On this week’s episode of the podcast, Abe and I discussed a few different ways that concern about “social contagion” is having an impact on the way we conduct ourselves in the world, and the way people try to regulate other people’s behavior and speech based on what they imagine might happen if still other people were exposed to it. Not satisfied with my own extensive ramblings about it, apparently, I took to the robits, and had a back-and-forth with Chat GPT-3 about it. If you’d like to read that exchange, I believe you are probably a very strange person, but I will allow you to indulge that strangeness as you see fit. (Here’s the link.)
I didn’t start off with the intention to have the “conversation” I ended up having, what with my rather sudden bringing up of my old college enemy Jürgen Habermas and me trying to tell the robit that it was wrong to worry so much about being right. (I also recently got access to Google’s version of this technology, which they are calling Bard, and I will report back at some point about my pointless arguments with that one, too.) It ended up perhaps helping me clarify some of my thinking around the subject of our talk while also being mildly frustrating, both of which have been consistent outcomes in my interactions with these fancy chatbots. In short: I tried to convince the robit that the pursuit of rational, accurate discourse is all well and good, but deciding that you know enough about something to make a definitive rational claim is a judgment, just as deciding that you don’t know enough about something to make an accurate claim is a judgment, and pretending otherwise—pretending that some objective standard is being followed—poisons the well. Rational and accurate discourse is a fine ideal to strive for, but not actually a foundation on which to build anything, because there will always be disagreement on what qualifies. We must accept wrongness and bad faith and irrationality as foundational preconditions for public life, and trying to control for that in some sort of top-down way only leads to more trouble.
All talk of trying to control or prevent the spread of “malinformation,” or misinformation, or disinformation sounds like an attempt to stop what people will eventually do with information—actions that the controllers have predetermined are undesirable. If the cat wasn’t out of the bag 200 years ago (it was), or 50 years ago (it was), or ten years ago (cat gone, dead, skinned, hanged, buried, in hell), it’s certainly out of the bag now, in the age of functionally infinite information. We must not attempt to be the ultimate arbiters of anyone else’s informational intake, because to do so is to break an important part of the social compact—that we must trust each other to know what’s best for ourselves. That I don’t know better than you do what’s best for you. And when people start making claims about who can speak about what, and what they are permitted to say—no matter how well-mannered or well-intentioned—there will be an anti-authoritarian backlash. And the juice is never worth the squeeze. That way madness lies. This is not a prediction—it is just what is happening right now, all around us.
To wit:
The New York Times: Biden Issues First Veto to Protect Socially Conscious Investing
I’ll be quoting from that story, but it couldn’t hurt to read it first. Here is another story, from Reuters, that is much more concerned with simply telling the audience what happened—letting the relevant parties speak their point of view, and allowing the readers to come to whatever conclusion they might: Biden uses first veto to defend rule on ESG investing.
From the Times article:
The rule that the president vowed to protect is an obscure investing principle known as E.S.G. — shorthand for prioritizing environmental, social and governance factors. It had been a widely accepted norm in financial circles for almost 20 years until Republicans recently started assailing it as “woke capitalism” that injected Democratic and liberal values into financial decisions. More than $18 trillion is held in investment funds that follow E.S.G. principles.
Which is it, then—obscure, or a widely accepted norm that has at least $18 trillion behind it? Bloomberg says that by 2025 a full third of all global “assets under management” will be in ESG funds. Sounds like the opposite of obscure! But maybe the reporter means that outside of the financial class, people aren’t familiar with the concept—which would be admitting a failure by the press to report on something so important to millions of Americans investment, retirement, and pension portfolios, but whatever—but I think that’s largely nonsense, too. I’m quite familiar with the concept, and I suspect that if you described it to someone, they would acknowledge some familiarity, too. “Did you know that some financial managers cater their products to reflect certain social or environmental priorities or goals?” This hardly seems obscure. This is the classic “Republicans pounce” framing—everything was fine and dandy and normal until Republicans pounced.
Also, though it might be a widely accepted norm or possibly an obscure concept no one has ever heard of before, it is hardly without controversy and non-partisan detractors.
All right, but first, I want to harp on the obscurity thing again, because sheesh. To the surprise of no one, I found a reference to ESG funds on a Marketplace (which runs on NPR) blog from 2009, snarkily headlined How Would Jesus Invest?, which briefly highlights a couple of religiously-concerned investment outfits. This 2016 Marketplace report discusses “the mainstreaming of ESG investing,” and readers of the New York Times would hardly be unfamiliar with the concept. I mean, come on, if USA Today is running explainers on ESG investing every couple of years, this is not an obscure thing! When USA Today runs an AP piece after the 2016 election about how “Donald Trump's move into the White House could drive even more dollars into the already hot field of sustainable investing,” we are officially in normie, mainstream territory.
But, as mentioned above, not entirely controversy-free territory.
Harvard Business Review: ESG funds don’t perform well and don’t generally invest in companies with better compliance for labor and environmental rules than any other investment outfit
Financial Times: The ESG investing industry is dangerous
Reason: The differences between individual and institutional investors considering ESG factors
There’s plenty more. The idea that public pension funds, which are often controlled by elected politicians, should direct their funds to the firms that adhere to certain interests of the public good as identified by politicians is of course a controversial subject. It’s begging for institutional corruption, and worthy of actual discussion. The point is simply that the paragraph quoted above is pure nonsense, seemingly intended to frame the entire broader conversation in the President’s preferred terms—that this is simply “far-right” “MAGA Republicans” trying to do harm to the public’s long-term financial security. True or not (it’s not), it’s blatantly political.
What does this have to do with the conversation about social contagion, and my argument with the robit? A fair question! The quoted paragraph is presented as a piece of disinterested fact-telling about the actual state of the world. It is essentially insisting that it has the rational, accurate position, and that anyone who would quibble with the assertions therein are not having the discussion on the agreed-upon ideals of rationality and accuracy, and should be ignored. This, despite the fact that the writer won’t even say what “prioritizing environmental, social and governance factors” displaces in the priority list—which is a pure fiduciary responsibility to maximizing returns. This is not an opinion piece, it is the NYT’s main reported-out piece on Biden’s first veto.
On its own, it may not seem like a very big deal. Fair enough! But I think it neatly illustrates what I’m concerned about in my line of thinking with the chatbot—it assumes a position of authority over the relevant facts and dispenses judgment from that position. The dice are loaded. Everything that follows that paragraph has been poisoned by the bogus claim of authority made at the outset. It almost doesn’t matter what the content of the rest of the piece is—the article has already told you what is and is not acceptable to believe. For much of the audience, it will confirm their priors and they will accept it without even noticing. For other readers, this article says: your opinion is invalid because you do not accept reality as objectively claimed by our authority. You cannot even rationally object, because all your objections are in bad faith.
Which is not to say that Marjorie Taylor Greene or Kevin McCarthy are acting in good faith and on the side of the angels. It’s not always some stupid binary, in which the detritus of Donald Trump must be cleansed at the cost of just explaining the world as it is. Maybe ESG is good, maybe it’s bad! Both are entirely defensible positions, taken up by perfectly reasonable humans. The journalists need not pick a side, here, out of some misplaced duty to some unknowable more perfect future. As I said to the robit, it is fine for you to be wrong. If ESG is good in some ultimate, objective way that is eventually proven out by some definitive metric at some point in the future, it will have been fine to have not taken a side here and now.
I think the reporter here—as institutional media often does—believes themself to be taking a stand for “rationality and truthfulness in communication,” but has in fact made a judgment that exposes a willingness to discount the views of others as entirely invalid. And in making flat claims about what is and is not part of reasonable discussion while simultaneously claiming that you’re simply explaining the world as it is, you are alienating a lot of people. As I also said to the robit:
[A shared commitment to norms of rationality, truthfulness, and sincerity is] a fine ideal or standard to live by, but it's functionally impossible to expect it in all domains of life. And I think the claim by some to be living up to it, while many others believe them to be falling short, itself creates unnecessary political and democratic strife. It's almost like by claiming the mantle of what ideal political discourse should look like, different political factions can no longer engage in good faith. They disagree about which one of them has what has been staked out as the moral or ethical high ground. There's something about making the claim to rationality and truthfulness that poisons the well.
The worst thing you can do while insisting that you’re “promoting norms of rationality and truthfulness in communication” is to lie. It’s not mere hypocrisy, it’s authoritarianism. Best to either slap an opinion label on it, or do what Reuters did in their article: just report the fucking news.