Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Null Hypothesis watch

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Scott Alexander writes,

Some parents “unschool” their children. That is, they object to schooling as traditionally understood, so they register themselves as home schooling but don’t formally teach much, limiting themselves to answering kids’ questions as they come up. When adjusted for confounders (ie usually these parents are rich and well-educated), their young children lag one grade level behind public school students on average – but only one (though these students were pretty young and they might have lagged further behind with time). By the time these unschooled kids are applying for college, they seem to know a decent amount, get into college at relatively high rates, and do well in their college courses. I think there’s some evidence that not getting any school at all harms these children’s performance on some traditional measures. But it doesn’t harm them very much. Given how little effect there is from absolutely zero school ever, I think missing a year or two of school isn’t going to matter a lot.

I suspect that the further down the socioeconomic scale you go, the more likely it is that missing school matters. I am willing to doubt the Null Hypothesis for very poor children.

Naked elitism

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In a podcast with Richard Hanania, Marc Andreessen says,

I think there’s a real argument, and this is the most uncomfortable form of argument, there is a real argument that there are just a certain number of super-elite people. There are a certain number of people who are going to be really good scientists and it’s just not going to be that many. It’s some magical combination of intelligence, honesty, industriousness, integrity, the ability to recruit and build a team. In some ways being a top researcher is like being an entrepreneur, you have to actually pull all these different kinds of dilemmas together. And there’s only a certain number of people who can do that.

And then of course, the implication of that from a societal standpoint is that we’ve really got to know who those people are and we’ve really got to give them room to run. We’ve really got to make sure they have room to run and are not driven out. If someone’s truly a member of the elite, are able to generate elite-level results, if you wanted to demotivate them and draw them out of the field, what would you do? You would surround them with mediocrity and drown them in [baloney sandwich].

Sometimes it seems to me that the whole purpose of the woke religion is to keep true elites down.

Anyway, I recommend the whole interview. It comes with a transcript.

Long article on rationality

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In the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman writes,

The realities of rationality are humbling. Know things; want things; use what you know to get what you want. It sounds like a simple formula. But, in truth, it maps out a series of escalating challenges. In search of facts, we must make do with probabilities. Unable to know it all for ourselves, we must rely on others who care enough to know. We must act while we are still uncertain, and we must act in time—sometimes individually, but often together. For all this to happen, rationality is necessary, but not sufficient. Thinking straight is just part of the work.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is not a hit piece. He discusses Julia Galef, Steven Pinker, and Tyler Cowen. He quotes from one of my blog posts.

Afghanistan and Hong Kong

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I looked at what some of the FITS are saying. Subsequently, I saw Richard Hanania’s take.

Why leaving had to go this poorly, and why Biden made the right decision.

I think that the Afghanistan withdrawal would have been a political disaster a few months before an election. But Biden has plenty of time to recover. The short attention span of the media works in his favor.

In fact, by the time this post goes up, Afghanistan may no longer be front-page news, and Internet pundits will have moved on.

I have read takes of all sorts about Afghanistan, and most seem to agree that the mission of turning that country into a liberal state was hopeless. We cannot create a liberal culture where none existed before, and we cannot save a culture that is not liberal.

So what about Hong Kong? Did the British create a liberal culture there, and if so, how? And what might we have tried in order to keep Hong Kong’s liberal culture from being destroyed by an illiberal regime?

To be sure, I never believed that liberal culture would grow in Afghan or Iraqi soil. Instead, I thought in terms of North, Weingast, and Wallis. Those countries were not ready to move beyond what NWW call a limited-access order, with key violent groups dividing up power and resources.

But I would like to hear the 20-20 hindsight pundits on Afghanistan say more about Hong Kong. I feel much more regret about our inability/unwillingness to prevent the conquest of Hong Kong than about “losing” Afghanistan.

I also worry about possible demoralization of our military. President Reagan’s otherwise frivolous invasion of Grenada was somehow necessary and sufficient to restore morale after Vietnam.

Science: method vs. sayings

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Emily Oster writes,

Back in spring 2020, many of us (here’s my particular take) argued that the only way to really track case rates (and serious illness rates and so on) was to engage in a program of random testing. Some countries, like the U.K., did that. But the U.S. did not. And we still do not have such a program. And while our tracking of the pandemic has improved tremendously with better testing and better data reporting, this would still be helpful.

Consider this. Right now South Dakota has low case rates relative to most places with its vaccination rates. Is this because of natural immunity from very, very high infection rates in the winter? Or is it, more plausibly, a lack of testing? We have no idea, since without random sample testing, we cannot know.

Rigorous thinkers, like Oster, naturally employ a scientific mindset. Apparently, many people trained in epidemiology don’t. Epidemiological “science” seems more like a set of sayings that students learn. They learn to scold people based on those sayings.

Even when they do studies, epidemiologists do not seem to think like scientists. Hence you have many irreproducible and unreliable results.

Elites and vaccine hesitancy

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You may have seen the story that Ph.D’s are especially vaccine-hesitant. This reminded a reader of an essay I wrote years ago about two strategies for avoiding truth.

The great mass of people form their political beliefs with little regard for facts or logic. However, the elites also have a strategy for avoiding truth. Elites form their political beliefs dogmatically, using their cleverness to organize facts to fit preconceived prejudices. The masses’ strategy for avoiding truth is to make a low investment in understanding; the elites’ strategy is to make a large investment in selectively choosing which facts and arguments to emphasize or ignore.

The Ph.D’s who hesitate to take vaccines may be harder to talk out of their stance than the stereotypical Trump supporters.

Update: See Michael Shermer’s piece on vaccine hesitancy.

A Dual Monarchy?

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Which Hungary?

1. Erik D’Amato writes,

On the ground nationalist conservatism looks more liberal than you might think.

The Hungarian capital has changed a lot since it became a Mecca for global right-wingers—it’s more international and lively than ever. Most striking is the flourishing of the former Jewish quarter, home to Europe’s largest synagogue and now one of its most hopping bar scenes. Just as populist economics do not immediately cause market mayhem, rule by Christian nationalists doesn’t necessarily make everything drab and provincial.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

2. Andrew Sullivan writes,

In almost every respect, it is vitally important to note, the Hungarian government is profoundly anti-conservative. It is deeply corrupt, treating the free market as a joke, with one man directing vast amounts of state funds to his friends and cronies in return for their support. Its free press is under siege, with “nearly 80 percent of the market for political and public affairs news … financed by sources decided by the ruling party.” State advertising is a huge part of media budgets, and Viktor Orbàn ensures it goes to his outlets. Its government monitors the Internet for violations of the moral order, forcing one university to leave the country entirely, while setting up a heavily subsidized complex of pro-Orbàn right-wing institutions to rival the left’s.

Contra Alexander

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Scott Alexander writes,

In this model, we end up with Woke Capital because Apple and Amazon are run by programmers, by managers who used to be programmers, and by MBA finance people – and all of those groups are highly educated and therefore liberal.

I am pretty sure that the “woke” in Woke Capital comes mostly from the HR departments. They derive their power from their ability to protect the corporation from bad PR and lawsuits having to do with race and gender.

I have a hypothesis that education has become a political dividing line because there are now very many college graduates who have second-rate minds, what Tyler Cowen once called lumpenintellectuals. These second-raters have no natural ability to take on jobs that require a lot of cognitive skill. They have spilled over into jobs that require credentials but where they do not have to compete with people of genuine intellectual ability. These include many government positions, K-12 teaching, academic administration, and corporate HR. The lumpenintellectuals have to work hard to protect their status against both those who have fewer education credentials and those with more genuine smarts.

Woke ideology has emerged as a solution to this problem. Lumpenintellectuals can use Wokeism against both genuine intellectuals and the less educated. I think at some point the really smart people will get tired of being bossed around by the second-raters. Perhaps there will be coups at some universities, in which the real intellectuals take them back. More likely, colleges and universities are a lost cause, and true intellectuals will coalesce around alternative institutions.

The FBI and Rauchian reality

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Eli Lake writes,

The most blatant example of Rauch’s failure to grapple with elite epistemic failure is his treatment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In fact, former FBI Director James Comey is one of the people who blurbs his book. Rauch’s brief mention of the 2019 Justice Department inspector general report on the FBI’s surveillance warrants for former Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page says it “found procedural errors but no political bias in the FBI’s investigation of Russian efforts to influence the Trump campaign.”

This is a complete misreading of the report from Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

I think that in general Rauch has a blind spot with respect to the political biases of the FBI.

Should the childless have less political power?

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J. D. Vance said,

Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don’t have children? And why is this just a normal fact of American life? That the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children and grandchildren?

…The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to sixteen-year olds. But let’s do this instead: let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country, as a parent, you should have more power. You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality. If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.

I share Vance’s sentiments. I think that old-fashioned two-parent households with children tend to exhibit less political insanity.

But his electoral reform proposal does not strike me as well worked out. What if parents disagree on politics? Which parent gets to vote on behalf of the children? In a divorce, who gets custody of the votes? etc.

Perhaps what matters most is not political power but cultural power. In the 1950s, the cultural hegemony was with the Ozzie and Harriett families. Today, it is with LBGTQ. Have a nice day, J.D.