Denialisms Are About Moral Authority, Not Truth

Sovereign citizens (sovcits) stick out among the various species of denialists.  Other denialisms are at least about matters of fact - even if the denialists demonstrate poor critical thinking, at least their core assertion is a truth claim.  The Earth is round, or it is flat.  Vaccines cause autism, or they do not.  9/11 was an inside job, or it was not. 

But sovcits extend their beliefs into having a kind of power of their own; that their legal pronouncements have some kind of magic power to them. When surfing Youtube for "sovereign citizen" you won't have to look long for Youtube videos of the form:

1. Sovcit gets pulled over, stopped, or otherwise detained by police.
   
   
2. Sovcit recites their legal incantation.
   
   
3. Sovcit, quite amazingly, somehow manages to be shocked when the police break their window, tase them, arrest them, etc. (Here is a perfect example, but don't watch it unless you are ready to see police violence.)

Creationists and Flat Earthers mostly agree with the same basic observations of the world, and they mostly don't make different decisions about how to live in the world based on their claims. I've never seen a creationist argue against the existence of island gigantism or dwarfism, or a flat Earther against the existence of the horizon - they just have a different explanation.

You might make the argument that as a denialism, the "theories" of sovreign citizens have domain-specific characteristics. After all, law requires a belief in its legitimacy to work, and they just claim legitimacy for a different set of rules, rules which affect our behavior on a daily basis. But this still doesn't really address the way in which sovcits seem different from the rest. Imagine that an evil neuroscientist plants in your head the belief that vaccines cause autism. Once under the spell of that denialism, you can predict that you would act the same way as other anti-vaxxers, avoiding immunizations, attending anti-vaccine protests, etc. But the thought experiment doesn't work for sovcits. The evil neuroscientist puts the belief in your head that the current American government is illegitimate. You STILL wouldn't think that you could Jedi-mind-trick your way out of a traffic stop, even though you would be frustrated by living under the thumb of the current regime. In fact we don't need an evil neuroscientist to demonstrate this - assuming you believe the Russian invasion of Ukraine is illegitimate, then you consider the political authority of the Russian government in the occupied territories to be similarly illegitimate. If you found yourself in Ukraine, would you go walking across an open field into the occupied territories loudly reciting "The U.N. says this is an illegal war and you can't be here" and then adding with surprise "Hey, you shot me!" No, because you recognize the physical reality even if you disagree as to who the legitimate authority is. But that's exactly what these sovereign citizens are doing.

And there, exactly, we see what DOES unite all these denialisms. In all of them, including the sovereign citizens, the core aspect is a disagreement as to the true source of moral authority. The different truth claims are a symptom of that underlying disagreement, and only in the sovereign citizens is the root cause so exposed.

A lot of other seemingly unrelated aspects of denialism start to snap into place now. Creationists believe the source of authority on the story of our origin is the Bible (or Quran), and by undermining religious cosmogony, ultimately we undermine religious morality (hence why creationists are overwhelmingly religious, hence their bizarre non sequiturs that teaching evolution leads to drug culture and promiscuity.) And I'm not sure who the moon landing people or 9/11 truthers think is a good moral authority, but I'm damn sure they do NOT think it's the United States government. And if you think the people telling you to wear a mask and get vaccinated are the same immoral elites making your favorite President look bad by calling attention to the pandemic, then no mask and no vaccines for me! Some people have a psychological makeup that is so polarized toward respect for authority that not only does it dominate truth, it becomes conflated with it. Sovereign citizens think that objective truth equals objective and irresistible authority, which is why they're inevitably shocked when physical reality disagrees with their perceived moral authority.

We neglect and misunderstand the complicated and ancient relationship between truth and authority at our peril.

Don't Paralyze Myths into Images

Cthulhu's city of R'lyeh, by Marc Simonetti

I made a decision last week not to draw my young daughter a picture of her imaginary friend.

I've drawn other monsters and fairies from her rich inner world - one was the Magic Space Pickle. Another was Bad Plus, an incorrigible villain who eats garbage. Thusfar all have been well-received. But despite having talked several times about drawing Sussa, her octopus friend from Neptune, I changed my mind. I think it would be cruel. I would be taking something away from her.

By summoning these creatures into the real world, or at least the concrete sensory world, you nail them down. You take the emotional experiences that are the important things about them - what they're really made of, what they're for - and you neuter them, constrain them, and tame them. You trap their unbound and supernatural essence inside something mundane and concrete. You've stolen it and broken it.

So here's an example: Grendel, in Beowulf. In the poem, Grendel is utterly terrifying. But even when it's rendered accurately according to the text, it loses something. 2005's Beowulf included the sinew-and-bone-chewing noises which at that time I didn't remember were actually in the text. But the distorted misshapen creature they dragged into the light just didn't feel like the vaguely sort of spiny reptilian insectoid thing I had imagined. It's not that the CGI people did a bad job; they could not, in principle, have done a good job. In the same vein, many otherwise enthusiastic fans of the movie Alien feel similarly deflated when the overall shape of the xenomorph is revealed as disappointingly humanoid as it disintegrates in the glare of the shuttle's engines.

I think my daughter understands this too. She did harass me for an image of the Space Pickle once I mentioned drawing him. But, interestingly enough, she has colluded with me in forgetting the decision to draw Sussa.

For this reason, Sussa and her ice cream powers and solar-system-spanning tentacles will remain forever as words and feelings in my daughter's mind - where they belong and flourish.

Professional Sports: Salary Distributions and Relationship to Team Size and League Revenues

Some casual fans of pro sports are actually much more interested in the business and psychology of the leagues than the action on the field. IF that's you, read on! I started wondering 1) what is the minimum you could make in each sport? What was the relationship between size of team in each sport, player salaries, and profitability? and 2) that if any of the figures in my table are glaringly wrong, please comment below and I will correct it (and my written conclusions if they're affected.)

Leag	Max/min	avg/med	rev, $B	sal/rev	rev/plyr	rev/pl / avg sal
NFL	76	1.28	18.0	0.10	10,613,208	9.68
MLB	56	2.92	9.56	0.40	10,988,506	2.51
NHL	21	1.04	5.2	0.42	7,065,217	2.36
NBA	44	1.97	10.0	0.34	22,222,222	2.96

Observations:

1. The smaller the team roster size, the better players get compensated (both in terms of minimum income, median, and average.) That is to say: if you're a player, the NBA is the best place to be.
   
   
2. To get an idea of the salary spreads in each sport, we can look at the max:min ratio. (Minimum salaries in each case are determined by the players union contract with the league.) A catchier name for this would beis the "J.P. Morgan index"*, is highest in football, then baseball and not far behind basketball, with the NHL the lowest.
   
   To get a Gini index (to see income inequality within the league) we'd need all the individual salary data. While that may be available, and I welcome you to find it and crunch the numbers yourself, for my level of curiosity a quick-and-dirty index of average salary divided by median will work. Despite the NFL having some outgroup super-earners giving it the highest J.P. Morgan index, baseball is the most unequal (suggesting the most high-earning outliers) at almost 3, followed by the NBA, NFL, and NHL. In the NHL the average and median are almost the same, and the top earner is an outlier among all the leagues at only $16M. (The J.P. Morgan index is also the lowest there.)
   
   As an additional thought, I wonder how closely real output (measured in goals, sacks, strike-outs etc.) correlates with pay - and does this explain why the NHL is so much more egalitarian in pay than the MLB or NFL? (Again there could be contract or business-specific reasons that I'm not aware of, rather than the nature of the sport.) It also raises the question of whether relative status has more of an effect in some sports, i.e. are there more positional effects in hockey?
   
   To explain this concretely: if you look at say, a brick-making factory, there will be people who are faster at making bricks, and people who are slower. If they're salaried, then you would expect rationally that someone who makes twice as many bricks as the median would get paid twice as much, and similarly someone who makes half as many bricks would get paid half as much.
   
   But that's not what we see - the curve is sigmoidal, flattening out at both ends, with the most productive people not making as much per unit as the people in the middle of the distribution, and the slowpokes getting more per unit. How does this make sense? The theory (as described by Robert Frank in Choosing the Right Pond) is that part of the compensation the fast workers are getting is status - they can strut around the factory with everyone knowing they're the best - and similarly to keep the humiliated slowpokes coming back day after day, you have to give them a premium to pay for the humiliation they suffer. So does a quarterback who throws for twice as many yards or scores twice as many touchdowns get twice as much? It's easy to tell just-so stories in other directions before we look at the data - yes, obviously status is a massive part of sports played for an audience, so the effect would be greater - or, people want to play sports professionally and the status of being a professional athlete more than offsets the humiliation of being the worst quarterback, paid commensurate with miserable stats. But again, I would need data at individual salary levels and have to compare stats (which differ for different positions), so if that's interesting enough to you to gather and crunch the numbers, I invite you to do it and post a link in the comments.
   
   
3. I was also curious about whether player salary or team payroll made a difference, and fortunately other people have been too and already crunched the numbers. Keep in mind that what matters to a franchise's owners is how much money they make, and winning or losing is just a means to that end (if it actually matters to the fan's expenditures at all - and the more loyal the fans, the less it matters - see more here.) But it turns out that baseball has the highest gap between payrolls, and it also makes the biggest difference to team performance; the NFL has the least gap, and it makes the least difference. According this article, the low-payroll teams actually made it to the Final Four more often than the high-payroll teams. (More data on MLB payroll-performance relationship here; yes payroll does help you win in MLB.
   
   
4. The most important thing is how much does each player produce? As someone involved in a league or franchise from a business standpoint, you might think of your sport this way: players are machines that produce revenue. In this analysis, using the average salary and number of players per league, as well as the overall revenue, we can see how much of the revenue is taken by salaries, and how efficient each league's players are at producing profit. Interestingly, here the NFL is in a league of its own. Its salaries are only about 10% of its revenue, compared to the other three which range 34-42%, and players in the NFL produce a share of the revenue 9.7 times their salaries, as opposed to the other three, who range from 2.36 to 2.96 times their salaries. Why is this? Does the NFL have better merchandising? More expensive tickets? Or it's just an inherently better TV sport so there's a bigger audience?
   
   (College football is obviously ideal in this regard. The individual player's share of revenue generated-to-salary ratio is nearly infinite. We might all be forgiven for dismissing the overwrought pleas not to pollute the moral purity of the sport by paying the players coming from the administrators of these programs, or the business office of the learning institutions that for some reason host them. It will be interesting to see, with college football consolidating essentially into two superleagues, how they'll keep the rankings and championships opaque in order to continue maximizing the number of bowls and profits therefrom.)

*Wasn't it J.P. Morgan who said the CEO should not make more than a certain multiple of what the lowest paid employee makes? I couldn't find the quote so if I'm misattributing it please correct me in the comments.