I have been critical of the theory of Official Mis- and Official Disinformation, given that they necessarily imply the existence of Official Truths (see blog/Substack).
As I have long said, the problem is not that rulers want to stifle what they label as Official Mis- and Disinformation, it is that rulers, elites, and Experts have picked known falsities as their Official Truths. Proscribing genuine falsities does little harm (with obvious allowances for discussions on why the false is false and that sort of thing). Allowing or insisting absurdities to pass as truths does great destruction. Lies passed off as truths become, as the academics we’ll meet below call, “malign influences”.
“Pregnant men” is necessarily false; if spoken in earnest, a lie. Logic students will recognize this as the “married bachelors” of our day. Such asininities ought to be addressed. But what to do about them? You cannot really expect any agency to crack down on lunatics espousing such enormities. For one, there are too many of them (both lunatics and falsities). True, most saying things like this are cowards, and would immediately recant should political winds shift. But that still leaves us with too many to handle.
Plus, policing speech in this way opens the door for tyranny, for all the obvious reasons, even though that particular proposition is one of the dumbest things one can hold. But we can police falsities in some contexts. Such as in voting.
Let’s examine the peer-reviewed comment “Misinformation poses a bigger threat to democracy than you might think” in Nature, by Ullrich Ecker, Jon Roozenbeek, Sander van der Linden, Li Qian Tay, John Cook, Naomi Oreskes & Stephan Lewandowsky. (Many of these luminaries we have met before.)
It is no coincidence they begin by saying, “Around four billion people have the opportunity to cast their votes in a series of major elections this year. However, the threat to democratic integrity posed by misinformation and disinformation looms large.”
You may be surprised to hear me say this, but I agree with them.
Just you watch this video (and any of the many others this fellow has) asking voters simple questions which they cannot answer. You will have your own favorite, but mine is when one pair of voters was asked to name three books. Struggling for some time, one eventually conjured Cat In The Hat. Which, indeed, is a book, and so cannot be strictly classified as misinformation. But I believe wrong or non answers can, such as in this video when a voter could not, even after prompting, say what country the Queen of England was from. Another voter could not name the country in which the Great Wall of China can be found.
The Nature authors do not come right out and say it, but I will. These people should not be voting in federal elections. They need to be disenfranchised, but quick. They are mis- or disinformed on a variety of matters; they are prone to propaganda, and do not have the ability to discern truth from falsehood. They will swallow, with relish, idiocies and lies told to them by those in (and out of) authority.
It’s also true at the top of scale, as it were. Anybody who believes “pregnant men” ought not to be allowed to vote. There are two possible sets of believers. The first are the inherently intellectually unequipped, the sort of people who show up in the videos above. Or they are Credentialed (“educated”), strangling in the death grip of Theory. Either set of people, by voting, do great harm to to the body politic.
Restore competency testing for eligibility to vote.
Requiring a pass/fail on simple tests, which can vary in their context for the office or matter under consideration, would be no burden. Everything is already electronic. You wouldn’t even need to ask for ID! Which, academics tell us, spouting an obvious falsity, are “racist”.
We can debate the number of questions (something small) and their content (relevance), but the idea is sound. Our academics must agree; and, indeed, they do: “classifying information as false or misleading is often warranted” they say.
The right answers can even be known in advance, so that nothing more than simple memorization is required to pass the voting test. People take the test, swear to the answers under penalty of perjury, and if they pass, they can vote. No publication of any results would be allowed, to spare feelings. And it’s really all about Feelings, isn’t it?
For instance, our Nature academics complain that some deny certain known historical facts. Very well, let’s pick one or two of real importance, such as The Resurrection (a historical event, none more important, with witnesses and massive evidence), and ask “Did the Resurrection happen?” Those saying No have it wrong, and it should count against them.
Light math is a necessity. People vote for candidate who will spend their money. The guy in the video asked people to compute 15% of 100. That’s as good a question as any.
Obviously, as our academics desire, we could require social media, and really all media, to bar Official Misinformation regarding test questions.
Questions that have answers that are not absolutely certain would be forbidden. For instance, anything related to the “covid vaccines” or “climate change”. There is no certainty here. The debate is not over. As our academics say, “The fact that veracity is often conceptualized better as a continuum than as a dichotomy, and that some claims cannot be unambiguously classified as true or false, must not detract from the reality that there are many incontrovertible historical and scientific facts.”
Agreed. We stick to the incontrovertible. Where there is uncertainty, it is true (necessarily) that there is room for disagreement. We stick to necessary truths and falsities and demonstrated facts.
So we couldn’t ask about “climate change”, but we could ask “Does the sun revolve around the earth, or the earth around the sun?” My experience is that a great many who are nervous about “climate change” get this one wrong (no joke).
Basic logic: “Do academic credentials guarantee correctness?” We do not want people voting who fall prey to the Appeal to Authority Fallacy. Our academics agree: “The promotion of opinions that go against expert consensus is often done by individuals who present themselves as heroic rebels.” Indeed. Heroic they are, especially when the Expert consensus wanders into preposterosities (you heard me) like “pregnant men”.
One last one—you will suggest others in the comments: “Should women be allowed to vote?” Only one right, obvious answer to that.
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Will today’s column be on the test?
I think you’re clutching at pearls here Briggs it doesn’t matter how many imbeciles vote given the distribution
is roughly equivalent across party lines. Though the democrats edge us out in the twisted gender category I
think we have them beat in the corporate incel demographic. All in all it’s the ballot stuffing by closing the count
at midnight and coming up with the winner by eight.
What does “draw a line around” mean? Lines are straight. You can’t draw them “around” anything? Question 5 instructs the test taker to circle something, so clearly the authors know the difference.
I agree – and here’s how it could happen.
Imagine that every state has two similar data centers, one run by democrats the other by conservatives. Each center connects to the other center and to one “smart display” (big screen, not programmable, all software runs on server, connection to server hardware encrypted, simple HTML interface) for every 500 or so potential voters. All data is duplicated between the two centers – with paper records, including voter verification, produced by display attached printers.
The people running each center spend their non-election period time developing lists of eligible voters using state, local, and federal records only. Add a pair of national servers and you can collect all of the vote, including the overseas vote, on one day because anyone, anywhere, can access his or her state system and terminals can be carried into places like hospitals and air craft carriers. Real time reporting…
With this in place it’s easy to add your mis-information wrinkle – remember the John Ziegler surveys showing that Obama voters mostly did not know his positions while the McCain people did? So require the parties to develop an agreed list of about 100 policy questions, give each voter N (e.g. 5) of these to answer, and weight the vote accordingly. Everybody gets one vote, but McCain wins by a landslide in 2008, Romney (who actually did win ) wins equally big in 2012, and Trump, of course, landslides now – basically the conservatives sweep the first election in which this is applied, and both parties “smarten up” their entire vote earning strategies thereafter.
“What is the capitol of your state of residence.” is my choice of a question. It’s basic. Anyone that votes should know where their state taxes are sent.
Cloudbuster: check q. 6 – calls for a 2d partition on a klein bottle. Utterly impossible…
I wonder if that question about drawing a line around something either meant drawing a square or leaving it blank. It is an excellent trick question.
This was going well, right up until that “resurrection” stuff.
Paul: “Cloudbuster: check q. 6”
Yeah, I thought that one was poorly worded, too.
You can interpret it in at least two ways besides the impossible, 1. Concentric circles, but “one inside the other” is only two circles, not the three required. “Each inside the other” might work, but it’s still not precise and could lead to the impossible situation you describe. You could draw a circle with another inside it (one inside the other) and a third circle not associated with the other two. You have to guess at which casual interpretation they might mean. If you are going to write questions that require the test taker to very carefully parse what they are being instructed to do, it is unforgivable to have ambiguity in the questions.
We engineers deal often with root cause analysis. It’s usually deceptively harder than it initially seems for any given failure syndrome.
Many republicans and conservatives view the 2020 US presidential election as a failure (i.e., we believe it was definitely “stolen” by the Demonrats), but very few of us get to root cause, focusing on secondary causes instead. Here are some of the causes I view as secondary causes:
– Low-information people voting in significant numbers. What was different about 2020? What made voters dumber than in previous elections? Why did many millions of dumb people suddenly start voting in 2020? My intuition and personal experience tells me that low-information voters are usually also low-motivation voters, and generally can’t be bothered to fill out a ballot, and much less take time out of their day to travel to a polling place.
– Electronic vote tabulation machines with software flaws were used for cheating by the Demonrats. How did the Demonrats orchestrate this? How have they been able to cover it up so effectively for so long, continuing to this day?
– Very wealthy Demonrat activists spent huge sums of money leading up to the 2020 election to subvert the existing system of integrity checks, successfully compromising the existing election safeguard mechanisms (bipartisan poll watchers, audit systems, paper trails, voting machine pre-election testing, chain-of-custody procedures, certain safeguards mandated by law to prevent foreign interference, real-time election results updates, etc). While there were stories and apparently evidence of a number of such “irregularities”, a smoking gun pattern or conspiracy hasn’t emerged. Overt actions to subvert election results are illegal with severe penalties, making a widespread effort difficult to plan, execute and then successfully cover up.
– Ballot-box stuffing. This secondary cause is unique to mail-in voting, and can be viewed as analogous to a “man in the middle” attack, and there appears to be some evidence that it occurred. I am calling it a secondary cause because it would require much effort and risk to implement at scale.
No, the root cause of the 2020 US presidential election failure seems clear to me: mail-in voting where ballots are sent out by mail to all registered voters. Specifically, this practice makes it trivial for low-ethics voters to vote more than once. Indeed, a recent survey found that at least 20% of voters voted at least twice (by voting a ballot signed by someone else):
https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/partner_surveys/one_in_five_mail_in_voters_admit_they_cheated_in_2020_election
Apparently at least 20% of registered voters in the US are low-ethics voters.
No matter for whom you vote, a politician gets elected.
I’ve been informed that the old-timey literacy tests were meant to disenfrenchise black people by being deliberately near-impossible to pass, and not having anything to do with actual literacy. However, that doesn’t mean a proper voter test can’t be designed. I’d imagine it should be kept short, up to five questions, and published at least one month in advance of it being administered. That way only proper idiots would get disenfrenchised by the test, which is what the test is for. xD
The other day I was at a statistics talk about a proposed method for meta-analysis, specifically for combining p-values in the search of p-values yet more wee than any in the component studies.
After the talk I asked the presenter if there were methods to control for differences in quality of the component studies, using the example of two studies calculating a p-value off of temperature, with one using a thermometer that could only return integer values and the second which could return values on the tenths. Clearly the first study would have more sources for measurement error, and that’s not even getting into problems caused from where the thermometer was placed (ex. elevation, whether it was in a city, etc.) The presenter responded that there is no need to worry about such things, because the accuracy of the measurements would be cooked into each individual p-value calculation by any responsible statistician (i.e. that one would have a discrete null hypothesis distribution that had zero probability off the integers, and that the other would have a discrete null hypothesis distribution that had zero probability off the tenths of integers.)
Yet in this very talk all of his distributions were normal distributions, even for things like “how many patients got sick after taking drug X?” He either saw no contradiction or was willing to lie about what “reasonable” statisticians do.
This was a trained professional who had at least a decent grasp of logic, and even he was willing to say things and then immediately ignore them. Should such a person be trusted as an “expert” for drafting policies? Should he even be allowed to vote?
Now consider the situation for even the literate common man.
Mr. Cotterman, you cannot vote, for I fear you will not only get The Resurrection question wrong, but also the one regarding the motions of the Earth and Sun with respect to each other. You definitely have to sit this one out. Don’t feel too bad, you’re in the majority!
Cloudy – lines can be curved, so you can just make a squiggly circuitous shape around the word. The wording is designed to make the best of us panic under the pressure. Caving in is a sign you are likely to make the wrong choice on the ballot due to societal pressure rather than the most rational sane decision, which today often means staying at home and making peace with the fact that your vote neither counts nor matters in the end, so why bother? But maybe you had nothing better to do, and the process provides some amusement. And, who knows? You might get lucky. So no harm, no foul.
All democracies fail – credit to the founding fathers – it is not difficult to see why.
Only a net tax paying man and wife should have one ballot to vote between them.
The women’s vote has destroyed this country and given us all the errors of Russia 1917.