I agree that interpretation does most of the work in how viewpoints can vary so wildly; after all, interpretation is about meaning and significance. The American term "spin" is the standard media jargon for interpretation, although actually "spin" is used to mean *biased* interpretation.
The charge of bias points to what I think the biggest problem of all is: the erosion of trust. Distrust is at the root, for example, of disbelieving evidence offered to support an interpretation. How can you trust that the evidence is not contaminated when you can't trust the source? Cultivating distrust has moved from a cottage industry level of opposition work to major industrial-strength attacks on credibility in the last several decades. Everyone knows it; we make jokes about it. "Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?"
Distrust is the worst because it's so pernicious. We rely on other people's views and analyses all the time. Our only way through is to continue to test the reliability of our sources for their consistency, their accuracy, and how well their interpretations help and fit with other things we know. That's what critical thinking does for us.
If trust has collapsed, the age-old human solution is, of course, coercion. We will end up in dictatorships. Democracy depends on consent. Consent will not survive without consensus on core facts and values. Trump, his minions and supporters understand that.
I agree: interpretations and the sheer number of facts makes most approaches hopeless. After a decade of studying how Democrats are misinformed (because I have often been misinformed myself), I've reached two conclusions. Most misinformation is works by omitting key facts. That's why Williams doesn't see much of it.
The NY Times wrote hundreds of article on critical race theory and never told us it was based on critical theory which Britannica tells us in it's first five words: "critical theory, Marxist-inspired movement." So almost no Democrats know (1) It's Marxist-inspired, and (2) It's an activist movement not a theory. Leaving out those two little facts keeps most Democrats completely in the dark.
And that would be very easy to fix.
Second, Krugman is right, the important misinformation is a few zombie ideas. These are relatively simple (complex ideas don't spread as well) and so long-lasting and widespread that they do a huge percentage of the damage.
The right approach is not to try to face up to the nearly impossible challenges, but to go after the low hanging fruit that we ignore, and do a super good job of picking it. It's not all that easy to get a few things really right, but the payoff per hour spent is far greater. --daretoknow.stoft.com/ Help me build a completely free community designed to let the rest of us fight this mess, instead of just being lectured to.
Initially on the Henry Nowak case I was inclined to agree more with the "right wing" interpretation, that the police has been pummeled by much "anti-racist" training and this was affecting the fairness of their actions. I have read pieces on some of the most horrible cases of this training and the intense pressure it might bring to bear on those whose employment depends on conforming to the employers expectations.
Then I read that offenders often feign injury as part of their playing the police and so it has to be said that the police actions in this particular case cannot necessarily be put down to bias, just a mistake.
But there are aspects of the case to note:
The relatives calling the police and claiming a racist attack. Its fair to say that a white family in the same situation would not use this move, they might just call it an attack, there is a sense that extra adjective in the description of the attack increases its (perceived to the police) severity and this special claim is only available to minority groups.
The other aspect is the carrying of a knife which would be illegal for most citizens. A carry legal knife in the UK must be a non-locking folding knife with a maximum blade length of 3 inches. The Sikh community has special dispensation to carry large fixed blade knives known as a kirpans for religious reasons. A dubious special dispensation?
These are facts too and for sure different people will interpret them differently but if we are to consider political pragmatism, differential treatment (perceived or otherwise) is dangerous therefore authorities should endeavour to adopt scrupulously equal treatment as far as possible.
Hold on, let's pause there for a second. That seems just as profound, if not moreso, than the subsequent rejoinder (that they are all, nonetheless, still wrong.) Focusing on the first clause might even crack open a glimmer of hope for alleviating the divisions.
As noted, these pseudo-environments bear only a partial and contingent relationship to the universal true environment. Since events are constantly unfolding in the outer (true) environment, it follows that different pseudo-environments will go through phases of relative "wrongness" - an array of stopped watches (or more charitably, uncalibrated watches) taking turns being closest to right at different times of day.
Which leads to one of my pet theories: I think the 2015-2025 decade, ESPECIALLY the lockdown/blm/censorship half of it, coincided with a time when the populist-right's psuedo environment just happened to be "least wrong" of the available options. Now even the socialists winning elections in NYC feel the need to distance themselves from that era, let alone anyone from any moderate faction. But at the time it was only the populist right pushing back against any of it.
You see, framing it this way gives an opening for acknowledging that some group you may despise (for many those are the "fascists!") had access to kernels of universal truth that your own pseudo-environment filtered out, without requiring any ongoing belief that their worldview is fundamentally more correct or righteous than yours. In fact I happen to believe the populist right is no longer particularly close to the truth for the 2025+ era issues, and that pivot required no great act of conversion or overcoming cognitive dissonance on my part. It's just about recognizing our shared, fallible humanity or at least, lacking that, some basic statistical plausibilty.
This is a great article! I heard a joke years ago. A husband and wife are arguing over the room temperature. She says, “it’s too cold!” He says, “it’s too hot!” Tis, tisn’t, round and round. He goes to the thermostat and it reads 72 degrees and says, “look 72 degrees, too hot!” She says, “no too cold!” Fact: It’s 72 degrees. Opinion: Too Hot or Too Cold.
I retired eight years ago as a Facilities Maintenance Technition! Where to set a thermostat in a public space is a great topic of controversy with the occupants of the building. I found that a setting where there were about as many complaints of too cold as there were too hot was about right. Most people didn’t complain in the elderly boarding homes I worked in if I aimed at 72 degrees. But, there was always someone unhappy with the setting–especially in the April and October seasonal transition times. T0M =)
That's about the size of it. We don't have to "deny the facts" to inhabit different worlds. There are always plenty of facts to go around, and some of them always say what we want them to say. We just have to declare some of them to be signal, and other facts to be noise.
I feel like the answer should be to accept that reality doesn't follow any sort of overarching narrative and just focus on dealing with each situation as it comes up, but maybe that's simply not within human nature. I dunno.
In my early athletic career, and then long corporate career where I have been given the privilege and challenge to try and unravel human behavior related to performance. There are of course many facets to personality traits that make us all unique. However, there are classification tools that help optimize our understanding and processes for dealing with the variance.
One of those classifications I have settled on is the relative level of emotional noise that surrounds and influences a person's critical thinking cognitive capability. There is a spectrum, but people high on emotional processing are in one category, and those with the capability compartmentalize strong emotions to get to a rational, factual and objective determination are the other.
It is The Emotionals and the Rationals.
And although there are plenty of people crossing the gender divide on this biopic behavior classification, females tend to dominate the former (Emotionals), and males the latter (Rationals).
Democrats/liberal progressives also dominate the Emotionals, and Republicans/conservatives the rationals.
I frequently test this theory, and it is always proven.
The problem with the Emotionals is that cognitive process gets tied up with their emotions. They often do not have the emotional intelligence to realize that their strong feels are supplementing fact. They feel-think and then come to conclusions that they are sure are correct, and those that oppose are stupid not seeing things the same way. But generally their arguments fall apart in a debate of facts and logic... which is why they also like their safe spaces and groupthink bubbles... because the logic shatters their feeling good about themselves, and feeling good is their primary pursuit.
Say things that make them feel bad, and they will go so far as to celebrate your assassination. Their need to protect from feeling bad about their ideas and positions is THAT strong.
Now, I think we are born with these strong emotive traits, but they are either reinforced or corrected for. Certainly, children are not expected to control nor understand their emotional impulses. They have to learn in their development to adult. But the lessons for adults are generally those of self-determination, responsibility and accountability. Because when you are on the front-line, you cannot afford making mistakes in judgement from strong emotional impulses. You have to calculate the probability and decide accordingly.
It is females because they don't have the evolutionary biology of front-line accountability. They are in fact protected from their out-of-control behavior by strong men that want to have sex with them. Mothering is an extension mechanism, as mothers care for people and thus the people cared from can shirk responsibility for being on the front-line.
This also explains the urban vs rural difference between liberals and conservatives. Urban living is having copious services for every-day life. Rural living you might have to raise your own chicken, butcher it and cook it. Urban people are mothered. Rural people are on the front line.
These differences have always existed. The reason that they are now a problem is the rise of females into power positions in our institutions where they are attempting to mainstream emotional behavior over rational behavior.
It looks crazy to the many of us... because, frankly, it is.
Recommendation for you Kenny. Instead of one-sentence quips in opposition to something that you disagree with, try actually making a cogent and intelligent argument in defense of your beliefs. Brevity can be a beautiful thing except when just crap comments that are designed to deflect the topic and denigrate others. You must feel good at some level posting a dig, but it demonstrates weak critical thinking skills and frankly is boring as all hell on a place like Substack where long-form discussion was the original design. Just go to Bluesky and X if you like one-sentence insults trolling for likes.
White and Black are always capitalized in my personal and any official writing because, like Greek, Korean, Indigenous, they designate a defined social group. Women is a designated social group as well but to my mind the issue is ethnicity. We also capitalize Caucasian though not always Negro. Hmmmm.
Anyway, when we are confronted by patterns, we can choose to ignore them or not, a battle of examples like lynchings placed against legacy classroom seats. In the 60s and 70s my wife and I dealt with knotty problems as people asked us, the first Black/White couple married legally in Arizona, to "talk about race." Much less so now. Progress? My Black son visited my classroom one day and when he left the students asked, "Why is he so tall?" I'm short and White but that's where they went. Progress?
One thought your essay sparked for me is that interpretation may be even more fundamental than factual disagreement.
Humans, and increasingly AI systems, cannot operate on reality directly. We necessarily compress the world into workable models before we can reason about it. In that sense, interpretation is not simply a source of polarization. It is a prerequisite for intelligence itself.
I have been exploring this from a different angle in a couple of recent essays. One argues that civilization increasingly treats machine outputs as objective facts because institutions need stable authorities to coordinate at scale. Another asks why even anti-authoritarian AI systems inevitably end up depending on some form of authority.
Together, they have led me to a question I am still working through. Perhaps what we call “hallucinations” are not merely bugs, but the inevitable abstractions every intelligent system needs in order to think. The challenge may not be eliminating them, but building institutions that remain aware that their models are always incomplete.
Your distinction between factual and interpretive polarization fits beautifully into that broader conversation.
I agree that interpretation does most of the work in how viewpoints can vary so wildly; after all, interpretation is about meaning and significance. The American term "spin" is the standard media jargon for interpretation, although actually "spin" is used to mean *biased* interpretation.
The charge of bias points to what I think the biggest problem of all is: the erosion of trust. Distrust is at the root, for example, of disbelieving evidence offered to support an interpretation. How can you trust that the evidence is not contaminated when you can't trust the source? Cultivating distrust has moved from a cottage industry level of opposition work to major industrial-strength attacks on credibility in the last several decades. Everyone knows it; we make jokes about it. "Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?"
Distrust is the worst because it's so pernicious. We rely on other people's views and analyses all the time. Our only way through is to continue to test the reliability of our sources for their consistency, their accuracy, and how well their interpretations help and fit with other things we know. That's what critical thinking does for us.
If trust has collapsed, the age-old human solution is, of course, coercion. We will end up in dictatorships. Democracy depends on consent. Consent will not survive without consensus on core facts and values. Trump, his minions and supporters understand that.
This is a very good Substack
I agree: interpretations and the sheer number of facts makes most approaches hopeless. After a decade of studying how Democrats are misinformed (because I have often been misinformed myself), I've reached two conclusions. Most misinformation is works by omitting key facts. That's why Williams doesn't see much of it.
The NY Times wrote hundreds of article on critical race theory and never told us it was based on critical theory which Britannica tells us in it's first five words: "critical theory, Marxist-inspired movement." So almost no Democrats know (1) It's Marxist-inspired, and (2) It's an activist movement not a theory. Leaving out those two little facts keeps most Democrats completely in the dark.
And that would be very easy to fix.
Second, Krugman is right, the important misinformation is a few zombie ideas. These are relatively simple (complex ideas don't spread as well) and so long-lasting and widespread that they do a huge percentage of the damage.
The right approach is not to try to face up to the nearly impossible challenges, but to go after the low hanging fruit that we ignore, and do a super good job of picking it. It's not all that easy to get a few things really right, but the payoff per hour spent is far greater. --daretoknow.stoft.com/ Help me build a completely free community designed to let the rest of us fight this mess, instead of just being lectured to.
By the way, thanks for reminding us of Lippman's many intellectual contributions. He deserves to be read (and re-read) in these difficult times.
Initially on the Henry Nowak case I was inclined to agree more with the "right wing" interpretation, that the police has been pummeled by much "anti-racist" training and this was affecting the fairness of their actions. I have read pieces on some of the most horrible cases of this training and the intense pressure it might bring to bear on those whose employment depends on conforming to the employers expectations.
Then I read that offenders often feign injury as part of their playing the police and so it has to be said that the police actions in this particular case cannot necessarily be put down to bias, just a mistake.
But there are aspects of the case to note:
The relatives calling the police and claiming a racist attack. Its fair to say that a white family in the same situation would not use this move, they might just call it an attack, there is a sense that extra adjective in the description of the attack increases its (perceived to the police) severity and this special claim is only available to minority groups.
The other aspect is the carrying of a knife which would be illegal for most citizens. A carry legal knife in the UK must be a non-locking folding knife with a maximum blade length of 3 inches. The Sikh community has special dispensation to carry large fixed blade knives known as a kirpans for religious reasons. A dubious special dispensation?
These are facts too and for sure different people will interpret them differently but if we are to consider political pragmatism, differential treatment (perceived or otherwise) is dangerous therefore authorities should endeavour to adopt scrupulously equal treatment as far as possible.
"not all pseudo-environments are equally wrong"
Hold on, let's pause there for a second. That seems just as profound, if not moreso, than the subsequent rejoinder (that they are all, nonetheless, still wrong.) Focusing on the first clause might even crack open a glimmer of hope for alleviating the divisions.
As noted, these pseudo-environments bear only a partial and contingent relationship to the universal true environment. Since events are constantly unfolding in the outer (true) environment, it follows that different pseudo-environments will go through phases of relative "wrongness" - an array of stopped watches (or more charitably, uncalibrated watches) taking turns being closest to right at different times of day.
Which leads to one of my pet theories: I think the 2015-2025 decade, ESPECIALLY the lockdown/blm/censorship half of it, coincided with a time when the populist-right's psuedo environment just happened to be "least wrong" of the available options. Now even the socialists winning elections in NYC feel the need to distance themselves from that era, let alone anyone from any moderate faction. But at the time it was only the populist right pushing back against any of it.
You see, framing it this way gives an opening for acknowledging that some group you may despise (for many those are the "fascists!") had access to kernels of universal truth that your own pseudo-environment filtered out, without requiring any ongoing belief that their worldview is fundamentally more correct or righteous than yours. In fact I happen to believe the populist right is no longer particularly close to the truth for the 2025+ era issues, and that pivot required no great act of conversion or overcoming cognitive dissonance on my part. It's just about recognizing our shared, fallible humanity or at least, lacking that, some basic statistical plausibilty.
This is a great article! I heard a joke years ago. A husband and wife are arguing over the room temperature. She says, “it’s too cold!” He says, “it’s too hot!” Tis, tisn’t, round and round. He goes to the thermostat and it reads 72 degrees and says, “look 72 degrees, too hot!” She says, “no too cold!” Fact: It’s 72 degrees. Opinion: Too Hot or Too Cold.
I retired eight years ago as a Facilities Maintenance Technition! Where to set a thermostat in a public space is a great topic of controversy with the occupants of the building. I found that a setting where there were about as many complaints of too cold as there were too hot was about right. Most people didn’t complain in the elderly boarding homes I worked in if I aimed at 72 degrees. But, there was always someone unhappy with the setting–especially in the April and October seasonal transition times. T0M =)
That's about the size of it. We don't have to "deny the facts" to inhabit different worlds. There are always plenty of facts to go around, and some of them always say what we want them to say. We just have to declare some of them to be signal, and other facts to be noise.
I feel like the answer should be to accept that reality doesn't follow any sort of overarching narrative and just focus on dealing with each situation as it comes up, but maybe that's simply not within human nature. I dunno.
In my early athletic career, and then long corporate career where I have been given the privilege and challenge to try and unravel human behavior related to performance. There are of course many facets to personality traits that make us all unique. However, there are classification tools that help optimize our understanding and processes for dealing with the variance.
One of those classifications I have settled on is the relative level of emotional noise that surrounds and influences a person's critical thinking cognitive capability. There is a spectrum, but people high on emotional processing are in one category, and those with the capability compartmentalize strong emotions to get to a rational, factual and objective determination are the other.
It is The Emotionals and the Rationals.
And although there are plenty of people crossing the gender divide on this biopic behavior classification, females tend to dominate the former (Emotionals), and males the latter (Rationals).
Democrats/liberal progressives also dominate the Emotionals, and Republicans/conservatives the rationals.
I frequently test this theory, and it is always proven.
The problem with the Emotionals is that cognitive process gets tied up with their emotions. They often do not have the emotional intelligence to realize that their strong feels are supplementing fact. They feel-think and then come to conclusions that they are sure are correct, and those that oppose are stupid not seeing things the same way. But generally their arguments fall apart in a debate of facts and logic... which is why they also like their safe spaces and groupthink bubbles... because the logic shatters their feeling good about themselves, and feeling good is their primary pursuit.
Say things that make them feel bad, and they will go so far as to celebrate your assassination. Their need to protect from feeling bad about their ideas and positions is THAT strong.
Now, I think we are born with these strong emotive traits, but they are either reinforced or corrected for. Certainly, children are not expected to control nor understand their emotional impulses. They have to learn in their development to adult. But the lessons for adults are generally those of self-determination, responsibility and accountability. Because when you are on the front-line, you cannot afford making mistakes in judgement from strong emotional impulses. You have to calculate the probability and decide accordingly.
It is females because they don't have the evolutionary biology of front-line accountability. They are in fact protected from their out-of-control behavior by strong men that want to have sex with them. Mothering is an extension mechanism, as mothers care for people and thus the people cared from can shirk responsibility for being on the front-line.
This also explains the urban vs rural difference between liberals and conservatives. Urban living is having copious services for every-day life. Rural living you might have to raise your own chicken, butcher it and cook it. Urban people are mothered. Rural people are on the front line.
These differences have always existed. The reason that they are now a problem is the rise of females into power positions in our institutions where they are attempting to mainstream emotional behavior over rational behavior.
It looks crazy to the many of us... because, frankly, it is.
I think you've just provided a perfect validation of the original article.
Frank has used his almost opaque corporate mumbo jumbo to say the same things he always says: dumb right-wing, misogynistic troll BS.
I'd always seen his longer comments as opaque mumbo jumbo, but you're right, it does have a very empty, corporate feel to it as well.
So weak Brucy. I am sorry for your retardation.
A low value, low critical thinking, comment from the feminized left. Why would I expect anything else?
Ah, poor Frank. You really can't engage without me insults. I feel you might benefit ftom some feminization lessons from your wife.
The insults started from you Kenny.
Where was the insult? I never took you to be subject to micro aggressions.
Recommendation for you Kenny. Instead of one-sentence quips in opposition to something that you disagree with, try actually making a cogent and intelligent argument in defense of your beliefs. Brevity can be a beautiful thing except when just crap comments that are designed to deflect the topic and denigrate others. You must feel good at some level posting a dig, but it demonstrates weak critical thinking skills and frankly is boring as all hell on a place like Substack where long-form discussion was the original design. Just go to Bluesky and X if you like one-sentence insults trolling for likes.
White and Black are always capitalized in my personal and any official writing because, like Greek, Korean, Indigenous, they designate a defined social group. Women is a designated social group as well but to my mind the issue is ethnicity. We also capitalize Caucasian though not always Negro. Hmmmm.
Anyway, when we are confronted by patterns, we can choose to ignore them or not, a battle of examples like lynchings placed against legacy classroom seats. In the 60s and 70s my wife and I dealt with knotty problems as people asked us, the first Black/White couple married legally in Arizona, to "talk about race." Much less so now. Progress? My Black son visited my classroom one day and when he left the students asked, "Why is he so tall?" I'm short and White but that's where they went. Progress?
Isn't 'pseudo-environment' the same thing as 'the narrative'? IOW, the essential thing is the story that is told about what is going on?
One thought your essay sparked for me is that interpretation may be even more fundamental than factual disagreement.
Humans, and increasingly AI systems, cannot operate on reality directly. We necessarily compress the world into workable models before we can reason about it. In that sense, interpretation is not simply a source of polarization. It is a prerequisite for intelligence itself.
I have been exploring this from a different angle in a couple of recent essays. One argues that civilization increasingly treats machine outputs as objective facts because institutions need stable authorities to coordinate at scale. Another asks why even anti-authoritarian AI systems inevitably end up depending on some form of authority.
Together, they have led me to a question I am still working through. Perhaps what we call “hallucinations” are not merely bugs, but the inevitable abstractions every intelligent system needs in order to think. The challenge may not be eliminating them, but building institutions that remain aware that their models are always incomplete.
Your distinction between factual and interpretive polarization fits beautifully into that broader conversation.