He speaks and futzes with a coffee mug in a twenty-minute video, in which he explains the origins of the intellectual dark web. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
My thoughts.
1. Weinstein speaks of “we” as if the label IDW was concocted by a a conspiracy of folks sitting in a room kicking around ideas for names. I doubt that it happened that way.
2. I think that my post following the Bari Weiss article mostly got the IDW’s philosophy correct. I wrote,
Really, the principles of good intellectual debate are not that obscure. Just make arguments as if you were trying to change the mind of a reasonable person on the other side. I believe that the reason that we don’t observe much of this is that most people are trying to raise their status within their own tribe rather than engage in reasoned discourse. It’s sad that reasoned discourse does not raise one’s status as much as put-downs and expressions of outrage.
Although he uses different terminology, Weinstein seems to suggest that institutions of the mainstream media–he names CNN, NPR, the NYT, and “magazines like The Atlantic“–have degenerated into put-downs and expressions of outrage at the expense of reporting the news. Stories that would reflect badly on the ability or moral conduct of oppressed groups, or that would reflect favorably on the moral conduct of privileged groups, cannot be processed by these institutions that hitherto were fairly reliable curators of news. The IDW is a reaction against, or an alternative to, the dereliction of duty on the part of the mainstream outlets. Not an alternative news source, but an alternative source of discussion and analysis.
3. Weinstein thinks that the mainstream media will not appreciate a rival. But it is worse than that. The oppressor-oppressed narrative is a main binding tribal force for progressives. I would say the main binding force. I doubt that these folks can tolerate someone who claims to be on the left but challenges that narrative. The Jonathan Haidts and Eric Weinsteins of the world are going to be chased out of their village with spears and rocks.
4. After watching the video, I would say that the IDW is making a wager. The bet is this: we know that we will be branded as racists or troglodytes by the mainstream media. Our wager is that the public will see us as the decent human beings we are, and the attacks will rebound to discredit the mainstream media rather than discredit those who identify with the IDW.
I know from watching other videos that Weinstein is far from confident that he can win such a wager. But the attempt is to his credit.
“The Jonathan Haidts and Eric Weinsteins of the world are going to be chased out of their village with spears and rocks.”
That basically already happened at Evergreen State College (though I only saw pictures of students with baseball bats, not spears).
I think it’s the same forces that have affected late night tv that are at work in major media institutions. As infotainment options multiply and the audience shrinks and fragments and shrinks some more along with advertising revenues, these publications try to come up with ways to retain as much of their audience as they can, and that seems to have translated into trying to foment tribal loyalty by demonstrating commitment to a particular ideological point of view. I agree that this is bothersome when the NYT has become the dead tree newspaper version of Salon.com but still pretends to be the official paper of record.
As far as discrediting the official narrative goes, I don’t expect them to bring down the NYT, whatever that would look like, but they can at least have an effect at the margin, and I would also point out that the NYT and their ilk probably have more to lose here. Shapiro is already anathema, Peter Thiel’s not gonna fire anybody because they got on the wrong side of some NYT editors, Jordan Peterson probably has a loyal enough following at this point that he could be blacklisted from academia tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect him, financially, etc.
My guess is that they really got it from Nick Land’s “The Dark Enlightenment”, but they’ll never admit it. Dark as “Hard to find” as an inside joke? Doesn’t sound quite right.
Just before 13 minutes, he says, “I think what’s frightening to people is the idea that you can’t ask the question, ‘might this have something to do with biological differences?’ … It just doesn’t make sense to exclude that and settle on an oppression narrative from the get go.”
No wager about it. Game over man. Personal destruction for going against the narrative in 10, 9, 8, …
The example he used of the sex ratio disparity among chess grandmasters is almost precisely what got Lawrence Summers in trouble. But that was 13.5 years ago, and it was too late then, and things have only gotten worse since. The tumor has been growing this whole time, and to only now resolve to do something mild about it makes the IDW like asking, “Maybe try some antioxidants?” Too little, too late.
It should be obvious to any intelligent and informed observer that there is simply no civil, polite, and respectable way to do this and to take this problem on. There is far too much power riding on it, and there is at present no balance of power. It’s not necessarily impossible to stop this cancer, but all possible treatments are unpleasant.
In the late sixties and early seventies, new American cars were a mess. Unless you spent a lot of money, they were pretty much guaranteed to quickly show defects, and to need frequent repairs over the (relatively) short life of the car. Management and labor were locked into an unhealthy adversarial relationship. Restrictive work rules, workers who didn’t care (The Lords of Lordstown, a very negative portrayal of the Lordstown plant, made a big splash in the concerned citizen world), management which didn’t seem to have a way out. Things looked pretty bleak.
Then Toyotas and Datsuns (now Nissan) started showing up in dealer showrooms, better built with better mileage and costing less. Things weren’t actually hopeless.
It impresses me how America-centric and Euro-centric modern taboos are. All relating to “the west” and to the last few centuries. One looks for “oppression” within a limited template and ignores it elsewhere. But as America and Europe become less important, that gets harder to do. The world becomes much more complicated. Lots of Chinese think Africans are stupid. Lots of Africans think gays are perverts. And so on and so on.
I haven’t really worked this idea out. But modern “western” intellectual manners are so self-centered, so simplistic. I suspect they will be mugged by diversity (and I don’t mean the diversity where “everyone looks different and thinks like me”).
In related news, Chinese-Americans are increasingly against the idea of racial set-asides. Mostly from self-interest, of course.
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/257250/asian-americans-racial-quota-system
“Intellectual Dark Web” is almost certainly derived from the earlier “Dark Web” or “Deep Web”. At LeWik, the “Dark Web” entry says “…The dark web forms a small part of the deep web, the part of the Web not indexed by web search engines, although sometimes the term deep web is mistakenly used to refer specifically to the dark web…”. If you look at the MSM publications as an analog to web search engines, the correspondences are obvious.
Precisely. I haven’t watched the linked video, but I watched the discussion in which Eric first introduced the term, and to my recollection that is the explanation he gave.
It’s intellectual organization and publication outside the standard means of information aggregation and access.
When progressivism was a minority opinion it needed heretical allies. As it grows in strength it can shed those heretics.
The IDW are leftisist of a certain variety that were necessary when on the defense, but unneseccary on the offense. Their response is mostly to protest on free speech grounds, but it has limited effect. Douthat says free speech isn’t enough. SSD reminds us that a few people with Patreon accounts doesn’t mean regular people can voice the same opinions and mobilize for real change.
The Scots Irish of Appalachia also got kicked out of the progressive coalition (they used to be solid allies of the “old left”). Their response was to elect Trump.
Perhaps we ought to look at other instances of total metaphysical replacement. What did the pagans do to right Christianity? Why did it fail? Christians started with asking to tolerance and free speech but didn’t end there, despite following the prince of peace.
The bet is this: we know that we will be branded as racists or troglodytes by the mainstream media.
I would take that bet and the MSM will probably ignore the IDW in six months and it will only be strong left websites that deal with the IDW.
I mostly agree with everything these guys are saying, but the embracing the Intellectual Dark Web as a movement is off putting to me. I don’t think it’s healthy tie up that much of your identity as a member of a marginalized group (ironic that we’re talking about the oppressor vs oppressed axis, but a big theme of the link and post above is oppressed the IDW is).
I agree with point #1, and am glad Arnold does too, but the language in the rest of the points (“the IDW is making a wager” … “the mainstream media will not appreciate it”) seems inconsistent with that.
We can’t we just “make arguments as if you were trying to change the mind of a reasonable person on the other side” and leave it at that?
The oppressor-oppressed narrative is a main binding tribal force for progressives.
I’d say that progressives are deeply committed to the idea that inequality can be fixed. The idea that some inequality is irremediable is threatening, not least because it makes a mockery of their ideals of striving and achieving. In my experience, few are even capable of considering the idea that “equality” isn’t even meaningful – equality is just as much a social construction as hierarchy, and people hold many interpretations of what equality means that cannot be mutually reconciled.
You say so many smart things, but lead off with a dumb one:
> 1. Weinstein speaks of “we” as if the label IDW was concocted by a a conspiracy of folks sitting in a room kicking around ideas for names. I doubt that it happened that way.
He doesn’t actually say (and leaves an important applicable name precedent out of his discussion) but what part of that narrative in improbable?
Is your problem that idea that someone would try to engineer a name? Naming is important for an emerging movement, and it is obvious that you are going to want to get ahead of the less flattering name your rivals are inevitably gonna slap on you. Not everyone gets lucky enough to have an opposition that is as tone deaf as Hilary’s team was when they came up with “deplorable”. The approach he describes is fairly normal, and has the virtue of generally not producing boring propaganda. I have sat in on political campaign discussions that weren’t very far from that.
Is you problem the idea that these guys would have time to talk together? They have done speaking tours with each other, so they could very well have had substantial in person discussions about naming. For that matter, if you substitute “email thread” or “discord channel” or “slack channel” or “skype conference” for “room” it matches his story just as well.
These guys are smart, and have had their noses rubbed in the need to apply their smarts to this problem, as opposed to whatever it was they were doing before. The worst I can say about his discussion is that (like a lot of smart people) he appears to be full of himself, and I would be a lot more impressed if he (and his brother) had deigned to notice/act on the problems before the situation at forced it on them.
” we will be branded as racists or troglodytes by the mainstream media.”
One reason the Dem PC-bullies have been winning so many culture war battles is their success at lawfare. They sue and sue and sue until they win.
A necessary, tho not sufficient, counter-cultural movement will also need to sue and sue and sue and win some lawsuits. This probably requires some tweaking of defamation laws, so that when PragerU (not quite IDW but a fellow traveler) is accused by the SPLC of supporting hate-speech, PragerU has some legal recourse.
Probably will need to change the non-profit laws, and the non-profit status requirement laws on education, too.
Rod Dreher (author of The Benedict Option) argues for Christians to form smaller, more devout communities. They need to accept that they are now losing in the PC persecution culture wars (and Trump is certainly no savior for them); er, they’ve lost already. He’s also been branded as a racist, tho not a trog.
The need for stronger faith based Christians seems clear — but I don’t want to live like that. Among intellectuals, there is increasing agreement about the need for an alternative, or many alternatives, to the Dem PC-bullies of the media & academia & often the courts for intellectual recognition.
Yet perhaps most important is a reaffirmation against the PC-bullies in the culture, and South Park isn’t enough, even with Dilbert. The attacks by the PC-bullies are already pretty clearly hypocritical, see the Rosanne Barr vs Samantha Bee disparate treatment.
Culture changes slowly at first … than very quickly. Tho it can also snap back pretty fast.
How about that Singapore meeting?
Kling and slatestarcodex have the two best, most elucidating explanations of this phenomenon on the Internet.
To link the SSC post: http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/
Recently Bed Stuy in NYC came under prog attack. I remember them well as my own high schools mirror image and competitor in math. I also remeber what profs put my own high school through.
We all know the background. It is as it is because unmentionable, which everyone in the IDE knows to. If you were going to pick a fight there isn’t one with a more clear truth vs dogma split on a matter that will dramatically impact many people. Not even just those students, but many others who will not benefit from their reaching their potential.
If the IDW can’t defend a wildly successful and established institution like Bed Stuy from progressive zealots we can conclude two things.
1) progressivism will continue to go after all unprincipled execrations to its ideology regardless of practical effect.
2) the IDW and it’s philosophy can’t stop it, even if they had a legion of tiger mothers at their back
You mean Stuyvesant High School, not “Bed Stuy,” which is short for Bedford-Stuyvesant, a neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Here’s an interesting article on out-groups and the IDW [link fixed–ed]
It uses a neat concentric circle of out-groups to illustrate the issue, which I thought was particularly apt.
From the abstract of a relevant recent paper (h/t SlateStarCodex):
Key findings are (1) genetic attributions are actually more likely to be made by liberals, not conservatives; (2) genetic attributions are associated with higher, not lower, levels of tolerance of vulnerable individuals; and (3) genetic attributions do not correlate with unseemly racial attitudes.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/696860
Ungated copy of the study, if you’d like to sample to decide whether it’s worth the $10 or not.
The data are presented in a very confusing way. One wishes to have access to the raw spreadsheets, and copies of the survey questions. Should we trust the “racial attitudes” measures?
Science should be much more open than this.
Damn right.