Category Archives: culture

Asymmetric ruthlessness

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Suppose that the other side is willing to use ruthless tactics. Suppose that we are not willing to do so. Suppose that these ruthless tactics work. That is asymmetric ruthlessness.

For example, Niall Ferguson in a vidcast with Dave Rubin, argues that conservatives are victims of asymmetric ruthlessness in the culture war. For example, on college campuses, left-wing professors are willing to make hiring and promotion decisions on ideological grounds, and conservatives do not counter.

I tend to think that the movement to increase the status of women in economics could well turn out to involve asymmetric ruthlessness on the part of the left. That is, I think it is unlikely that it will be conservative women whose status gets raised, and it is likely that the males who are pushed out at the margin will be conservatives.

But I am inclined to be very cautious about positing asymmetric ruthlessness. I think that each side can point to asymmetric ruthlessness on the other side, and that this becomes mutually reinforcing.

So you can think of a Type I error as failing to notice real asymmetric ruthlessness. You think that Hitler won’t really do all the horrible things he indicates he might do. You fail to take proper counter measures soon enough.

You can think of a Type II error as believing in asymmetric ruthlessness that isn’t there. You needlessly escalate the conflict. Yuval Levin worries that conservatives are making this sort of Type II error. In a way, Niall Ferguson worries about it, too, because he fears that the Brexit and the Trump Presidency could set in motion forces that bring Jeremy Corbyn and his American equivalent to power.

Christian exceptionalism

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Jonathan Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich write,

the institutions built around kinship and marriage vary greatly across societies (21–23) and that much of this variation developed as societies scaled up in size and complexity, especially after the origins of food production 12,000 years ago (22, 24–29). In forging the tightly-knit communities needed to defend agricultural fields and pastures, cultural evolution gradually wove together social norms governing marriage, post-marital residence and ingroup identity (descent), leading to a diversity of kin-based institutions, including the organizational forms known as clans, lineages and kindreds (21, 27, 30). The second insight, based on work in psychology, is that people’s motivations, emotions, perceptions, thinking styles and other aspects of cognition are heavily influenced by the social norms, social networks, technologies and linguistic worlds they encounter while growing up (31–38). In particular, with intensive kin-based institutions, people’s psychological processes adapt to the collectivistic demands and the dense social networks that they interweave (39–43). Intensive kinship norms reward greater conformity, obedience, holistic/relational awareness and in-group loyalty but discourage individualism, independence and analytical thinking (41, 44). Since the sociality of intensive kinship is based on people’s interpersonal embeddedness, adapting to these institutions tends to reduce people’s inclinations towards impartiality, universal (non-relational) moral principles and impersonal trust, fairness and cooperation. Finally, based on historical evidence, the third insight suggests that the branch of Western Christianity that eventually evolved into the Roman Catholic Church—hereafter, ‘the Western Church’ or simply ‘the Church’—systematically undermined the intensive kin-based institutions of Europe during the Middle Ages (45–52). The Church’s marriage policies and prohibitions, which we will call the Marriage and Family Program (MFP), meant that by 1500 CE, and likely centuries earlier in some regions, Europe lacked strong kin-based institutions, and was instead dominated by relatively weak, independent and isolated nuclear or stem families (49–51, 53–56). This made people exposed to Western Christendom rather unlike nearly all other populations.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who tells us how politically incorrect the paper is by saying that he expected (but did not find) a Steve Sailer citation. This paper should be catnip for the IDW.

Possibly related, but not as controversial: I did a podcast with Russ Roberts recently (it may or not already be up) on the theme that human beings are social. I argue for the importance of culture, based in part on my reading of Henrich. Compared with animals, for humans the ratio of culturally learned behavior to innate behavior is extremely high. This is important, in my view.

Almost certainly related: The Origins of English Individualism, by Alan MacFarlane.

The Disputation of Vancouver

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As this is being written, Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris were supposed to have a discussion of religion at a theater in Vancouver the nights of June 23rd and 24th. This post is going up the following day.

The Disputation of Barcelona took place about 750 years ago. My guess is that it’s been quite a while since we’ve had a disputation. The Peterson-Harris battle is so highly anticipated that tickets cost a fortune. And it may have been sold out!

I find this very encouraging. I would much rather see people going for this than reading newspaper columns and twitter feeds.

Although Harris is not a fan of what he sees as the baggage of religion, he is a fan of psychedelics and altered states of consciousness. Peterson is a fan of Jungian views of a sort of universal unconscious.

My own view is that the value of insights that we might get from altered states of consciousness is low and getting lower.

Let me start with a metaphor in which we have a physical layer, an operating system, and an application layer. So when you eat, your digestive system is the physical layer. Your cravings and your inclination to enjoy sugar and fat come from the operating system, which is your brain as shaped by evolution and your particular genetic inheritance. But at the application layer–how you find food, how your food is prepared, what you choose to eat, and so on–that is all cultural. You copy others, you learn from others, you experiment within the context of the people and technology around you.

I am not saying that this is a scientifically useful metaphor. But I use it to point out that most of what we are is cultural. We come into the world knowing nothing at all about pizza or french fries or sushi. Over many generations, humans have built up this vast storehouse of cultural paraphernalia–buildings, equipment, social norms, organizations, books, electronic devices, art, music, dance, sports, science. We put tremendous effort into communicating with one another, teaching with one another, and exchanging with one another in order to share access to the contents of this vast cultural supermarket.

Is there stuff sitting in altered states of consciousness that we can’t find in the rest of our cultural supermarket? Is that stuff really so important that we should devote a lot of our lives to exploring it through Biblical stories or Buddhist meditation or psychedelics? I am not dismissing that such exploration is worthless, just questioning whether it is of great value to more than a few people.

I understand that people want there to be meaning in their lives. But you don’t necessarily need altered states of consciousness to find meaning. You can find meaning from caring–about family, friends, art, science, sports, philosophy, religion, politics, nature, you name it. My guess is that the more you care about what you are close to, like your family, and the less you try to derive meaning from caring about distant phenomena, like celebrities or politics, the better off all of us are.

Where I get news

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A reader asks,

What sources do you use to gather “news”? I have become quite cynical and skeptical of most major news outlets. I am certain that one must consider multiple sources of news to gather a general understanding of what is going on. I am just interested as to where you gather your news from.

In general, I think that competition for attention favors “outrage of the day” stories and disadvantages important stories that do not feed the outrage machine. I try to lean against.

1. My print news source is the Wall Street Journal.

2. I dropped my subscription to the Washington Post. I sort of miss the editorial section, which has some balance to it. But the front section is devoted to undoing the 2016 election. No doubt this caters to the tastes of many of the Post‘s readers, but it does not make for reliable prioritization of stories or for balanced coverage within those stories. Also, the Sunday Outlook section has too many pieces that look like undergraduate essays written to please the sociology professor. Instead, the Journal‘s Saturday Review section often has interesting material.

3. I check Google News once or twice a day, just to see the headlines. Interestingly, they almost never show me headlines from the Journal, but they always show me headlines from the Post. So I don’t

4. Blogs are less shrill and more useful for following news than other social media. But the blog ecosystem functioned better when there were trackbacks, the Google newsreader and Google blogsearch. And no Twitter. As it is, I use Feedly to check blogs. Even though I am not interested in the outrage-of-the-day stuff, it often gets enough blog coverage to keep me from missing out entirely. As an aside, I believe that some of the stories that outrage people on the right, such as college campus hijinks, are not covered in the mainstream media very much.

5. I never turn on a TV. I would not be able to pick out of a police lineup any of the reporters or pundits whose names I see mentioned on blogs, much less anyone who is less well known.

6. All I do on Twitter is echo my blog posts there. Not sure I should even do that.

7. I check Facebook once or twice a week. But I really want Facebook to show me personal items from my friends, not so-called news. I only click on a news-type story if it seems really interesting and different from what I might see anywhere else. That does not happen very often.

Update: Jordan Greenhall, one of my current favorites, says,

I have recently fully unplugged from social media because social media is almost completely toxic, which is to say that when I go into any social media environment I find myself decreasingly capable of making good choices and increasingly willing to make bad choices, because it has that effect. Now, this is an interesting problem because we’ve got billions of people who are now connected on social media.

And by the way I don’t just mean social media; think also broadcast media… if I read an article in the New York Times there’s a 99% chance that I’m worse off rather than better off. Books, particularly old books, by the way, are things that we can still rely on because they take so long to write and to read. They have this cool concept… that has to do with a differential time element—so books are slower than other things.

Complicated vs. Complex

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Jordan Greenhall writes,

a complicated system is defined by a finite and bounded (unchanging) set of possible dynamic states, while a complex system is defined by an infinite and unbounded (growing, evolving) set of possible dynamic states.

. . .In the case of complication, the optimal choice is to become an “expert”. That is, to grasp the whole of the system such that one can make precise predictions about how it will respond to inputs.

In the case of complexity, the optimal choice goes in a very different direction: to become responsive. Because complex systems change, and by definition change unexpectedly, the only “best” approach is to seek to maximize your agentic capacity in general. In complication, one specializes. In complexity, one becomes more generally capable.

I found this distinction to be interesting. I would argue that mainstream economists treat economic problems as complicated, to be mastered by the expert. Those of us who lean toward Austrian heterodoxy treat economic problems as complex, best dealt with by adaptation.

I recommend the entire essay. His theme is the challenge that social media poses for human culture. As you know, this topic interests me a great deal.

The game-playing society

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My latest essay.

During the industrial era, the key word was systematic. Factories and assembly lines turned production into a system. We invented the discipline of political economy, which analyzed the capitalist system. From Leon Walras in the 19th century to the Congressional Budget Office today, economists have used systems of equations as a way of interpreting the economy.

. . .I claim that we are entering the era of games, in which the key words are scorekeeping and strategy.

The main idea in the essay is, if valid, really profound. Whole books have been written about less. Read the essay twice, and then see what happens if you look contemporary phenomena and try to view them through the “era of games” lens.

Not your 1960s protests

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Barton Swaim writes,

a walkout is supposed to be an act of rebellion, of resistance. It involves risk. Like a strike at a factory—if you participate, you might get what you want or you might lose your job. The Enough! walkout was a safe gesture, honored by our governmental and cultural authorities. The national news media—consider the lavish coverage in the New York Times—practically begged the kids to go through with it and heaped praise on them when they did.

Pointer from the WSJ. The way I would put it is that a real protest is an act of disagreeableness. It is not an act that primarily attracts the agreeables.

Let me reminisce a bit.

1. Around 1966 or so, my middle school in the tony suburb of Clayton, Missouri invited a performance by a group called “Up with People!” Their songs were upbeat and patriotic. They were trying to steer young people away from becoming hippies or war protesters. I hated the assembly, and I let other students know that I didn’t like having an agenda thrust on me like that. It was traumatic for me because a beautiful female classmate sneered at me, “Arnold, you have no soul.” It was an episode that marked me as a disagreeable.

2. The biggest cause for protest at my high school was the demand by students for a smoking lounge. It was not my cause, but lots of students fought for it, and they won. So if you think that the 60’s was all about peace and civil rights, think again. At Clayton High School, it was about a smoking lounge.

3. I remember writing a long editorial in favor of gun control for the high school newspaper, but it’s hard to pinpoint when. I want to say it was after Robert Kennedy was assassinated, but that would have been the end of my freshman year, and I don’t think I became involved with the newspaper until at least a year later.

4. It was actually during high school that I peaked as a radical. I lost my radical edge when I went to college. The Swarthmore radicals scared me, because they either seemed cult-like (this was when Lyndon Larouche called himself Lyn Marcus and was a Marxist and he recruited heavily at Swarthmore) or just not very logical in their thinking. I wanted them to be more intellectually sophisticated than I had been in high school, and it seemed more like the opposite. The bottom line is that I just didn’t connect on a personal level with any of the campus radicals.

One factor in my de-radicalization is that I arrived on campus prepared to re-think my entire personality. I had become aware that my high school persona wasn’t working well for me socially, and I made a conscious effort to be less sarcastic and hard-edged.

The group of friends I fell in with as a freshman had very left-wing views, but politics was not their focus. They were more into folk dancing (and I was not–that came later) and classical music (again, I did not really share that interest, but what little classical music I own goes back to chamber music that I saw my friends perform). If I had been more agreeable, I might have at least joined them for dancing.

Come to think of it, my freshman-year friends were very strongly on the agreeable end of the spectrum. In hindsight, I think I fell in with them because unconsciously they represented the direction I wanted to take myself, and it was exciting because they made me feel like it was working.

In my junior year, I took the first of several economics seminars with Professor Bernie Saffran. Bernie was not out to champion any one political view. He wanted to be friends with everyone in the economics profession, and in that he was very successful. He did his graduate work at Berkeley, where he be-friended many young liberals who later achieved very high status within the profession, including Peter Diamond, Laura Tyson, and George Akerlof. Yet his own views were mildly conservative, and in class he had more praise for Milton Friedman than for Paul Samuelson. Although many of his students went on to become prominent left-of-center economists, more than one of us ended up differently. Jeff Miron comes to mind.

On the whole, my memories of my political self in high school are more negative than positive. The Vietnam War was stupid, but the protest movement was stupid in its own way.

The authoritarian moment

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David Brooks writes,

progressives are getting better and more aggressive at silencing dissenting behavior. All sorts of formerly legitimate opinions have now been deemed beyond the pale on elite campuses. Speakers have been disinvited and careers destroyed. The boundaries are being redrawn across society.

There seems to be a bit of a trend. Putin is getting more authoritarian. Erdogan is getting more authoritarian. Xi Xinping is getting more authoritarian.

I know I’m not saying anything original here. But I wonder what it will take to turn things around.