What we do: We make educational content and share it using Google Ads, Facebook, and other media with key U.S. citizen groups. We also measure learning using AYTM surveys and quizzes on our website.

Our qualifications: Our officers and members are experts at social media analytics and artificial intelligence. We seek to use that expertise to pick facts on important topics (less influenced by short-termism and noise) and stretch donation dollars as far as we can for maximum, measurable impacts.

Why it is important: Many of us have missing knowledge and feel disillusioned with government and voting. This has permitted markets to function poorly in every industry segment. Spending much more than other countries for poorer health care outcomes is just a key example. All governments including ours (hypothetically) could be improved and so could the level of political discourse.

What is new: Parties mainly try to draw contrasts on personality and key issues. They fail to educate, and they fail to address the “government is the problem” narrative because they want to win over libertarians. Yet, the truth is that the mixed economy continues to be critical to the health and functioning of our society. Also, third party groups like factSpread can be critical and government roles are under assault from several special interests. This assault must be answered, and it can be. $10k can reach over 1M key voters.

What is also new: The news media partly exists to make money and, therefore, to preach to the converted. We do not need to preach to the receptive, and we can be boring with charts of data. This permits us to “talk to the other sides” and not “dumb things down”. Even if not convinced, the audience hopefully realizes that: (a) they are missing information and (b) effective government could possibly benefit from a more clinical mindset with lower emotional temperature.

Motto: Better voters → Better politicians –> Better world.

What we want: Donations on the order of $10,000 or $100,000 to reach over 1M key voters or 10M key voters, respectively. Enthusiasm and participation in our activities is also welcome. We value oversight and, if content is both easily fact-checked and important, we support it. We get it that some markets may be or could be over-regulated. 

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Counterperformativity may also be critical in relation to the US media ecosystem and national politics. As argued in the book Abundance, we humans tend to focus on short term threats. Then, the news focuses on the small number of bad actors who are criminals and ignores the bigger picture of the massive reduction of crime that is occurring (see the “Case of the Missing Crime” economist cover). In fact, we fail to be aware of many positive trends. This fixation on threats and simplistic thinking also relates to the fixation on single-issue voting with its many negative effects highlighted in a past post.

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In relation to dial 502, I suggest two things seem important. First, the idea of setting this dial to zero may reflect a desire to imagine that government is unimportant and unnecessary rather than a careful data-driven study of the unavoidability of government participation in various sectors. Are other countries successfully having less government participation in the technology or energy sectors? Second, the choice to fix the percentage of GDP spend in the US has meant a reduction in investment in science and infrastructure investment. The aging of the US population has meant an increase in entitlement spending while there have been significant reductions in the federal workforce government spending related to growth and investment.

In relation to dial 617, there is a legitimate argument that the US is currently permitting around 800,000 human beings or at least a fetus to be killed by their would-be mothers and their health care professionals. At the same time, the abortion rate is now currently lower than the rate in 1973 when the US Supreme court made abortion legal in all states. Also, the idea that only dial 617 could impact abortion rates is simply not true. Demographic trends have helped reduce the abortion rate as older people have fewer abortions. Yet, there are many other activities including relating to education and poverty that could continue to reduce abortion rates. Admittedly, countries like Saudi Arabia really do have lower abortion rates through governmental and societal actions. Yet, the heavy hand is not the only hand. 

The main point here is that thinking about and fixating on one or two dials can permit undesirable leaders to gain office. This can cause poor setting choices for the thousand or millions of other dials. It can also create a strong incentive for simplistic thinking and a disincentive for learning. I already picked my one or two settings, leave me alone! Single issue voting may be the main reason why US citizens are quite ignorant about the big picture of the US government in the context of world history.

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Much attention has focused on the tendency among high-level members of the presidential administrations to persist in beliefs at variance with facts, a practice that is acknowledged even by other members of that administration (Krugman, 2020). Dick Cheney, for example, continued for a long time to view the Iraq war as an “enormous success” and to express that view at every opportunity, causing frustration even among other Bush aides who have made off-the-record comments about “creating their own reality.” A Newsweek poll in 2006 —- suggested that 67% of citizens felt the president is influenced more by “personal beliefs” than established facts. This nonfactual thinking has become a matter of curiosity and comment. How is it possible not only to hold false beliefs but to promulgate them widely? Is this something that we, the public, should simply be amused by, or is it cause for concern? 

Let me first introduce a term of my 2006 concept: “blying”. I define this word to mean saying something that the bliar believes to be true notwithstanding the absence of support and indeed in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary. It is a term intended to give the benefit of the doubt to the bliar on the question of belief and in that way to come up short of an accusation of deliberately spreading wrong information. In the Seinfeld episode “The Beard”, the George character tells Jerry, “It is not a lie if you believe it.” 

Generally, blying offers benefits to the bliar or to the person to whom the blie is directed. Take, for example, supply side economics — the theory that lower tax rates promote so much growth that they more than pay for themselves. In the last 50 years, the top tax rate dropped from 91% to 35%. Figure 1 shows a graphic representation of the history of both tax rates and economic growth rates.

Figure 1. The history of the top income taxation rate and economic growth in the USA at the time when the concept of blying was invented. The country had done an expensive experiment, and many were willfully ignorant of that fact.

I am not an economist, yet it seems apparent to me from the graph that that there is no obvious relationship between marginal tax rates and the pace of economic growth. If tax rates are very high, cutting them could, in theory, not only encourage more risk taking and work effort but also less tax avoidance thereby leading to increased revenues and economic efficiency. But marginal rates have been relatively low in recent decades and no effect is apparent from the data. Over the period from 1950, the sample correlation between the yearly growth rates and the tax rate is a trivial +0.01. 

What is clear, however, is that the rate reduction helped the rich get richer (Figure 2). Consider a plot of the percentage of income received by earners in the top 5% of the income distribution as derived from Census Bureau data. A commonly cited figure is that in 1998 the top 5% of earners owned 59% of the country’s private wealth. That percentage has likely grown to around 65%, making the United States by far the most unequal industrialized country. Common sense suggests that the tax rate reduction itself accounted for at least a sizeable part of the increase in inequality. 

Figure 2. More of the economic history at the time of the coining of the blying word and concept.

This brings us back to the bliars at the places which spread supply side economics. It is not clear that any amount of evidence will ever change minds in these circles. Clearly, the belief that cutting tax rates increases government tax revenues well serves the perceived interests of their constituents. Step 1, convince oneself that lowering taxes will increase revenues: Step 2, with the persuasive force of your own convictions, blie to others to convince them of the benefits of cutting tax rates. 

The result has been public debt exceeding $20 trillion dollars and no realistic plan for retiring it. Consider that a substantial fraction of that deficit is still owed to people here at home among them many in the top 5% of the income distribution. In a real sense, money that, absent tax cuts, would have been taken in taxes from top earners instead helped create a recurring budget deficit that was financed in part by borrowing the money back from these top earners, with interest. 

What we might conclude from this example is that blying, as practiced by those in high places, is far from a harmless diversion. Public ignorance or indifference can give politicians the freedom to believe whatever most benefits them and their major supporters. On-going research into the theory and practice of blying might provide insight into ways to curb this pernicious form of self- and public delusion. Yet, bliars are limited by what the public is willing to believe. Educating ourselves as a people is likely the only way to reduce the maneuvering room for blying politicians. We need to diagnose the situation before our pressing problems—both at home and abroad—become critically serious.

References

• Krugman, P. (2020). Arguing with zombies: Economics, politics, and the fight for a better future. WW Norton & Company.

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“A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

– President Ronald Reagan (March 1987)

“It is not a lie if you believe it.” 

– George Constanza character on Seinfeld (1990)

“You take the blue pill…you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.”

– Morpheus Character, The Matrix (1999)

Blying – (verb) communicating beliefs unlikely to be true, selected for benefit and believed to an inappropriate degree by the communicator

In 2004, I observed an interesting fact. In the Bush-Kerry debate, the score of verifiably untrue statements was (Drum 2004):

• Bush # verifiably untrue statements = 18 
• Kerry # verifiably untrue statements = 11.

Many people recoil in horror at such information. “Politicians are all liars,” they might mutter and feel disgust. Yet, it is widely reported that the politicians were sincere in many of their beliefs, even while many were verifiably false.

Here, I argue that this score is part of an interesting phenomenon. Would you or I make 11 verifiably untrue statements in a debate? Would we have any chance to compete at such a high political level? Is it possible that false statements offer a key advantage at such a level? 

In 2006, I endeavored (somewhat halfheartedly) to model this phenomenon. I also invented the concept of blying and gave it a name googling options. At that time, blying was listed as a sailing term. I presented the concepts at a university departmental seminar. Some tend to think of such seminars as obscure in importance with mostly unassuming foreign graduate students attending. I asked the attendees to use the word and spread its use. Amazingly, the word has gained in popularity with celebrities such as Rachel Maddow and Nina Dobrev using it in public.

I never sought to publish my ideas relating to blying but here are some key slides from my old presentation. 

Consider the set, S, of things that politicians can say that voters might consider to be believable or at least not ridiculous as indicated in Figure 1. Fortunately, not everything is in the set S. Saying that people should drink disinfectants to address COVID-19 was recently found not to be in the set. Plagiarized words may not be in the set S. Also consider the set of things that politicians might say, and experts would agree that they are plausibly true, R (right-hand-side of Figure 1).

Figure 1. The sets S and R relating to political discourse.

Given the competitive nature of politics, it is unrealistic to imagine that politicians will restrict themselves to set R. In fact, staying away from R might confer benefits as ivory tower intellectuals will tend to be on the other side. Yet, in this information age of hopeful enlightenment, it might be possible (theoretically) to shrink the set S until it fits inside set R. Then, even competitive politicians would find themselves in agreement with at least some respectable experts. This is perhaps the main goal of factSpread.

Perhaps the quintessential illustration of blying relates to supply-side economics. Clearly, at some level taxation rates will become counterproductive. For example, if you take 99.9% of my last dollar earned, I might well take more vacations and earn less. Yet, evidence that this phenomenon has applied in the context of actual US tax rates and economic growth is limited at best. This evidence is the subject of another bulletin post. Here, I use the example for my half-hearted modeling.

In 2006, I imagined the political process as a two-player competitive game influence by Filar and Vrieze (1999), who wrote on “Competitive Markov Decision Processes”. It should be noted that: (a) Markov Decision Processes have formed the core for the hot subject of “Reinforcement Learning” within machine learning which is the subject of many books including my own forthcoming textbook with Enhao Liu and (b) game-theoretic interactions are complicated and I am only now becoming able to actually use such advanced methods in modeling. 

Player 1 is 95% of the US public which could control politics in the US if it wanted to. Player 2 is the 5% who have limited direct influence but can control things if only through their influence of Player 1. (This was before the “1%” concept became popular.) 

The key idea that I introduced was that Player 2 influences the system only through the selection of beliefs. Further, these beliefs drag the beliefs of Player 1 away from its original beliefs. Note that in all or most modeling activities, beliefs are generally regarded not as controllable or decision variables. Thinking of beliefs as controllable was modestly innovative. 

Back then, the states, defined by Gross Domestic Product levels, were sketched in the big picture system as shown in Figure 2 . (The economy is now considerably larger, projected to exceed $20 trillion by the end of the year despite the contraction caused by the pandemic) 

Figure 2. A super-simple model of the economic state of the US economy.

In Markov Decision Processes and their generalization Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP), beliefs can be represented in part by transition and reward matrices. Figure 3 sketches some possible beliefs about transition probabilities or rewards. Perhaps the default belief for the 95% is that the choice of tax rate (level 1 or level 2) has minimal if any effect on the economic trajectory for relevant levels. 

Figure 3. The default actions for Player 1 (the 95%) that tax rates effect revenues but not the overall GDP.

The objective of Player 2 is to maximize its expected profits. It can convince Player 1 to set the rate and then reap rewards personally. All it needs to do is “believe whatever they want to believe” and convince Player 1 through the convex combination in Figure 4. 

Figure 4. The optimization “objective function” with the constraint which relates to blying and influence.

Player 1 on its own would simply keep the top tax rate at 70% in all cases since it would keep high levels for all system states. Figure 5 shows the single-player solution and backward recursion. 

Figure 5. The optimal policy and the usual dynamic programming recursion.

Yet, with two players and blying, we wind up with a top tax rate as low as the set S will permit, e.g., 37%. In this solution, we wind up with a self-brainwashed Player 2 and a partially brainwashed Player 1 and a large governmental debt. 

Why would people (or even robots) deceive themselves and say verifiably untrue statements? Part of the reason is to convince others and, therefore, receive benefits. Our faces can give us away if we are merely lying. Deeply held beliefs are more likely to influence. 

In conclusion, the phenomenon of blying will continue to greatly influence politics in democracies and, to a lesser extent, other human activities. The key implication from the related discussion is the importance of reducing the set S – set of falsehoods people consider believable – by educating the public to tell the difference. This is the primary mission of factSpread.

References

• Filar, J., & Vrieze, K. (2012). Competitive Markov decision processes. Springer Science & Business Media.

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Of course, there is no conservative or liberal way to set up welding machines. Yet, welding machines are much simpler than national economies. We suggest that if the public thought about national decision-making more as we think about arc welding machines, we would get better outcomes. Also, the public would see much more value in learning about the facts relating to the operation of the national system and subsystems.

In Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR), we often advise customers about how to use data and modeling to improve their outcomes.  Using the systems view to represent national economies is a major step forward as compared with the left-right spectrum.  Commonly, we use the “systems view” in which there are many inputs or decision variables and many outputs or system responses (Figure 1).  Even for a welding machine, the control panel consists of more than just one left-right slider switch.

Figure 1. (a) The political spectrum metaphor, (b) the systems view, and (c) knobs within the systems view.

Determining the control settings for an engineered system involves system optimization of the associated inputs. These inputs may interact, as indicated in Figure 2. In the example, the effect of changing input x1 depends on the value of input x3. This non-parallelism is an “interaction” effect. With many possible decision variables or factors and interactions, the situation might seem daunting. Yet, Industrial Engineers and Operations Researchers (IEOR) commonly solve problems with billions of decision variables as in vehicle routing or hundreds as in voting machine allocation. 

Figure 2. Example interaction plot showing how the inputs or knobs sometimes conspire to change the conditional effects on a system response. The response could be national Gross Domestic Product, happiness, or life expectancy.

You might say that large scale systems are too complicated for useful model-based system optimization. That is at least partly false. Several private companies and research groups have been creating prescriptive large-scale macroeconomic models and advising governments.  Having a public still limited by the left-right spectrum metaphor is a serious constraint on possible ways to make the world better. This explains part of the importance of the role of adult education companies such as factSpread.

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     Advocates and salespeople try to make people feel informed rather than informing them.  They also paint other groups of people as hostile and dangerous, trying to rally people to become more partisan and more divided (Yudkin).  FactSpread seeks to counter these damaging disinformation campaigns by spreading true information about topics that are important to the country but not necessarily at the top of the news cycle.

     Polarization and lack of information may be mutually reinforcing as seen in figure 1. If all that a person needs to know is that the other disliked group is ridiculous, this can divert them from other learning. Knowing more about issues and trends helps people not to be pulled along by emotional, negative, and misleading appeals.

Figure 1. (a) The likely continued evolution of for-profit media with otherization pressures, (b) the polarization and ignorance reinforcing pressures, and (c) the possible role of FactSpread in breaking the feedback loop.

     Also, big important issues may be complicated.  If a person can be persuaded that “it’s all really very simple, just good guys versus bad guys,”, the person will resist learning new facts that might change their position.  But then they will also resist the understanding of others’ views that leads to a more civil and unified society.

     Maybe the most important issue is that for-profit media seeks to affirm the completeness of the listener’s world view. “You are a complete and correct being. Please watch our toothpaste commercials.” At factSpread, we seek to leave the impression of incompleteness and complication, like science itself. We feel that this will help to reduce ignorance, increase engagement, and make politicians better at their jobs.

    The conclusion of this analysis is depicted in Table 1. Whereas for-profit media focus on shareholder profits, factSpread focuses on helping the audience understand. For-profit media seeks to provoke an emotional response, often through otherization. The mission of factSpread is education and not advocacy. Being unconstrained by trying to build tribalism offers a potentially critical advantage. Whereas media sources are often focused on controversial stories or anecdotes, we strive to avoid controversy and focus on trustworthy data. Further, we seek to focus on important facts. Why do people score at 40% on our tests about how government works? Perhaps the answer is because their media ecosystems are too short-term, and personality focused. 

Table 1. Summary of the difference between the for-profit media ecosystem and factSpread.

References

Jacobs, A. (2017). How to think: A survival guide for a world at odds. Currency.

Yudkin, D. A. (2019). Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape.

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