Latest / Logosofia no Dia a Dia / When Visual Shortcuts Fail: Reading Politics by Appearance in Israel
Transcript
- [Prompt] custom: I mentioned in recent episodes about my frustration with Israeli politics, but about my larger conce | Hosts: corn, herman [Response] Corn: Daniel sent us this one — and it's the kind of question you can only ask after a decade of actually living somewhere. He's been in Jerusalem ten years now, and he's noticed something about how we all read each other. You see a guy with a large knitted kippah, untucked white shirt, maybe a pistol on his hip, and your brain immediately fills in the rest — who he votes for, what he thinks about Arabs, what he wants for the country. But Daniel says the moments that have stuck with him most are the ones where that mental shortcut completely failed. The ultra-Orthodox-looking guy who turns out to be deep in coexistence work and votes Meretz. The secular Tel Aviv type who's actually hard-right on security. And he's asking: how much do physical symbols actually tell us about someone's politics, and how often are we just wrong? Herman: This lands at a really specific moment too. July twenty twenty-four — Knesset member Zvi Sukkot gets questioned by police for his role in the Sde Teiman base break-in. Soldiers had been detained for alleged abuse of a Palestinian prisoner, and Sukkot was part of the crowd that stormed the base to protest those detentions. If you've seen photos of him, he's practically the poster child for that visual brand Daniel's describing — big white knitted kippah, the whole aesthetic. Corn: Sukkot's interesting because he's not a legacy figure. Elected in twenty twenty-two as part of the Religious Zionist Party alliance. He's younger, he's newer, and he's deliberately cultivating that look. It's not accidental — it's a uniform. Herman: And that uniform is doing work. It says "I'm Religious Zionist, I'm armed, I'm to the right of Likud, and I'm not here to make you comfortable." The question Daniel's really asking is: how reliable is that signal? Because if you've spent any time in Jerusalem, you know the answer is — less reliable than you'd think. Corn: That's the tension I want to sit with. Not the Israeli politics themselves — we could do twenty episodes on that and still not cover it — but the pattern-recognition thing. Why we do it. What it costs us. And what happens when the visual shorthand breaks. Herman: Let me give you the context that makes this question so vivid. Israeli society is often described as a confederation of tribes. That's not just a metaphor — it's a sociological framing. Sammy Smooha, who's been studying Israeli society for decades, uses exactly that language. You've got Haredi, Religious Zionist, secular, Arab, Ethiopian, Russian-speaking communities — and each one signals identity through distinct visual markers. Kippah style alone is practically a taxonomy. Black velvet versus knitted versus no kippah — each one tells you something about religious affiliation, which correlates pretty strongly with political leanings. Corn: The kippah as political Rorschach test. And it gets more granular than that. Size matters, color matters, whether it's perched on the back of the head or covering the crown. There are people in Jerusalem who can read a stranger's kippah the way a sommelier reads a wine label. Herman: It's not just kippot. Head coverings for married women — wig versus scarf versus hat versus nothing — that's another signal. Tzitzit out or tucked in. Even the cut of the suit jacket. These are genuinely informative in a statistical sense. If I showed you a hundred photos of Israeli men and asked you to guess their voting patterns based on dress, you'd do better than random chance. Corn: Here's where Daniel's experience gets interesting. Better than random chance is not the same as reliable. And the gap between "statistically correlated" and "actually predictive in individual cases" — that gap is where all the interesting stuff happens. Herman: And the specific fringe Daniel's talking about — the Kahanist ethno-nationalist camp — has developed what you can only describe as a deliberate visual brand. Ben Gvir's Otzma Yehudit party is the direct political heir to Meir Kahane's Kach party, which was banned from the Knesset in nineteen eighty-eight for racism. These are not subtle people about what they believe. And their supporters wear a recognizable uniform: large white knitted kippot, untucked white shirts, and openly carried firearms. It's a look that says "I am armed, I am Religious Zionist, and I am not here to negotiate. Corn: The pistol as fashion accessory. It's a branding strategy borrowed from the settler movement, and it works because it's instantly legible. You don't have to ask what that person believes — the clothes have already told you. Or at least, they've told you a story. Whether the story is true is a separate question. Herman: That's the thing Daniel's really probing at. He's not asking whether the visual code exists — it clearly does. He's asking how often it lies. And his own experience in Jerusalem has given him a handful of what he calls "delightful failures" — moments where the visual signal pointed one way and the actual human being pointed somewhere else entirely. Corn: I love that phrase — delightful failures. Because failure is usually the thing we try to avoid. But a failure of prejudgment is actually a gift. It's the moment where reality interrupts your mental model and says "nope, try again. Herman: Why do we do this? Why do we instinctively judge politics by appearance? Pattern recognition is one of the most fundamental things the human brain does — it's not a bug, it's the whole operating system. Your brain encounters a staggering amount of sensory information every second, and it needs shortcuts to make sense of it all. So it maps visual cues — clothing, grooming, accessories, posture — onto known categories. In a place like Israel, where tribal identity is literally worn on the body, this system goes into overdrive. The signals are so rich and so consistent that your brain can't help but use them. Corn: It's the same reason you can walk into a room and immediately know who's at a wedding versus who's at a funeral. The visual code is doing work, and most of the time it's accurate enough to be useful. The problem comes when you stop treating it as a heuristic and start treating it as a fact. Herman: Right — a heuristic is a shortcut that you know might be wrong. A prejudice is a shortcut you've stopped questioning. And the line between them is thinner than most of us want to admit. Corn: What I find striking about Daniel's examples is how specific they are. He's not talking about the Haredi guy who votes Shas — that's the pattern working as expected. He's talking about the Haredi guy who runs a Jewish-Arab dialogue program and votes Meretz. The visual signal says "ultra-Orthodox, probably right-wing on security, probably votes for religious parties." The reality is completely inverted. Herman: The reverse case is just as revealing. The secular-looking Tel Aviv hipster — no kippah, modern dress, maybe a nose ring — the visual signal screams "left-wing Meretz voter." But this person votes Religious Zionist Party because of security concerns. Every visual cue was wrong. Corn: That second one is almost more uncomfortable, because it violates the progressive assumption that looking modern means thinking modern. The hipster who wants a harder line on security — that doesn't fit the narrative. Herman: Narratives are what we're really talking about here. The visual code isn't just a set of signals — it's a story we tell ourselves about who someone is. "This person looks like my tribe" or "this person looks like the other tribe." Once that story clicks into place, confirmation bias takes over. You stop looking for evidence that contradicts your initial read. You interpret ambiguous signals as confirming what you already believe. And you never even notice you're doing it. Corn: This is especially dangerous in polarized environments. When "the other side" is dehumanized through visual caricature — and we see this everywhere, not just in Israel — the mental shortcut stops being a useful tool and starts being a weapon. You're not seeing a person anymore. You're seeing a costume. Herman: There's a tradeoff here worth naming explicitly. Relying on visual heuristics saves cognitive energy. Your brain doesn't have to do the hard work of actually getting to know someone — the clothes have already done the categorization for you. That's efficient. But efficiency is not the same as accuracy. And in high-stakes contexts, the cost of that efficiency can be enormous. Corn: Think about what happens when a police officer, or a journalist, or a hiring manager relies on these shortcuts. The false-positive rate — the number of times the visual signal points to the wrong conclusion — isn't zero. And when you're making decisions that affect people's lives, "not zero" is a problem. Herman: There's a Pew study from twenty twenty-three that puts numbers on this. Sixty-two percent of Americans said they believe they can guess someone's political affiliation just by looking at them. But when they were actually tested on photos, the accuracy rate was only forty-four percent. That's worse than a coin flip in terms of being meaningfully predictive — because if you just guessed "Democrat" for everyone, you'd be right about half the time anyway. Corn: The confidence is high and the accuracy is low. That's a dangerous combination in any context. And in Israel, where the stakes are existential and the tribal signals are worn on the body, the gap between confidence and accuracy is probably even wider than the Pew study suggests. Herman: Let me circle back to the Kahanist visual brand specifically, because it's such a clear case study. Ben Gvir and Sukkot and their supporters aren't accidentally dressing this way. This is a deliberate branding strategy. The large white knitted kippah, the untucked white shirt, the pistol — it's a uniform, and uniforms are designed to communicate. They say "I belong to this group, I share these values, and I want you to know it immediately. Corn: It's also designed to intimidate. The pistol isn't just a political statement — it's a message to Arab citizens of Israel. "I am armed, and I am not afraid to show it." That's not subtext, it's the text. Herman: Yet — and this is where Daniel's insight is so sharp — even this deliberately constructed uniform doesn't perfectly predict the individual. There are people who dress exactly like that who don't vote Otzma Yehudit. There are people who vote Otzma Yehudit who don't dress like that. The branding works at the group level but fails at the individual level, which is exactly the nature of a heuristic. Corn: The "hilltop youth" — the noar hagvaot — are another example. Young settlers with oversized kippot, tzitzit out, often deliberately unkempt. The visual code screams "hard-right settler." And many of them are. But some are actually post-Zionist or even anarchist. There are religious-looking activists in the "anarchists against the wall" movement. The costume doesn't tell you the politics. Herman: That's such a good example because it completely scrambles the visual code. Someone who looks like a settler but is standing next to Palestinians protesting the separation barrier — your brain does a double-take. And that double-take is valuable. It's the moment where the heuristic fails and you're forced to actually see the person. Corn: Daniel called these moments "unexpectedly delightful," and I think that's exactly right. There's something pleasurable about being wrong in that way. It's like your brain gets a small shock and suddenly the world is more interesting than you thought it was. Herman: The pleasure comes from the surprise. If every Haredi-looking person you met voted exactly the way you expected, the world would be boring. Predictable, but boring. The delight is in the exception — the person who doesn't fit the box you tried to put them in. Corn: There's a humility in it too. Being wrong about someone's politics based on their appearance is a reminder that you don't actually know as much as you think you do. That's uncomfortable in the moment, but it's good for you. It's like cognitive vegetables. Herman: I'm going to use that. Corn: You're welcome to it. Herman: This isn't just a cognitive curiosity — it has real-world consequences. When visual shorthand becomes a political tool, it can be weaponized in both directions. The recognizable uniform creates in-group solidarity — "we dress like this, we're part of the same tribe" — but it also makes the group easy to caricature. A cartoonist can draw Ben Gvir with three visual elements and everyone knows exactly who it is. The same dynamic plays out globally. MAGA hats in the US — you see the red cap and you think you know everything about that person. Yellow vests in France. Keffiyehs at pro-Palestinian protests. Each one is a visual shortcut that does real political work. Corn: Each one is also a trap. Because the person wearing the MAGA hat might be a union Democrat who thinks tariffs protect American jobs. The person in the yellow vest might have voted for Macron in the first round. The shortcut works until it doesn't. Herman: Daniel's hypothetical about the gay couple is such a clean example of this. The visual marker — a same-sex couple holding hands — triggers an immediate assumption: progressive, left-wing, votes on LGBTQ issues above all else. And then you discover they're Log Cabin Republicans, or they vote for right-wing parties because their primary concern is something else entirely. The rainbow flag told you one story, and it was wrong. Corn: That example lands differently depending on where you're standing. If you're progressive, the gay couple who votes right-wing is a betrayal of the narrative. If you're conservative, it's a vindication. But in both cases, the error is the same — you assumed the visual signal was the whole story, and it wasn't. Herman: That's the universal thing Daniel's getting at. This isn't an Israeli phenomenon. It's a human phenomenon. Every society has its visual codes, its tribal markers, its costumes that are supposed to tell you who someone is. And every society has people who don't fit the costume. Corn: The question is what we do with that knowledge. If we know our pattern recognition is flawed — and the evidence is pretty clear that it is — can we consciously correct for it? Or is the heuristic too deeply wired? Herman: I think the first step is just noticing when you're doing it. That moment when you see someone and your brain immediately fills in their politics — just catch yourself. "I just assumed that person votes X because of their kippah." Naming the assumption is half the battle. Corn: The second step is what Daniel's been doing for ten years in Jerusalem — seeking out the delightful failures. Not avoiding people who look different, but actually talking to them and discovering where your assumptions were wrong. Those encounters are more satisfying than confirmation, as he put it, because they actually teach you something. Herman: They break the tribal echo chamber. If everyone you talk to confirms what you already believe, you're not learning — you're just marinating in your own priors. The person who looks like the other tribe but thinks like you, or looks like your tribe but thinks differently — that person is a gift. They force you to re-evaluate. Corn: There's a practical dimension too. In daily life, you can practice what I'd call visual agnosticism — treating clothing and grooming as cultural information, not political data. A kippah tells you something about religious practice. It doesn't tell you how someone votes. Use conversation to discover someone's politics, not their head covering or their haircut. Herman: That sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but almost nobody actually does it. We all make the snap judgment. The question is whether we then check it against reality or just file it away as fact. Corn: Here's the thing — the snap judgment isn't the problem. The problem is never revisiting it. Your brain is going to make the shortcut whether you want it to or not. The discipline is in saying "okay, that's my guess, now let me find out if it's right. Herman: Which brings us back to Zvi Sukkot and the Sde Teiman moment. That incident crystallized something about the Kahanist visual brand — it's not just a costume, it's a political identity worn on the body. But Daniel's decade in Jerusalem has taught him that even the most deliberately constructed visual identity doesn't perfectly predict the individual. The uniform tells you a story, and sometimes the story is true, and sometimes it's a complete fiction. Corn: The delight is in discovering which one it is. Herman: What do we do with this? Daniel's experience points toward something practical. The first move is embarrassingly simple. When you catch yourself making a political judgment based on appearance, just pause and ask: what evidence do I actually have that this person holds those views? Not what does the costume suggest, not what's statistically correlated — what do I actually know about this specific human being? The answer is almost always "nothing. Corn: That pause is the whole thing. It's not about suppressing the snap judgment — your brain's going to make it in about two hundred milliseconds whether you want it to or not. The discipline is in the gap between the judgment and the conclusion. "That's my guess, now let me find out. Herman: The second move is what Daniel's been doing for a decade without maybe naming it — actively seek out the delightful failures. Don't just wait for them to happen. Put yourself in situations where you're talking to people who look like a tribe you disagree with, and actually listen to what they believe. Those encounters are more satisfying than confirmation for a reason — confirmation is just your brain high-fiving itself. The failure teaches you something. Corn: Confirmation is cognitive junk food. Tastes good, does nothing for you. The delightful failure is a proper meal. Herman: Cognitive vegetables, as you said. Corn: I stand by it. But the third thing is harder — visual agnosticism. Treat clothing and grooming as cultural information, not political data. A kippah tells you something about religious practice. It tells you nothing about how someone votes. Use conversation to discover someone's politics, not their head covering or their haircut or whether they're carrying a pistol. Herman: That sounds obvious when you say it out loud. Almost nobody does it. We all make the snap judgment, we all file it away, and we almost never go back to check our work. The people who do — the ones who actually ask — they're the ones who collect delightful failures instead of accumulating confirmation bias. Corn: In a polarized environment, that's not just personally satisfying — it's politically important. If you only ever talk to people whose visual signals match your expectations, you're not engaging with reality. You're engaging with a costume party. Herman: Let me leave you with a question we can't really answer yet. In an era where polarization keeps intensifying and political tribes keep developing ever more distinct visual brands — the Kahanist uniform becoming more codified, the MAGA aesthetic hardening into something instantly recognizable — can we actually train ourselves to override the visual heuristic? Or is it too deeply wired to ever fully escape? Corn: I think the honest answer is that we can't turn it off, but we can get better at doubting it. The goal isn't to stop having the snap judgment — that's like trying to stop blinking. The goal is to treat the snap judgment the way you treat a weather forecast. Useful as a starting point, wrong often enough that you should bring a jacket either way. Herman: The future might make this harder, not easier. As these visual brands get more deliberate — as people adopt them strategically, knowing exactly what signal they're sending — the gap between appearance and reality could go in either direction. It could widen, as more people use the costume to deceive or to fit in while holding private views that don't match. Or it could narrow, as the tribes become so visually sorted that the signal actually becomes reliable. Corn: My bet is on widening. Once people know the code, they can game it. The person who dresses like a Kahanist but isn't one, the person who dresses like a progressive but votes right — those aren't anomalies, they're features of a system where the visual signal has become self-aware. And that makes Daniel's delightful failures not just satisfying personal moments, but a kind of early warning system. The exceptions are telling you something about where the whole thing is headed. Herman: If this episode made you question your own assumptions — and I hope it did — share it with someone you disagree with. Preferably someone whose politics you think you can guess just by looking at them. See what happens. Corn: Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for making this possible. Herman: This has been My Weird Prompts. Find us at my weird prompts dot com, or email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com. Corn: Until next time, try being wrong about someone. You might enjoy it. And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact. Hilbert: During the high medieval period, Malagasy fermentation of raffia palm sap into a wine called betsabetsa relied on a wild microbial succession dominated by Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Schizosaccharomyces pombe, the latter producing unusually high levels of malic acid that gave the finished drink a sharp, green-apple tang distinct from any other palm wine in the Indian Ocean basin. Corn:...green-apple tang.