Groupthink

Nydwracu linked to this Tweet over here, which I found quite amusing.

Oscar selfie is 20% or more of *all* Twitter activity in some states & DC: pic.twitter.com/s220aYDZZf— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) 2014, 3月 3

Often the decline of Western Civilization is linked to the increasing numbers of foreigners in our midst, and often there is a tacit assumption that the decline is linear: the more NAMs the worse the decline. Well that doesn't explain why Whitopias like Vermont or New Hampshire were so overrepresented in this last example of retarded celebrity worship.

For some reason this table reminded me of this video on bloggingheads.tv:

http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/1345?in=31:56&out=47:06

I saw this clip years ago, and always wanted to write about it (there's a draft lost somewhere in my wordpress dashboard with the title: The Enemy), but it always pisses me off so much that I just can't come with any coherent writing, besides calling the guy a revolting douchebag (tell me those "yeahs" don't remind me you of Bill Lumbergh) and the woman a vapid whore.

Special attention should be paid to 31:10 when they start talking about James Watson. The douchebag starts saying how when he wrote about it, people (more knowledgeable than himself) would tell him that Watson was right and there's plenty of scientific basis for saying black Africans have genetically low IQs, and the vapid whore says "Really?!". If she were 20 years younger she's say "OMG Wow, just wow". You get the picture.

Of course all this comes down to the concept of groupthink. Why do intelligent white people show outrage towards James Watson when they don't really know shit about the facts? Groupthink.  And why do old-stock Yankees in New Hampshire and Vermont retweet like crazy a selfie of a bunch of actors in the Oscars? Groupthink.

Now, Groupthink is a quite well established concept in psychology, although it suffers from serious neglect, as it doesn't fit the zeitgeist, or more accurately, it goes against the basic Christian concept of individual sin, and its bastardized Enlightenment idea of the autonomous individual. A good recent takedown of the idea of individual rationality was published in the last annual question at Edge.org here.

The problem with groupthink is that we tend to think that it is correlated with  IQ, as more intelligent people are less prone to groupthink than less intelligent people. Nobody's surprised at Africans penis theft panics, or Indians dying in hundreds in some temple stampede. People are sheep, and dumb people more so. But that doesn't explain a lot of things. It doesn't explain why it was Vermont retweeting that retarded Oscar selfie rather than California or Florida. There's something else.

The obvious answer is that there's something about Yankee culture that produces more groupthink than other cultures. Tocqueville famously wrote about how all those free and independent republican Americans were so much sheepish than the old world peasant subject of feudal lords and ancient superstitions. There are only so many ways to solve the Coordination Problem. You can have a strong and unequal hierarchy, which keeps people subject by force and custom even if they complain and joke about it. Or you can abolish all hierarchy and make people free and equal, but how do you coordinate them then?

Groupthink, i.e. mutual surveillance, periodic witch-hunts, frequent rituals to confirm the social bonds of the village (and check who's not as enthusiastic as the others).

It's a tough choice.

I had to stop listening after 5 minutes, it's just too horrifying. This conversation reminded me of some artistic-liberal arts college students I knew a few years ago. Within that circle, any coherent statement about the world was met with scorn, and only duckspeak was rewarded with approval. Chicks in that group were horribly empty (of both feminine virtue and whorish attractiveness), and seemed like they could achieve orgasms only through the overwhelming sensation of high intellectual and moral superiority. I agree with your idea on IQ and groupthink. Smart people often have stronger hamster, spinning their rationalization wheels in order to satisfy the reptilian need for power and status.

I have to admit. I quite took to the Oscar photo bomb by Benedict Cumberbatch. He was photo bombing Bono from U2 though.

Of course, this makes me want to make a 2x2 matrix. High and low groupthink vs hierarchy societies. Top of my head thoughts, but I wonder who you would put in as exemplars: H-GT, L-HR = Yankees H-GT, H-HR = Japanese L-GT, H-HR = Italians? L-GT, L-HR = Bushmen? Thoughts?

If my post has any sense, it means that both L-GT, L-HR and H-GT, H-HR are empty. I certainly don't see the Bushmen as being freethinkers, and the strict hierarchy of Japan has the strange property of being incapable of making the subordinates obey the top. See the famous Japanese ministries contradicting each other, Prime Ministers changing every few months, etc.

It's hard to tell how freethinking some group is when there's not much to think about. My experiences with American Indians reflect that, though, there is naturally a lot of tribal variation. But you see a lot of variety of views and highly opinionated individuals who stand up for their position and stubbornly resist group pressure for conformity. And then ... sigh ... as soon as the whiskey starts flowing there's definitely going to be a homicide about some stupid argument, so maybe some more groupthink would be a good thing. I would say their tendency toward hierarchy is low, but then again, I never saw then during the tribes and chiefs days, so I'll have to read up on what observers at the time thought. But, again, like with intelligence, it's hard to tell much about hierarchy if your group size is low and primitive people usually have some kind of chief. There's always the example of the Mayans and Aztecs. Hierarchical, but who knows how free thinking.

Maybe inequality is a better indicator. Hierarchy can be hard to measure. In Japan they often say that pre-war Japan was a much more light-hearted, easy going society where people spoke their mind and were merry. They also had an official aristocracy which owned everything and peasants were lucky to grow beyond 1.50m.

I think that's a good insight. Also, I think another measure is the level of development - the scope or scale - of a society. This is like the bouquet metaphor for intelligence specialization (Sailer here). At high intelligence, you see people who are all-math, or all-verbal, or combination of both that you still recognize as smart. As low intelligence, that kind of differentiation doesn't seem to matter or show up much. If you're going to get beyond Dunbar-number levels, you need more intelligence and some kind of social coordinating mechanism. If you don't have those - then you're at the stem of the bouquet, and it's hard to tell what's going on. But as you start growing larger and more complex, it means that at least some people are getting smarter, and they also need some way to organize the mass and keep it together and aligned to prevent it from splitting up. And social coordination can be all-hierarchy, all-moral-conformity-enforcement-mechanisms, or some equally effective combination of moderate amounts of both.

Yes, which means that the larger the society, the more the total amount of glue it needs, so if it gives up on one sort of glue, it will need industrial amounts of the other. So you get Yankees who have a huge society but little hierarchy/inequality, so to coordinate they need industrial amounts of groupthink.

For balance, even for New York, 26000 tweets is just not a huge amount, to say nothing of 320 tweets in Vermont. Before drawing any conclusions, I'd like to know what twitter activity was sampled, how these ratios were calculated etc., what else was retweeted by the persons who retweeted the Oscar selfie (whatever the hell that is), and also how representative of the general population is the twittering population (my guess: not very). High IQ by itself does not make a person immune to groupthink, rather the contrary, as reakcionar mentions above. A certain amount of mental discipline is required to be able to avoid groupthink, and most modern education does not appear to be geared to provide this kind of discipline. A good STEM education or real IT experience seems to provide some of it (which accounts for the prevalence of these people in NR), but not quite in the same areas as, I believe, the classics-heavy pre-war "liberal education" did.

I'm not sure that twitter is a good measurement here, a more perfect medium for encouraging vapidity and group think could not be designed.

The point is not the absolute number, but the relative number or groupthink on Vermont compared to, say, Florida.

It's just begging for a Herfindahl–Hirschman Index regression analysis. Given any particular n-characteristics profile, how much 'industry concentration' is there in your cohort's tweets? Now compare cohorts. The thesis her, I think, is that it would look like one of those 'American Nations Maps' that JayMan likes to put out. High levels of conversational-homogeneity and tweet-topic concentration in the old-stock Yankee Northeast, more individualism / eccentrism elsewhere.

Your post makes sense with all four slots filled. There is no fundamental requirement that a culture solve the coordination problem very well. What you are calling empty slots could work well as relatve failure modes when filled.

Orwell wrote something about this, how the English upper class worked by a kind of consensus- groupthink is the harsh word, unspoken consensus a neutral to positive one- about what was and was not acceptable. He did it in the context of commenting on the horse people in Gulliver's Travels, a group based on English gentry.

It's colder, northwards, of a winter's eve. Fewer people in Vermont will just have been out of the house for a hazelnut coffee that mankind needs to know about, or will have just run into so-and-so and it was swell to see him. Some of those states are also extremely rural ; others, admittedly, not at all. Call me a genius/ jerk, but your post seems like a thin-beer rationalization for being less paleo than before. Well, I'm not saying you must hew to some school of thought, or that I never change my outlook or have all the answers. I'm a bit bewildered actually. The talk about Limeys is usually that they're individualist (that was Spengler's opinion, and I think many people's) and lightly aspie-ish, or inferior in psychological insight (Nietzsche's opinion). There is some weird gap in the English mind: utterly towering art on the one hand, and sci/tech on the other . . . utterly . . . Tallis is my #1 artist. Yet the stuff in between, that partakes equally of intuition and ratiocination, namely philosophy as we Continentals understand it (I'm not very English-blooded, and I think I feel that fact), philosophy with some emphasis on wisdom and 'outlook' -- and also psychology -- not so great, not real amazing. William Sommerset Maugham might be one exception, and obviously Shakespeare, and Blake. By psychology I mean the old sense in which methods are mostly informal and great psychologists besides Blake and Shake-speare include Moliere, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoevskij, Montaigne, Rouchefoucauld, or Chuang-tze -- though I think all ten of those would be entirely interested to read Kahneman and Tversky, and would see most of it as fascinating insights that happened to come from more formal methods, but not very different in essence from other insights they got from a lifetime of contemplation, scrutiny of intuition, and unstructured observation. English are said to be more tolerant of eccentricity than Americans. So too are Southrons said to be more tolerant than Yanks proper. I suspect both of those are true. If you just act how you act, Dixie people aren't going to freak out. Though actually Maine people don't either. There may be a minor Alaska effect in Maine. Strange and independent-minded people have migrated to Alaska, and to a lesser extent maybe Montana/Idaho and the whole interior west, because with an infinity of wilderness all over the place, whatever you feel like doing or being ain't really my problem, mos' like. Looking at English documentary TV and Sherlock Holmes and stuff from maybe the 70s, 80s, I see this (haven't actually been to England to speak of). Holmes is kind of the original phreekozoid hero in artibus, whereas Gogol (the man himself) is perhaps the same sort of thing in real life. In my adulthood it seems like the English have closed the gap though, becoming more American on this axis. > It’s a tough choice. Hardly

Also a second factor is that Maine is just not very elite, and nor are the other regions I mentioned. Only the Northeast and West coast are, really. I think eliteness drives more conformity in America than it does in Europe, because Americans don't have 1,000 continuous years of high art, from whose existence we may infer 800 to 1,000 years of continuous schooling in what to do and be when you are elite. It adds up. After the Great War and the 60s this schooling is rather eroded on both sides of the ocean, but Euros have more of it left over after this erosion. In XIX England it's a gentleman that you think of as being quirky and different. In my American lifetime I've found the blue collar man more likeable, unique, and charismatic, on average. But I have spent more of my time with white collars, obviously ones who are hyperintellectual and odd. Other American white collars of my day are not my thing, by and large.

I think I left my point marginally clear. It is that Americans don't quite know what to be when they are elite (plus, it is a little awkward being elite given the country started with a proto-1789) . . . so the conclusion is that they should simply be like each other -- other American elites. Hence conformity in the elite.

I read somewhere that officer school (which started quite young) in the pre-war IJA was so tough that the officers were on average shorter than their men.

L-GT, H-HR - not Italians. One has to watch out for groups or societies where there are more than one groupthink-attractors. For example, the French were famously *either* Catholic mystics after Blaise Pascal, *or* Cartesian atheist rationalists. You see that on specific ideas, too - most people asked about gay marriage will start their answer with "of course", whether the answer is yes or no.

Do you have any suggestions for which groups would best fit the cases?