I was puzzling over some of the early picks of the FITs draft. I don’t have a problem with anyone picking Joe Rogan, Steve Sailer, Joel Kotkin, or John Cochrane, but elevating them to the first round? What is it about this blog that attracts readers who would do that?
One hypothesis is that my readers are anti-Straussians. They want forthrightness, not strategic ambiguity. Some of the top picks may not score many points in the game, but they are certainly forthright.
My readers probably associate Straussianism with careerism. The careerist is careful not to say something right when it is the wrong thing to say. Fauci is a careerist. The Zvi (pick 106) isn’t. As Scott Alexander (pick 4) has pointed out, if you want accurate advice about the virus, go with The Zvi.
I could see myself attracting anti-careerists, because there is a fair amount of that in me. I think of careerists as having giving us the Vietnam war, from which many tragic consequences followed. There have been times when my own career-limiting behavior, such as making a sarcastic comment very loudly in Stan Fischer’s class expressing what I thought of the material on his MIT graduate syllabus in monetary economics, seemed to help me in the end, by sending my life in different directions.
One more story. When you can’t stand your boss, my advice is to quietly find a different situation as quickly as you can. Don’t do what I did.
This was more than 30 years ago, and my memory is dim and probably distorted by self-serving bias. But as I recall, a woman on my staff was on maternity leave and she came in to the office for a visit. I was not around. My boss called her into his office to tell her that because of headcount constraints (we had staffing quotas imposed from on high), she would not have a position when her leave was finished.
I think what especially ticked me off when I found out about it was that he had never discussed it with me beforehand. He also did not give me the courtesy of being the one to break the news to her.
I went into his office and threw a tantrum. After a while, he said, “I don’t want to do this, Arnold, but you’re giving me no choice but to fire you.”
The end result was that I changed divisions within the company. It worked to my long-term advantage, just as it worked to my advantage a few years later when I was relieved of a position in a humiliating way, driving me to quit and start my own business. But I would advise my children, my grandchildren, and my blog readers to take better control of their emotions than I did in those days.
I was shocked when Rogan was picked #1… but I must admit I expect him to score a lot of points, provided the owner takes the time to watch his content. Rogan is not ideological and regularly steel-man’s his guests. He also has A LOT of content. If he had fallen to the third round he would have been an absolute steal.
I also think that there are significant constraints on owners that are mostly unrelated to maximizing points outright. All of John Cochrane’s content is free, which may elevate him from a third or fourth round pick to a first round pick for owners not keen on buying 15 subscriptions.
I was surprised by Rogan’s high ranking, too. He is an amiable fellow, but not a particularly insightful thinker.
Faced with complex issues, insight is valuable. Obvious issues at the moment (think CRT, or COVID policies that don’t resonate with the public) don’t require nearly as much insight, but require more intellectual common sense.
Time for a virtual or in-person meetup with your audience? At the least, it would be fun to meet others and gain their perspectives.
But yes, I was absolutely surprised by certain high draft picks. Joe Rogan? Hmmm…
If time permits, please publish the teams, so that we can see the various lineups.
I was puzzling over some of the early picks of the FITs draft. I don’t have a problem with anyone picking Joe Rogan, Steve Sailer, Joel Kotkin, or John Cochrane, but elevating them to the first round?
Scott Alexander once floated the idea of making Steve Sailer a judge of some (essay?) contest at SSC because he’s unusually fair-minded. It’s fascinating that someone so far to your left recognizes this, but you can’t.
John Cochrane has a book coming out and seems to have been promoting it steady. He also posts frequently on his blog. With the inflation debate looking to be an ongoing issue, his track record of steel manning and thinking in bets should continue and hopefully produce points. Straussianism and steel manning don’t compatible.
Straussianism is a terrific a larval-stage strategy. But the goal is to gain enough wealth, influence, and independence to make it to the adult stage, at which point the middle finger emerges and can thus be deployed at will.
Its a virtue to be a coward when you can’t change things and it will only blow you up.
It’s cowardly to be a coward when you have a decent chance to change things but choose not to anyway.
The great seduction of Straussianism is that it can very easily be a rationalization for cowardice. You do an obviously cowardly thing but try to cop out of it by claiming its Straussian. A lot of evil has perpetuated via this rationalization.
And of course we all tend to become what we pretend to be. If you keep pretending to be a craven careerist, you tend to end up one.
I rank ordered my choices not by how valuable I believed they would be to my team, but by how I believed other team owners would value them. Because I chose many names who were not on the master list, there were only 4 or 5 who I believed other team owners might choose, so I front loaded them. That is how Joel Kotkin became my #1 pick
My team chose Joe Rogan as our first-round pick. This…
“Rogan is not ideological and regularly steel-man’s his guests.” (per @LEB’s comment above)
…coupled with Rogan’s prolificness, was part of the reason.
Unfortunately, we also made all of our picks going from my memory of what the rules were—and in my memory, I conflated early drafts with the final version. There was really no excuse for this, as I was the one who actually compiled all the rules into a single document precisely so we could avoid confusion. That’s what I get for finalizing our picks on my phone while at the beach.
Even so, we still have a ton of strong pics, and our team is going to crush the competition. And I’m not counting Joe out, either. He is a serious competitor in other areas of his life, and I fully expect him to bring his best to this competition.
“and our team is going to crush the competition.”
Love the confidence! Can Arnold please publish the teams?
I think you could have done better if you picked nothing but Las Vegas bookies. Since they post a probability prediction every day, they’ll easily score 1 point on every single day (if not multiple?)
The quantity of output matters a ton for this scoring system I’m surprised you didn’t look for no name prolific blogger that posts probability predictions in every post.
To me S was a non-scoring category but Rogan might be able to score points by just having a lot of “so what your saying is XYZ” guest “yep that’s correct” and also occasionally score some points in meme.
I am not participating, but Steve Sailer has originated at least one meme that I see fairly often in a wide range of conversations.
(It’s not) “magic dirt”
I think that alone will win a fair number of points.
As I understand it, it can only win at most 1 point.
And it has to be seen somewhere “prominent”.
Please send a link, here or to me, if you see it!
Example “Black Swan” by Taleb – 1 point for the catch phrase.
Sailer is actually pretty witty and I can name a dozen of his good memes off the top of my head. But they are “under-memes” like Kaus’ “undernews”. You can’t repeat them in polite company. Instead, the same idea is likely to be expressed in a more respectable, albeit less catchy, form by some other conservative intellectual. But once you’ve seen the meme catchphrase, you can’t read about that phenomenon later without it popping into your head.
Is he the author of “hate hoax” (e.g., Jussie Smollett, Tawana Brawley)?
World War T (following World War G).
The constant sarcastic reminders of Emmet Till and FDR’s redlining are hilarious.
Hair Hysteria.
and so on. But mocking the dominant religion, particularly one as self-righteous as the current prog crop, makes it challenging to go properly viral. Heck, Twitter banned at one point “Learn to Code” or “dindunuffin” for instance.
FWIW, the great Steve Sailer agrees he might not be a high scorer: https://www.unz.com/isteve/i-was-drafted-6-in-the-fantasy-intellectuals-league/
Oh rats – I haven’t even yet sent him a note about how
“I Drafted You to Be On My Fantasy Intellectual Team” – since I wanted to do that only after the season starts.
I don’t think his “bet’ would be a valid point-getting bet:
I would bet that between now and the end of the year, the Woke will dream up a whole new reason for canceling a white individual with a good job that will seem absurd when first trotted out, but by the end of the year will strike everybody as routine whaddaya-whaddaya.
“Third, I’m not that excited about steelmanning — rewriting somebody’s argument to be better than he made it himself.”
I’m with Steve on this one, and wary of steel-manning for additional reasons I’ve expressed in other comments here.
There are many important norms of intellectual discipline to include, “Be open-minded” – “Try to fully understand the argument” – “Avoid Intellectual Technical Fouls and especially Personal Fouls” – “Try to keep criticism objective instead of indulging in expressions of moral outrage” – “Be fair in criticism and description – don’t straw-man or misrepresent an argument just to score points.”
To the extent steel-manning is just being used a catch-all term for following these good norms, it would be unobjectionable. But many purported attempts go astray.
I believe in an additional norm – maybe a “cancellation handicap” like in golf, which is that you should cut people slack when you have reason to suspect that because of social pressures they are likely intimidated from fully and forthrightly expressing their honest sentiments on a sensitive topic. In other contexts progressives would point to the structural power imbalance
The reverse is true as well, which is what Steve was getting at. When prominent people and their ideas have high status and institutional influence, and thus can be assumed to say things exactly the way they wanted them said, then it’s fair to take their words at face value and go after their errors without needing to prop up their case any more than they propped it up themselves.
In the case of a high-status idea, when top advocates make a weak case for it, it is good evidence in favor of the conclusion that the idea itself is false. The situation is more ambiguous for weakly-argued low-status ideas.
Reading anything written by an American is useless if you don’t steel the arguments they use.
They often attempt many useful arguments, but never succeed. If you’re not going to steelman it, might as well start learning Greek, because there’s nothing in English worth the effort.
E.g. Sailer doesn’t know what steelmanning is, and as a result his analysis of steelmanning is about something else. If you don’t steel the argument, he sounds like an idiot. Is Sailer an idiot?
Sailer probably made the error of taking Kling’s incorrect description of steelmanning seriously.
The steel version of what Sailer said is something like this: “Attempting to clearly argue what Foucault said is unwise, because Foucault wanted evil things. The argument will sound evil regardless of how it is stated.” And this is certainly true. (There’s more too, but cut for length.)
However, some find them convincing. They probably see something other than what Foucault in fact argues. This would be the steelman of Foucault.
Because I, too, am not an idiot, I had to look up Foucault’s arguments, and I’ll do a proper steelman here. “According to Foucault, force relations are an effect of difference, inequality or unbalance that exists in other forms of relationships (such as sexual or economic).”
Sailerian steelman, parodied for length: “Egalitarianism is radically true. All humans are perfectly identical, plus or minus socialization; all difference results from some application of (implicitly illegitimate) force.” Sounds dumb, because it is.
A real steelman recognizes this is something about social status and envy. Humans feel imposed upon by anyone who has better status markers than they do. To steel this argument, notice I have to transmute being to seeming…but that’s nearly all I had to do. Some or even many of Foucault’s conclusions may still follow from this premise.
A straw man is not merely a rewording of the argument. Attacking the straw man is a fallacy because it is a substantially different than the real argument, and things which apply to the straw man don’t apply to the real argument. A mere rewording for clarity and persuasiveness is known as an ironman.
Like a straw man, a steelman is not merely a rewording of the argument.
There is an argument very near Foucault’s that useful or even compelling. If Foucault weren’t basically evil, we would even say that was what he was trying to argue, but tragically failed to reach. We all make these mistakes, and steelmanning is about forgiving the mistake, rather than refuting the imperfection our weak human flesh managed to achieve.
Of course Foucault was an absolute rat bastard, and the causation was likely the reverse. He found a real argument and deliberately perverted it so as to lead to perverted conclusions. His far from vain hope that many readers would accidentally read the real argument and mistakenly link it as support to his deviant conclusions.
Even the ‘Sailerian steelman’ (which is in fact merely rectification of names) is useful, since we can see this is what the Woke in fact believe. Or rather, act like they believe, because Conquest #1 applies and when they’re talking personal actually-their-business specifics instead of not-their-business social abstracts, they suddenly figure out Foucault was wrong.
1. Could someone produce a 1 sentence definition of Straussian that a high school graduate would easily understand? I look up the definition 3 times a year and it never sticks.
2. As an owner of a team, I know our draft strategy was influenced in the early rounds by “folks we already follow” due the overhead burden of the scoring system. Joe Rogan makes a ton of sense to me due to the volume of his content and his steel manning.
3. Would love to see a wisdom of crowds prediction on the success of teams before the season starts.
(team owner of Null Hypothesis)
“Could someone produce a 1 sentence definition of Straussian…?”
+1
I can’t for the life of me figure out how Joe Rogan is anti-Straussian (or Straussian for that matter).
Pretty sure “straussian” just means “read between the lines”. There’s something important that you want to say but you feel like you can’t say it directly because it would hurt others (or yourself) too much. So you try and communicate your thoughts in a less deliberate, roundabout manner so you can share your thoughts but not make the wrong people uncomfortable.
Rogan is very straightforward and frank, and doesn’t seem to shy away from stating his opinions, hence his anti-straussianism.
I’ll give it a shot, though I might be conflating it with a more (secret?) garden variety esotericism.
When you are in danger of ostracism or other punishment for wrongthink and can’t separate audiences to avoid getting in trouble for what you really want to say, you write in such a way that the more common, and potentially dangerous, readers won’t see anything particularly wrong, but your predictably educated audience gets enough of the references to read between the lines and see what you actually mean.
I use predictably educated in the sense that you know what they know, so you can speak to that. E.g. Adam Smith references Grotius (who was a big name at the time) when he is talking about the inland grain trader (speculator), and see how its all good? Old de Groot knew all about that and was cool with it, so we should be too and I am not saying anything radical. Except he was: Grotius actually does come down against speculators. Smith knows that perfectly well, but Grotius was both widely known and rarely read, so referencing him as agreeing is basically saying “Smart people have agreed for over 200 years here” so most readers will nod their head sagely and move on, while those few who really knew their shit would actually recognize what Smith is doing and start reading more closely. If called on it, Smith could always say “Oh, sorry, did I get that backwards? I will fix it in the next edition!”
Another way of looking at it would be writing such that understanding most of what you write doesn’t get you in trouble, but to people who really know the score you are making a different point.
A more modern version might be talking about inherited intelligence in dogs and debating in that frame work, when what you really are discussing is humans, but because you are not allowed to suggest genetics might be important in human intelligence, you stick to dogs, and only those people who are specifically talking to understand.
This was very helpful. Also explains why I was never able to intuit the definition via the contexts in which I encountered it. I’m not classically educated and I have a gag reflex to internal jargon of almost any sort. So using the term Straussian is almost Straussian?
Thank you very much.
So when my wife expects me to read her mind she being Straussian I guess.
Always seemed to me that saying someone is Straussian is the most charitable way to say the are being unclear. Yeah, they are being unclear but it’s on purpose because they are playing some inscrutable long game.
Confusingly, I have also seen (and used, perhaps misleadingly) the term mean the endorsement or indulgence of ‘noble lies.’ E.g., an atheist might support Christianity because he believes it will make people more moral or help society maintain cohesion. Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe we need another word for that worldview. Karamazovianism, after the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov?
“Could someone produce a 1 sentence definition of Straussian that a high school graduate would easily understand?”
“Signaling in code to avoid getting cancelled.”
Except that Strauss was doing it long before modern cancel culture and doesn’t seem to have been in any danger of being cancelled.
Was he? I think the term Straussianism refers more to Strauss’s interpretation of Maimonedes (who Strauss believed was a surreptitious atheist) than Strauss’s own stated beliefs.
I would say Strauss was Straussian too, but that’s a long story. Indeed, the classic Straussian signal is to keep talking about about other people being Straussian.
Regardless, Greg is interpreting “cancellation” too narrowly. I just mean facing likely and severe negative consequences for expressing disfavored ideas, which goes back to the dawn of man.
>—“I just mean facing likely and severe negative consequences for expressing disfavored ideas, which goes back to the dawn of man.”
Fair enough but was Strauss really worried about severe negative consequences for himself if he was clearer about his meanings? I’m not claiming to know much about him. Maybe he was.
I thought it was more of an issue of him seeing little point in telling people things they weren’t prepared to hear and understand. Again I’m asking, not claiming to be an expert on him.
@Greg: It’s best to separate the meaning of the word ‘Straussian’ from Leo Strauss the man, his life, whether he also felt pressures to “write between the lines”, and for forth.
To be ‘Straussian’ does not mean “to be like Strauss was”, but “to be like the people Strauss studied and wrote about,” for example, the subjects of his “Persecution and the Art of Writing.”
‘Plausible deniability’ is key and as good a definition as any. “To write on sensitive subjects in a way calculated to get as close as one can but still avoid getting in trouble.” If someone wants to get you in trouble, you will be able to plausibly deny that you meant anything that might be considered ‘problematic’.
In Russia, from the mid 19th century and especially in the Soviet era, the common way to refer to such writing was to use “Aesopian language” after Aesop’s fables, which many other scholars including Marcuse have written about. Nothing to do with Aesop’s life at all, just the practice of telling seemingly innocent tales with ‘morals to the story’, and messages that are hidden just enough to fly below the radar of people looking to punish crimethink.
Of course you now also see a lot of people looking so hard for crimethink that they throw around unfounded accusations and claim to uncover such secret coding, often where it doesn’t exist, e.g., in all the claims about ‘dog-whistles’.
Arthur Melzer’s “Philosophy between the lines” is a terrific study of the phenomenon, and we could just as easily refer to this type of activity as “Melzerian”, because it doesn’t have anything to do with Melzer, his life, his writing style, etc.
In previous eras many would use ‘esoteric’ or ‘obscurantist’, but there were different kinds of both of these and practitioners had different motivations, for example, the ones Nietzsche criticized in a line I like, “… and by their excessive acumen provoke a distrust of acumen …”
Sometimes people add ‘deliberate’ or ‘motivated’ or ‘strategically’ for emphasis. But to be Straussian means to be “*Defensively* Obscurantist” usually on behalf of oneself, but occasionally on behalf of a philosophically stratified social order.
So, while the secondary question of whether Strauss was also Straussian does not bear on the primary question of what ‘Straussian’ means, I’ll get to it now.
In my judgment the answer is clearly yes. Certainly after coming to America Strauss was not worried at all for his personal safety or for his position or academic career, but that was an easier time for ideas.
But he *was* deeply worried about the “predicament of modern politics” or the “crisis of modernity”, as he conceived it in a broad sense.
That would take too long to explain here. But related to the question, it was not so much that Strauss and his disciplines and acolytes thought they had ‘the answer’ to the problem they knew to be intractable in the abstract, or at least for anything longer than the short term or for anything better than buying some more time by slowing or mitigating an inevitably degenerative but entrenched social process in a disenchanted polity.
But they had an approach to the problem for the particular time and situation of the late 20th century, and that approach required esoteric techniques too, in particular, “meta-esotericism”, that is, using *scholarship and commentary* on Straussian messaging as a medium to signal that one is *also sometimes being* Straussian, or, at least, sometimes merely paying lip-service to things the writer doesn’t believe but has to say to get along, and thus, should be cut some slack by critics on his own, true side.
Unless inviting that criticism was part of the strategy too! A good Yudkowsky quip is “nothing goes more than three levels of meta”, but that’s still a pretty deep rabbit hole to go down, and on this topic one can go down all the way.
Thanks for clarifying Handle. That was helpful.
Like many terms, I suspect this one continues to change a bit in meaning especially because an ambiguous use of the term “Straussian” can itself be defended as being Straussian.
This is a great 1 sentence definition. Also probably answers Arnold’s question. How would you keep score on anyone speaking in code?
“Socrates was hemlocked. Say the things Socrates said without getting hemlocked by saying the opposite in a noticeably wrong way.”
Every time I google it I am literally just boggled at the need to invent terms to show off your reading list OR create weird phrases. Like steelmanning is just objective description.
Steve is one of my favorite intellectuals, but he is neither a Straussian nor a steelmanner, which is fine by me. Loury is a genius at restating, the best there is.
Kling: “As Scott Alexander (pick 4) has pointed out, if you want accurate advice about the virus, go with The Zvi.”
So a psychiatrist is telling us to go with a card player for advice about Covid-19.
Before posting this dumb comment – good for nothing except illustrating precisely the kind of bad attitude of intellectually lazy and sheepish deference to credentials – did you even try for two whole minutes to read over Zvi’s year’s worth of covid blogging or attempt to compare his admirable track record with the mostly worthless public statements and prognostications of the so-called “public health experts”?
One doesn’t have to be a radical skeptic to know that if this pandemic has shown us anything it is that we need to update our priors and dramatically reduce the confidence we place in claims made by those people in favor of independent thinkers willing to rigorously explain themselves with logic and evidence, as opposed to merely insisting that we all respect expert authority without question.
Better luck next virus you fools…
Of course I read some of it – which didn’t makes sense so didn’t read much further. Here is a sample of his nonsense from last July:
“The other good news is that masks, especially cloth masks, might be a lot of the story of reduced death rates, by reducing initial viral loads.”
Cloth masks let 97% of the virus through (2015 study) and none of the RTC has shown a notable reduction in transmission.
Here is another major miss from last July:
“More deaths than about 2,500 [a day] would mean a health care system collapse.”
There were more than 2,500 deaths a day from early December to Mid-February, or about ten weeks and nothing close to a “collapse”.
Fantasy Intellectuals League — I think Steve Sailor is now saying this “first”. And I haven’t even yet told him I drafted him (First!)
When there are multiple teams, the teams form a league. All of our 10 FI Teams should be in the FI League, with each Team having 15 intellectuals.
I made an ordered list of over 150 names, mostly from the cheat seat. When my #7 pick came up (6th, due to missing Team #4) I …
decided on Steve Sailor. He was high up but not at the top of my list.
But he was on my mind. Because of Honesty and fairness – I’ve only recently started following him more closely. He’s cranking out content.
He was voted most accurate by some professional IQ group, and IQ is one of the early Big PC Lies which I hate.
Steve is the most underrated truth teller in media today.
Team #7 Sam-I-Am:
Steve Sailer
Martin Gurri
Glenn Loury
Robin Hanson
Lee Smith
Bari Weiss
James A Lindsay
Ben Shapiro
Angelo Codevilla
Marc Andreesson
Rod Dreher
Alister McGrath
Marvin Olasky
New Neo
Robert Barnes
I’m really happy with my 15. I expect to be reading & listening to just about everything from all of them for the next 3 months. Some I haven’t been spending as much time as they deserve / as I think I should spend / not quite the most fun for me.
$5/month per substack writer is not much of an issue, but it’s certainly something.
I think we should ask Tyler’s Emergent Ventures to give all our teams a grant of cash to subscribe to the substack or on-line magazine for all 150 chosen. Arnold thinks we should see how this first season goes, first – and he decides.
I’d also like more prize money!
And more publicity.
So I’m writing it on my blog :
https://tomgrey.wordpress.com/2021/03/30/fantasy-intellectual-team/
It would be good to have an Open Readership / limited to owner edit set of Google Docs for the team owners to track their intellectuals.
If you can’t salvage your relationship with your boss after 6 months, you’re not going to. Quit. Doesn’t say anything about you or her. Sometimes people just don’t work well together.
However if this happens too often, it’s time to look inward. Remember this piece of wisdom from the FX TV series Justified: If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.
Omgosh – perfect comment, thank you!
“If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”
I’m gonna have to plead guilty.