My essay is called Nassim Taleb and the Disagreeables (catchy name for a rock band, perhaps?).
Agreeables tend to take people’s words at face value. Disagreeables do not. One of Taleb’s themes is that people’s words are not trustworthy unless they are backed by skin-in-the-game action.
It’s a fun essay, in my less than humble opinion.
Ira Stoll is angry about a NYT interview with an Israeli modern dance choreographer.
Israelis stole folk dancing from the Palestinian Arabs in an act of “cultural appropriation,” The New York Times claims.
I think that he is over-reacting. In response (without referring to his piece), I wrote,
it was the most liberal-minded Jews who enjoyed Israeli dances that incorporated steps modeled on Arab debkas. Some of the choreographers had come from Arab countries and were proud of their heritage. Others wanted to promote their idealistic vision, which was for an ethnically and culturally integrated state, with Arabs blended seamlessly into the economy and life of Israel. In hindsight, this vision may seem naive , but it was well intended.
we see increased prevalence of depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia across time and culture. Our genetic heritage has clearly not changed and yet the incidence of mental illness is changing.
Read the whole thing.
Politics also reflects the new division. In the United States suspicion or resentment is no longer directed to the capitalists or the merely rich. It is the intellectuals–the effete snobs–who are eyed with misgiving and alarm. This should surprise no one. Nor should it be a matter for surprise when semiliterate millionaires turn up leading or financing the ignorant in struggle against the intellectually privileged and content. This reflects the relevant class distinction in our time.
This is from the 1971 edition of The New Industrial State, by John Kenneth Galbraith. He gets many things spectacularly wrong, of course. But offers insights into the role of technical expertise and Weberian organization within a large firm that are too little appreciated by today’s economists. He deserves to be re-read.
Serbia has a much stronger affinity with Russia, Croatia is in Catholic Europe, while Slovenia seems more like Northern European nations than Croatia.
You have to go read the whole thing. He discusses a cultural map of the world, based on two scales: traditional values vs. secular/relational values; and survival values vs. self-expression values.
He then goes on to discuss the Peter Turchin, et al paper that I’ve seen referenced on several blogs. It’s the paper that develops an index of social complexity. I think of it as something like an IQ measure that operates at a cultural level.
Just talk to any parent. It is too easy for children’s curiosity to lead them to the sleazy online square, and every parent now worries whether a child has enough sense to handle a disingenuous text. What is a parent to do—keep them off YouTube for fear of much worse?
2. Try Chamath Palihapitiya. As The Verge reports,
Palihapitiya’s criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
I give Greenstein credit for speaking fervently about a topic that he correctly points out is one that we prefer to ignore. I am less inclined to be charitable toward Palihapitiya. Too many f-bombs and too much catering to smug lefties. Apparently, he decided quite a while ago that Facebook is not a good thing, but his views are only cool now. A year ago it became cool to knock social media, after Donald Trump managed to eke out an election victory. Even though it is by no means certain that social media played any role in the eking.
There is a bull market in paranoia these days. I am missing out on it. That is why my portfolio does not include any Bitcoin.
Noting that Matt Lauer could be fired but Al Franken and John Conyers could not, he writes,
There’s an irony here. The government, which imposes regulations and other restrictions in a top-down way across the whole economy, has a strange degree of autonomy. The constraints on government tend to come from the bottom up, with limited effectiveness. The control is spread out over time and the process of competition among political parties is more like a cartel than a competitive market. The constraints on the private sector actors are top-down. The board of directors fires the CEO at will. There is much more command-and-control at NBC than there is in the oversight of Congress.
Read the whole essay. Russ does not offer any definitive answers on this topic du jour. I try very hard to resist du jour topics, but I may end up writing on this one.
He might have said,
Perhaps the single most destabilizing political development since the WW2 has been the destruction of ruling class prestige by the Internet.
But in this case, the quote is from Richard Fernandez.
It wasn’t until you crowded thousands, or tens of thousands of them, along with their animals, into small dense areas with poor sanitation that disease outbreaks took off. Instead of meeting dozens of new people per year, an urban dweller probably encountered hundreds per day. Diseases that would have affected only a few people at a time as they spread slowly across a continent (or just burned out for lack of new carriers) would now leap from person to person in a flash.
He is talking about the effect of urbanization on disease. But the point is to use this as a metaphor for social media’s effect on our mental life. He says that perhaps diseases of the mind are now spreading quickly. As with urbanization, the trick with social media will be to obtain the benefits and to contain the risks.
Possibly related: in the Peterson/Haidt discussion I referred to the other day, they talk about how the sense of disgust may have evolve to protect people from disease. We tend to feel an instinctive disgust toward groups with customs and manners that differ from our own. If you can overcome this instinct to feel disgust when you are around foreigners, then you can benefit from their ideas and culture. But you increase somewhat your risk of contracting disease. Peterson describes Adolf Hitler as operating on the theory that having Jews or Gypsies in a population was like having rats in a factory. He was so concerned about the disease that might be spread by such creatures that he wanted them eradicated.
1. In a recent talk, he says,
The question has been posed at this conference whether we are witnessing the rise of authoritarian or fascist governments. Among the old democracies at least, I believe the opposite is closer to the truth. Democratic governments are terrified of the public’s unhappiness. They know that heroic actions are expected of them, but also that every initiative will be savaged and every failure amplified. Their behavior is the opposite of authoritarian. It’s a drift to dysfunction: to paralysis.
Look at the Republicans on Obamacare.
Other provocative passages:
Rhetorical aggression defines the political web. By embracing Trump in significant numbers, the public has signaled that it is willing to impose the untrammeled relations of social media on the fragile forms of American democracy.
Information, it turned out, has authority in proportion to its scarcity – the more there is, the less people believe.
I recommend the whole thing.
2. Read his account of the controversy over allowing a representative of a far-right German party to speak at the conference.
3. I continue to recommend The Revolt of the Public more often than any other book. But I also recommend my review of it. Near the end of my very long review, I wrote,
The dominant strategy of the outsiders is to focus on the negative, exposing and denouncing the failures, imperfections, and corruption of the insiders. On the left, this means heaping blame on the institutions of capitalism and free markets. On the right, this means heaping blame on the institutions of government. Neither side will propose, much less implement, an effective reform agenda.
I could have included academia and professional media as institutions disparaged by the outsider right.
Maybe a publisher would want to produce a print version of the book, with my review as an introduction.