Category Archives: Politics

Martin Gurri watch

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Contrary to appearances, I argue that the center-left did not win in 2020.

As of 2021, both the Democratic and Republican establishments are reeling from what Martin Gurri calls The Revolt of the Public. Both the left and the right must reckon with an illiberal, religiously fanatical constituency. On the right, Mr. Trump bullies and insults anyone who is less than worshipful toward him. The large body of his supporters that is willing to comply with his demands for personal loyalty represents the illiberalism of the right.

On the other side, there are the young progressive activists who are so certain of their moral rectitude that they see those who do not share their positions as heretics. They are unwilling to allow heretics even to enjoy gainful employment while holding dissenting beliefs. These activists represent the illiberalism of the left.

Epistemology and social science

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1. On substack, I wrote,

We learn socially, so that most of our beliefs come from other people.

This makes the problem of choosing which people to trust the central problem in epistemology.

What Eric Weinstein calls our “sense-making apparatus” can be thought of as a set of prestige hierarchies, at the top of which are the people who are most widely trusted.

Our prestige hierarchies are based largely on credentials: professor at Harvard; writer for the New York Times; public health official.

The incentive systems and selection mechanisms in the credential-based hierarchies have become corrupted over time, allowing people to rise to the top who lack wisdom and intellectual rigor.

I proceeded to expand on these sentences.

2. Rob Henderson writes,

In his book The Social Leap, the evolutionary psychologist William von Hippel writes, “a substantial reason we evolved such large brains is to navigate our social world… A great deal of the value that exists in the social world is created by consensus rather than discovered in an objective sense… our cognitive machinery evolved to be only partially constrained by objective reality.” Our social brains process information not only by examining the facts, but also considering the social consequences of what happens to our reputations if we believe something.

Later on,

In her recent book Cognitive Gadgets, the Oxford psychologist Cecilia Hayes writes, “children show prestige bias; they are more likely to copy a model that adults regard as being higher social status- for example, their head-teacher rather than an equally familiar person of the same age and gender.” Hayes cites a 2013 study by Nicola McGuigan who found that five-year-old children are “selective copiers.” Results showed that kids were more likely to imitate their head-teacher rather than an equally familiar person of the same age and gender. Young children are more likely to imitate a person that adults regard as being higher status.

and later,

researchers Ángel V. Jiménez and Alex Mesoudi wrote that assessing competence directly “may be noisy and costly. Instead, social learners can use short-cuts either by making inferences from the appearance, personality, material possessions, etc. of the models.”

In my view, these observations/findings make the philosopher’s approach to epistemology seem wrong-footed. The philosopher wants to ask when I should believe my senses. I want to ask when I should believe Jack, especially when he disagrees with Jill. Or Fauci when he disagrees with Mowshowitz.

I pay attention to social learning because of my reading of Henrich and Laland. This predisposition is reinforced by what I found in the Henderson piece. I had an exchange with Michael Huemer on this after this post. I still think that philosophers ought to pay more attention to the issue of how one decides who is trustworthy.

Grumpy about Yellen

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John Cochrane writes,

I know Washington is political, and a Treasury Secretary must go along with her President’s agenda. But that does not mean you have to say such silly things in public. It will cost us all dearly, including yourself and the institutions you care about.

Here we see the stark difference between the incentive to seek the truth and the incentive to seek power. I have been interested in this ever since I read David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. That theme permeates the book, starting with the opening vignette, which describes the way that the power game was played as of 1960. These game-players gave us the Vietnam War. Our contemporary game players are giving us things like Woke financial regulators and the antics of the peacetime bureaucrats of the FDA and the CDC.

Conservative radicalism

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These days, I am thinking about this oxymoron. As a libertarian/conservative, you feel like dealing with the mainstream media is like playing basketball with the refs on the other team. And with cancel culture and Biden’s idea of unity, it feels like the other team has decided to foul at will. Hence, it is tempting for conservatives to radicalize.

One idea I have for an organizing principle:

Anyone, not just the rich and the well-connected, should be able to escape the consequences of progressive policies

Everyone, not just the wealthy, should be able to enjoy the same level of police protection that the rich enjoy in their gated communities.

Everyone, not just the wealthy, should be able to choose a private-school rather than be forced to deal with the teachers’ unions.

Everyone, not just the elite Woke, should be able to express their political beliefs without fear of retribution on the job or in selling a product.

Etc.

History of the ACLU

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James Kirchick writes,

“My successor, and the board of directors that have supported him, have basically tried to transform the organization from a politically neutral, nonpartisan civil liberties organization into a progressive liberal organization,” Glasser says about Anthony Romero, an ex-Ford Foundation executive who continues to serve as the ACLU’s executive director. According to former ACLU national board member Wendy Kaminer in her 2009 book Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU, Romero and his enablers routinely engaged in the sort of undemocratic and unaccountable behavior practiced by the individuals and institutions the ACLU usually took to court, like withholding information (concerning a breach of ACLU members’ privacy, no less), shredding documents in violation of its own record-preservation and transparency procedures, and attempting to muzzle board members from criticizing the organization publicly. (“You sure that didn’t come out of Dick Cheney’s office?” remarked the late, great former Village Voice columnist and ACLU board member Nat Hentoff of this last gambit). Eerily prescient, Worst Instincts foreshadowed the hypocrisy and fecklessness that has since come to characterize the leadership of so many other, previously liberal institutions confronted by the forces of illiberalism within their own ranks.

Read it and weep.

Prequel to a Chauvin acquittal

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Suppose that Chauvin is acquitted. If so, then I would argue that it is irresponsible for any leading media outlet or politician to denounce the criminal justice system. That would be equivalent to delegitimizing the 2020 election and claiming that it was stolen.

Of course, I expect some people to denounce the criminal justice system if there is an acquittal. But elites should be obligated to say that they accept the decision of the jury. I fear that we will not see them do so.

I am not saying that it will be an injustice if Chauvin is found guilty. But there are some factors that mightlead to an acquittal.

It is ironic that much of the trial will focus on the issue of proper police procedure. In Chauvin’s case, proper procedure would have been to investigate the incident before filing charges. I have read that this procedure was not followed. As a result, evidence has emerged subsequent to his being charged that makes the charges less justified than when they first were made.

I am not a lawyer. But my impression is that to prove even the weakest charge, manslaughter, the prosecution must show that

(a) Chauvin’s conduct was reckless, the way that drunk driving is reckless.

(b) Chauvin’s conduct contributed to George Floyd’s death.

To believe (a), you have to take into account the way that Floyd resisted arrest and the challenges that police face when someone resists arrest. You must believe that Chauvin’s actions were highly abnormal for a police officer in those circumstances. And you must believe this beyond a reasonable doubt.

To believe (b), you have to believe that had Floyd been left unrestrained, he would have survived the drugs he ingested. And this, too, must be true beyond a reasonable doubt, no?

Please restrict comments to correcting my amateur legal “analysis.” If you have general opinions related to the trial and protests and such, please refrain from putting them in the comments.

Fantasy Intellectual Teams: version 2.0

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The goal of the Fantasy Intellectual Teams project is to improve public discourse by highlighting writers and podcasters who model high-quality discourse. Version 1.0 has been in progress since April 1. I am excited by the way that the initial buzz has shown that it is a viable method for working toward that lofty goal. We have also learned enough to be able to plan a much-improved version 2.0 for May 1.

The initial set of scoring categories, while a good start, will be improved. Because these categories are so important to achieving the goals of this project, we will develop new versions until we are satisfied. In that sense, the project is in Beta.

For those of you who are interested in the project–and I hope that many of you are–I plan to roll out version 2.0 in about a week, with a new draft around May 1. I encourage you to participate as a team owner by picking a team in the next draft. Leave a message in the comments if you are willing to play.

We will be having each owner pick a team of 7 intellectuals to follow. This is down from 15 in version 1.0, which was too much of a burden on owners. Also, as long as the project is in Beta, seasons will last just one month each. Longer seasons will be desirable once the scoring categories have stabilized.

As an owner, you have two responsibilities. One is to follow the team that you draft and submit claims when intellectuals on your team score points. Another is to provide feedback on improving the way that the project works, especially in defining the scoring categories. The experience of scoring your own team is a valuable basis for feedback.

Below are some initial ideas for scoring rules for version 2.0.
Continue reading →

What is fragile?

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Scott Alexander writes,

in an area with frequent catastrophes, where the catastrophes have externalities on people who didn’t choose them, you want to lower variance, so that nothing ever gets bad enough to produce the catastrophe.

In an area where people can choose whatever they want, and are smart enough to choose good things rather than bad ones, you want to raise variance, so that the best thing will be very good indeed, and then everybody can choose that and bask in its goodness.

Scott’s essays on “anti-fragile” point to a need to define fragility in a way other than “I’ll know it when Nassim Taleb sees it.” Are we talking about a person, a choice, a process, a system. . .?

It could be that the admonition “Be anti-fragile!” has no practical implications. That is because most disagreements can be framed as disagreements about what are the important sources of fragility.

Conservatives see individual human beings as fragile, but they see the accumulated habits of civilization as anti-fragile. But a progressive could argue that the accumulated habits of civilization make a society fragile. As the environment changes, people need to change in response.

Education and cultural dynamics

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John Alcorn pointed out to me that I have two beliefs that appear to be inconsistent.

1. The Null Hypothesis, which is that educational interventions have no durable effect on average outcomes.

2. K-12 educators and college professors and administrators have adverse cultural effects.

It may be tough to reconcile these, but let me try.

Humans have a lot of cultural knowledge to acquire, and we do it by copying others. The Null Hypothesis is true because we do not have interventions that reliably improve one’s copying process. If Jill is better at learning than Jack, we do not have techniques that will produce equal outcomes between Jack and Jill.

But the content of what Jack and Jill learn is affected by educational institutions. If we teach them a heroic narrative of the United States, then they are likely to absorb that narrative. If we teach them a dark narrative of the United States, then they are likely to absorb that narrative. Not everyone who goes through the educational system will support its dominant narrative to the same degree, but the dominant narrative will tend to be absorbed.

I would not say that educators are totally free to impose cultural beliefs on their students. Educators need some support from other influential adults and from students’ peers. Education takes place within a culture, and it has to resonate with that culture to a fair degree. But I think that this leaves room for me to justifiably complain about the cultural influence of K-12 and higher education in the United States these days.

A toy to spot your bias on Twitter

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Tyler Cowen writes,

What is the ideological news slant of your Twitter account? (mine was 57% left-wing, 34% right-wing, not too many centrists, at least by their measures, maybe I prefer “the kooks”). I don’t wish to embarrass anyone in particular, but some of the ideological bubbles you can find with this are…just remarkable.

I put in klingblog, and it says I do not interact enough with Twitter to give a reading. Check.

I put in econtalker (Russ Roberts) and it said 48 percent left, 44 percent right.

I put in slatestarcodex (Scott Alexander) and it said 71 percent left, 15 percent right.

My thoughts.

1. I think that Twitter overall leans very far to the left. So my guess is that this measure overstates the amount of leftwing news and understates the amount of rightwing news that a person gets in the “real world.”

2. I suspect that if you are active on Twitter and interested in political issues, you have no choice but to interact with a lot of news from the left. For a long time I have believed that those of us on the right know what the leftwing narrative is on news. But people on the left miss some angles on stories and some stories altogether because these analyses never penetrate their bubble.