[FRIAM] projection propaganda

[glen]

Nice. I'll try. There's an arc to your post that, I think, mirrors the arc of the McGilchrist rhetoric I've learned about second hand. And it's not an unusual arc. We all do it. And, therefore, we all need to help each other recognize it (and, in my opinion, avoid it).

1. The hype trap - The case of plant communication is a great example of where overly zealous, even if well-meaning, extrapolators "champion" their way of thinking. The runaway zealotry is followed by a reactionary rejection. The reaction is as ill-informed as the inflation, in spite of the skeptics' posture as hard-nosed realists. Then the more modest, humble yet still curious worker ants keep chipping away at the problem until there's a foundation to build upon. The inflation-reaction is made all the more intense by the con-men who gladly take the Great Man role.

2. Left- and right-brain - While you, and McGilcrhist, give some lip service to the variation, you *leap* very quickly from that variation into the gravity well of "large preponderance", "correlated with most of", "in most people", "the only form that matters anymore", etc. This leap feels very much to me like the same sort of thing happening in the other thread(s) attempting to develop an intuition of "entropy" (whatever that word might mean). Over-reliance on one *type* of probability distribution (those with intuitive parameters like "mean", "mode', etc.) prevents us from thinking broadly about variation. When a a low N study says something like "19% of subjects vary from the normal bilateralization pattern in 2 functions" - paraphrased, it feels intuitive. And we *preemptively* register that most people mostly follow the typical pattern.

But that's not what science is or does. It's job is to *explain* the 19%. The focus is not on the 80% but on the 19%. And the very first job is to find out how stable those numbers are, including varying the types of distributions to see what might fit better.

3. The Left-brain metaphor - To be clear, science, indeed all STEM, requires both synthesis and analysis, meticulous rigor and lazy daydreaming. Any *outrageous* rhetoric you see that claims "other forms of cognition" are not deemed valuable is simply false; or if you don't believe me, go to a music festival or even your local farmer's market. Everyone I know, anyway, combines this other knowledge with their more formal knowledge on a regular basis. Most of the STEM people I know do mushrooms or eat marijuana and are adamantly unashamed about it. At the very least, they play instruments, paint, or whatever. It's silly to think we/they don't value such.

Of course, many "creatives" are duped (and have duped themselves) into seeing the world the way you describe. My more artistic friends will denigrate themselves, saying they're "not smart" or whatever. But that condition isn't new. The persnickety bean counters have *always* tried to Lord it over the creatives, as long as we've existed. Hell, it's probably true in other apes, too. The explanation for this is that the bean counting is right there in front of your face. The concreteness of their produce is obvious to all. And that obviousness inflates their ego. "Look at how productive I am!" And the more repeatable the process, the more productive they are, the more they strew their banal constructs across the earth.

4. This is NOT "left-brained". This is "I'm smarter than you are." We can leave aside the left-brain metaphor, which is blatantly stupid in my not so humble opinion. And we can focus on reinforcement learning. The bean counters, because what they're doing is repeatable, can hammer it home over and over again until you can't hear anything else. But what precedes the behavior of the bean counters are the creatives who take informal knowledge and turn it into formal knowledge. And in order to do that, you have to not only recognize "other ways of knowing", you have to be very good at them. As Popper argued, science is *open*. Hypotheses can come from anywhere.

Lastly, this rhetoric about cultural hegemony is great. I'm not objecting to that. But i am objecting to the unjustified assertion that it's rooted in physiology. That has not been shown. And until/unless it is, those evoking the metaphor land squarely in the hype-generators, inflationary assertions of Great Men and their analogs. It's a fallacy of composition, not a problem with the intra-layer, domain-specific work, but with the inter-layer mappings.

Sorry this post has so many words. If I had more time, I'd write a shorter post.

On 7/13/25 7:46 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> I am going out on a limb here, and take this post as an invitation to a potential conversation about McGilchrist and ...
> 
> *First*, I want to note a parallel between a book I am reading on plant "communication," "intelligence," and "consciousness." (/The Light Eaters/, by Zoe Schlanger) The book reviews current research in botany. She notes that research in this area was derailed in 1973 with the publication of The Secret Life of Plants, which became a bestseller, despite being a compendium of dubious, overblown, and pseudo, scientific claims about plant consciousness and intelligence.  Legitimate research in this area immediately ceased (could not be funded). But honest research is resuming, cautiously, and the findings are pretty darn interesting.
> 
> Something similar happened in right/left brain studies. A host of faddish books of dubious validity were published and tarred the whole field of study. It is fair to approach McGilchrist with caution, lest his work be yet another example of the pseudo; but unfair to automatically assume so.
> 
> *Methodological Note*: McGilchrist, Neuro-Theology, Neuro-psychology, essentially all of Cognitive Science; has some grounding in finding correlations between electrical activity in brain-loci and observed phenomena. Correlation is not causation, of course, nor is it "explanation."
> 
> *Initial Question/Answer*: Why to so many species, including human beings, have brains with two distinct lobes? Because they must be capable of two simultaneous activities. Using a bird to illustrate; one activity is to locate and consume food, the other is to watch the sky for predators. Tentative conclusion, one lobe of the brain specializes in "manipulating the World," the other in "attending to the World."
> 
> *Assertions/first order observations:*
> 
> 1) all cognition utilizes the whole brain
> 2) the brain has substantial, but not absolute, plasticity. Functions lost in one lobe (e.g., by injury) can, in many cases, be replicated in the other lobe.
> 3) Functions are statistically assigned to lobes, allowing for some variation. E.g., 80% of subjects will show a large preponderance of activity in one lobe when observed exhibiting a specific behavior.
> 
> *Observation*: The use of language (symbols, including numbers, in general), engaging in rational/scientific/computational thinking, etc. (collectively labeled, Left-Brain-Cognition, LBC) is correlated with most of the brain activity, in most people, occurring in the left lobe. Not surprising, perhaps, because these are the tools that humans use to manipulate the World.
> 
> *First Extrapolation:* LBC conferred a dramatic Cultural Evolution, not physical evolution, advantage to human beings. Humans can use LBC to manipulate the world into supporting human life in every clime (we did not physically adapt to them), upgrade standard of living, even destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons.
> 
> *Commentary:* Humans in the industrialized world became so enamored of, so besotted with, our LBC abilities and the results they provided, that we came to believe no other way of thinking had value. STEM is, nearly, the only form of education that matters anymore. University departments are funded in proportion to their embrace of "scientific principles." Fine Arts and Cultural Anthropology (both of whom eschew science for the most part) are left aside. UX (nee HCI) specialists are deemed far less valuable than full-stack programmers. Ad infinitum.
> 
> *Primary Conclusion:* LBC has become so dominant, it is difficult to see any other form of cognition, and we have lost almost all of our ability to "attend" to the world - to connect with it, to see it as a whole, to 'empathize' with it. And this loss diminishes our humanity.
> 
> *Personal Note:* I find McGilchrist compelling. In large part because he provides confirmation bias for long held positions. I read Korzibski (non-Aristotelian) when I was in junior high school, more interested in James than Peirce, became a critic of science with Feyerabend, replaced classical physics (retained interest in Pauli, Feynman, Prigogine, et. al.) with Asian philosophy, first semester of college, began hallucinogens second semester of college, and have been a consistent and constant critic of software engineering and its mindset.
> 
> davew
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jul 9, 2025, at 3:06 PM, glen wrote:
>  > 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 <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 <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 <mailto: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 <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 <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 <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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