Politics: How information theory helps us avoid being manipulated
Design theorist William Dembski offers some thoughts at his Substack on how to use information theory as a shield against psychological warfare:
A key question we should ask ourselves is: Are the choices we are offered in a given situation all the ones that are really available? Sometimes, that’s not true. For example:
It could be, for instance, that the powers that be present only one option to us in the frame. Historically, this has been called Hobson’s choice, after Thomas Hobson, a stable owner in Cambridge, England, who lived a few hundred years ago. He offered his customers a choice of taking the horse nearest the stable door or taking none at all. Hobson’s choice describes situations where only one real option is available.
Hobson’s choice afflicts much of our current political discussion. On hot-button topics like climate change or vaccine safety, the political and media mainstream sees the science as “settled” and brooks no dissent. The (information-theoretic) frame in these cases allows exactly one possibility, and to reject that possibility is to go outside the pale—it is to be blacklisted, cancelled, demonized, to be a horrible person, to be a rube, to be harming others through dis-mis-mal-information.
“Information Theory as a Shield Against Psychological Warfare,” October 10, 2024
Often, the manipulation is more subtle. For example, there is the false choice (also called the false dilemma or false dichotomy).
You know the sort of thing: “Either you vote for my Plan A or you condemn thousands of families to substandard housing!” Really? Maybe Plan B, the actual other choice in the upcoming referendum would house more people more efficiently and cost less. But our speaker — strategically — doesn’t address that possibility. Dembski comments,
… the focus is on forcing a choice between two options while ignoring a viable third option. Yet from the vantage of information theory, there’s nothing essential in this fallacy about having two options and ignoring a third. There could be more. There could be less. It’s a question of what’s the frame and what possibilities are inside the frame. Only if these are accurately identified can we avoid psychological manipulation.
There’s a more subtle move to be aware of as well…
Sometimes the manipulator sets up a decoy choice, to drive the hearer to one of several other choices instead. This happens in real estate.
Let’s say the agent is anxious to unload 2 So-So Avenue (Choice A). But the client wants to see 12 Nice Crescent (Choice B) instead. So the agent takes the client to 13 Fawlty Downs (Choice C), which is, at best, drab. Fawlty Downs makes So-So Avenue look good by comparison and, as planned, distracts attention from Nice Crescent. Pretending that the choice is between A and C instead of A and B is often used in politics as well as sales. Perhaps we are offered the dreaded Disinformation Police or the less dreadful Misinformation Police instead — when we would really prefer the advertised Freedom to Read option…
Dembski comments
Decoys are psychologically very effective and unless we are self-aware, we often will not know that we are being manipulated in this way. Perhaps the best way to deal with decoys, even if we are not conscious that we are dealing with them, is to ask ourselves, whenever we are confronted with three options, whether one might be a decoy, and also to insist on seeing additional options if possible.
That’s where information theory comes in:
Information theory helps us to defend against psychological manipulation by questioning the frame in which possibilities are presented to us and by getting clear what those possibilities actually are. It doesn’t matter the size of the frame or the number of possibilities in it. What matters is getting clear on the frame, whether it needs to be expanded or can be contracted, and whether we’ve clearly identified and enumerated all the possibilities that are actually in play.
Lots of opportunity to practice these days. And much more at the link.
