This is a good reminder to check our prior assumptions before believing everything claimed by someone who shares our political opinion. But there is a difference - some people claim that immigrants are eating their neighbors' cats and dogs. Some people claim that immigrants are mostly (or all) criminals. Some people say FEMA spent all its money on immigrants. Some people say that children go to school, have gender altering surgery there and return of the opposite gender. etc. That's a bit different from failing to point out that you need a battery if you want to use solar power at night.
People cherry-pick data that supports their views. One obvious example is GDP growth. GDP growing doesn't always mean that people are actually better off. It could just be a product of resource extraction or even population growth. But it's an easy number to campaign on because it's good when number go up. This is easy to check with GDP per capita. It's close to $90K in the US now. The median salary is somewhere around $60K for someone that works full-time.
The S&P 500 is another example. Sure, it's good in theory if the index goes up. But the lion's share of stock is owned by 10% of the population. The stock market going up doesn't always mean that the average person is better off.
I’ve struggled to square a lot of Matt’s recent writing about the information environment with his classical article on “the hack gap.” I think a lot of people think “narrative control” matters a lot for politics, and to some degree this involves misinformation. Would love to read an article where he squares this circle.
I know this isn't the point of this post, but it's incrediblely bizarre to talk about inflation without mentioning the role of monetary policy in driving that. Supply and demand shocks happen all the time, but a well managed monetary authority will even put those fluctuations in the real economy.
Like John Travolta said in Primary Colors - “I’m gonna do something crazy — I’m going to tell the truth. You’re probably thinking I must be desperate, well I am.” Maybe we should try it. We are desperate.
[pulls out trusty old IFeelLikeImTakingCrazyPills.gif]
Matt Y just praised me as a discerning, intelligent person, so I sincerely apologize for saying something painfully obvious/banal/dumb:
Matt Y gave us a whole essay on how misinformation is bad and doesn't work and it fools your own side more than your opponents' side and that's why you shouldn't do it...
And I'm sitting here thinking, absolutely right, that's why, after Trump and his surrogates spread obvious, blatant misinformation and lies during the 2024 campaign - everything from "I was unfairly robbed of my victory in 2020" to "tariffs will make us rich" to "Project 2025, what's that, never heard of it" to "illegal Haitian immigrants are eating people's pets in Ohio" - that's why everyone recoiled in horror from this barrage of bullshit and Trump lost in a landslide!
Oh, wait...
Again, I know I'm in Captain Obvious territory, but I'll say it again for those in the back: the two parties are highly mismatched in their susceptibility to bullshit. Not that Democrats are immune! Democrats have believed/continue to believe some crazy *cough*transwomeninsports*cough* stuff. But the scale of the problem is just not comparable on the two sides. Why, Matt Y himself wrote a piece last year on the "crank realignment," i.e., the conspiracy theorists aggregating predominantly on the GOP side. The fact remains, Trump and MAGA can get away with saying crazy and blatantly false shit in a way that Democrats just can't. What do we do about this asymmetry?
Solar power is a finance problem. We the people don’t have fat wallets to bankroll solar systems that will take a big chunk of our life expectancy to pay for themselves.
Instead of the homeowners taking out HELOCs to bankroll the arrays, the power utility should rent homeowners’ rooftops for space to put the panels. Pay the homeowner in reduced rate electricity.
Or, sell predefined shares in a solar farm with a predefined monthly credit, say a $500 investment equals $5 a month or something so the consumer knows when the break even date will be.
Utilties mostly don't want this. First, it's cheaper (for them) to build in random, remote, out-of-the-way places, at large scale. And in many cases, we guarantee them a return on this investment (e.g. investor-owned utilities in California), so it's good business for them. Second, the cost of electricity folds in a lot of unrelated costs which do not go away for the utilities, even if they get the production 'for free' with rooftop solar. Which means that the reduced rates that they do offer (see e.g. California NEM 3.0) are not very attractive.
If we were to adopt more reasonable regulatory and permitting processes, rooftop solar wouldn't cost 2-3x what it does in Australia, and many more people would be able to afford it and benefit from it. And with an EV in the driveway serving as a backup battery, grid defection would be a real possibility.
Matt is getting really radical now with takes like "say more true things." Not just kind of true but not really. Not true but selectively framed to be misleading. Actually maximally true. In order to make good decisions. It's crazy.
This highlights how broken our information economy is. We've already talked about how the news is now largely delivered for engagement rather than information value. Beyond that, I don't think the information economy works among politicians either. I have a stylized view that historically parties could hold each other accountable for saying true things. With polarization, that no longer seems to work (if it ever really did), and in fact BSing your base is probably a more effective political strategy, even if it's not an effective public policy strategy. Is there any way we can reestablish some competition for good information? I've seen people start to use AI as a quasi-neutral arbiter on topics, like people asking Grok about Musk's statements. Maybe AI-driven fact-checking will take off?
This is one of those things that seems like it should have been obvious, but for some reason only Yglesias seems to be able to put into words. Of course you can fool your own side easier than you can fool the other side. Of course, there are still undecided people who latch onto these narratives so it's not as if they don't work at all. From my perspective (being an ex-Republican), Democrats are much more truthful than the GOP (imagine them trying to blame airplane crashes on DOGE the way Trump blamed them on DEI), but this doesn't seem to help them significantly in the polls. Truthfulness is obviously a better governing strategy, but is it actually a better winning strategy? Maybe that's the wrong question, and larger cultural beliefs are more important than short term election wins which can evaporate from year to year.
Speaking of honest truth telling, this otherwise wonderful post contains its own misinfo RE controlled burns. You absolutely CAN safely perform controlled burns in urban areas, including areas with steep slopes. It happens biannually in the midwest, where prairie and oak savannah restoration has been ongoing for decades and requires regular burning to prevent forestification (not sure thats a word). I have personal experience working on burns on steep slopes adjacent to residential areas, including within feet of occupied housing. Lots of these burns aren't even performed by professionals, its literally just homeowners/retirees who went to an hour long training. Or, in my case, pyros who realize there is a sanctioned way to play with fire :). My work contracts for controlled burns in its restored prairie/stormwater infrastructure, and this is immediately outside of laboratory buildings with active lab work ongoing, as well as adjacent to dense urban neighborhoods. My high school did similar things in the early 2000s. I currently live in a high rise with a view that includes hilly suburban areas, and every fall/spring there are giant plumes of smoke from controlled burns, and regular announcements of "hey its not a wildfire, please don't call 911, its a controlled burn". Its not rocket surgery.
This piece seems particularly timely to me because just last night I blundered across some Twitter threads where a bunch of Qanon types were getting agitated over the Trump administration's continuing "failure" to release the alleged Epstein client list and other supposed evidence of the massive elite child sex ring.
The biggest driver of general craziness in the current era seems less misinformation per se, more boredom, Internet-driven anxiety and our general unseriousness as a people.
Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into an insanity machine (and a model for a political, Turkey-style government purge) because he was bored and driven insane by his Internet addiction and narcissism. Voters convinced themselves that Biden's America was the Worst Of All Possible Worlds because they marinated in those Internet vibes and negativity, and because they were bored.
If misinformation took hold in that environment, it's because it was a good environment to take hold in and because voters wanted to be taken hold of.
This is not to absolve the liars and propagandists pumping out garbage conspiracy-theory rationales for horrific policy as we speak. They suck. They will go to hell, if hell exists. But the fault is less in the stars than ourselves, etc\. And all that jazz.
The best, positive, example in my life of misinformation working was during AIDS in the 90s (yes I am old). There was a real concerted effort to mislead the public about the transmission rate for heterosexual sex relative to gay sex.
And the effort took place because America was deeply homophobic and wasn't going to spend enough money on research for a disease that would primarily infect MSM.
Due to ramped up spending we've turned HIV infection into a manageable disease rather than a death sentence. And the above explains why I think a lot of advocates are tempted to go with the "just lie" approach. It allows you to skip persuasion.
But the overall track of misinformation is exactly what Matt outlines:
1. you make your supporters less informed.
2. you cause unintended usually negative consequences.
3. you make decision making more confused since people misunderstand the basic facts.
4. you make it hard to reverse course if you were initially mistaken.
Most times you are better off trying to persuade people to you cause or offering trades. I'll give you X if you give me Y.
"The real problem, though, is that not only does your side already say more false and misleading things than you’d like to admit, but they are almost certainly saying more false and misleading things than you realize. That’s because your side is much better at misleading you than they are at misleading people outside of your ideological camp,"
100%. I'm sure Pelosi, Obama, Biden and other prominent Dems have deceived me because I'm inclined to agree. I'm also very vulnerable to deception from Matt on housing since I trust him on this issue a lot.
You haven’t established the lie. When, for example, was it established why the vast majority of HIV are via heterosexual sex (but no in first world countries?)
Because in a world where they thought it was because of untreated STDs and it was instead caused by a different strain of HIV that eventually burned through the first world hetro population you’d be screaming that they LIED! When they said it was untreated STDS, right?
Because I’m sure you’d agree that in a world where the vast majority of HIV is via hetro sex you’d have to be double super extra sure you understood the problem because you gave first world hetros the all clear to have unprotected sex, right?
This is a good reminder to check our prior assumptions before believing everything claimed by someone who shares our political opinion. But there is a difference - some people claim that immigrants are eating their neighbors' cats and dogs. Some people claim that immigrants are mostly (or all) criminals. Some people say FEMA spent all its money on immigrants. Some people say that children go to school, have gender altering surgery there and return of the opposite gender. etc. That's a bit different from failing to point out that you need a battery if you want to use solar power at night.
People cherry-pick data that supports their views. One obvious example is GDP growth. GDP growing doesn't always mean that people are actually better off. It could just be a product of resource extraction or even population growth. But it's an easy number to campaign on because it's good when number go up. This is easy to check with GDP per capita. It's close to $90K in the US now. The median salary is somewhere around $60K for someone that works full-time.
The S&P 500 is another example. Sure, it's good in theory if the index goes up. But the lion's share of stock is owned by 10% of the population. The stock market going up doesn't always mean that the average person is better off.
I’ve struggled to square a lot of Matt’s recent writing about the information environment with his classical article on “the hack gap.” I think a lot of people think “narrative control” matters a lot for politics, and to some degree this involves misinformation. Would love to read an article where he squares this circle.
I know this isn't the point of this post, but it's incrediblely bizarre to talk about inflation without mentioning the role of monetary policy in driving that. Supply and demand shocks happen all the time, but a well managed monetary authority will even put those fluctuations in the real economy.
Like John Travolta said in Primary Colors - “I’m gonna do something crazy — I’m going to tell the truth. You’re probably thinking I must be desperate, well I am.” Maybe we should try it. We are desperate.
I could see them going after USFWS because Don Jr wants to hunt rhinos and elephants and import the ivory
[pulls out trusty old IFeelLikeImTakingCrazyPills.gif]
Matt Y just praised me as a discerning, intelligent person, so I sincerely apologize for saying something painfully obvious/banal/dumb:
Matt Y gave us a whole essay on how misinformation is bad and doesn't work and it fools your own side more than your opponents' side and that's why you shouldn't do it...
And I'm sitting here thinking, absolutely right, that's why, after Trump and his surrogates spread obvious, blatant misinformation and lies during the 2024 campaign - everything from "I was unfairly robbed of my victory in 2020" to "tariffs will make us rich" to "Project 2025, what's that, never heard of it" to "illegal Haitian immigrants are eating people's pets in Ohio" - that's why everyone recoiled in horror from this barrage of bullshit and Trump lost in a landslide!
Oh, wait...
Again, I know I'm in Captain Obvious territory, but I'll say it again for those in the back: the two parties are highly mismatched in their susceptibility to bullshit. Not that Democrats are immune! Democrats have believed/continue to believe some crazy *cough*transwomeninsports*cough* stuff. But the scale of the problem is just not comparable on the two sides. Why, Matt Y himself wrote a piece last year on the "crank realignment," i.e., the conspiracy theorists aggregating predominantly on the GOP side. The fact remains, Trump and MAGA can get away with saying crazy and blatantly false shit in a way that Democrats just can't. What do we do about this asymmetry?
You forgot to add [rant over] at the end of your comment.
Solar power is a finance problem. We the people don’t have fat wallets to bankroll solar systems that will take a big chunk of our life expectancy to pay for themselves.
Instead of the homeowners taking out HELOCs to bankroll the arrays, the power utility should rent homeowners’ rooftops for space to put the panels. Pay the homeowner in reduced rate electricity.
Or, sell predefined shares in a solar farm with a predefined monthly credit, say a $500 investment equals $5 a month or something so the consumer knows when the break even date will be.
Utilties mostly don't want this. First, it's cheaper (for them) to build in random, remote, out-of-the-way places, at large scale. And in many cases, we guarantee them a return on this investment (e.g. investor-owned utilities in California), so it's good business for them. Second, the cost of electricity folds in a lot of unrelated costs which do not go away for the utilities, even if they get the production 'for free' with rooftop solar. Which means that the reduced rates that they do offer (see e.g. California NEM 3.0) are not very attractive.
If we were to adopt more reasonable regulatory and permitting processes, rooftop solar wouldn't cost 2-3x what it does in Australia, and many more people would be able to afford it and benefit from it. And with an EV in the driveway serving as a backup battery, grid defection would be a real possibility.
Matt is getting really radical now with takes like "say more true things." Not just kind of true but not really. Not true but selectively framed to be misleading. Actually maximally true. In order to make good decisions. It's crazy.
This highlights how broken our information economy is. We've already talked about how the news is now largely delivered for engagement rather than information value. Beyond that, I don't think the information economy works among politicians either. I have a stylized view that historically parties could hold each other accountable for saying true things. With polarization, that no longer seems to work (if it ever really did), and in fact BSing your base is probably a more effective political strategy, even if it's not an effective public policy strategy. Is there any way we can reestablish some competition for good information? I've seen people start to use AI as a quasi-neutral arbiter on topics, like people asking Grok about Musk's statements. Maybe AI-driven fact-checking will take off?
This is one of those things that seems like it should have been obvious, but for some reason only Yglesias seems to be able to put into words. Of course you can fool your own side easier than you can fool the other side. Of course, there are still undecided people who latch onto these narratives so it's not as if they don't work at all. From my perspective (being an ex-Republican), Democrats are much more truthful than the GOP (imagine them trying to blame airplane crashes on DOGE the way Trump blamed them on DEI), but this doesn't seem to help them significantly in the polls. Truthfulness is obviously a better governing strategy, but is it actually a better winning strategy? Maybe that's the wrong question, and larger cultural beliefs are more important than short term election wins which can evaporate from year to year.
Speaking of honest truth telling, this otherwise wonderful post contains its own misinfo RE controlled burns. You absolutely CAN safely perform controlled burns in urban areas, including areas with steep slopes. It happens biannually in the midwest, where prairie and oak savannah restoration has been ongoing for decades and requires regular burning to prevent forestification (not sure thats a word). I have personal experience working on burns on steep slopes adjacent to residential areas, including within feet of occupied housing. Lots of these burns aren't even performed by professionals, its literally just homeowners/retirees who went to an hour long training. Or, in my case, pyros who realize there is a sanctioned way to play with fire :). My work contracts for controlled burns in its restored prairie/stormwater infrastructure, and this is immediately outside of laboratory buildings with active lab work ongoing, as well as adjacent to dense urban neighborhoods. My high school did similar things in the early 2000s. I currently live in a high rise with a view that includes hilly suburban areas, and every fall/spring there are giant plumes of smoke from controlled burns, and regular announcements of "hey its not a wildfire, please don't call 911, its a controlled burn". Its not rocket surgery.
Here’s to the pyros who harness their powers for good!
This piece seems particularly timely to me because just last night I blundered across some Twitter threads where a bunch of Qanon types were getting agitated over the Trump administration's continuing "failure" to release the alleged Epstein client list and other supposed evidence of the massive elite child sex ring.
You mean this guy?
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQOwPncwYxJG1NX--hHJwbsjUnnM7uHwb3_7tihAGs1Yw&s=10
dId YoU KnoW THAt BILL CliNTON ROdE oN EpsteIN'S PlaNe???!!!1!oNE
The biggest driver of general craziness in the current era seems less misinformation per se, more boredom, Internet-driven anxiety and our general unseriousness as a people.
Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into an insanity machine (and a model for a political, Turkey-style government purge) because he was bored and driven insane by his Internet addiction and narcissism. Voters convinced themselves that Biden's America was the Worst Of All Possible Worlds because they marinated in those Internet vibes and negativity, and because they were bored.
If misinformation took hold in that environment, it's because it was a good environment to take hold in and because voters wanted to be taken hold of.
This is not to absolve the liars and propagandists pumping out garbage conspiracy-theory rationales for horrific policy as we speak. They suck. They will go to hell, if hell exists. But the fault is less in the stars than ourselves, etc\. And all that jazz.
Boredom vs when there were 3 TV channels?
I think internet driven anxiety, including status anxiety, is doing a lot of the work.
Yup. Boredom.
With all our enhancement in standard of living. With all our cable channels. With the entire Internet.
Boredom. Not even kidding.
Plus that stuff you mentioned.
The best, positive, example in my life of misinformation working was during AIDS in the 90s (yes I am old). There was a real concerted effort to mislead the public about the transmission rate for heterosexual sex relative to gay sex.
And the effort took place because America was deeply homophobic and wasn't going to spend enough money on research for a disease that would primarily infect MSM.
Due to ramped up spending we've turned HIV infection into a manageable disease rather than a death sentence. And the above explains why I think a lot of advocates are tempted to go with the "just lie" approach. It allows you to skip persuasion.
But the overall track of misinformation is exactly what Matt outlines:
1. you make your supporters less informed.
2. you cause unintended usually negative consequences.
3. you make decision making more confused since people misunderstand the basic facts.
4. you make it hard to reverse course if you were initially mistaken.
Most times you are better off trying to persuade people to you cause or offering trades. I'll give you X if you give me Y.
"The real problem, though, is that not only does your side already say more false and misleading things than you’d like to admit, but they are almost certainly saying more false and misleading things than you realize. That’s because your side is much better at misleading you than they are at misleading people outside of your ideological camp,"
100%. I'm sure Pelosi, Obama, Biden and other prominent Dems have deceived me because I'm inclined to agree. I'm also very vulnerable to deception from Matt on housing since I trust him on this issue a lot.
I see you point but it’s also true that the vast majority of the HIV cases in the world were the result of heterosexual sex.
That's totally correct and important to point out.
But the odds of a developed world, heterosexual outbreak were overstated. And to be clear this is a case where I understand why the lie was made.
People, mainly at the peak of life, were dying in droves.
You haven’t established the lie. When, for example, was it established why the vast majority of HIV are via heterosexual sex (but no in first world countries?)
Because in a world where they thought it was because of untreated STDs and it was instead caused by a different strain of HIV that eventually burned through the first world hetro population you’d be screaming that they LIED! When they said it was untreated STDS, right?
Because I’m sure you’d agree that in a world where the vast majority of HIV is via hetro sex you’d have to be double super extra sure you understood the problem because you gave first world hetros the all clear to have unprotected sex, right?
I said a while back that - partisanship makes you dumber. I think that is basically what Matt is saying here.
Thanks for this post -- it's such an astute point.