Going way meta here.
Knowing about cognitive biases can hurt some people: Mr Inman is subtly implying that the backfire effect only happens to the red tribe, while simultaneously poisoning the well on counterarguments.
Imagine a version of that comic that tells you stuff about Abraham Lincoln, and ends with “Abraham Lincoln did not think that the American Civil War was about slavery (source)“, and then immediately condescendingly say that certain people are going to write rebuttals on Facebook and miss the point?
Imagine starting out with the famous sentence from the Treaty of Tripoli about the constitution of the USA being agnostic, only to then veer into the white slavery of the Barbary Pirates that made such a treaty necessary.
Moldbug did that all the time. This is a positively Moldbuggian infographic!
Imagine starting out with some statistics about equality, diversity and feminism in Scandinavia, and then adding statistics about decreased social cohesion resulting from ethnic diversity, male-dominated professions resulting from greater female freedom to choose careers, and the effects of the Law of Jante on entrepreneurship and GDP. If you accept one, you must accept the other!
Imagine an infographic about refugees, freedom of the press, ISIS and Erdogan, then suddenly about support for authoritarian Islamic reactionaries, or straight-up Jihadists, among Muslims in the West. Not fair, you say. Backfire effect, I say!
This is what Moldbug did. He roped you in with some well sourced, morally neutral facts, then got into morally repugnant territory, and you were left wondering if you didn’t accept it only because you didn’t want it to be true. “Fine”, Moldbug says: “You appeal to consequences. But are the consequences of a Singapore-style ethnically uniform capitalist dictatorship not so much better than what we have now? You said that free trade brings peace, why stop here?”
Of course, you can accept one and not the other, and the reason Moldbug can get away his arguments is that once you accept that your world view has been shaped by cognitive bias and whig history, every cherished belief of yours is up for grabs. Those beliefs that contradict Moldbug are obviously the ones that are wrong!
Inman does not go as far. He does not lead you to a repugnant conclusion. He just stays in the comfortable confines of bland tribalism. He does not have cognitive biases, or he does not share them. Mr Inman only has pinky toe, and an understanding of cognitive neuroscience that makes the average person who reads his infographic slightly less well-informed about emotion and what an amygdala is.
Ｇｏｄ ｂｌｅｓｓ ｔｈｅ Ｕｎｉｔｅｄ Ｓｔａｔｅｓ ｏｆ Ｓｉｎｇａｐｏｒｅ．
Good post.