & Doehler, S. P. (2011). L2 interactional competence and development. In J.K. Hall, J. Hellermann, & S Pekarek-Doehler, S. (Eds.) L2 interactional competence and development. Multilingual Matters. (pp. 1-15). Multilingual Matters.

Henrich, J. (2015). The secret of our success. Princeton University Press.

Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press

Hymes, D. H. (1972). On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride & J. Holmes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: Selected Readings (pp. 269-293). Penguin.

don't get me started wrote:Anyways, this is seriously O/T. Sorry to derail your thread Hackenslash.

Not an issue. The thread has served its purpose, so the topic is whatever it becomes.