How not to be like Donald Trump

 One of the themes from this week's hearings was the attempt to show that Donald Trump "knew" that he lost the 2020 election.  Yet as I often remark, it is not accurate to say that Trump "knows" anything, because the word, "know," denotes acceptance of facts, by the old, Philip K. Dick definition of reality:  that which is still true, even when you stop believing in it.  Trump is not a philosophical postmodernist, in the sense of having read Michel Foucault or any other supposedly-deep thinker who isn't really as deep as he seems to a 19-year-old punk.  He's just stupid, crazy, and above all, narcissistic in the colloquial as well as technical, DSM-sense.  Donald Trump does not hold "knowledge" in his Trump-brain.  He will assert any claim in service of his short-term goals, and accept any claim in service of his short-term goals, and he is indifferent to contradiction, prioritizing only a limited set of goals:  self-aggrandizement, and revenge most importantly.  Hence, it is not possible for Trump to "know" that he lost the 2020 election, not only because his brain does not contain "knowledge," but because he processes information purely through the lenses of self-aggrandizement and revenge, so any piece of information that does not serve either self-aggrandizement or revenge cannot be retained.  He reverts, instead, to axiomatic principles which guide his self-aggrandizement and revenge-seeking processes.

To Donald Trump, "did I win the 2020 election?" was never an empirical question.  "I won the 2020 election" was, instead, an axiomatic assumption.  Why?  Because were it to be untrue, it would feel bad to him.  Hence, he could not accept the untruth of the claim.  What was so fascinating about so much of the testimony was that behind closed doors, he could raise a claim or a question about "fraud," those around him could tell him that the claim was false, and he would accept it!

But then he would move on to the next "fraud" story, never allowing a challenge to the greater "fraud" narrative.

What was happening?  "I won" was an axiomatic assumption, rather than an empirically falsifiable proposition.  Any individual claim of fraud might be subject to empirical analysis... behind closed doors, although he was perfectly willing to lie publicly, because he's Donald Trump, and when you don't think in terms of facts, you don't care about lying.  Yet to Trump, the greater narrative of "I won" was not subject to empirical analysis.  Again:  axiom.

Hence, the interaction with Trump over the "fraud" conspiracy theories turned into "whack-a-mole," and once you are playing whack-a-mole, you are lost.  You aren't playing the same game as the family of subterranean rodents.  If you let yourself get sucked into that game, you fucked up.

Trump was never going to let himself believe that he lost.  He couldn't.  He didn't need "time to process" his loss.  Remember that line?  His brain literally cannot process factual information.

You have similar tendencies.

I'm going to start with an observation.  Trump actually had people around him, at that point, who were contradicting him.  Now, his brain is defective, so he cannot process information that doesn't serve either self-aggrandizement or revenge-related purposes, but people around him contradicted him.

How many people, as we move up the ladder of political engagement, put themselves into informational bubbles such that they only encounter confirming information?  Sometimes to the point of receiving misinformation/disinformation?  Trump's incapability of processing information meant that even when he received disconfirmation, it couldn't affect him (John Zaller's resistance axiom in action), but those who actively seek to cut off the flow of information that might conflict with what they believe... 

... remember how Trump kicked people out of his inner circle for not going along with his shit?

So let's dig in a little further.

This post is all about how one deals with cognitive dissonance.  As a general rule, Donald Trump is the worst human being in the history of the species.  He is a model of everything you should not do.  If you see him do something, don't do that.  That doesn't mean you should stop breathing oxygen because that makes you like Trump, but when you see Trump doing things, take that as a warning, because damn, he's really, really bad in every single way.

Here is your first axiom.  Axiom The First.  You are wrong.

You must take it as axiomatically true that you are wrong about a lot of shit.  You cannot take it as axiomatically true that you are wrong about X when discussing X, because that sends you into a logic loop.  However, you should take it as axiomatically true that the set of things about which you are wrong is not only non-empty, but big.  And you don't know what elements go in that set, and obviously, you cannot know what elements go in that set at any given point in time.  If you did know, you'd believe differently, and those elements wouldn't be in that set anymore.

But you're wrong about a lot of shit.

The scientific method is built on Axiom The First.  Default to the null hypothesis, which is that the world is random.  Your working hypothesis (the "alternative hypothesis"), which you derive from existing theory (in the technical definition of the word, "theory"), is wrong.  We default to the null hypothesis in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary because science is based on Axiom The First.

You experience cognitive dissonance when you encounter information that conflicts with what you already believe, though.  Hence, you have psychological incentives to work the other way.  Assume you're right, and try to discount disconfirming evidence.  Trump is the extreme.  He cannot allow himself to believe that he is ever wrong, much less that he lost.  Why were his people unable to convince him that the fraud stories were bullshit?  His axioms are his greatness and infallibility.

Trump looks like a joke to anyone even marginally sane, because he is a joke, but if we're being honest, those behavior patterns are really just taking the normal range of cognitive psychology to a bit of an extreme.  His narcissism is extreme, his propensity to lie is extreme, but his propensity to treat a falsifiable proposition as an axiom because to do otherwise would bruise his ego?  That's... normal.  Ish.  Normal-ish.  He just cranks it up to 11.

How do you not be like Trump?  Axiom The First.  Understand that you are wrong.  Begin with the assumption that you are wrong!

There are times when this is hard.

Those are the times when it is most important to begin with the assumption that you are wrong.  Those are the times when it is most important to remind yourself of Axiom The First.  Any claim that gives you ideological, partisan, psychological or personal comfort should be treated, not with acceptance nor joy, nor happiness, but with the harshest interrogation that your inner Stasi-brain can muster.  Take that claim, lock it in windowless cell, subject it to sleep deprivation and waterboarding, and stress positions, stick the electrodes anywhere the sickest part of your scientist brain tells you, and then see what that comforting claim says.

The way science works is that you don't let yourself believe a claim until you have tried, in good faith, to convince yourself otherwise, and failed.  It's like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and flying.  It is the art of throwing yourself at the ground, and missing.  So you take that comforting claim, lock it in a cell, fuck with it, and by the time you let it out of its cell, having held to its convictions, it'll be so traumatized that it won't give you much comfort anymore.  It'll just cower in a corner.  Your comfort should come from your adherence to the scientific method, not the protective methods you use to shield your beliefs from scrutiny.

Here, then, is a question.  What are the beliefs-- factual, normative, whatever-- which give you some form of comfort?  Trump, of course, takes comfort in any belief in his own greatness.  He doesn't care about much beyond that, except revenge, but that's just the flip-side of his narcissism.  Because he takes such comfort in self-aggrandizement, he cannot allow himself to subject a self-aggrandizing claim to any scrutiny, and instead, uncritically rejects any greater narrative that challenges his supposed greatness, even if he might, behind closed doors, accept the falsehood of a minor element of one of his favorite conspiracy theories.

If your goal is to not be like Trump, then, you must ask:  what gives you comfort?  Now, remember Axiom The First.  The normal, human tendency is to seek confirming evidence, and either avoid or reject disconfirming evidence, with Trump just being the reductio ad absurdum of the tendency.

Y'all know the phrase, "confirmation bias."  Students volunteer the phrase in class.

Do the opposite.  Take that belief, which gives you comfort, and get medieval on its ass.  Go to work on it with some pliers and a blow torch.

At the very least, it is important to ask, what are my criteria for evaluation?  There is an interesting version of this going around right now thanks to Peter Boghossian, formerly of Portland State, having been driven out by the wokestirs for the sin of exposing the intellectual vacuousness of Woke Studies.  He was one of the original co-authors of the "Grievance Studies" hoax, and I have written about it periodically, including the messy circumstances of his own resignation, but he is doing some interesting things right now.  He is stepping onto college campuses and playing a little game.  He sets up a line, and asks students to array themselves, physically, on a line from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" on some social justice-style question.  He then asks them why they place themselves where they do, and what it would take to get them to move.  He will phrase it as, "what if I could show you a study __," or something like that.  There are a few of them on youtube, and in many ways, they are predictable, both in what the students say, and in the general level of conflict surrounding the events, but my point here is that there is an underlying issue.  Many times, the students on the left say that there is nothing that could ever change their minds.

In math, there are the axioms, which we must take to be true because we need propositions on which to build something.  From those axioms, we ask:  what can we derive?  At that point, it is all about the process of the proof.

My point here is that the more axioms you have, and the more restrictive your axioms are, the more fucked up your process is.  Science works, broadly speaking, because Axiom The First is an axiom of skepticism and self-doubt.  It sets a high bar for acceptance of a claim.  Once you accept a claim, though, you aren't done.  Any acceptance of a claim is provisional, and subject to the possibility that one may encounter more data, different data, different analysis.  Axiom The First.

From Axiom The First, one asks, what are the criteria by which I would change my mind?  Those criteria may be unlikely, and I may stop looking, putting the issue out of mind because really, there is little utility at this point to poking at evolution as a broad model, even though there is utility to refining the model.  Could the whole model be wrong?  In principle, yeah, Axiom The First, but it's about the most successful scientific model we've ever seen.  The more empirical success a model has, the less useful it is to spend time or effort pushing back on it.  Prior to that point, the more important it is to push back, in scholarly terms, because that's how science works.

Truly, though, axioms are for math.  The more statements you treat as axiomatic, the more blinkered your analysis becomes.  If nothing (or at least, almost nothing) is axiomatic, then what gives you comfort?  Challenge it, and try to reject it.  Only accept it upon your failure.

Belief is failure.

And it can only ever be conditional.

That requires advanced statement of the conditions, so that you can update your... beliefs.  By which I mean your failures.  If you don't have conditions, they aren't beliefs.  They're axioms.

And axioms have no place here.  See Axiom The First.  Which is an axiom.  Which has a place here.  Um...

Anyway, if you cannot state rejection conditions, then you have axioms set in advance because they give you comfort, not because they are demonstrably true, because you have abstracted away from the process of demonstration.

No axioms, beyond what is minimally necessary.  In math, we construct a system with as few axioms as necessary, and if you are building your belief systems around axioms while claiming otherwise...

... that's what Trump does.

Donald Trump will almost certainly run for president again in 2024.  With a turbulent economy, he may very well win.  And even if he doesn't, the House and Senate will go Republican this year, and they will declare him the winner no matter what happens.  Donald Trump will be president again, and there is precisely zero chance that Merrick Garland indicts him.  Zero.  Not epsilon, zero.  Merrick Garland is Donald Trump's defense attorney, working pro bono.  Besides which, there's no point indicting when there is zero chance of conviction.  What, you're going to reject every single juror who is Republican?

Come January, 2025, Trump will be back in the White House, and there is nothing you can do to stop it.  There are 330,000,000 in the US, and 8 billion people on the planet.  You don't matter, and neither do I.  What you can control is whether or not you fall prey to the same cognitive deficiencies as a thing like Donald Trump.

Hold no more axioms than you must, with "comfort" not being a necessity.

I forgot jazz again yesterday.  I would have gone with Jordan Tice's "The Assumptionists" for this morning (bluegrass/newgrass), but instead, let's have Lafayette Gilchrist, "Assume The Position."  There's a cool studio version on The Music According to Lafayette Gilchrist.