Motivated Reasoning for Identity-Protective Cognition

I am now working through Dan M. Kahan, Neutral Principles, Motivated Cognition and Some Problems for Constitutional Law, in: Harvard Law Review, vol 125 (2011), pp.1-77 (see also the summary by the author as a blog post, Motivated Reasoning and its Cognates). The Harvard Law Review version is independently useful, because it has two responses, by Mark Tushnet and by Suzanne Sherry.

Kahan, a former clerk of Supreme Court Judge Thurgood Marshall, takes his departure from the question of the neutrality of the US Supreme Court justices.

The most fundamental form of individual freedom that liberal constitutionalism secures for its citizens depends on the promise that government won’t impose legal obligations that presuppose adherence to a moral or political orthodoxy. [6]

Kahan is concerned that the socio-psychological context in which this freedom to pursue one's own happiness is negotiated is missed. 

Scholars and jurists have focused their attention entirely on the content of doctrines, I will argue, without attention to the social-psychological dynamics that shape how culturally diverse groups form impressions of what the Court’s decisions mean. [6]

People are hamstrung in noticing the others' illiberality without seeing their own. 

... although people are poor at detecting motivated reasoning in themselves, they can readily discern its effect in others, in whom it is taken to manifest bias or bad faith. [7]

What should be a discussion around evidence thereby turns into a question of social status of the in-group. 

... the issue of whose view of the facts will be endorsed by the law takes on added meaning as evidence of the groups’ relative social standing. The result is a distinctive cognitive form of illiberalism ... [7]

Claims of neutrality are disbelieved by those who disagree with the outcome of a ruling. 

... the neutrality of Supreme Court decisions becomes just another focus of illiberal status competition among groups who have fundamentally different visions of the good society — but who don’t disagree about the value of neutrality or about what neutrality in law requires. [8]

After analyzing the legal discourse on neutrality, Kahan turns to the problem of motivated reasoning in the case where the self-understanding of the individual is at stake.

Individuals depend on select groups — from families to university faculties, from religious denominations to political parties — for all manner of material and emotional support. Propositions that impugn the character or competence of such groups, or that contradict the groups’ shared commitments, can thus jeopardize their individual members’ well-being. [20]

Kahan breaks it down into three well known biases that people have:

Individuals are more likely to seek out information that supports than information that challenges positions associated with their group identity (biased search). They are also likely to selectively credit or dismiss a form of evidence or argument based on its congeniality to their identity (biased assimilation). They will tend to impute greater knowledge and trustworthiness and hence more credibility to individuals from within their group than from without. [21]

To throw in my own two cents for a minute, the credibility might well relate to a famous dictum by Karl Barth. Just as it is more difficult to deal with the disagreement of people closer to my own position, it is difficult to understand why people with greater knowledge and trustworthiness are not in my own group.

Kahan reminds us [21] that thoughtful people are even more adept at making such mental adjustments, pointing to his own research with Maggie Wittlin, Ellen Peters, Paul Slovic, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Donald Braman & Gregory Mandel, The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change (Cultural Cognition Project, Working Paper No. 89, 2011).

Kahan then points to the problem of how "naive realism" leads people to spot the biases in others, in terms of the identity-protecting cognition, but not in their own stance.

Naïve realism refers to an asymmetry in the ability of individuals to perceive the impact of identity-protective cognition. Individuals tend to attribute the beliefs of those who disagree with them to the biasing impact of their opponents’ values. [22]

Nevertheless, in such situations individuals usually understand their own factual beliefs to reflect nothing more than “objective fact,” plain for anyone to see. [22]

In Kahan's reconstruction, this becomes the basis of the interminable round of mutual recriminations as the debate devolves into a "contest over the integrity and intelligence of those groups" [22]:

The (accurate) perception that a rival group’s members are reacting in a closed-minded fashion naturally spurs a group’s members to express resentment — the seeming baselessness of which provokes members of the former to experience and express the same. [22]

The study of these situations and behaviors is what Kahan aspires to in his research into cultural cognition (cf. the Cultural Cognition chapter from 2008, where Kahan admits his debt to Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky's Risk and Culture of 1982).

Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their perceptions of risk and other policy-consequential facts to their cultural worldviews. Cultural worldviews consist of systematic clusters of values relating to how society should be organized. [22] 

Kahan illustrates the challenge with an analysis of how people use their values to react to question involving the environment versus the economy.

People who subscribe to a relatively hierarchical and individualistic worldview, for example, tend to be dismissive of environmental risk claims, acceptance of which would justify restrictions on commerce and industry, activities they value on material and symbolic grounds. Individuals who hold egalitarian and communitarian values, in con- trast, are morally suspicious of commerce and industry, which they see as sources of social disparity and vehicles of noxious self-seeking. [23]

Even scientific consensus is not exempt from this matrix [24]; cf. Dan M. Kahan, Hank Jenkins-Smith & Donald Braman, Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus, 14 J. RISK RES. 147, 149–50 (2011); and even questions of date rape exhibit these viewpoints; cf. Dan M. Kahan, Culture, Cognition, and Consent: Who Perceives What, and Why, in Acquaintance-Rape Cases, 158 U. PA. L. REV. 729 (2010).

Thus, while the US project is united in its attempt to provide the good life for its citizens, the means of achieving this are hotly contested [25]. US voters are not haggling over values, they are haggling over facts which they valuate differently.

The varying emotional resonance of risk claims across distinct cultural communities predisposes their members to find some of these claims more plausible than others, a process reinforced by the tendency of individuals to seek out and credit information from those who share their values. [25]

As a result, policy debates tend to 

... build into rivalries among the members of groups whose members subscribe to competing visions of the best life. [25]

The positions that individuals take on whether the death penalty deters, whether deep geologic isolation of nuclear wastes is safe, whether immigration reform will boost the economy or put people out of work, and the like express their defining commitments and not just their beliefs about how the world works. [26]

In this context, the symbolic status competition becomes projected onto the policy actions of the state.

Whose answer the state credits — by adopting one or another policy — elevates one cultural group and degrades the other. [26]

Though Kahan does not use that terminology, the public discourse has turned into a zero-sum game of status where the state's choice of policy can only elevate the one side while disregarding the other.

Using this infrastructure, Kahan can now reconstruct the neutrality debate of the Supreme Court in terms of the illiberal bent of motivated reasoning toward identity-protective cultural cognition.

Even among nonzealots, however, perceptions of the Court’s decisions remain vulnerable to identity-protective cognition in much the same way sports fans’ perceptions of the calls of a referee — or dare I say umpire — do. [28] 

There is thus an inherent risk that citizens will perceive decisions that threat- en their group commitments to be a product of judicial bias. [28]

 Unfortunately Supreme Court findings use all the wrong argument types to get past this impression.

The Court’s decisionmaking conspicuously features procedures, techniques, and doctrines informed by the trappings of the grand neutrality theories. [28]

This comes about by "equating prevailing interpretations with “reason” and defeated ones with mere “will” or “preference,” [28] thus coming across as putting down the losing side of a ruling.

Against this back- ground, the decisions of the Court are no longer seen as determinations of particular disputes but rather as adjudications of the status and dominance of contending cultural groups. [29]

Using this framework, Kahan now turns to the 2010 term of the Supreme Court for analyzing the actual decisions that the court had made and looking at how the evidence of each side was contested by the other.

In cases involving sex equality, gay rights, the death penalty, police seizures, drug testing, and other charged matters, the Court has invoked empirical evidence — or some- times the lack of it — as warrant for its decisions. When it does so, the genuineness of its reasoning has provoked accusations of bad faith, not only from within the Court but also from without. [34] 

Some of these decisions may well be that the Justices think [35] such empirical recourse will help the losing side accept the verdict. But Kahan's approach suggests that doing so only aggrevates the feelings of rejection and status loss. Such a tack however [36] leaves the losing side with no interpretation but the feeling that they are "either deluding themselves or trying to deceive others." [36]

The narrative falls apart altogether when later decisions do away with the empirical support in lieu of moral justification.

The point is not that decisions grounded in empirical “fact” shouldn’t evolve into ones of “principle”; it is that the observable tendency of them to do so makes it predictable that citizens will suspect the Court is trying to deceive them (or is surrendering to self-deception) when it purports to lay decisive weight on “empirical facts.” [36]

At the same time, the empirical evidence becomes ammunition for the "winning side" to be used in their verbal sparring with the losing side.

This factionalized environment incubates collective cynicism — both about the political neutrality of courts and about the motivations behind empirical arguments in policy discourse generally. Indeed, Justice Scalia’s extraordinary dissent in Plata synthesizes these two forms of skepticism. [37]

In short, the Supreme Court is just as identity-protective as the remaining social discourse:

Empirical factfinding, then, is a normal and basically unremarkable member of the judicial toolkit — even for Justice Scalia. Except when it isn’t: empirical factfinding has properties that provoke identity-protective cognition in cases that are culturally charged, at which point individuals of diverse values are likely to disagree about whether the tool is being applied appropriately. [40]

After covering how this problem is especially strong in Free-Speech situations, where factual findings via the "non-communicative harm" priniple are necessary to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behaviors, Kahan concludes:

In this way, the Court’s decisions are transformed into symbols. In assessing whose “harms” are “cognizable,” the Court is adjudicating who counts in a factionalized society, the members of which live in a state of permanent resentment of one another’s perceived attempts to erect their worldview into a political orthodoxy. [49]

Of course, evidence and science are not the only markers. In the end, the "Framers' intent" and even originalism functions in quite the same way, as symbolic markers to constituencies:

As Greene has argued in another article, “originalism” is a kind of presentational style, adopted by academic critics and sometimes by angry Justices, that citizens (through the agency of culturally authoritative intermediaries) use as a cognitive heuristic for deciding what is at stake and whom they should trust in a charged case. [55]

For those outside of these cultural circles, the result was the opposite:

Both the valence of “originalist” theorizing and its denunciatory and confident tone begged credulity in a manner that in turn begged for rebuke. [55]

With David Strauss, Kahan argues that it is the combination of high ground for taking highly charged positions:

Judges’ reasoning triggers self-reinforcing waves of self-deception and distrust only when judges make use of the simulacra of these heuristics that get packaged as “theories” and sold to the public as furnishing exclusive guides for “neutral” interpretation. The provenance, valence, and tone of these frameworks are what make them carriers of the partisan meanings that provoke the complex of identity-protective mechanisms that polarize citizens on cultural grounds. [57]

Thus, the Supreme Court needs new expressive strategies that do not simplify extremely complex problems into siding with half of the electorate under the guise of empirical evidence. Researchers like Paul Secunda (e.g. Cognitive Illiberalism and Debiasing Strategies, Marquette Law Review) have proposed debiasing strategies that have at least some experimental evidence to recommend them.

Kahan begins [60] by pointing to the oddity that 5-to-4 decisions are still pronounced as obvious from the Supreme Court bench. This is bad, Kahan reminds us:

Studies of motivated cognition and related dynamics show that pronouncements of certitude deepen group-based conflict. [60]

Because the group-dynamic rewards conformity, the dissenters within the group will stay silent, increasing the appearance of cohesion and agreement. It is here that strategies can attach, by requiring each side to name plausible counter-arguments to their position. [61]

Because this requirement confers a type of procedural immunity for equivocating, those individuals who feel doubt about their group’s position will now add their voices to the mix. The genuineness of what they say, however, is not lost on the other participants. Those in the speaker’s group are exposed to evidence that they otherwise wouldn’t have seen, demonstrating that those who share their commitments hold more nuanced views. [61]

Members of the opposing group, too, see that those on the other side are not in fact uncomprehending of counterarguments; they are thus less likely to write off everything else the other side has to say as originating in self-deception or deceit. [61]

Judges can simulate this by admitting the complexity, the aporia of the issue at hand.

Aporetic engagement does not preclude a definitive outcome or resolution. But it necessarily treats as false — a sign of misunderstanding — any resolution of the problem that purports to be unproblematic. [62]

Kahan then turns to self-affirmation.

Researchers have found that self-affirmation devices can be used to counteract group conflict on political issues, such as the predicted con- sequences of a social-welfare policy or the performance of governmental officials. [67]

Kahan then introduces expressive overdetermination, a technique where a challenging fact is packaged with a consequence that appeals to the recipients: global warming ameliorated with nuclear power, or nanotechnology as mode of cleaning up the environment [67f].

Expressively overdetermined laws — ones that combine elements conveying a multiplicity of culturally valued meanings — have been instrumental in dissipating political conflict over environmental regulation and social welfare policies in the United States, and abortion in Europe. [68]

Kahan is not willing to do so when such accommodations might endanger an unambiguous outcome.

Sometimes governments enact laws that simply violate the Constitution, and sometimes citizens challenge laws that don’t. In those cases, the Court obviously must decide the case in favor of the side that has the better position. [69] 

But even there overdetermination can be used to give the opposing sides their due. 

Dipping into Factual and Narrative Cognition

 I was generally wondering how we got from the freedom to differ on how exactly purgatory works to dismissing the scientific evidence on climate change or vaccinations on grounds that amount to beliefs.

ChatGPT 4-o helpfully sent me to start understanding this by looking into the work of Dan Kahan at Yale and his research on cultured cognition and motivated reasoning (e.g. Motivated Reasoning and its Cognates, extracted from Dan M. Kahan, Neutral Principles, Motivated Cognition and Some Problems for Constitutional Law, in: Harvard Law Review, vol 125 (2011), pp.1-77).

In a blog entry that gives a talk at an NSF 2011 conference, Kahan summarizes the problem well:

When risks and other facts that admit of scientific investigation become the focus of cultural status competition, members of opposing group will be unconsciously motivated to construe all manner of evidence in a manner that reinforces their commitment to the positions that predominate within their respective groups.

Or, as Kahan clarified in a blog entry from 2014 when discussing whether social science research shows a dissipation of trust in science in people who identify as Republican,

... political polarization over risks and other policy-relevant facts is a consequence of a the latent distrust citizens with opposing cultural identities have of one another, & their suspicion that "science" is being invoked opportunistically, disingenuously to disguise as claims about "how the world works" what are in fact contested understandings of "how we should live".

Note that ChatGPT 4-o was very clear that I needed to look at the side of the narrative imagination (Martha Nussbaum) as well as the epistemic character that dealing with truth requires (Quassim Cassam). The "minimal program" for looking at the various facets of this issue ChatGPT 4-o summarized in this handy table, which I copy as a graphic here.

The core dilemma in this investigation is the aymmetry between facts and narratives:

“Facts do not counter, narratives do. But you need facts to invalidate narratives.”

As ChatGPT 4-o pointed out:

This is the epistemic asymmetry that the 21st century hasn’t resolved. And bad actors have exploited it masterfully: because a compelling lie with emotional resonance is faster and more persuasive than a slow, careful debunking—even when the debunking is factually unassailable.

Juritsch on the Babenberger -- Part II: Markgrave Heinrich I

We continue with the book by Georg Juritsch, which is a staggering 750+ pages long. We are speaking about Geschichte der Babenberger und ihrer Länder (976-1246), published in Innsbruck with Wagner in 1894.

Markgrave Heinrich I (994-1018)

994 Wolfgang of Regensburg also died (25). He had been a champion of Christianity in the Eastern marches and especially in Hungary. The Hungarian ruler Geisas and his wife Sarolt were supportive of the Christianization. Wenn Gaisas son Waik (995) took over the rulership, he turned to Bavaria not Constantinople, requesting the hand of Gisela, the daughter of the Bavarian duke Heinrich who had just died, to accept Christianity completely. As a result (26), Stefan I (995-1038) becomes the first Hungarian Christian king. 

The new bishop of Passau, Christian (24), had the emperor Otto III reaffirm all his privileges in 999 (27), including market, mint, weight and toll rights. It was not always clear who influenced which abbey, however; Duke Heinrich II of Bavaria placed abbots in Altaich and Tegernsee, much to the annoyance of the Bishop of Freising (28). The Benedictine rule of Altaich is spread in its reform, as the other abbeys request monks from there to become abbot with them, for example, Lanthbert in Ostrow founded by Boleslaw der Fromme.

The Northern March of the Babenberger, under Markgrave Heinrich, had been promised Bavaria if Duke Heinrich of Bavaria, a cousin of Otto III, was elected king. The election took place in 1002, but the Markgrave did not receive Bavaria. This disappointment could not be fixed with extensive land donations: a complex of grounds between Liesing and Triesting, 20 Huben between Kamp and March. The Northern Markgrave still established connections with the Polish Duke Boleslaw. The insurrection (30) pulled in the Babenberger Ernst, who had assisted in the battle against Arduin in 1002 in Italy, and the brother of the new king, Bruno von Augsburg.

The Northern March was horribly devastated in this conflict, Heinrich was captured, as was Ernst, and would have been executed without the intervention of Willigis von Mainz. Heinrich III of Lützelburg received the Bavarian duchy instead (31), even if the capture of Prague in 1004 (30) lead to the release of the Babenberger (31).

Luitpold's son Poppo had studied in Regensburg to be ready for a church position (31), and moved on to St Emmeran afterwards (32). When Heinrich II founded a new bishopric in Bamberg, which was to be a pattern institution, he made his chancellor Eberhard the bishop (32) and Poppo the cathedral provost (33). 

(rck Juritsch sees the hanging of St Coloman, whom he calls a pilgrim from Palestine, in Stockerau during this time as an indicator that the popular justice of the people continues in spite of the jurisdiction of the markgrave.)

1014 the corpse of Coloman is transferred to Melk and then the miracles begin (34). 

In spite of his involvement in the insurrection, Count Ernst was allowed to marry the older sister of Duke Hermann III of Suebia. In 1012, Hermann died and Ernst now became Duke of Suebia (34), but dies soon when hit by a friend's arrow during the hunt (35).

Adalbero von Lützelburg had basically been holding Trier hostage since 1008 (36). But the Emperor called his bluff in 1017 and had the clerics and the people acclaim Poppo to be archbishop of Trier. Poppo goes to Rome (37) to pick up his Pallium on April 8, 1017. Poppo reflects the Benedictine reform, expands the cathedral by 1/3rd, and becomes the guardian for his nephew Ernst. His sister Christina moves to Trier to enter a nunnery there. Poppo visits Palestine (38) and possibly even Babylon.

Markgrave Heinrich I is equally reliable on the emperor's side, attacking the polisch borderlands of Moravia in 1015 and leaving some 800 men of Boleslaw's dead on the field (38). Two years later, in 1017, he cuts off the returning Polish army laden down with plunder.

Then the Northern Markgrave Heinrich of Babenberg dies and his brother Adalbert becomes the new markgrave (39). 

Juritsch on the Babenberger -- Part I: Markgrave Luitpold I

This is probably going to have to be a multi-part post, since the book by Georg Juritsch is a staggering 750+ pages long. We are speaking about Geschichte der Babenberger und ihrer Länder (976-1246), published in Innsbruck with Wagner in 1894.

The general organization of the work is to go through the individual rulers, though some of them, such as Leopold VI and his son (and final Babenberger) Friedrich have multiple chapters. It is not clear if this is correlated with their importance only; after all, the general state of records improves the closer one moves toward the present.

Before the Babenberger

Juritsch sets us up in 907, a hundred years after Charlemagne, when the East Marches are lost to the invading Hungarians, and the area from the Plattensee to the Enns is taken. Duke Luitpold and his Bavarian army was killed that year, including the bishops Thietmar of Salzburg and those of Freising and Säben (1). Juritsch speculates that, not unlike the Romans, the German pioneers retreated to the west and left the border marches depopulated, while abbeys (Altaich, Regensburg, Passau, Freising, Salzburg) and bishops held on to their legal titles (2) of their latifundiae (4) in the hope of future reclamation (2).

Though most of the villages were wood constructions, there were a few stone fortifications, such as the Eparesburg of Kremsmuenster, or the Hollenburg, and the holdings of some of Charlemagne's liegemen near St Pölten. Karlmann had owned a palatinate near Baden (3), and there was Mödling, a fief of Passau; surely both were fortified as well. In the Tullnerfeld, the remains of the Roman fortifications at Faviana and Comagena (Tulln) could be repurposed as defenses at short notice. (rck: Juritsch thinks that Faviana is Traismauer, where the Moravian duke Priwina was baptized (3), which however was called Augustianis; Favianis would have been the Roman castle Mautern.)

Though colonization had pushed along the rivers emptying into the Danube into the pre-alps, those ranching areas were just as deserted (3), though the Huns undertook no effort to destroy either fruit orchards or vineyards, looking mainly for plunder and slaves.

The military fortunes varied around the reign of Duke Heinrich II of Bavaria, the brother of the king; the Hungarians were defeated at Sediraburg and in the swamps of Drömling (938), and near Wels at the Traun (943 or 944). Bohemia had been put into its place (4; 5) making it possible for Bavaria to focus on the reconquest. The victory of 948 found its projection even into the writings of the Gandersheimer nun Hrotsuit (5). When the Hungarians tried to take advantage of the uprising of Arnulf and Luitpold in 954, they revolt was put down decisively and the Hungarians defeated August 10, 955 near Augsburg (Lechfeld). 

The religious rulers were ready for re-colonization of their properties (6) and pushed beyond the Wachau on the left and the Traisen on the right side of the Danube banks. This reinstated the separation of the church territories of Salzburg and Passau (6). 

Several of the Hungarian rulers at the Lechfeld (Karchan Bultzu, Dewix, Achtum) had already been christianized via Constantinople. The East-Roman monk Hierotheus was the bishop of Hungary, and the monastery of St John the Baptist near the river Maros was in place (7). The prince-bishoprics of Salzburg and Passau tried to build on these foundations when attempting pacification through Christianization. 

An important person in that context was Pilgrim of Passau (8), nephew of Archbishop Friedrich von Salzburg, who had grown up in the monastery of Altaich, another owner of latifundiae in the Eastern marches. Pilgrim was also related to the Arnulfinger, key landowners in Bavaria and Carinthia (8). Pilgrim attempted to reorganize the responsibilities by consecrating a few more bishops via Benedict VII in Rome. He justified this with embellished reports of the missionizing successes in Hungary (9) and in his role as the archbishop of Lorch. Implied was the elevation of Passau to a metropolis (10) of an archbishop. Haldemar organized a papal bull in Rome supposedly reflecting the archival state there (11) which was used in this regard. Friedrich von Salzburg was not excited (11),  and his influence in Rome sufficient to get the decision reversed. Pilgrim, thwarted, kept the bull and twelfth-century documents record him as archbishop nevertheless.

Refounding the Eastern Marches (976-774)

Emperor Otto I died 973 (12). The Bavarian Duke Heinrich II made a pact with Boleslava II of Bohemia and Miseco of Poland. Among those assisting the new emperor Otto II to put down the revolt was Luitpold, a count of the Danube district, and his brother Berthold, whose father was a relative of the sister of Heinrich I of Saxony. They themselves believed their descent from one Adalbert of Babenberg, who was executed in the reign of Ludwig the Child, but a franko-suebian origin makes more sense. 

The brothers had known the favor of Otto I already and now Berthold received the northern district and Luitpold the Eastern marches. 

The marches toward Carinthia and Verona were separated to form the Duchy of Carinthia (13), and the reduced Bavaria given to the Suebian Duke Otto.

This Ostarrichi of Luitpold was enclosed by the Enns in the West, the town of Spitz in the East (13), and the Traisen in the South (14). In order to secure this border region, the count of the marches was the sole count in this territory, required to both hold diets and attend the Bavarian diets (13) and serve in their wars.

We know that soon thereafter three counties were established, at Neuburg, Tulln and Mautern, which the marcher count had to service in a six-week rhythm (14). At the same time, Luitpold remained the count of the Danube district, especially the monastery of Metten received donations from him. He also held the castle of Melk (20), later claims of Passau notwithstanding.

Otto II was generous toward Passau as well (15): 975 they received Kremsmünster, the toll at Passau, the Ennsburg, St Florian and St Pölten. When the Carinthian duke Heinrich rebelled, Passau suffered destruction of its cathedral, which was made good with donations around Lorch. Salzburg, which had also stood with Otto II, received lands as well (16).

Otto II was smart to look to the churchmen for support against his aristocracy, and some of them, such as Wolfgang of Regensburg, were brave warriors that built their own defenses, such as the Wieselburg.

With the elimination of Duke Arnulf, the monasteries of Altaich and Tegernsee had lost their roles, and the game of latifundiae was down to Salzburg, Passau and Regensburg.

While the marcher counts did not have to participate in Italian wars, such as Otto II's campaign of 979, it was good to remain close to the emperor and the Roman curiae to realize plans, as the Merseburger bishop Giseler had demonstrated when he achieved his elevation to the archbishopric of Magdeburg (16) when Merseburg (which Otto I had created as a bishopric in gratitude to Laurentius after the Lechfeld) was decommissioned again (17). Unsurprisingly, the disaster in Italy of 979 (17) was considered "payback" from Saint Laurentius for having lost his bishopric so hastily [rck Wikipedia suggests that Otto II died of a malaria infection during the campaign]. 

Perhaps the contemporaries also expected a return of the Hungarians, which happened in 983 with the death of the Bavarian duke, but Luitpold managed to beat them back and even extend his sphere of influence to the Wiener Wald (17). Pilgrim nevertheless painted a picture of devastation of his lands in the Eastern marches when meeting Otto III in Bamberg 985. The point of this complaint was (18) to receive rights to bring free settlers into the marches, in addition to the bishop's colonials. These free settlers should be free of the Ministerial's interference, either fiscally or legally through the courts of the markgrave. Otto III obliged Passau, extending the immunities of Karl III, which in turn led to an apparently quick increase in free Bavarian settlers into the Eastern marches.

Pilgrim organized Synods to Lorch and Mautern (18) to settle the question of who would receive the tithe between Enns and the Wiener Wald (19), a topic that was also discussed at the Synod of Mistelbach.

Friedrich of Salzburg was no less concerned to get his holdings certified by the authorities in Rome and at the Imperial court, and the list is long and impressive: Ybbs, Url, Megalicha, Wachau, Arnsburg, Grinzing, Holenburg, Tulln, Pottenbrunn, Traismauer, Oberwöling. Unfortunately, these rights were backed with a forged privilege of King Arnulf (19), which led to ongoing frustrations 200 years later still (20). 

The warfare had diminished the education in the new marches as well; Count Udalrich von Ebersberg claimed that all Bavarians knew how to read the public law (Volksrecht) (20), but saw this no longer the case during his adulthood. The school in St Emmeran (21), reformed in 980 by St Wolfgang of Regensburg and reorganized by the Benedictine monk Ramwold of St Maximin near Trier, was famous and had 300 books in its library managed by Reginbald, who worked to increase the holdings. Ramwold had the Aureus Codex of Emmeran renovated. Salzburg had inherited most of its books, including Beda's De Arte Metrica of 701 and a collection of letters from Alexander the Great to Aristotle. There was also Bishop Reginold of Eichstätt, who knew Hebrew and Greek und wrote a vita of St Willibald and poems about St Wunnibald and St Blasius. Tegernsee (22) was renovated from St Emmeran through Gozpert (21), who brought enthusiasm for the classics with im (22) and had Boethius, Stasius, Persius, Horaz and the letters of Cicero read and copied.

(rck Juritsch thinks that Master Conrad wrote earlier versions of the Nibelungenlied in Latin, no less, at the behest of Pilgrim of Passau around this time; modern scholarship assumes that the epic was written in Middle High German from the beginning and that Pilgrim occurs because this was during the time that Pilgrim was supposed to be canonized. (22) Juritsch is well-informed about the miracles some 200 years after Pilgrim's death at the rediscovery of his grave (23).)

In 991 both Friedrich of Salzburg and Pilgrim of Passau died (23).

In 994 (24), Luitpold is hit by a stray error during a wargame and dies July 10th, 994. Thietmar of Merseburg praises him (24), as do the Annals of Quedlinburg. 

Luitpold's son Heinrich I becomes the new markgrave, even though the role is not hereditary yet.

David Manheim on Underspecified Goals

 In a follow-up to the previous David Manheim discussion, a blog-post from 2016/09/29 entitled Overpowered Metrics Eat Underspecified Goals, Manheim analyzes examples of twitter use and startups to get a handle on how goals ought to be formalized, especially when transitioning to a corporate structure — here, Peter Drucker's SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound) versus the BHA goals (Big, Hairy, Audacious) that startups use.

Manheim reminds us that

metrics work because they help ensure that the tasks aligned the intuition of the workers with the needs of the company, create trust between workers and their management, and reduce the complexity of larger goals into manageable steps.

Manheim points out that, in their existing formulation, Goodhart's Law, which probably derived from Donald T Campell's formulation, are at least sometimes false. This follows from the good regulator work of Roger Conant and Ross Ashby, which show an isomorphism between the model of the regulator and the system regulated and which lead to the internal model principle in control theory.

Since Conant's and Ashby's good regulator cannot existing in a process that exceeds modeling complexity, simplified models are targeted by the regulators instead, which can then be exploited.

This means any simplified model used by a regulator can be exploited, especially when the agents understand the model and metrics used. This happens almost everywhere; employees understand the compensation system and seek to maximize their bonuses and promotion, drug manufacturers know the FDA requirements and seek to minimize cost to get their drug approved, and companies know the EPA regulations and seek to minimize the probability and cost of fines. The tension created by the agents is what leads to Goodhart’s theorem; whatever simplifications exist in the model can be exploited by agents.

Manheim now shows how this interacts with the principal-agent problem. [Fn1] Manheim argues that where the story of the individual agent and the bigger story of the cooperative collide, that's too bad for the bigger story.

In companies, the discrepancy between the metrics used and the goal isn’t maximized by the agents: the agents aren’t necessarily against the larger goal, they just pursue their own goals, albeit subject to the regulator’s rules. Goodhart said the correlation doesn’t reverse, it simply collapses.

The outcome is a mismatch between the company's space of possibilities and

the subspace induced by agents’ maximization behaviors.

In other words, even metrics that are aligned well with agents whose goals are understood, they are distorted by the agents whose motives or goals are different than the ones used to build the metric. And because all metrics are simplifications, and all people have their own goals, this is inevitable. 

 This puts the onus on the model to be as explicit as possible (I think that is what Manheim means with legibility, but I am not 100% sure).

If the model is explicit, game-theoretic optima can be calculated, and principal-agent negotiations can guarantee cooperation. This is equivalent to saying that simple products and simple systems can be regulated with simple metrics and Conant and Ashby style regulators, since they represent the system fully.

Manheim then suggests that Wilson in his discussion of bureaucracy and organizational theory made a useful contribution by replacing the goals with missions (Manheim is persuasive that complexity is often irreducible, thereby curtailing Wilson's other suggestion of how to remedy organizational misalignments.) 

[Wilson writes:] "The great advantage of mission is that… operators will act… in ways that the head would have acted had he or she been in their shoes.” But that requires alignment not of metrics and goals, but of goals and missions.

When saddled with unclear goals, metrics begin to take on the role of (self-)justification. 

And as Abram Demski pointed out to me, this is an even deeper point; Holmström’s theorem shows that when people are carving a fixed pie, it’s impossible to achieve a stable game-theoretic equilibrium and be efficient too, unless you ignore the budget constraints. 

A corporation's solution to this conundrum is

... to make sure people can contribute to growing the size of the pie, making it a non-zero-sum game. Creating this non-zero-sum game to serve as a context for goals is the function of the mission; it’s something that everyone wins by furthering.

To put matters into my own words, missions are supposed to be goal generators.

For Manheim, this is how to turn the old adage from management theory

To motivate a team, you need goals that are clear, and metrics that support them.

into something actionable.

Failure to use metrics well means that motivations and behaviors can drift. On the other hand, using metrics won’t work exactly, because complexity isn’t going away. A strong-enough sense of mission means it may even be possible to align people without metrics.

(This may explain why start-ups and open source projects work.) 

The solution may well be to hybridize them, or turn them into a flywheel process.

It makes sense, however, to use both sets of tools; adding goals that are understood by the workers and aligned with the mission, which clearly allow everyone to benefit, will assist in moderating the perverse effects of metrics, and the combination can align the organization to achieve them. Which means ambitious things can be done despite the soft bias of underspecified goals and the hard bias of overpowered metrics.