an essay influenced by Jordan Peterson’s insights into psychology and politics. Continue reading
Author Archives: Arnold Kling
More agreement with me
As for most major social problems, the causes of demonization are complex, defying perfect comprehension. I bring just one more cause to our attention, a factor that complicates the analysis: the rise of what social theorist Frank Furedi labeled “emotional correctness” in his book What’s Happened to the University? Furedi maintains that a governing purpose of higher education today is to protect the emotional comfort of students and others, regardless of how subjective and unreasonable the claim for comfort might be.
In 1957, sociologist Robert Merton conducted a study of how mass media functions via interpersonal influence within a small town. He juxtaposed “locals” to “cosmopolitans”; “locals” were parochial and fundamentally self-interested to the exclusion of the nation and society around them, while cosmopolitans were “ecumenical,” seeing themselves as connected to the problems in society at large, looking outward
Note that this distinction seems to have been independently rediscovered by David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere, where he speaks of “somewheres” (Merton’s “locals”) and “anywheres (Merton’s “cosmopolitans:).
Usher goes on to write,
My sense is that we are stuck in this battle between cosmopolitanism and localism/parochialism because those who identify as the most cosmopolitan are often the most likely to be narrow-minded and judgmental.
Overall, this issue of Cato Unbound might strike you as boring, because there is so little disagreement with my original essay. Perhaps they should have recruited one of the commenters here, perhaps Handle, to write one of the responses essays!
Essay backup: My tips for healthy media consumption
Science: increasing and decreasing returns
Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood write,
To sum up the basic conclusions of this paper, there is good and also wide-ranging evidence that the rate of scientific progress has indeed slowed down, In the disparate and partially independent areas of productivity growth, total factor productivity, GDP growth, patent measures, researcher productivity, crop yields, life expectancy, and Moore’s Law we have found support for this claim.
I think of this in terms of what factors might cause science to exhibit increasing returns or diminishing returns
The most obvious source of diminishing returns would be the “low-hanging fruit” story. The problems that remain to be solved are really hard: human biology; human psychology; climate science; etc.
Another possibility is that scientific genius is limited. If you throw more money at mediocre scientists, you don’t get any results.
The most obvious source of increasing returns would be lower cost of new scientific tools. The cost of genome sequencing, for example.
Another source of increasing returns would be better communication technology.
If you want to speed up scientific progress, the tools that are available are probably institutional. What changes in institutions can we make that would either mitigate diminishing returns or promote increasing returns?
As the authors point out, science has become bureaucratized, with much of the funding coming from government grants that impose a lot of costs in terms of process and perhaps impede creativity. Having more science funded by patronage, with wealthy donors providing funding with fewer strings attached, might be an improvement–unless you think that the bureaucratic requirements add value and rigor to the process of choosing scientific projects.
Essay backup; Paradox of profits, part 3
The new “it” paper from Joseph Henrich
and others, two of whom are colleagues of Tyler at GMU. Caitlin McDermott-Murphy provides coverage.
Comparing exposure to the Western Church with their “kinship intensity index,” which includes data on cousin marriage rates, polygyny (where a man takes multiple wives), co-residence of extended families, and other historical anthropological measures, the team identified a direct connection between the religious ban and the growth of independent, monogamous marriages among nonrelatives. According to the study, each additional 500 years under the Western Church is associated with a 91 percent further reduction in marriage rates between cousins.
“Meanwhile in Iran, in Persia, Zoroastrianism was not only promoting cousin marriage but promoting marriage between siblings,” Henrich said. Although Islam outlawed polygyny extending beyond four wives, and the Eastern Orthodox Church adopted policies against incest, no institution came close to the strict, widespread policies of the Western Church.
The authors adopt a “not that there is anything wrong with that” attitude toward cousin marriage. Whether that protects them from being sent to the Correctional Institution for Dangerous White Supremacists (where Charles Murray is held, among others) is an open question.
Essay backup: Why we need the profit system
This is also the Paradox of Profits, part 2 Continue reading
Concerning Twitter
Social media have their function, but the superiority of the old blogosphere — the internet as it existed say in 2006 — is that it’s a loosely coupled system. Bloggers could be as obnoxious as they wanted, and if you didn’t like them, you just didn’t go read their blog. And it didn’t really affect much of anything else.
Pointer from a commenter. I agree with most of the interview.
I have not read Reynolds’ book, but this sounds like the essence:
these social media platforms, which cram a bunch of people together with no effort of sanitation – and honestly, the way the algorithms are designed, they basically encourage people to fling poo at each other — allow for the spread of toxic ideas, fake news, irrational ideations and such, with no control for people whose immune systems, mental immune systems, were not really designed to withstand that.
As Reynolds points out, Twitter is elegantly suited to forming self-organizing mobs. In my view, blogging is elegantly suited to forming self-organizing discussions. That is what makes “academic Twitter” such a mystery to me. I would think that more academics would prefer participating in blogs to participating in Twitter, but my impression is that in reality it is nearly the opposite.
Essay backup: Paradox of Profits, Part 1
I’ve decided to back up essays I wrote for Medium here. My thoughts:
1. Medium is very poorly curated, and so what little worthwhile content that is on the site is invisible.
2. As a commenter pointed out a while ago, the Medium site could fail, which might cause my essays there to disappear. My guess is that Medium will survive at least through the 2020 election, but why take chances?
3. Scott Alexander has proven that long essays can work as blog posts.
Note that these essays are not well formatted. That is because I just did a copy-paste from medium and took the results. When I write new essays, as opposed to backups, I will just post them here and the format will be reasonable.
So here we go: Continue reading
Why we tend to be negative and paranoid
Psychologists Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman were the ones who originally coined the term negativity bias to describe this asymmetry. “Negative events are more salient, potent, dominant in combinations, and generally efficacious than positive events,”
. . .We tend to focus on the constellation of threats as signifying some systematic program aimed at doing us harm. This is a manifestation of what I call “agenticity”—our tendency to infuse patterns (especially patterns of threat or harm) with meaning intention and agency. And so we imagine that disconnected misfortunes are commonly directed by intentional agents, sometimes operating invisibly. Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, governments, religious officials and big corporations all have played this role in conspiracist lore (and, in the case of the latter three entries, real life, too, it must be conceded). Taken together, patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of conspiratorial cognition.
There are many other paragraphs in the essay that I wanted to excerpt.
We automatically search for patterns and for stories–preferably involving supposedly culpable individuals–to explain those patterns. Recall that Ed Leamer’s macroeconomic textbook is titled Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories. Blaming the Fed is the simplest conspiracy-theory type explanation, which I try to resist.
Blaming every weather event on climate change would be another example.