Bogus allegations of election fraud have me thinking lately about the Dunning-Kruger effect and other cognitive errors. Put colloquially, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Or perhaps not knowing enough to know better. Knowing the limits of what you know keeps you from getting into trouble. Having a medical degree does not make you a brain surgeon, etc.
Like the tale of Daniel and the priests of Bel. Each morning, a feast left in the temple the night before for a Babylonian idol is gone — proof, the priests tell the king, that Bel is a living god. But Daniel secretly scatters ashes on the floor one night before the king seals the chamber. In the morning, the feast is gone again. “Great thou art, Bel,” shouts the king. Except whose footprints are all those on the floor? asks Daniel.
Like 19th century flat Earthers who sighted down a six-mile stretch of England’s Bedford Canal to prove the Earth is flat. Markers set at the far end should have been below the line of sight if the Earth was round. But they were still visible! The experiment, however, had not compensated for atmospheric refraction of light. The experiment’s design was faulty. As was the flat-Earthers’ proof.
Like 9/11 truthers believing the World Trade Towers collapse was an inside job because the burning temperature of jet fuel is not hot enough to melt steel. Accurate facts led to a faulty conclusion through ignorance of metallurgy and column buckling.
Like scientists testing psychics. Detecting frauds is not their milieu. In everyday science their data is not actively trying to deceive them. Believing themselves “too smart to be fooled,” they got taken in by magicians’ tricks.
“No matter how smart you are, or how educated you are, you can be deceived,” is the lesson of the late illusionist, escape artist and debunker of psychics, James Randi. A documentary on his career explained:
People often find ways to ignore or explain away the facts. A generation ago, this approach propped up faith healing and energy crystals; today, it fuels climate-change denialism and the anti-vaccination movement.
And now belief in massive election fraud where evidence for it is as faulty as that for a flat Earth. But no amount of proof will satisfy those who want to believe.
The New York Times’ Nate Cohn tweeted Saturday about bad faith and bad data in the fraud allegations:
Cohn continued, “You’ve got folks convinced that there were more votes than people in Detroit. All you have to do is do is google search ‘detroit population’ and ‘detroit election results 2020’ to learn that it’s wrong.
“You’ve got folks convinced that there were fewer mail ballot requests than mail votes in Pennsylvania. A google search can disabuse you here, as well–and worst of all this was clear before the election.
“You’ve got folks convinced there’s something strange about ‘vote dumps’–AKA, populous jurisdictions reporting their results. If you’ve got an issue with it… you just have an issue with them having results…I can keep going here.
“The point is that the case for ‘fraud’ is so bad that it’s quite clear it only exists for one reason: they don’t like the result. Nothing could have been done to avoid this, and that was obvious even before the ’16 election–before the mail surge. If we had an election where every state had photo ID, in-person voting, and reported all of its results at once we would be in… exactly the same place.”
That is because believers are not interested in accuracy or facts, even from conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg.
The entire world is rigged against Trump. Or didn’t you know? Because QAnon does.
The New York Times explains QAnon thusly:
QAnon is the umbrella term for a sprawling set of internet conspiracy theories that allege, falsely, that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump while operating a global child sex-trafficking ring.
QAnon followers believe that this clique includes top Democrats including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros, as well as a number of entertainers and Hollywood celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres and religious figures including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama. Many of them also believe that, in addition to molesting children, members of this group kill and eat their victims in order to extract a life-extending chemical from their blood.
When game designer Reed Berkowitz came across QAnon he saw elements familiar from the design of “Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), LARPs, experience fiction, interactive theater, and ‘serious games‘.” In QAnon, he saw gaming’s evil twin: A game that plays people.
Berkowitz explains one of game design’s bugaboos: apophenia.
Apophenia is : “the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)”
In game play, apophenia leads players down dead-end trails after non-clues and frustrates progress. In QAnon, he explains, “apophenia is the point of everything. There are no scripted plots. There are no puzzles to solve created by game designers. There are no solutions.”
In “A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon,” Berkowitz explains:
QAnon grows on the wild misinterpretation of random data, presented in a suggestive fashion in a milieu designed to help the users come to the intended misunderstanding. Maybe “guided apophenia” is a better phrase. Guided because the puppet masters are directly involved in hinting about the desired conclusions. They have pre-seeded the conclusions. They are constantly getting the player lost by pointing out unrelated random events and creating a meaning for them that fits the propaganda message Q is delivering.
There is no reality here. No actual solution in the real world. Instead, this is a breadcrumb trail AWAY from reality. Away from actual solutions and towards a dangerous psychological rush. It works very well because when you “figure it out yourself” you own it. You experience the thrill of discovery, the excitement of the rabbit hole, the acceptance of a community that loves and respects you. Because you were convinced to “connect the dots yourself” you can see the absolute logic of it. This is the conclusion you arrived at.
“Do your research,” believers tell you, and it shall set you free. From reality.
Training players to see conspirators behind random events is the point. “QAnon uses the oldest trope of all mystery fiction. A mysterious stranger shows up and drops a strange clue leading to long-hidden secrets which his clues, and your detecting power, can reveal.”
The Smoking Man from The X-Files knows everything. But if he just blurts it out, the mystery is solved and the fun is over. Instead, he drops clues. This is exactly why Q is not a whistleblowing, high-ranking intelligence officer. “He” is a plot device, Berkowitz insists.
And the point if there is one? To create an alternate reality for believers to inhabit.
Qanon is an attempt to create a new reality that can be acted on, lived in “as-if”, and manipulated, but does not match actual reality. Because if they can do that, then they can do anything they want and blame the outcomes on any fictional plot point they choose. One tentacle of a many-pronged attack of boogaloo bros, Qanons, Anti-maskers, Fake News, Alex Jones, etc. Scattershot programs all with the same message and the same end-game. To doubt reality. To create the fog of war without the war. To create a collectively shared reality that they directly control.
The republic our founders envisioned depended on a set of agreed-to facts. Alternative facts shatter the foundations on which the nation was built and destabilize it.
Who would want to do that? Another game designer, Jim Stewartson, believes “Russian intelligence is, at a minimum, exploiting this gamecult, to coin a phrase, to undermine our democracy.” Who knows? That’s beyond the limits of my knowledge.
But a large fraction of Trump supporters believe he actually won the election. That it was stolen in plain sight even as his attorneys try to steal it in plain sight. Belief that a cabal of elite, Satan-worshiping, cannibal pedophiles runs the world plays a part. That is alternative beyond faith in idols or the flat Earth or a government conspiracy behind 9/11. Hunter S. Thompson/Terry Gilliam alternative. One can find the genesis of that nonsense in the first 90 seconds of this clip from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).
On this rock, QAnon has built its church.