Dependence Drives Group Thickness
We are parts of many social units. In those we see as “thick”, we are more okay being partisan and wanting other members to share many loyalties and cultural features with us. In “thin” units, we are instead more tolerant and tend to allow everyone who doesn’t violate basic norms.
Bryan Caplan has a new book You Have No Right To Your Culture, wherein he seems to me to say that we should see nations as relatively “thin” social units, and so be open to more immigration into them. Which made me curious about which kinds of units we see as how thick, and what unit features predict this view.
So I listed nine types of social units: families, clubs, firms, professions, churches, neighborhoods, cities, nations, and world. And I came up with three plausible factors that might predict thickness:
Power - How much power a social unit has over its members.
Competition - How easily might this unit be killed by competition. Which correlates with how many alternative units compete with each one, with how easy it is to leave the unit, and with voluntary entry to the unit. This tends to be stronger for smaller scale units.
Dependence - How much unit members depend on each other, and so have externalities due to other member choices. Which creates more coordination gains within such units. Which induces such units to manage a wider range of aspects of member lives. Which results in members gaining deeper identities from such units, seeing these units as more sacred, discouraging internal diversity, and encouraging equal treatment.
To estimate which factors matter more, I asked six LLMs to give 0-10 scores for each of these nine units re levels of thickness, power, competition, and dependence, and then to do a regression estimating thickness from the three factors.
The next table shows all their coefficients, together with the median across all the LLMs. I also asked for the predicted thickness for nations from their regression model, which is the last row. (The median of those happens to equal the median of nation thickness scores.)
The medians tell a simple story: social unit thickness, i.e.., how okay we are with requiring unit members to share loyalties and cultures, as opposed to tolerating differences, depends little on how much power those units have over us, nor on how much competition those units face, including how easy units are to leave or how voluntary to enter. Thickness is instead mainly seen as resulting from dependence, i.e., feeling that member outcomes depend a lot on choices made by other members. Nations are seen as ~2/3 toward thick on a thin-to-thick scale.
So people wanting to be more careful than tolerant re nation immigrants seems quite predictable, given that people think that nation member outcomes often depend a lot on what other nation members do. Which suggests three ways to change their minds:
Show them that nation member outcomes do not in fact depend so much on what other nation members do.
Convince them to set unit thickness levels on something other than how much unit member outcomes depend on other member actions.
Convince them that the immigrants they worry about are in fact likely to take actions that will give them good outcomes.
typo: killed might this unit be killed
Robin, here is a list of how they exploit these innate biases:
Ten Ways the 1% Who Owns Almost All Media Are Manipulating Us Right Now by Unknown:
1) The first manipulation is the illusion of choice. You think you have two parties representing different visions for America but both parties are funded by the same billionaires, vote for the same surveillance bills, approve the same defense budgets, and serve the same corporate interests. The choice you are given is which color tie the puppet wears, not who controls the strings.
2) The second manipulation is emotional hijacking. The news does not inform you, it activates you. Every story is framed to trigger fear or anger or disgust because those emotions bypass your rational thinking and make you easier to control. You are not watching journalism. You are being subjected to psychological operations designed to keep you in a constant state of agitation.
3) The third manipulation is tribal sorting. The algorithm learns what makes you angry and feeds you more of it until your entire worldview is shaped by outrage at the other side. You are sorted into a tribe not because you chose it but because keeping you tribal keeps you predictable and profitable.
4) The fourth manipulation is false scarcity. You are told resources are limited and the other tribe is taking what belongs to you. Immigrants are stealing your jobs. Welfare recipients are draining your taxes. The other party is destroying your healthcare. Meanwhile the billionaire class has more wealth than any humans in history and could solve most of these problems tomorrow if they wanted to.
5) The fifth manipulation is memory holing. Stories that threaten powerful interests get buried or forgotten within days. Exposed crimes result in no consequences. Historical context that would help you understand the present is never taught. You are kept in a perpetual present with no past to learn from and no future to plan for.
6) The sixth manipulation is controlled opposition. The voices you think are fighting for you are often funded by the same interests they pretend to oppose. The outrage merchant on your side of the aisle is playing a character designed to keep you engaged and angry and tuned in while nothing ever actually changes.
7) The seventh manipulation is the Overton window. The range of acceptable opinion is artificially narrowed so that anything outside it seems extreme. Ideas that were mainstream fifty years ago are now treated as radical. Ideas that serve elite interests are treated as moderate common sense. You are not choosing your beliefs from the full range of human thought. You are choosing from a menu they wrote.
8) The eighth manipulation is learned helplessness. You are shown so many problems with no solutions that you eventually give up and accept that nothing can change. This is intentional. A population that believes resistance is futile does not resist. They scroll and complain and feel superior for understanding how bad things are while doing absolutely nothing about it.
9) The ninth manipulation is identity capture. Your political affiliation becomes your identity, and any attack on your party feels like an attack on you personally. This makes you defend politicians and policies that harm you because admitting they are wrong would mean admitting you were wrong, and your ego will not allow that.
10) The tenth manipulation is the most insidious of all: you are manipulated into believing you are too smart to be manipulated. Every person reading this thinks the manipulations I described apply to other people, the stupid people, the brainwashed people on the other side. That certainty is itself a manipulation. The moment you believe you are immune is the moment you become most vulnerable
Much more must know information on these insidious manipulations here: https://tritorch.substack.com/p/there-is-something-way-bigger-going
There is something way bigger going on when you can divide everyone in the entire world into an 'us vs them' mentality on almost every single subject.. We cannot let them get away with these ridiculous ancient divide and conquer tactics...