A reader asks,

How would you encapsulate Martin’s thesis?

1. Starting around 2000, the amount of information on the Internet doubles in a year. If that goes on for ten years, there would have been 420 one thousand times the information in 2010 as in 2000. Even if that number is imprecise (and it has to be imprecise), there is way more information out there than there used to be. The increase is staggering.

2. 20th-century elites and institutions relied on having a much less chaotic and engulfing information environment. Politicians, journalists, and academics now are overwhelmed by: (a) what they don’t know that others do know. Think of citizens using cell phones to cover events sooner and more completely than paid journalists; and (b) by the amount that others know about them that they used to able to keep secret. Think of President Kennedy trying to get away with his sexual escapades today.

3. The elites cannot accept the new reality that there is so much information that they cannot control. They see new competitors as illegitimate (“fake news”) and they blame others for elites’ loss of status and respect.

4. The general public is frustrated by the arrogance of the elites, and they have the means to assemble revolts. This has happened everywhere, from the Arab Spring to the Yellow Vests to the January 6 riot. These revolts have no organization and so they end up not accomplishing much.

5. Society requires authority. But the existing authorities can seemingly do nothing other than hope for a return to the 20th century when they had closer to a monopoly on information. And they seem to be completely incapable of dealing with the digital world. They cannot operate at Internet speed (it takes the bureaucracy too long to react to events) or at Internet scale (the Obamacare web site fiasco).

6. Maybe a new generation of elites and/or institutions will emerge that is more adept at dealing with technology and sufficiently humble to deal with a situation in which information is more dispersed than it was last century.

Michael Muthukrishna wrote,

One key insight from cultural evolution is that our behaviour is rarely a function of causal understanding. Cultural evolution explains how our species creates and thrives in a world too complicated for any of us to understand. For at least the last 50,000 years and probably longer, we have lived in a world of accumulated technology, know-how, and ways of thinking that surpass the abilities of even the smartest among us—cumulative culture. Our lack of causal understanding is masked by an illusion of explanatory depth; we assume we understand and have reasonable causal models for our beliefs, behaviours, and technology. That illusion is shattered only when we’re asked to explain specifics. For example, you may have some sense that you understand: (a) how a flushing toilet works, until you’re asked how the water flushes everything away and returns to the same level. . .All of this is to quickly illustrate that the world is not only complicated, but even more complicated than our psychology allows us to believe. Instead, our beliefs and behaviours are shaped by our incentives and by those around us. We prefer to believe things that align with our self-interest and we internalise the beliefs and copy the behaviours of those who are successful or those who others copy. As this process filters beliefs and behaviours over generations, most people acquire the accumulated package of past successes, and so conforming to the majority also becomes a successful strategy. [links omitted]

. . .In the cacophony of opinions on the COVID-19 crisis, how do people deploy their many social learning strategies to decide whom to listen to? How do we identify who has relevant expertise if we’re listening to experts at all? Are the learning strategies themselves learned? What is the role of trust, costly and sincerity displays? And how does a psychology evolved for vicarious information acquisition with little direct access to the truth, nor sufficient causal models, interact with a world in which evidence is easily manufactured and electronically disseminated? How do we decide which fact checkers to trust and how do we know what is and isn’t so?[again, links omitted]

I put it this way: We engage in behaviors and hold beliefs without understanding why we behave the way we behave or why we believe what we believe. This is not a failure of rationality. It is the human condition.

Cultures are preserved because humans are copiers. Cultures differ because we do not all copy the same people. Cultures evolve because copying is imperfect, people innovate, and changes in the competitive environment cause some cultural practices to become extinct and others to survive.

I recommend gorging yourself on Muthukrishna. My first taste was on The Podcast Browser, who also recommends Muthukrishna talking with The Dissenter.

Of the many links in the essay above, I followed one on the topic of innovation, by Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich.

Our societies and social networks act as collective brains. Individuals connected in collective brains, selectively transmitting and learning information, often well outside their conscious awareness, can produce complex designs without the need for a designer—just as natural selection does in genetic evolution. The processes of cumulative cultural evolution result in technologies and techniques that no single individual could recreate in their lifetime, and do not require its beneficiaries to understand how and why they work ([12]; electronic supplementary material, for further discussion). Such cultural adaptations appear functionally well designed to meet local problems, yet they lack a designer.

. . .By our account, IQ is a measure of access to a population’s stock of know-how, techniques, tools, tricks and so on, that improve abilities, skills and ways of thinking important to success in a WEIRD world. IQ tests are useful as a measure of cultural competence, which may require cultural learning (and there may be differences in this), but not as a universal test of ‘intelligence’ as a generalized abstract problem-solving ability. The Flynn effect (for recent meta-analyses, see [141,142]) describes the steady increase in mean IQ since IQ tests were developed, approximately three points per decade. If taken at face value, then the Flynn effect renders large proportions of previous generations barely functional, but by this account, the Flynn effect becomes a measure of increased mean cultural complexity.

It’s a difficult paper to excerpt. Read the whole thing.

Megan McArdle writes (WaPo, paywalled),

The media’s pronouncements about fighting “misinformation” often sound perilously close to declaring that the common presumptions of a handful of major media outlets should define the bounds of accepted truth for everyone. That’s both arrogant and impossible, and I don’t blame anyone for recoiling. But I do question those who have reacted by casually (and publicly!) suggesting that they’ll use their entrepreneurial mojo to destroy journalism and replace it with something better.

She refers to discussions on Clubhouse. I have observed the same thing. In fact, her description of Clubhouse as like a big conference with lots of panel discussions going on fits with my experience.

In rooms discussing media where tech people are on the panel, the tech people complain about journalists of having abandoned objectivity. In rooms with mainstream media on the panel, the journalists complain about consumer having abandoned tradition news outlets for social media and fake news. I see both sides as trying to click their heels together three times, hoping to be transported back to the 20th century. I want to shake everyone by the collar and make them read Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public, or at least his essay about the NYT.

As an aside, Bret Weinstein seems to have observed more dramatically the militant black-power element that first struck me (Dick Gregory’s Clubhouse).

Also, listen to Heather Heying’s take in the podcast with Bret. I personally place her above Bret in my FITs rankings. Bret reminds me of the story I read about the KC quarterback in the Super Bowl racking up 497 yards behind the line of scrimmage, running back and forth to try to evade defenders. She instead runs straight at you. I would draft her to pick up some W’s.

As another aside, room population size on Clubhouse is a great illustration of an autocatalytic process. The more people who are drawn to a room, the more additional people will be drawn. If you have only a handful of people in the room, you are going to be stuck at a low level. If you have close to 1000, you room will keep growing. That is because of the way the “feed” algorithm works. You get alerted when people you follow are in a room. So if 1000 people are in a room, it is much more likely that one of them is someone I follow than if the room has only 5 people. In addition, other things equal it seems that the algorithm shows rooms in population-size order. So if I am just scrolling through the rooms, the first one I see will be the one with the most people.

I can easily imagine a dynamic where if someone with thousands of followers leaves room A and goes to room B, then room A pretty much empties out and room B fills up. This could be regardless of what the panel discussion is like in room A vs. room B.

Gertjan Steede writes,

status is, first and foremost, something that we claim, give and receive in everyday interaction. As a result, a status hierarchy develops in society and in every group within society. Depending on the group’s activities, that hierarchy could be more or less obvious. It will simultaneously be expressed in all kinds of currency: kindness, power, beauty, skill, daring, money – to name a few. I am claiming status by writing this blog, and if you read it to the end, you are giving me status.

While status is about voluntary acts, power is about everything that people coerce one another into. We use power when we receive status insults, or if we have learned that this is a good way of obtaining what we want.

. . .In fact, we people play the status-power game all our lives. If something “gives us energy”, it means it gives us status. We like those whom we can count on to give status to us. In contrast, we long to give status to those we love. We claim status, by being nice or showing off. The status-power game is our life. We do nothing else.

Read the whole post. I think his concepts of status and power map to the distinction between a prestige hierarchy and a dominance hierarchy that I learned from Joseph Henrich.

The post also supports my intuition that people turn to dominance moves when they cannot attain status through prestige. Regulating other people’s speech is an example.

1. Glenn Loury writes,

Anti-racism advocates, in effect, are daring you to notice that some groups send their children to elite colleges and universities in outsized numbers compared to other groups due to the fact that their academic preparation is magnitudes higher and better and finer. They are daring you to declare such excellence to be an admirable achievement. One isn’t born knowing these things. One acquires such intellectual mastery through effort. Why are some youngsters acquiring these skills and others not? That is a very deep and interesting question, one which I am quite prepared to entertain. But the simple retort, “racism”, is laughable—as if such disparities have nothing to do with behavior, with cultural patterns, with what peer groups value, with how people spend their time, with what they identify as being critical to their own self-respect. Anyone actually believing such nonsense is a fool, I maintain.

Pretty much every paragraph in the essay is as powerful as that.

This essay needs to escape the confines of Quillette and find its way to readers of the NYT and into schools of education.

Or is that hopeless?

2. John McWhorter writes,

Of a hundred fundamentalist Christians, how many do you suppose could be convinced via argument to become atheists? There is no reason that the number of people who can be talked out of the Third Wave Antiracism religion is any higher. As such, our concern must be how to continue with genuine progress in spite of this ideology. How do we work around it? How do we insulate people with good ideas from the influence of the Third Wave Antiracists’ liturgical concerns? How do we hold them off from influencing the education of our young people any more than they already have?

My interest is not “How do we get through to these people?” We cannot, at least not enough of them to matter. The question is “How can we can live graciously among them?” We seek change in the world, but for the duration will have to do so while encountering bearers of a gospel, itching to smoke out heretics, and ready on a moment’s notice to tar us as moral perverts.

Of all the essays I have read about the new anti-racism, McWhorter’s is my current favorite.