The Foolishness of the Crowds

Audience and mindless populism, along with other takeaways from attending a Ben Shapiro talk

Introduction

I recently attended, at my university, an event with Ben Shapiro. While I have many significant policy disagreements with Mr. Shapiro — I’m something of a left libertarian — I think political events are fun and I was hoping to ask about veganism or immigration¹. There were several things that were notable about the event — so notable, in fact, that I plan on noting them!

A funny story of poor reasoning

One was just an amusing story from the event. I got there very early and began chatting with some pro-lifers. Being a contrarian and deeply undecided about abortion, I decided to advocate for the pro-choice view. They took the (in my view) deeply crazy position that a being matters if and only if it’s a biological human being.

I presented one standard counterexample to this. Suppose that there are two fetuses that are not conscious and you know with absolute certainty they will never become conscious. They will remain non-conscious for all of eternity. In this case, you can either save the two immortal, eternally non-sentient fetuses or one full-fledged five-year-old child. If we say that a being’s moral worth has nothing to do with its consciousness or its capacities, then this being would be just as valuable as the five-year-old — so we should save two of them over a five-year-old. But this is clearly crazy.

However, amusingly, one of the people that I talked to seemed to be very confused about the way that hypotheticals worked. This person said “show me a fetus like that, then we’ll talk.” This is like objecting to the trolley problem on the grounds that the trolley problem hasn’t actually arisen in the real world.

Conservatives are nice and fun to chat with

Another takeaway: I had a huge amount of fun. Maybe it’s just the contrarian in me, but this was actually one of the most fun events at my university so far. Arguing with like six conservatives — ones that are very nice, cordial, and intelligent — was quite entertaining. I’d imagine that being conservative on a college campus selects for being decently contrarian and thoughtful — I certainly found the gaggle of people that I talked to much more interesting than most conversational partners on college campuses. One guy even subscribed to my substack — I wonder how many of my substack subscribers are MAGA hat wearing Trump supporters, but we now know that the answer is at least 1.

This shows, I think, an important point: the other side politically is not evil. They’re mostly ordinary people. There’s nothing wrong — and indeed, something deeply right — with having friends that disagree with you politically. Scott Alexander has talked about this in his article I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup. One hilarious quote from it is the following.

The other day, I logged into OKCupid and found someone who looked cool. I was reading over her profile and found the following sentence:

Don’t message me if you’re a sexist white guy

And my first thought was “Wait, so a sexist black person would be okay? Why?”

(The girl in question was white as snow)

But on a more serious note, Scott raises quite an important point — there’s actually just hugely destructive, rampant political prejudice.

“But racism and sexism and cissexism and anti-Semitism are these giant all-encompassing social factors that verge upon being human universals! Surely you’re not arguing that mere political differences could ever come close to them!”

One of the ways we know that racism is a giant all-encompassing social factor is the Implicit Association Test. Psychologists ask subjects to quickly identify whether words or photos are members of certain gerrymandered categories, like “either a white person’s face or a positive emotion” or “either a black person’s face and a negative emotion”. Then they compare to a different set of gerrymandered categories, like “either a black person’s face or a positive emotion” or “either a white person’s face or a negative emotion.” If subjects have more trouble (as measured in latency time) connecting white people to negative things than they do white people to positive things, then they probably have subconscious positive associations with white people. You can try it yourself here.

Of course, what the test famously found was that even white people who claimed to have no racist attitudes at all usually had positive associations with white people and negative associations with black people on the test. There are very many claims and counterclaims about the precise meaning of this, but it ended up being a big part of the evidence in favor of the current consensus that all white people are at least a little racist.

Anyway, three months ago, someone finally had the bright idea of doing an Implicit Association Test with political parties, and they found that people’s unconscious partisan biases were half again as strong as their unconscious racial biases (h/t Bloomberg. For example, if you are a white Democrat, your unconscious bias against blacks (as measured by something called a d-score) is 0.16, but your unconscious bias against Republicans will be 0.23. The Cohen’s d for racial bias was 0.61, by the book a “moderate” effect size; for party it was 0.95, a “large” effect size.

This is a huge problem. One reason it’s a problem is that it fosters vast political division. It makes it so that liberals have no idea what a real, honest to god conservative sounds like, and vice versa (there are certainly exceptions to this). There’s a reason that both parties are really bad at figuring out what the other party believes and consistently rate them as far more radical than they actually are.

It’s much easier to portray the Democrats as being a party whose sole agenda is transing the kids if you don’t have any Democratic friends. Likewise, it’s easy to think that Republicans are all a bunch of racist bigots if you don’t have any Republican friends. The best cure for radicalism on both sides is actually hearing what people on the other side are saying.

But there’s another much simpler and more obvious reason that not having friends of the opposite political party is bad — it dramatically reduces the pool of possible friends. While I’m no objective list theorist, even a hedonist about well-being like myself can agree that friendship is good. And so it’s bad when you nuke half of the pool of prospective friends based on their political leanings. It’s bad for both sides.

Generally when people are trying to defend their prejudice against the other political party, they’ll say something like the following: ‘I could never be friends with someone who believes X — it’s just too horrible.’ But this is very silly for a few reasons.

One reason is that politics is primarily isn’t really about the issues. It’s primarily about affiliation with one side — and then people mindlessly defend the side with which they’re affiliated. There’s a reason that more data doesn’t change people’s minds about politics — politics is about identity not policy.

A second reason is that it turns out that people in your own camp are pretty damn evil. As Huemer notes

Since college, I’ve occasionally run into other evidence of human amorality. Of course, everyone knows about the Milgram experiments, in which it emerged that 2/3 of humans are willing to electrocute an innocent person just to avoid the discomfort of disobeying a man in a white lab coat.

Now the point isn’t that the people on your side are evil. Most people are not very evil. Instead, it’s that most people can get caught up in truly horrible things through involvement with those that they respect. Conservatives and liberals aren’t different genetic stock — they both just mindlessly follow the things that their side agrees with most of the time.

Thus, if you’re going to judge the other side based on ‘they support terrible things under some circumstances’ you should take a long hard look in the mirror.

Politics zombifies the brain

In the aforementioned abortion discussion, I was asked why I think that consciousness matters. I explained that this just seems to be a very fundamental intuition — a world of philosophical zombies or mindless robots wouldn’t seem to matter.

No doubt because of the framing of the abortion discussion, they bit the bullet on zombies still mattering. This seems really crazy, though I wonder if they’d have had the same view if the issue hadn’t been politicized through an abortion discussion.

Philosophers in academia are mostly liberals. I wonder if conservatives have more zombie-friendly intuitions. They seemed to take it as odd that I wouldn’t care about zombies intrinsically, while I took it as the opposite. I’d previously been very confident that most people think zombies don’t matter, though my confidence in that claim has dropped somewhat.

Counter-protesters are silly

There were roughly 20 counter-protesters. One of them had a megaphone. He really wasn’t very good at the counter-protesting thing.

At first, the slogan was something like “Take your vile conservative hate off our campus now,” but that seemed to be too complex and multisyllabic for the counter-protesters. So then it changed into something simpler like “hey hey, ho ho, hate on campus has got to go.”

These people were really annoying and did nothing productive. One only makes liberals sound crazy when they’re yelling about someone giving a speech. If you care about left-wing causes, going home is more productive than yelling about someone giving a speech.

A funny story from the event

(Obviously not a complete transcript — just a Thucydides-esque recreation from memory).

Woman: “Thanks for coming here and speaking — it’s good to hear the other side, political polarization is bad…. now, why do you support telling women what they can do with their bodies?”

Shapiro “well, you can do what you want if it’s just with your body, but not with someone else’s body by killing them”

(Shapiro continued for several minutes, basically just saying this.

Woman: “Nice strawman fallacy.”

(she then walked away from the mic).

Shapiro: “Wait, you can’t just accuse me of a strawman fallacy — are you going to elaborate, what was the strawman? No, okay!”

I found this whole series of events very funny.

Mindless crowd-induced populism

The first guy who asked a question was with some progressive group on campus. He and Shapiro had a polite, several-minute back and forth.

It was the crowd that really annoyed me.

When Shapiro would make a nuanced, substantive point, the crowd would not cheer. But when he gave a snappy one-liner like “Men are men and women are women,” the crowd would cheer. This is, I think, pretty typical of crowds.

Shapiro has no doubt been in lots of previous crowds. So it’s no surprise that he would play to them, even if he wasn’t doing so consciously. But this really eroded the quality of the discourse. It did this in two ways.

First, it gave Shapiro an incentive to make really shallow points. Instead of nuanced points, he had an incentive to repeat slogans and bumper stickers. This is not, on the whole, a good thing.

Second, it made it so that it seemed that Shapiro was really crushing the guy. Now, I think Shapiro probably got the better of him verbally — he has lots of experience with this. But it becomes very easy to imagine that one guy is DESTROYING the other when the crowd cheers seven times at the things one guy says and the other guy doesn’t get any reaction.

It reminded me of this interaction. I think it’s very clear that Shapiro here is the only one saying anything of substance. The other guy is literally just repeating slogans. But upon first watch, if you’re not really paying attention, it’s easy to imagine that the other guy got the better of Shapiro.

This is because everything Nance says is a slogan — and it all gets a cheer from the crowd. The crowd, much like likes on Twitter or Instagram, serves directly to reward making various statements. Given this, it’s no surprise that people make the statements that the crowd rewards — but these are trivial, shallow statements, ones that don’t really get to the heart of the issue.

Takeaways

All in all, the event was a lot of fun. I’d encourage fellow liberals to go to conservative events just to chat with people and vice versa. One gets a very interesting perspective on the world.

1. Sadly, due to horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad cancel culture, I did not get to ask the question — Shapiro left before I could ask the question.