Long Reads: The rise of stupidity; The analytic failures of the Russia-Ukraine War; and how presidential polls are always wrong

Last night I posted some long threads; tonight, I have several interesting "long reads" on topics I have frequently discussed on this blog:

   

The Stupid, It Burns!

Substack writer Black Cloud Six writes The New Normal: Living in the Age of Stupidity

Black Cloud describes this as "perhaps the most critical issue of our generation: the rise of stupidity."

He continues:

... Unfortunately, the entry of Donald Trump into the US political arena accelerated the tendency to accept all opinions—no matter how ridiculous or grounded in conspiracy—as being equal. Social media has magnified this tendency, as bizarre opinions and theories find validation among like-minded groups. How else can we explain the resurgence of Flat Earth conspiracies, chemtrails, "gang stalkers," and, most consequentially, anti-vaccine rhetoric?

...The last six months have shown just how fast this tendency is spreading. In what other reality could a major candidate’s claim that immigrants were eating pets not be disqualifying? Recently, the Premier of Alberta promised to "look into" chemtrails and raised questions with the US Department of Defense. That this is a fringe, lunatic conspiracy theory didn’t seem to matter. After all, aren’t all opinions valid? This trend has real-world consequences, which became evident when the province announced amendments to its Bill of Rights, which included overt anti-vaccine rhetoric. In virtually every sphere, conspiracies, falsehoods, and outright lies have entered mainstream discourse.

That traditional media gives a pass to such views and helps platform them isn’t helping. Conduct that would have been utterly disqualifying 20 years ago is now "normal," and views that would never have been discussed in public are now being mainstreamed. There may be eye-rolling when discussing flat earthers or the idea that migrants are eating pets, but it's not a lie if large numbers of people believe it, right? After all, it's the media's duty to entertain diverse voices and share both sides, even when one side is clearly ludicrous. The problem is that accepting such views has real-world consequences, as the folks in Springfield, Ohio, or those dealing with the latest whooping cough outbreak can tell you.

A great article, but I do want to add one comment of my own -- the rise of stupidity actually started during the George W Bush administration. It was 20 years ago that journalist Ron Susskind told us that the Bush people said the "reality-based community" wasn't important anymore. Susskind describes his conversation with an unnamed Bush admin official (who was likely Karl Rove or someone in that office):

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

The egotism of claiming to be "history's actors" when these were the guys who killed half a million people in an unjustified war over WMD that didn't exist... well, the stupidity of that lie is really profound, isn't it. And also check Alternative facts, Consensus reality, Fake news, and Truthiness for other ways that lies are now described.

     

The Russia-Ukraine War

Phillips O'Brien has been sharing his excellent analysis of the Russia-Ukraine War ever since that war began. At the end of September, he noted this: CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) Phillips O'Brien and Eliot Cohen The Russia-Ukraine War: A Study in Analytic Failure

Introduction: ... the attack was foreseen, but the immediate outcomes were astonishing. To use an old Soviet phrase, analysts misunderstood in fundamental ways the “correlation of forces.” Their judgments about Russian and Ukrainian military capacity were not merely off—they were wildly at variance with reality. And even more perplexing, leading and widely acknowledged experts misjudged with a degree of certainty that in retrospect is no less remarkable than the analytic failure itself.

Their misjudgment was not a case of normal error or exaggeration. The expert community grossly overestimated Russian military capabilities, dismissed the chances of Ukraine resisting effectively, and presented the likely outcome of the war as quick and decisive. This analytic failure also had policy implications. Pessimism about Ukraine’s chances restricted military support before February 24, 2022. For years, voices in the analytic community argued publicly against providing crucial military aid for Ukraine precisely because Russia was presumably so strong that a war between the two countries, particularly a conventional one, would be over too quickly for the aid to make a significant difference. Once the war began, some of Ukraine’s most important international friends hesitated to supply advanced weapons, in part out of the mistaken belief that Ukraine would prove unable to use them or would be overrun before it could deploy them effectively. Today, such hesitation remains, with Ukraine still lacking the weapons systems it needs to defeat Russia in its relentless effort to destroy Ukraine as a state.

In his substack PO'Brien discusses this CSIS report. O'Brien writes:

...in this case the mistakes were so grave and had such significant policy implications that they require particular study. This was not a case of just a normal error. As part of the report, I went back and looked at strategic analysis throughout the 20th century, to see what happened before. Earlier analysis was actually far more measured and even-handed—and usually (but not always) avoided the kinds of lopsided analyses we saw in 2021-2022.

So the analysis for Russia and Ukraine was not only off, it represented the greatest strategic failure in analysis in modern history. If you don’t believe me—try and find a worse case. The war as presented by the analytical community as a consensus bore no resemblance to the war that occurred. This is something that requires real consideration. We have constructed networks of think tanks, research centres, Intelligence Communities of all stripes—and the quality of the strategic analysis has gotten worse.

... What the report argues is that very narrowly defined expertise needs to be broadened and filtered by expertise in many other areas. For instance, the expertise that studied the Russian and Ukrainian military was actually quite limited, and focussed in a small group of analysts of the Russian military. The report argues that a far greater range of expertise needs to be consulted in such cases—from economists, to weather/terrain experts, to military historians, to scholars of Ukraine. The paper is strongly against making broad assumptions based on a very limited base of expertise—it wants more and varied expertise, not no expertise.

US Presidential Election

The American Prospect - Rick Perlstein The Polling Imperilment Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago. So why do they consume our political lives?

... presidential polls are almost always wrong, consistently, in deeply patterned ways. Unusual for any historical narrative, the pattern is almost unchanged for a good hundred years.....

That polls do not predict presidential election outcomes any better now than they did a century ago is but one conclusion of this remarkable history. A second conclusion lurks more in the background—but I think it is the most important one to absorb.

For most of this century, the work was the subject of extraordinary ambivalence, even among pollsters. In 1948, George Gallup called presidential polling (as distinguished from issue polling, which has its own problems) “this Frankenstein.” In 1980, Elmo Roper admitted that “our polling techniques have gotten more and more sophisticated, yet we seem to be missing more and more elections.” All along, conventional journalists made a remarkably consistent case that they were empty calories that actively crowded out genuine civic engagement: “Instead of feeling the pulse of democracy,” as a 1949 critic put it, “Dr. Gallup listens to its baby talk.”

...Pollsters might not be able to tell us what we think about politics. But increasingly, they tell us how to think about politics—like them. Following polls has become our vision of what political participation is. Our therapy—headlines like the one on AlterNet last week, “Data Scientist Who Correctly Predicted 2020 Election Now Betting on ‘Landslide’ Harris Win.” Our political masochism: “Holy cow, did you hear about that Times poll.” “Don’t worry, I heard it’s an outlier …”

The Washington Post’s polling director once said, “There’s something addictive about polls and poll numbers.” He’s right. When we refer to “political junkies,” polls are pretty much the junk....

But OMG, I hope these polls are right:

Not for nothing, but every single poll listed on the front page of 538’s list of national presidential polls has VP Harris ahead. pic.twitter.com/4rc8BZv40S

— Kushibo MPH, Monster Island (actually a peninsula) (@kushibo) October 2, 2024