The Curse of Knowledge and Predicting Electoral Results

Well, you undoubtedly read too much as well. If you see something on the front page of the newspaper every day for two weeks, and repeated on the nightly news every night for the same two weeks, then you quite reasonably assume that virtually all voters know about it.

The problem is that a fairly large percentage of voters do not know about it, and an even larger percentage don’t believe it because some blogger told them it wasn’t true. So, while you assume it will impact the election, it either doesn’t impact the election, or it has an impact other than the one you expect.

Crap. It’s early (Pacific time). One more time. You “read too much into what you assume that voters read.”

I know lots of leftish sorts whose analysis of the electorate begins and ends with wishful thinking. For some of them, their thinking consists of imagining that “everyone” would respond favorably to a particular policy proposal or just a slogan. “Health care should be a right!” – – that kind of thing. Even professional politicians sometimes seem to have an oddly mechanistic view of how people will respond to particular cliches of rhetoric or symbolism.

Most of the electorate does not know (or care) much about politics and does not have strong ideological commitments. Even some people who do seem to have “principles” seem to acquire them from comic books or Ayn Rand or some half-remembered high school history or Sunday school lesson.

Moods and fashions and memes sweep thru the electorate because humans are monkeys and monkey see, monkey do: people are mimetic, we imitate the shiny objects that get our attention and being storytelling animals, we crave the meaning we get from stories.

American politics is awash in manipulative propaganda and desperately short of institutions of verification and exemplars of good, humane, balanced judgment. There is therefore little check on elite manipulation of the electorate, other than the contest among rival elite factions. The competition among elite factions, as far as the propaganda it generates, generally repulses ordinary voters, makes them more ignorant and seeks to subvert whatever instincts they might have for good, humane judgment. “Good guys” are rarely on the ballot anyway and even when they are, the gargantuan effort to draw people into enough political participation to resolve their ambivalence, suspicion and ignorance into support is rarely made on the left.

I think elections are eminently predictable for anthropologists and political scientists who can focus on observable indicators. The professional generation of propaganda has created technicians who are quite good at fine-grained prediction in service of control. Obama’s 2012 campaign against Romney was a masterpiece of tuning the propaganda to produce a narrow margin of nevertheless nearly certain victory.

Even the intuitive readers of the zeitgeist did fairly well in anticipating Brexit and Trump.

The “curse of knowledge” would seem to come down to knowing the consequences and wishing it were not so.

For the left in general, the shortage of available resources and institutional base combine with an ideological blindspot regarding the need for same. I wish Tom Friedman would lose his spot on the NYT op-ed page for being wrong and a very bad hack of a writer and be replaced in prominence by someone wise and knowledgeable. if we are to have really good left writers policing our politics from the commanding heights of journalism they have to be able to eat and make careers being good and smart. there is very little space for that, for even Matt Taibbi or Glenn Greenwald.

What can be said for pundits applies also to politicians. They have to be able to make careers doing good and being good. There is not much space for AOC and what little space there could be is closed deliberately by the powers-that-be. It is not accidental that Sanders comes from a small, rural state without overwhelming corporate interests.

To get a better politics, we would need much better institutions to create an ecology for a better politics. That is predictable. (cf Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class)

I think you have latched onto something important here. As I have argued when people have brought up “collective” responsibility for some misdeed, it takes a lot of effort and time to be informed on a topic. The people working 2 and 3 jobs have the least time and access to make informed decisions. All the more reason to treat our corrupt media with the disdain they deserve. The propaganda runs 24/7 but people know most of it is bullshit, they know they are being lied to even if they don’t know the truth of matters.
I didn’t make my Trump prediction on knowledge, I did it on societal anger. The masses may be ill-informed but they are still angry at the state of the country. It doesn’t take a Oracle to see that the status quo is going to be at a disadvantaged. Now if I were asked about Biden vs. Harris I couldn’t say. The only thing I’m sure of is that both will lose to Trump.

@ Ian Welsh,

The only way I can think of to self-mitigate the effects of the Curse of Knowledge is to accept the fact that it is a curse and that nothing will lift it or break it. One can then thinkyfeel about ways to work with it and/or work around it without forgetting about its ever-hovering presence.

The only way I can think of to do THAT . . . when it comes to guessing election results . . . is to stay socially connected to many different types of bunchloads of ordinary people and keep monitoring what they say about things and stuff, and how they say it.

If you think you have figured out a way how to do that, you can then make silent predictions to yourself. If you get it right over and over and over, this method is working and you can predict again.

@someofparts,

“Catfood Joe” makes Catfood-DemParty sense in the wider scope. The wider scope being that the Catfood Democrat Party has only one Prime Directive just now. And that is to never ever permit Sanders to get the Democratic nomination. And the SubPrime Directives 2,3 and 4 are to never ever let Warren or Gabbard or Gravel get the nomination either. Never. Ever.

They may not actively “want” Trump to win by a Nixon vs. McGovern sized landslide. But they have already decided that a Nixon-sized Trump victory in 2020 is a price they will accept paying in order to make sure that no New Deal Revivalist ever gets DemParty nominated for President. Never. Ever.

” New Dealer keep on moving. This is a Catfood neighborhood.”
” God help you New Dealer if the sun sets on you here.”

That’s the whole Catfood Democrat ethic in one dirty little Clintonite Obamazoid nutshell.

I used to have the problem that many on the left (and even some on the right) have which is I thought I knew the obvious best choices in elections and I felt that if someone could just put out a good platform and run a good campaign the rest of the population would see the light. Then I started to read up on politics and why it seemed to be so dysfunctional. Most of my ideas about democracy were shattered. Tribalism, identity, charisma and other factors outside of pure policy considerations were a lot more important than I thought.

Also, I now realize that most people are just not very interested in politics and that it is not because they are stupid but because for most people following politics is probably a waste of time given the infinitesimal chance they have of actually having an impact on politics. Those of us who follow politics more than usual might even be more biased and more prone to ideological thinking than we realize and that is not even getting into how so many politics junkies treat politics like sports fandom.

I won’t be surprised if Bernie loses to Biden or some other neoliberal Democrat. Even though I think Bernie is the best candidate out of the whole field, that doesn’t mean other people feel the same way.

I only bother to follow politics in the first place to arm myself with foreknowledge as much as possible.

Local news is on tv in the background as I write this. Just heard that Biden is in town. Big fundraiser in wealthiest part of the city. News lady telling us in hushed tones how much a seat at the dinner costs. Running a clip of him back-pedaling on the Hyde amendment faux pas. Stacey Abrams will be attending.

I’m looking forward to watching Trump take him down.

Maybe running a check against the long list of Cognitive Biases would be, at least, a start?

Wikipedia List of Cognitive Biases

There are many sites that discuss how to avoid falling prey to Cognitive Biases. There’s a link to one I like below, it has good references to scholarly research. One thing I find is that just changing my aspect, mostly going to a different neighborhood shakes up my view. Additionally, I live in a non-homogenized area of the city, so I hear lots of viewpoints every day, from a large and growing contingent of homeless, and poor to middle class, even the recent invasion of the upper middle class provides additional perspective, fortunately or unfortunately, the wealthy class has not settled in here (yet).

Wikipedia Avoiding Cognitive Biases

I’m probably missing something, but unless you’re making bets about or investments based on who wins, then what’s the point of “predicting” anyway?

I can see all sorts of reasons why one could predict that Bernie might not win or Tulsi probably won’t win (most coming down to effective propaganda by the DNC/MSM, some due to problematic campaign strategy on Bernie’s part, i.e. failing to tend his working class base, falling into the pundit class identity politics trap, fighting the battle on the wrong terrain in an effort to appeal to voters who won’t back you anyway while losing out on lots of others desperate for a champion who won’t lie to them like Trump or Obama), and probably too many variables to predict this far out anyway in any direction, but . . .

unless a candidate wins who will actually turn around the course of the world (or someone so awful wins that they promptly start an exchange of nukes) . . . what good is predicting? Aren’t the more important things (1) figuring out (1) which candidates you think will make a sufficient, or at least might make a sufficient difference, for good, and (2) figuring out what factors will decide whether they can get elected, and how best to push those things in their favor? (along with: what traps not to fall into, to help ensure there is sufficient momentum to accomplish policy objectives) Those are where the predictions will matter (or, alternatively, figuring out how to counter the prevailing trends if your side loses, if you think they have no chance).

Sometimes, also, if you think you have something worth fighting for, if all the models say “you have approaching zero chance”, well, as Sun Tzu said, if all else fails and doom appears upon you, “When on death ground, fight.”

That’s what Bernie did in 2016, and barring cheating, it would have worked. I don’t think even he realized how much of anti-establishment groundswell there would be. The same thing worked for Trump and I don’t even think he was trying to win, at first (or even at the end, he didn’t want to lose, but he didn’t want the job, either, I’m near certain; his ideal would have been Hillary winning in a way where he could go on TV and make a jillion dollars talking about how he got cheated, but his reflexive combat instincts were sufficiently better than all the pros and HRC was sufficiently awful at campaigning that he won anyway, because unlike w/Bernie, the powers that be thought they had it locked up and there was no reason to cheat).

If you’re a Tulsi or Gravel fan, that’s what to do now. Say what you mean, mean what you say, push the issues that are actually important, and come out swinging. The corporate media has improved their disinformation tactics and are trying to stomp out future Bernie uprisings before they can get out of low single digits, having realized past mistakes, but you never know . . .
(and if you’re a Bernie fan, he’s still got at least as good a chance as anyone else) (and all the Dems have to worry about winning the primary w/out losing the independents; which the corporate media is making VERY difficult, one almost wonders if they want Trump to win, or if they’ve started believing their own false paradigm, or that much faith in their propaganda efforts and voter malleability–they might not be wrong on this one– or what)

There’s reality, there’s the official version of reality, there’s what most people faced with both of these plus a few alternatives actually believe, plus conflicting priorities, etc. And this applies even to the people not paying attention–they think certain things are, and people are a certain way, and will vote accordingly. The propaganda artists have figured this out and are trying to convince voters Biden is a champion of the working class and “any blue will do, so vote for whoever our polls tell you is in first” and about 5,000 other bits of disinformation, but they don’t control public perception entirely and some people are getting better BS detectors, and most people don’t fit into the neat little boxes that most of the pundit class (including most of the leftist pundit class) keep trying to fit everyone into, so . . .

All is flux. We need someone w/the sincerity, commitment and track record of Bernie, along w/the combat instincts of Trump, and ideally a lot of charisma. Don’t predict prevailing trends, try to make new and more favorable trends (as Bernie and Trump both did in 2016).

The problem is that elections won’t — indeed can’t — get you what you want especially if you’re on the leftish side of the political/ideological spectrum. Electing candidate X rather than Y will inevitably disappoint and may well be horrible. Yet Y will inevitably be a disaster for some people in some ways some of the time, so it is better to go with X, no? At least you avoid that disaster. Or something.

The only certain outcome is that somebody is going to get screwed, likely screwed badly as a consequence of this or that election, and there will be wars and horrors too many to count, and most of us will stumble on as best we can, and the cycle will repeat, over and over. Progress will be made in some areas, reversion in others. The imperial spectacle will increase and diminish; the narrative will be jiggered this way and that; decline and advancement will contend with stability.

Predicting who will win the office is more of a media marketing ploy in the end. Wanting to know and understand the future is human nature, and media makes plenty of money asking its questions and predicting its outcomes. Wrong or right, it doesn’t matter. The prediction is the product.

Our nihilists yearn for The End, Finality, the Inevitable Collapse and see the signs everywhere. Well, sure. An end is certain, at least on the individual level if not necessarily collectively all at once (though when the Giant Asteroid comes… ) Yet stumbling on, one way or another, is just as inevitable. Elections merely change some of the players at the top, but they’re all socialized to the same system and inevitably perpetuate it. Even some outlier like Trump (who’s not really an outlier at all, but more an unmasked representative of his class) serves and perpetuates the System in spite of the spectacle, just with a somewhat different cast of characters.

So it goes.

There is one factual understanding that is relatively new to most of us, and has vastly complicated our efforts to predict political weather, and that is the growing awareness that the democratic party is not really opposed to the corporatist agenda that is pushed by the GOP.

It may as well be yesterday that we realized that the democrats are republican lite.

This realization has lead rather quickly to the realization that 10% of the population, regardless of political identification, the credentialed class, does not give wit about the rest of us, so long as they can hold on to what they’ve got.

One of the main, unforeseen developments is the obvious commitment of the 10% to ‘pulling up the ladder’, that has those who we previously assumed, on thin evidence, were ‘fighting for us’, instead, joining the effort to impose austerity.

When one considers how blind to this obvious reality the die-hard HRC backers of a certain stripe are, then we can see why we have such a hard time predicting.

We had been aggressively asking why poor working class whites were voting against their own self interest, all the while ignoring the glaring spectacle of poor ‘liberals’ blindly voting for the latest Clintonite, third-way to the exact same effect.

And now, finally, we’re starting to understand that identity politics is not evidence of the democrats dedication to a ‘big tent’, but a deliberate, and proactive tactic to divide and prevent an effective collaboration toward solidarity.

All of this, though you and I have been mulling it over for ten years or so, may as well have started dawning on ‘us’ just yesterday.