He wants to know what some goods and services are worth to you. You have until September 9 to participate.
Author Archives: Arnold Kling
Free speech as a cultural value
if open debate is truly desirable, we should be concerned not just about government suppression of unpopular views, but about non-governmental suppression. As chilling effects go, “I would speak out, but I don’t want to risk going to jail” is not all that different from “I would speak out, but I don’t want to risk losing my friends and my livelihood.” The end result is the same—less speech, less debate, less openness.
His point is that we should be troubled by private actors suppressing speech, even though that is not a technical violation of the first amendment. I agree.
Libertarians and criminal justice reform
A reader forwarded this story to me under the heading of TLP Watch.
“At some point, you have to address the underlying issues of racism and classism,” said Daryl Atkinson, a former staff attorney at the North Carolina Office of Indigent Defense Services and co-director of Forward Justice, a civil rights advocacy organization. “Otherwise we’re kind of putting a Band-Aid on cancer.”
Carroll, who has helped restructure public defense systems in 15 states, has heard reactions like Atkinson’s from many liberal reform advocates. But he says looking at the issue through the lens of big government overreach—or what he calls “the tyranny prism”—may provide results that the left ultimately cannot argue with, even though it means sacrificing a central tenet of their ideology.
The point of the story is that conservatives (actually, libertarians) have been more effective than progressives at promoting criminal justice reforms. Libertarians frame the issue using the liberty-coercion axis, while progressives frame it using the oppressor-oppressed axis.
Ayn Rand on the spectrum?
Ayn Rand, in all likelihood, knew nothing about the autism spectrum. But she could draw from her own life and experiences. The creator of Howard Roark worked obsessively, evening after evening. She rarely went out. Ayn Rand was extremely nervous before public functions, but there was a violent intensity about her. She observed, rightly, that boredom preserves the precarious dignity of people who love small talk. Her sensitivity to cruelty and injustice has largely escaped her readers. All her life, she collected things, and kept them in separate file folders. Her grandmother gifted her a chest of drawers to store her collections, and her mother complained about all the rubbish she collected. She loved ordering and categorizing things, something very fundamental to the autistic cognitive style. Ayn Rand ticks way too many boxes.
I speculate similarly ten years ago.
Edward Leamer deserves the Nobel Prize
His paper Let’s Take the Con out of Econometrics was highly influential. It changed the direction of econometric research.
There are several economics Nobels sitting out there, including Koopmans, Klein, and Tinbergen, that would not be considered prizeworthy in light of Leamer’s critique.
Rigorous political thinking
If you’re interested in furthering honest political inquiry, consider playing the steel man game: “Can we steel man each other’s view, to make sure we understand them?” This is part of another game one of my graduate school mentors encouraged us to play, the “belief game”: First try to completely understand the other person’s philosophy, occupy it from the inside, see the world through that philosopher’s eyes. Only then are you in a legitimate position to speak to its flaws, if any survive that exercise in cognitive empathy. Playing the steel man game is a smaller version of that larger endeavor.
As I was reading the essay, I thought that perhaps I had written it. There is that much reinforcement of some of the political psychology and advice in my book.
Fear kills curiosity and openness
if we are not feeling safe, we cannot take in new information. And curiosity and openness are essential for a conversation that might cover new ground or change minds.
He describes some neurobiological findings that support this view.
Dumbed-down U.
Are there enough top students to populate the top colleges and universities? Here is a stab at answering that question. Continue reading
Speaking of rigor
American University has brought in an academic from the University of Washington-Tacoma with a curious mission for an academic institution: to teach academics not to grade on the writing ability of students as opposed to their “labor.” Professor Asao Inoue believes that writing ability should not be assessed to achieve “antiracist” objectives.
Inoue is the director of the UW-Tacoma Writing Center and has explained that “White language supremacy is perpetuated in college classrooms despite the better intentions of faculty, particularly through the practices of grading writing.” It appears that grading on writing ability is one of those acts of white supremacy. He has insisted that professors who use a single neutral standard for all students are perpetuating racism: “[using] single standard to grade your students’ languaging, you engage in racism. You actively promote white language supremacy, which is the handmaiden to white bias in the world.”
In the few years I taught as an adjunct at George Mason, I based part of my grades on writing quality. The white students did not demonstrate any advantage.
Pointer from Rod Dreher, who also located this gem, by Donna Riley, who is an academic administrator in the school of engineering at Purdue..
‘Rigorous engineering education research’ and the related ‘evidence-based’ research and practice movement in STEM education have resulted in a proliferation of boundary drawing exercises that mimic those in engineering disciplines, shaping the development of new knowledge and ‘improved’ practice in engineering education. Rigor accomplishes dirty deeds, however, serving three primary ends across engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research: disciplining, demarcating boundaries, and demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege. Understanding how rigor reproduces inequality, we cannot reinvent it but rather must relinquish it, looking to alternative conceptualizations for evaluating knowledge, welcoming diverse ways of knowing, doing, and being, and moving from compliance to engagement, from rigor to vigor.
So. . .we have university administrators arguing that good writing and rigor are aligned with white supremacy. These sorts of arguments might work to convince people. . .to become white supremacists.
And then there is this story about a special physics course at Stanford for minority students, because they have “less preparation.” I mean, why not offer a special physics course for students who have less preparation, rather than designate the race of the students?
It appears to me that these institutions are behaving as if they do not believe that their minority students can handle high-level work. Maybe some can’t. My guess is that a lot of white student’s can’t, either. But I think it’s clearly degrading to the students who can do high-level work, especially minority students who can do high-level work, to try to disparage such work with racialist boo-words.
Watch out for George Will
Two young whippersnappers interview him in this podcast. They try to make the case that conservatives need to use government to address various problems. To my ear, he absolutely destroys them.