As promised in the last post, herewith I publish the ingredients in Alt-Right Recipe #1. When you have mastered all these secret ingredients, the following opportunities open up for you:
1) You will be able to invent your own truths.
2) You will be able to recognize truths being invented by other people using similar recipes.
3) You will be qualified to get a job with Breitbart as a journalist writing news articles.
Key ingredients in alt-right Recipe #1 include:
Irrefutable Untestability: A bedrock rule in creating new truth is to pick truths that cannot be proven false. If you claim that 1 million American households are secretly housing terrorist cells, since there are 77 million households in america, you cannot disprove this without searching more than 76 million homes. So as a practical matter your claim can never be proven false. Of course, you must eschew the easily disproven claim: if you say that the world will end on November 9, what do you do on November 10?
Commonplace Truth Warmup: Start your claim with several comfortable truths that everyone agrees upon. Once you have convinced the reader of your truthfulness, you can bring out the whoppers. The grass is green, the sky is blue, all Muslims hate America. One biography of Trump started out, "Donald John Trump, was born June 14, 1946. He will be 70 years old on election day. From the Internet, he is 6'2" or 6'3' and ...." After several true paragraphs like this, he goes on, "Donald Trump is the greatest career achiever of the baby boomer generation." Whoa. Since everything else is true, this must be true too.
False Inductive Logic: Well chosen real-world truths can be combined with false inductive logic to produce a more powerful alternate reality. Consider regular deductive logic: Grass is green, the field is covered with grass. Therefore the field is green. This is the analysis process used by Sherlock Holmes. It is very reliable. But consider this: Grass is green, the field is green. Therefore the field must be covered with grass. This is erroneous inductive logic: the field could be covered with pine trees, limes, or John Deere tractors. In just this way one alt-right blogger shows pictures showing that Muslim jihadists point their finger in the air to celebrate Allah, and other pictures of Barack Obama pointing his finger in the air. We therefore conclude that Obama is a secret Muslim. Note that it is critical that Obama be a *secret* Muslim. Only if it is secret can it be irrefutably untestable.
All Conspiracy All the Time: You can make any invented truth untestable by simply declaring it "secret", and allowing it to be assumed that the conspiracy to keep it secret is vast enough to cover all the people who must know the real-world truth. A recent fascinating example is Donald Trump's assertion that the birther rumors about Barack Obama were secretly started by Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary -- this is particularly delicious since it begs the question, how did Donald, lone discoverer of the truth outside the conspiracy, find out so he could hound Obama with it for so many years? And why did he not name his fellow conspirators until now? Anyway, despite multiple demonstrations that even Masters of Secrecy, like the NSA, lose control of their secrets (Snowden, anyone?), the real-world truth that "two can keep a secret if one of them is dead" is not believed to apply for stories reported on the Internet.
Ad Nauseum: One of the oldest ingredients for the truth inventor's cookbook is to simply repeat a falsehood over and over ... and over and over ... again. This is how the $15 minimum wage went from being self-evidently unwise to left liberal gospel without the acquisition of a single fact or datum supporting the belief that this would have none of the tragic side effects its enthusiasts deny. An alt-right example is Trump's ad nauseum naming of Clinton as Lyin' Hillary. According to Politifact, Hillary tells whoppers roughly 30% of the time. Pretty bad, right? Except that Trump tells whoppers about 75% of the time. Trump is the record-holder for most lyin' presidential candidate in recorded history. Yet polls say he is considered more trustworthy, an immense triumph for the Ad Nauseum technique. Meanwhile, the repetition ad nauseum is a key part of other whoppers like Hillary's Parkinson's, and Obama's birth in Kenya.
Testimonial: I have repeatedly reminded people that statistics are, in general, lies. This is particularly true in economics, where all the stats are slippery, and you have economic laws giving you a baseline of what one can really expect in the real-world. But there are actual real-world facts that are bigger lies than even statistics. Such a fact is the carefully-selected testimonial. When Trump brings a person to his rally to talk about a friend or relative who was harmed by an illegal immigrant, he mysteriously does not bring thousands of people who had friends and relatives harmed by legal citizens. However slippery and lie-rich statistics may be, the testimonial that stands alone with no data or even statistics to show it is the great population-wide issue being implied, is worse.
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1) You will be able to invent your own truths.
2) You will be able to recognize truths being invented by other people using similar recipes.
3) You will be qualified to get a job with Breitbart as a journalist writing news articles.
Key ingredients in alt-right Recipe #1 include:
Irrefutable Untestability: A bedrock rule in creating new truth is to pick truths that cannot be proven false. If you claim that 1 million American households are secretly housing terrorist cells, since there are 77 million households in america, you cannot disprove this without searching more than 76 million homes. So as a practical matter your claim can never be proven false. Of course, you must eschew the easily disproven claim: if you say that the world will end on November 9, what do you do on November 10?
Commonplace Truth Warmup: Start your claim with several comfortable truths that everyone agrees upon. Once you have convinced the reader of your truthfulness, you can bring out the whoppers. The grass is green, the sky is blue, all Muslims hate America. One biography of Trump started out, "Donald John Trump, was born June 14, 1946. He will be 70 years old on election day. From the Internet, he is 6'2" or 6'3' and ...." After several true paragraphs like this, he goes on, "Donald Trump is the greatest career achiever of the baby boomer generation." Whoa. Since everything else is true, this must be true too.
False Inductive Logic: Well chosen real-world truths can be combined with false inductive logic to produce a more powerful alternate reality. Consider regular deductive logic: Grass is green, the field is covered with grass. Therefore the field is green. This is the analysis process used by Sherlock Holmes. It is very reliable. But consider this: Grass is green, the field is green. Therefore the field must be covered with grass. This is erroneous inductive logic: the field could be covered with pine trees, limes, or John Deere tractors. In just this way one alt-right blogger shows pictures showing that Muslim jihadists point their finger in the air to celebrate Allah, and other pictures of Barack Obama pointing his finger in the air. We therefore conclude that Obama is a secret Muslim. Note that it is critical that Obama be a *secret* Muslim. Only if it is secret can it be irrefutably untestable.
All Conspiracy All the Time: You can make any invented truth untestable by simply declaring it "secret", and allowing it to be assumed that the conspiracy to keep it secret is vast enough to cover all the people who must know the real-world truth. A recent fascinating example is Donald Trump's assertion that the birther rumors about Barack Obama were secretly started by Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary -- this is particularly delicious since it begs the question, how did Donald, lone discoverer of the truth outside the conspiracy, find out so he could hound Obama with it for so many years? And why did he not name his fellow conspirators until now? Anyway, despite multiple demonstrations that even Masters of Secrecy, like the NSA, lose control of their secrets (Snowden, anyone?), the real-world truth that "two can keep a secret if one of them is dead" is not believed to apply for stories reported on the Internet.
Ad Nauseum: One of the oldest ingredients for the truth inventor's cookbook is to simply repeat a falsehood over and over ... and over and over ... again. This is how the $15 minimum wage went from being self-evidently unwise to left liberal gospel without the acquisition of a single fact or datum supporting the belief that this would have none of the tragic side effects its enthusiasts deny. An alt-right example is Trump's ad nauseum naming of Clinton as Lyin' Hillary. According to Politifact, Hillary tells whoppers roughly 30% of the time. Pretty bad, right? Except that Trump tells whoppers about 75% of the time. Trump is the record-holder for most lyin' presidential candidate in recorded history. Yet polls say he is considered more trustworthy, an immense triumph for the Ad Nauseum technique. Meanwhile, the repetition ad nauseum is a key part of other whoppers like Hillary's Parkinson's, and Obama's birth in Kenya.
Testimonial: I have repeatedly reminded people that statistics are, in general, lies. This is particularly true in economics, where all the stats are slippery, and you have economic laws giving you a baseline of what one can really expect in the real-world. But there are actual real-world facts that are bigger lies than even statistics. Such a fact is the carefully-selected testimonial. When Trump brings a person to his rally to talk about a friend or relative who was harmed by an illegal immigrant, he mysteriously does not bring thousands of people who had friends and relatives harmed by legal citizens. However slippery and lie-rich statistics may be, the testimonial that stands alone with no data or even statistics to show it is the great population-wide issue being implied, is worse.
>> All Blog Posts <<