I suggest some essays and podcasts that pertain to liberal values.
The fantasy intellectual who is emerging as Most Valuable Player by leading in several scoring categories is Robert Wright. Listen to what Wright says to Robert Wiblin, especially minutes 28-38, about the way that tribalism and psychological biases are impediments to solving important problems. The rest of the podcast elaborates on these themes.
1. Noise, by Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, and Olivier Sibony. The first two authors are Fantasy Intellectual Teams selections. As I often do when reading, I skipped ahead to the conclusion. They make the point that algorithms can reduce noise relative to human judgment. Think of mortgage underwriting as an example.
Or think of deciding when a fantasy intellectual has earned a point for stating a Caveat. I think it would be possible to state the criteria in algorithmic terms. Then in theory one could use machine intelligence to assign points. That would be powerful.
2. High Conflict by Amanda Ripley and The Way Out by Peter Coleman. These are both inspired by the problem of political polarization and purport to offer solutions. The authors are familiar with one another’s work.
Ripley is also a FITs selection, and I have listened to some of the many podcasts that she has done on the book, in which she comes across as a careful thinker. She is a journalist, and she likes to convey ideas through specific cases. Some readers claim that she tries to squeeze too much out of a couple of them. I have not gotten far enough into the book to say.
Coleman is an academic, who likes to speak in abstractions. Here is a passage from p. 78 of The Way Out.
However, the bubble principle also suggests that in order to sustain any positive change in our situation resulting from building on what is working, it is paramount that we also seek to actively reduce the attraction of our more (now latent) detrimental tendencies. Therefore, we must also find ways to break down or otherwise diminish the attraction of the more destructive dynamics that are driving us to mitigate the worst inclinations of our system. These practices complicate the need to address these drivers upstream, away from the heat of the conflict, to minimize resistance. In addition, it stresses the importance of leveraging or expanding existing repellers or social taboos for engaging in more destructive political acts.
I am inclined to associate clarity of thought with clarity of writing. Even after reading the entire book, this passage is opaque to me. A couple of chapters of the book are worthwhile. But Coleman’s style is not to my taste.
If and when popular majorities produce outcomes the rulers don’t like, their devotion to “democracy” instantly evaporates. Judges, administrative state agencies, private companies—whichever is most able in the moment to overturn the will of unruly voters—will intervene to restore ruling class diktats. On the other hand, when voters can be counted on to vote the right way, then voting becomes the necessary and sufficient step for sanctifying any political outcome. It doesn’t even matter where the votes (or voters) come from, so long as they vote the right way. The fact that they vote the right way is sufficient to justify and even ennoble their participation in “our democracy.”
Blues perpetually outvoting Reds and ruling unopposed: this, and only this, is what “democracy” means today.
Anton endorses secessionist movements, such as the attempt by the Reds of western Maryland to secede from the People’s Republic. My thoughts:
1. If Amanda Ripley’s term “conflict entrepreneur” were to appear in a dictionary, Michael Anton’s picture would be next to it.
2. For nearly 15 years, I have been endorsing secession. See the widely-unread, and ridiculously high-priced Unchecked and Unbalanced.
3. I also have endorsed “virtual” polities, so that I could continue to live in the geographical area of the People’s Republic but choose government services from elsewhere. Balaji Srinivasan’s networked state.
I think that the best scenario for the United States is one in which the Progressive Puritans choose to worship their religion among themselves without trying to impose it on others. But I don’t know how to get from here to there. What happened to the original Puritans that they didn’t end up as hard to live with as today’s version?
CDC stats say about 95,000 excess deaths each year can be attributed to alcohol abuse, of which about 10,000 are drunk driving fatalities. So looked at one way, booze is deadlier than guns. Looked at another way, gun murder is a more serious problem than drunk driving. Either way, to the extent that you’re inclined to see the gun situation as worth major legislative action, I think it’s certainly worth looking at alcohol as well. Indeed, scholars think that something like 40% of murders involves the use of alcohol, so the issues really are fairly comparable.
It’s a great piece, probably paywalled.
“Policy Tensor writes,”
[IF] Henrich is right, Todd must be wrong about the archaic character of the Western nuclear family. Examination of the evidence shows that Todd is right and Henrich is wrong. The reason is simple — we can rule out the Henrich hypothesis. The alternate hypothesis is that the Church’s war against cousin marriage was directed at the nobles, who did indeed practice it in a manner that isolated them from the dominant family system of their societies. Just as socialism could spread easily over the exogamous communitarian anthropological base and found itself blocked on its boundaries and Islam likewise for the endogamous communitarian base, the Church’s influence may have been greatest in exogamous anthropological terrain. In other words, the alternate hypothesis inverts the causal arrow between family systems and the Church’s influence. The correlation between them is explained by a causal vector pointing in the reverse direction — the exogamous anthropological base explains the extent of medieval Christendom.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. This is not lowering by very much my probability that Henrich is right.
My latest essay covers Yascha Mounk and Amanda Ripley on Ripley’s recent book.
Ripley says that one of the keys to getting out of high conflict is to disengage from conflict entrepreneurs. Stop following the conflict entrepreneurs. I would say to start following instead people like Mounk and Ripley and the Fantasy Intellectual Teams category leaders.
From Greg Lukianoff and FIRE. They include,
Yes, K-12 education is expected to impart some amount of “moral education” to students, far more than is expected in higher education. As former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger described it, “schools must teach by example the shared values of a civilized social order.” However, if we are educating a generation to live as citizens in a free society, we must not teach them that those in authority are allowed to — let alone encouraged to — tell citizens what political beliefs they must hold, endorse, or profess.
Pointer from commenters. There is much more at the link.
Scott Alexander offers many wise observations.
I don’t want to say angry tweets never accomplish anything, but there is a massive oversupply of angry tweets compared to almost any other part of the machinery of change.
…I’m not saying you have to write blog posts! …. Just do anything, anything at all, other than tweet.
The Fantasy Intellectual Teams scoring system does not have a point category for “wise observations.”
Have each Twitter user designate a buddy to whom your tweets are directed. If my hypothesis is correct, then simply having a single person in mind who you respect would temper your rudeness as you tweet. And if enough people on Twitter temper their rudeness, then good manners would replace bullying and put-downs as social norms.
Read the whole essay before you shoot down the idea.
I was Trump-tolerant right up until the November 2020 election. But his refusal to concede was unacceptable, in my view. I make a strong distinction between disliking the electoral process and refusing to accept the electoral outcome.
I should point out that I had the exact same reaction in 2000. I actually voted for Al Gore, but as soon as he challenged the Florida results I turned against him. I have hated him ever since. My visceral reaction is to treat challenging an electoral outcome as selfish and destructive.
A statesman in Mr. Trump’s position would have called for a bipartisan commission to suggest reforms to the electoral process to make it more reliable and to enable more rapid, secure counting of votes. Improve the process, but don’t try to overturn the results.
My concern with Mr. Trump centers around the issue of personal loyalty. He appears to me to demand unquestioning loyalty. If you express such loyalty, you can be a knave or a fool and still earn his support (“fine people”). If you fail to express such loyalty, he will cast you aside as cruelly as he possibly can.
I watch 0 television, so I had never seen Mr. Trump until I watched his talk at CPAC this year. I was put off by the narcissism of his remarks. But what really disturbed me was the intensity of the cheering of his supporters. These were not farmers and blue-collar workers doing the cheering, which probably would have disturbed me less. They were affluent, white-collar urbanites, who should have been taught to treat politics with some degree of detachment.
My wife often says that she fears charismatic leaders. She was bothered by people who worshipped Barack Obama. I believe that she is right that everyone should have a healthy skepticism of political leaders. But I think that it is even more important for leaders themselves to be able to accept that other people treat them as fallible. Mr. Trump struck me as the very opposite in that regard.
Mr. Trump’s supporters fault other Republican leaders for being too elitist or too conciliatory. Those complaints are often valid. But I would rather look for a different leader who is empathetic with ordinary voters and is willing to take firm stands that are unpopular inside the Beltway. But we should look for someone who does not possess such a single-minded focus on personal loyalty.