Templates in your head

Via SparkleBox.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Field is Flat", New York Times, March 27 2015:

Democrats could easily lose the presidential election next year. For one thing, they probably won't take Georgia, Arizona, or Texas. Besides, the voters have templates in their heads.

World-famous moral philosopher David Brooks seems to have been stuck for weeks on a slumming trip in his filthy old haunts, in the ghetto of ordinary panditry, whether owing to the agenda of his hidden masters or just boredom with moral philosophy. As far as I'm concerned it's more fun when he does the moral philosophy, but he doesn't care about my needs.

Today it's the elections looming just 20 months away, and a couple of articles from the National Journal, neither of them for some reason by Ron Fournier.

One, from February 11, is by another Ronald, Brownstein, who remarks that Georgia and Arizona and Texas haven't turned Democrat yet in spite of their growing immigrant populations. Although I think he may not be remembering the 2014 elections quite right; as I recall it, all the Democratic candidates told Obama they didn't want any immigrant votes, thanks, so you can hold those delayed deportation orders, and Obama obliged them so that Kay Hagan and Mark Begich and Mark Udall (and Wendy Davis, Jason Carter, and Michelle Nunn from the states in question) could lose their contests anyway. Anyway it's not going to happen in 2016 unless the nominee whoever she may be is as stupid as Hagan and Begich were last year, which is hardly likely, even if she's capable of being petty stupid, because that was some awesome stupidity.

The other, from January 31, is by John B. Judis, and likewise about how employed white men are an "emerging Republican advantage" because a Republican won the Maryland governor's race in 2014, apparently because they thought the Democratic governor, Martin O'Malley, had raised their taxes, although for the most part he had not.

In 2012, Jerry voted for Romney, whom he admired as a "businessman." In 2014, he voted for Hogan. Taxes were an important reason. "Every year I seemed to pay more with Maryland state taxes," he explained. "I am not happy with what is happening with the taxes. I don't seem to be getting anything more from them." 

Only his state taxes didn't go up in the real world; he earns $80,000, according to Judis, and O'Malley's tax increase was on singles earning a minimum of $100,000 or $150,000 for couples. Jerry, along with Judis's other informants, was hallucinating. Too much hallucinating is a real problem for Democrats, I'm not going to try to deny it.

Luckily the number of black, brown, and female voters who are capable of learning to read their pay stubs is increasing, just as the amount of money deducted for their insurance premiums is not increasing, very much, thanks to Obamacare (cute piece from Politifact), so I'm just not going to worry too much. I certainly hope Democrats don't have an unbreakable lock on the 2016 presidential election, because that means people not bothering to vote, and we really need voters for the unlikely project of taking over Congress, but the research work of world-famous political superhack David Brooks does not impress me much, except for how little he needed to do to get up to his 800 words.

More evidence that the Times copy editors are boycotting Brooks's column:

Republicans, meanwhile, do doing sensationally well with just about every shrinking group. If 67-year-old rural white men were the future of the electorate, the G.O.P. would be rolling.

I do doing sensationally well too. It's my existentialist upbringing.

the aging of the electorate is partially canceling out the diversifying of the electorate. People tend to get more Republican as they get older, and they vote at higher rates. And older people are moving to crucial states. In Arizona, Obama won 63 percent of the young adults but only 29 percent of the oldsters.

What's crucial about Arizona??? Democrats have won the presidential contest in Arizona exactly once since 1948 (Clinton 1996, who didn't need the votes, either). Please, Br'er Fox, don't let all the old folks move to Arizona!

Voters have a lot of economic anxieties. But they also have a template in their heads for what economic dynamism looks like.

OK, so a template in your head is actually a thing, and I don't mean the fill-in-the-blank Word document with [expression in brackets] that Brooks uses to write a column on a tough day; or rather used to be a thing (and let the record show that I've been out of the cognitive science business for literally a significant number of decades and templates were out before I was). It was the idea that the way you recognized things was by a tiny model stored in the brain that you could map against your perceptions to determine whether what you were looking at was your grandmother, say, or a yellow Volkswagen, or the letter A; and was replaced many years ago by the concepts of prototype, or a much more schematic kind of internal representation that allowed for all the necessary variation among things that are never exactly the same and annoyingly keep moving, and by feature bundles, and more recently, as Wikipedia informs me, by multiple discrimination scaling, which actually works in artificial intelligence, though I'm not sure there are any robots dedicated to seeking out economic dynamism.

Comically enough, I'm finding one place where the template concept has survived, and that is in the "cognitive science of religion"—no jokes, please, about how template theory is ideally suited to the recognition of objects that don't exist, this is an open and affirming weblog at which persons of faith should feel welcome, at least if they're not too offended by the use of the word "fuck". So maybe that's where Brooks got it. I found a really interesting paper, too, by Pascal Boyer and Charles Ramble 2001, from which the concept seems to have grown, which David Brooks undoubtedly has not read, that kind of does use template theory to account for the recognition of imaginary objects, or

[2] an explicit representation of a violation of intuitive expectations, either:
[2a] a breach of relevant expectations for the category, or
[2b] a transfer of expectations associated with another category

Where was I?

That template does not include a big role for government. Polls show that faith in government is near all-time lows. In a Gallup survey, voters listed dysfunctional government as the nation’s No. 1 problem.

Ah yes. And once they've experienced dysfunctional government they naturally give up on government altogether, just the way someone who has been in a dysfunctional family normally chooses to live alone, or in Texas.

When many of these voters think of economic dynamism, they think of places like Texas, the top job producer in the nation over the past decade, and, especially, places like Houston, a low-regulation, low-cost-of-living place. 

What did I tell you? The "many of these voters", of course, frees the writer from the burden of trying to say how many (four? five? 62%? which voters?). Personally if I try, by way of experiment, to think of economic dynamism, which I have never done before, the first thing that comes to mind is insanely regulated, expensive Singapore. If I try to imagine Houston I can't get beyond the expectation that it would smell of sulfur and that one would be in a car all the time. I realize I'm not normal, but I can't imagine it's any more normal to think of Houston than not to think of Houston, unless  one is Joel Kotkin, which is certainly not normal in and of itself.

I suspect it will be a “Time for a Change” election. The crucial swing voters will be white and Hispanic college graduates in suburban office parks.

Really? I'm warning you, if they're in Houston it's not going to be crucial. Also they're what you would call a shrinking group too, according to a certain newspaper that pays you handsomely to live in a charming walkable neighborhood and work at home, whereas the job growth, better not tell Joel Kotkin, is in New York, San Francisco, and the urban cores of Chicago, New Orleans, Orlando, Charlotte and Milwaukee.

They are not into redistribution or that Senator Ted Cruz opened his campaign at Liberty University.

Well, there's something at last. I'm so into that Brooks has invented a whole new grammatical structure!