Donald Trump

Statistricks: how they lie to you with numbers (part 1)

If we’re going to fight back against the populists’ calculated assault on truth, we need to raise our numbers game

• Part 2: ‘We send the EU £350m a week’ (no, we don’t)
• Part 3: Why are all polling companies run by Tories?
• Part 4: ‘The UK is the fastest-growing economy in the G7’ (no, it isn’t)

Maths is scary.

There are plenty of maths wizzes out there, of course, and most of us, when the necessity arises, can perform basic calculations. It’s just that these operations don’t come naturally to human beings. For most of our species’ history, there was little need for any more mental arithmetic than “one/two/many” and “our tribe small, their tribe big”.

If your brain isn’t adequately trained, maths requires serious mental effort, which most of us will go to any lengths to avoid. As a result, when confronted with a differential equation or trigonometry problem, we curl into a ball and whimper, “Oh, I’m rubbish with numbers!”

So when it comes to statistics, just as with molecular biology and nuclear physics and translating ancient Phoenician, we tend to leave things to the experts. The catch is, the main conduits of this knowledge from professors to public – the media – are as clueless about maths as we are.

As a veteran of journalism of 25 years, I can let you in on a scary secret: reporters – even reporters who are specifically charged with writing about business and science and trade – rarely have any sort of background in maths or economics. Most of those who aren’t media studies or journalism graduates studied humanities (English, modern languages, history, politics, law), and the same goes for the subeditors and desk editors whose job it is to check their work. In the average newspaper office, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who tell an x-axis from a y-axis, a percentage point from a percentage or a median from a mean. And TV interviewers, judging by their performance before and since Brexit, are no better.

Most of us aren’t too bad at figuring out when people are trying to mislead us with words or facts or pictures. But because we’re useless with numbers – and the gatekeepers are too – we’re much more susceptible to numerical shenanigans. Statistics can be massaged, manipulated, misrepresented and murdered as easily as words can. And it is this human weakness that the populists are counting on.

What I want to try to do in the next few posts is look at some of the more common examples of statistical chicanery that you will come across, in the hope that at least a few more people can start calling out the bastards who are trying to rip our society apart. (If I miss any obvious ones, please add your suggestions in the comments.)

(If you have no time to read on, I beg you to consider buying or borrowing a copy of Anthony Reuben’s Statistical: Ten Easy Ways To Avoid Being Misled By Numbers (Constable, 2019). It’s clear and concise and bang up to date, covering Brexit and Trump (but not coronavirus), and an easy read even for the fraidiest maths-phobe.)

The truth, the half-truth, and nothing like the truth

Sometimes, of course, as our present government demonstrates on a daily basis, populists are perfectly happy to forsake real numbers for entirely imaginary ones.

Think Owen Paterson’s assertion that only 5% of Northern Ireland’s trade is with Ireland, when the true figure is at least 30%; Jacob Rees-Mogg merrily retweeting the Sun’s innumerate bollocks about how much cheaper your shopping basket will be after Brexit; Dominic Raab overstating the cost of the CAP to British agriculture by a factor of 1,600%; Daniel Kawczynski’s ludicrous lemons claim; Matt Hancock counting pairs of gloves as two individual items of PPE; Matt Hancock including coronavirus tests on the same person and testing kits put in the post in the 100,000 total of tests carried out; Matt Hancock counting nurses who haven’t left towards the total of extra nurses employed; Boris Johnson, and thus, subsequently, the entire Conservative party, repeating until blue in the face that the Tories are building 40 new hospitals, when in fact they have committed to only six; Boris Johnson’s claim in January 2020 that the economy had grown by 73% under the present Tory government, when in fact the data covers the period back to 1990, which includes 13 years of Labour; Boris Johnson’s brazen and still unretracted claim that there are 400,000 fewer families in poverty since the Tories came to power, when in truth there are 600,000 more.

The chief drawback of straight-up untruths, of course, is that they’re easy to check and challenge. Most of the fictions above were exposed as such fairly quickly (though not before they’d burrowed their way into a few million poorly guarded minds). A far more effective way of misleading people is to present numerical information that is not incorrect, per se, but which tells only part of the story. To offer up, if you like, a fractional truth.

11/10 for presentation

If you’ve ever used a dating app, chances are you didn’t upload as your profile picture that zitty red-eye selfie you took in the Primark fitting room. You hunted through old snaps, maybe asked a camera-handy friend over for a mini-shoot, possibly even added a flattering filter, did a bit of Photoshopping, and judiciously cropped out the boyfriend. In short, you went to reasonable (or extreme) lengths to paint yourself in the best possible light.

This process – statisticians call it “cherry-picking”, but I prefer “Instagramming” – is the populists’ most common way of abusing numbers (it can also be applied in reverse, to show something in its worst possible light). If the absolute figure (say, 17.4 million) is the most impressive, use that. If the percentage best advances your case, use that (but if it’s, say, only 51.9%, poof! It’s gone). If neither of those works to your advantage, what about the trend?

Which brings us to our first example.

‘Trade with the EU is declining’

OMG! Trade with the EU is declining?! Tomorrow, our trade with them will be nothing! We must end all commerce with them now!

That’s clearly the reaction this claim was designed to elicit, and there were enough people lacking either the ability or the inclination to check it that it succeeded in its goal.

While it wasn’t one of the primary arguments advanced by the Leave campaign, it’s a drum that rightwing politicians, commentators and newspapers have been beating since day one. It was also one of the central planks of the “failing EU” narrative, which you still hear to this day.

Still, if the UK’s trade with the EU is shrinking, surely it’s a point worth making?

The first problem here is that the statement is not true. UK trade with the EU has grown steadily since we joined, as even House of Commons figures show:

(I couldn’t find an HoC graph covering the whole period, but the figures are all out there.)

Which shouldn’t come as a colossal surprise, as these are our closest neighbours, with whom we have enjoyed ever closer ties for almost 50 years. Of course trade with them is always going to grow.

So what is Thickinson wittering on about? It turns out what she meant is that the UK’s trade with the EU as a proportion of its overall trade has been decreasing (slowly) since 2000. Trade with the EU is still growing, but trade with other countries is growing faster.

(The trend was bucked in 2019, when the share rose to 46%, which is why they bit their tongues on this one for a while.)

So, not exactly a precipitous decline, but if trade with the EU as a proportion of overall trade is shrinking, shouldn’t we be a little worried?

Well, no, for two reasons.

First, trade outside the EU has increased precisely because of EU trade agreements with other countries and blocs, such as Israel, Egypt, South Africa, Canada, Mercosur and South Korea. In other words, trade with the EU has (proportionally) fallen because of trade through the EU. (For the benefit of those who have been living under a rock for five years, the UK will cease to be a signatory to all those deals as well as its EU agreements from January 1 2021. Sure, we might renegotiate some after exit, but there’s no guarantee of that, and even if we succeed, they’ll almost certainly be on less favourable terms, as the UK now has a lot less negotiating clout than it did as part of a bloc of 510 million people.)

Second, the countries with which the UK’s trade is growing more quickly are on the whole much smaller; they are developing countries. Trade with developed nations, and with nations with which trade relations are already well established – such as those in the EU – is never going to grow particularly fast, because it’s all grown up already.

Let’s take, as a hypothetical example, the nation of Arsendia. If you were to tell me that trade with Arsendia had increased by 1,000% over the past year, while trade with the EU 27 had grown by only 0.2%, I’d think, “Whoa! Maybe Arsendia is the future!” But if I then discovered the somewhat relevant supplementary information that trade with Arsendia this year was worth £110, compared with £10 in 2018-19, while the value of trade with the EU stood at £668bn, I might come to a slightly different conclusion.

To take a real-world example often cited by Brexiters, over the last 20 years, trade with Commonwealth nations has increased by a factor of more than three.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the value of UK trade with EU countries has merely doubled.

But now look at the absolute figures. Exports to the EU in 2019 were worth £300bn (43% of the UK total), and imports from it £372bn (51%). Meanwhile, UK exports to all the Commonwealth nations combined in 2019 were worth £65.2bn, while imports from those countries had a total value of £64.5bn. That’s less than a fifth of the EU total.

Again, pretty much what you’d expect when countries tend to do most of their trade with their neighbours, and most Commonwealth countries are half the fucking world away.

Adversely comparing the rate of growth of trade with established trade partners with the rate of growth of trade with tiny, brand-new buddies is the equivalent of a father taking a tape measure to his 18-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter, then saying, “Sorry, Kev, but Lisa’s grown three inches this year and you’ve barely sprouted at all, so I’m afraid she gets all the attention now.”

This is a common statistical misapprehension called the base rate fallacy, or ignoring the baseline. Expect it to make a reappearance, as it is one of the populists’ favourite subterfuges.

(The United States’ share of global GDP is declining for the exact same reason – less developed nations are eating up the pie because they have more scope to expand quickly – but you won’t find any of the Brexit zealots shouting about that.)

Let’s try to boil this down into something so simple that even the average Tory MP can understand it. Trade with the EU is growing. Trade with some other, much smaller countries is growing a little faster, because they have more capacity for growth, but that’s unlikely to continue for long. The EU, the UK’s closest neighbour, is, and will always remain, the UK’s most important trading partner.

A recurring theme of these posts is going to be: whenever you see pat statistical statements like Dickinson’s, by politician or commentator or journalist, they are not giving you the full picture. It’s not necessarily their fault – there isn’t enough space. But the space shortage gives them an excuse to Instagram the data; to present only the facets of the information that best supports their agenda.

For a full understanding of the situation, you need to a) read beyond the headline or tweet, and ideally trace the source of the data; b) do further research, or at least read some rebuttals; and if neither of those is possible, c) ask questions. In the particular case of “Trade with the EU is declining’”, the relevant questions would be: “What level is it declining from?”, “How fast?”, and “Is this trend likely to continue?”

As we’ll see time and again in the coming posts, without the proper context, numerical information is useless. However great the emotional impact on you, you must not draw any conclusions until you see the wider picture. If you can’t overcome your fear of numbers, you must at least stop meekly accepting them.

Next time: let’s fund the NHS instead!

Brexit might be simple. But it sure as hell ain’t easy

No, the two things are not the same. And it’s a failure to appreciate this that has driven a wedge into the western world

That fucking meerkat from off the telly — You can fuck off as well.

Why are the UK and US suddenly so divided, so angry, so broken, when a mere matter of months ago, civility and relative prosperity reigned? Could the explanation be as trivial as a difference in interpretation of a nuance of meaning? Probably not, but let’s run with it anyway.

On Wednesday 16 May 2018, former stand-up comedian Lee Hurst posted this tweet:

That’s correct. In response to an article about a serious skills shortage caused by the overzealous application of immigration targets, Hurst, failed mayoral candidate, former warm-up man on Have I Got News For You? and veteran of literally several appearances on BBC1’s gammon-pleasing panel show They Think It’s All Over, piped up with the suggestion that the UK simply source the necessary workers from among its own citizens.

Why, you demand breathlessly, is Mr Hurst languishing in obscurity ranting to 46,000 racists on Twitter, when he should clearly be in City Hall – or even Downing Street? Well, I have one potential objection.

Labour shortages have been around for as long as civilisation. Did this 10th-dan dipshit, this walking cerebral vacuum, this hasbeen-who-never-quite-was who is now routinely blanked by all who once called him friend and whose greatest hope of glory these days is a retweet from Julia Hartley-Brewer, seriously imagine for a moment that his “idea” had never occurred to any of the 100 billion or so people who had preceded him on this earth? That he, Lee Hurst, with all the wisdom conferred by three months’ work as a telephone engineer, a few years being heckled on the east London standup circuit and a short spell presenting Shark Tank, had somehow produced the flash of genius that would rescue not just a nation, but a civilisation, from certain doom?

Here are seven (I’m sure there are more) glaringly obvious reasons why Hurst’s plan is the most moronic plan since Baldrick had a brain embolism while trying to translate his stupider cousin’s plan from Mandarin:

1) Unemployed British people might not want to do that particular job.

2) Unemployed British people might not have the aptitude for that job. You can’t just turn anyone into an IT genius with a wave of a magic wand, or even several years of training.

3) Unemployed British people might not want to, or be able to, move to the area where that job is based.

4) Training people takes time, and those jobs need to be filled now. This rebuttal goes double for all those Brexit twats insisting that we can simply replace all the departing EU doctors and nurses with British equivalents. TRAINING MEDICAL STAFF PROPERLY TAKES UP TO EIGHT YEARS. WE HAVE LESS THAN ONE. I DO NOT WANT DAZ FROM BASILDON PERFORMING MY CORONARY BYPASS AFTER A COUPLE OF AFTERNOONS WATCHING YOUTUBE VIDEOS.

5) There are undoubtedly people far better qualified for the job located elsewhere in the world who would enjoy the role more and be more effective in it.

6) What level of enthusiasm, commitment or productivity would you expect from a British person who didn’t want to take the job or move to the area in the first place?

7) What criteria will you use to select these people? A pin in the phone book? You know that in a free society, people choose jobs and not vice versa, right? That a society where citizens are told what work to do is … communist?

This sort of top-of-the-head chaff has been reeled off by belching illiterates in pubs up and down the land for centuries. But suddenly, thanks to social media, it is undeservingly reaching a wider audience. Now that the campaign to discredit intellectuals and experts has been running for several years, every jackass with a finger and an internet connection feels the need to make their voice heard on everything, regardless of their mastery of the subject-matter. Most of the time, these (largely far right, but there are plenty of culprits on the left) self-appointed arbiters offer nothing constructive to address the problems at hand, content merely to sneer at and abuse those who are giving it their best shot.

When they do make a suggestion, you can guarantee it’ll be entirely lacking in any of the substance or detail required to put it into practice. Donald Trump’s so-called policies; Rodrigo Duterte’s campaign to kill all drug dealers; Leave.UK screaming “Just leave”.

This, my populist friends, is the end result of the process I’ve been banging tiresomely on about. This is common sense, unconstrained by reason, in action; the system 1 brain, impatient at the slowness of system 2’s results, elbowing it out of the way and … fucking everything up even more. So it’s way past time, I think, to revisit a basic, but often overlooked, distinction in the English language.

The words “simple” and “easy” are often used interchangeably, but the difference is crucial. When something is simple, it requires little intelligence or effort to conceptualise or to articulate. Something that is easy, meanwhile, describes an action that requires little skill or effort to actually do.

Some examples to illustrate.

“Lose a stone!”

“Run a marathon!”

“Build a house!”

“Eat my shorts!”

“End world hunger!”

“Travel back in time!”

“Make Lee Hurst funny!”

These instructions are all eminently comprehensible – even John Redwood could understand them – but when it comes to actually implementing them, they range from difficult to downright impossible.

Simple cares only about the end result (usually some deliberately vaguely defined “better” state). Easy cares about how you get there.

Any idiot can shout slogans – indeed, that’s all most of them do – but it takes nous to apply them successfully, as Trump, and the Conservative government that the UK electorate has baldly ordered to “leave the EU”, are discovering. Moreover, there is no guarantee that, even if they do manage to realise these plans, they will be remotely effective.

When simple people propose simple solutions, they tend to omit two salient factors from their plans. 1) How exactly would you go about this? Implementation requires details. 2) Actions often have consequences beyond those intended. How do you know that you will a) achieve your stated goal and b) do so without causing even worse problems? George W Bush’s instinctive, system-1 reaction to 9/11 – the simple solution that the majority of people were demanding – was to bomb the crap out of the Middle East. Did that solve anything? No, it made things worse, killing millions, radicalising millions more, and causing further terror attacks, civil wars and regional instability.

Society’s unresolved problems are unresolved for a reason. The simple solutions have been suggested, and tried, time and time and time again and guess what, Lee Hurst? They haven’t fucking worked once.

Let’s look at some of the major problems still facing humanity, and at some of the fixes that the far right (and left) are proposing, and examine some of the possible hurdles to implementation. Into small, digestible chunks. You know. Keeping it simple.

Terrorism

Solution: End freedom of movement in the EU

Why the solution sucks: In terms of implementation, ending freedom of movement is perfectly feasible – it’s just doubtful whether or not it would be remotely effective. Hardly any of the people who have committed terrorist acts on British soil were immigrants. Some were Muslims, but all were born here – and in any case, the migration of people from Muslim-majority countries has sod all to do with EU membership. What’s more, the UK already has more control over its borders than any other country in the EEA, having secured an opt-out from the Schengen agreement. People will still travel to the UK from Muslim-majority countries, and since few terrorists accumulate long criminal records before they blow themselves up, there will be no way to tell the good from the bad. It’s very hard to see how adding a few customs checkpoints and lorry parks is going to change that.

The real flaw here, though, lies in the repercussions.

Knock-on consequences: Less money for everything else. Reduced trade. Reduced opportunities in travel, education and employment, especially for younger people. Reduced tourism, both ways. Fewer “desirable” migrants (99.99% of them) filling skills shortages. More hostile environment for immigrants. Requires abandoning the EU’s single market and customs union, as well as putting at risk countless lucrative collaborations and agreements including Erasmus, Euratom, Horizon 2020, European Atomic Energy Community, European Medicines Agency, etc etc ad infinitum.

There are a thousand more effective ways of combating terrorism than slamming the doors shut: education, attacking their funding, tackling social isolation and online radicalisation, improving links with minority communities, the Prevent programme, taking out the ringleaders. That’s where we should be focusing our energies.

Low wages

Solution: Stop immigration

Why the solution sucks: Common sense suggests that expanding the workforce, and thus creating more competition for jobs, will drive wages down. Alas, as we have established, when it comes to complex issues like this, common sense is as useful as an umbrella in a tsunami.

The true figures show that immigration has minimal negative effect on both pay and employment. In fact, in the longer term, it increases the average standard of living, because those immigrants pay taxes and spend money in their host country, stimulating the economy and creating yet more jobs.

Knock-on consequences: Less money for everything else. More hostile environment for immigrants. Less mixing of cultures, leading to greater distrust between nations, and an increased likelihood of war.

Services under strain

Solution: Stop immigration

Why the solution sucks: If too many new people move into an area in too short a time, local services can indeed feel the pinch. However, in the UK’s particular case, immigrants tend to be younger and fitter and require little care or support, and work disproportionately in exactly those areas. Losing immigrants would do more harm than good to healthcare and social care.

Knock-on consequences: As above.

Lots of people are dying in mass shootings in America

Solution: Ban guns

Why the solution sucks: In the interests of fairness, I’ll debunk a cause more often championed by the left. (The right don’t tend to bother offering any ideas at all for this one, apparently considering thousands of innocent children’s lives an acceptable price to pay for the protection of the second amendment.)

Yes, gun control advocates, history is on your side, insofar as both the UK and Australia have seen a big drop-off in mass shootings since tightening their gun laws. However, America’s situation is unique. A blanket ban on guns would be incredibly hard to enforce and probably would result, in the short term, in more civilians being unable to protect themselves from the criminals who had failed to turn in their weapons.

Knock-on consequences: Sizeable hit to the gun economy.

America is insufficiently great

Solution: a) Drain the swamp, b) lock her up, c) build the wall

Why these solutions suck: a) There are no doubt plenty of corrupt people on Capitol Hill. There always are near corridors of power. However, in the grand scheme of things, America was cleaner than most countries. The system was, if not perfect, then at least functioning.

b) Locking up Hillary Clinton would entail finding real evidence of a crime she had committed, which is impossible, because the charges were made up by Nazi conspiracy theorists.

c) Building a wall all the way along the US-Mexican border is cripplingly expensive, both to build and maintain, and will not in any case prevent much illegal immigration.

Knock-on consequences: a) The drained swampwater needs to be replaced with cleaner “water”. So far, the substitute looks like concentrated raw sewage.

b) Everyone thinks you are a bunch of gullible twats.

c) Less money for everything else, etc, etc.

There are too many brown people on my street

Solution: Stop immigration

Why the solution sucks: I hate to be the bearer of bad news, racist, but most people don’t consider any solution necessary here. Most of us believe that immigrants enrich our lives.

This is your problem, not the problem of the government, or of non-racists, or of immigrants. I suggest you deal with it by learning a foreign language, by making an effort to get to know someone from another country, or failing that, by topping yourself.

The last bit

People have complaints. We get that. Everyone (well, everyone normal), left and right and centre, wants life to be better, for there to be less disease and poverty and suffering and murder. We’ve just taken very different approaches.

As 10,000 years of slavery and sexism and famine and war should have hinted by now, there are no easy solutions to any of the above. But the fact that we have reduced all those things from everyday occurrences to vanishingly rare ones should be a huge encouragement.

How have we achieved this astonishing reduction in violence and increase in quality of life? By dismissing simple solutions and digging deeper, for complex ones. Solutions that involve detail, flexibility, compromise, sacrifice. And forgiveness. The pattern of history is unarguable.

And if we are to continue this trend, we need to acknowledge the difference between simplicity and ease. We need to recognise, while pledging eternal gratitude for its value in keeping us alive in trickier times, that instinct, the system 1 brain, is no longer in the driving seat of human destiny. Like cockfighting, trepanning, leeching and human sacrifice, common sense must now be consigned to history, and people with two functioning halves of a brain be allowed to take the wheel again.

Common sense: the enemy of reason

Instinct and popular wisdom might butter parsnips, but they don’t design jet engines or cure smallpox

“Some folks set a powerful store by this here eddication, but I tell y’all right here and now that readin’ an’ writin’ an’ cipherin’ ain’t never got no sinners into Heaven yet!” – Evangelical Missouri preacher quoted in Ozark Folk Songs vol IV, ed. Vance Randolph (1949)

We’ve established, over the last few posts, why quite a few folk have “had enough of experts”, and some of the mechanisms by which rationalism is being undermined. One question we haven’t considered is this: who do they want running the show instead? Fine, so you’re anti-intellectual; but what are you pro?

Many don’t seem to have thought that far ahead. All they know is, the technocratic status quo isn’t quite to their liking, and they want it gone pronto, consequences be damned. Leave the EU with no deal! Lock her up!

But abandoning ship in the absence of even a makeshift lifeboat is criminally reckless. That’s why so many Britons are still so passionately opposed to leaving the EU; we haven’t heard any better ideas yet. Wishy-washy promises of a socialist utopia, or a “global-facing Britain”, both entirely dependent on variables over which we have little control, will not do. We want a detailed bloody plan.

Some give off the impression that they just want things to be like they were; before the EU, before all those horrid forriners moved in. But they’re overlooking three things. First, the hardships of life before 1973: lower living standards, labour disputes, moribund industries, high inflation, dwindling resources, diminishing world influence. Second, the rest of the world has moved on; the UK no longer enjoys the democratic, technological or military superiority it once did, and in this dynamic, hyperconnected world, the best way to survive is to maximise your international ties, not sever them.

Third, you can’t just wave a magic wand and undo 46 years of structural change. The UK’s economy is now intricately woven into the EU and the wider world, and if you just rip it out lickety-split, it will, quite simply, stop working.

Only one realistic alternative to technocracy has been proposed, but you won’t find any manifesto spelling out its methods or aims. It exists only in half-lit corners, in fragments of tweets, at the tail end of flip insults.

Kirk versus Spock

Tweet: 'Don't quote that evidence and statistics crap at me' — And, uh, what will you be basing those on then, Mark?

To explain, I’m going to bring in another book (sorry, Brexiters). Thinking Fast and Slow, published in 2011, is a tour-de-force roundup of the work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. At the risk of doing Kahneman a disservice, his thesis is essentially that humans have two primary modes of thought: he calls them system 1 and system 2.

System 2 is deliberate, reflective, analytical; it involves focus and application. It’s what we mean when we say we’re “putting our thinking caps on”. We use it to tackle novel or complex problems, to carry out complex calculations, to make long-term plans, and learn skills. Most of its operations take place in the prefrontal cortex, the newest, most uniquely human part of the brain.

System 2 is also creative, original, often brilliant. The catch is, it’s slow – and takes a lot of effort. It monopolises valuable resources (because when you’re focused on one task, you can’t undertake any others). Improvising a speech, writing a play, attacking a mathematical problem: few can sustain these activities for long without a break. As a result, we do all we can to avoid engaging system 2 thought, particularly as we get older.

The good news is, we don’t have to – because we have a spare brain.

System 1 has none of system 2’s hangups. It is quick, bold, almost effortless. It’s what we’re using when we talk about doing something automatically, or “without thinking” (we are thinking, of course – we’re just not conscious of it). What’s more, it’s remarkably good at a vast range of tasks. Estimating distances, locating sources of sounds, pattern recognition, basic arithmetic, completing common phrases. System 1 can even – after lots of practice, for which it is admittedly indebted to system 2 – manage complex functions like playing the piano and flying a plane.

But speed comes at a price. The reason system 1 is so snappy is that it uses a lot of short cuts. Because its functions are centred on the amygdala – one of the oldest parts of the brain, the part we share with lizards – its deductions and decisions are rooted in instinct and emotion rather than reason, and thus can be wildly off the mark.

(If I have one bone to pick with Kahneman’s book, it’s that “system 1 versus system 2” isn’t a terribly memorable opposition. So henceforth, I shall refer to system 1 – the the old-fashioned, impulsive, combative brain – as Kirk, and system 2, the more modern, analytical brain, as Spock.)

Kahneman spends much of his book detailing Kirk’s commonest cockups – the cognitive biases. I’ve covered these in a previous post, but those that crop up most in online discussions are the third-person effect (“My opponent has fallen for lies but I haven’t”), the projection illusion (“Most people act like me, for the same reasons as me”), the slippery slope fallacy (“Soon we’ll all be under sharia law!”), the sunk cost fallacy (“We’ve come this far – we can’t turn back now”) and the availability heuristic (“I’ve seen or read about this behaviour, so it must be everywhere”).

Essentially, humans have two different operating systems, with complementary strengths, suitable for different situations. One is great for getting you through everyday tasks and dire emergencies; the other is better for novel quandaries and counterintuitive problems.

As fascinating and rigorous as Kahneman’s book is, it is, in a way, just a restatement of an age-old theory. Ideas about the duality of mind date back at least to the concepts of chokhmah and binah in the 13th century and run on through instinct and reason, conscious and subconscious, to id and superego.

So what’s all this psychobabble got to do with the common fisheries policy? Look back at the description of Spock thinking. Reading, problem-solving, creative solutions, learning: it’s basically the operating manual for an intellectual.

Academics, experts and their ilk don’t only use this mode of thought. We all have access to both Kirk and Spock; they are what makes us human. What differentiates one person from another is not their access to these systems, but the frequency and efficiency with which they use them. Genetics may play a part, but there’s little doubt that education is a decisive factor.

People who have read more widely, who have studied to a higher level, travelled more widely, mastered a skill like a language or a musical instrument, or spent more time solving problems or creating things, are more likely to have a well-developed Spock brain, and to use it in a wider range of circumstances.

Meanwhile, those who aren’t so in touch with their Spock side – because they didn’t go to university, or learn a language – prefer, wherever possible, to stick to Kirk.

“As popular democracy gained strength and confidence, it reinforced the widespread belief in the superiority of inborn, intuitive, folkish wisdom over the cultivated, oversophisticated, and self-interested knowledge of the literati and the well-to-do” – Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

Just plain folks

Tweet: 'Donald Trump's genius is that anyone can understand him' — Trump. Genius. Let’s see if that makes his Britannica entry.

One of the crucial factors in Donald Trump’s appeal seems to be his gift – in the eyes of just enough American voters – for “telling it like it is”. An exit poll taken during the South Carolina Republican primary, for example, reported that 78% of those who rated “tells it like it is” as the top quality in a candidate planned to vote for Trump.

For non-Trump supporters, this is flabbergasting. Few of us could name anyone who tells it less like it is. It’s a documented fact that Trump has told an average of six lies for each day of his presidency. So what do they mean by this?

I think what they love about Trump is not his laser accuracy or his staggering genius, but his simplicity. He tells it not like it is, but like they wish it was, breaking every problem down into a formula so basic that they can absorb it without breaking sweat.

Kahneman might translate thus: “Donald Trump speaks to me in my language. He offers solutions simple enough for me to understand without effort, in words simple enough for me to understand without effort.” In other words, this is a Kirk-dominant brain communicating in a way that is perfectly clear to other Kirk-dominant brains. And the language it is using is common sense.

Common sense. The rallying cry rings out again and again and again across tabloid editorials and the social media battlefield.

$Tweet: 'No facts needed, just common sense\$ Their passion is not wholly misplaced. As we’ve seen, the system 1 brain, honed over millennia, is a perfectly good remedy to many problems. You sure as hell don’t want to be hanging around engaging your Spock when there’s a rock hurtling straight at your head.

But in the wrong situations, common sense is poison. Its ingrained cognitive biases make nuance and compromise impossible. Kirk is abysmal at performing cost-benefit analyses and hopeless at planning for the long term. While going with your gut might serve you well in a live combat situation or on a frenetic trading floor, it’s a downright liability when it comes to negotiating intricate trade deals, eliminating terrorism, or persuading a rogue state to abandon its nuclear research programme.

When confronted with unfamiliar problems, ones that Kirk is not best equipped to deal with, lizard-brains react in one of three ways: fight, flight, or give up.

The first two are apparent in just about every one of Donald Trump’s policy decisions. Drain the swamp (fight). Build the wall (flight). Lock her up (bit of both). And 99% of his Twitter diplomacy consists of hamfisted playground insults and threats. The man is literally incapable of a measured response.

The third reaction is interesting.

Armchair critics

One of the things that has struck me most during my online interactions with Brexiters is how little work they are prepared to put in. Few lifted a finger or eyelid to inform themselves about the pros and cons of EU membership before the referendum, and the number has scarcely been augmented since. When responding to statements they disagree with, they seldom elaborate beyond “You’re wrong”, “Bollocks”, “Nonsense” or “Yawn”. If you send them a link to an article to back up your point, they rarely click on it, and when they do, they don’t read past the headline.

As for creative phraseology, forget it. They talk almost exclusively in clichés and slogans, and their “arguments” are all ripped verbatim from Farage or the Express. This is why it’s sometimes so hard to distinguish Brexiters from bots.

Tempting as it is to write off all diehard Brexit and Trump voters as stupid, that might be an oversimplification. My theory is that because their Spock brains are less developed, analytical thinking is even harder for them than it is for the rest of us, and so they’re even more likely to avoid it. They just prefer to use their Kirk, even when it’s clearly not the right equipment for the job. They’re not dumb, necessarily; just intellectually lazy.

Revenge of the pointyheads

Many people still seem to revere common sense as an unalloyed good, a panacea. It is not. Different operations call for different tools, and Kirk is painfully limited in scope. (For a good summary, read this.)

Common sense dictates* that you should run away from a bear. Don’t; you’ll die. Common sense dictates that you should throw water on an electrical fire. Don’t; you’ll die. Common sense dictates that you are safer with a close family member than with a stranger. You’re not. Common sense dictates that letting your anger out is good for you, that time passes at the same rate for everyone, regardless of velocity, that you can ascertain both the speed and location of an electron at any one time. Common sense dictates that you do not inject someone with a mild strain of a disease in order to prevent them from contracting a potentially fatal type.

(*Telling little phrase, that. Reason doesn’t dictate anything; it simply states.)

Common sense was all very well when humans scavenged on the savannah, and it served most of us adequately until quite recently. But it has always been our ability to reason that separated us from the animals, allowing us to create, to hypothesise, to codify, to pass on knowledge and, crucially, to specialise.

Common sense has had millions of years to eliminate war, terrorism, poverty, disease and famine, and it has failed miserably. It’s only since the Enlightenment broke its chokehold that humanity has begun to address those issues. And in this insanely complex modern age, when the amount of knowledge required for society to function is a thousandfold greater than any one person could hope to take in, the need for uncommon sense – ie, experts – is greater than ever.

The historical trend is undeniable: slowly but surely, Spock thinking is displacing Kirk, correcting its cognitive biases and giving us more effective solutions to our problems. Advances in medical science, the steady increase in the standard of living, the lengthening human lifespan and the gradual decrease in the rate of violent crime are all testament to this.

Now, perhaps resentful of this encroachment on their territory, the lazy lizard-brains have reared up. In a campaign unlikely to be of their own devising – I’ll save the speculation as to who might be responsible for my next post – they are sidelining, shouting down and smearing voices of reason at every turn.

It’s time to return fire. But I’m not suggesting that we try to eradicate common sense. We can’t – it’s an inalienable part of our makeup. But we do need to dispel this pernicious notion that gut feeling is the answer to everything; to escort Kirk out of the delicate galactic peace negotiations, pack him off to some distant planet with lots of slimy aliens to punch and green-skinned women to boink, and let Spock handle the tricky stuff.

Caller to James O’Brien’s LBC radio show: “I’m just an ordinary, common-sense mum … who believes that Britain framed Russia for the Salisbury poisoning”

Thanks, Lu.

Laziness, envy and fear: the handmaidens of Brexit

Fearful people want swift, simple solutions – and woe betide any pointy-headed intellectual who gets in the way with pleas for calm or evidence

Over the last two years, there have been more attempted explanations of Brexit and Trump than there have been leaders of Ukip. It was racism; it was the Russians; it was a longing for simpler times; the dumbing-down of culture; the echo chambers of social media; a collective brain fart. And all those things doubtless played a part.

But since it’s the alarming new wave of anti-intellectualism – the collapse of faith in expertise – that has enabled both these developments, it might be productive to consider how we’ve suddenly arrived in a world where knowledge is seen as a shortcoming and “I’m no expert” is practically a boast.

History tells us that surges in populism like the one we’re experiencing generally follow periods of economic strife. But while times may be tough by modern standards, our privations are nothing next to the hardship of the 1930s, 50s, or even the 70s (yet). Cashflow can’t be the sole cause.

I’ve already written about the evolution of language and culture to paint an ever darker picture of intellectuals; but as I said, those are as much symptoms as causes of the new climate.

Why, at an individual level, did people vote for Brexit and Trump? What have intellectuals and liberals done to deserve the sudden scorn of the masses? To my mind, there are three main factors.

Envy

It’s hard to escape the feeling that some of the people who voted for Brexit and Trump did so out of sheer spite. Having not, perhaps, achieved the station in life they feel they deserve, they are beside themselves at the notion that others might have found relative happiness. Their pain is all the more acute for being at least partly self-inflicted. They’re haunted by the suspicion that if, at school, instead of flicking bogies at the ginger kid who finished top in the spelling test, they had applied themselves, or if, in their first grown-up job, they’d thrown sickies less than once a fortnight, they too might have finished a little higher up the field.

Tweet: "Glad it's hurting" — How to persuade Remainers to get behind Brexit.

Others’ grievances have a little more substance. After all, the world is plainly full of high-flyers who haven’t earned their wings. Too many people have got where they are by cheating, or through nepotism, the old boys’ network, or dumb luck. And those who have put in the graft are often rewarded out of all proportion with their efforts. I’m sure running Lloyds Bank is no cakewalk, but is António Horta Osório’s contribution really worth £8m a year? Mark Zuckerberg may have sweated blood building Facebook, and his social network brings pleasure to millions (when not furiously fucking them in the arse), but is $65bn really a commensurate prize when talented, dedicated nurses and firefighters are topping up their weekly shop at the food bank?

We’ve reached a point where the top dogs have a bigger share of the Winalot than ever before. What’s more, the inequality has never been more glaring: it’s rubbed in our faces daily on reality TV shows, newspaper and magazine front pages, advertising billboards and Instagram.

But the perception that all people keeping their heads above water are similarly undeserving is grossly unfair to those who started without any advantage – and particularly so to intellectuals, such as writers and academics, who on the whole have it a lot less cushy than is widely believed.

Laziness

“Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot comprehend” – Samuel Johnson

Far too many Britons – and I include Remain voters here – voted in the EU referendum in ignorance. I’m constantly astonished at the number of people with a tenuous grasp of the issues involved, even almost two years after the decision. The majority seem to have voted with heart rather than head, without taking the time to find out if there was any truth to the tabloid stories about Brussels bureaucracy, or how deeply integrated the UK’s economy is with the EU. I don’t think some of them even read the fucking bus.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, I don’t think many people really believed their vote would count. Both sides were expecting a walkover for Remain (so much so that many plumped for the “Give Cameron a bloody nose” option, believing that it wouldn’t tip the balance). Why bother doing your homework when your vote won’t matter anyway?

Second, many people are not accustomed – or can’t be bothered – to take in complex information. They’ve got more important, or more interesting things to think about than what James Thurber called the “clanguorous, complicated fact”. Going through the minutiae is someone else’s job.

Indeed, that’s exactly how things work in a representative democracy, our usual system of government. Since we don’t have the time to do all the research required, we elect councillors and mayors and MPs, who then, with the help of expert advisors (we hope), make decisions on our behalf. But when it comes to referendums – the purest, most direct form of democracy – those crutches fall away. You’re the expert now. At least, you should be.

What’s more worrying is that some of the representatives we elect to make decisions for us think exactly the same way.

Nadine Dorries (MP!) came in for a lot of stick for her assertion that the vote to leave the EU was correct because international trade was too complex for her to understand, but she deserved it all and more. This is one of our supposed leaders, giving up on a matter of paramount importance just because it made her head hurt. If we all followed Dorries’ logic, humankind would have given up long ago on space flight, curing polio, powering our homes, building viaducts, developing antibiotics, compiling the English dictionary and mapping the globe.

A few months later, another Tory MP made a similarly unedifying contribution to the public debate.

To label this behaviour “stupidity” is to give Dorries and Fysh too much credit. What they are guilty of here is intellectual laziness; they’re not too dumb to understand international trade. They just can’t be arsed.

This pattern is repeated thousands of times a day, in pubs, in the comments under online news articles, and on social media. Attempt to explain a point in any detail at all and you’re greeted with a “Yawn”. Boring. Tell me something simple that makes my tummy feel fuzzy instead, like how all Muslims are paedophiles.

It’s hard to pin down what’s turning us all into Homer Simpson, but there’s little doubt that in this era of tweets and vines and all-round instant gratification, attention spans and patience are declining. In 1982, 57% of US citizens had read at least one novel, play or poem in the previous year. By 2015, that had fallen to 43%. In the UK, only 40% of children now read beyond what they are obliged to at school.

Probably the scariest study in this area was carried out by Kiku Adatto of Harvard University. She found that in 1968, the average quotation from a presidential candidate used in TV news lasted 42.3 seconds; by 1988, the duration had fallen to 9.8 seconds. In 2000, according to a later paper, it stood at 7.8 seconds. Donald Trump’s rousing battle cries – “Make America great again”, “Build the wall”, “Lock her up”, “Drain the swamp” – come in at an average of 1.3. You can’t solve complex problems like crime and unemployment and terrorism with 1.3-second soundbites. But people, it seems, aren’t willing to listen for any longer.

(I’ll go into this in more detail in my next post. If you want to do some prep in advance, I recommend that you go out and buy Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast And Slow. Even if you don’t intend to read the next post, you won’t regret it.)

Fear

Four years before the referendum, no one, beyond a handful of cryogenically frozen Tories and fanatical racists, cared much either way about the UK’s membership of the EU, probably because it had no readily measurable effect on their everyday lives. In a survey carried out at the end of 2012, just 2% of respondents said the EU and Europe were the most important issues facing Britain. But by June 2016, millions of people had suddenly become raving Europhobes. What happened?

The last great wave of populism in the 1950s occurred at a time of unprecedented flux. Millions had lost loved ones in the second world war, food and money were scarce, and the world was cowering under the threat of nuclear armageddon. Technology was advancing at a dizzying pace: newfangled gadgets from TVs to phones, from freezers to food mixers, transformed homes beyond recognition in a matter of years. Cultural change was not lagging far behind, thanks to contraception, vaccination, postwar immigration, and the more prominent role in public life played by women.

For many people, change engenders fear. We prefer to stick to familiar things and routines because they don’t require mental effort and we know from experience that they won’t kill us. Too much innovation too fast sends their primal instincts into overdrive. The calmer, more rational part of the brain is cut off. They want swift and simple solutions to their problems, and woe betide any “pointy-headed professors” who get in their way with pleas for calm or evidence.

Change-induced fear, I believe, was also a decisive factor in 2016. Immigration, sexual liberation, WhatsApp, gay marriage, wind farms, Amazon, contactless payments, self-driving cars: the scale and pace of innovation can be bewildering even to young, plastic minds.

Few of these things, however, are threatening in and of themselves. On a day-to-day basis, most of them can be mastered, or avoided, easily enough. But the crucial point here is not the change itself; it’s the perception of change.

Each and every one of the Remain camp’s warnings about the likely dangers of leaving the EU was airily dismissed with a cry of “Project Fear!”. But the other side was even more adept at peddling dread. “Turkey is joining the EU!”; “The EU is becoming a superstate!”; “The EU wants to form an army!”; “The EU’s share of world trade is shrinking”.

After 30 years of relentless Brussels-bashing by the tabloids, the Vote Leave campaign, with the forensic assistance of psyops firm Cambridge Analytica, weighed in with a bumper anthology of horror stories. Online, an army of trolls sputtered out every tale they could find, true or false, about terrorists and feminists and Muslim rape gangs and fucking Easter eggs. While the streets were notable for the absence of upheaval, the gutter press and gutter politicians successfully forged the narrative that the British and American ways of life – and particularly the white male way of life – were under immediate threat. To deliver their message more effectively, they used deliberately emotive language: when the likes of Katie Hopkins deploys the words “swamped”, “infestation” and “cockroaches”, she does so knowing full well which part of the brain she is poking at.

Those who did not take the time, or did not possess the critical faculties, to question what they read went into fight-or-flight mode. Few could point to any direct personal experience of the danger posed by immigrants or the European Union or Barack Obama, but they had been told that they were a threat. The papers said so. My friend on Facebook shared a meme saying so. Simple, swift solutions.

And so they gobbled up the vacuous, undeliverable slogans. And they voted for Brexit and Trump.

I have a couple more things to say about this, and then I’m going to take a bit of a break and write a hit romcom and retire to fucking Lanzarote. Brexit permitting.

Poisoning the well-educated: how the far right are waging war on knowledge

The demagogues can’t win the debate with intellectuals, so instead, they’re trying every trick in the book to shut it down

The western world is some way from being a technocracy. But there is no doubt in my mind that those sectors that are run on the basis of expertise – the judiciary, the civil service, academia, the creative sector – are under ferocious attack.

Intellectuals, however, are no pushovers, because – well, they’re bright, and they usually hold influence and power. When ideologues face experts on a level playing field, they tend to have their arses handed to them – see the epic owning of alt-right bilemonger Paul Joseph Watson by teacher Mike Stuchbery over the question of racial diversity in Roman Britain. So if a fair fight is out, how is this war being prosecuted?

Wherever possible, extreme rightwingers steer clear of direct confrontations. Jeremy Hunt declines Ralf Little’s offer of a live debate about mental health provision; Chris Grayling refuses to appear on a radio chat show with Andrew Adonis.

They’re assisted in this by the dumbed-down clickbait culture that’s consuming our media. The coverage of science in most newspapers these days is woeful: research findings are published without caveat, rebuttals added too late, if at all. And on news programmes, it’s increasingly rare to see a genuine expert consulted on any issue of note. You can understand why: academics can be a little dry and stuffy, their arguments detailed, nuanced, full of ifs and buts.

Watch the BBC or Sky next time there’s a debate about gun control: guaranteed, there’ll be someone from the NRA, spouting the usual inflammatory bilge, and as a counterpoint, if you’re lucky, you might get the relative of a shooting victim. They don’t want people who know about guns; they want people who care about guns (and who generally add little of substance to the debate). Similarly, in any discussion about the EU, do the producers summon a professor of European history or an economics journalist? Good God no, haul in a rabid Remainer and a batshit Brexiter and watch the sparks fly!

This sidelining of rational voices is even easier on Twitter, where Brexiters can obliterate all those who post inconvenient truths with a tap of the block button.

If a showdown with someone who knows their stuff is unavoidable, far right-demagogues have several ploys. The crassest is simply to prevent their opponent from getting a word in edgeways, as Nigel Farage did to Femi Oluwole on his LBC show, and Julia Hartley-Brewer to Heidi Alexander on Talk Radio. It seems the freedom of speech they profess to hold so dear only matters when it’s theirs.

Another part of their arsenal is the logical fallacy. I don’t want to regurgitate my entire post on the subject here, but to recap, they’re non-arguments masquerading as arguments – underhanded attempts to deflect or reframe the debate, or throw the opponent off balance, rather than address the topic at hand. The ones you’ll come across the most are the argumentum ad populum (“17.4 million people can’t be wrong”), the false dichotomy (“You’re either for freedom of speech or against it”), the appeal to emotion (any tweet by Daniel Hannan), tu quoque or whataboutery (“But Hillary’s emails”), tone policing (“Typical condescending Remoaner”), and Boris Johnson’s favourite toy, the straw man (“So what you’re saying is …”).

But the populist’s standard-issue weapon is the ad hominem: the personal attack. Play the man and not the ball, and hopefully you can forget about the ball.

I’ve written before, too, about the revival of the art of the smear. Essentially, Leave and Trump advocates, like fascists throughout history, love to sling mud. In logic speak, this is known as poisoning the well: an attempt to discredit the target such that people will no longer believe or trust them. Thus, no matter how wise their words today, Tony Blair (Iraq), Nick Clegg (tuition fees), Tim Farron (homophobia), Hillary Clinton (crooked, although no one has yet produced any evidence to support this assertion) and Jeremy Corbyn (IRA, Palestine) can, in some eyes, never be taken seriously again.

(The reason ad hominem works, of course, is that it is not entirely without foundation. Some people or publications are habitual liars or fools and, if shown to have been so often enough, probably should be ignored. Into this category fall most of the UK tabloids, Fox News, Hannan and many of his Brexit conspirators, and most of the alt-right – but also plenty on the far left. Generally speaking, however, people should not be permanently written off on the basis of one or two lapses of judgment.)

Intellectuals – and for the purposes of this section we can scale right down to passably intelligent liberals debating on Twitter – represent a particular challenge for the ad hominist. They don’t tend to be well-known, so their every past mistake and foible is not in the public domain. Populists will still take every opportunity to play the man rather than his argument, but where that’s made difficult (eg by the anonymity conferred by the internet), they’ll go after his sources, or his motives, instead. And in my experience, they tend to do so in one of six ways.

1) Fallible

You may have more information than me, but you were wrong once before, so you may be wrong now.

The argument that someone’s opinion shouldn’t be trusted because she doesn’t have a 100% record in her field is idiotic, but it’s one that’s trotted out with tiresome regularity, most often, in the context of Brexit, in respect of economists.

Yes, they goofed up once. (Or rather, a different group of economists did; that was 10 years ago.) But those economists were appointed to their jobs over thousands of hugely qualified rivals. If they weren’t generally good at their jobs, they’d have lost them long ago. They’re still far more likely to make accurate forecasts about the UK’s future outside the EU than Kev from Castle Point.

Say you find out the cardiac surgeon who’s going to perform open-heart surgery on you lost his last patient. Would you rather he operated on you, or a bricklayer? Someone’s past failings have no bearing on the credibility of their statement today.

2) Biased!

You may have information, but that information comes from a compromised source.

The word “biased” is tossed around by arch-Brexiters almost as freely as “democracy” and “Get over it”, and yet it’s far from clear whether they know what it means.

Bias is not a synonym for preference. You can prefer something to something else instinctively, or having considered both options carefully. “Bias” specifically means a predisposition to like or dislike something because you have a stake in the matter. I’m not biased against wasps; I’ve just weighed up the pros and cons of wasps and concluded, as I imagine most have, that they are a bad thing. If I argue that 1 + 1 = 2 and you argue that 1 + 1 = 3, I’m not biased towards the result 2. I’m just right.

Similarly, I don’t have a holiday home in Florence and I don’t have a crush on my Latvian barista. I have no vested interest in the future of the EU. I’ve just researched the issue, calculated the likely fortunes of my country within and without it, and decided, overwhelmingly, that within is better.

More commonly, this accusation is levelled at any source you use to back up your claims. There’s more justification for this – after all, the Mail, Express, the Canary, and fake news sites like Westmonster, Breitbart and Infowars are notorious for their partisan views and casual relationship with the truth. But a number of other news providers – the “mainstream media” – are also regularly rubbished.

There’s a lot of contempt for the Guardian, for example (mostly from people who haven’t opened it since 1981). Sure, it probably has more commentators from the left of the political landscape than the right, although most are tepidly centrist these days. But it provides a forum for voices from across the spectrum. It follows due journalistic process: it names its sources where possible, and allows those mentioned in its stories a right of reply. It has subeditors and lawyers and its staff routinely discuss the most balanced way to word headlines. On the whole, it uses neutral language in its news pieces, with minimal value judgments. It keeps its news reports separate from its opinion pieces. And above all, it is accountable to its readership, to its own ombudsman, and to the wider public. It responds to all complaints, and when it is incorrect, it publishes retractions and apologies.

The likes of Infowars, Fox News and the Express, meanwhile, are bound by no such constraints. They publish only stories that promote their narrow, ultra-right conservative agenda. News and opinion are an inseparable morass: their stories tell you not just what happened, but exactly what you should think about it.

Crucially, the established free press doesn’t routinely make shit up. Yes, it makes mistakes, and yes, it has been known to put a mild spin on things; but it doesn’t falsify footage, invent quotes, misidentify pictures, or blatantly publish provable falsehoods.

So next time someone plays the “MSM” card, stand your ground. Ask them: “What’s that got to do with anything? The BBC/Guardian is the fourth/seventh most trusted news source in America. (Fox News is 29th.) Which specific details of the report I linked to are wrong?”

3) Brainwashed!

Yes, you have more information than me, but it is false information imparted to you by another. You are a dupe; a stooge.

I love it when Brexiters pull the pin on this one. “You’ve been brainwashed into loving the EU.” As if, through some preposterous sequence of accidents, I had only ever been exposed to pro-EU messages. And it really would have to be preposterous: most of the tabloids (and the Telegraph) have printed nothing but negative stories about Brussels for decades; the quality papers, meanwhile, never said much positive about it because – well, come on, European politics. (If the EU really is a dictatorship, it must surely go down as the dullest in history.)

The circulations of the Guardian and Independent, the only unabashedly pro-EU papers left, are, as the right never tires of pointing out, dwindling rapidly. Personally, I can barely recall coming across any positive messages about the EU, even from the Remain campaign during the referendum. Am I missing something? Euro-conversion booths on our high streets, perhaps? The only real advertisement I ever saw for the EU (before I went looking for information) were EU citizens themselves – valued contributors to our economy and our culture, to whom I cannot apologise enough for the shitstorm Brexit has visited upon them – and the general impression that the country was more prosperous and culturally rich than when I was a boy.

Perhaps sensing the absurdity of that argument, some Brexiters shift the blame to an institution that, to them, is shrouded in mystery: university. Our places of higher learning, some seem to believe, are hotbeds of communism, cranking out rows of malodorous, long-haired men and short-haired women who love immigrants and homosexuals and quinoa and hate white people and Britain and America.

If any of these deluded souls had ever been within a country mile of a campus, they’d know the truth was more mundane. With the exception of the politics faculty and the student union offices, universities are not especially political places. Some right-on loon might make the news every few weeks with a call to ban music from campus because it’s discriminatory against deaf people, but most courses don’t even touch on politics (students of history and the social sciences make up 8% of the corpus) and membership of political groups is low. Most students aged 18-21, like most non-students aged 18-21, are more interested in beer, sport and sex than they are in social welfare budgets or the privatisation of the Land Registry.

Besides, how the hell is this monumental operation being conducted? Are there posters on every wall depicting a smiling Jean-Claude Juncker with the slogan, “Your country needs EU?” Is Ode To Joy piped into student halls of residence while they sleep? Are the student union canteen lunches laced with brie?

If there were some sort of conspiracy to indoctrinate western students in leftist ideas, you’d think someone would have produced some definitive proof. But 49% of Britain’s young people go into higher education. That’s half a million people a year. Surely one of them – or a rogue lecturer, or cleaner – would have recorded some footage on their mobile by now?

There’s a far simpler explanation for young people’s attachment to the EU: their minds are more idealistic, more plastic, more open to new ideas. In addition, university teaches them to think critically, and introduces them to people from a far more diverse range of backgrounds than they were exposed to at home. It’s not the current education system that makes people liberal; it is education itself.

And ask yourself this. Who is more susceptible to brainwashing: the person with at least three years’ extra education, who has been trained to question and critique everything she reads; or the person who never once raised his hand in 10 years of school?

4) Bribed!

You may have information, but it is information that you have been paid to disseminate.

We’re fully into wackjob territory now. I know George Soros is rich, but to fund every Remain vote and leaflet and march and pro-Remain MP and academic and research paper and CEO and judge and economist, and keep it all a secret … You know what? If that did turn out to be the case, I’d remain a Remainer, because I’d want to be on that man’s side.

5) Brideshead

You may have information, but it is esoteric information, irrelevant to everyday life.

Alongside the soap-dodging, sickle-wielding snowflake, another university stereotype stubbornly persists: of Rupert and Sebastian, foppish, entitled aristocrats lounging louchely in their double set while Mrs Miggins meekly serves them tiffin and opium. Entitled, effeminate, with alabaster hands that have never been in the same room as a screwdriver, they can solve complex equations or recite passages of poetry or critique Leibniz’s theory of monads, but when it comes to the business of getting by in life, they’re all at sea. And yet, on graduation, Daddy will fix them up with a cushy number in the civil service or on the board of a big bank.

This, I think, is the image the tabloids are trying to conjure up when they use phrases like “out of touch” and “elite” (the American equivalent seems to be “coastal elite”). They’re trying to foster this idea that students (and academics, judges, civil servants, and anyone else who may have touched a book by someone other than Danielle Steel or Andy McNab) are sheltered from hard reality and therefore unqualified to speak on real-world issues.

Loath as I am to break the devastating news to you, Brexit fans, things have moved on a lick since the 1930s. Ninety per cent of UK students are now from state schools. Daddy’s more likely to be a bookie than a landed gent. And contrary to your belief, the laws of the universe apply as much at university as they do in the “real world”. You still have to work hard, you still have to pay your way – most undergraduates now do regular temporary work on top of their full-time course – and the social competition from your peers is, if anything, more intense. All that, plus the crushing spectre of tens of thousands of pounds of debt hanging over you, and no guarantee of a job at the end of it. Small wonder that suicides among students have doubled in the last decade.

A greater number of students than ever are studying hard vocational subjects, in science, IT, agriculture and journalism, with clearly defined careers at the end of them. In any case, education isn’t about what you learn. It’s about how you learn, how to develop a curiosity about the world, how to question and understand and predict and follow chains of logic.

Besides, if people are so implacably opposed to a pampered, nepotistic elite, they’ve chosen a decidedly odd bunch of champions to rid themselves of the scourge. Jacob Rees-Mogg (Eton and Oxford), Daniel Hannan (Marlborough and Oxford) and Boris Johnson (Eton and Oxford); and in the US, Donald Trump (wealthy businessman), Steve Bannon (Goldman Sachs financier and media executive) and Reince Priebus (corporate lawyer).

6) Boring!/Bollocks!/Bullshit!

You may have information, but it is … bollocks. Because I say so.

Probably the most common responses from Brexit fanatics to any point I make, or any post I write, are one-word answers: “Rubbish”, “Nonsense”, “Bullshit”, “Bollocks”. They go silent when you ask them to elaborate. I can’t begin to imagine why.

So much, then, for the strategy behind the war on intellectuals. In my next post, I’ll look at the war aims.

Meep-meep to MAGA: how Road Runner paved the way for Trump

Is it any surprise that kids don’t want to learn when the learned are routinely portrayed as asexual, autistic archvillains?

So what is driving this new climate of distrust, bordering on outright hostility, towards people who think?

History shows us that populist surges generally follow periods of economic hardship, war, or both. We all know what happened in the 1930s after the Great Depression, but a similar pattern of events can be seen in the rise of Andrew Jackson after the downturn of the 1820s and in the aftermath of World War Two. As discontent grows, so does anger towards those in charge – whether they are responsible or not – and clever folk are usually part of that establishment. The time is ripe for other interest groups, usually those who have been sidelined from power, to step in and widen the cracks.

And there are always plenty of such candidates in the wings. As Richard Hofstadter notes, the impetus for anti-intellectual movements usually comes from one of three directions: big business, which rarely appreciates transparency; the church, whose very existence is threatened by concepts such as reason and evidence; and the nationalist right wing, which depends heavily on misinformation to get its message across.

These people aren’t exactly pushing at a locked door. The latent scorn for experts among the inexpert population is never far below the surface.

There’s one area that Hofstadter conspicuously glosses over in his analysis: culture. And yet for the most illuminating insights into a society, it helps to look at its fictions as well as its facts. Hence this post.

In western culture, real men don’t think. (It should become obvious in a few paragraphs why I’m only talking about men here.)

From the oldest folk tales to the latest TV shows, the heroes of British and American stories have overwhelmingly been men of action rather than people of learning: King Arthur. Robin Hood. Flashman. Hornblower. Jack Aubrey. Sharpe. Tarzan. Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and virtually every comic-book character. Dick Barton. Dan Dare. Biggles. Bond. Roy of the Rovers. Starsky and Hutch … Men of courage, men of heart, honourable and true, but none of them likely to appreciate a subscription to the London Review of Books.

They are brave to the point of recklessness; chisel-jawed, dimple-chinned, gung-ho, love their mothers, love their country. They’ve rarely spent any time acquiring any of their prodigious skills; they’re just born that way. And usually, to be frank, they’re titanically dull, relying on quirky sidekicks for any entertainment beyond the thud of fist on jaw.

They might be possessed of a certain resourcefulness, a dry wit or cunning, but they are never learned men. They’re the first person you want to call when trouble breaks out – but the last you’d want on your Only Connect team.

More recently, Anglo-American culture has thrown up a second type of hero: the lovable rogue. In this category you have Molesworth, Just William, Bertie Wooster, Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx, Del Boy, Arthur Daley, Norman Stanley Fletcher, Homer Simpson. These characters aren’t just ambivalent about intellectual enrichment; they’re actively averse to it. They too survive on native wit and luck rather than on any insights they might have picked up by study or observation.

In terms of popular protagonists with actual brains, all I could come up with (after an admittedly cursory thunk) was Doctor Who and Iron Man. I’m discounting detectives – Holmes, Marlowe, Marple, Morse, Columbo – as brains are kind of the sine qua non in a crime solver.

(It’s perhaps worth noting that both Tony Stark and the Time Lord come to us as fully formed geniuses. Their brilliance is cool only because it is effortless. Stark magically knows everything despite spending his every spare moment partying and banging hot chicks, and the Doctor is an alien who picked up his magisterial knowledge before we met him. While you can bet a pound to a penny that any film about sporting prowess will feature at least one montage showing our hero training earnestly for the Big Match or Fight, cerebral heroes are never shown putting in the unglamorous work that got them where they are.)

There seem to be two roles reserved for bright characters in western fiction. The most common is socially inadequate, undersexed oddball sidekick: Willow from Buffy, Mr Spock*, Flash Gordon’s Dr Zarkov, Dan Dare’s Professor Peabody, Hermione from Harry Potter, Thunderbirds’ Brains – so narrowly defined by his mental acuity that he’s never given a real name – and Bond’s Q. While the hero kicks butt and pumps booty, these poor souls toil thanklessly in the shadows, emerging only to deliver their (often crucial) findings when the hero requires them.
* Thankfully, The Next Generation flipped the Kirk-Spock dynamic with Picard and Riker.

The other part the genius regularly gets to play, of course, is the bad guy. Dr Frankenstein, the archetypal mad scientist. Bond’s various evil-genius enemies. Dennis the Menace’s nemesis, Walter the Softy. The Mekon. The Bash Street Kids’ Cuthbert Cringeworthy. Street-smart Will Smith’s preppy punchbag cousin Carlton in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. None of these are helpful depictions for academics who are mostly trying to make the world a better place.

So far, so depressing. To my mind, there are two fictional universes in particular that encapsulate society’s unhealthy attitude towards its brainboxes.

The Looney Tunes cartoons featuring Wile E Coyote and the Road Runner, which initially ran from 1949 to 1966, were a straight-up battle between ingenuity and common sense, between artifice and natural ability. And who wins out every time? Wile E Coyote’s ingenious traps, courtesy of the Acme corporation, always end up blowing up in his face, while a combination of raw speed and luck allows the Road Runner to live to meep another day.

Intentional or not, the message is hammered home as surely as Wile E’s skull is pounded into the Arizona dust: instinct trumps science every time. Those with ideas above their station will pay the price for their arrogance; far better to accept your natural place and your natural gifts. The coyote, as the rightwingers and religious nuts see it, would have more luck if he just used his God-given animal instincts.

Hulk comic issue 1 — Sorry, Bruce. We need the big guy.

Then, in 1962, a character came along who distilled the brain/brawn dichotomy into a single body. Under normal circumstances, he’s Bruce Banner: a (supposedly) brilliant scientist, but weedy, emotionally distant, indecisive, ineffectual. But subject Bruce to stress, and he undergoes a priapic transformation into the Hulk: an unstoppable, unkillable powerhouse of limitless strength who’s barely able to form a sentence. Sure, Banner can recalibrate your mass spectrometer or fix the frizz on your TV, but if when the real shit goes down, there’s only one guy you want around. Once again, the primal, “natural” persona wins out over the modern, reflective soul.

There’s been precious little to counter this narrative. Sure, the cerebrally unchallenged have mounted mini-fightbacks in the films of John Hughes (The Breakfast Club, Weird Science) and more recently under the direction of Judd Apatow, and the words “geek” and “nerd” have been somewhat reclaimed, thanks in part to the terrifying success of the Silicon Valley tech elite. But even today, the stereotypical image of the educated person is of a friendless introvert who, while gifted in one department, can’t win an arm-wrestle, change a lightbulb, or get laid in a Bangkok brothel.

For every Good Will Hunting, there are 100 Ethan Hunts; for every Dead Poets Society, 50 Fight Clubs. Given the bombardment of negative stereotypes around learning and diligence, it’s no wonder a good 75% of my male peers spent most of their schooldays twanging the girls’ bra-straps and carving FUCK into their desks instead of developing their mental abilities. Nor is it a huge surprise when the likes of Nigel Farage waves away 60 years of universally accepted medical research to insist that smoking is perfectly safe. (Here, Nige, have another. Go on, be a devil.)

Some will protest that art imitates life rather than shaping it. This is true, but in reflecting stereotypes, culture also reinforces them. And when our stories offer so few positive role models of a particular type, what hope is there that things will change?

Coming up: how does an intellectual David take on Goliath?

The new age of unreason

In our new reality, the views of a West Ham fan who left school at 15 are deemed as valid as those of a politics professor at LSE

(Fair warning: there’s a lot of ground to cover on this subject, so this will be the first in a mini-series.)

In 415AD, a band of thugs dragged the mathematician, astronomer and Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia from her carriage and took her to a nearby church, where they stripped her naked, battered her to death with roof tiles, dismembered her and set the body parts on fire.

During the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, the majority of the 200,000 Spanish civilians killed were members of the intelligentsia, as were most of the victims of the “killing fields” of Cambodia in the late 1970s. In the months after the invasion of Poland that triggered the second world war, the Nazis captured and killed around 100,000 Poles, 61,000 of whom were academics, priests, lawyers and doctors, in a secret cleansing operation codenamed Intelligenzaktion.

On his accession to power in Iran in 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini closed all universities and either executed or drove out most of the country’s intellectuals. In 2001, the Taliban planted and detonated explosives to destroy the Buddhas of Bamiyan, giant sandstone sculptures in the Hazarajat region of Afghanistan dating from the 6th century.

And in a history lesson at Ridgeway School in Swindon in 1982, Gavin McCracken pulled a wad of mucus from his nostril, rolled the sticky residue into a ball, and flicked it at the back of Andy Bodle’s head after the latter raised his hand to answer the teacher’s question.

All right, so it’s not exactly the martyrdom of Hypatia, but there’s a direct line connecting 5th-century Alexandria to Gavin McCracken’s bogie. Humanity has a long and inglorious history of persecuting its brighter minds and vandalising its culture, and if the last couple of years are any guide, it’s far from done yet.

“You know, I’ve always wanted to say this – I’ve never said this before – with all the talking we all do, all of these experts, ‘Oh we need an expert’ – the experts are terrible!” – Donald Trump, Wisconsin campaign rally, April 2016

Once again it has become fashionable, particularly on the right, to call expert opinion into question, to criticise judges and academics as “out of touch”, and to prize “real men” and “common sense” over rational inquiry. Suddenly, after years of rational debate, climate change deniers are back on an equal footing with climate scientists. Michael Gove is blithely declaring that we’ve “had enough of experts”.

And a serving British MP thinks this is a perfectly reasonable reply to an economist on Twitter:

Marcus Fysh tweet — Bah, facts. Who needs ’em?

It seems at first sight that in the space of a few short months, someone – this is not the place to speculate as to who – has begun to shape a reality in which “overeducated” is routinely deployed as a term of abuse, in which the complexity of a trade arrangement is considered sufficient grounds for binning it, and in which the views of a West Ham fan who left school at 15 are deemed as valid as those of a politics professor at LSE.

After years of relative peace, harmony and prosperity, a good chunk of the populace suddenly seems hellbent on dragging us back to the Byzantine era. But is this really an overnight development?

In his Pulitzer-winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, historian Richard Hofstadter charts the history of the relationship between his country and its intellectual class. For Hofstadter, writing in 1963, the most recent outbreak of boffin-bashing was the period of 1947-56, when the erudite Democrat Adlai Stevenson lost out twice to man-of-action Dwight Eisenhower in the presidential elections, and Joseph McCarthy’s Communist hysteria was at its vindictive height.

Hofstadter concludes that backlashes against the highly educated are cyclical, usually coming when times are economically or otherwise tough, after extended periods of liberal governance, and usually led by the church, business interests, and those on the right of the political spectrum. (I’ll be returning to Hofstadter a lot, as the parallels between what he describes and our present troubles are consistently alarming.)

Hofstadter’s focus was exclusively on the US, through the lenses of politics, business, religion and education. One area he didn’t really touch on was language, which turns out to be just as enlightening.

Insults for the intelligent have always been with us – “know-it-all”, “clever clogs”, “smart alec”, “swot” – but the end of the second world war and the start of the cold war saw a veritable deluge of new terms. “Square”, in the sense of “boringly old-fashioned or conventional person”, which soon morphed into a synonym for “swot”, is first attested in 1944. “Boffin” arrived in 1945. These were swiftly followed by “geek” (1946), “nerd” (1951), “dork” (1967), “dweeb” and “pointy-headed” (1968) and “anorak” (1984). “Egghead” seems to have been coined around 1907, but only really gained currency in the early 50s.

It’s true that some of these slurs have lost their force over time, some have been at least partially reclaimed (geek, nerd), and others (“pointy-headed”) have disappeared altogether. Nonetheless, those who once might have reached for a word to torment their diligent classmates with are now spoilt for choice.

We’re already beyond ideal blog post length, so I’ll pause here. That’s some of the background to emergence of this brave, stupid new world. In the next few posts, I’ll consider how this came about, why it came about, what the enemies of reason propose to replace it with, and whether there’s anything we can do about it.

The art of the smear: how the far right destroyed public discourse

Online debates these days unfold with all the dignity and decorum of a stag do at a Reading Wetherspoons

“Whoever first hurled an insult at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilization” – Sigmund Freud

Insults are nothing new. From the 4th century BC ding-dong between Demosthenes and Aeschines, to Shakespeare’s “You starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, you bull’s-pizzle, you stock-fish!”, to Noel Gallagher’s laceration of Robbie Williams as “the fat dancer from Take That”, incivility is as old as civilisation. We start calling each other names in the playground and, if the Leave voters I’ve encountered online are any guide, there’s no upper age limit on abuse.

But suddenly, it’s Ragnarök out there. Get involved in an online discussion about anything from topiary to the Tweenies and the chances are you’ll be set upon within minutes. Political “attack ads” were once frowned upon; now they’re the norm. There’s hardly been a single positive message in the UK general election campaign thus far; it’s just been smear after slur after slight. Most modern debates – usually online, but increasingly in real life – unfold with all the dignity and decorum of a stag do in a Reading Wetherspoons.

It’s all rather odd, because as I’m sure you already know, attacking a person in this way, instead of the substance of what they’re saying (or in the case of political debate, their policies), is a fallacy: a failure of reasoning that renders a claim invalid. In this case – the argumentum ad hominem fallacy – abuse is invalid because the truth of a person’s statement has nothing to do with their character, past behaviour or friends. Just because it’s Tony Blair saying, “Two plus two equals four”, that doesn’t mean the real answer is five. Much as it pains me to quote Margaret Thatcher, on this point, she had it right: “If they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”

Civilisation is supposed to be advancing. We are devising ever better theories to explain the world, sending more kids to university, sharing more information, faster, than ever before. The use of logical fallacies should be declining, not increasing.

So why the recent explosion of invective? Some blame the global climate of fear since 9/11 and the ensuing jihadi atrocities. Some say it’s deindividuation: when we’re online, or part of a large group, we enjoy anonymity; our actions have fewer repercussions for us, either because we are untraceable, or we because we share responsibility with others. When we are at one remove from the consequences, our actions tend to be less inhibited.

Others point to the bubble effect, the fact that people tend to assort themselves into groups of like-minded people. If we spend too long in these echo chambers, hearing only what we want to hear, then we are likely to react more aggressively when someone attacks them.

These theories all have merit, but I don’t believe they are enough to explain the extent of the poisoning of discourse, or the speed with which it’s happened. Echo chambers have always been with us – we’re a tribal species – and abuse is less effective online than in the real world, because while we may be anonymous, our opponents often are too, so we don’t have as much informational ammunition.

There’s something else going on. I have a theory of my own, but before we go into that, it would be helpful to look at abuse in more detail. First, a key distinction. There are two broad classes of ad hominem, which serve different purposes. The first is relatively innocuous and is largely accepted as a legitimate debating tactic.

“You, sir, are drunk.” “And you, madam, are ugly … but at least I shall be sober in the morning.”

Winston Churchill’s zinger to Lady Astor is a regular chart-topper on “Top 10 Putdowns” lists – but like all ad hominems, it’s a fallacy. From a purely logical perspective, Lady Astor is in the right. Churchill’s comeback is fallacious; as well as being offensive, it’s irrelevant. He’s also drawn a false equivalence. While he is quite capable of controlling his level of inebriation, poor Lady Astor has no such dominion over the shape of her face.

But if Astor wins on substance, Churchill wins on style. This is a class of ad hominem that you might call a joust. It’s usually found in the context of the cut and thrust of repartee, and its purpose is to throw the opponent off balance. If your interlocutor has the upper hand in a discussion, a droll, well-targeted personal attack can move the debate to surer ground. Since people’s natural reaction to being attacked is to defend themselves, they’ll often attempt to defend the slight instead of driving home their advantage.

Jousts take place in real life, in real time, in the real world. If they hit the mark, they earn kudos for the wielder. Churchill’s comment may have been mean, but it was quick, it was (presumably at least partially) accurate, and it took some courage – presumably Dutch – because the target of his tongue-lashing was standing right next to him. Above all, it was funny.

Many of the greatest literary minds in history have been able practitioners of the joust. Chaucer, Swift, Pope, Voltaire, Johnson, Twain, Byron (“Posterity will ne’er survey/A nobler grave than this:/Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:/Stop, traveller, and piss”), Wodehouse (“She’s got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need”), Wilde (“I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result”) and Orwell (“He is simply a hole in the air”) all earned their stripes partly by tearing others off a strip. We excuse these slights, applaud them even, because they show qualities that we aspire to: intelligence, originality, speed of thought. Besides, there’s often a sense that the target had it coming. Who are you going to side with – the guy who won the second world war, or some judgmental fuddy-duddy?

The second class of ad hominem is the smear. It too is rapidly becoming an ingrained part of public discourse, but it is, I will try to argue, far more dangerous, and has no place there. Smears come in four main varieties.

1) Character assassination

There’s really only one contender for the title of World’s Bigliest Trash-Talker. As of March 2017, Donald John Trump was estimated to have slagged off no fewer than 320 different people, organisations and … items of furniture. Yeah, he dissed a table.

Trump’s gibes have the same drawback as jousts – they’re irrelevant to the discussion – and none of the merits. They’re not funny. They’re inane, unoriginal, and, as often as not, false. They do not signal a quick wit, because for the most part Trump delivers them via Twitter, or in prepared speeches to adoring crowds. And they are anything but brave, because Trump’s opponents are rarely in the same room when he vilifies them. To compare the US president’s infantile taunts to Shakespeare’s eloquent excoriations is to stick a Lego staircase next to the Taj Mahal.

Trump tweet about reporter — The “reporter who no one has heard of” was David Cay Johnston, winner of the Pulitzer prize for journalism.

And yet here he is, signing poorly drafted executive orders like baseball cards, merrily topping up the swamp with the contents of every septic tank in America, and hooking his drives ever closer to the nuclear bunker. How so?

When you look at the Mango Mussolini’s modus operandi, all becomes clear. Shower your enemies with insults; see which gains the most traction (ie likes and retweets); then use it again and again, until it becomes irretrievably associated with the target. So Hillary Clinton becomes “Crooked Hillary” at every mention; the New York Times “the failing NYT”; and rival for the Republican nomination Ted Cruz “Lyin’ Ted”.

These remarks are not designed to artfully throw Trump’s opponents off balance or to enhance his comic credentials. They’re not really directed at his opponents at all; they’re aimed at the wider world. Trump is not trying to undermine what his rivals are saying now, but everything they have ever said. These are cynical, systematic smear campaigns. And incredibly, through sheer force of repetition, they worked.

Most people are smart enough to realise that, just because a hay clump stapled to an overripe satsuma repeats something over and over again, that doesn’t mean it’s true. Unfortunately, it seems there are just enough credulous idiots out there for Trump’s bullying tactics to pay off. By means of a million gutless, leaden, charmless, bogus backstabs, Trump managed to destroy the credibility of everyone who stood in his way.

TL;DR: Your argument is rubbish because you are rubbish.

2) Tu quoque

“L’hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend a la vertu.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

The tu quoque – Latin for “you also” – is a special case of ad hominem also known as the appeal to hypocrisy. Here, instead of trying to undermine the target’s argument by maligning their character, you are attempting to do so by pointing out things they have said or done in the past that contradict their current position.

A tu quoque often feels somehow more cutting than a basic ad hominem, because, well, no one likes a hypocrite. However, it is just as invalid as a criticism, because it too fails to disprove the premise. Whether your past or current actions are 100% consistent with your view or not is completely immaterial. Let’s take a recent example.

On March 22 this year, the UK’s esteemed prime minister, Theresa May, stood up in parliament and delivered a broadside against Labour frontbenchers who had sent their children to grammar and private schools. The aim, of course, was to expose the hypocrisy of Labour, who as a party oppose the creation of more grammar schools. But as well as being unfair, May’s point is entirely without merit.

We live in a world where personal and public interests do not always align. (This is why we need governments; to balance private freedoms against the general good.) Politicians aren’t just politicians. They are also, despite appearances, human beings, and many of them are parents.

When you’ve got your MP’s hat on, grammar schools are a bad thing. Most studies have concluded that while they might benefit the few who attend them, they have a deleterious effect on other schools; they suck in all the best pupils and the best teachers, and regular schools suffer as a result.

But now look at the question from the viewpoint of the MP as parent. Grammar schools exist. The kids who go there do better. Given the choice between sending them to a grammar or to a comprehensive, which way do you swing? The effect of your decision on other people is infinitesimal – but it could make a huge difference to your child. You’re technically a hypocrite if you choose the grammar, but it doesn’t mean your opposition to the principle of grammars is wrong.

When Lily Allen and Gary Lineker spoke out in defence of refugees last year, they were bombarded with incandescent messages along the lines of “Well, how many are you taking into your mansion?”

Like May’s tirade, the detractors were missing the point. It isn’t Lily Allen’s job to look after refugees. There are lots of childless couples who’d probably be more than happy to take in a Syrian orphan, for example. The alt-right are constantly frothing at the mouth about the atrocities committed by Isis – but how many of them are donning combat fatigues and heading off to the Levant? If Allen and Lineker are hypocrites, so are they.

Few of us have the time, the equipment or the expertise to devote our lives to solving all the world’s problems. There are others better placed to tackle these matters: police, governments, charities. All we can do is flag them up, perhaps donate some cash, or if we’re lucky enough to have a free weekend, organise a trip to Calais to hand out clothes and food.

The fact is, we’re all hypocrites on a regular basis. Have you ever sat in gridlock and moaned about the traffic? You’re part of the problem! Ever merrily sucked on a fag while gravely warning a young relative never to take up the habit? Pot, meet kettle! Worried about overpopulation – and you have two kids? You’re a fine one to talk!

TL;DR: Your argument is rubbish because not every single thing you have ever said and done in your entire life has been 100% consistent with it.

3) Circumstantial ad hominem

The implication that a person has taken a position purely because it suits their agenda; they cannot be trusted on a particular issue because they have a horse in the race, or their judgment is otherwise clouded.

There’s sometimes something to this one. Most prisoners on death row insist that they are innocent, because it’s hugely to their advantage for others to believe them. However, by strict logical criteria, their claim is not automatically untrue simply because it is in their interest. We just need to take it with a healthy pinch of salt.

TL;DR: Your argument is rubbish because you are biased.

4) Guilt by association

Fetch the Nurofen. We are now entering the realms of spectacularly twisted logic, where the cognitive gymnastics can induce migraines in the unprepared.

4) is essentially 3) on steroids. The association fallacy is the most egregious and toxic of ad hominems, since it attempts to invalidate someone’s point by smearing them on the basis of her membership of, or tenuous association with, a particular group.

It’s become depressingly common practice, in online discussions, for your opponent to try to dig up dirt on you. They’ll read your profile, scan your previous tweets or comments, even Google you in their quest for incriminating evidence. Failing that, they’ll use whatever they find to try to pigeonhole you.

Why? Because then they can write off your opinion on the basis that they have already written off the opinions of everyone in your group. “Aha, you live in London! Of course you’d parrot pro-EU propaganda – membership benefits the metropolitan elite!” (Forty per cent of Londoners voted Leave.)

As well as committing the same logical misstep as the other smears – implying that a person’s identity is somehow relevant to their point – the association fallacy asks us to accept two further false propositions: a) that the entire group’s views and values are without merit; and b) that everyone in that group thinks and acts in exactly the same way.

Loath as I am to cut the hate-fuelled shitrag that is the Daily Mail any sort of slack, the continued attacks over its historic sympathy for Hitler and the Blackshirts make no sense. For one thing, everyone involved with the paper in 1934 is dead. New office, new owner, new staff. The words “the Daily Mail” now refer to a different entity; there is no immortal “Daily Mail soul” that inhabits everyone who sets foot in its offices. (True, the current team is starting to look more and more like its historic incarnation, but from a logical standpoint, there is no reason why this should be so.)

The guilt by association fallacy effectively means that no one can ever be right, because it holds that your view is worthless if you, or any group you have ever been associated with, have ever done anything wrong.

Telltale phrases: “Typical Leaver”, “You liberals are all the same”, “Just what I’d expect from a Muslim”.

TL;DR: your argument is rubbish because I consider (erroneously) that everyone in the group I have assigned you to (erroneously) is wrong about everything.

I used to think that humanity was slowly waking up to the preposterousness of generalisations like “All men are bastards”, “All Jews are stingy” and “All Gypsies are thieves”. But suddenly, writing off entire cross-sections of society at a stroke is enjoying a renaissance.

I picked the Daily Mail example for a reason. Of all the smear campaigns mounted in the last few years, one of the most sustained and successful has been the coordinated effort to discredit the entirety of the world’s journalists – or, to use the dismissive alt-right term, the “MSM” (mainstream media).

Organisations like the Mail, Express and Fox News haven’t helped the cause with their rabidly partisan headlines and editorials, and it’s true that the Independent, for example, has a strongly pro-EU slant. But the far right demagogues would have you believe that every journalist in every media outlet in the world is part of some huge conspiracy to deceive you, to keep a boot on the throat of the working classes and maintain the status quo.

The alt-right pursue this narrative by seizing on any and every mistake, oversight or lapse of judgment from any publication or broadcaster and magnifying it to ludicrous proportions. So, because the Guardian once ran an erroneous story about Jeremy Corbyn sitting on the floor of a train, we now cannot believe any Guardian story we read. Because Buzzfeed runs listicles and fluff pieces on its site, its investigative journalism is worthless. Because the BBC once published a news item about the negative effects of Brexit, it is irredeemably biased in all matters. The fact that Nigel Farage – an MEP for a party with no representation in parliament who only bothers turning up for work to sour the UK’s foreign relations – gets more airtime than any other politician in the UK is neither here nor there.

Yes, the mainstream media have made mistakes. And yes, some lean in a particular political direction. But on the whole, they try to give a reasonably balanced view of things. They are bound by ethical standards and libel laws, and subject to the oversight of a regulator. When they get things wrong, they apologise, they retract, and they print corrections.

Again, most people don’t buy into the alt-right’s absurd narrative. But a small, significant section of society have swallowed the lie, and now routinely reject any facts from mainstream sources as “biased” or “fake news”. To them, all of the media – from the Independent to the Guardian to the Mail to the BBC to ITV to CNN to the Times to Al-Jazeera to Buzzfeed to the South China Morning Post to the Dumfries & Galloway Standard – are all part of some vast conspiracy to prop up the metropolitan elite. We have now reached a point where a Brexiter, in a discussion about Brexit, will demand that you provide evidence to back up your point – and then, when you do, airily dismiss it because it happened to be published in the Sunday Times.

So if no conventional news sources can be trusted, who are these people listening to? Who has stepped into the information vacuum to expose The Real Truth? Blow me down with a feather, if it isn’t those selfsame alt-right demagogues! The alt-right demagogues, whose newsgathering resources generally stretch to a Twitter and YouTube account and a camcorder in their mum’s basement. The roving-reporter alt-right demagogues, like Paul Joseph Watson, who openly admits that he hardly ever leaves his Battersea flat, Julian Assange, who has been trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy for five years, and Katie Hopkins, who broke her world exclusive that there were quite a few Asian shops in London by going to the shops.

(This post is plenty long enough without a diversion into the shameless mendacity of the alt-right, but I’ve posted a few examples here, and there are plenty more at Snopes, FactCheck.org and FullFact.)

It wasn’t enough, of course, to smear the media. They are, after all, just mirrors to majority opinion. If a new order is to be imposed, all the traditional institutions must be undermined.

Dominic Cummings’ “Take back control” was very clever. The NHS promise on the bus probably did it for some people. The Breaking Point poster, even though immigration from outside Europe had precisely jack shit to do with the EU, undoubtedly won over a few racists. But for me, the real stroke of genius from the Leave contingent, and the turning point of the whole campaign, was Michael Gove’s “People have had enough of experts.”

Never mind that he was told to say that by one of the exact same metropolitan elite experts he was maligning. Never mind that he apologised abjectly for the comment the next day and retracted it altogether months later. In one pithy phrase, Gove manage to articulate the fury of millions of underachievers. He also single-handedly destroyed the last scrap of trust the public had in the system. Suddenly, the opinion of the man in the street was just as valid as that of someone who had spent years mastering her subject.

Gove’s (or, rather, Cummings’) ludicrous argument, that, because some trusted individuals once made an incorrect prediction, all their predictions are worthless, was the final justification for a Brexit vote among a decisive group of waverers. This arrant nonsense, combined with parallel whispering campaigns – Boris Johnson merrily defaming the EU in his columns for the Telegraph and Spectator, and the relentless demonisation of immigrants and Muslims in the Express, Mail, and far-right “news” sites – was what dragged Leave over the line.

For years, liberals ignored all this mudslinging, I guess because they assumed no one was gullible enough to believe it. Hopefully, they’re waking up to the fact that they can’t afford to ignore it any more.

(I’ve got more to say on this subject, but I’ve already wittered on for too long. Part two will follow shortly.)

Logical fallacies: weapons in the information wars

In the era of Brexit and Trump, it’s more important than ever to be able to tell truth from post-truth

Transformer Megatron — It’s Megatron. He’s a Decepticon, innit? Oh, come on, it was either this or yet another fucking picture of Pinocchio.

“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” ― Adolf Hitler

In my last post I talked about cognitive biases, or errors in thinking. Now I want to move on to logical fallacies – errors in communicating. It’s sometimes difficult to see the difference between the two because there’s so much overlap between them. If you believe (erroneously) that all Muslims are terrorists, then you are going to argue that all Muslims are terrorists. But you can also believe something that is true and argue it incorrectly. The truth gets lost somewhere between your brain and your tongue (or tweet).

Very broadly speaking, cognitive biases are stupidity, while logical fallacies are lies, or distortions of the truth. But there’s a complicating factor: lies can be told innocently (you believe them to be true), or maliciously (you know they are untrue but want to persuade other people that they are true). We’ll come to that. It’s probably best if I just crack on.

(First, a note: committing a logical fallacy does not in itself mean your point is wrong. If I claimed that, I would be guilty of the fallacy fallacy. It just means that your argument is invalid, and you’ll have to find another way to support your view. And sorry about all the Latin. I didn’t name these things!)

A priori argument

AKA rationalisation, proof texting.

Starting out assuming something to be true (some pre-set belief or dogma) and then seeking out only arguments – or pseudo-arguments- that support it, and ignoring all those that contradict it.

Usually involves …

Appeal to emotion

Using emotive or loaded words to make your argument instead of neutral ones. People respond more viscerally to emotive terms and are thus more susceptible to persuasion.

“The #TrumpRiot is yet another example of how the alt-left is infinitely more dangerous, violent & intolerant than the alt-right.” – Paul Joseph Watson

Often goes hand in hand with …

Hyperbole

Exaggeration for effect; overstating the case in an effort to be more persuasive.

It is technically cheating, because it’s misrepresenting the truth, but it’s long been an accepted part of discourse (probably because it’s generally quite easy to see through).

“I voted Leave because our prisons are full of Polish rapists.”

“We even had Barack Obama flying in to tell us what to do.” – commenter on Guardian website

(The facts – the president of the US, on a visit to Britain, gave his personal opinion that it would be a bad idea for the UK to leave the EU – have been stretched, so that now it is suggested that Obama was ordering the UK to vote to stay, which is clearly not the case. If he’d threatened to launch ICBMs on London if we didn’t do as he said, well then, yes, that would count as telling us what to do. But my interlocutor has set up a straw man here.)

Cherry-picking

AKA half-truth.

Telling the strict truth, but deliberately minimising or omitting important key details in order to falsify the larger picture and support a false conclusion. Pretty much accepted practice, particularly in the age of the attention deficit, but no less dangerous for it.

Hey Hillary supporters; You're about to vote for someone who is funded by countries that still execute gay people. How progressive.

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) November 7, 2016

The trick can be played with pictures as well as words.

PROPAGANDA: When a newspaper crops out a veteran on Remembrance Sunday so they can accuse an opponent of disrespect… pic.twitter.com/A2OGi2Yrf8

— The DM Reporter (@DMReporter) November 13, 2016

Plain truth fallacy

AKA simple truth fallacy, salience bias, executive summary.

The tendency to favour familiar, or easily comprehensible examples and evidence over that which is more complex and unfamiliar.

“This country’s been going to the dogs ever since we joined the EU. It’s high time we got out.” – commenter on Guardian website

Appeal to authority

Generally speaking, we would be well advised to heed the opinions of experts, because they know whereof they speak (certainly better than the man in the street). However, when they are talking about something that’s not in their area of expertise, or if their opinion is very much in the minority in their field, we should take their pronouncements with a pinch of salt.

“It must be true. I read it in the Mail.”

Getting a celebrity endorsement – like asking Beyonce and Jay-Z to appear at your rally – is a form of appeal to authority.

Just plain folks

The opposite of the above. The supposition that someone’s opinions are more valid because he is a “plain talker” who “says what’s on his mind”. Usually comes with a free side-dish of ad hominems designed to ridicule or demonise anyone with a heart or a brain: “boffins”, “bureaucrats”, “tree-huggers”, “coddled liberal elite”.

“I’m voting Trump because he tells it like it is.”

Argumentum ad populum

AKA appeal to popularity, bandwagon effect.

“A million customers can’t be wrong!” The assertion that your view must be right because the majority of people share it. But remember, we’re all numpties. The popularity of an idea has no bearing whatsoever on its validity.

There are 1.6 billion Muslims and 2.2 billion Christians in this world, and they sure as hell can’t all be right.

False dichotomy

AKA false dilemma; false binary; logical fallacy of the excluded middle.

Believing (or stating) that there are only two opposed approaches or answers, when in fact a range of solutions are possible. Probably the most common example of this is “You’re either with us or against us”, when it’s obvious that you can agree with some of a person’s views and not others. We don’t live in a black-and-white world; the true answer (assuming there is one) usually lies somewhere in the grey.

“You’re either for freedom of speech or you’re not.” – Paul Joseph Watson

Hopefully, even a fool can see that it is perfectly possible to take an intermediate stance. You could approve of freedom of speech under certain conditions, for example, or with certain exceptions (the position that most legal systems in the developed world take).

Personally, I’m for freedom, except where it impinges on others’ freedoms. There’s no contradiction there; it is, however, an ever so slightly complex idea, at least, one that’s evidently too complex for Watson’s followers to grasp.

“Black lives matter.”
“No, blue lives matter.”

Again, there’s no reason to make this an either/or affair. It should be obvious that all lives matter (although there may be certain times when it is appropriate to highlight the fact that one particular group is at disproportionate risk).

Argument to middle ground

In a way, the opposite of the above. We generally think in a linear, binary way. Someone makes a claim, someone else makes a counterclaim, and ultimately, if we are lucky, they agree on a compromise. The Greek terms for this are thesis (proposition), antithesis (negation) and synthesis (reconciliation of the two). Here’s a example: thesis: “Drugs are bad.” Antithesis: “No, drugs are great.” Synthesis: “Some drugs are good and some are bad”/”Drugs are not too harmful in moderation.”

But it doesn’t always work this way. Sometimes the thesis is rubbish, sometimes the antithesis is rubbish, sometimes one or the other is indisputably correct, and sometimes they’re both way off, so the answer does not always lie somewhere in the middle. Replace “drugs” with “cigarettes” in the above example and you’ll see what I mean (PS: I’m a smoker).

This faulty logic can have pernicious consequences for debate. When the BBC has a discussion panel on man-made climate change, for example, they’ll generally invite one or two people who are proponents of the idea, and one or two who are rabidly opposed, in the name of “balance”. But if they were to truly reflect the weight of opinion in the scientific community (and the evidence), they would invite 99 climate change believers and one sceptic.

Equally, populating Question Time with one person from the far left, two from the centre and one from the far right is not necessarily a fair representation of the political makeup of the country.

Non-sequitur

Latin for “does not follow”.

Developing an argument by suggesting that one thing automatically follows from another when it clearly does not; implying causality where there is none.

“Donald Trump has been a very successful businessman, so he’d make an excellent president.”

Slippery slope fallacy

Claiming that if X happens, then Y will automatically follow, when there is no evidence to suggest this is true.

“If we let any more Muslims in, the next thing you know, we’ll all be obeying sharia law.”

Moving the goalposts

Asking for a certain degree of proof or evidence, and then, when this is offered, demanding more.

“The EU was going to let Turkey join.”
“They could never have done that as long as the UK exercised its veto.”
“But … they banned our bendy bananas.”
“No they didn’t. They simply proposed a new classification under which straighter bananas were given a higher rating.”
[Half-hour pause while they go on Google]
“But they banned powerful hoovers.”

Shifting the burden of proof

Claiming that the onus is on your opponent to disprove your point, rather than on you to prove it. Your point does not become right simply because someone cannot explain why you are wrong.

“If you visit the Real News Network, you’ll find Clinton was the higher risk of WW3, especially with her support of the dopey Syria No-Fly Zone idea.”
“I’m afraid deranged far-right websites that peddle fake news and conspiracy theories are some way down my list of reputable sources.”
“Instead of mocking my source, how about demonstrating, using logical fact based arguments, why I’m wrong?”

False analogy

The assumption that because two things are similar in one respect, they are similar in others.

“The EU is failing and breaking up, just like the USSR did. In fact, it’s just like the USSR.” – commenter on Independent website

“Humans are tribal animals living in cultural groups. That is what makes us human.”
“We were. Some of us aspire, via education and tolerance and openness, to a better future.”
“A ‘better future’? History is full of ideological madness ending up in bloodshed. Think of the Great Leap Forward!”

“Remember when the right rioted after Obama got in? Me neither.” – Paul Joseph Watson

[Obama was not elected on a platform of hate, he was not openly racist or misogynistic, and he did not threaten to revoke the hard-won rights of millions of American citizens. Also, the numbers of people actually rioting were inflated, as we’ll see below.]

Will @lilyallen apologise to 1400 kids in Rotherham for the failure of 'her country'? No, that won't get her the publicity she craves for.

— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) October 23, 2016

(Tweet posted after Lily Allen went to a Calais refugee camp and apologised to one of the children there on behalf of the UK. The two points aren’t remotely comparable. The UK government could see exactly what was going on in Calais and could have acted to help much sooner. No one in authority knew about the paedophile ring in Rotherham until it was exposed, so no one could have done anything.)

Reductio ad Hitlerum

The observance of Godwin’s Law; namely, the likening of one’s opponent to Adolf Hitler, or Nazis in general. Liberals (and Remain voters) are often guilty of this. It’s usually hyperbolic and unwarranted, but sometimes, the comparison is apt.

Tone policing

Attempting to dismiss an argument based on the manner in which it is delivered rather than its content. Whether I am screaming, laughing or crying while making a statement has no bearing on its truthfulness.

“More sneering and condescension. Exactly what we’ve come to expect from liberals.”

“Stop whining. You lost!”

Terror management theory

The exploitation of threat hypersensitivity, which I covered in my last post.

“We have to do something!”

AKA security theatre.

A relatively new fallacy, which maintains that when people are scared, angry or fed up, it is necessary to do something, anything, immediately, regardless of whether it will actually work.

“I’m voting for change!”

Argumentum ad baculum

Latin for “argument from the stick”.

The fallacy of “persuasion” or “proving one is right” by force, or threats of violence. More of a sign of desperation than a logical fallacy, but used increasingly often.

“Give me your address and we’ll see who’s right.” – (Twitter user, to me)

Generalisation

Here we encounter the problem I mention above: the human tendency to generalise is a cognitive bias and a logical fallacy. They’re two sides of the same coin, feeding on and reinforcing each other. I thought I’d cover this under both rubrics because it is, in my opinion, the single greatest cause of misunderstanding.

“The mainstream media tries to portray these ‘refugees’ as a peaceful and freedom-loving people, but that’s just not the case at all.” – Supreme Patriot website

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard people say things like “God, Italy’s awful”, based on one subpar holiday, or “I refuse to shop at Tesco since that checkout girl pulled a face at me”. The reverse is almost as common: “Everything David Bowie does is genius”, “Portuguese people are so lovely!” We’re constantly trying to extrapolate from the specific to the universal, and it often leads us to false, and sometimes dangerous, conclusions.

“You voted Leave, so you must be racist.”

(Yes, many who voted leave voiced concerns about immigration, and concerns about immigration often go hand in hand with racism. But one simply does not follow from the other.)

The problem of intent

There’s a fuzzy logic to the order of this list.

I’m going to don my optimist’s hat and speculate that most of the time, when people make logical blunders, they’re doing so in ignorance; they’re simply not aware that they’re obfuscating or mangling the truth. But there’s no doubt that some people commit them deliberately. They know full well what they are saying is wrong, but they say it anyway, because they have an agenda – usually the acquisition of power, or money, or influence. They are using logical fallacies to exploit other people’s cognitive biases, in order to achieve their own ends.

So I’ve listed the fallacies in a sort of “order of innocence”; the further they occur down the page, the more likely it is that they deployed with malicious intent. From hereon in, in the main, we’re no longer talking about Leave or Remain voters, but the campaigners. We’re not dealing with Clinton or Trump fans; we’re dealing with the media, the politicians and their advocates. This is the point where stupidity starts to shade into lies.

The red herring

Responding to a question by changing the subject; a form of non sequitur. I guess point blank refusing to answer the question would fall under this heading as well.

The romantic rebel

AKA truthout fallacy, brave heretic, iconoclastic fallacy.

The fallacy of claiming validity for your standpoint based solely on the premise that you are heroically standing up to the prevailing orthodoxy, or speaking up for the people, or “sticking it to the Man”. The principal modus operandi of the alt-right. Although they’ll probably have to ditch it now that their views are becoming orthodoxy.

Ad hominem

AKA poisoning the well.

If you can’t win the argument, go for the man. The argumentum ad hominem takes two main forms: first, attacking your opponent’s character (the guilt by association fallacy) – “Why should I listen to Tony Blair’s opinions on the EU? He invaded Iraq” – and second, an attempt to discredit their argument by pointing out their previous failings on this subject: “People in this country have had enough of experts.”

Just because someone was wrong once – even if it was on the topic at hand – it doesn’t mean they’re wrong this time, and it certainly doesn’t mean they’re wrong all the time. Experts are experts for a reason.

Michael Jackson may not have been your first choice of babysitter, but that doesn’t mean his music wasn’t great. If we were to apply this reasoning rigorously, the only person who would ever be allowed to judge or challenge anyone would be Jesus Christ himself. Oh, except for that time he overturned the moneylenders’ tables.

“Why should I listen to a leftie moron like you?”

“Liar, liar, pants on fire, Gary Lineker pushes junk food for a living, and then tries to take high road on migrants” – Jon Gaunt

(Someone just called “House” in fallacy bingo. That’s a hyperbole, an appeal to emotion, an ad hominem, a non sequitur and a false equivalence in one tweet, along with a bonus malapropism. But please don’t look this guy up – he’s a professional hatemonger only doing it for the attention.)

Tu quoque

Latin for “you also”. AKA appeal to hypocrisy.

“You, sir, are drunk.”
“And you, Bessie, are ugly. But I shall be sober in the morning, and you will still be ugly.” (Winston Churchill to Bessie Braddock – possibly)

Ducking the question by flipping the accusation around on the accuser; a particularly poisonous blend of red herring and ad hominem, but one that often succeeds in taking the heat off the accused by forcing the accuser on to the defensive.

“Take a look. You look at her. Look at her words. You tell me what you think. I don’t think so.” – Donald Trump, on one of the women who accused him of sexual assault

“LGBT GARBAGE IS JEWISH BY NATURE. Feminism is Jewish mind poison and almost all feminist icons are Jewish criminals.”
“Fuck off back under your rock, you fascist prick.”
“Not very tolerant for a liberal, are we?”

(There’s clearly quite a big difference between intolerance of different skin colours and cultures and intolerance of hate. NB this is also an instance of false equivalence.)

“I’m sorry, but a lot of people who voted to leave the EU are racist.”
“No, it’s the EU, with its protectionist policies, that is really racist.”

(I think the reasoning here is supposed to be something like this: the EU is a trading bloc of neighbouring states. Those states, which all have majority white populations, are discriminating against all countries who are not part of the bloc, and some of them have majority black populations. Of course, the logical conclusion of this argument is that if you ever talk to, give a gift to, make a deal with, promote or do anything nice to a white person, you’re a racist.)

“The Leave campaign was full of lies.”
“But Remain lied too.”

(I’d argue that while the Leave campaign was riddled with blatant falsehoods [Turkey, the £350m, bendy bananas, EU accounts not signed off for years], the Remainers were guilty of, at worst, empty threats [austerity budget] and inaccurate predictions [immediate recession].)

“Trump is a serial sexual assaulter, a liar, a sexist, a cheat, a quadruple bankrupt … etc”
“But Hillary sent confidential emails through a private server.”

TINA (There is no alternative)

Margaret Thatcher’s catchphrase, which she used to railroad through her pet policies. An attempt to stifle debate by asserting, falsely, that we have no choice but to follow the present course of action. Often accompanied by the argumentum ad baculum.

“Instead of sulking, Remain voters should accept the result” – Daniel Hannan MEP

“Get over it”/”Suck it up”/“You lost.”

Equivocation

Premeditated ambiguity; a deliberate failure to define your terms, or the deliberate use of words that have multiple senses in an effort to mislead.

People seem to be especially susceptible to semantic tricks. Using military euphemisms such as “friendly fire” and “collateral damage” makes the events seem less awful than if you said “We killed our allies” or “We killed civilians”.

Take a tweet by Paul Joseph Watson. Under the message “Anyone who talks about the system being rigged is nuts” – a sarcastic reference to Trump’s suggestion that the US election might have been manipulated – Watson quotes two tweets from senator Elizabeth Warren:

1) “Washington is rigged for the big guys.”

2) “It’s not rigged, @DonaldTrump. You’re losing fair and square.”

Superficially, that looks like a clever observation. But think about it for a second and it falls apart, because the word “rigged” is being used in two distinct senses and contexts. Warren’s first tweet was about the general imbalance of power and lack of social mobility in America. The second refers to Trump’s suggestion that the election (or at least the media coverage) was rigged, against him, which is clearly a different proposition. Watson is comparing apples and oranges.

The straw man

A common fallacy, and one routinely deployed by politicians, especially Boris Johnson (probably picked it up at the Oxford Union debating society). Basically, it’s an attempt to discredit your opponent’s position by restating it in a weakened, exaggerated or distorted way. The name derives from an analogy: instead of attacking the real man, you’re standing up a “straw man” and attacking that instead. The reductio ad absurdum is a form of straw man.

“Self-loathing Brits alert!”
“Or, perhaps, xenophobia-loathing Brits alert?”
“Do you have evidence to suggest 17 million people wanting control of their own country are xenophobic?”

(These were comments under a Guardian article about an anti-racism protest. At no point did I suggest that all 17 million Leave voters were xenophobic.)

“Can we be so sure peace and stability on our continent are assured?” – David Cameron
“I don’t think leaving the EU is going to cause world war three” – Boris Johnson

Snow job

Attempting to “prove” your point by overwhelming your audience with mountains of marginally relevant facts, documents and statistics that look impressive when taken together, but don’t hold up under any sort of scrutiny. Basically, you’re counting on your reader or listener not to bother to check any of your facts or sources, which these days seems to be a fairly safe assumption.

Some of the more deranged fascist websites, the day before the US presidential election, ran a story linking Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and his brother, Tony, with … wait for it … the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal in 2007.

BREAKING BOMBSHELL : Multiple Reports Tie Clinton’s Podesta Brothers to Child Abduction Case of Madeline McCann

Alarm bells should sound immediately: this “story” falls squarely into the realms of what you might call “too bad to be true”. It’s just so horrific and so damaging – surely we’d have heard something about it before?

It only takes a quick glance at the evidence to prove your gut instinct right. Exhibit A is a photo of the Podesta brothers next to two photofits issued by British police in 2013 in connection with the McCann case; B, an email purportedly proving that John Podesta went to Portugal; C, testimony from businessman and former Navy SEAL Erik Prince.

A) Put aside for a moment the questionable resemblance. If you read the original Guardian article from which the photofits were taken, the police e-fits were different portraits of the same man, not two different men. B) If you actually read the email, it was not John Podesta, but Mae, his daughter, who travelled to Portugal … in 2014. C) A quick check on Prince reveals him to be a serial fantasist whose main claim to fame is that his private security firm Blackwater was responsible for the killing of 20 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

This particular snow job melts pretty quickly.

Banners from fake news websites — Oh. *Now* I believe you.

Argumentum ad veritatem

AKA the appeal to the truth; “protesting too much”.

This isn’t a recognised fallacy so much as an observation of my own. In the same way that virtually every sentence that begins “Fact is” generally goes on to offer either opinion, speculation, or bug-eyed fantasy, I’ve noticed that any website that screams “TRUTH!” or “INFORMATION!” at you can reliably be dismissed as a purveyor of unadulterated bullshit.

The more strenuously someone insists that they are telling the truth, the more seriously you should scrutinise their claims.

Now we come to the ultimate fallacy.

Making shit up

Sometimes, when you want to win an argument, it’s not enough to tinker with the truth, to use misleading words and diversionary tactics and unfairly malign your opponent. Sometimes, you just gotta lie through your teeth.

And lies – from tendentious fibs to full-on fabrications – seem to be the weapon of choice in today’s internet information wars. (Although the Mail and Express have been at it for years.)

Some are fairly easy to see through, such as this “news story” from 2014 about dastardly Muslims demanding that the US army alter its dress code to include, er, turbans (which Sikhs wear).

Others are less easy to dismantle. Take this story about an FBI agent involved in the leak of emails from Clinton’s private server being found dead in an apparent murder-suicide. (There’s no such news organisation as the Denver Guardian, and no evidence that the events described ever happened.)

The doctoring, or repurposing, of pictures and video have now become routine. Several memes doing the rounds that claim to show Democrat protesters in scenes of carnage were in fact taken during the London riots of 2011. This photo and this photo are just two examples of the many fakes doing the rounds; this video, of a man purportedly being beaten up “for voting Trump”, in fact shows an attack after a road rage incident, and this one, of a woman supposedly taking a dump on a Donald Trump placard, actually shows a piece of (disgusting) performance art in Mexico City in July 2012.

I won’t bang on again about the smorgasbord of lies the Leave campaigns cooked up to get their way, but … you know. They lied. A lot.

Then there was this horseshit about Clinton and John Podesta eating babies at satanic rituals, somehow conjured from a single email from a Serbian artist inviting Podesta to a dinner party in 2015. Say what you like about these alt-right types: they certainly don’t lack in imagination.

Fake news is on the rise because it’s working – even some of the more outrageous alt-right confabulations are getting shares in six figures on Facebook – and it’s working because it’s tailor-made to prey on people’s cognitive biases: their fears, their prejudices, their ignorance.

What should you take away from this? I dunno, really; I just want people to have as many tools as possible at their disposal to help them make some sense out of the hurricane of information out there.

But I will say this: next time you’re tempted to share a news story on Facebook or Twitter, stop. Consider the source. Do they have an agenda? Use your critical faculties. Does it seem too good (or bad) to be true? Is it consistent with other, proven stories you’ve read about? Have they committed any obvious logical fallacies?

Keep an open mind. Doubt first, check second, accept third. There are some dangerous bastards out there who think you are stupid.

Prove them wrong.

Stupidity and lies: the new standard for online debate?

Israel/Palestine. Russia/Ukraine. Brexit. Trump. The quality of online debate has arguably never been lower. Is it time for a reminder of the basics of rational thought?

“How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.” – Adolf Hitler

(I’ve got way too much for one post, so part one will deal with “stupidity”, part two with “lies”.)

Humans have been arguing for as long as they could speak. You’d think, given 200,000-odd years of practice – plus all the intervening research into rhetoric, logic and psychology – that we’d have it down to a fine art by now. And yet the vast majority of online debate these days seem to consist of little more than “You lost, suck it up”, “Moron”, “Liar”, and “Fuck you”. What happened?

Some social explanations have been put forward: the phenomenon of deindividuation – when we deal with anonymous avatars rather than real people, we don’t accord them the same respect – and the creation of ever more disparate echo chambers, or bubbles, of people who agree with us, leaving us less able to understand those who don’t.

Part of the problem, I think, is that most people aren’t remotely trained in critical thinking. Half the time, when people think or speak or write – and I include myself in this – they don’t know that they’re committing basic errors of reasoning. So I thought I’d put together a little list of some of the more common ones (and in my next post, some of the rhetorical cheats people use to exploit them), so that you can avoid tripping up when you’re debating – and politely point out when your opponent does.

I’m with stupid

Are Leave voters the dumb ones, or Remain? Do Clinton fans need educating, or do Trumpettes? Who’s the bigger fool: the liberal, or the alt-right fascist?

The uncomfortable fact is, we’re all idiots. Your brain, thanks to your evolutionary past, is prone to all sorts of errors and biases. The model of the world in your head is not an accurate representation of the world in front of you.

Sure, humans can be amazing. We’ve been to the moon, we’ve cured smallpox, we’ve figured out the structure of DNA and made computers that fit on a fingernail. But we also text while driving. We hook up with our exes, we pump industrial waste into lakes, and we laugh at Mrs Brown’s Boys. Even Einstein mislaid his keys.

This is because there’s a lot of information coming at us, 24/7. And our brains, while capacious, can’t take it all in – they need to winnow, to precis, to prioritise, often instantaneously. And while we generally think of ourselves as rational beings, all too often, our thought processes are derailed by inbuilt prejudices; emotion, wording, status, looks.

Full disclosure: I’m not the world’s leading authority on this subject. I’ve picked up most of this from reading books and websites (although after 25 years of subediting, I’d like to think my critical thinking skills aren’t a complete disgrace). What’s more, there’s still a lot of disagreement even among the experts about terminology and classification, not least because these areas straddle the separate domains of psychology and logic, and as a result, some of my definitions may be a little fuzzy. But the basic principles are solid enough, and should be of some use to anyone looking to improve the standard of their online discourse.

For a more in-depth, comprehensive and authoritative list of cognitive biases, you could do worse than check out this site.

And please try not to be put off by the big Latin words. I didn’t coin them!

Dunning-Kruger effect

AKA illusory superiority.

Time and time again, studies have shown that most people consider themselves more intelligent than average. Most people also consider themselves better drivers than average, better-looking than average, and nicer than average. Which can’t, obviously, be the case, because statistically speaking, only half of us can make that claim.

Why is this so? Because human self-esteem is a fragile thing. In order to drag ourselves through the daily grind, we have to convince ourselves that we’re in with a shot of happiness, of success, that we can hold our own. Consequently, we think of ourselves as being at least competent at everything. (Those who suffer from depression, though, often report feeling the opposite.)

But there’s a more alarming twist. When you start learning a discipline, you quickly come to realise exactly how much there is that you do not know. Someone who has never studied that discipline, on the other hand, does not have that insight. Instead they tend to assume that their passing acquaintance with the subject, combined with their natural, above-average intellect, qualifies them to have an opinion. In short, amateurs are often more likely to believe that their opinions on a subject are valid than experts are.

“People have had enough of experts.” – Michael Gove

Third-person effect

You believe your opinions are based on experience and evidence and fact, and that people with opposing views are gullible and susceptible to propaganda. In reality, you are probably just as susceptible as they are.

Confirmation bias

Related to: cognitive dissonance

Again, it’s all about self-esteem. People like to build up an image of ourselves – an identity – that is strong and above all consistent. As a result, we tend to seek out information and people and things that support our existing beliefs, rather than sources that contradict or threaten it. This is why Arsenal supporters rarely subscribe to MUTV, and why ardent admirers of Taylor Swift are more likely to follow other Swifties on Twitter than Katy Perry fans.

If we do this for long enough, we create echo chambers around ourselves, filled with people and things that reinforce our world-view. So when we are eventually confronted with evidence or opinions that threaten it, we react with intolerance, or even hostility.

“Hello, I’m a rabid xenophobe. Do you have any copies of the Daily Express?”

“There’s nothing you can say that will interest me, you fucking libtard.” [liberal retard]

Backfire effect

The tendency to harden your stance when you come up against evidence that contradicts your position. Widely observed among Remain and Leave voters since the referendum – rather than seeking compromise or to better understand opposing views, many people have “doubled down” and entrenched their positions.

Self-serving bias

On a similar note, most people, when something good happens, tend to believe that it’s a quality within themselves, or within their “ingroup” (people they share an identity with), that was responsible. Any failures, meanwhile, will generally be blamed on outside forces. So if you pass an exam, you’ll probably come away thinking, “Wow, I deserve that because I worked really hard for it”, but if you fail, you might think, “Stupid teacher totally failed to prepare me for that.”

“Wow, Team GB did so well at the Olympics. Isn’t Britain amazing?”

“The NHS is falling apart, and it’s all the fault of those bloody immigrants.”

Choice supportive bias

AKA defensiveness, special pleading.

Sometimes, when you have to make a decision, it’s a bit of a coin-toss. You genuinely don’t know if you will have a better time at the local club or at the bowling alley. So you choose the bowling alley … and it turns out to be a disaster. Brian breaks his wrist and Trish loses her phone. But when someone has the temerity to criticise your choice, you leap to its defence, citing all sorts of reasons in favour of the decision – reasons that you didn’t even think of when you made it. This bias, which again boils down to self-esteem, tends to be more pronounced in older people.

“I voted Leave because I thought the Remain campaign’s predictions of economic problems were just fearmongering.”
“But sterling has tanked and investment is down and food prices are rising.”
“Everyone knows that sterling was hugely overvalued, and anyway, it’ll be great for our exports!”

Cult indoctrination

When you read about cults in the papers, you probably think, “How could any of these people be so weak-minded as to fall for that crap?” But the unfortunate reality is that most people, given impoverished circumstances, some catchy slogans, a big enough crowd and a sufficiently charismatic figurehead, are more than capable of being coopted into a religious or quasi-religious sect. Our innate desire to belong to a group is very strong, rooted in millions of years of tribal culture, as is our propensity to kowtow to authority figures. This often leads us to overlook flaws in authority figures, to fail to question them, and to follow their bidding without question.

“Oh my God, like – like – Gee, I can’t – Paul, Paul Joseph Watson, you are like, like – everything to me, I just …”

“Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!”

Projection illusion

AKA false consensus bias.

While everyone likes to think they’re a bit special, few of us want to be seen as a freak. On the whole, people crave acceptance; we want to fit in, to be liked and understood. So we seem to have an inbuilt predilection for believing that everyone else – at least, everyone else in our little cabal – thinks the way we do. In the absence of any clear signals, we project our own wishes, desires, interests, concerns, ethics and moral code on to others.

If you’ve never taken sugar in your tea, you’ll probably raise an eyebrow when you meet someone who asks for two. And if you’ve grown up in an omnivorous household, your first invitation to a vegetarian dinner party is likely to come as a shock.

“You have no idea why most people who voted to leave did so. Most people voted over the immigration issue” – garyhumble, Guardian website

“Immigration was not the top issue for Leave voters, however much Remainers *want* it to have been” – Daniel Hannan MEP (tweet, now deleted, but still in Google cache)

Nostalgia fallacy

AKA Pollyanna principle, golden age fallacy, positivity bias.

“Thiiiiings … ain’t what they uuuused to be …” It’s been the lament of every older generation since the dawn of time. And yet history shows that broadly speaking, the quality of life has consistently improved for most people the world over. The standard of living in western countries, at least, has followed an almost uninterrupted curve upwards for 2,000 years; life expectancy has improved, rates of crime have fallen, wars and disease and famine have become less common, and technology has made our lives easier. Whence this disparity?

It turns out, it’s because when recalling past events, people have an innate tendency to remember positive experiences and suppress the negative ones. You’ll often hear older people waxing lyrical about the sense of community and the trees and fields and the games of cribbage round the fireplace, while conveniently glossing over the freezing outdoor toilet and the regular beatings from Dad and the cousin who died of polio.

“I know from the days before the common market that we did OK, we did fantastic, and we can go back to that” – May Robson, Sunderland resident

[In the early 1970s, prior to signing up to the EEC, the UK was known as the “Sick Man of Europe”. Its beaches and skies were polluted, wages were depressed, inflation was high, and industry was in decline. During the first 42 years of its membership of the EU, UK GDP grew by almost 250%, outperforming most major world economies.]

Threat hypersensitivity

We’re all going to die. We try not to dwell on it too much, but our fear of mortality informs our every moment. We go to great lengths, consciously or otherwise, to avoid things that might endanger our lives. Some people find religion useful in submerging this fear; some throw their energies into raising a family; others base their hopes for pseudo-immortality on historical fame, or works of art or engineering.

It turns out that even mentions of death can markedly affect our behaviour. When people are reminded of their mortality (say, by a news story about a terrorist attack), they tend to defend their world-view, and people who share that world-view, more strongly. According to terror management theory, reminding people of their mortality tends to shift people’s politics to the right.

“We have a situation where we have our inner cities, African-Americans, Hispanics are living in hell because it’s so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot.” – Donald Trump

“It’s a total disaster, on top of which you have migration which is destroying Europe,” he said at an event in September. “Germany is a disaster now. France is a disaster.” – Donald Trump

“Fix our broken mental health system. All of the tragic mass murders that occurred in the past several years have something in common – there were red flags that were ignored.” – Donald Trump’s campaign website

Correlation v causation

This encapsulates a range of logical snafus, but I’ll confine myself to a couple of examples.

Humans have a habit of drawing conclusions from limited information. Say a football player happens to wear red underpants for a particular match, and his team wins handsomely. Then, in the next match, when he wears his blue strides, they lose. He might conclude, since victory coincided with red-pant-wearing and defeat with blue, that the red pants are responsible, and thus decide to wear the red pants for every match. He’d be a fucking bellend if he did, but this is a mistake people make all the time.

For a more complex example, consider the deadly Mr Whippy. It’s a proven fact that every time ice-cream sales rise in an area, the local murder rate rises too. Could this really mean that Magnums turn people into killers? Well, no, it’s more likely the fact that in warmer weather, people buy more ice-creams – and they also stay out later, drink more, and interact more with other people.

“This country’s been going to the dogs ever since we joined the EU. It’s high time we got out.”

Availability heuristic

AKA attention bias, anchoring bias; closely linked to the above.

If you see (or hear about) a particular event, you are more likely to think it is far more prevalent than is actually the case. The classic example of this is fear of flying: many people refuse to get in an aircraft because they are worried that it might crash, but in fact, each time you take off, your chances of carking it are only about 1 in 10 million. The reason we think air disasters are more common than they are is that when they do happen they are, understandably, given extensive coverage.

“I voted Leave because our prisons are full of Polish rapists.”

[As of March 2016, there were 965 Polish nationals in British prisons. That’s out of a total Polish population of just over 800,000 — so 0.12% of all Poles here are convicted criminals. The total number of prisoners is around 95,000; about 0.14% of the population as a whole. I can’t find any figures broken down into both ethnicity and crime. So unless Polish rapists are better at avoiding detection than British ones, or the CPS for some reason is softer on eastern European sex offenders, they’re no worse than the natives.]

Generalisation

Possibly the most insidious – and thus the most invidious – of all cognitive errors, generalisation covers a wide range of sins, including the out-group homogeneity effect, illusory correlation, attribution errors, essentialism, the representativeness fallacy and stereotyping. But they all essentially boil down to the same thing: the human mind abhors an information vacuum.

Picture yourself as the alpha male of a savannah-dwelling tribe of hominids around a million years ago. (Ooh, primal!) You’re stalking through a wooded glade with a companion when you spot a spider on his neck. He cries out and brushes the spider off. A few hours later, he’s dead. To avoid a repetition of the tragedy, you forbid the tribe from foraging anywhere where they see a spider. Sadly, this means you can no longer access any of your food sources, so you all starve and die. D’oh!

The fact is, less than 30 of the 43,000 or so species of spider (less than 0.1%) have ever caused a human death. Avoiding every spider is an irrational and costly response to the (exceptionally rare) problem of spider bites. What you’ve done here, Ogg, is generalise, or stereotype, in a most unhelpful way. You’ve (correctly) identified a link between a spider and a death, but you’ve extrapolated the qualities of one spider to all spiders, and consequently stone-tooled yourself in the foot.

Historically, this ability to derive sweeping rules from limited information would often have been useful. Water from little lake bad. Put leaf on wound good. But in the modern world, where life-or-death situations are far less frequent and it’s become almost impossible to judge a book by its cover, the knee-jerk response is rarely the right one.

“Typical Remoaner.”

“You liberals are all the same – patronising, smug and condescending.”

Default Bias

AKA status quo bias.

Many people (Remain voters, I’m looking at you. I mean us) naturally favour a situation simply because it pertains right now; because it works, more or less, and because they fear that any significant change might jeopardise that. I’d argue that it’s a fairly justified fear when no one actually has any credible idea of what to replace the status quo with.

“If it ain’t broke …”

Nihilism

AKA “Tear it all down!”

Polar opposite of the above fallacy. A blind rejection of what exists in favour of what could be, no matter what the likely cost. A disorder particularly common among infants and psychopaths.

The sunk cost fallacy

AKA argument from inertia.

One of the more personally costly mistakes people make.

You realise, at the end of a trying first year of your university course, that you don’t like your subject. What do you do? If you switch courses, you’ve basically wasted a year of your life. But if you stick it out, you might have wasted three.

We often think, once we have set out on a certain path, that the best course of action is to see it through no matter what. “I can’t back down now,” we say. “I mustn’t lose face.” To give up now would mean admitting that we were wrong, which is harmful to our self-esteem.

Logically speaking, it’s much better to have been a bit wrong in the past than to be massively wrong in the future. It usually makes sense to quit sooner rather than later, and give yourself more time to make a success of your next plan. But no, we still watch crappy movies all the way to the end, we still stay in doomed relationships for far too long, and we persist in pursuing disastrous policies.

“Get used to it. We’re leaving.”

Coming soon: logical fallacies and dangerous, lying bastards.