[FRIAM] projection propaganda

[glen]

Ian McGilchrist's extrapolations from organism-scoped attributes to psychsocial (and beyond to society) scoping seems to commit a fallacy of composition along the same lines as ascribing projection to nations/regimes. At the risk of SteveS accusing me of false humility, know that I haven't read any of McGilchrist's works and rarely know what I'm talking about anyway. My posts here are as much a plea for assistance as they are anything else.

1) So the first problem I have is the inter-individual variation in brain lateralization. It seems like a fairly large proportion of us (e.g. 19% for one study) deviate from the normal bilateral pattern in 2 functions (where functions are things like arithmetic, spatial processing, face recognition, etc.). The recent turn from generalized/averaging medicine toward precision medicine helps us guess that this composition from individual to populations is suspect.

2) Then there's a jump from the disposition of functions to psychological effects. It confirms my bias toward parallax to see studies that show increased "fluid intelligence" in those that have significant hemispheric asymmetry. But given how little we actually know about how mind arises from brain, any leap across this divide is suspect.

3) The next jump is from patterns we're observing in these (usually low N) studies to biological evolution. Admittedly, physiological attributes may be well justified here. But mixing biological evolution with evolutionary psychology is worrisome, especially given how often it's exploited in Scientism-inclined culture war rhetoric like the transphobic/manosphere right.

4) And finally, as a cultural evolution rubbernecker, it's fairly easy for me to buy into statistical trends in behavior and social artifacts like music or gender roles. But to invoke loaded concepts like "Western society" and suggest we have any kind of good handle on how how those behaviors and artifacts mix to result in consequences like post-truth or conceptions of sanctity is a bit much.

Again, I haven't (and probably won't) read McGilchrist's tomes myself. And that rightly limits the accuracy and efficacy of any worry I might have. But it's also useful to recognize something like Stockholm Syndrome or Brandolini's Law ... or even the [multi|inter]disciplinary effect that naive outsiders can often see features of some paradigm those fully embedded cannot. McGilchrist may well be guilty of a kind of Gish Gallup, *because* of the length of the tomes. Unlike a corpus of peer-reviewed publications, it's easy to get lost in the sea of words, even *if* he's capable of walking up and down the metaphor stack.

It just seems to me like there's a significant risk of Scientism.

On 7/7/25 8:14 AM, glen wrote:
> So if I read the "research" part correctly, the more complex (social) structure allows them to read organismal expression as a signal/symbol and avoid the fighting that would otherwise occur in the simpler (social) structure.
> 
> Specifically to Eric's question: "is it the reality, or the heavy weight on metaphors ...?" This came to me this morning:
> 
> Bram Vaassen (Umeå University), "Mental Causation for Standard Dualists"
> https://newworkinphilosophy.substack.com/p/bram-vaassen-umea-university-mental
> 
> I'd claim it needn't be either the reality of such compositions nor the reliance upon the metaphor that needs demonstrating, at least to us lumpers <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters>. What needs demonstrating is that those of us who do overly rely on metaphor are *capable* of concretizing/literalizing our metaphors when necessary.
> 
> E.g. if some pundit claims the US is projecting ("engaging in projection propaganda") when it accuses Russia or China of some motivation, a good interlocutor will damage the flow of conversation and test whether the pundit can restate their claim more concretely/literally. Another e.g. might be peri-entropy metaphors. >8^D
> 
> It seems to me this skill (the ability to walk up and down the metaphor stack) is critical to good science and especially science communication [⛧]. Here's me testing the waters for "projection propaganda": Going back to using the more literal as signals in the meta-game, the set of behaviors surrounding patriotism et al have always seemed to me like markers identifying people as uncomfortable in their own skin. And there, Trump's crowd is the paper tiger, where Putin's and Jinping's crowds have the advantage. I'm still on the fence re: Musk, though. Vitamin K may lend you some organismal at-homeness. The primary damage Trump's crowd is doing to the US lies in making us as uncomfortable in our skin as they are ... We're being infected with his TACO cowardice because we're less and less coherent about who and what we are (even if whatever we thought we were was a fiction).
> 
> 
> [⛧] Full disclosure, I believe science communication is more primitive than science. If you can't enlist/coerce others to your methods, then you're not doing science. The lone genius working on her "science" and whose notes forever remain encrypted nonsense, is nothing but a mystic, even if it tracks perfectly with reality.
> 
> On 7/3/25 1:10 PM, Santafe wrote:
>> I don’t know that it holds up, or furnishes evidence, but it seems to me our common language is strewn with metaphors showing that people cognize groups as if they are individuals, whether or not they actually would deserve it under a proper composition.  I will give examples in a moment.  But first a bit of something that was research:
>>
>> Before he became America’s Morality Guide, Jonathan Haidt did some work that I liked, looking at the language around social emotions, and arguing that it still showed explicitly metaphorical marks of its origins in body sensations.  The cases I remember are things like social uses of “disgust”, which of course uses the roots for being (literally) food-sick.  Haidt had a list of these, which he argued showed a common pattern, going from the more embodied-concrete to the social-abstract.  It seems to me like i remember Jessica Flack’s making arguments of a similar sort within comparative primatology, for embodied actions, like grimacing, grooming, or things of that sort.  That they are early attested in primate groups in concrete contexts, like aggression and submission, and then keep their form while mediating more abstract categories (in this case, more stable social roles) of dominance and subordination, in primate branches that seem to have more hierarchy in the social 
>> structure and more complexity it its categories.  The difference being stark: that in the aggression/submission dichotomy, these are behaviors that occur when fights happen, as parts of settling their outcome short of one of the fighters incapacitating or killing the other, whereas dominance/subordination are social roles that head off fights, by acting as if their outcome has already been established without actually having the fight.  (the _actual_ function of the lightning rod, which precludes lightning strikes, as contrasted with its common-language gloss, which people think of as drawing them to itself).
>>
>> Anyway, the obvious examples that everybody knows, in language:
>> Patriotism and Fatherland
>> Mother tongue
>> Alma Mater
>> I have a sense of knowing there are another 1 or 2 that use explicit family-words that I am not remembering.  There was a time when I was alert to these things, and seemed to have a running list of maybe a dozen such expressions.
>>
>> So the question of whether individual behaviors _actually do_ compose to group-level phenomena while preserving their type is a legitimate one, and the thing that micro-to-macro in economist most relies on and doesn’t generally fulfill.  But for the projection effect Glen talks about below, is it the reality, or the heavy weight on metaphors in people’s reception that needs to be demonstrated?
>>
>> This seems like Nick’s bread and butter, and also an area where EricC can inject some much needed professional criticality.
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Jul 4, 2025, at 0:34, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm used to interpersonal projection. E.g. Joe Rogan's supplements vs. his accusations re the mRNA vaccines:
>>>
>>> Rogan's Big Pharma Scandal Keeps Getting Weirder
>>> https://youtu.be/bogYSu3cCLg?si=U1Jk93n5DC4gppdx
>>>
>>> But I'm not habituated to the analogy of projection ("lady doth protest too much") to national/party scale propaganda:
>>>
>>> Projection as an Interpersonal Influence Tactic: The Effects of the Pot Calling the Kettle Black
>>> https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672012711010
>>>
>>> I expect man-babies like Trump to accuse their targets of their own misdeeds (https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2ftheconversation.com%2fwhy-trump-accuses-people-of-wrongdoing-he-himself-committed-an-explanation-of-projection-237912&c=E,1,dsyRQszQSTlWaQaHOPF40m7xy43QaKWsPNAEXRnHbHFzA8jfwedUvqHsFVDlkQsR_FZO1zlBJ7LxxE8JR1bS_27IDlBZq91dUf32AtMWDN86gTzHCFEyuxQs&typo=1). And to the extent that the right in the US (including SCOTUS) believe in and achieve the unitary executive, the analogy between interpersonal projection and national or group projection will be more accurate. This is one reason why "projection propaganda" worked well for Russia and China but not so much for the US, because the difference in scope between an individual and a regime was smaller there than here in the US.
>>>
>>> So given that one of my whipping posts is that we bear the burden of showing how group behavior composes from individual behavior before we assert that the map is in any way coherent, I can't use "projection propaganda" without coming up with that composition. If any of you historians or journalists have any clue sticks to hit me with, I'd very much appreciate it.
>>>

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