Scott Alexander once wrote about the difference between "mistake theorists" who treat politics as an engineering discipline (a symmetrical collaboration in which everyone ultimately just wants the best ideas to win) and "conflict theorists" who treat politics as war (an asymmetrical conflict between sides with fundamentally different interests). Essentially, "[m]istake theorists naturally think conflict theorists are making a mistake"; "[c]onflict theorists naturally think mistake theorists are the enemy in their conflict."
More recently, Alexander considered the phenomenon of "bounded distrust": science and media authorities aren't completely honest, but are only willing to bend the truth so far, and can be trusted on the things they wouldn't lie about. Fox News wants to fuel xenophobia, but they wouldn't make up a terrorist attack out of whole cloth; liberal academics want to combat xenophobia, but they wouldn't outright fabricate crime statistics.
Alexander explains that savvy people who can figure out what kinds of dishonesty an authority will engage in, end up mostly trusting the authority, whereas clueless people become more distrustful. Sufficiently savvy people end up inhabiting a mental universe where the authority is trustworthy, as when Dan Quayle denied that characterizing tax increases as "revenue enhancements" constituted fooling the public—because "no one was fooled".
Alexander concludes with a characteristically mistake-theoretic plea for mutual understanding:
The savvy people need to realize that the clueless people aren't always paranoid, just less experienced than they are at dealing with a hostile environment that lies to them all the time.
And the clueless people need to realize that the savvy people aren't always gullible, just more optimistic about their ability to extract signal from same.
But "a hostile environment that lies to them all the time" is exactly the kind of situation where we would expect a conflict theory to be correct and mistake theories to be wrong!—or at least very incomplete. To speak as if the savvy merely have more skills to extract signal from a "naturally" occurring source of lies, obscures the critical question of what all the lying is for.
In a paper on "the logic of indirect speech", Pinker, Nowak, and Lee give the example of a pulled-over motorist telling a police officer, "Gee, officer, is there some way we could take care of the ticket here?"
This is, of course, a bribery attempt. The reason the driver doesn't just say that ("Can I bribe you into not giving me a ticket?"), is because the driver doesn't know whether this is a corrupt police officer that accepts bribes, or an honest officer who will charge the driver with attempted bribery. The indirect language lets the driver communicate to the corrupt cop (in the possible world where this cop is corrupt), without being arrested by the honest cop who doesn't think he can make an attempted-bribery charge stick in court on the evidence of such vague language (in the possible world where this cop is honest).
We need a conflict theory to understand this type of situation. Someone who assumed that all police officers had the same utility function would be fundamentally out of touch with reality: it's not that the corrupt cops are just "savvier", better able to "extract signal" from the driver's speech. The honest cops can probably do that, too. Rather, corrupt and honest cops are trying to do different things, and the driver's speech is optimized to help the corrupt cops in a way that honest cops can't interfere with (because the honest cops' objective requires working with a court system that is less savvy).
This kind of analysis carries over to Alexander's discussion of government lies—maybe even isomorphically. When a government denies tax increases but announces "revenue enhancements", and supporters of the regime effortlessly know what they mean, while dissidents consider it a lie, it's not that regime supporters are just savvier. The dissidents can probably figure it out, too. Rather, regime supporters and dissidents are trying to do different things. Dissidents want to create common knowledge of the regime's shortcomings: in order to organize a revolt, it's not enough for everyone to hate the government; everyone has to know that everyone else hates the government in order to confidently act in unison, rather than fear being crushed as an individual. The regime's proclamations are optimized to communicate to its supporters in a way that doesn't give moral support to the dissident cause (because the dissidents' objective requires common knowledge, not just savvy individual knowledge, and common knowledge requires unobfuscated language).
This kind of analysis is about behavior, information, and the incentives that shape them. Conscious subjectivity or any awareness of the game dynamics are irrelevant. In the minds of regime supporters, "no one was fooled", because if you were fooled, then you aren't anyone: failing to be complicit with the reigning Power's law would be as insane as trying to defy the law of gravity.
On the other side, if blindness to Power has the same input–output behavior as conscious service to Power, then opponents of the reigning Power have no reason to care about the distinction. In the same way, when a predator firefly sends the mating signal of its prey species, we consider it deception, even if the predator is acting on instinct and can't consciously "intend" to deceive.
Thus, supporters of the regime naturally think dissidents are making a mistake; dissidents naturally think regime supporters are the enemy in their conflict.
I have several "local" nitpicks and a "global" objection to the overall narrative that I think is being proposed here. Local issues first.
He does. But one thing you don't mention which I think makes your presentation of SA's argument misleading is this: between the things you've previously described (about Fox News, liberal academics, and the Bush/Quayle "revenue enhancements", all things going on in the contemporary-ish USA) and the bit you go on to quote (referring to "a hostile environment that lies to them all the time) SA's piece has moved on somewhat, and (1) the "hostile environment" bit is not talking about the contemporary US but about (a somewhat hypothetical version of) the Stalin-era USSR and (2) the business about interactions between "savvy" and "clueless" people is addressing a fundamentally different question from most of the article.
So (1) to whatever extent you're taking SA's article to say that the contemporary USA (or other similar places) is "a hostile environment that lies to us all the time", I think that is an error (maybe SA would in fact agree with you about that, maybe not, but at any rate it isn't what he says).
And (2) he isn't saying we should necessarily regard the presenters on Fox News, or those liberal academics, or the writers in the Washington Post, or the government of the Stalinist USSR, as being honestly mistaken. That isn't what the conflict/mistake dichotomy is about. When he talks about our attitudes to those people, he does so in terms of "they aren't honest, but are they likely to be lying to me about this, in this particular way, in this particular context?". The mistake-theory-ish bit you quote comes in only at the end and is about an entirely different question: how should we interact with people whose assessment of the honesty of what those would-be authorities are saying is different from ours?
"Conflict theory" and "mistake theory" don't mean thinking that everyone all the time is or isn't working towards the same goal. Obviously different people have different goals, sometimes opposing ones. The terms only make sense in the context of some sort of discussion (e.g., a political one) where the differences between you and your interlocutor may or may not be conflict-y or mistake-y. The bribing-a-cop scenario is not of this type, and "we need a conflict theory to understand this type of situation" seems to me like a category mistake.
(Remark: I think conflict/mistake oversimplifies in important ways. 1. We can have the same ultimate goals but still relate in conflict-y ways, if our differing opinions give us opposing instrumental goals and prospects for reaching agreement on those opinions are poor. 2. There are ways to have different goals that aren't of the form "I want my group to be on top, you want your group to be on top" and while these may still lead to conflict I think it's a fundamentally less-hostile sort of conflict.)
There are definitely situations where "dissidents are trying to create common knowledge of the regime's shortcomings" so that when the right time comes everyone can have enough confidence to revolt. But SA's example of "revenue enhancements" is unambiguously not one of those situations. One didn't need any particular degree of common knowledge to not vote for George Bush. No one was proposing an armed revolt or anything similarly risky. Saying "aha, Bush did levy new taxes despite saying he wouldn't" did not put one in danger of being "crushed as an individual".
(This is a place where I think you are taking advantage of your earlier conflation of contemporary-US and Stalinist-USSR situations in SA's article.)
Further, while the "revenue enhancements" thing is obviously slimy, it's not remotely in the same category as e.g. the things in the "Kolmogorov complicity" article you link to. Saying that thunder is heard before the corresponding lightning is seen (SA's example in that article) is flatly incompatible with reality; you can't actually believe it along with the truth about how physics and thunderstorms work, but you can call a tax a "revenue enhancement" without any actual false beliefs about reality. (You probably can't think that's optimal terminology for good thinking without false beliefs, but most people most of the time are not choosing their terminology solely to optimize good thinking, and it's not at all clear that they should.)
As for the overall narrative:
The impression I get from your article is something along the following lines: "SA is a mistake-theorist; he wants us to think of other people as basically on the same side as us, and reason politely with them. His article about bounded distrust applies this thinking to governments, major media sources, etc. But this is all wrong and possibly outright sinister: governments, major media sources, etc., are actively trying to mislead us for their own ends, and the people who want to think in mistake-theory terms in such a situation are the lackeys of Power, the government mouthpieces and suchlike, as opposed to the brave dissidents who see the conflict for what it is." With a somewhat-plausibly-deniable side order of "Boooo to SA, who has shown himself to be on the side of Power, which is much like the government of the Stalinist USSR".
And I think most of this narrative is wrong. SA is indeed a mistake-theorist, but he conspicuously doesn't take that to mean that the mouthpieces of state/cultural/... power should be assumed to be arguing in good faith. His article about bounded distrust, in particular, doesn't suggest doing that. I see no reason to think that his general preference for mistake theory indicates that he is on the side of Power (whatever specific sort of Power that might be). I do not think any sort of Power he is plausibly on the side of has much in common with the Stalinist USSR.
It doesn't seem to me like the setting of the illustrative examples should matter, though? The problem of bounded distrust should be qualitatively the same whether your your local authorities lie a lot or only a little. Any claims I advance about human rationality in Berkeley 2023 should also hold in Stalingrad 1933, or African Savanna −20,003, or Dyson Sphere Whole-Brain Emula... (read more)