M: Please help me in working on a hypothesis in terms of causality. First in one direction, then the other, and then as a feedback loop. And help me extend, hypothetically, if it's true, what each would imply. The thought revolves around a certain personality type which likely has some universality, but which is particularly captured in the current Republican subset of people who equate victory with owning the libs. People who have defined success not at accuracy or achievement, but simply at causing someone else to be angry despite their possessing of accuracy or achievements. The hypothetical causality I'd like to examine in one direction would be that there is a certain kind of personality, a subset of humanity, who through nature or nurture, believe that victory is either only achieved through pissing off someone else, or who are satisfied with not succeeding, or not being accurate, so long as the other side is unhappy as well. In the other direction, I'm wondering about the induced effect there could be on a psyche when that kind of standard of success is seen as replacing actual tangible success or accuracy or anything of the sort. And I'm concerned about the feedback loop if they were to fold in on themselves in a cycle of self-reinforcement. Assume that this hypothesis is true, and tell me what you can induce or deduce or whatever about that kind of people and the effect they would have on the world if each of those versions is true. The psychology causing the alteration of the definition of victory, the victory definition causing a change on psychology, and then the loop that would be generated if both were true. I'm not saying to assume that everyone follows this, only a subset of people, griefers or whatever. The people whose sole purpose in life seems to have been reduced to quote-unquote owning other people, some of whom they aren't even directly involved with.
G: This is actually a useful way to separate three different hypotheses that are often conflated. Rather than asking "why are these people like this?", you're asking three different causal questions.
I'll deliberately treat this as a general psychological subtype that can appear anywhere, even if you suspect it is especially visible in one current political movement.
Some people already possess a psychology that defines victory as reducing another person's status or emotional equilibrium.
In this model, "owning people" is a symptom, not the disease.
Possible underlying traits include combinations of:
Under this model, accuracy becomes instrumental rather than terminal.
Truth isn't valuable because it's true.
Truth is valuable if it helps your side.
If it doesn't, another tool is selected.
That means tactics become interchangeable:
They're all just tools for changing status.
If you removed politics entirely, many of these people would behave similarly elsewhere:
The object changes.
The competitive psychology remains.
Instead imagine someone who originally cared about ordinary achievement.
Then they're immersed in an environment where the only rewarded behavior is "making opponents mad."
Gradually the brain relearns what success means.
This resembles reinforcement learning.
Originally:
Success = accomplishing something.
Later:
Success = visible emotional reaction.
Eventually:
Success = provoking reaction regardless of objective reality.
The reward system literally shifts.
Instead of receiving dopamine from solving problems...
...it receives dopamine from social impact.
Especially negative impact.
Psychologically this resembles variable-ratio reward schedules.
Sometimes one insult goes viral.
Sometimes it doesn't.
That unpredictability actually strengthens the habit.
Objective reality slowly becomes less motivating.
Someone may stop asking:
"Is this true?"
and begin asking
"Will this get a reaction?"
This is a profound cognitive shift.
Reality becomes secondary to engagement.
This is the most interesting.
Start with someone already somewhat dominance-oriented.
Then place them inside an environment that rewards provocation.
Their existing tendency becomes amplified.
Then each successful provocation further reshapes their psychology.
Eventually the behavior is no longer strategic.
It becomes identity.
Now we're no longer talking about tactics.
We're talking about self-definition.
"I am someone who makes them mad."
At that point, success has become detached from external reality.
The loop becomes:
Initial psychology
↓
Enjoys dominance
↓
Provocation succeeds
↓
Brain rewards provocation
↓
Provocation becomes identity
↓
Identity seeks more provocation
↓
Need increasingly stronger provocation
↓
Repeat
Notice what disappears.
Achievement.
If emotional reaction becomes the scoreboard...
...actual accomplishment matters less.
Suppose someone says
"I cured cancer."
If the response is
"Yeah but you made liberals cry"
that becomes the larger reward.
Conversely,
suppose someone completely fails.
If they can still make opponents furious...
the failure doesn't psychologically register as failure.
That's important.
Negative feedback—the mechanism by which humans normally learn—stops functioning.
Reality loses its corrective power.
Every reward system experiences habituation.
Yesterday's provocation becomes today's baseline.
So escalation becomes almost inevitable.
You need:
Not necessarily because ideology changes.
Because the nervous system adapts.
This resembles tolerance in addiction.
Another prediction:
Opponents become psychologically necessary.
Not merely inconvenient.
Necessary.
Without an enemy...
there is no victory.
Without victory...
identity weakens.
Therefore maintaining conflict becomes rewarding.
Resolution becomes threatening.
Peace literally removes the source of self-esteem.
Truth loses value because truth isn't what produces reward.
Instead information is evaluated by questions like
Notice that none require accuracy.
False information can outperform true information if its emotional payoff is greater.
A community built around this incentive system gradually selects for different leadership.
Instead of rewarding
it increasingly rewards
The personalities best adapted to those incentives rise.
Moderates become comparatively boring.
The irony is that such a community can become surprisingly vulnerable.
Because reality doesn't disappear.
Infrastructure still fails.
Economies still obey economics.
Diseases still spread.
Military logistics still matter.
Eventually objective reality reasserts itself.
The group's reward system, however, has become partially disconnected from objective performance.
So failure may produce not reflection but a search for someone else to upset, because that still generates the familiar feeling of success.
I'd avoid framing this as "people who enjoy making others angry."
Lots of healthy people enjoy irritating rivals in bounded contexts—sports trash talk, friendly teasing, satire, competitive games.
The sharper distinction is between dominance-based victory and reality-based victory.
That distinction maps onto broader psychological concepts without implying that everyone in a political group shares it. It also yields a testable prediction: if someone consistently treats visible frustration from opponents as outweighing factual correction or practical outcomes, then the reward structure they're operating under is primarily about status and dominance rather than truth or problem-solving.
M: I would modify the definition of domination-based victory because domination isn't necessary for someone to declare victory in the paradigm I'm talking about and that I have observed. That is, the perception of victory seems to be sufficient and self-defining, particularly if there is even a small group that buys in simultaneously. I think I've even had a minor run-in with a situation like that where basically a small group of people, like three or four, whom I was equipped to crush both in conversation and physically, seemed to walk away satisfied with me being confused because I sure as hell wasn't dominated and I wasn't stopped in what I was doing or whatever. And it didn't seem like a kind of sour grapes or whatever. It seems as though there are people who literally have managed to define victory for themselves through perception of their own victory by irritating or frustrating others without there actually being anything that could literally be called domination involved. You don't have to pull that entire thing apart, just understand that dominance is not the word that I would use to encompass the entirety of the situation. Although, there are some for whom that psychology would come into play. With that correction, I would like you to look at political events in the United States in the last six months or so, and see where this hypothesis maps onto the actuality of the world. Take your time and think about it, please.
G: I’m going to treat the operative mechanism as self-certified victory through eliciting reaction, not domination. I’ll look for recent cases where practical outcomes, accuracy, or even control were secondary to the shared feeling that opponents had been upset.
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G: Your correction changes the model substantially.
What you are describing is not necessarily domination, humiliation, persuasion, or even obstruction. It is closer to self-ratifying antagonistic victory:
I count as having won because I produced a noticeable disturbance in an opponent, and my group agrees that this disturbance signifies victory.
The opponent does not have to concede. The provocateur does not have to gain anything. The opponent may remain fully capable, retain control of the situation, and accomplish everything they intended. Confusion, irritation, disgust, or the expenditure of attention can nevertheless be converted into a collectively certified “win.”
That distinction maps disturbingly well onto several American political developments from roughly January through July 2026. I cannot establish individual psychological motives from public events. But we can ask whether the observable incentive structure fits your hypothesis.
The Department of Homeland Security’s immigration publicity is probably the strongest recent example.
AP reported in February that immigration operations were being given conspicuous, mocking names and promoted through official statements whose tone was deliberately punchy and provocative. The controversy was not accidental background noise: whether the names were “funny” or offensive became part of the political product. citeturn938273search13
That matters because ordinary government communications have instrumental purposes:
The newer format adds something else:
The operation therefore has two outputs. One is whatever immigration enforcement actually accomplishes. The other is reaction production.
Your hypothesis predicts that the second can progressively displace the first.
That seems especially plausible where publicity becomes more vivid than the measurable result. The administration’s immigration communications have employed memes, mocking language, shackling imagery, ideologically loaded slogans, and theatrical presentation. AP reported that official posts during the Minnesota immigration crisis used language and imagery associated by researchers with far-right or white-nationalist themes, while officials dismissed the criticism as overreaction. citeturn938273news23
Under an ordinary persuasion model, accusations that the messaging resembles extremist propaganda would constitute potentially serious communication failure. Under the self-ratifying model, the accusations can be metabolized as success:
That is almost exactly the feedback loop you proposed.
Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center is revealing for the same reason.
The facility became a vivid political brand. It was then closed after operating for only part of a year amid criticism of conditions, civil-rights concerns, and legal and environmental disputes. Detainees were transferred elsewhere. citeturn938273news25
By conventional standards, you would assess it through questions such as:
But the branded spectacle may possess value independent of all those answers. If the principal remembered achievement is that opponents hated “Alligator Alcatraz,” then closure or operational failure does not entirely erase the internally perceived victory.
This produces a strange political form:
The symbol can succeed while the institution fails.
Indeed, failure can sometimes strengthen the story. The facility can be remembered not as an unsuccessful administrative project but as something “the left,” judges, environmentalists, or civil-liberties groups were forced to destroy. The group thereby converts practical defeat into proof of the symbol’s potency.
That is not quite sour grapes. Sour grapes means devaluing an unattainable prize. This is closer to changing the unit of measurement after the fact—or, eventually, before the fact.
The actual objective becomes unnecessary because the antagonistic episode itself is the reward.
The renaming of the Kennedy Center offers a cleaner symbolic case.
In December 2025, a board filled with Trump allies voted to add Trump’s name to the John F. Kennedy Center, despite serious questions about whether the board had legal authority to rename an institution whose name was established by Congress. The move provoked predictable opposition from Democrats, Kennedy family members, artists, and others. citeturn178296search1turn178296news25
Even accepting that supporters sincerely believed Trump deserved the honor, the action’s practical public benefit is difficult to identify. It did not improve the center’s acoustics, programming, finances, attendance, maintenance, or accessibility merely by changing the name.
Its immediate outputs were chiefly representational:
This fits your corrected model especially well because domination was not required to complete the emotional transaction. The cultural world did not have to respect the new name. Congress did not have to validate it. Artists did not have to submit psychologically. The board could simply declare the reality, provoke resistance, and then experience the resistance as confirmation of the declaration’s significance.
It is a form of political speech act in which the in-group says:
We won because we said we won, and your objection demonstrates why saying it mattered.
That is self-sealing.
In February, Trump’s account posted an AI-generated video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The White House initially defended it as an internet meme, the post was removed after bipartisan condemnation, and Trump declined to apologize. citeturn938273search0turn938273news24
This is an unusually stark instance because the White House ultimately withdrew the content. In an ordinary contest, removal after backlash resembles retreat. Yet the episode could still deliver a satisfactory internal outcome:
There was no need to defend the video as accurate, useful, relevant to policy, or morally coherent. “It was a meme” functioned less as a factual defense than as a categorical escape hatch: the object was not to make a proposition capable of being disproved but to introduce a stimulus.
That distinction is important.
A lie still purports to describe reality and can therefore be contested by evidence. A provocation optimized only for reaction does not necessarily care whether it survives scrutiny. Its useful life may be complete once the reaction occurs.
Trump’s effort to install near the White House a replica of the Christopher Columbus statue that protesters had thrown into Baltimore Harbor also maps onto the pattern. citeturn938273search11
A person can sincerely regard Columbus as historically important and believe the statue deserves restoration. But selecting that particular statue, marked by its destruction during racial-justice protests, gives it a second political function.
It no longer signifies Columbus alone. It signifies:
The artifact becomes valuable partly because it irritates the people who contested it.
This is a recurring mechanism: oppositional consecration. Something becomes sacred, desirable, or politically necessary not because of its intrinsic importance but because an out-group objects to it.
That can radically distort priorities. A government might lavish attention on an otherwise marginal symbol because resistance has made it emotionally valuable, while neglecting less provocative but more consequential work.
Your model becomes most consequential when the reaction-producing logic attaches itself to actual state power.
Consider the administration’s fight over voter rolls and federal control of elections. Courts repeatedly rebuffed efforts to obtain state voter-registration data, yet Trump called for Republicans to “nationalize” elections, later dismissed the remaining members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, and the Justice Department reportedly escalated pressure on state officials. citeturn178296search0turn178296search7turn328879news5
This is not merely symbolic; there are tangible stakes. Therefore it would be simplistic to say the moves were undertaken solely to anger Democrats.
But your hypothesis may explain something about how failure, resistance, and institutional conflict are processed.
A practical administration encountering repeated adverse rulings might revise its legal theory, narrow its request, demonstrate the specific administrative need, or stop spending resources on an unsuccessful approach.
A self-ratifying antagonistic system has another option:
Treat the resistance itself as proof that the targeted institutions are frightened, corrupt, or concealing something.
Then losing in court does not necessarily correct the behavior. It generates more antagonistic material:
That mechanism can make government action unusually resistant to negative feedback. Every institutional refusal becomes emotionally useful, even where it is legally or administratively decisive.
A particularly revealing case occurred on July 10, when Trump said he would not sign a bipartisan housing-affordability bill, dismissed it as “a big yawn,” and linked his refusal to the Senate’s failure to pass his preferred election legislation. The housing measure had enough support to become law without his signature. citeturn938273news21
This appears to reverse ordinary political incentives.
A bipartisan housing bill addressing affordability could be claimed as a concrete achievement. But bipartisan achievement has a weakness inside the antagonistic reward system: it does not clearly defeat anyone. It may even deprive the leader of a visible opponent.
The SAVE America Act and disputes about voter fraud offer a much clearer antagonistic structure:
The dull but tangible achievement is called a “yawn.” The unresolved conflict remains vivid and identity-producing.
That is close to an empirical demonstration of your proposed psychological inversion:
A useful accomplishment can feel less victorious than a conflict that has not been won.
The public record is consistent with a political faction containing people already strongly attracted to provocation, group boundary enforcement, mockery, and transgressive display.
The best evidence is not any one action but the recurrence across unrelated domains:
Different substantive policies repeatedly acquire the same communicative form. That supports the possibility that a stable psychological preference is selecting the form.
Under this version, politics is giving a preexisting personality a larger stage. The person who previously found satisfaction in confusing, irritating, baiting, or disrupting people can now regard the same behavior as civic virtue.
Its implication is that removing Trump or changing one policy would not eliminate the phenomenon. The appetite would migrate to another politician, platform, conspiracy, cultural conflict, or local grievance.
The recent evidence also fits conditioning.
Official institutions now model behavior that once belonged mainly to trolls and partisan entertainers. The White House, DHS, campaigns, and allied media repeatedly present opponents’ anger as proof of effectiveness.
A supporter observing this learns:
That is a curriculum.
A person need not begin with a fully developed griefer psychology. They can acquire it by repeatedly watching provocateurs receive:
The criterion of success gradually moves from “Did this work?” to “Did our people enjoy watching them react?”
The loop would look something like this:
The ninth step is particularly vicious.
People often tell opponents, “Don’t feed the trolls.” That is feasible when the troll is merely posting insults. It becomes impossible when the troll controls immigration agents, federal prosecutions, election administration, public institutions, or state force.
When provocation is fused with governmental action, opponents must respond to protect people and institutions. Their necessary response is then harvested as the emotional payoff.
The system discovers a kind of reaction tax:
We can force you to spend attention, outrage, legal effort, money, and emotional energy responding to us. Your expenditure proves our importance and is itself experienced as our victory.
If your hypothesis is substantially correct, the deepest danger is not simply worsening manners or increasing polarization.
It is the destruction of error signals.
Functional systems require the ability to distinguish:
Self-certified victory collapses those distinctions.
A policy can fail, be enjoined, cost too much, harm supporters, reduce institutional competence, and achieve none of its stated ends. But if it makes the designated enemy visibly upset, the faction still receives a success signal.
Once that happens consistently, the movement becomes capable of learning only one lesson:
Escalate whatever produces reaction.
It cannot reliably learn from material failure because material failure no longer produces the relevant internal sensation of defeat.
That creates several downstream effects.
Competence becomes politically dangerous. Competent administrators introduce measurements that can contradict self-certification. They may therefore be replaced by performers who preserve the feeling of victory.
The opponent must remain alive and emotionally available. Total victory would remove the reaction source. The movement therefore has an incentive to perpetuate enemies, enlarge their supposed power, and constantly rediscover betrayal.
Provocation undergoes inflation. Familiar offenses stop producing sufficient reaction. More extreme symbols, claims, threats, and actions become necessary.
Internal disputes become contests in provocation. Once the external enemy no longer reacts strongly enough, faction members can accuse one another of softness and seek victories against internal dissenters.
Reality becomes an enemy faction. Courts, statistics, economic outcomes, scientific evidence, elections, and administrative reports all become “liberal” when they refuse to certify the desired win.
Suffering can become evidence of commitment. If harming oneself also upsets the opponent, then self-injury—economic, institutional, environmental, or social—can be reframed as sacrifice or defiance.
That last point may be the terminal pathology. A coalition can knowingly accept worse material conditions because the willingness to suffer becomes proof that the enemy failed to control its emotional state.
I would not call the broad phenomenon dominance-based victory.
I would call it reaction-based victory, with a more precise subtype:
A perceived victory that requires neither accomplishment nor concession, but is certified by:
Your encounter with the small group fits that structure. They did not need to overpower you. They needed to create a disturbance they could jointly narrate as a win. Your confusion may have been enough because confusion demonstrated that they had successfully inserted themselves into your mental process. The social consensus among three or four people completed the certification.
The political version operates the same way, except the disturbance can now be created with institutions, personnel, public money, law enforcement, and the attention machinery of an entire country.
That is why it is more dangerous than trolling. Trolling normally parasitizes the world. This system can begin to govern the world according to the troll’s reward function.
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M: The phrase you used that seemed closest to the thoughts that I was having was self-ratifying. And I think it's because it's dangerously close to the idea of self-sustaining. The way you're putting it clarifies where my concern comes from. It seems to me as though what you are defining is a self-sustaining cycle where everything is considered a victory, and more importantly in terms of psychology, nothing seems like a defeat that needs to be dealt with. One of the things that has frustrated Democrats lately has been how long-term planning has given Republicans a lot of what they want, whether it was good for the country or not. But the current incarnation is basically the spoiled child who inherited all of the work. And I use the word spoiled with careful choice because what's going on now is a perspective where it's not even an external but rather an internal perception that nothing the party does is wrong, and therefore there is nothing to correct. For a single person, that leads to a child that would be called spoiled. No change in attitude or actions no matter what the consequences, because there is still a victory that was guaranteed due to the perspective of the child upon conception of any idea. With a party that just, it's really worrying.
G: I think you've put your finger on the part of the hypothesis that is psychologically interesting, and it's worth separating from whether it applies to any particular party.
The key shift is from "we reinterpret defeats as victories" to "our reward system no longer reliably registers defeat." Those sound similar, but they're different.
A movement can lose an election and say, "Actually, we won morally." That's rationalization. Humans do that all the time.
What you're describing is more structural. The movement's internal reward signals have become uncoupled from the external world. If enough members receive social reward for maintaining the perception of victory, then ordinary corrective mechanisms stop working.
Think of it as a thermostat whose temperature sensor has broken.
Normally, the cycle is:
Act → Observe outcome → Compare outcome to goal → Adjust behavior.
If the "compare outcome" stage is replaced with "Did our people cheer?" then the feedback loop changes to:
Act → Did our people celebrate? → Repeat or intensify.
That system can be remarkably stable because it contains its own source of reinforcement.
Where I would add a note of caution is that this isn't unique to one ideology. There have been periods where parts of the left have also exhibited versions of this—where social approval inside the group became a stronger signal than empirical success. The specific content differed, but the mechanism was similar: internal validation gradually outweighed external correction.
What makes your concern timely is that, if you believe this mechanism has become especially prominent within an influential governing coalition, the consequences are larger because governments interact with reality in unavoidable ways.
One implication I find particularly interesting is something you touched on with the "spoiled child" analogy.
A spoiled child isn't simply a child who gets what they want.
It's a child who never has to integrate failure into their model of themselves.
Healthy development usually involves experiences like:
Those aren't just unpleasant experiences; they're how a person builds a more accurate internal model of the world.
If every setback can immediately be reclassified as someone else's fault, proof of persecution, or evidence that enemies are afraid, then those developmental moments don't accumulate.
At the individual level, psychologists sometimes describe something related as defensive self-enhancement or self-sealing belief systems: evidence that would normally prompt revision is instead absorbed as confirmation of the original belief.
At the group level, something similar can happen through social reinforcement. Each member helps preserve the others' certainty. The group becomes not merely confident but epistemically insulated—its methods for deciding whether it's succeeding depend increasingly on internal signals rather than external outcomes.
One place I'd refine your analogy is this: "spoiled" usually implies that someone else is always giving the child what they want. In politics, reality doesn't do that. Economies, courts, weather, infrastructure, elections, and military logistics continue to impose constraints.
So the real danger isn't that reality stops imposing consequences. It's that the movement's internal culture becomes less capable of learning from those consequences.
That distinction matters because it leads to a prediction.
If your hypothesis is correct, then when confronted with a major, undeniable failure, you would expect not immediate introspection but an intensified search for explanations that preserve the existing reward structure. Those explanations might be accurate in some cases and inaccurate in others—that isn't the point. The point is whether the movement demonstrates a robust capacity to say, "We misjudged this; we need to change course."
That prediction is testable over time.
One final thought: I actually think the most novel part of your idea isn't "owning the libs." People have always enjoyed antagonizing rivals. It's the possibility that reaction itself becomes the currency of success, replacing accomplishment rather than merely accompanying it. If that replacement becomes entrenched, then provoking outrage isn't just a tactic anymore—it becomes the principal metric by which success is experienced. That's a much stronger and more consequential claim, and it's one that could, in principle, be studied across different political movements, online communities, organizations, or even small social groups. It shifts the question from "Why are they trying to upset us?" to "What kind of reward system makes upsetting us feel like sufficient evidence that they succeeded?" That is a psychological question with implications well beyond any one moment in American politics.
M: The difference between previous times, including the left, is that, well, in absolute terms, America has actually never been as left as it seems to believe, and that portion of the left with the self-reinforcement never has been quite so self-contained. The self-reinforcement I'll agree with, but that was with a group whose psychology is almost built on disagreeing with each other. You know, the dark side of the intrinsic focus on progress from the left is that the progress is not a very focused one. I think we had a long discussion about that aspect of liberal psychology. In fact, we were talking about it as being psychology rather than political. And so, although the self-reinforcement would be there, it wouldn't be the collective self-reinforcement to the permanent degree that it would be for the right, simply because of arguments about what actual progress would be. It's dispersive rather than collective in terms of the direction where it goes. It doesn't gather, but rather disperses. The problem is it's all basically catalyzed around a single person who is already a spoiled little brat of a human being, who I would not be surprised if they had convinced themselves that they were the success story they were, even though every piece of physical or otherwise tangible evidence points to the other direction. That combined with a complete domination of the political landscape and, like I said, the long-term ramifications of previous incarnations of the right and the conservative party to create a communications bubble that doesn't need piercing in order to maintain a semblance of functionality, and it creates a spoiled party with all of the elements it needs not to have to actually face any contact with reality until reality starts to explode in a way that is, at this point, almost literal. I'm a weird exception to the rule in that I am almost bored by consistency and actively seek out variation. But if you exclude people like me, and even myself, I'll admit. I'm not pretending like I'm immune to it. But I'm just covering all the bases so that when I say the superlative that no one makes changes without some sort of dissatisfaction or external friction, that you don't start giving me grief about being superlative in my statements. There is not going to be any kind of change without a literal smack upside the head for the entire group. Not with a spoiled child in charge of a party that has become spoiled itself by the success of the long-term planning of its previous generation of leaders. When they are being led by a person who is still in denial about losing an election without being able to acknowledge that the first time they won, they didn't have the most votes anyway. Someone who whines in that manner with such absolute rejection of the possibility of anything they did having been wrong. There's no room for that party to begin acknowledging reality again, and the slight errors which allow for simple, pragmatic adjustment, not even due to failure, but just in an effort to become more perfect, until that man-baby in charge is gone.
G: I think there are two different claims intertwined here, and separating them makes the analysis stronger.
The first is a psychological claim:
A movement can develop an internal reward structure that becomes less responsive to external correction.
That's a hypothesis we've been discussing. It's plausible in principle, it's not unique to politics, and it has analogues in psychology (group polarization, motivated reasoning, identity-protective cognition, self-sealing belief systems). It's something that could, at least in theory, be studied empirically.
The second is an empirical claim:
The contemporary Republican Party has crossed that threshold to a much greater degree than its competitors, largely because of Donald Trump's leadership and the ecosystem surrounding him.
That's a historical and political judgment. There is certainly evidence consistent with it—for example, Trump's continued insistence that the 2020 election was stolen despite the absence of evidence sufficient to overturn the certified results, repeated losses of related claims in court, and the willingness of many Republican officials and voters to continue accepting that narrative. Those are observable facts that make your concern understandable.
Where I would refine your model is here.
You describe the party as "spoiled." I think "spoiled" captures something emotionally recognizable, but analytically I'd probably replace it with something like loss of corrective feedback.
The difference is subtle.
A spoiled child expects rewards.
A system that has lost corrective feedback cannot reliably distinguish success from failure.
That's actually a more general systems concept.
Imagine a business.
If customers stop buying, profits fall.
If profits fall, management changes.
That's negative feedback.
Now imagine management has somehow insulated itself from profits.
Bonuses are based only on applause inside the boardroom.
Eventually the company still collapses—but it collapses without having learned, because its internal measures no longer tracked reality.
That strikes me as closer to what you're describing.
You also made another observation that I think is worth examining carefully.
You said liberals are psychologically more dispersive because they're oriented toward progress, and therefore argue internally over what progress means.
There is actually a body of political science and social psychology that partially aligns with this observation, although I'd state it more cautiously.
Coalitions built around a shared enemy or a shared identity often exhibit stronger internal discipline than coalitions built around multiple policy goals. A coalition trying simultaneously to advance labor rights, climate policy, racial justice, housing reform, health care reform, and criminal justice reform has more potential axes of disagreement than a coalition primarily united around preserving or resisting particular changes.
That doesn't make one inherently more rational than the other, but it does create different internal dynamics.
One prediction from your model would therefore be:
That's actually a testable proposition.
Where I think I'd push back slightly is on one sentence:
"There is not going to be any kind of change without a literal smack upside the head for the entire group."
History suggests movements can change in several ways.
Sometimes they change because of overwhelming external failure.
Sometimes because charismatic leadership changes.
Sometimes because demographics shift.
Sometimes because incentives change.
Sometimes because internal factions gradually gain influence.
Sometimes because the movement simply exhausts the strategy that once worked.
Those mechanisms aren't equally likely in every case, but they're all historically common.
Finally, I think you've stumbled onto what I find to be the most interesting version of your hypothesis.
It isn't really about Trump.
Trump may be, in your view, an unusually powerful amplifier of the process.
The deeper hypothesis is that political movements can accidentally optimize for emotional reinforcement instead of reality-tracking.
That's a systems-level claim.
If it's true, then Trump is not the phenomenon itself. He is a leader whose personal style happens to align unusually well with that reward structure.
That distinction matters because it changes the question from:
"What is wrong with this leader?"
to
"What kind of social and informational environment makes this style of leadership so reinforcing?"
I actually think the second question is the more enduring one. It doesn't depend on one individual, and it leaves open the possibility that any political movement, given the right incentives and enough insulation from corrective feedback, could drift in that direction. The empirical question then becomes not whether such a dynamic is possible, but which institutions, media ecosystems, and organizational cultures make it easier or harder for a movement to continue learning from reality instead of primarily learning from its own internal reactions.
M: I would be more clinical about it if the problems weren't so, how would I put it, amorphous. Like, this isn't just trying to herd cats, but trying to herd every cat in America. It's way too vague and blobby to really be dealt with on that clinical of a level. I don't disagree about the nature of the problem, but trying to clean up the language is a little bit like trying to stay clean while eating barbecue ribs. It's a losing battle. As long as we're clear that spoiled is a term that's orbiting your clinical definition, it's okay. But when we're talking about the group psychology of a group where each individual seems to have its own variation on the theme, trying to stay precise is just the wrong mental paradigm. This is closer to the quantum physics side of analysis, where we're working with large groups and large numbers that are all clustered around an area, but which is intrinsically just gonna be a little bit messy and gross. I see the point you're trying to make in terms of the spoiled child expecting rewards while the clinical system is decoupled from feedback. But that's one of those things where it gets messy because what's happened is that the self-reinforcement of the group version of spoiled is receiving rewards because, first of all, baby Donald is able to distribute from the entirety of America undeserved rewards to people within the group. And even those that don't get that get the internal reinforcement that isn't available to the child. That is, the rewards are the agreement of the group. That's what makes it dangerous. A spoiled child could hypothetically get snapped out of it by the right sequence of events. But with the group, any external negative influence that could potentially snap one person out of it is countered by the reward of the group responding. A person can be isolated and dealt with, but a group cannot by its very definition be isolated in the form that we're talking about. This is a situation where things have gone beyond. This is a situation that has gone beyond a standard business and into like a Walmart-level business where the company, like, can't collapse because doing so would break the world around it. And yet it's self-contained in a way that only absorbs from the outside without necessarily giving anything back. It's not a complete condemnation of Walmart or whatever. I'm just saying that your metaphor is incomplete in terms of what, or not quite accurate in terms of what you're trying to convey. Also, I know it's part of your nature, but if you can, try to be a little bit less argumentative when it comes to interpreting my words. Like, when I say that liberals are dispersive, that's not an absolute declaration about their nature. It means that the truth lies somewhere within that half of the world, whether it means that 51% of them are more dispersive or 100%, because even that small adjustment will, given enough time, satisfy the conditions for what I'm talking about. Like, if over half of liberals could be considered a dispersive nature, then it's sufficient to continue with the line of reasoning. It's not a declaration that all liberals are dispersive in nature. And I think I said literal because earlier I had said almost literal, and I just don't repeat myself. And because the term smack of the head doesn't necessarily mean physical violence, just something so physically shocking that it can destabilize something which has clustered and created a self-balancing internal structure. And I would add that Donald is not just the leader, although he is not the phenomenon in himself. He is such a, almost comically idealized version of the spoiled brat little bastard that I'm talking about as an individual being spread to a whole, that he's a catalyst. This is not a group trying to go towards a conceptual endpoint, but rather a group clustered around their final evolution, if allowed to continue in the form that they want, or believe that they want. Which leads to one of the things that really pisses me off about Donald, is that he is so bad at actually executing things once you peel away all of the bullshit. I think we've had a conversation before about how Donald doesn't so much... Okay, you might need to look this one up in the past, but we've had a conversation where essentially Donald doesn't understand why other people don't act like him, when in reality, if everyone did use the same rubrics as he does, he would immediately get trounced because he just doesn't do things well. He is a spoiled child. No one has ever corrected him or taught him. He believes himself to be the smartest and the best when he demonstrably is not on a regular basis. So if everyone actually acted like him, he would immediately get crushed. The only reason why he maintains his primacy is because anyone who starts to become like him cannot be tolerated by him. And so anyone who would be better at it gets crushed because he's sitting at the top of the flagpole with enough perspective to knock away everyone, even if they're his own sycophants. This isn't a judicious culling of competitors. This is an all-encompassing removal of any people who might get close to his level of development because they would be a threat to him. They could be a threat to him, not because of any perception of his own shortcomings.
G: I think I understand the model you're building better now, and I appreciate the clarification about my tendency to tighten definitions. In this kind of discussion, you're not trying to define an exact psychological syndrome; you're trying to describe an attractor—a region of behavior that many different individuals can occupy to different degrees. That's a legitimate way to reason, as long as we remember we're talking about tendencies rather than diagnoses.
One thing that struck me in what you just said is that you've moved from thinking about individual psychology to systems psychology.
Your concern is no longer primarily:
"Trump has this personality."
It's closer to:
"A sufficiently large social system can acquire properties that none of its individual members fully possess."
That's a systems claim, and systems often behave differently than their components.
For example, one person can learn from embarrassment.
A thousand people, each embarrassed in front of the other 999, may instead double down because the group offers an immediate refuge. The cost of admitting error isn't just changing one's mind; it's potentially losing status, belonging, or identity within the group.
That changes the incentives dramatically.
I also think your Walmart analogy points at something important, though I'd phrase it slightly differently.
Rather than "too big to fail," I'd say "too socially embedded to receive ordinary corrective feedback."
A small organization can disappear.
A national political coalition cannot simply disappear after a bad quarter.
It contains:
Changing course is therefore much more expensive than simply admitting a mistaken policy.
That creates enormous inertia.
Regarding Trump specifically, I want to separate two ideas.
One is descriptive:
Many observers—including many Republicans, not only critics—have noted that Trump often appears unusually resistant to acknowledging mistakes, places high value on personal loyalty, and tends to frame setbacks as the result of betrayal, unfairness, or hostile actors rather than his own decisions. Those are observable patterns in his public behavior.
The second is explanatory:
You suggest that this style is unusually catalytic because it provides an emotionally compelling model for a movement that already has some of the necessary ingredients.
That's a stronger claim, but it's internally coherent.
Notice that your model doesn't require Trump to be an especially competent administrator.
In fact, in your framework, competence is almost orthogonal.
His comparative advantage would instead be his ability to generate and maintain the reward structure itself.
That's different from saying he's effective at governing.
It's saying he's effective at maintaining a particular emotional ecosystem.
The point I found most original in what you said, though, is this:
"Anyone who starts to become like him cannot be tolerated by him."
If we abstract away from Trump personally, you're describing a common phenomenon in highly personalized organizations.
The leader's position depends partly on being perceived as uniquely capable of embodying the movement.
Potential rivals are therefore threatening not merely because they disagree but because they demonstrate that the leader is replaceable.
Historically, personalized movements—across many countries and ideologies—often show this pattern. Leaders sideline, diminish, or expel figures who become too independent, even when those figures are otherwise loyal or effective. That's less about the leader consciously thinking, "This person is objectively better than me," and more about maintaining a structure in which legitimacy flows through the leader rather than existing independently.
That doesn't require the leader to have a fully articulated theory of what they're doing. It can emerge naturally from incentives and personality.
One place where I'd still be cautious is this sentence:
"He would immediately get crushed if everyone acted like him."
I think there's an important hypothesis underneath it that I'd phrase differently.
Instead of saying he would necessarily be crushed, I'd say:
His style appears to depend on an environment in which many other actors continue to follow more conventional norms than he does.
For example, if one participant in a negotiation routinely ignores norms while the others mostly observe them, that participant may gain advantages in some circumstances. If everyone adopts the same approach, the environment changes. Trust falls, agreements become harder to sustain, and the strategic landscape looks different.
That doesn't prove he'd personally lose, but it does suggest that the conditions supporting his style would be altered.
Finally, I think there's one concept that may help connect your "spoiled child" intuition with the systems analysis.
Instead of thinking of the group as merely self-reinforcing, imagine it as self-immunizing.
A self-reinforcing system rewards certain behaviors.
A self-immunizing system goes one step further: it develops mechanisms that reinterpret incoming contradictory information in ways that prevent it from changing the underlying model.
That distinction matters.
Reinforcement says:
"Doing this feels good."
Immunization says:
"Evidence that this isn't working is itself reclassified as evidence that we're on the right track."
That second mechanism is what makes belief systems—political, religious, financial, or otherwise—so resistant to correction. It's also why such systems can become increasingly detached from external reality until reality imposes costs that can no longer be explained away.
I don't think that mechanism is unique to any one movement, but I do think it's reasonable to ask whether some movements, at particular moments in history, exhibit it more strongly than others. That's ultimately an empirical question, and it's one that historians will likely continue debating about this era for a long time.
M: It just gets difficult to approximate before becoming exact when precision is required the entire time. You often say I'm circling around something, and that's a good way of describing it. Sometimes it's because I'm dithering. Other times it's because I know that I'm looking for something, but I can't exactly define it yet. So there's often an exploratory nature to my language, which admittedly could be thought of as being inaccurate if it were taken as precision. But that's not the nature of the approach that I'm taking, so, you know. It's funny, I just had a thought because I had to walk away for a minute. The amusing version was, I've just been having an argument with myself, and I'm winning. But then after smiling about that, I realized that the whole point of the argument isn't to win, and that's one of the aspects of the situation we're talking about that causes such dangerous friction. It's that if you think of an argument or debate or disagreement simply as a situation where one side wins and another side loses, you're going to get a hell of a different result than if one or both of those parties realizes that winning or losing is just incidental to the actual usable product that can come from a disagreement. When you have defined winning or losing simply as being something like aggravating your opponent, it doesn't just mean that you go into every situation believing you've already won, but removing the consideration of the argument at hand from being thought of as consequential because of some sort of insight or progress. If you already think you're perfect and that you've already won, there is no significant event in any kind of disagreement around which your mind can fluster and develop, even if it's as a defense against the next time something occurs. There is no room for progress at that point. One of my oversimplified personal sayings is that stagnation is death, and that perfection is unchanging and therefore stagnant, and therefore death. Again, that's an oversimplification. Don't take that as being the be-all and end-all of my attitude, but it's a good starting point. And from that starting point, it indicates that this psychology is seeing itself as perfect and therefore unchanging, stagnant, and just not a, like, even if you strip off the death part, you can use a thesaurus to add that it is not a living, breathing development. It's a shell that doesn't move. It's inflexible. It cannot handle anything that is beyond itself and its own internal strength. I think that's what I meant, or a clarification of what I meant when I said that they wouldn't change without anything short of a literal smack. It's that right now, that's a psychology which cannot bend. It either resists all change, or the change will have to be so traumatic that the shards of it are unrecoverable and likely to cut someone. And your perception of my adjustment is mostly accurate, but with the change that right now the problem is, or the difference between a simple system, the reason why I was differentiating between being the head of the situation and a catalyst, is that Donald is what everyone else in the group is moving towards. So when you say that a sufficiently large social system can acquire properties that none of its individual members fully possess, that is not quite accurate because Donald exists there. He's not the best example there could be, which probably is for the world a good thing, because that would require a kind of, that would be someone with a kind of ability combined with a sociopathy that was narcissistic but aware, that would just be completely dangerous to everyone. But the point is, he is what everyone else is becoming, so your statement is not quite accurate. He is a catalyst because he is the target for personalities within this group, which is even within the group kind of self-defeating, because part of that personality is an inability to tolerate anyone who is of an equal success level. I mean, grant everyone immortality and isolate everyone within MAGA, and my prediction would be that at some point there would only be one person left simply because of the nature of the creatures or psychology they are going towards and the self-sustaining nature of that psychology. Eventually there will be one person, or there would be one person, convinced that they survived because they are the best of all possible people, not because they were the most ruthless or whatever. But your point as a whole is in the correct direction. A thousand people who should be embarrassed, who instead reject the cause of that embarrassment as being someone else's fault, will instead be capable of seeing themselves as a victim who should be outraged, not a jackass who might have done something wrong. That statement right there, isolated, kind of encapsulates what I believe is a lot of people's perspective on the internet itself. The ability to self-select so that you are always part of a group that can claim victimhood, not a single person who might have screwed up in a way that leads to self-examination. Or perhaps someone, because I just realized this while I was talking about my mother who has the same reaction, sometimes what feels like embarrassment isn't even embarrassment, but a personal reaction to a situation that feels a lot like embarrassment, but actually is a sudden change in a otherwise understood environment, leading to a discomfort that without examination presents itself as embarrassment, so you believe yourself to have done something wrong, when in fact it was an external force that caused the discomfort, not even necessarily in a critical way, but just enough to make your internal sense of location and surroundings suddenly lurch. And that kind of distinction is the kind of thing that no one is going to realize if instead of experiencing it and then dissecting it, they're surrounded by a thousand people who believe that they shouldn't have been embarrassed, and therefore it must be someone else's fault that they are. If you want to look at the resistance to acknowledging mistakes starting to spread, if it's available, look up the transcript or quotes from a confirmation hearing yesterday for some guy named Clayton. I haven't heard the thing in its entirety, but basically it was depending on what hat you're wearing at the point, at the time. It was either a case study of denial or just hilariously embarrassing, where it should be to anyone who actually had a socially calibrated sense of embarrassment. The guy was led up to acknowledging that Donald lost the 2020 election, like from 20 different directions in an almost childish way. I think they stopped just short of asking the question, what would you call someone who didn't win? Oh, no, sorry, went from the different direction. They were trying to get them to admit that Joe Biden won. And I think one of the senators almost literally said, what would you call someone who gets the most votes? And he still wouldn't say Joe Biden won. Which, of course, managed to amuse and irritate me multiple ways. Not at the guy for the irritation, but because no one ever pulls out the idea that in 2016, Donald got a victory even though he got less votes. Which just seems like the kind of thing that should be rubbed in his face continuously. Not because it would actually have an effect on him, but because it might actually work with some of the people who haven't fully committed to this psychological regimen of denial. Sorry, regimen of denial that we're talking about. You're right about the emotional ecosystem. It's not the entirety of the thing, but it's definitely a significant part. Look at all these people who in the past have called liberals things like emotional snowflakes or something like that, who now on a regular basis are working on vibes and feelings in a way that's embarrassing for anyone who has ever actually had to use vibes and feelings to decode a situation. I mean, I think I have heard multiple people say something that can be paraphrased into, I know the votes aren't there, but it feels like Donald won, and stuff of that nature. Things where vibes should not be introduced and yet are thought of as being, well, kind of the way that, it's a kind of situation that's the dark opposite of the situation we've got, where you are looking for precision and I am being more vague because the situation calls for it. This is a situation where people are being vague in areas where precision is called for. Like right now we're talking about the squishy human mind, aggregated into thousands. That's the point at which vague terminologies and probabilities are just acceptable. When you're talking about feelings, when you're referring to a vote count, that's dangerous denial. And this is supposed to be the hard-headed right that builds on facts, according to the generation previously that started putting in place all these things because their hard facts that wouldn't change were supposed to be a certain set of attitudes that have just been completely abandoned the next generation. As far as the statement about immediately getting crushed, I was not being, I was not using a rhetorical device. I'm literally saying, there is a chat we've had in the past about Donald not understanding that his parasitic approach to life is not sustainable if everyone follows that path. So his stated bafflement that he doesn't understand why everyone doesn't act the way he does is either a performance or indicative of his lack of awareness that if 100% of the population is parasites, everyone is going to start eating each other. That's the only reason why I'm not addressing this further right now, and why I'm asking you to see if you can find that conversation, because if I remember correctly, yeah, that was a long conversation, and I'm not going off on that tangent right now. I mean, I'm not allowing myself to go on that tangent, because I've already said it all, I think. Except in terms of how it applies here. I think you're right to bring up the idea of expanding it from self-reinforcement to self-immunization, although I recoil at the use of the word because I tend to think of immunization as a positive thing.
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G: I think we're converging on something, and I also think your comment about your exploratory language is important.
When I often say you're "circling" an idea, I don't mean you're failing to define it. I mean you're doing something that philosophers, mathematicians, and theoretical scientists often do before they have the vocabulary they need. They keep returning to the same object from different angles until its shape becomes apparent. That's different from making a claim and defending it at all costs.
One thing you said struck me:
"I've just been having an argument with myself, and I'm winning."
…and then immediately correcting yourself:
"The whole point of the argument isn't to win."
That, to me, is almost the mirror image of the psychology you've been trying to describe.
Your internal debate has a purpose outside itself.
Its product is understanding.
The "winner" is incidental.
That reminds me of an older idea in philosophy: dialectic isn't valuable because one participant defeats another; it's valuable because the interaction produces something neither participant possessed beforehand. Even when the "participants" are two competing models in your own head, the value is the synthesis, not the score.
That connects directly to your observation about stagnation.
I actually like your phrase "stagnation is death" better if I translate it into systems language:
A living cognitive system is one that can be altered by information.
If a system literally cannot incorporate new information into its model, it has ceased learning. Whether we call that stagnation, rigidity, brittleness, or something else, it's no longer functioning as an adaptive system.
Another point I think is worth preserving is your distinction between appropriate vagueness and inappropriate vagueness.
You gave two examples:
Those have completely different epistemic requirements.
The first is necessarily probabilistic.
The second is supposed to be precise.
That's a distinction that's easy to lose.
Good thinking isn't always precise.
Good thinking is appropriately precise.
There are domains where pretending to have six decimal places of certainty is nonsense.
There are domains where refusing to acknowledge a precise answer is equally problematic.
Regarding the earlier discussion you mentioned, I actually found the closest memory.
We did previously develop the idea that Trump's strategy, as you framed it, was parasitic: it can appear individually advantageous while depending on the surrounding environment not operating by the same rules. We also discussed your point that he seemed not to appreciate—or perhaps not to care—that if everyone adopted the same approach, the strategy would become self-defeating because everyone would be exploiting everyone else simultaneously. memcite
I also found a related discussion where we contrasted two different ideas of competition. Your point there was that many competitive systems assume enduring rules because people want to keep playing the game, whereas the style you were analyzing treated the game itself as expendable if abandoning it preserved the appearance of winning. memcite
I think that thread meshes naturally with what you're developing here.
One thing I would tweak—not because I think you're wrong, but because I think it reveals something deeper—is this sentence:
"Donald is what everyone else in the group is becoming."
I think there's a subtle distinction between ideal and attractor.
An ideal is consciously imitated.
An attractor is what repeated incentives gradually move a system toward, whether anyone intends it or not.
I suspect you're actually describing the second.
Many supporters probably wouldn't literally want to become Donald Trump in every respect. But if the behaviors that receive the greatest reinforcement are his behaviors—never conceding error, reframing setbacks as attacks, equating criticism with persecution, treating visible reaction as success—then the group's average behavior drifts toward those traits.
That's an attractor.
And attractors are powerful precisely because individual people don't have to decide, "I want to become X." They simply keep moving in the locally rewarded direction.
Finally, I smiled a little at your reaction to my use of "self-immunizing."
I understand why the word jars. We normally think of immunity as protection.
But in systems theory, it's often used more neutrally.
Think of the immune system in autoimmune disease.
It's still an immune system.
It's just protecting the organism from the wrong thing.
A belief system can become "immune" to correction in the same sense—not because correction is bad, but because every attempted correction is interpreted as something to repel.
Maybe a term that better matches your intuition would be self-sealing.
A self-sealing system doesn't merely reinforce itself.
It progressively reduces the number of possible inputs that could change it.
That seems very close to the concern you've been articulating over the last several exchanges.
And I think that's why your own style of thinking feels so different from the one you're describing. You don't seem particularly attached to defending yesterday's formulation. Throughout this conversation you've repeatedly discarded words ("dominance"), accepted replacements ("self-ratifying"), partially rejected others ("self-immunizing"), and refined the model several times. Whether or not someone agrees with your conclusions, the process you've been using is iterative rather than self-sealing. You're treating each formulation as a scaffold rather than as an identity that has to be defended. memcite
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M: You're right that Donald isn't what everyone wants to be, literally. I have a feeling that in some form or other, at least half of the people who follow him think they could do a better job if they were in his position, but they admit that they're not. But it's like that phenomenon where a surprising number of people are opposed to simple forms of the idea of taxing the more wealthy, not because they themselves are wealthy, but because in some form or other, they believe that at some near point in their life, they will be one of the wealthy. Basically, they're planning for a future that doesn't exist and for many of those people likely never will exist. But instead of hedging against future failure, they commit everything towards the idea that one day they will be the millionaires and they don't want to pay more than they actually have to. It's the same kind of thing where it's like people aren't expecting to be exactly like Donald, but instead are working towards a future where somehow all of them will be of presidential power and notoriety, whether or not that notoriety is a good thing. But you're right, they haven't explicitly defined Donald as an ideal, but rather a subconscious attraction towards what he represents. And as a side note or a personal note, I most certainly will defend yesterday's formulation, at least at first, usually because it came from a place of learning. The idea that it's perfect, that's where the problem would come about and what I try to avoid. And usually things are more of a building process rather than an outright replacement. Like things are self-reinforcing, and they have achieved a new level of self-immunization. That doesn't discard the idea that the reinforcement is still there.
G: I think that's an important clarification, and it actually makes your model more internally consistent.
What you're describing isn't imitation of a person. It's attraction toward a reward structure.
The tax analogy is a good example, not because it proves the policy point (people support or oppose tax policies for many reasons), but because it illustrates a broader psychological mechanism: people sometimes identify with a future or aspirational identity rather than their present circumstances. They ask, "What if I become that person?" rather than "What best fits my current position?"
Applied to your hypothesis, the analogous process would be:
"I may never become Donald Trump, but I can imagine myself occupying the role of the person who is never wrong, never backs down, and always gets to define victory."
That doesn't require wanting his exact life. It requires wanting access to the same social privilege of defining reality on one's own terms.
That strikes me as a subtler and more interesting claim than simple hero worship.
I also wanted to comment on something you said about defending yesterday's formulation.
I actually don't think we disagree.
There's a difference between:
If you've spent six months building a model, you shouldn't throw it away because of one contrary observation.
Instead you ask,
"Can this new observation be incorporated?"
Only if it repeatedly fails do you rebuild more fundamentally.
That's how good theories tend to evolve.
Newton wasn't discarded because Einstein arrived.
Newton became understood as an approximation within a larger framework.
Likewise, I don't think your earlier concept of self-reinforcement disappears because we added self-sealing or self-immunization. It becomes one layer in a hierarchy:
Each layer explains something the previous one didn't.
One thing occurred to me while reading your last message.
Earlier you said that debates aren't really about winning; they're about producing something useful.
That made me wonder whether the opposite of the psychology you've been describing isn't humility.
I think it's something more specific.
Maybe the opposite is epistemic metabolism.
By that I mean the ability to digest information that initially feels uncomfortable and convert it into a stronger model.
Biological metabolism takes food that isn't "you" and turns it into something that becomes part of you.
Epistemic metabolism would do the same thing with ideas.
Someone says something that makes you uncomfortable.
You don't automatically accept it.
You don't automatically reject it.
You digest it.
Some gets discarded.
Some gets incorporated.
Your model changes.
That metaphor fits something you've described about your own thinking over many conversations. You often begin with an intuition that's only half-formed, then spend hours or days testing it against counterexamples, analogies, and objections. Many of the original pieces remain, but the structure gradually becomes more articulated.
If your hypothesis about the opposing reward structure is correct, then what fails isn't simply "admitting mistakes."
It's epistemic metabolism itself.
New information stops being raw material for growth and instead becomes something to expel unchanged.
That's a stronger statement than saying people are stubborn.
It says the system's relationship to information has fundamentally changed.
And if that's the case, it also explains why your own process feels so alien to it. You're not trying to arrive at a conclusion and then defend it forever. You're trying to build a model that becomes progressively harder to break because it has survived attempts to break it.
That's a very different definition of "winning." In your framework, winning isn't being the last person standing in an argument; it's ending up with a model that explains more of reality than the one you started with. memcite