Scott Sumner posts on the controversy, which was recently re-ignited by what I thought was a reasonable post by Russ Roberts. My thoughts.
1. There is a correlation between belief in Keynesian economics and preference for a larger government. Economists who advocate for higher government spending to fight recessions also tend to argue at other times either to increase or not reduce every non-military component of government spending.
2. Nonetheless, those economists who believe in Keynesian economics and generally support higher government spending usually will insist that they are not ideological. In their view, they are merely scientists, who are free from confirmation bias.
3. Any online discussion that employs the term “Keynesian economics,” “macroeconomic facts,” or “Paul Krugman” will, with probability one, be un-constructive and uncharitable.
I am becoming increasingly convinced that the Internet is making us stupid politically. On the Internet, there is an impulse to react immediately to political comments, which means engaging your emotions rather than any self-critical reasoning. There is an impulse to be uncharitable to those with whom you disagree. Some of my responses:
1. I try to schedule blog posts at least a day in advance. My goal is to react less to the “threat” posed by political disagreement.
2. I look for opportunities to challenge the views of other libertarians, although not as often as Tyler does.
3. Recently, I made a determination to avoid commenting on political issues on Facebook. In fact, I would love an app that filters out all political posts on Facebook. I prefer even the pointless cute animal posts. But I mostly just like pictures and personal status updates of friends’ weddings, travel, anniversaries, etc. At some point I may have to sort through and unfriend the folks who only post on politics.
You can “unfollow” someone’s posts in your news feed without unfriending them. This also has the virtue of not letting them know that you’re not looking at their stuff.
“I am becoming increasingly convinced that the Internet is making us stupid politically.”
Perhaps the internet (format & exchanges) are simply making us MORE AWARE of personal stupidities in political expressions (and reactions).
“On the Internet, there is an impulse to react immediately to political comments, which means engaging your emotions rather than any self-critical reasoning.”
In hasty reactions there is always the tendency to be “incomplete,” even if not “emotional.”
But, in initiating comments there has to be some “drive;” some expression of the daimonic. Like the song before it is sung, the thought is somewhere before it is expressed.
There are two funny things related to Scott Sumner’s post. In a lot of other fields, when an experiment happens, most people are in general agreement that it happened. Also, in most other fields, they don’t try to extrapolate from those results to huge implications beyond the actual experiment.
I find the stupidity factor to have a strong, inverse correlation with length of discourse. Twitter, IMO, exemplifies the worst, or at least nearing out of the worst, political dialog there is. The very format encourages snark and quick one upsmanship. Facebook is somewhere between blog posts and Twitter.
I don’t think Twitter is any worse than Facebook, in fact I’d argue it’s smarter given you can more easily follow intelligent discussions there, and more easily follow only what you want to follow relative to wanting to see dog photos on FB and being inundated with echo chamber politics.
I would argue the dumb get dumber and the smart get smarter.
Some will spend all their time on the internet reading about conspiracy theories. Otherwise will educate themselves with the best blogs
I take it that includes this post!
3. I think if you post politics on Facebook you are using it wrong, unless you want your Facebook friends to filter you based on politics.
I see a lot of liberals making standard liberal statements. They don’t seem concerned that I might be offended. Maybe they want to me to unfriend them, but I get the impression they don’t realize my position could exist. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen in other directions (shhh, I secretly kind of am).
2. You don’t really need to challenge my/our views, I constantly challenge them myself. Our side doesn’t have enough of a group to groupthink. There is a difference between well-considered and doctrinaire. We start with axioms and then argue a lot about the implications. What of my alleged views could you challenge? That I can see a modest role for countercyclical fiscal policy?
The other sides seem to argue the opposite direction with each other about the results and which side’s policy aesthetic is to blame upstream.
I suppose the other sides would think they do too, but see one PK post. Pick any one at random. His reputation? We didn’t build that.
My liberal friends make the argument, all the time, that they are the only ones who challenge their in-group views. And though liberals tend to be the loudest and most obnoxious about it, IME, everyone does it. When I challenge them on this, they have many just-so stories to explain why.
I think it’s kind of a silly thing to argue about anyway. It’s far too easy to turn it into an exercise in self congratulation.
We are all motivated reasoners, and this line of argument doesn’t improve your own thinking or bring potential allies to your cause.
“I am becoming increasingly convinced that the Internet is making us stupid politically”
I’m not at all sure about that. One of the problems with sites like Twitter is that the audience is self-selecting and not representative. Socialist opinion gets much more heavily retweeted than libertarian or even moderate left/right opinion (on the other hand, I’d say that blogs are biased more towards libertarian perpectives). The 2015 UK election was won by a Conservative government. You wouldn’t know this from looking at Twitter.