The Sanity Project

Don’t inoculate people against reason   Recently updated !

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged psychology SanityProject on by

I’ve been reading about a psychological notion called “inoculation theory.” The idea is that just as people can gain immunity to a disease by being exposed to a weakened pathogen, they may develop resistance to a point of view as a result of hearing weak arguments for it. Most discussions of the idea that I’ve seen focus on doing this intentionally, but it also works when people hear bad attempts to convince them.

Suppose there’s some position for which you’ve heard only ridiculous arguments. After a while, you’ll stop paying attention to any arguments for it, even if one of them actually presents a good case. If someone claims to have solid evidence that 9/11 was an inside job, Trump won the 2020 election, or the Moon landings were faked, are you going to spend much time listening? Probably not. Usually that’s a rational response; if there were good arguments for these claims, you’d have heard them before. But if you get all your information from your social media bubble, genuinely good arguments can be drowned out by the ridiculous ones. People love to repost bad arguments to expose them to ridicule. Others repost whatever favors their cause without verifying it, and readers stop paying attention.

A bad argument can be worse than silence. In a well-known story, the townspeople are “inoculated” against the boy’s cries of “Wolf!” When you offer weak or invalid claims to a skeptical audience, they’ll assume you have nothing better to offer.

Returning, inevitably, to Donald Trump, I’d like to give two examples I’ve often seen. One is the claim that he’s a “pedophile.” While there have been accusations, he hasn’t been charged with a crime, and I haven’t seen strong supporting evidence. If that’s the worst you can say about him, you’ll only convince his supporters that you don’t have a good case against him.

A second example is the statement that’s he’s a “felon.” He has been convicted of a felony, but it’s not one that gets most people excited. He didn’t report hush money as a campaign expense. It isn’t obvious to non-lawyers and non-accountants that he was required to, and some lawyers without an axe to grind have called the case dubious. These two claims are far weaker than the undisputed facts that he ordered civilian boats sunk without a legal process, started a war, pardoned everyone who broke into the Capitol to support his election claim, and threatened to destroy a civilization.

It’s also possible to inoculate people against words and concepts. Some people toss “Communist!” around as an all-purpose comeback; others use “Racist!” After a while, listeners treat the words as noise, whether they apply or not.

Some people say that more arguments are always better. They aren’t, if the arguments are weak. People have limits on their attention span and patience. If you strain both, you lose your audience, and you’ll have a hard time getting it back.

Update: I just found another good article on this issue: “The paradox of argument strength” in Nature.

Credit the songwriter!   Recently updated !

This entry was posted in Music Writing and tagged music writing on by

The idea for this post started when I tried to find out if the resemblance of the 1979 song “Gloria” to the “Gloria” of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis was intentional. (It was.) While doing the usual Internet searches, I found it repeatedly referred to as Laura Branigan’s song, even on lyrics sites, although she didn’t write it. Not to take away from her excellent performance, but she wrote neither the music, the original lyrics, nor the English-language version. Wikipedia credits Giancarlo Bigazzi and Umberto Tozzi as the creators of the original song and Jonathan King as the author of the English-language lyrics. Tozzi performed the Italian song before Branigan. Yet somehow Branigan gets all the credit.

(I’m not counting Beethoven as a creator. The song uses only nine notes of his. They give the song its backbone but not its content.)

I cited another example of failure to credit the song writer in a book discussion a couple of months ago.

It’s routine to give performers the credit for songs they didn’t write. The reason is laziness. People hear someone perform a song and assume that person must have written it. If you believe the lyrics sites, Frank Sinatra wrote over a hundred songs, but Wikipedia lists him as the creator or co-creator of only a handful. An exceptional performance makes the difference between a hit and a flop, but the performance wouldn’t exist if no one had written the song. Before recordings became the most common way to hear music, writers got more attention. William Billings, Stephen Foster, George Root, and Irving Berlin were famous names in their time. Today, it’s rare for songwriters to be well known unless they write musicals or perform their own songs.

When you’re writing about a song, especially if the lyrics or the musical content is important, please mention the writer’s or writers’ names.

This post was partially inspired by Debbie Ridpath Ohi’s campaign to get acknowledgement for the illustrators of children’s books. That’s important, too.

The apocalyptic mindset 3

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged liberty psychology religion on by

It’s hard for me to understand the popularity of authoritarian movements. Why would people willingly cede power to someone whose overriding goal is power? Yet it’s happened over and over. Lately I’ve been looking at comments on the Internet and seeing a strong pattern. They see the world as facing an apocalyptic battle between two utterly opposed forces. Their side is good, and anyone who opposes it must be evil. Not only that, their opponents are all on the same side. It’s hard to think of immigrants, Constitutional lawyers, liberals (in all the senses of the word), Muslims, socialists, and the Pope all as a unified front, but to orthodox MAGAs they are.

Evangelical Christianity, which is the heart of Trump’s support, loves the idea that history is a struggle between Satanic and divine forces, and they expect it to culminate in a world war which God, of course, will win. It colors people’s worldview even when they aren’t thinking of supernatural forces. It’s their habit to think of political conflicts as fights between two fully consistent and completely opposed forces. It’s a view that doesn’t leave much room for good people who disagree, honestly mistaken ideas, and people who aren’t wholly on one side or the other.

When you accept this view, it’s reasonable to think anyone on your side is completely trustworthy, anyone opposed is a thorough liar, and anything which supports your side must be right. Anything your side does is good, including threatening to destroy a civilization. It helps if the civilization to be destroyed is aligned with a non-Christian religion.

In praying to God from the Pentagon, “Secretary of War” Hegseth raged: “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Jackson Lahmeyer, a Trump-aligned candidate from Oklahoma who is also an Evangelical pastor, proclaimed, “Good and evil, that’s the story of the Bible. The good news is that at the end good always wins.” Look at chapter 16 of Revelation, if you have the stomach for it. Angels spread skin disease, pollute the seas and fresh water, cause deadly heat waves, and dry up a major river. They’re allegedly working for God, so this makes them “good.”

The Crusades were run on the same mindset. Armies set out to take Jerusalem and the surrounding area because “God wills it!” When the Crusaders took the city in 1099, they massacred thousands of people, mostly Muslims and Jews. They considered their own side “good” not because of their character or deeds, but because they claimed to be on God’s side. They could cite Biblical precedents, such as the genocide of the Canaanites.

Communicating with people who look at the world that way is hard. By the very fact of disagreeing with them, you’re on the side of “evil.” The important thing is to reject their worldview vocally and persistently.

The LACon code of conduct

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged conventions fandom worldcon on by

One more in my sporadic series of posts on the codes of conduct of various conventions. This time it’s LACon V, the 2026 Worldcon in Los Angeles. Its code isn’t so bad that it would have kept me from attending if I’d really wanted to, but it has enough problems that I changed my mind about getting a “virtual membership.” Here’s a look at some of its good and bad points.

First concern: “Discrimination (based on but not limited to, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, neurodiversity, physical appearance, body size, or physical/mental disability) will not be tolerated.” Discrimination on these grounds by businesses, support organizations, and other public-facing groups is a bad thing, except when it’s necessary to their function (for example, Catholic churches can discriminate in favor of Catholics when hiring priests). Individuals can’t be held to the same standard. People often prefer the company of their own kind, and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as they aren’t obnoxious. Heterosexuals mostly would rather date heterosexuals, and homosexuals usually prefer other homosexuals. Affinity groups often meet at cons. This kind of rule can only be applied sporadically. Hopefully it will be invoked only when people get nasty about their preferences, but it could be used on anyone.

“Harassment of any kind will not be tolerated. If someone tells you no or asks you to leave them alone, you are expected to cease your interaction with them immediately. Because people may feel uncomfortable saying no or asking you to leave them alone, the absence of no is not sufficient to assume consent. Only yes means yes.” This mixes two different points. First we’re told that we should leave people alone if they say no. That’s reasonable, but then it immediately says that the absence of “no” isn’t sufficient. Does that mean explicit consent is required for every interaction? It creates pressure to formalize everything. Do people have to keep to themselves completely to be safe? Again, there won’t and can’t be complete enforcement, but the rule could be used on anyone.

It gets worse with the specific items that are called harassment. “Deliberate misgendering / deadnaming of people or continued misgendering / deadnaming after being corrected.” This applies a one-size-fits-all rule to trans people. Some people consider their previously manifested sex to be “dead” and want no reference made to it. Their choice should be respected. Others treat their transition differently. I know a fannish musician who treats his previous female identity as another person and has made an album combining her recordings with his new ones; he’s “deadnamed” himself. Some others wrote songs which they like to have credited under their previous names. Their choices should be respected.

“Comments that belittle or demean others” are deemed harassment. This is the same rule Balticon used in a nasty way. It will be quite an interesting convention if you can’t say anything bad about Donald Trump.

“Attempts to weaponize this Code of Conduct” violate the code of conduct. What counts as “weaponizing”? Does it mean anything more than using it in a way someone doesn’t like?

“Advocating for or encouraging any of the above behaviors.” I guess I’ve engaged in “harassment” by writing this.

The “anti-racism statement” is a mixed bag, but it doesn’t have specific prohibitions on members, so it’s out of scope for this discussion.

Will the bad parts of this code cause trouble for innocent people at LACon? No one knows. Sometimes senseless provisions get thrown in as boilerplate and never get fixed. It’s possible that if I registered for online participation and a WSFS membership, someone might point to this article and claim it’s “demeaning,” “harassment,” or “advocating for [prohibited] behaviors.” It’s more common, though, for cons to have badly written codes of conduct than to use them to punish people arbitrarily. Even so, their presence can be intimidating. A few bigoted organizations have taken action against Israelis and their supporters, so the risk is there.

Bottom line: If I were going, I wouldn’t skip the con because of this code of conduct, but I consider it enough of a negative that I’m foregoing the virtual membership.

Three silent shorts, April 7

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged music silent movies on by

My next silent film show at the Plaistow Library will be on Tuesday, April 7. This time I’ll accompany three short comedies:

  • The Immigrant with Charlie Chaplin
  • Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde with Stan Laurel
  • His Royal Slyness with Harold Lloyd

Chaplin, Laurel, and Lloyd were major comedy stars in their time. I shouldn’t have to say much about Chaplin. Stan Laurel’s career peaked after he joined with Oliver Hardy, but before that he had some excellent films on his own. Harold Lloyd’s “glasses” persona was a middle-class character, best known for his image hanging from a clock tower in Safety Last.

The Immigrant isn’t very controversial, in spite of its title. It has two distinct parts. The first shows Chaplin coming to America on a crowded boat from an unspecified country and helping a young woman whose money has been stolen. In the second part, he goes into the restaurant with a silver dollar he has found and encounters the young lady again. He discovers that the coin has fallen through a hole in his pocket and he has nothing to pay with. All turns out well, though.

I love mad scientists, Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde is a great parody of John Barrymore’s 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In this version, the doctor turns into not a murderous fiend but a silly prankster. The ending is lost, and what we have ends on a cliffhanger as a crowd breaks into the lab to save Pyckle’s assistant from Pryde. I’ll handle it by continuing to play, accompanying the way I think the film would have ended.

Finally, His Royal Slyness has a book salesman, played by Harold Lloyd, impersonate a prince and compete for a princess’s hand. The salesman looks just like the real prince, and you see them together on screen. No trick photography was used. Harold’s brother Gaylord looked a lot like him, and with glasses and makeup, they were nearly impossible to tell apart. Gaylord plays the real prince, who changes his mind about the deal and tries to claim the princess.

It’s a change of pace for me. The three movies together don’t run much over an hour, but they provide some of the best laughs of the period. They’re still fun today, and I aim to make them more fun with my accompaniment. Each one his its own keyboard setup, with a couple of surprises programmed in. If you’re in the area and it sounds interesting, drop by the Plaistow Library on April 7 at 6:00 PM.

This summer, the library will have some special events for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. On of them will be D. W. Griffith’s America, an epic presentation of the American Revolution. The date hasn’t been set yet.