It is now on substack (In My Tribe). There is still no charge to read it.
I am trying to maintain the feel of this blog, including the daily scheduled posts and the comments section. Substack makes it easier for people to receive email notifications and for me to tweet my posts.
I will shift the blog back here if unexpected problems arise.
Discussing various forces hostile to liberalism.
Perhaps in the 21st-century media environment you do not need as much structure to have a religion. What would Christianity be like if the early followers of Jesus could have used Facebook? Would it never have occurred to them to institute a custom of praying a church?
The team that won the most games in real baseball, the Giants, won 66 percent of their games in spite of having no hitter score more than 79 runs and no pitcher win more that 14 games. Somebody do a search through major league baseball history since 1950 (not counting strike-shortened seasons) for every team where the leader in runs had 79 or fewer and the leader in wins had 14 or fewer. I’d say that the chances are more than 99 percent that within that set the maximum winning percentage is less than 55 percent, and the average winning percentage is less than 45 percent. My expected value for the winning percentage in that set would be 35 percent, barely more than half of what the Giants managed to pull off.
This would be on a weekly basis for eight sessions, with a topic that I call Modern Problems. More at the link.
I thought I would wait a week to do this, but I came up with so much good material in a couple of days that I posted this. A taste:
The challenge for us as a society is to better align “get-ahead” with “understand reality.” In a sense, the Fantasy Intellectual Teams project is an attempt to do that, by using a scoring system that prioritizes the type of discourse that is associated with “understand reality.”
It’s mind boggling that 40% of teachers in NYC schools remain unvaccinated. This is the group charged with ‘educating’ our children? Union can’t allow teachers in classrooms until they’ve been vaccinated, then almost half of them refuse to get vaccinated. We’ve made a huge mistake.
I’m surprised that Trump has so much support among teachers. After all, my friends all assure me that it’s Trump supporters who refuse to get vaccinated.
Sorry. I shouldn’t do snark posts, but this one got away from me.
Howard Darmstadter writes,
We have two different ways of explaining events. One way relies on material factors and physical laws: “The water boiled (or the meat cooked) because the flame heated it.” The second way relies on beliefs, wants, and other psychological traits: “He crossed the road because he wanted to get to the other side.”
We generally favor the psychological mode to explain human actions, and the material mode to explain inanimate events. It’s usually problematic to propose a psychological explanation for a material event, as when pre-scientific peoples explain a violent storm as caused by an angry god. It’s an error we can still be prone to: I stub my toe on a table leg, and for a moment I’m angry at the table. A more insidious misuse of psychological explanation is to see events that result from the uncoordinated actions of many individuals on the model of the consciously planned actions of a single person.
To put this in my own words: we can think of causes as material or intentional. A material cause is a historical impetus that pushes from the past. An intentional cause is a goal that pulls from the future. We can say that the car stopped because of a series of physical events. Or we can say that the car stopped because the driver made a plan to stop it.
The field of economics struggles with which of these causal frameworks to use. Most economists try to use the material framework. But human intentions constantly intrude. Social norms, institutional practices, and widely-held beliefs are non-material factors that affect economic outcomes.
On the one hand, Nouriel Roubini writes,
For now, loose monetary and fiscal policies will continue to fuel asset and credit bubbles, propelling a slow-motion train wreck. The warning signs are already apparent in today’s high price-to-earnings ratios, low equity risk premia, inflated housing and tech assets, and the irrational exuberance surrounding special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), the crypto sector, high-yield corporate debt, collateralized loan obligations, private equity, meme stocks, and runaway retail day trading. At some point, this boom will culminate in a Minsky moment (a sudden loss of confidence), and tighter monetary policies will trigger a bust and crash.
Have a nice day, in other words.
On the other hand, we have the Institute for Global Management survey of macroeconomists. In response to the question
What is your estimate of the likelihood that five-year five-year forward inflation compensation will exceed 3 percent at the end of the first week of January 2022?
75 percent of the economists surveyed say that the chance of this is less than 40 percent. And it’s not because they think that there will be a recession.
Jonathan Rauch writes in Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion Community.
If we care about knowledge, freedom, and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: Anyone can believe anything, but liberal science—open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network—is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community. Other communities, of course, can do all kinds of other things. But they cannot make social decisions about objective reality.
The overall essay is the best summary of Rauch’s Constitution of Knowledge that I have seen. Read it. I like this particular essay better than I like the book.
I am fine with Rauch’s rules for social epistemology. What bothers me about the book is the assumption that he makes implicitly–and often explicitly–that we can look to twentieth-century institutions to revive what he calls the reality-based community. He writes as if Harvard and the NYT are basically ok, and all that we need is for Google, Facebook, and Twitter to do a better job of moderating content on their platforms.
In Rauch, you won’t find anything like what I wrote in academic corruption 1, academic corruption 2, or academic corruption 3.