Category Archives: Libertarian Thought

Michael Shermer on free speech

Posted on by

He writes,

Flynn asks rhetorically, “Does academia really want to ally itself with those who reserve free discussion to Philosopher Kings, and create dogmas to deaden the minds of all others?” The answer for many academics, I’m sorry to say, is a resounding yes. They see themselves as Philosopher Kings who know what is best for the masses, whom they believe are incapable of thinking as deeply as themselves.

This narcissistic arrogance goes a long way to explaining the recent and disturbing trend on college campuses to censor unwanted speech and thought (yes, thought crimes!), well documented by Greg Lukianoff, President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), in his 2014 booklet Freedom From Speech.11 Readers may recall the wave of ‘disinvitations’ at universities who invited controversial (or simply interesting) speakers to enlighten their students, only to disinvite them after waves of protest from some students and faculty that the speakers’ words might offend. FIRE has documented 257 such incidents since 2000, 111 of which were successful in preventing the invited speakers from delivering their speeches (75 disinvitations, 20 speaker withdrawals, and 16 ‘heckler’s vetoes’ in which student hecklers shouted down the speakers or chased them off-stage).

The whole essay is a statement of a point of view that is hard-core truth for libertarians and seems clearly correct to the IDW but which seems to be in danger on college campuses.

Pointer from Charles Chu.

Handle is skeptical of Yimbyism

Posted on by

He writes,

Right now Libertarians and some Progressives are on a pro-density “just build more housing” kick, and tend to dismiss and disparage the motives of local residents who try hard to stop it. What I’ve tried to point out is that a legitimate reason for protest is the fact that our system government – especially in big winner city centers – is simply no longer capable of “preserving infrastructural adequacy” let alone at anything approaching reasonable costs and timescales.

Read the whole comment.

The thing is, Boston is capable of undertaking infrastructure projects. It now has bike lanes galore.

De-coupling vs. post-modernism

Posted on by

Jacob Falcovich writes,

scientists depend on what rationality researcher Keith Stanovich calls “cognitive decoupling.” Decoupling separates an idea from context and personal experience and considers it in the abstract. It is the approach used in the scientific method, when performing thought experiments, and when generalizing principles from individual examples. . .

The contrary mode of thinking sees every argument embedded in a particular context. The context of an idea includes its associations, implications, and the motivations and identities of those who advance it.

Pointer from a commenter. I recommend the entire article.

My thoughts:

1. The “contrary mode of thinking” strikes me as post-modernism.

2. It seems to me that “decouplers” and post-modernists must unavoidably talk past one another. The decoupler thinks that decoupling is necessary for rationality. The post-modernist thinks that decoupling is impossible.

3. This language can be used to re-cast my 2003 essay criticizing Paul Krugman. We might now say that my claim was that economists are trained to decouple, and instead he was doing the opposite.

4. The term “outgroups”in the article is illustrated by a chart in which coastal progressives are the primary outgroup for the Intellectual Dark Web. Of course, since coastal progressives wield the post-modernist cudgel.

5. In fact, I had come to think of the left as always refusing to decouple. But there are those on the left who are ardent decouplers, and they are in the IDW. I suppose that by the same token there must be people who, even though they are on the right, routinely deploy post-modernist arguments.

I still have not finished processing the Falcovich piece, and again I thank the commenter for the pointer. This will not be my last word on the topic.

The parasitism metaphor

Posted on by

Why are affluence and “state capacity” positively correlated? Bryan Caplan writes,

Perhaps rich societies have big governments because it takes a colossal host to sustain colossal parasitism.

Possibly related: Handle comments,

One thing we can observe is that, at least for a time, liberalism was more or less culturally self-sustaining, even during those periods of adversity you mentioned. It would take a while to explain why, but my position is that the self-sustaining social mechanism has run out of juice in the process of being replaced by a rival ideology, and so, despite our technologically-enabled economic prosperity, liberalism really is in more danger than in those dangerous times, and there is no longer any ‘soft’ (or coherent) way to implement ‘more liberalism’ solutions.

He might say that left-wing ideology is a parasite that is in the process of killing the host. It will suffice here to define left-wing ideology as the view that capitalism is inherently bad. By that definition, the parasite has already infected an awful lot of educated young people.

Eric Weinstein on the IDW

Posted on by

He speaks and futzes with a coffee mug in a twenty-minute video, in which he explains the origins of the intellectual dark web. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

My thoughts.

1. Weinstein speaks of “we” as if the label IDW was concocted by a a conspiracy of folks sitting in a room kicking around ideas for names. I doubt that it happened that way.

2. I think that my post following the Bari Weiss article mostly got the IDW’s philosophy correct. I wrote,

Really, the principles of good intellectual debate are not that obscure. Just make arguments as if you were trying to change the mind of a reasonable person on the other side. I believe that the reason that we don’t observe much of this is that most people are trying to raise their status within their own tribe rather than engage in reasoned discourse. It’s sad that reasoned discourse does not raise one’s status as much as put-downs and expressions of outrage.

Although he uses different terminology, Weinstein seems to suggest that institutions of the mainstream media–he names CNN, NPR, the NYT, and “magazines like The Atlantic“–have degenerated into put-downs and expressions of outrage at the expense of reporting the news. Stories that would reflect badly on the ability or moral conduct of oppressed groups, or that would reflect favorably on the moral conduct of privileged groups, cannot be processed by these institutions that hitherto were fairly reliable curators of news. The IDW is a reaction against, or an alternative to, the dereliction of duty on the part of the mainstream outlets. Not an alternative news source, but an alternative source of discussion and analysis.

3. Weinstein thinks that the mainstream media will not appreciate a rival. But it is worse than that. The oppressor-oppressed narrative is a main binding tribal force for progressives. I would say the main binding force. I doubt that these folks can tolerate someone who claims to be on the left but challenges that narrative. The Jonathan Haidts and Eric Weinsteins of the world are going to be chased out of their village with spears and rocks.

4. After watching the video, I would say that the IDW is making a wager. The bet is this: we know that we will be branded as racists or troglodytes by the mainstream media. Our wager is that the public will see us as the decent human beings we are, and the attacks will rebound to discredit the mainstream media rather than discredit those who identify with the IDW.

I know from watching other videos that Weinstein is far from confident that he can win such a wager. But the attempt is to his credit.

Morality and the Dunbar Number

Posted on by

From my latest essay.

When people confuse micro-morality and macro-morality, they make mistakes. Treating a micro-moral problem as a macro-moral problem is one mistake. Treating a macro-moral problem as a micro-moral problem is another mistake.

I think that a lot of the criticism of capitalism reflects an inappropriate application of micro-morality in a context where macro-morality is what matters.

A paragraph to ponder

Posted on by

from Tage Rai:

Across practices, across cultures, and throughout historical periods, when people support and engage in violence, their primary motivations are moral. By ‘moral’, I mean that people are violent because they feel they must be; because they feel that their violence is obligatory. They know that they are harming fully human beings. Nonetheless, they believe they should. Violence does not stem from a psychopathic lack of morality. Quite the reverse: it comes from the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations.

He is a colleague of Alan Fiske, a very interesting anthropologist.

Anarchocapitalism would break down

Posted on by

A commenter writes,

Law enforcement, like soldiering, doesn’t work well on a contract basis because it relies on a fundamentally different approach to morality than capitalism does. Jane Jacobs’ Systems of Survival is worth reading on this point, but the basic idea is that a guardian who can be bribed is no guardian at all. Guardian morality rigorously and ostentatiously spurns trading because it is necessary to signal to one’s allies that you will be dependable even in the face of severe temptation (which combat is full of).

I take this as saying that police, security guards, and soldiers need a binding force that replaces or supplements monetary incentives. Otherwise, there is a risk that the guard will change sides in the middle of a conflict, going over to the highest bidder.

Scott Alexander on the IDW

Posted on by

He writes,

Silencing is when even though a movement has lots of supporters, none of them will admit to it publicly under their real name. Even though a movement is widely discussed, its ideas never penetrate to anywhere they might actually have power. Even though it has charismatic leaders, they have to resort to low-prestige decentralized people-power to get their message across, while their opponents preach against them from the airwaves and pulpits and universities.

As usual with his posts, I recommend reading the whole long thing. My thoughts:

1. Commenters on this blog and elsewhere have said that Scott Alexander should be counted as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

2. “Scott Alexander” is not his real name, which suggests that the issue of what one would “publicly admit under their real name” is salient to him.

I would recommend trying to move away from “silenced” as a binary concept. The word itself invites a binary connotation–you are either silenced or you or not. But it may help instead to think of a continuum.

Instead, I would talk about something more like a filter ratio. For any given proposition, what percentage of time is it filtered out because of social pressure?

To take an actual example, consier the proposition that the variance of genetic mathematical ability is higher in males than females. I believe that proposition. But it seems that Larry Summers lost his job as President of Harvard because he affirmed that proposition. Since many people are aware of that story, I can imagine that not everyone would be willing to affirm this proposition publicly.

For any proposition, let the numerator be the total number of times a proposition that is relevant to a discussion is NOT affirmed by someone who believes it. Let the denominator be the total number of times that the proposition would have been affirmed in the absence of social pressure. The ratio of the numerator to denominator is the filter ratio.

When the filter ratio is zero, there is no silencing going on. When the ratio is 1, there is total suppression. “Silencing” is somewhere in between. If you want to stick to a binary view of the world, then you can say that any time the ratio is greater than 0, there is silencing. But I think a world of absolutely no filters is unrealistic. What we can reasonably argue about is how strong the filters should be for various propositions.

For example, back in the 1960s, if you had asked me, I would have been on the side of those trying to get rid of the filter that suppressed people’s use of four-letter words. But I have since come around to the view that suppressing cursing was a good thing, and getting rid of the filter was a mistake. People gave each other more respect when they acknowledged speech boundaries with one another.

In general, I see the IDW as battling the left over the issue of filters on topics related to race and gender. The left wants to implement certain filters, and the IDW sees these filters causing problems. In theory, we could get beyond name-calling and argue about what makes the filters good and what makes them bad. But the discussion rarely takes place at that level. Instead, it tends to become personal.

What I’m Reading

Posted on by

Uncivil Agreement, by Lilliana Mason. It will certainly make my list of best books for 2018. My review on Amazon says,

Uncivil Agreement addresses the topic of polarization from the perspective of political psychology. The author advances the view that social identity is more important than opinions on issues as a driver of political behavior in general and polarization in particular.

The book is timely because it can help to explain the high levels of political anger that we see around us. The book is convincing in part because it makes intuitive sense (at least to me) but mostly because of the author’s clever and careful empirical research. Even a skeptic should find her studies persuasive.

We might naturally assume that our political selves are shaped by our interests and our views of policy. The alternative that Mason proposes is that our political selves are shaped by our sense of where we fit in socially.

From this alternative perspective, the increase in polarization arises from the fact that people are becoming more certain of where they belong in the social sphere. Our social class structure has become more segregated. Fewer people cross the bridges between status groups defined by location, education level, wealth, race, religiosity, etc.

As the social structure solidifies, political antagonism increases. People who are locked into their identity as Democrats only care about seeing Democrats win and Republicans lose. Republicans, too, have come to care more about winning than about issues. I would note that Democrats loved Barack Obama’s victories, even though at the state level the party hollowed out while he was President. By the same token, Republicans love Donald Trump’s victory, even though it seems to be devastating the party’s future.

Another trend is an increase in what Mason calls “blind” activism. That is, political activism driven by anger and enthusiasm, rather than by reason and practical considerations.

I think that the publisher is wrong to position this as a purely academic book or textbook. It should be of value to the many people who have a general interest in the nature of political behavior. I read the Kindle version of the book, and I found that I had to squint to read the graphs. But it was still very much worth it.

Finally, I cannot resist saying that if you like this book, you may also like my own more amateurish effort, The Three Languages of Politics. Although my book is very different in style from Uncivil Agreement, I think that the two books share some of the same underlying psychological outlook.

I think that there are libertarian implications that the author does not mention. If homo politicus acts tribally, rather than on the basis of self-interest or policy preferences, then surely this warrants some disenchantment with voting as a mechanism for guiding society.

Note: Handle has a comment on an earlier post that goes against Mason in some important respects. I will discuss this next week.