Category Archives: Politics

Who’s afraid of a little CRT?

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Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes that the fight against teaching Critical Race Theory in schools is the brainchild of Christopher Rufo. So we can blame it all on one white conservative activist.

The Washington Post tells almost the exact same story.

a) coincidence?
b) co-ordinated leftwing media attack?
c) Rufo self-promotion effort?

I am guessing it’s mostly (c), with some (b)

Concerning the leftwing narrative that CRT is benign and the attacks on it are desperate and racist, Andrew Sullivan writes,

This rubric achieves several things at once. It denies that there is anything really radical or new about CRT; it flatters the half-educated; it blames the controversy entirely on Republican opportunism; and it urges all fair-minded people to defend intellectual freedom and racial sensitivity against these ugly white supremacists.

Note how far removed we are from a discussion of race, or of critical race theory per se, or of how these topics should be handled in school. Instead, we see observe each side accusing the other of exploiting racial divisions in order to exercise power.

But it is hard for me to be charitable to the left on this one. I think that conservatives are willing to discuss the real issues, and progressives are ducking them. I can remember when the progressive mantra was “We need to have a conversation about race.” Now their mantra is “Shut up, racist.”

UPDATE: a reader points me to an anti-CRT piece by Donald Trump. That will probably make it harder for any Democrats to do anything other than support CRT. All in all, it would not surprise me if the anti-CRT movement manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Rauch is un-FIT

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I write on Jonathan Rauch’s new book here.

I doubt that his exhortations and calls for a return to twentieth-century values in those fields will work.

I think that if we are going to fix the problem with social epistemology, we are going to need new prestige hierarchies to replace the old ones. The Fantasy Intellectual Teams project offers a more radical way of overcoming the corruption of the intellectual status game.

There is much to like in The Constitution of Knowledge. I especially like the focus on social epistemology–especially after my disappointing dialog with Michael Huemer on the topic.

But Rauch’s book also annoyed me a great deal. Perhaps if I am in a better mood when I write a full review, I will put a higher weight on what appealed to me and a lower weight on what annoyed me.

FITs update

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Infovores writes,

Competing in FITs opened my eyes to how easy it is to listen to thinkers that appeal to my own biases rather than the highest intellectual standards. Where before I experienced an aggressive takedown of an opposing point of view as exciting, I now often come away disappointed. I have found a new way of keeping score.

Read the whole essay. I think that the May version of Fantasy Intellectual Teams provided solid proof of concept. We demonstrated that using a scoring system could help raise the status of intellectuals who engage in constructive discourse. It was gratifying to see that the leading scorers were at least as numerous on the left as on the right.

Fantasy Intellectual Teams is a worthwhile institutional innovation. It is the anti-Twitter.

The fact that Twitter is overwhelmingly on the left means that most of the intellectual spoilage that Twitter generates afflicts the left. In that sense, the left has the most potential to raise its intellectual caliber by shifting the spotlight to something other than Twitter. An institution like Fantasy Intellectual Teams could help rescue the left, and along with that the rest of us.

I really wish that I could convince Substack to offer subscription bundles to owners of Fantasy Intellectual Teams. Something like a 25 percent discount to an owner who picks five Substack subscriptions. I think it could be a win-win, in that it would help Substack, help authors, and help improve intellectual discourse.

Signs that we face an epistemological crisis: book titles, 2021

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Some book titles in 2021, in chronological order.

February. Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know

March. Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us

April. Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t

May. Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, and Oliver Sibony. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

June. Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

September. Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

So far, I have only read Galef and Sunstein, et al. I read some of Morson and Schapiro, but it was less than I hoped for. I expect to read Rauch and also Pinker when they become available. But what does it say about contemporary culture that so many heavyweights are writing on epistemology? This seems to me an indictment of: social media, certainly; political discourse, certainly; higher education, probably; journalism, probably.

This may fit with a historical pattern. The barbarians sack the city, and the carriers of the dying culture repair to their basements to write.

Not exactly on this topic, but pertinent, I am curious to read Heying-Weinstein A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, due in September. And McWhorter’s Woke Racism, due in October.

Null Hypothesis Watch

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In his new book, Facing Reality, Charles Murray writes,

Because we have not talked openly about group differences, we have kidded ourselves that the differences are temporary and can be made to go away.

Scott Alexander writes,

maybe the Jewish advantage will turn out to be cultural. If that’s true, I think it would be even more interesting – it would mean there’s some set of beliefs and norms which can double your income and dectuple your chance of making an important scientific discovery. I was raised by Ashkenazi Jews and I cannot even begin to imagine what those beliefs would be – as far as I can tell, the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average American worldview. But if I’m wrong, figuring out exactly what was the active ingredient of that payload would be the most important task in social science, far outstripping lesser problems like crime or education or welfare (nobody expects good policy in these areas to double average income!).

There is a folk theory that says that cultural differences explain group differences in academic achievement. Jewish and Asian culture places a premium on academic achievement, while African-Americans who do well in school are derided by their peers as “acting white.” I don’t know how to test the folk theory rigorously. You can’t randomly assign children to different sets of parental and peer influences.

I doubt that the folk theory explains a lot. But I am a bit surprised that both Murray and Alexander slide past it.

Another folk theory is that differences in school quality explain a lot. On the contrary, I believe in the Null Hypothesis. As Murray puts it,

no one has yet found a way to increase cognitive ability permanently over and above the effects of routine education. The success stories consist of modest effects on exit tests that fade out.

Murray says that the purpose of his book is to get society to treat a black individual primarily as an individual. Instead, identity politics puts all the emphasis on black.

Murray admits that it is “paradoxical” that he is devoting a book to analyzing differences in group outcomes in order to get people to stop focusing on group differences. He wants to convince people that we should blame differences in group outcomes largely on immutable characteristics. Call that option A. But we might be better off with what I might call option B: stop paying attention to differences in group outcomes.

Neither option A nor option B is palatable on the left today. But I bet that option B stands a better chance of becoming accepted in our society.

The civil rights bureaucracy

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Richard Hanania writes,

The US seems to elect some of the most conservative politicians in the Western world, but has perhaps the wokest institutions. Civil rights law makes all major institutions subject to the will of left-wing bureaucrats, activists, and judges at the expense of normal citizens.

By the time this post goes up, I expect a lot of you will have seen Hanania’s piece. Somehow, over the course of the 1960s the culture managed to go from lots of anti-black racism to lots of anti-white racism without stopping at “color-blind.” Hanania blames the civil rights bureaucracy. Indeed, that bureaucracy might be an iconic example of a self-licking ice cream cone, in that its institutional survival is inversely related to its effectiveness at addressing the problem.

Note that Shelby Steele would blame white guilt. I would caution against any simple cause-and-effect story.

Finally, this amusing comment from a prior post.

DEI is a fad, and will disappear like the Macarena.

Imagine a world in which universities and corporations had set up organizational units dedicated to the Macarena. It would be better than the world we got.

Another Burgis remark

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In Wanting, Luke Burgis writes,

One hundred years ago, there was a much wider gap in knowledge between someone who had a doctoral degree and someone who didn’t. Today, with the world’s information at nearly everyone’s fingertips, the knowledge gap between people with a great amount of formal education and those with less has narrowed.

. . .Today value is largely mimetically driven rather than attached to fixed, stable points (like college degrees). This has created opportunities for anyone who can stand out from the crowd. This has positive and negative consequences.

We used to think of expertise as embedded in prestigious institutions. But attachment to a prestigious institution no longer guarantees expertise.

Another concept that Burgis introduced to this reader is the self-licking ice cream cone. This phrase was coined by Peter Worden of NASA to refer to an institution whose main purpose is sustaining itself, having lost sight of its higher mission.

Peacetime armies tend to degenerate into self-licking ice cream cones. The CDC and other bureaucracies that were supposed to help us deal with the virus turned out to be self-licking ice cream cones.

Harvard University once had a higher mission of selecting and training leaders for politics and business. But Harvard has degenerated into a self-licking ice cream cone.

We need new and better institutions.

Burgis on Girard: note who you want to fail

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I’ve finished one pass-through of Wanting, by Luke Burgis. The book is an attempt to spread and build on the ideas of Rene Girard. I liked the sections of the book that I thought I grasped. Other sections did not reach me, but perhaps I will get more out of a second reading.

The Burgis-Girard view is that we all have models, meaning people to whom we compare ourselves. What Girard calls mimetic desire is the tendency to want what our models want. That can make us jealous of our models, especially if they inhabit our intimate world rather than our remote world.

Here was one interesting aphorism:

think seriously about the people you least want to succeed

Some remarks:

1. I think of my friend from high school who, a few months before the 2020 election, said that he would never take a vaccine “developed by Trump and his cronies.” Clearly, he (along with many other Americans) really wanted President Trump to fail. That probably means that Mr. Trump was a model for my friend, in that my friend was comparing himself, consciously or not, with Mr. Trump. Incidentally, my friend was voted President of our student body our senior year.

2. I think of a situation from almost 30 years ago at Freddie Mac. I wanted to be in charge of a project, and when someone else was put in charge, I really wanted him to fail.

3. If I resent the success of Olivier Blanchard, Paul Krugman, or Ezra Klein, then that probably means that I treat them as models. Because I have met them, I cannot emotionally dismiss them as being part of the remote world.

4. I think that social media have crunched together the intimate world and the remote world. Burgis agrees that social media creates amped-up rivalry. He says that we are all like new college freshmen–feeling insecure and competing to stand out in a crowd of people who seem similar.

5. Think of someone who has had a nasty divorce. How would they feel if their ex were to be happy in a new relationship?