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Is it necessary to lie to win a controversial public debate?

curryja

by Judith Curry

Serge Galam provides a disturbing answer to this question.

Serge Galam is the father of a field called sociophysics, which is the study of social phenomena from the physics perspectives.

A selection of Galam’s publications that provide an overview (h/t Tomas Milanovic):

The Unexpected Conference – New Trends in Sociophysics was held last November in Amsterdam.  Jeanette Haagsma has a blog post at eHumanities. Some excerpts:

The “Unexpected Conference” in Paris, November 14-16, 2011 brought together more than 35 researchers from Europe, North and South America, and Asia to present current research in the field of sociophysics.  Serge Galam, organizer of this conference and a pioneer in the field, equally reported about the repelling reaction in some parts of the physics community at the beginning of the 80s, when the verdict ‘not suitable for publication’ branded his first thoughts about what we commonly call today sociophysics. The many different presentations encompassed mathematical analysis and comparison of non-linear models, but also applications for urban development (Jean-Pierre Nadal), wine markets (Tatiana Bouzdine Chameeva), and public debates (Alexandre Delanoe) to name a few examples. All presentations showed an unbroken interest in understanding social dynamics by means of concepts and mathematical models rooted in statistical physics and computer sciences. Computational sociology, and in particular the Agent-Based Models community, are nowadays well-appreciated sparring partners for physicists; philosophers (Kate Forbes-Pitt) and physicists (Franco Bagnoli) reflected about ontological and epistemological principles of a “complexity science”.

New data sources – such as statistical information on beliefs from census data across decades  have inspired new models of social conformity (Danny Abrams), but also new approaches to understand scientific careers (Alexander Petersen).

The field has already long passed the stage of a niche for some eccentric pioneers. To the contrary, a variety of groups are working on similar questions, new generations are entering the field, and the activities across different branches of the rapidly growing science system are calling for means of integration and consolidations. The comparison of models, the use of different types of models translating from one description to another (Tyll Krueger), the reflection on the specific nature of a self-constituting social dynamics (David Chavalarias), the sharing of datasets and programs (not a standard in this field by the way); and eventually the production of proceedings, monographs and textbooks (Anirban Chakraborti) seem appropriate steps towards such a consolidation.

Links to the talks can be found [here].

From Boleslaw  Szymanski’s presentation On the Influence of Committed Minorities on Social Consensus:

From Serge Galam’s talk entitled Is it Necessary to Lie to Win a Controversial Public Debate (I am paraphrasing his points for clarity):
Public debates driven by incomplete data (include global warming)

Always, incomplete scientific data ot spare information. Necessity to fill up the missing parts to come up with a complete view of the issue from which rationally motivated political decisions can be made

Policy makers want to rely on public opinion to legitimate their decisions

It is therefore of central importance to determine if what is accepted as the complete theory corresponds to the real scientific status of the issue

Galam poses the following questions about the dynamics of public debate (not necessarily directed at the climate change debate, but certainly very relevant to the climate change debate):

  • Why have alarmists made overstatements while there exists no alternative explanation?
  • Why did alarmists succeed in getting the majority of public opinion to align along their unproved claim ?
  • Why did skeptics who adopt a rigorous scientific position without advocating an alternative claim fail (up to recently) to crystallize at least some part of the public opinion?
  • Why despite the skeptic failure has the alarmist majority been very adamant in slamming the skeptic behavior?
  • Why are alarmists suddenly and quickly loosing support in public opinion?

A perspective from the Galam sequential probabilistic model of opinion dynamics is provided below.

Consider three kinds of agents:

  • Floater: has an opinion and advocates for it, but is susceptible to shifting his opinion if warranted by new arguments
  • Contrarian: takes the choice contrary to the consensus, independently of the choice itself
  • Inflexible: never shifts opinion
The analysis recognizes two separate mechanisms in opinion forming:
  • External:  acts directly on individuals
  • Internal:  results from interactions among individuals
Considering the dynamics of internal interactions of a group of agents, Galam asks:
Will a stable collective and individual opinion emerge?
Model calculation of a democratic process show that to convince the entire population, an opinion must start with acceptance beyond 50%; the opinion then evolves towards extremism.
Adding an additional type of agent:
  • Liars: inflexible agents overstating their assessment
Galam states that the context of inflexibility depends on the nature of the problem:
  • For incomplete data debate, it is lies
  • For political issues it is conviction
  • For religion it is strength of belief
  • For individual interest: funding, career, fear
The model results, when liars are included, show that the strategy for winning a debate:
  • Produce inflexibles on your sideWeaken the basis for inflexibles on the other side
The unfortunate and disturbing conclusions:
  • To adopt a fair discourse is a losing strategy to promote a cause in a public debate
  • To adopt a cynical behavior is the obliged path to win a public debate against unfair and rigid opponents
  • Alternative conclusion: dismiss the increasing weight given to the public opinion in the process of policy making by decision makers
JC comments:  the ideas of Galam and sociophysics are new to me.  I don’t know how to evaluate the technical aspects of Galam’s model, but there are some very interesting (if depressing) insights here.  I find this framework for understanding the debate to be much richer than the ‘motivated reasoning’ framework, although motivated reasoning arguably contributes to inflexibility on both sides (and possibly to “lying”).
I am not sure about the use of the word ‘liar’ in this context; this category seems to also include the overconfident and overly concerned.  In terms of our conventional nomenclature, liars would seem to include both alarmists and deniers.  Inflexibles would include more moderate types (inflexibly convinced and unconvinced).  I’m not sure what role contrarians actually play in the climate debate, although Lindzen is arguably a contrarian.
I’m trying to put Climate Etc. into the context of Galam’s argument.  What I am trying to do is build the community for floaters, and diminish the basis for inflexibles and liars.
If Galam’s main conclusion is correct:
It appears that the decisive goal (to win the public debate competition) should be to get a lead, even small, in the respective inflexible densities.”
Then Climate Etc. is fighting an uphill battle.
I am also wondering about the applicability of these ideas to the group consensus seeking process used by the IPCC, and to what extent the inflexibles have undue influence.
And finally, the extreme polarization of the public debate on climate change seems very difficult to change; perhaps this is why President Obama is not talking about climate change, but rather framing extreme weather adaptation and energy policy in a different way.
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