Cognitive Dissonance With Election Outcome and the Breakdown of Rationalist Frameworks
by Tiger Gao
Tiger Gao
Princeton ‘21
Let me use this as an opportunity for my own reflection, and I hope it could spark some interesting discussions. I imagine many of you may push back fiercely, so as usual please don’t hold back.
Things we got right:
David Pakman and I said a few weeks ago that Biden’s chance is no more than 50-50, and that appears to be the case today.
WTF is going on with the polls? This past weekend we said Nate Silver is no better than Crackhead Jim; we iterated that view again at 8pm on election night; by midnight everyone had this thought in their mind. “We ran 40,000 simulations of the election forecast and Nate Silver was wrong in 90% of them.
More importantly, what we got wrong: we started our livestream with some electoral maps predictions – all with varying degrees of blue sweep scenarios and one even put Biden at 375. In hindsight, it was really biased on our part to not go over a Trump-win scenario. I did criticize the polls, but at the last minute I drank the Kool-Aid and didn’t want to embarrass myself by deviating that much from Nate Silver… This is my own cognitive dissonance, and I feel bad about this.
I sent an email to the team on 8/13 warning why I thought Trump may win and why we will likely go into a contested election. I listed reasons from hidden conservative votes to people not genuinely thinking that Trump did a bad job on Covid. Many of you thought I was out of my mind and pushed back hard citing reasons of wide support for Biden.
Yesterday, the American people had spoken, and they resoundingly rejected the hypothesis that “Americans are overwhelmingly disappointed at Trump.” If you consider Biden’s nail-biting (still not certain) victory as America’s condemnation of Trump's 4-year performance, then you may be in an even greater cognitive dissonance than I was.
Some of you spoke with me in the past 24 hours and were extremely confused – that you simply cannot understand how half of America “could be this dumb, racist, xenophobic, hopeless, etc. etc.” I’m here to offer some thoughts.
Rationalist frameworks had been breaking down, for a while…
I don’t think the inability to understand Trump voters has ever been treated seriously by the hyper-rational, college-educated, sensible people at large (though probably more so on the Left). We think we understand, and we can list a litany of reasons why these people on the opposite side of us are wrong and why we’re right, but I don’t think we do understand.
First, we have to get out of simple correlations and mainstream narratives – this is the whole point of long-form podcasting and what we’re doing here!
Let me give you a very simple example: just because Trump used the phrases “kung-flu” or “China virus,” many of you may think that it would be utterly irrational and even morally condemnable for a Chinese person to support Trump now. No. He had lost little support amongst Chinese Americans. Why? Because they support his trade war against China and believe that he, Pompeo, and the Republican Party China Hawks have finally stood up to the Chinese Communist Party. They treat his “China virus” narrative as attacks against the Communist Party’s mishandling, not Chinese people themselves.
Sure, one may believe that his actions embolden racists and “racists vote for Trump," but one should probably not extrapolate that logic to “all non-racists will note vote for Trump.” Here, “A implies B” does not mean “not B implies not A.” The rationalist framework breaks down, especially for someone like Trump.
Our education has made me out of touch
The longer I stay in the Princeton bubble and Ivory Tower at large, the more doubts I have on my wonderful education – because what I’ve learned is to become more rational in my thinking, to be considerate to a wider range of ideas, to advocate for progressive causes… These are great qualities we should all strive for, but they make me too far away from how many others in this world think.
In reality, people are one-issue voters so they don’t consider a broad range of tradeoffs like you do; they don’t believe in science about climate change because they’re not exposed to high-quality facts in ways that they don’t feel threatened by; they’re more tolerant to moral flaws that are despised on at higher-education circles; they don’t come to a “synthesis” like we do after hours of debate at Eating Club dinners… This is not even to mention how all kinds of irrational psychology is behind one’s decision-making like voting.
Sure, I’ve interviewed more than 100 renowned policymakers and am quite good at it, but I wouldn’t survive a f*cking day in politics in China – I may last a bit longer in America, but I doubt much longer… Economists from Harvard & MIT can build out all the models they want, but their applications in underdeveloped countries have often led to greater socio-political instability – except the very few good applied microeconomics examples like reducing poverty in India… Likewise, when you put a bunch of Ivy League graduates in the State Department who have never lived in the Middle East or China for a day, they lead to disastrous policies (those who lived there for 2 years and think they understand the region are even more dangerous)…
We’ve experienced our whole lives so far that we can learn and achieve anything, but I think we ought to acknowledge our limitations and seriously work on them…
How to work on the limitation? Idk, perhaps update the beliefs more strongly?
One thing I respect the most about Nate Silver is that his Bayesian model constantly updated his beliefs about the elections. (Well, 2020 shows that he probably didn’t update his beliefs that much from 2016 after all). As college students, I think we’re somewhat fundamentally incapable at updating our beliefs because we’ve received the best education in the world and are surrounded by the most brilliant scholars all the time (who happen to all share mostly the same beliefs like us).
We can always find facts to support our beliefs – and not just random facts that an average American would find on Facebook – but quite superior facts. Whether it’s from academic journals or credible news outlets, we really think we got the knowledge down and are close to the truth. But what if we aren’t?
Kenneth and Rogoff's seminal paper that led to East European countries enacting austerity policy after 2008 turned out to have reached the wrong conclusion in the paper due to an Excel error. If the world's most highly regarded economists can be wrong and subsequently ruin livelihoods, I don't know why most of us – who barely learned how to run linear regressions with controls – can be certain about our beliefs on the effects of Trump's tax cut or so on. I'm not saying you shouldn't develop a view; I'm just saying that a view merely based on an Instagram post and a few news articles is likely far from the truth. The stronger our belief based on these sources, the greater our cognitive dissonance will be...
I don’t mean to encourage you to question the science behind climate change, and I am not saying we should be nihilists and relativists – but for non-hard-science issues like a policy intervention’s effect or prediction on American voters’ preferences, why should any of us be confident that we’re ever right, at least at this stage?
While you’re confused why half of America still voted for Trump, I’m confused why I’m not fundamentally changing my lack of consumption of conservative ideas (not talking points, serious works by public intellectuals on the Right) and why I should still listen to Ezra Klein’s podcast every day…
Someone texted me yesterday saying she’s confused whether I’m actually conservative cuz’ I seem to hate liberals, to which I responded “I don’t hate liberals, but I think liberals hate me, even though I’m liberal…” There’s a reason why I often “play devil’s advocate” and are disliked by many for that – because I think it’s crucial to expose ourselves to new data and narratives, update our beliefs, and update them especially strongly when something unexpected happens.
I’ve always forced myself to be exposed to unconventional and counter-mainstream narratives. This election outcome reaffirmed my suspicion on many issues but also exposed many of my own cognitive dissonances. From now on, I think it would be irresponsible for me, as the leader of this podcast, to not expose you and our listeners to ideas much, much different than we had previously even conceived. I hope you may join me in this journey forward.