Conflict Theory of Bounded Distrust

I have several "local" nitpicks and a "global" objection to the overall narrative that I think is being proposed here. Local issues first.

Alexander concludes with a characteristically mistake-theoretic plea for mutual understanding

He does. But one thing you don't mention which I think makes your presentation of SA's argument misleading is this: between the things you've previously described (about Fox News, liberal academics, and the Bush/Quayle "revenue enhancements", all things going on in the contemporary-ish USA) and the bit you go on to quote (referring to "a hostile environment that lies to them all the time) SA's piece has moved on somewhat, and (1) the "hostile environment" bit is not talking about the contemporary US but about (a somewhat hypothetical version of) the Stalin-era USSR and (2) the business about interactions between "savvy" and "clueless" people is addressing a fundamentally different question from most of the article.

So (1) to whatever extent you're taking SA's article to say that the contemporary USA (or other similar places) is "a hostile environment that lies to us all the time", I think that is an error (maybe SA would in fact agree with you about that, maybe not, but at any rate it isn't what he says).

And (2) he isn't saying we should necessarily regard the presenters on Fox News, or those liberal academics, or the writers in the Washington Post, or the government of the Stalinist USSR, as being honestly mistaken. That isn't what the conflict/mistake dichotomy is about. When he talks about our attitudes to those people, he does so in terms of "they aren't honest, but are they likely to be lying to me about this, in this particular way, in this particular context?". The mistake-theory-ish bit you quote comes in only at the end and is about an entirely different question: how should we interact with people whose assessment of the honesty of what those would-be authorities are saying is different from ours?

We need a conflict theory to understand this type of situation [sc. cop-bribery].

"Conflict theory" and "mistake theory" don't mean thinking that everyone all the time is or isn't working towards the same goal. Obviously different people have different goals, sometimes opposing ones. The terms only make sense in the context of some sort of discussion (e.g., a political one) where the differences between you and your interlocutor may or may not be conflict-y or mistake-y. The bribing-a-cop scenario is not of this type, and "we need a conflict theory to understand this type of situation" seems to me like a category mistake.

(Remark: I think conflict/mistake oversimplifies in important ways. 1. We can have the same ultimate goals but still relate in conflict-y ways, if our differing opinions give us opposing instrumental goals and prospects for reaching agreement on those opinions are poor. 2. There are ways to have different goals that aren't of the form "I want my group to be on top, you want your group to be on top" and while these may still lead to conflict I think it's a fundamentally less-hostile sort of conflict.)

When a government denies tax increases but announces "revenue enhancements" [...] regime supporters and dissidents are trying to do different things. Dissidents want to create common knowledge of the regime's shortcomings [...]

There are definitely situations where "dissidents are trying to create common knowledge of the regime's shortcomings" so that when the right time comes everyone can have enough confidence to revolt. But SA's example of "revenue enhancements" is unambiguously not one of those situations. One didn't need any particular degree of common knowledge to not vote for George Bush. No one was proposing an armed revolt or anything similarly risky. Saying "aha, Bush did levy new taxes despite saying he wouldn't" did not put one in danger of being "crushed as an individual".

(This is a place where I think you are taking advantage of your earlier conflation of contemporary-US and Stalinist-USSR situations in SA's article.)

Further, while the "revenue enhancements" thing is obviously slimy, it's not remotely in the same category as e.g. the things in the "Kolmogorov complicity" article you link to. Saying that thunder is heard before the corresponding lightning is seen (SA's example in that article) is flatly incompatible with reality; you can't actually believe it along with the truth about how physics and thunderstorms work, but you can call a tax a "revenue enhancement" without any actual false beliefs about reality. (You probably can't think that's optimal terminology for good thinking without false beliefs, but most people most of the time are not choosing their terminology solely to optimize good thinking, and it's not at all clear that they should.)

As for the overall narrative:

The impression I get from your article is something along the following lines: "SA is a mistake-theorist; he wants us to think of other people as basically on the same side as us, and reason politely with them. His article about bounded distrust applies this thinking to governments, major media sources, etc. But this is all wrong and possibly outright sinister: governments, major media sources, etc., are actively trying to mislead us for their own ends, and the people who want to think in mistake-theory terms in such a situation are the lackeys of Power, the government mouthpieces and suchlike, as opposed to the brave dissidents who see the conflict for what it is." With a somewhat-plausibly-deniable side order of "Boooo to SA, who has shown himself to be on the side of Power, which is much like the government of the Stalinist USSR".

And I think most of this narrative is wrong. SA is indeed a mistake-theorist, but he conspicuously doesn't take that to mean that the mouthpieces of state/cultural/... power should be assumed to be arguing in good faith. His article about bounded distrust, in particular, doesn't suggest doing that. I see no reason to think that his general preference for mistake theory indicates that he is on the side of Power (whatever specific sort of Power that might be). I do not think any sort of Power he is plausibly on the side of has much in common with the Stalinist USSR.

Why is there even the social norm that some form of misleading is okay as long as the sufficiently smart people can figure it out?

Once you start paying attention to this, you can see it in many places. For example, advertising. There is a rule that you cannot say "X is better than Y" (where Y is your competitor), but it is okay to say "X is best". But how could that make sense? If X is the best, then logically it must be better than Y.

I guess the official version is that "everyone knows" that calling something best in advertising is an exaggeration.

I say, fuck that. "Everyone knows it is an exaggeration" means that it is a lie. Lying about the product you are selling is fraud. Fraud should get you in prison. But... only a stupid people would believe that literally, right? Yes, but stupid people exist, you told them something, some of them believed it, and they bought your product. How specifically is this not a fraud?

(No, I am not blaming you for the "stupid people exist" part. I am blaming you specifically for the "you told a lie" part. If you tell the truth, and the stupid people misunderstand you, you can defend yourself by showing that they misunderstood. But if you tell a lie, the stupid people understand you correctly... technically... they just do not understand that you are socially allowed to lie to sufficiently stupid people. Why is that so?)

From the conflict theory perspective, it is all obvious. We are scamming the stupid because we can, LOL! What are they going to do about it? Anyone who fully understands the problem and is capable of doing something about it, is by definition already on the winning side!

(But of source, "stupidity" is relative, and no matter what your IQ is, in certain contexts the stupid one is you.)

In another comment I've raised various objections to what seems to me to be Zack's overall line of argument here, but I want separately to address the claim at the very end:

Thus, supporters of the regime naturally think dissidents are making a mistake; dissidents naturally think regime supporters are the enemy in their conflict.

That sounds clever and insightful, but is it actually right? I don't think so. I mean, the second half is probably right -- dissidents do generally (and for good reason) view supporters of the regime they're objecting to as their enemies. But isn't it also true that supporters of any regime generally view dissidents as their enemies? (For the more oppressive sort of regime Zack's conjuring up here: how do you think Nazi supporters felt about e.g. the French resistance? How do you think Vladimir Putin's faithful think about opponents of the war in Ukraine? For the at-least-superficially less oppressive sort most of us are living in, where you need to go further to count as a "dissident"[1], how do you think fans of liberal democratic capitalist states generally think of neoreactionaries or revolutionary communists? Or, turning from actual government power to the sort of cultural thing Zack might have in mind, what's the usual attitude of progressive media/academic types to people proposing "human biodiversity" or to "gender critical feminists"?

[1] It's pretty much the case that one only speaks of "dissidents" when referring to oppressive systems. But I'm trying to consider honestly what sort of person might be thought of as a "dissident" in the context of somewhere like the contemporary US or UK, and I'm pretty sure they need to go well beyond "I disagree with the policies of the current government" to be called that; I think the criterion is something like "disagreeing energetically enough, or fundamentally enough, to be at risk of actual reprisal from those in power".

It seems to me that in all these cases the allies of the (literal or metaphorical) regime have just as strong a tendency to frame things as a conflict as its opponents.

A bunch of things in this post seem wrong, or like non sequitors, or like they're smushing different concepts together in weird ways.

It keeps flipping back and forth between criticizing people for thinking that no one was fooled, and criticizing people for thinking that some people were fooled. It highlights that savviness is distinct from corruptness or support for the regime, but apparently its main point was that the savvy are collaborating with the regime.

As I understand it, the main point of Scott's Bounded Distrust post is that if you care about object-level things like whether taxes are increasing, whether wearing a mask reduces your risk of getting covid, whether the harvest will be good, or whether Russia will invade Ukraine, then you can extract some information from what's said by authorities/institutions like Fox News, the New York Times, the CDC, Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, etc., even though they often present distorted pictures of the world, as long as you're savvy enough about understanding how they communicate and interpreting what they say.

This post categorizes everyone into dissidents and supporters of "the regime" and somehow stuffs savviness in there and says things that don't map onto the concept of savviness or the examples of savviness that come to mind.

The police officer example is about safe escalation of shared knowledge, not mistake theory or conflict theory: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2410

I think the analogy in this post makes a great point v clearly, and improves upon the discussion of how those who control the flow of information mislead people. +4

I think I've said it every time the conflict vs mistake theory topic comes up: it's a vastly oversimple model, pretty close to useless in any real-world situation.  I fully agree with your view of mixed purposes and mixed receiver capabilities for public messaging. 

Even bounded distrust isn't sufficient - first, the boundary between straightforward truth-seeking and deception is fractal - there's a LOT of grey and no way to have a classifier that can tell you what's happening.  Second, social technology (understanding of impact of communication choices) has grown in the last few decades, so that the deception is evolved to be far more effective, even while being far less clearly biased in any direction.  It's MASSIVELY improved at "engagement", and only a bit improved at directional political movement.