Category Archives: Politics

Number One Pick on polarization

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Scott Alexander writes,

So although polarization is definitely rising in the US, it’s stable in other countries, and falling in still others. There is no consistent trend toward more polarization in the First World! As Klein points out, this is a strong challenge to any story relying on digital media or social media or the changing media landscape.

But also: the average country at the average time is about as polarized as the US is now. This confirms Klein’s thesis that the US isn’t in a historically unprecedented state of hyperpolarization. It’s coming out of a period of unusually low polarization, into a more normal era.

He is reviewing Ezra Klein’s book on polarization. I would have expected Number One Pick to start the way he usually does, by posing a precise question, looking at survey articles and meta-analyses to get the perspective of the highest status academics, and then digging into some of the literature to see how well supported that perspective is. But instead, Scott mostly discusses Klein’s speculations and offers counter-speculations.

A precise question, which he comes close to asking, would be: will polarization, as measured by voting patterns in Congress and opinion polls in the general public, continue to increase, or is it likely to level off?

I am not going to try to locate an academic article, but I remember Jonathan Rauch wrote a useful essay.

We are not seeing a hardening of coherent ideological difference. We are seeing a hardening of incoherent ideological difference.

. . .In 2017, Pew’s polling found that blacks’ political attitudes have not diverged significantly from whites’ since 1994, or women’s from men’s, or college graduates’ from non-college graduates’. Even across lines of age and religious observance, political attitudes have diverged only modestly. But the attitudinal gap between Democrats and Republicans has risen from 15 percentage points in 1994 to a whopping 36 points in 2017. In other words, the growing, and now gaping, divide in Americans’ political values is specifically partisan. And the growth in partisanship does not reflect a clear or clean ideological divide. First and foremost, the increase in partisanship reflects, well, an increase in partisanship.

I think that Rauch would answer my question by saying that he is somewhat hopeful that polarization will level off or decline, because there are many people who see our current polarization as a problem and are making attempts to alleviate it.

Overall, I would score this game as Rauch first, Alexander second, Klein third. Alexander usually plays better, so I am not suggesting that you draft Rauch ahead of him, but you should consider these results when you get ready for the FITs draft.

Claire Lehmann vs. me

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She sent out an email:

Facebook has blocked Australian users from viewing or sharing news content on their platform. The mass-blocking is in response to new media laws proposed by the Australian Government which would mean that digital giants such as Facebook are required to pay for news content.

in resistance to the proposed laws, Facebook has now blocked Australian news sites, and Quillette has been included in the wide net that has been cast. Our Facebook page has been wiped and our links are blocked on the platform. If you would like to share a Quillette article on Facebook you will be unable to, even if you live outside of Australia.

I replied:

1.  I consider Quillette the best of online magazines, and I link to its content often on my blog. 

2.  I see the Australia-Facebook imbroglio as a reason for hope.  If they can ban content from Australian news sites, then they might someday ban content from all news sites.  Then I could go back to using Facebook.

Academic corruption 2: Emasculated culture

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Saturday summers, when I was a kid
We’d run to the schoolyard, here’s what we did
Pick out the captains, choose up the teams
It was always a measure of my self-esteem
Cause the fastest, the strongest, played shortstop and first. . .

“Right Field,” Willy Welch (popularized by Peter, Paul and Mary)

I enjoyed this podcast with Joyce Benenson, about her book, Warriers and Worriers. She and Roy Baumeister are the rare social scientists who see that (a) men and women differ on average in their behavioral tendencies and (b) male tendencies are not all bad.

Her book is grounded in observations of young boys and girls. My memories of my boyhood align perfectly with her picture of boys, and with the song lyrics above. We played team sports without supervision, put a lot of effort into setting rules, and competed to demonstrate skill. When we weren’t playing sports, we imagined ourselves fighting the “bad guys,” either in the Old West or in World War II.

One of her ideas is that men have a social strategy that works well in war: organize unrelated males, fight other groups overtly according to rules, then reconcile after battle. Women have a social strategy that works well for protecting their individual health and the health of their children: emphasize safety, covertly undermine the status of unrelated females, and exclude rivals rather than reconcile with them.

This leads me to speculate on the consequences of adding a lot of women to formerly male domains. Over the past several decades, a number of important institutions that were formerly almost exclusively male now include many women: academia, journalism, politics, and management positions in organizations. These institutions increasingly are discarding the values that sustained them when the female presence was less.

1. The older culture saw differential rewards as just when based on performance. The newer culture sees differential rewards as unjust.

2. The older culture sought people who demonstrate the most competence. The newer culture seeks to nurture those who are at a disadvantage.

3. The older culture admires those who seek to stand out. The newer culture disdains such people.

4. The older culture uses proportional punishment that is predictable based on known rules. The newer culture suddenly turns against a target and permanently banishes the alleged violator, based on the latest moral fashions.

5. The older culture valued open debate. The newer culture seeks to curtail speech it regards as dangerous.

6. The older culture saw liberty as essential to a good society. The newer culture sees conformity as essential to a good society.

7. The older culture was oriented toward achievement. The newer culture is oriented toward safety. Hence, we cannot complete major construction projects, like bridges, as efficiently as we used to.

I think that in each case, the older culture was consistent with male tendencies (what Benenson calls “warriors”); the newer culture is consistent with female tendencies (what she calls “worriers”). Keep in mind that men can have worrier personalities and women can have warrior personalities, but those are not the norm.

Overall, we have made institutions harder for warriors to navigate. College no longer helps men to make the transition to adulthood. It keeps them sheltered and controlled, and after graduation they end up living with their parents.

Why did opening up opportunities for women lead to this outcome? One can imagine other outcomes. Perhaps women would have assimilated into the male culture, adopting some male tendencies in the process. Perhaps women and men would have retained their different behavioral tendencies but agreed to accommodate one another.

Instead, both men and women seem to have agreed that a purge of male tendencies is in order. Some women scorn male values as tools of oppression, and most men would rather accommodate this view than voice disagreement.

I note that the readership of this blog appears to be overwhelmingly to be male, at least based on those who leave comments. Note also that this is the long-postponed “cancel-bait” post.

Is it time to serve the nuts?*

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Jonah Goldberg writes,

as a matter of rank political analysis, most Americans are members of the stupid party as [Irving] Kristol described. These people aren’t dumb, and they’re not necessarily Republicans, but they do have strong antibodies against radical excess or excess radicalism.

He argues that Republicans who try to appease hard-core Trump supporters are doing damage to the party and to the country.

Here is the counter-argument: Donald Trump signed an executive order banning government training using Critical Race Theory. Joe Biden reversed that.

The counter-argument amounts to, “The Democrats are serving their nuts. So if we have to serve our nuts to beat them, so be it.”

I don’t find the counter-argument persuasive. I think that we will soon see in the voting public a longing for order. The editors of Quillette write,

there is likely a solid majority of Americans who know that Biden won the election, that biology is real, that QAnon is a conspiracy theory, that COVID-19 isn’t just a seasonal flu, that skin colour doesn’t indicate your moral worth, and that abolishing the police is a bad idea. If Biden can empower that silent majority without gratuitously denigrating the 74 million Americans who voted against him, perhaps he can get America to start coming together

I think that our present period reminds me of the late 1970s, when people longed for order. They were suffering from rampaging inflation, rising crime, high divorce rates, and humiliating defeats overseas in Vietnam and Iran. The relative success of the Reagan Presidency in taming inflation, and in the now-forgotten invasion of Grenada, helped to satisfy that demand. Conservatism and the Republican Party gained in status.

If President Biden restores a sense of order, his party will rise in status. But there are chaotic forces in his party, and his first round of executive orders mostly catered to them. Crime is rising. The stock market is looking like a consensual hallucination. Inflation is looming.

Above all, the pandemic war is still killing people and the economy. If President Biden doesn’t replace the peacetime bureaucrats with a fighting general soon, no amount of fawning PR from the WaPo is going to save him.
__
*The title to this post is a line from one of the original Thin Man movies. It is spoken by Nora Charles, played by Myrna Loy as hostess of a dinner party arranged by her husband Nick. But although she is referring to food, the movie audience laughs because of how aptly it refers to their guests.

Cancellation bets

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Bryan Caplan writes,

I bet Todd Proebsting $50 at even odds that I will NOT be “clearly mistreated” by George Mason University before January 1, 2031.

I think that the chances that the Woke mob will come for Bryan are pretty low, because he is under their radar. So at even odds I think he has once again made a bet he is likely to win. And I don’t think that extending the date out to 2031 helps Proebsting’s chances very much.

The Woke Tyranny train is moving very rapidly. I think that within two or three years the Woke mob will either have trampled its opposition or started to fade away. Completely trampling the opposition means that it is able to inflict what Bryan would call clear mistreatment on Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, Peter Thiel, and Ross Douthat. I would not bet on that at this point. A better bet would be that there will be clear mistreatment of at least one of the them or one of the following between now and January 1, 2023: Coleman Hughes, Tyler Cowen, Megan McArdle, Joseph Henrich, John Cochrane, Ezra Klein.

Dick Gregory’s Clubhouse

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I experienced an odd juxtaposition late last month. I started reading Shelby Steele’s White Guilt, and I used the hip new audio-only social media app Clubhouse for the first time.

Steele writes about going to hear Dick Gregory in 1967. The young Steele was totally captivated by Gregory’s hip, Marxist black power rhetoric. But years later Steele came to view as harmful what he saw as the exploitation of white guilt over slavery and segregation.

The first “room” I went into in Clubhouse had at least 100 listeners in it, mostly African-American. The speaker was a soft-spoken but supremely self-confident black woman, who resembled an updated version of Dick Gregory. Her theme was that after the Civil War, Reconstruction failed to transform the former Confederacy, and that after the election and the Capitol riot we must not make the same mistake again. I assume that the audience found her captivating, while I found her quite frightening. She showed no recognition of anyone’s humanity. Instead her world view seems to be that it is imperative for the Woke to stifle the un-Woke. Probably if she could have her way, everyone who is to the right of Ibram X. Kendi on race would be treated as a domestic terrorist.

I remember when Medium was the hip new platform a few years ago. I saw it degenerate into an echo chamber for narrow-minded, self-righteous young progressives. I get the sense that Clubhouse is starting out even more left-dominant than Medium or Twitter.

The timing for launching Clubhouse is perfect. With the pandemic, people need something to do. And young people are particularly restless and in need of social interaction. A lot of profile photos show generous cleavage.

The question for Zoom or Clubhouse is what happens to demand once the pandemic is behind us. In six months, even though there will be more people receptive to video conferencing than there were before the pandemic, a lot of folks will be happy if they never look at heads in squares again. Clubhouse will have less time to establish its value before we are back to meeting in person. It may have difficulty expanding beyond its current user base.

Is the resistance getting organized?

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1. Bryan Caplan quotes a proposal.

What is required is administrative reform, where attacks on academic freedom, free speech, and intellectual diversity are treated with at least the same degree of seriousness as other offenses at universities. Specifically, every university should have an “Office of Free Speech” where faculty can lodge complaints when their academic freedom or free speech rights are violated, or when policies are put in place to limit the possibilities for intellectual diversity. This office must have adequate funding to complete independent investigations of such allegations, and it should report directly to the highest authority governing the university, either the board of trustees or regents for most private universities or the regents or state legislature for public universities. These investigations must have teeth; attacking academic freedom (not simply criticizing speech with speech) cannot be allowed to stand as acceptable behavior for administrators, faculty, or students. The same sorts of consequences available for other offenses should be applied to those who use their position at the university to deprive others of their institutional or constitutional rights.

Read the whole thing. Let me argue against the idea: More college administrators are the problem, not the solution. And the Office of Free Speech will evolve very quickly into an office of censorship. Conquest’s Second Law and all that.

2. Helen Pluckrose and others have started Counterweight Support, to fight back against cancel culture.

3. The folks at Legal Insurrection have started a project to track Critical Race Theory on college campuses. I think we should be tracking it at elementary schools.

4. Maybe all the resistance needs is more John McWhorter. If you already saw this post, go ahead and read it again.

What everyone is reading

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Lee Smith on China and the U.S. A few representative excerpts:

he [President Trump] failed to staff and prepare to win the war he asked Americans to elect him to fight.

. . .Talk about how Nike made its sneakers in Chinese slave labor camps was no longer fashionable. News that China was stealing American scientific and military secrets, running large spy rings in Silicon Valley and compromising congressmen like Eric Swalwell, paying large retainers to top Ivy League professors in a well-organized program of intellectual theft, or in any way posed a danger to its own people or to its neighbors, let alone to the American way of life, were muted and dismissed as pro-Trump propaganda.

. . .The leading members of a city, state, or nation do not imprison its own unless they mean to signal that they are imposing collective punishment on the population at large. It had never been used before as a public health measure because it is a widely recognized instrument of political repression.

File this one under: poses a dilemma for libertarians.

FITs update

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I already have a list of over 200 intellectuals for the Fantasy Intellectual Teams draft. Thanks for your suggestions. More are still welcome. You are not limited to any proposed team.

I should say that the way a fantasy draft works, owners take turns drafting players. You cannot just say “Tyler is on my team.” Somebody else could pick him first. So if there were 10 owners of these 18-intellectual teams, and there are 200 to choose from, then you can be sure to wind up in the last rounds drafting some folks that were put on the draft list by me or someone else but who you would not have intended to draft as of now.

One scoring issue that I am wrestling with is name recognition. The goal of FITs is to increase name recognition for intellectuals that deserve it. That might suggest downgrading anyone who has high name recognition among, say, Ivy League social science professors. So David Brooks, Jared Diamond, or Daniel Kahneman would not help your score, because they already have plenty of name recognition among Ivy League social science professors. Someone like Joe Rogan, who enjoys mass name recognition, does not lose points, because I guess he has low name recognition among Ivy League social science professors. And Rand Paul has name recognition among elites, but not as an intellectual, so he does not lose points for that. Note that I am not pushing Joe Rogan or Rand Paul for high draft choices.

But another possibility is to ignore that issue. I want my FITs to be people who are great role models as thinkers. I want my children to model their thought processes after my FITs team. If that means Steven Pinker or Joseph Henrich, so be it.

In fantasy sports, a “sleeper” is someone gets overlooked by other fantasy owners during the draft, so that you can pick the player up in a late round. As one commenter pointed out, in fantasy baseball you win the draft by picking good sleepers. In FITs, Jim Manzi is an outstanding sleeper.

But somebody who has a cult following in a particular realm is not necessarily a helpful sleeper. How to score Gary Taubes, for example? He gets credit for going against conventional wisdom in the field of diet, but otherwise I don’t think he has much value in the draft.

I am not inspired by FITs candidates that you like for “mood affiliation” reasons. I enjoy Victor Davis Hanson as a writer, but I know what one of his columns is going to say before I even read it. That is a bad sign. And he is too uncharitable to those with whom he disagrees.

One reason that my choices skew so far to the right is that I see those on the left relying much more heavily on mood affiliation. Few left intellectuals are charitable toward, or even aware of, important conservative arguments.

FITs who have influenced my view of the world are way up there in terms of draft choices. This can be true even though I reject important parts of their view of the world. Robin Hanson has never convinced me that uploading someone’s brain into a computer is going to be a big thing, but he has convinced me of all sorts of other important ideas.

Handle’s criteria are also on target.

Fantasy Intellectual Teams

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Epistemology is social. We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. When we believe the wrong people, bad things happen. On race relations, for example, the wrong people have tremendous influence in academia, and this has spilled out into schools of education, corporate human resource departments, and elsewhere. I think that some (much?) of the loss of trust in news media and other important institutions is due to a general suspicion that the wrong people have achieved high status within those institutions. Therefore, I think that the problem of intellectual status inversion is worth trying to solve. Not by politicians, but by replacing academic credentialism and cronyism with a more rigorous process for evaluating intellectual quality.

I need to emphasize again that I do not want to put FITs in positions of political power. My thinking is that the political garden grows in cultural soil. Because of intellectual status inversion, that soil is only suitable for growing ugly weeds. If we can raise the status of intellectuals that really deserve our admiration and lower the status of those who don’t, then I think that the soil will be more hospitable to better plants.

Here is the idea for a game of FITs. You are the owner of a FIT. You compete with other owners to draft the best fantasy team of intellectuals. A team consists of the following positions. The number in parentheses is the number of each position that will be on your team.

(p) podcaster and/or blogger (2)
(b) from the world of business (1)
(e) academic economist (4)
(o) academic other than economist (4)
(t) think tank person
(c) regular columnist for newspaper or magazine (can be an online magazine)
(u) utility (5)

A total of 18 players on your team. All players must be currently alive. You can’t pick Hayek.

To be eligible as an academic economist or other academic the player has to have tenure.

Some players are eligible at multiple positions. You can treat Tyler as eligible to play t, e, p, or c. You can treat anyone as eligible to play u, including Tyler and others who are eligible at other positions.

I am not eligible to be on anyone’s team. I will be judging the teams.

Note that I don’t have a position for “tweeter.” Perhaps there are some good players on Twitter, but they are as rare as Korean baseball players who can make it in the major leagues in the U.S. Of course, you are welcome to draft a player at the u position based on tweets if that’s what you want to do. Same with politicians.

I do not yet have a formal scoring system. My goal in the short run is to get a better idea of what my criteria are for judging intellectuals. As of now, I would say that I value players who monitor their thought process, admit when they have been wrong, steelman other points of view, and show some humility. Good players are judicious about challenging conventional wisdom; they pick their heterodox points of view carefully. I am inclined to give low ratings to narrow specialists, unless they ask big questions that are of pressing interest to those outside of their narrow field. The “small ball” that is good to play if you want tenure does not help you in FITs.

The scoring criteria problem is not going to be easy. Sometimes when faced with a problem like that, it helps to invert it. What would constitute a bad score? Straw-manning; refusal to acknowledge any strong points of the other side or weak spots in your preferred theory; carelessly tossing around epithets, like “market fundamentalist” or “neoliberalism” or “cultural Marxism” that nobody uses to describe themselves; predictably speaking in just one of the Three Languages of Politics.

If some of you want to play, maybe we can hold a draft before the baseball season starts. If you have any questions about the rules, or you have questions about which positions certain players are eligible for, feel free to put them in the comments. I have over 50 FITs candidates, based on names people have left in the comments plus people I thought of off the top of my head. Feel free to suggest more.