Rattling Cubes
To the editor:
My cousin once told me that cows are dumb, but they know one thing: how not to get penned up.
Most people around here know that to be true, but we also know there is an exception. Feed them cubes—cow crack—inside the pen, and they will come running whenever you shake the bucket, or sometimes just when they see your truck in the pasture.
Of course, if you penned them every time, they would get skittish and the trick would stop working. The key is to keep them thinking about the cubes instead of where they are going—to build the reflex while keeping that curious cow from stopping to think.
This technique is nothing new. A man named Ivan Pavlov became famous for training dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell he rang before feeding them. I wonder whether he grew up on a farm.
You might think cows would eventually wise up, but farmers know that if you give them cubes often enough, they will keep coming as long as you do not close them in too often. They hear the bucket rattle and want the reward more than they worry about getting penned.
Psychologist Lynn Hasher and her colleagues documented a similar tendency in people. We are more likely to believe information we have heard repeatedly, even when it is false. They called it the “illusory truth effect.” That is a fancy term for one of the basic tools of propaganda, something Joseph Goebbels exploited years ago and the internet has since refined into an art form.
But wait, “there’s more.” There are always “things they don’t want you to know.”
Have you already been trained?
Here is a little test. Below are several facts you can verify for yourself. Pay attention to your immediate reaction:
• In December 2020, Trump-appointed Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have changed the election outcome.
• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, then led by Trump appointee Chris Krebs, joined election officials in reporting no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was otherwise compromised.
• Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit involving false claims that its machines had manipulated the election. Evidence from the case showed that Fox executives and hosts privately dismissed electionfraud claims as “crazy” and “nuts” while continuing to put them on the air.
• A declassified U.S. intelligence assessment concluded that Russian state-linked actors worked to damage Joe Biden and help Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. It found no evidence that any foreign government altered votes or the technical voting process.
• Trump presented no credible evidence in his July 16 speech that the 2020 election was rigged. Much voter-registration information is already publicly available through state and local governments. Obtaining that information does not give China—or anyone else—the ability to change votes.
Was your first reaction “fake news,” “witch hunt,” “Democratic hoax,” “what about...” or some other wellrehearsed phrase?
Then you might already be a winner.
And if you refuse to believe any of these facts while also making a conscious choice not to check credible sources, there is a good chance you are moving from the pen toward the sale barn—where there are “no new wars” and “100 percent” of the Epstein documents are supposedly being delivered.
The cubes must be pretty good.