Team Accurate vs. Team Strong Identity

Annoyed much by public figures that thrive despite making inaccurate and outright false claims? Unfortunately, accuracy-respecting leadership contenders will always fight an uphill battle, and thus need additional support from accuracy-striving humans and organizations. Are the actions proposed in this article enough? What else can we do?

Let’s list two “teams”:

• Team Accurate - Does not make strong claims nor take drastic action unless motivated by a balanced consideration of available evidence.

• Team Strong Identity - Makes strong claims and takes drastic action as long as it resonates with the dreams and hopes of a specific group of people.

Before advancing, consider this: Which team is more likely to win elections?

As to give you a chance to reflect on the answer without revealing the rest of the article, here is a very tall picture of a kitten, requiring you to scroll down.

• If you answered Team Accurate or neither, please let me/us know in the comments why you think that is.
• If you answered Team Strong Identity, I believe you are correct.
• If you answered both, you and I share the same dream, but I don’t think we are there yet.
• If you answered something along the lines of the question is misleading since the given answer options are not mutually exclusive, nor have we researched these particularly defined “teams” regarding their abilities to gain advantages in democratic elections thus any answer to this question would be purely speculative, then your answer is definitely more accurate(ish), but lacks in chutzpah (extreme self-confidence or audacity).

Most people are interested in a strong identity, not accuracy

An important and universal human trait is the need for epistemic closure, eg the desire for predictability, decisiveness, preference for order and structure, and discomfort with ambiguity.

Ambiguity and accuracy will always be comrades, since inherent in the concept of accuracy is acknowledging that the world is not black-and-white and true knowledge is hard to obtain. To be more accurate than not, one must consider different perspectives simultaneously and ideally base any prioritization of one perspective over the other on available evidence.

On the other hand, a strong identity provides an ideal shortcut to epistemic closure due to an evolutionary history where survival has been closely tied to social identity. It is easier to say “I am with and think like these people” rather than form a nuanced opinion of many individual subject matters. It is indeed a very wise and pragmatic solution for the individual.

“Most people” decide the outcome of elections

When it comes to electing leadership of the tribe, especially when the stakes are high, it will naturally feel better for most people to put forward their support for a leader that expresses confidence and promises action towards outcomes that favor their perceived “group” and its associated identity. Since “most people” decide the outcome of democratic elections, any such strategy will be more likely to win in an election.

Exacerbating this, the current entertainment industry (including influential outlets calling themselves “news”) is efficiently producing emotionally striking stories/headlines (that are at best inspired by reality) that drive thinking towards the most convenient opinions. It should not be a surprise that the candidate that can bring forward the strongest identity that resonates with the largest group of people are most likely to win.

“Team Accuracy” takes little to no concrete action. Annoyment does not compare with the anger that can be fueled by non-accurate but emotional doctrine. Anger makes people click, make people share, makes people proselytize. “Lies can travel around the world multiple times while truth is putting on its shoes”, someone once said (or a variant of that).

An uphill battle

All in all, this allows certain public figures to make inaccurate and outright false claims with positive consequences:

• Attractiveness - Instill a sense of certainty and security across a large part of the population
• Reach - Cheap professional and social media reach via high engagement levels and organic sharing of identity-favorable messages
• Productivity - Without having to research the contents of shared messages, it is possible to produce a large quantity of powerful messages in a short amount of time

Meanwhile, an accuracy-respecting leaders has to put up with the following:

• Take away people’s dreams of an ideal lifestyle - Many accurate conclusions are not inline with the dream lifestyles of large populations (eg having to change habits, or work harder, or else expect some bad consequences)
• Difficulty to cut though the media noise - Accurate “news” are seldom neither dramatic nor easy to summarize in bite-sized nuggets.
• Hard work - It takes a lot of prep to create, research and distill accurate messages.

It may be that my argumentation at this point is kicking in an open door by restating that people will vote for their favorite candidate regardless of that candidate telling the truth or not, but the clarification I want to make is that accuracy-respecting leaders will always fight an uphill battle. Naturally then, they need additional support from accuracy-striving humans and organizations - and they need the right kind of support.

Put down the accuracy hammer for a change

Team Accuracy has a large amount of extremely skilled and accuracy-striving scientists, artists and engineers. This can possibly make all the difference if the right type of actions are taken. Unfortunately, one of the most common type of action that is taken today is to in a balanced way attempt to persuade the “other” using “scientific reasoning”. Other variants of this is “giving them the true facts”. To do this properly, it is believed to require explaining various perspectives and allow the “other” to consider available evidence in a balanced manner.

This is just not going to help, simply because facts/accuracy is not even part of the equation.

If Martin Luther King had based his campaign on expressing a balanced consideration of scientific evidence, nothing would have happened. Imagine switching “I have a dream” with “I have here a review of all available research to date regarding treatment of people with different skin tones. Preliminary evidence suggests that adjusting certain social circumstances would achieve a more equal society. I suggest that we take this evidence into consideration moving forward.” Accuracy don’t make no change by itself.

For all means, keep striving for accuracy, and do it relentlessly, but don’t attempt to sway public opinion by preaching the scientific method.

Rather, we need to band together and all work on making it easier for accuracy-striving leaders to do their job more efficiently.

Shifting the odds in favor of Team Accuracy

Here are a list of concrete actions we can partake in:

• Unfck the internet - ??
• Make accuracy fun - Gapminder tests?

What do you think? Tell me/us!

Are the actions proposed in this article enough? What else can we do? Comment below! (Given that I have literally no organic readers of this blog, I won’t be expecting comments, but I’ll follow up on every single one that happen to come this way!)