Trish, Author at Patricia Roberts-Miller

Three triggers for procrastination: drudgery, decisional ambiguity, and existential threat

The short version of this post is that there are three triggers of procrastination, or three situations in which procrastination is a very tempting choice, and writing a book, grant proposal, article, or dissertation falls into all three areas.

Some tasks involve a lot of uninteresting drudgery, and many people procrastinate those tasks partially because the panic of being up against a deadline makes them slightly more interesting. Some tasks require that we make decisions without adequate information, and so the temptation is to delay making the decision in the hopes that we’ll get more information. Some tasks threaten our sense of self–failure at the task feels as though it would be the end of the world.

One scholar, Baker, takes those three situations and points out personality types prone to one or another (but, again, all three are part of academic writing) Amanda, the procrastinating grant-writer mentioned in a previous post, fits into the category that Baker, following Ferrari, calls “avoiders,” “who seem to have issues of self-esteem that they are confirming by putting off needed tasks and who are also very concerned with the opinions of others (they promote the idea that they did not have time rather than that they were not up to a task)”. (Baker Thief 169) That is, “avoiders” avoid tasks that have existential stakes (“am I an imposter?” “am I good enough?”). Failing to get around to the task, rather than failing at the task, leaves open the possibility that one could have succeeded if one had tried. In my experience, “avoiders” sometimes avoid scholarly tasks by taking on unnecessary service responsibilities, picking up time-consuming hobbies, or getting involved in organizations (procrastiworking). That isn’t to say that everyone engaged in service is procrastinating, or that no one should take up a hobby or get involved in community work, but that those choices might be subtle forms of procrastination.

Rose Fichera McAloon describes her undergraduate writing process: “I was terrified of criticism, of being unmasked as a fraud, of being stripped of my self- esteem, of being irreparably crushed. I wanted to write the papers, fuss over them lovingly, craft them to perfection—but would not and could not. They were always written in a slapdash way, never reread for content, and turned in with the hope that a miracle would happen and that I would beat the odds once again. It mostly worked.” (239)

Amanda’s situation (above), like McAloon’s, is one in which applying for the grant appears to have more pain associated with it than delay: if writing the grant means confronting her sense of personal inadequacy and risking rejection and exposure, why do it? The route of shoving the grants away and hoping that something comes up down the road can seem very, very attractive.

Procrastinating can seem to protect one’s self-image as a talented person. Our talent remains untested, since we didn’t fully apply ourselves. Also sometimes called “fear of failure,” or “imposter syndrome,” this strategy of procrastinating the immediate task in order to evade existential challenges is, it seems to me, difficult, but not impossible to overcome, particular with a combination of strategies (discussed in the next section), most of which involve some method of removing, reducing, or even procrastinating the shame and anxiety that writing raises for us. One strategy for managing this kind of anxiety, perhaps paradoxically, is to write through it; as a method of desensitizing, working even when feeling almost paralyzed by self-doubt becomes a foundational experience on which we build future experiences. Having done it once, and survived, we know we can do it again.

The best way to get over the anxiety that you might get a savaging review of a book or article is to have a book or article savaged. After all, it isn’t the savaging we fear, it’s some suspicion that we will be entirely destroyed by the savaging; if our identity is “a good writer” or “a smart person,” then it might seem that we will lose our very identity if an editor, committee member, reader, or reviewer tells us that a piece is badly-written, stupid, or wrong. Once you get savaged by a reviewer, and it happens to everyone, you learn that your cells did not cease to adhere, you did not melt into the floor, your friends will not shun you, and you’re okay. Sometimes you decide the piece really was pretty bad, and sometimes you decide it wasn’t that bad, and sometimes you decide the reader’s responses should be entirely ignored, and sometimes you bounce around among various responses. But, whatever response you have, you are still you, maybe a slightly more resilient you, and that might be good.

Baker notes two other kinds of procrastinators (relying on Ferrari’s research). There are “’arousal types’ who experience a ‘euphoric rush’ by putting off their work until it is too late” (Thief 169). Ferrari’s description of this kind of procrastination is similar to Piers Steel’s discussion of people prone to procrastinate boring or tedious tasks, a character he calls “Time-Sensitive Tom.” By introducing the possibility of failure, a dull task becomes more interesting; in addition, living in crisis mode is gratifying—comfortable even—for some people. A colleague once speculated that filling out book order forms a day late or rushing one’s grades in at the last minute can make it seem as though one’s life is so busy (and, by implication, the person is so important) that getting simple tasks done on time is difficult. It struck me as a cynical interpretation, till I caught myself thinking almost exactly that about myself: getting tedious tasks done on time is what drudges do; tossing too many balls in the air is what interesting people do. “Arousal types” tend toward what is described above as “just in time” procrastination. When JIT procrastination goes badly, it is the consequence of a failure to estimate time correctly and/or correctly calculate the costs and risks of failure.

Steel argues, convincingly, that impulsivity strongly correlates to procrastination (see especially 25-26), which is worsened by the fact that “We tend to see tomorrow’s goals and concerns abstractly—that is, in broad and indistinct terms—but to see today’s immediate goals and concerns concretely—that is, with lots of detail on the particulars of who, what, and when” (25). Also called “hyperbolic discounting,” this tendency to value the immediate (the bird in the hand) is one of the fundamental biases, and is implicated in a lot of bad decision-making of various kinds.6 We know the pleasure we will get from playing another computer game; the pleasure we will get from getting an article published is distant (I will later discuss how I think this tendency to favor immediate reward is one reason that people put too much time into service and teaching, since they both provide immediate rewards).
Whereas it’s useful to reduce drama in order to reduce avoidance-type procrastination (and make the task more routine), increasing the drama makes boring tasks more likely—arousal types may procrastinate to make something less routine. Steel emphasizes the importance of planning, saying, “Proper planning allows you to transform distant deadlines into daily ones, letting your impulsiveness work for you instead of against you” (39). Thus, the method for dealing with “avoidance” procrastination can be very different from the best method for dealing with “arousal” procrastination.

Similarly, the best methods for managing “Decisional procrastinators”—people “who procrastinate because they cannot make up their minds” (Thief 169)—are somewhat different from the avoidance or arousal procrastination. For some academics, grading, serving as an outside reviewer (for journals or presses), or reading dissertations trigger “decisional” procrastination. Afraid that we might assign the wrong grade, or that we might unfairly reject an article, we put off making the decision. Decisional procrastination is not necessarily a bad choice; in fact, David Allen’s very useful Getting Things Done is largely about being deliberate regarding decisional procrastination. If it is a decision about which it is possible to get more information, and plausible that we will, then deliberately delaying it (but not losing track of it) is a rational strategy. The strategies for managing this kind of procrastination are also discussed later, but mostly involve setting reasonable deadlines, not just for completing the task, but for trying to get the information that would make the decision easier to make. People who have an aversion to closure are particularly prone to decisional procrastination, and so can benefit by finding ways to make decisions that are contingent (this can be done in regard to grading in various ways, also discussed later).

It’s because these various kinds of procrastination can happen at different moments during the same project that I’m dubious about the accuracy or utility of identifying them as different kinds of people: a person might be an “avoidance” procrastinator in regard to writing an article, an “arousal” procrastinator in regard to preparing the Works Cited, and a “decisional” procrastinator in regard to where to submit the manuscript. The same task might trigger different kinds of procrastination in different people: some people find that grading triggers “arousal” procrastination (because they find it tedious), and some people find that it triggers “decisional” procrastination (because they are unsure about their grading), and some people find that it triggers “avoidance” procrastination (because reading papers raises insecurities about the job they have done as teachers).

So, I think most of us are prone to all three kinds of procrastination, especially since academic writing presents all three situations. Still and all, knowing about the three can help figure out which one we’re doing right now, and that will help us decide which strategies might work. I think understanding the different triggers also helps reduce shame. There are so many books of advice out there–Destination Dissertation, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, Getting Things Done–and they all work for a bit and under some circumstances because they’re useful for one or two of the kinds of procrastination. But they all stop working at some point or in some situations. In my experience, grad students or faculty can then fall into a shame/anxiety spiral, thinking they suck, and they’ll never finish. It’s just that they need some new strategies–not for ever, but for this moment.

Ways of thinking about our procrastination: “naifs” v. “sophisticates”

Procrastination researchers Ted O’Donoghue and Matthew Rabin set up an experiment that had two tasks for the subjects. Subjects who committed to both tasks and completed them got the most rewards, with the second-highest rewards going to subjects who committed to the first step and completed it. Subjects who committed to both tasks but didn’t complete both received the least reward. Hence, subjects were motivated to be honest with themselves about the likelihood of their really finishing both tasks. O’Donoghue and Rabin argue that some people who procrastinate know that they do so, and make allowances for it. These people, “sophisticates,” in O’Donoghue and Rabin’s study, made better decisions about their commitments and therefore (or thereby?) mitigate the damage done by their procrastination. “Naifs” are people who procrastinate, but “are fully unaware of their self-control problems and therefore believe they will behave in the future exactly as they currently would like to behave in the future” (“Procrastination on long-term projects”). That is, although they have procrastinated in the past, and may even be aware that this practice has caused them grief, naifs make decisions about future commitments predicated on the assumption that they will not procrastinate in the future. They are not harmed by their procrastination as much as they are harmed by their belief that they will magically stop themselves from procrastinating in the future.

The short version of this post is that we all procrastinate, and so we plan for it.

O’Donoghue and Rabin conclude that naifs are more likely to incur the greatest costs from procrastination. They say: “The key intuition that drives many of our results is that a person is most prone to procrastinate on the highest-cost stage, and this intuition clearly generalizes. Hence, for many-stage projects, if the highest-cost stage comes first, naive people will either complete the project or never start, whereas if the highest-cost stage occurs later, they might start the project but never finish. Indeed, if the highest-cost stage comes last, naive people might complete every stage of a many-stage project except the last stage, and as a result may expend nearly all of the total cost required to complete the project without receiving benefits.”

Sometimes procrastinating the highest-cost stage to the end is necessary: the dissertation is the highest-cost stage of graduate school, and it is necessarily the last. Many people advise leaving the introduction to the dissertation or book (or theoretical chapter) till last because it’s more straightforward to write when we know what we’re introducing–we’ve written the rest, but that also means procrastinating the highest- cost stage. It isn’t necessarily bad to procrastinate the highest-cost stage, but it does mean that people who sincerely believe that 1) they don’t procrastinate, or 2) they can simply will themselves out of procrastinating this time (“I just need to sit my butt down and write”) may be setting themselves up for a painful failure, especially if this kind of procrastination is coupled with having badly estimated how much time writing the dissertation would actually take. It would be interesting to know how many ABDs are “naifs.”

In a sense, the story that “naifs” tell about procrastination is a simple one—they can make themselves behave differently this time the same way one can make oneself get out of bed. But such a view—that willing one’s self to write an article is like willing one’s self to get out of bed—ignores “procrastination” in regard to scholarly productivity is not a question of lounging in bed or getting up, of eating cupcakes or writing an article. These posts are from a book project I was thinking about writing, and the first very rough draft wasn’t too hard to write; it went quite quickly, probably because I’d been thinking (and reading) about the issue for years. But when it came time to work on it again—incorporate more research, especially the somewhat grim studies about factors that contribute to scholarly productivity—I instead reprinted my roll sheet, deleting from it the students who had dropped, adding to my sheet the dates I hadn’t included, composing and writing email to students whose attendance troubled me, and comparing students’ names with the photo roster (in a more or less futile effort to learn all their names). I then printed up the comments I’d spent writing and stapled them to the appropriate student work. I sent some urgent email related to a committee I chair, answered email (related to national service for a scholarly organization) I should have answered yesterday, and sent out extremely important email to students clarifying an assignment I’d made orally in class. None of that was very pleasurable—I’d far prefer to have eaten a cupcake. And yet it was procrastination.

My procrastinating one task by completing others is typical of much procrastination (it’s sometimes called “procrastiworking”); it isn’t a question of choosing between something lazy and self-indulgent and something else that is hard work. Take, for instance, this poignant description of a scholar who keeps procrastinating applying for grants:
“Grant application season has rolled around once again. Amanda, who has in the past regularly failed to submit applications for research grants that many of her colleagues successfully obtain, feels that she really should apply for a grant this year. She prints out the information about what she would need to assemble and notes the main elements thereof (description of research program, CV , and so on) and—of course—the deadline for submission. She puts all of these materials in a freshly labeled file folder and places it at the top of the pile on her desk. But whenever she actually contemplates getting down to work on preparing the application—which she continues to think she should submit—her old anxieties about the adequacy of her research program and productivity flare up again, and she always find some reason to reject the idea of starting work on the grant submission process now (without adopting an alternative plan about when she will start). In the end the deadline passes without her having prepared the application, and once again Amanda has missed the chance to put in for a grant.” (Stroud, Thief 65) Whatever complicated things are going on in this story, or in the minds of people who find themselves in Amanda’s situation, it’s absurd to say that she is choosing pleasure over pain.

I find this story heartbreaking, probably because the details are so perfectly apt. Of course she would neatly label the folder, and add it to a pile (I used to keep a section of my file cabinet labeled “Good Intentions”). And I have to add, she needs to get “down” to work on the applications—why is it always “down”? When people are beating themselves up about not doing writing (or grading), they tell me, “I just need to sit down and do it” or “buckle down and do it” or variations on those themes. Why don’t people need to “sit up” and work on the project? Or “get up and go” on it?

That this method of managing grants has never worked doesn’t seem to register, and so there is what Jennifer Baker calls “a cruel cycle:” “Procrastinators are inefficient in doing their work, they make unrealistic plans in regard to work, and they are so cowed by perfectionist pressures that they become incapable of incorporating advice or feedback into their future behavior.” (Thief 168). Baker is here describing something much like “naifs”—unwilling or unable to recognize that there is a pattern, they hope or expect to be able to work on getting a little better: they will do it completely different in the future. Applying the same sense of perfectionism to our work habits, we set unrealistic goals for our future selves, virtually ensuring that we fall back into imprudent delays. Because no grant could possibly be as good as we want, we write no grant at all. Instead of setting up fantasies of behaving completely differently in the future, we need to be honest about what we are doing now, and why we are doing it.

Procastination of academic writing: different kinds and different solutions

I. Some ways of categorizing procrastination: “just in time,” “miscalculation,” “imprudent delay”

When people talk about “procrastinating,” they often mean “putting off a task,” but there are many ways of doing that: putting off paying bills till near the due date, avoiding an unpleasant conversation, rolling back over in bed instead of getting up early to exercise, delaying preparing for class till half an hour before it starts, ignoring the big stack of photos that should be put in albums, answering all of my email rather than proofing an article, writing a conference paper the night before, delaying going to the dentist, intending to save money for retirement but never getting around to it, eating a cupcake and promising to start the diet tomorrow, telling myself I cannot do my taxes until I have set up a complicated filing system, ignoring the stack of papers I need to grade until they must be returned. All of these involve putting off doing something, but they are different kinds of behavior with different consequences:
1) indefinite delaying such that the task may never get done;
2) allocating just barely (or even under) enough time necessary to complete a task (“just in time” procrastination);
3) a mismatch between my short-term behavior and long-term goals (procrastination as miscalculation).
Procrastinating proofreading by answering email is potentially productive (as long as I get to the proofreading in time), delaying going to the dentist might mean later dental work is more expensive and more painful, and putting off papers till the last minute might reduce my tendency to spend too long on grading.

It seems to me that many talented students use a “just in time” procrastination writing process for both undergraduate and graduate classes, largely because it works under those circumstances. (In fact, the way a lot of classes are organized, no other process makes sense.) “Just in time” writing processes work less well for a dissertation—they make the whole experience really stressful and very fraught, and they sometimes don’t work at all. It’s an impossible strategy for book projects—it simply doesn’t work because there aren’t enough firm deadlines. Shifting away from a “just in time” writing process to more deliberate choices means being aware of other writing processes, and can often involve some complicated rethinking of identity.

“Just in time” procrastination sometimes goes wrong, as when something arises in the allotted time and so it was not nearly enough. Sometimes the consequences are trivial—a dog getting sick means I didn’t finish those last few papers and I have to apologize to students; my forgetting to bring the necessary texts home means I have to get to campus extremely early to prepare class there; I misunderstand the due date on bills and have to pay a late fee. But the consequences can be tragic: if there is a delay at a press, a reader/reviewer has serious objections, or illness intervenes, then a student may lose funding, a promising scholar may be denied tenure, a press may cancel a contract.

Procrastination as miscalculation, or the inability to make short-term choices fit our long- term goals, is the most vexing, what Christine Tappolet calls “harming our future selves” (Thief 116) or what Chrisoula Andreou calls “imprudent delay;” that is, procrastination as involving “leaving too late or putting off indefinitely what one should, relative to one’s goals and information, have done sooner” (Andreou Thief 207). This kind of procrastination (imprudent delay) might mean choosing a short-term pleasure over a long-term goal (going back to sleep instead of getting up to exercise), delaying a short-term pain (putting off going to the dentist until one is actually in pain), or simply making a choice that is harmless in each case but harmful in the aggregate (spending time on teaching or service rather than scholarship). Imprudent delay isn’t necessarily weakness of will, as it doesn’t always mean doing something easy instead of something hard; it might mean choosing different kinds of equally hard tasks, and it is only imprudent in retrospect, or in the aggregate.

Many books on time management and productivity focus on this kind of procrastination, and describe effective strategies for keeping long-term goals mentally present in the moment. Ranging from products (such as the Franklin-Covey organizers) to practices (such as David Allen’s “tickler” files), these methods of improving calculation seem to me to work to different degrees with different people under different circumstances. None of them works every time with every person, a fact that doesn’t mean the strategy is useless or the person is helpless, but it does mean that people might need to experiment among different strategies and products.

Imprudent delay, when it comes to academia, is complicated, perhaps because it so often not a choice between eating a cupcake and exercising. After all, even if a scholar gets to a point in her career at which she comes to believe she has previously spent time on service that should have been spent on scholarship, there is probably, even in retrospect, no single moment that she made the mistake. I can look back on a period of my career when I spent too much time on service and teaching, but I was asked by my Department Chair to do the service, so I didn’t feel that I could say no. My administrative position often involved meeting with graduate student instructors to discuss their classes, and I can’t think of a single conversation I wish I hadn’t had. I can think of things I wish I had done differently (some are discussed here) but I empathize with junior colleagues who carefully explained why they have taken on this task. And, as my husband will tell anyone who wants to listen, I still regularly take on too many tasks. But, I will say in my defense, I’m better.

Imprudent delay—failing to save for retirement, spending too much time on service, engaging in unnecessary elaborate teaching preparation—never looks irrational in the short run. Phronesis, usually translated as “prudence,” is, for Aristotle, the ability to take general principles and apply them in the particular case. One reason “prudent” versus “imprudent” procrastination seems to me such a powerful set of terms is that the sorts of unhappy situations in which academics often find ourselves are the consequence of the abstract principle (“I want to have a book in hand when I go up for tenure”) not being usefully applied to this specific case (“Should I write another memo about the photocopier?”). This is a failure to apply Aristotle’s phronesis.

Another reason that thinking of procrastination in terms of Aristotle seems to me useful is that his model of ethics is as a practice of habits, which we can consciously develop through the choices. We do not become different people, but we develop different habits, sometimes consciously. People with whom I’ve worked sometimes seem to have an ethical resistance to some time or project management strategies or writing processes because they don’t want to become that kind of person (a drudge, an obsessive, ambitious). Thinking that achieving success requires becoming a different person is not only unproductive, but simply untrue.

Martha Nussbaum points out that Aristotle’s metaphor is aiming: making correct ethical choices is like hitting a target. If one has a tendency to pull to one side, then overcompensating in the aim will increase the chances of hitting the target. Andreou points out that there are things about people have a lot of willpower, and others about which we have very little, “I may, for example, have very poor self- control when it comes to exercising but a great deal of self-control when it comes to spending money or treats” (Thief 212). The solution, then, is to use the self-control about spending money to leverage self-control in regard to exercise: meeting one’s exercise goal is rewarded by spending money. If, however, one has little self-control in regard to spending money, then trying to use monetary rewards/punishments to encourage exercise won’t work, since a person won’t really enforce whatever rules they’ve set for themselves.

A lot of people respond to procrastination with shaming and self-shit-talking, and my point is that those are both useless strategies. It’s more useful to try to figure out what kind of procrastination it is, and what’s triggering it (the next post).

Procrastination: introduction

weekly work schedule — “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” (E.B. White, “E. B. White, The Art of the Essay No. 1” *Paris Review*)

Reason #3 I wanted to retire early was so that I could finish a bunch of projects. One of them is about scholarly writing. Someone asked that I pull out the parts about procrastination–that was about 10k words. Even when I brutally whacked at it, it was 4k, which is just way too much for a blog post. So I’ve broken it into parts. Here’s the first.

I haven’t edited or rewritten it at all, and I wrote this almost six years ago. I tried to move footnotes into the texts, but it’s still wonky as far as citation. I didn’t want to put off posting it till it was perfect (the irony would be too much), so here goes.

Procrastination is conventionally seen as a weakness of will, a bad habit, a failure of self- control–narratives that imply punitive behavior is the solution. Those narratives ignore that procrastination isn’t necessarily pleasurable, and often doesn’t look like a bad decision in the moment. Putting off doing scholarship in favor of spending time and energy on teaching or service is not a lack of willpower, the consequence of laziness, or inadequate panic. But it is putting off tasks that Stephen Covey would call important but not urgent in favor of tasks that are important and urgent. Since it isn’t caused by lack of willpower or inadequate fear, it isn’t always solved by self-trash-talk or upping the panic.

Procrastination isn’t necessarily one thing, and so it doesn’t have one solution. Nor is it always a problem that requires a solution; dictating barely enough time to a task can ensure we don’t spend more time on it than is necessary can make a dull task more interesting, as it introduces the possibility of failure, and it can be efficient. I once tried preparing class before the semester began by doing all the reading and making lecture notes during the summer. I had to reread the material the night before class anyway, so the pre-preparing meant I spent more time on teaching, not less. Grading papers is a task that will expand to fill the time allotted, as I could always read a little more carefully, word my suggestions more thoughtfully, or give more specific feedback. Leaving the most complicated four or five papers till the morning of class means I had to get up at 4 in the morning, but it also meant I could only spend half an hour on each, and I was forced to be more efficient and decisive with my comments.

Many self-help and time managements books promise an end to procrastination, but that is an empty promise. As long as we have more tasks than time, we will procrastinate. The myth that one can become a perfect time manager who doesn’t procrastinate can inhibit the practical steps necessary to become more effective with one’s time. People who procrastinate because they don’t want to be drudges, and like the drama of the panicked writing, resist giving up procrastination, since it seems to suggest they have to become a different person. Some perfectionists procrastinate because they won’t let themselves do mediocre work—hoping to do perfect work, they may spend so much time doing one task perfectly that they get nothing else done, or they may wait till they feel they are capable of great work (if that moment never comes, they complete nothing), or they ensure that they have good excuses (such as running out of time) for having submitted less than perfect work. Unhappily, the same forces—the desire for a perfect performance—can inhibit the ability to inhabit different practices in regard to procrastination.

The perfectionist desire for procrastination can cause us to try to find the perfect system, product, or book–a quest that can will someone into a person who never gets anything done. It’s possible to procrastinate by trying all sorts of new systems that prevent procrastination. We can fantasize about ending procrastination—so that we will, from now on, do all tasks easily, effortlessly, promptly, and without drama—in ways that are just as inhibiting as fantasizing about writing perfectly scholarship. The point is not to become perfect, but to become better. The next few posts will describe some concepts and summarize some research that I found very helpful.

Trump’s tax returns and his quiet supporters

Trump with bad spray tan — Photo from here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-unhappy-returns-11601333853

I wrote a bunch of posts called “Arguing with Trump supporters,” and decided to use the term “Trump supporters,” but “arguing” was really the distinguishing term. I was talking about the group of people who still try to defend Trump, either in person or on the internet. They’re mostly repeating pro-Trump media talking points, and they don’t even try to defend him through rational argumentation. I’m not sure they ever had reasons to support him, as much as passionate beliefs about him and government.

When James Arthur Ray—a self-help bozo who made his money telling people how to make money (when he made his money telling people how to make money)–was exposed as not only murderously irresponsible, but a person telling people how to be successful when he was underwater in terms of debt, there were blog posts (which have since disappeared) saying that the fact that he had more debts that profit wasn’t evidence that his advice was bad. It was, they said, a kind of success.

In other words, for them, that you have a lot of money to spend means that you’re successful, even if you have that money because you have unmanageable loans, fraudulent claims about your wealth, and skeezy ways of getting the money. They were admiring a con artist.

Trump’s base—his cult [1]—will love that he screwed over the government through fraud. They’re beyond reasoning with, since they have no reasons to support him, and they like that he’s a con artist. (It’s interesting that they don’t realize he’s conning them.) This post is about a different set of people.

That other set of people voted for Trump did give reasons, and did (in 2016 anyway) often engage in rational argumentation to advocate for voting for him.[2] These are the people who in 2016 expressed some ambivalence about voting for him, but who gave reasons for their voting that way, and almost none of those reasons now apply. I wonder about them.

Here were the reasons I heard:

1) they hated HRC;
2) he has no relevant experience, but he’d hire the best people (I heard this a lot);
3) he’s a buffoon, but the GOP will keep him in line;
4) he’d appoint justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade;
5) he’s a good business man, and we need a businessman’s perspective on how to run government;
6) they think Democrats will raise taxes on businesses and the very wealthy, either force businesses to fund ethical health benefits for workers or have substantial government-subsidized healthcare, enforce environmental regulations, promote non-partisan redistricting policies.

So, here’s their situation now.

1) HRC isn’t running.

2) He never hired the best people. As early as 2017 it became clear that the best people won’t work with him because he’s unpredictable, unreliable, and disloyal. (I assume that his inability to hire good lawyers is why Barr is trying to get the DOJ to take over Trump’s worst case.) His personal lawyer is Giuliani, whom no sensible person would hire to fight a parking ticket. In fact, like many narcissists, Trump deliberately hires underqualified people so that they are completely beholden to him. I can’t imagine any of the people who said in 2016 “He’ll hire the best people” looking at whom Trump has hired (and fired) and thinking those are people whom they would hire for anything that requires more intelligence than being a crash test dummy.

3) When people argued in 2016 that the GOP would keep him in line, others said (correctly), that’s exactly what the conservatives said about Hitler. Since, clearly (or not), Trump wasn’t Hitler, his supporters ignored that argument. It wasn’t a claim that Trump would kill all the Jews, but that narcissistic people on the edge of sociopathy can’t be controlled. The better argument (and the one I wish I’d made when arguing with people) was: when has that worked? When has someone as difficult to work with, as narcissistic, as mercurial as Trump ever been controlled by a political party? (The answer is: never.) He isn’t controlled. It’s important to note that people who worked with him have described him as a threat to the country.

4). If your only reason to vote for Trump was that he would appoint enough justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, that’s a done deal. So there’s no longer any reason to vote for him. (I wonder about this one a lot—I think it’s really a moment of truth for whether the people who made this argument actually were all that ambivalent about Trump’s racism, reckless rhetoric, and appalling character.)

5a) This argument–he’s a good businessman–is the only one that the taxes affect. Even his defenders aren’t disputing that Trump lost a lot of money, or that he owes a lot of money–their argument, as far as I can tell, is that The New York Times hasn’t proven fraud (see, for instance, this WSJ editorial— talk about a low bar). If they’re saying his taxes aren’t fraudulent, then they’re saying it’s clear that he made no money from his businesses; he’s wealthy because of his TV show. That’s the reasonable inference.

I have to point out that lots of people in 2016 said that Trump was not a business success, because a reasonable assessment of his assets (even with all his lying and evasion) would lead to that conclusion. In my experience, the people who defended him as a successful businessman when presented with that information had the same argument that defenders of James Arthur Ray had–so what if it was a con and he’s underwater in terms of debt? He’s got money to spend, and that’s success.

5b) It’s interesting that this was exactly the argument made for Bush Jr., which people conveniently forgot when Trump was running. There’s no evidence that businessmen (it’s always men) who go into government make government more efficient. And I always think that’s a weird argument because there are a lot of things one can say about massive corporations, but being efficient with their use of resources isn’t a claim that withstands any scrutiny. So, the notion that a successful businessman would be a great President is one of those things that some people believe but can’t defend rationally.

6) Don’t I wish.

Democrats don’t have a recent history of passing that level of social safety net—the last time was under LBJ. And, even if they did, those policies don’t lead to Stalinist socialism. That’s an empirical claim subject to disproof. Were that narrative right, then there would be countries where people slid slowly—through one democratic socialist policy after another—into Stalinism.

And that country would be?….

In fact, although countries have slid into increasingly authoritarian governments (such as Russia now), no government slid into communist socialism. Israel has been socialist for a long time, after all. So, just to be clear, the fear-mongering about what happens if we adopt universal health care, for instance, has literally no evidence to support the claim that we’ll end up as the USSR.

So, I’m curious what those people will do—will they vote for Trump again?

[1] That is, his base that neither wants nor admires democracy but openly wants an authoritarian government in which someone they feel represents them has unlimited powers. That’s called fascism, in case you’re wondering.

[2] Being able to engage in rational argumentation to support your position doesn’t mean your argument is true or right or ethical, let alone that I agree with it. It’s actually a fairly low bar, so it’s interesting that Trump supporters can’t meet it.

On arguing with Trump supporters V: it isn’t just Trump supporters

Tweet saying "Patricia Roberts-Miller should've let demagoguery die rather than try to explain it and bring it back."

I mentioned elsewhere that I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around the digitally-connected world arguing with assholes, and so I think some people have been surprised when I’ve said that the best response to someone who supports Trump is to refuse to argue with them. I’ve also said the same thing about people who get all their information from the pro-Trump propaganda feedback loop. And each time I’ve tried to be clear that I’m not talking about “conservatives” or all Republicans. I think our tendency to divide everything into left v. right is gerfucked.

I think it’s better to think about politics as something like a color wheel, with both tone and saturation. And there are people all over that spectrum who refuse to look at any information that might contradictor or complicate their beliefs, mistake personal conviction for proof, and are poster children for confirmation bias. In fact, I think we’re all that way on some issues and under some circumstances. So, not everyone who makes the mistakes I’ve talked about in this set of posts is a Trump supporter.

And I doubt every Trump supporter makes all those mistakes, but it does seem to me that everyone arguing for Trump does. Perhaps I’ve missed the good arguments, but I don’t think so.

I’ve focused on Trump supporters because they exemplify (not prove) what happens when in-group loyalty trumps rational argumentation–something we all do.

I mentioned the tendency to think that proving They are bad means that We are good, and it doesn’t. That Trump supporters argue badly is no guarantee that everyone else argues well. That their position is, they performatively admit, indefensible through rational argumentation is not proof that all other positions are grounded in rational argumentation.

Right now, all that seems to hold the pro-GOP coalition together is the ethical theater of abortion and feeling superior to the libs. Seeing that Trump supporters argue badly shouldn’t be part of forming an anti-Trump coalition in which we feel good about who we are because we’re better than they; it should be part of our seeing how we argue badly. And that’s what I hope people take away from this series. It isn’t just them.

Why I wish we would stop talking about left v. right in American politics

Showing that politics is not a continuum, but more like a scattershot

Discussions of American politics typically describe either a binary or continuum of left v. right, a model that is both false and damaging.

First, the false part. The model comes from the French Assembly, when one issue was at stake—what should happen with the monarchy, and so it was possible to describe the various people involved as on a continuum. The positions of participants ranged from wanting a strong monarchy, to constitutional monarchy, to no monarchy or aristocracy at all. They sat in a way that put those in favor of retaining a monarchy on the right, and those in favor of abolishing it on the left. So, it made sense in that moment.

It makes less sense when we’re talking about a variety of policy options, as we are when we’re talking about current politics. It seems to makes sense if the topic is voting patterns for Federal elections, in which case it’s pretty useful to say that there are people who
• will only vote socialist or Green;
• are varying degrees of likely to vote socialist/Green v. Dem;
• will only vote Dem;
• are varying degrees of likely to vote Dem or vote GOP;
• will only vote GOP;
• are varying degrees of likely to vote Libertarian v. GOP;
• will only vote Libertarian.
Notice, though, that it isn’t a binary, and that it’s more of a spectrum of colors going from green through turquoise, blue, lavender, red, orange, yellow. Notice also that it doesn’t make sense to talk about the points at either end as more “extreme.” If you pay attention to actual policy agenda and voting patterns, then it’s clear that Libertarians aren’t more extreme versions of Republicans—they have a different policy agenda–, and it’s the same with Green Party and Democrats.

It isn’t an accurate description of where people stand on particular issues, even polarizing issues like abortion, gun control, civil rights, or immigration. [1] When people are talking about policies, there can be coalitions for particular kinds of changes that draw from all over that spectrum (such as regarding prison reform, decriminalizing drug use, bail reform).

There are two other axes that are important for thinking about American politics. One is domestic v. foreign policy issues, mapped above. There are people who vote consistently Dem in regard to domestic policy, but are supportive of military intervention (generally for humanitarian reasons). There are people who vote GOP consistently in regard to domestic policy, but are opposed to military intervention (essentially isolationist).[2]

The other important axis is degree of commitment to one’s place on the spectrum—that is, the extent to which one believes that other positions are legitimate and should exist. There’s a sense in which this is one’s commitment to the process of democratic deliberation. Republicans will sometimes argue that we aren’t a democracy, but a republic. I think that’s a tough argument to make past the Jacksonian opening of citizenship rights, but it sort of doesn’t matter. We can call our sort of government a democratic republic, representative democracy, liberal democracy (not in the American sense of “liberal”). Regardless of which terms one uses, the point is that our country was founded on the notion that disagreement is beneficial, that a community thrives when there are multiple perspectives, that determining the best policy is challenging.

There are people all over the political spectrum who reject that premise, who believe that their (and only their) position is entitled to power and that all other positions should be silenced, or at least marginalized.[3] Those people should be described as extremists. A Libertarian or socialist who is a passionate supporter of their party is not necessarily any more of an extremist than someone who only votes moderate Democrat. I think we should reserve the word “extremist” for someone who wants the political sphere purified of everyone other than them.

Very few people (maybe zero?) care about every policy issue, but most of us have one or two about which we care passionately. When we talk about those one or two policy issues, commitment to parties weaken, since it’s unlikely that a party is going to promote the one policy we want exactly as we want it. For instance, global warming might be the biggest issue for both of you and me, but that doesn’t mean we’re in perfect agreement as to what we should do. I might think the Kyoto Accords are great, too weak, too strong, the wrong route, and you might take one of the other positions. Or, let’s say that we both strongly believe in strict limits on immigration—we’re extremely likely to disagree about the details (especially when it comes to enforcement). To get the votes, a political party is going to have to form a coalition of people who disagree—that’s easier if we don’t know we disagree. And that is easier if we keep the discussion to vague assertions of policy goals (the vaguer the better)[4]. It’s even easier if we don’t run for our policy agenda at all, but run against Them. And that’s what Outrage Media is all about—it’s about getting clicks, links, shares, views, and commitment by ginning up outrage about how awful They are (for more on this, I think The Outrage Industry is really useful, but so is Network Propaganda).

Just to be clear, sometimes there is a group that is awful. What the Outrage Media does, though, is group all of our opponents into that one category. For instance, a lot of media talks about how awful “conservatives” are, putting Libertarians, fundagelicals, neo-conservatives, Trump supporters, and GOP loyalists all into one group. Those are fairly different groups. For instance, Libertarians and the GOP both claim to value neoliberalism, but Libertarians have a stronger commitment to it (the GOP is very supportive of government intervention in the market despite claims otherwise). So, some people try to claim that Libertarians are just a more extreme version of Republicans.

But the Strict Father Morality of the GOP is more important to its policy agenda than neoliberalism (as is shown by how GOP political figures behave when the two values are in conflict, such as in the case of bailouts, corporate subsidies, military intervention, laws regarding drug use). And it’s in that regard—the one more consistent in GOP policy commitments–that Libertarians are not more extreme than the GOP.

In other words, thinking that the binary/continuum accurately represents political ideology (at least if we think that political ideology is representative of policy agenda) is inaccurate. It’s damaging because it’s nutpicking—we allow the Outrage Media to persuade us that the outliers of the outgroup(s) represent everyone who disagrees with us. We therefore not only fail to see possible shared policy options, but demonize compromise itself (it’s trucking with the devil). We aren’t even open to thinking about what might be wrong with our policy agenda because we dismiss everyone who disagrees with us. We are on the road to mutual extermination.

[1] There are people who consistently vote Democratic who are opposed to legal abortion and gay rights, for instance. Many self-identifying Republicans support far more control (and they support it far more) than the NRA or GOP would have you believe. Everyone is in favor of immigration, and very few people are in favor of unlimited immigration—the question is how much, and what to do about illegal immigration.

[2] You may have noticed I’m up to four axes (or at least three). In other words, we should either stop trying to create one map for everyone (and think and talk in terms of policies rather than identities) or else just try to map where people stand on specific issues. I think we’d discover a lot of common ground.

[3] There are, for instance, people who believe that we should purify the Democratic Party of all but the centrists—that’s just as much a politics of purity as people who believe the party should become purely progressive. People who argued for the political extermination of anyone who advocated integration claimed to have the moderate position, and may have sincerely believed they did. I intermittently run across supporters of the GOP who want the Democratic Party political exterminated, and they seem to see themselves, quite sincerely, as thereby eliminating “extremism”—but they’re advocating an extreme position. Their extreme commitment to their position is extremist.

[4] There’s some research that says that people likely to vote Dem are more likely to be policy wonks, and really want to hear and debate the details of policy. Thus, people trying to mobilize Democrats are in a double-bind, of needing enough policy talk to get the votes of the wonks like me, but not so much as to alienate potential voters.

Arguing with Trump supporters IV: data isn’t necessarily evidence, let alone proof

Gohmert yelling — From https://www.businessinsider.com/gop-rep-louie-gohmert-screams-at-mueller-you-perpetuated-injustice-2019-7

At this point, it should be more clear why I’m saying that Trump supporters have stopped trying to defend him through argumentation—they deflect away from defending their own claims in the attempt to get their critics to accept the burden of proof, mistake their own refusal to accept an affirmative case as proof of their affirmative case, and fallaciously assume that an argument is rational if it has certain surface features. In this post, I want to point out another common strategy: mistaking data for proof (which is closely associated with believing that believing is thinking).

One of the mistakes that people make when criticizing Trump supporters is to say that their position ignores facts and logic. That’s the wrong tack to take because, I think, they sincerely believe that their position is the one grounded in logic and facts. In a previous post, I talked about their thinking their position is logical because they think they are logical people. That is, they think that the logic of a position can be inferred from whether the person making the argument is a logical person. That’s illogical.

There are two other mistakes they make: they think that a rational argument has a lot of data to support it, and a rational argument is true. So, if they have evidence to support their position, it’s both rational and true. And that way of thinking about argumentation is neither rational nor true.

Data isn’t necessarily evidence, let alone proof

I want to talk about data and not “facts” because people use the term “fact” to mean “a claim I believe is true.” “Data” is a neutral term, and I think people understand that a datum might be true and yet not prove anything. Data don’t have necessary consequences.[1]

If you’re arguing with Rando, one thing you’ll notice is that he has a lot of data: claims about reality, many of which are true. But, even when true, they’re almost always unsourced (or their source doesn’t provide sources), frequently irrelevant, and aren’t logically connected to the main claim he’s making (“Bunnies are fluffy because they’re mammals”). The temptation is to argue with him about those claims. I’ve found that is hard to do (because the claims are unsourced or badly-sourced, it’s a lot of work to find the original source) and doesn’t change his mind.

To take an older example, in 2016 a lot of Trump supporters would say, “I’m voting for Trump because Benghazi.”

That’s an enthymeme: a compressed syllogism. They have given a claim supported by another one, and so it looks as though they’re saying “Benghazi” is the reason they have the position they do. Were it a reason, then if that claim (“Benghazi”) turned out to be false, they would change their mind. But it isn’t a reason; it’s an example of why they have the position they do. (We’ll come back to that—it’s what makes the Trump supporting arguments irrational—they don’t have reasons, but a lot of examples.)

I used to ask sometimes, “What do you think happened at Benghazi?” The most common response was “People died because of Clinton.” And I’d ask exactly how, and then things got vague—most didn’t know. Some said that she responded too slowly to the threat, and I’d point out the pages in the Republican-dominated committee that said that wasn’t true. They’d refuse to look. I’d ask if they could provide a source to support what they were saying. They’d stop arguing with me.[2]. (There was another answer I’d sometimes see that I’ll get to in a bit.)

Those are the two moves that generally end an argument with a Trump supporter—ask them to read counterarguments, and ask them to provide sources. And that’s why their position is irrational.

What I’ve found is that, if you ask them to look at counterarguments, they’ll most commonly refuse to look at anything on the grounds that those sources are “biased”—that is, as mentioned in an earlier post, they’re admitting that they refuse to consider counterarguments (so their position is irrational). Sometimes they’ll sealion. They want you to summarize a complicated argument in a sentence or two, and that’s fascinating. I’m not entirely sure why they make that move, and I’ve never seen any studies on it, but I have some crank theories.[3]

The most important of those crank theories is that they don’t really believe that it matters how an argument is made—all that matters is whether the argument is “true,” and they think they can assess the truth of an argument on the basis of a one- or two-sentence summary of it. They don’t see understanding an issue or coming to a position as a process. I think that’s connected to why they see data as exemplifying a point, rather than as reasons (that, if false, suggest we should be open to reconsider the claim we say we believe for that reason).[4]

In any case, if you do want to dispute their data, my advice is not to try to figure out where they got their information (unless they can tell you). Find in-group sources that show their claims are false or misleading (and it’s generally pretty easy). At this point, Trump supporters are wildly mis- and under-informed, so it’s often straightforward to find articles in Wall Street Journal, The Economist, or even primary documents that show they’re wrong or missing important information. The question, of course, is whether they’ll care that they’re mis- and under-informed, and my experience says they don’t. (This is something that has changed since 2016.)

The reason I think it’s generally not useful to dispute the data is that they don’t believe what they believe because of that data—as I said, it’s an example, not a reason—so showing them that data is wrong won’t get them to change their position. They’ll just find different data.

Perhaps more important, the data—even for them—has no logical relationship to their main claim, or, at least, they don’t think so. The other argument I sometimes heard was, “Clinton was Secretary of State, and therefore she had ultimate responsibility for security at the embassy.” Okay, that’s an argument. But is it one the person believed? Sort of, but not really. They only agree with the logic of that argument if it’s useful for whacking the Dems, not if it applies to Republicans. Do they hold Trump responsible for everything that happens under him? (Only the good stuff.) Do they hold Republican Secretaries of State responsible for attacks on embassies? Nope.

So, the logic of their argument appeals to something they don’t believe. It looks as though they’re appealing to a principle–people in charge are responsible for what happens under them–but their application of that principle is purely partisan. And that is why it’s so frustrating to argue with them—because they aren’t engaged in rational argumentation.

They aren’t being hypocrites—I don’t think that’s the right term. They really believe that Clinton is bad, and they really believe that Benghazi exemplifies what’s wrong with her. Attacks on embassies under Republicans don’t prove anything, though. The principle that a Secretary of State is responsible for the safety of all embassy employees only applies in support of an argument they believe is true—that Democrats are bad.

In other words, Trump supporters begin with certain beliefs that are beyond question: Trump is great, Democrats are evil, any data that confirms those beliefs is true, any that doesn’t is false (or biased). They didn’t get to those beliefs through rational argumentation, and therefore those beliefs can’t be weakened through rational argumentation.

We don’t disagree about Trump because of Trump; we disagree about what it means to think. We disagree about whether believing is a substitute for thinking.

I began this set of posts by saying that Trump supporters make three mistakes about rational argumentation (a rational argument has a calm tone, lots of data, and it rings true). Now I’m saying it’s that third one that drives everything. A rational argument, they believe, is one that they believe, and for which they can find support. That isn’t a rational argument.

That’s why I keep saying that it’s perfectly fine, and perhaps even healthy, to begin a conversation with someone who wants to argue about Trump by asking if they’re open to persuasion on it, if they’re willing to read things that criticize him, and if they’re willing to cite their sources. And if they say they aren’t (or, as usually happens, they’ll try to deflect on you, and insist that you first identify what you’d need and so on), then say you only argue with people whose positions are grounded in rational argumentation, so you aren’t having this argument.

Trump will come and go, but if he goes and people still believe that belief is all you need, another Trump will come along. And then democracy will go.

[1] Were I Queen of the Universe, one of the things that people would have to learn to graduate from high school (in addition to understanding the distinction between correlation and causation) would be what it means for something to have necessary consequences (that would also help people understand what it means for something to be “necessary but not sufficient”). I think we could begin to get away from monocausal narratives, and that would be nice.

[2] I’d sometimes see the argument that she was Secretary of State, and there was inadequate protection for the embassy workers in Benghazi. Both of those claims are true, but the logical connection is wobbly.

[2] Here are a few of my crank theories. First, they prefer arguing with people. The whole point of arguing, for them, is to dominate someone else, and they feel confident about being able to do that with interpersonal moves, but they don’t think they can do it with a text—it’s no fun to argue with a text. Second, in my experience, the kind of people who are still supporting Trump are epistemological populists—they think the truth can always be stated simply and clearly in a sentence of two and reasonable people will instantly understand and recognize the truth. That crank theory is supported by research, although most of it is about “conservatives” and not Trump supporters specifically. They’re drawn to certainty, dislike complexity and nuance, and believe in a world in which everything we need to know is on the surface. In other words, they think they don’t need to read a complicated argument with lots of data because, if what that document says is true, they’ll recognize it instantly. Third, they’re afraid they’d lose and have to reconsider their belief—that is, they’re afraid of well-sourced counter arguments. Fourth (and connected to the epistemological populism), I’ve noticed that some of them have strong preferences for oral/visual arguments. That is, they themselves don’t read very much, but get their information from TV, youtube, or radio. So, if they do offer sources, it’ll be a two-hour youtube video. Those media—TV, youtube, radio—are all unsourced sources. They provide a lot of data that it’s almost impossible (or extremely time-consuming) to check.

[4] Obviously, I’m not saying that we have to abandon a position every single time we turn out to have bad data. But we should be able name what the data is that would make us change our minds. And, equally important, if we keep finding ourselves turning out to be wrong in our data, we need new sources of information.

Arguing with Trump supporters III: tone isn’t rationality

Kavanaugh yelling — https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/09/kavanaugh-opening-statement-angry/571564/

Just to recap: Trump supporters avoid taking on the responsibilities of rational argumentation by taking the position of a negative case even when they’re making an affirmative claim. They do so this through shifting the issue from Trump to various distractions: your emotionality (“Why are you so upset?”), your sense of humor (“You just can’t take a joke”), your supposed biases (“Snopes is a liberal site”), your identity (“Typical Social Justice Warrior bullshit”), whatever the latest fear-mongering distraction-of-the-moment whaddaboutism is that pro-Trump propaganda is promoting (her emails, Benghazeeeeee, abortion, socialism, immigration, a prayer blanket found in the desert, the caravan, ISIS, Biden will kick in your door and take your guns), and by what amounts to a version of sealioning (setting themselves as the arbiter of truth).

Sometimes, they make claims, but they rarely engage in argumentation—at this point, they even rarely engage in pseudo-rational argumentation. Since maybe they still are, and just not in places I hang out, I’ll go ahead and explain how it works and why it’s hard to argue with. Pseudo-rational argumentation is neither rational, nor argumentation, but it has surface features that people (fallaciously) associate with rational argumentation, so it can look like it’s rational.

We too often characterize rational argumentation by surface features and, paradoxically, our visceral response. As far as the surface features, we’re tempted to call something a rational argument if it has: a calm (or “matter of fact”) tone, what are sometimes called “rationality markers” (words like “because,” “therefore,” “it necessarily follows”), appeals to external knowledge (“everyone knows,” “everyone agrees,” “obviously,” “clearly”), data, appeals to expert opinion (citing reliable experts, or people with apparently expert information). Finally, a lot of people think (because they have been taught) that a “rational” argument will “make sense”—it resonates. That’s the visceral response part. Let’s call an argument that fulfills these criteria but not the criteria of rational argumentation pseudo-rational argumentation.

Such arguments appear to be rational, as long as we judge on the basis of superficial traits of the argument and the person making the argument (and how we’re cued to judge the argument and person).

Tone is not an indication of the ir/rationality of an argument
Pseudo-rationalism plays on the common misunderstanding of rationalism as not emotionalism (a relatively recent want to think about emotions v. reason). In this world, a person is rational if they are not emotional, and an emotional person is not rational. In fact, that someone appears unemotional might mean all sorts of things, such as that they’re just good at suppressing their expression of emotions, they’re not an empathetic person, they don’t understand the situation, the person judging whether someone is emotional is a bad judge of emotionality (this last is pretty common, I think).

Being emotional doesn’t necessarily mean that one has an irrational argument. One of the things Rando might do (especially if Chester is female) is first deliberately outrage Chester, and then accuse Chester of having an invalid argument (or being unable to argue) because they are emotional. (This is a classic strategy of abusers). What this does is shift the stasis (that is, the thing about which we’re arguing) from Chester’s argument to Chester’s emotional state.[1]

This is one instance of Rando’s (the nickname of Random Internetasshole, the hypothetical interlocutor of Chester’s) favorite strategy—throw the burden of proof onto Chester, and, ideally, to things Chester can’t prove. (How do you prove you’re not emotional? That’s proving a the presence of an absence, and it’s notoriously hard to do.) And it doesn’t matter. That Chester is now emotional doesn’t mean their argument is irrational. (The “you have no sense of humor” accusation is another instance of this strategy—trying to make the argument about your feelings).

We have a tendency to think about arguments in terms of identity—a good person makes a good argument; a rational person makes a rational argument; an expert makes an expert argument. Good people do not necessarily make good arguments. (By the way, I’m often misunderstood as rejecting the notion of identity politics—I’m not.) Identity politics is an acceptance that different policies have different impacts on various identities—that we are not the same. Good v. bad people is not a useful way to think about identity, especially since neither guarantees the ir/rationality of the argument a good or bad person makes.

A slight variation on this muddle about rationality is the notion that a rational person is in control (of their emotions, themselves). It was this sense of rationality and control being connected that meant that women and non-whites were prohibited from rationality—they (we) weren’t allowed to control anyone. Thus, for someone who believes in this pseudo-rationality, a woman or POC can’t argue because we’re too emotional; if we appear not to be emotional, we’re hiding it, or—worse yet—we’re trying to control them. Then, oddly enough, it’s okay for them to get angry.

Later, I’ll get back to how to respond to these moves in pseudo-rationality (all of which you can see in Trump supporters). Here the point is simply that a person appearing to argue calmly is not necessarily someone making a rational argument.

To judge the rationality of the argument, we have to look at the argument. Pseudo-rationality tries to pretend that we can infer the rationality of the argument from the tone of the arguer. We can’t.

Something else that I’ve noticed tricks people into thinking an associative argument is rational argumentation is the use of what linguists call “metadiscourse” (especially “rationality markers” and “appeals to external knowledge”). “Metadiscourse” is the term used for the language that tells the reader about what you’re telling them. That’s a weird sentence, but it’s a useful concept. Imagine the claim, “Bunnies are fluffy.”

I might say, “Unfortunately, bunnies are fluffy,” “Thankfully, bunnies are fluffy,” “Obviously, bunnies are fluffy,” “It’s well known that bunnies are fluffy,” “Bunnies are generally fluffy,” or “I think bunnies are fluffy”—those are all sentences with that same predicate (“bunnies are fluffy”), but with metadiscourse that tell you how I want you to consider the claim.The first two tell you how I feel about bunnies being fluffy. The third and fourth are “appeals to external knowledge”—they’re saying that this claim about bunnies isn’t just my opinion, (and the “obviously” is what is called a “booster” in that it boosts the strength of the claim). The fifth and sixth have “hedging” in which I’m restricting the claim (the opposite of boosting). “Rationality markers” are words we use to signal that it’s a rational argument—often words like: because, therefore, thus, in conclusion.

The tendency to infer that the presence of a lot of those sorts of words and phrases means the argument is rational is connected to our tendency to think associatively. As I’ll explain when I get to the issue of data, “Bunnies are fluffy because 1 + 1 =2” is not a rational argument. It doesn’t matter how much metadiscourse I add, or how calmly I say it. It’s a sentence that has two logically disconnected claims. “Bunnies are fluffy because bunnies are mammals” has two claims that are more associated (they’re both about bunnies) but they’re still logically disconnected. People are likely to read them as logically connected simply because of the word “because.” We’re particularly likely to make this mistake if we believe both claims to be true.

Boosters and appeals to external knowledge are likely to persuade some people of the truth of the claims (even though they aren’t evidence, let alone proof) because we too often conflate certainty and credibility. That is, a lot of people assume that decisiveness, rhetorical clarity, and certainty are signs that someone has a perfect and complete understanding of a situation. They aren’t.

The calm tone, rationality markers, and signs of certainty are all surface qualities of a text that persuade people who mistakenly believe that those surface features are indications about the rhetor being a reliable person—rational and knowledgeable. Instead, we have to look at the argument they’re making.

[1] Since this is my blog, I get to put forward some of my crank theories. One of them is that a lot of people who say they are opposed to valuing rational argumentation have been traumatized by people in their lives who use pseudo-rational argumentation as a weapon to abuse and often gaslight them (particularly the move of deliberately upsetting someone and then condemning that person for being “emotional”). I think their experience of pseudo-rational argumentation as a kind of abuse is important to keep in mind.

Arguing with Trump supporters II: an unpersuasive negative case isn’t proof of the opposite claim

Arguing with Trump supporters is frustrating because they can look like they’re engaged in argumentation, but they aren’t. They’re using a very old trick of doing everything possible to avoid the burden of proof—that is, the rhetorical responsibility of supporting your claims. They’ll engage in sham outrage if their interlocutor won’t support their claims (or engages in fallacies like ad hominem), and that’s interesting. It’s striking how often a Trump supporter blasts into an argument with insults and then is on the ground crying and screaming if someone insults them. They’re very fragile.

I think there’s something else going on. They really can’t win an argument on an even playing field—one on which everyone is held to the same standards of argumentation—and so they do everything they can to make sure it isn’t level. They evade the responsibilities of argument as though they’re running from a vindictive ex, through sham outrage, motivism, deflection, distraction, and, most of all, trying to position themselves as making the negative case.

Argumentation has two cases—proposing a solution or case, and critiquing the case someone else has made. That is, affirmative (making a case) or negative (saying they haven’t made their case). People get confused as to what a “negative” case is—it isn’t a case saying something is bad; it’s saying that something hasn’t happened. And here’s what people have a lot of trouble understanding: the success of a negative case is not the proof of an affirmative claim. If I fail to prove to your satisfaction that Chester is a bunny, it’s fallacious for you to conclude that Chester is a duck. He might be neither; he might be a bunny, and I put forward a bad case; he might be a bunny, and I put forward a great case, and you aren’t open to persuasion. A successful negative case just that shows that this argument is inadequate.

If Chester says that Trump is a bad President, and Rando destroys that argument, Rando hasn’t shown that Trump is a good President.

“Trump is a good President” is an affirmative case—that’s the case his supporters have completely stopped defending through rational argumentation. Defending that case through rational argumentation would mean that his supporters engage the smartest critics of him while following these rules.

If any Trump supporters read this post, they’ll respond by listing what he’s done that they like (which he may or may not have actually done—they’re strategically misinformed), motivism, straw man, and nutpicking. Not through rational argumentation. That would be proving my point.

In my experience, Trump supporters often make one or more of four moves. First, as I’ve been saying, they can’t rationally defend “Trump is a good President,” so they don’t try—they insist that his critics take on the burden of proof, and they take the stance of a negative case. (And his critics tend to take on that burden, for really interesting reasons—that’s a later post, and if anyone is that interested, and I forget to write it, nag me.)

Second, they often set their own persuasion as the standard of a good argument. I have to say that every person who has done this latter move to me is a white male. Can we cay privilege? [1]

Third, having declared the opposition argument inadequate (because they are unpersuaded), they declare an affirmative victory. They never made an affirmative case, so they can’t have won it.

The fourth move isn’t necessarily the last one (sometimes it’s the first one they make, and they don’t make the others)—it’s to say that the Democrats are bad (you get to abortion and socialism on this road very fast). But Democrats being bad doesn’t mean he’s a good President. He might also be bad.[2] After all, if A is bad, that doesn’t mean not-A is good (that a gorilla is a bad pet doesn’t mean that a lion is a good one). But I think a lot of people really have trouble understanding that absence of proof for one affirmative case is not proof for the opposition affirmative case. Logic is not zero-sum.

Supporting Trump is sloppy Machiavellianism—anything, any argument or any action, that supports him is assumed to be good because their goals are supposedly good. Neither are good, and neither are rationally defensible.

[1] Speaking of privilege, being an actual Professor of Rhetoric, with a specialty in argumentation, means I have some cred when I say that whether a person is or is not making a good argument is something I am better qualified to determine than they are. But, arguing in my actual identity means making it clear that I’m a woman, and I can tell you that white males with no more research than asking their own brains what they think often feel fully qualified to tell me that I am wrong about rhetoric and argumentation.

And here we get back to whether the rules are applied equally. If Rando not being persuaded means the argument is bad, does my not being persuaded by his argument mean his argument is bad?

It doesn’t, of course. But if you ask him that, the two neurons he can get to fire short out. It’s kind of entertaining to see the response. Here again, if Rando is claiming to be Christian, it’s useful to point out that he is failing to do unto others as he would have do unto him.

[2] “He’s a bad President but he’s better than Biden” is not the same claim as “he’s a good President,” nor is it even evidence for that second claim.