My Number One Pick

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I have scheduled a post to go up in a week or so about “Fantasy Intellectual Teams.” I am trying to figure out how to make it sound serious rather than frivolous. In fact, it is an attempt to fix the main problem of our times, which is the demise of our key institutions and what Martin Gurri describes as the “post-truth” age and the loss of authority.

I claim that the reason that we don’t have socially trusted authorities any more is that we suffer from intellectual status inversion. The people at the top of the status hierarchy in the bureaucracy, journalism, and academia are not great thinkers. And the great thinkers are not at the top of the status hierarchy. I believe that a necessary and sufficient condition for pulling society out of the ditch is to come up with a cure for intellectual status inversion. We need to reverse the status levels of Coleman Hughes and Ibram X. Kendi, for example.

Once the really great thinkers are on top, then the people below them will be copying better examples. This will make the social process of searching for truth more functional.

You should ask, How are we to determine who are the really great thinkers? That is where the Fantasy Intellectual Teams contest fits in. If I were advising you to draft a fantasy intellectual team, I would argue that the number one pick should be Scott Alexander. He is the most careful thinker out there, by a noticeable margin.

He is like a lawyer who is the best at arguing either side of a case. This is illustrated in one recent post, Ontology of Psychiatric Conditions. The question is whether there is a clear distinction between being normal and having a condition, such as depression or schizophrenia. Read the post to see how well he formulates the question and how carefully he sifts through the evidence pertaining to the answer.

But at some point we should judge a thinker side by side against another thinker. And that is where another recent post, Contra Weyl on Technocracy, comes in. Let me leave aside the substantive issue and instead treat this as a contest between Alexander and Weyl.

In the grand scheme of things, perhaps Weyl is under-rated, in the sense that most of the public intellectuals who are more well known are worse than he is. (As an aside, you can think of the Fantasy Intellectual Teams project as an attempt to play out Tyler’s “over-rated or under-rated” game until the right people come out on top.) But Weyl is not on my list of very careful thinkers. In fact, I am very much put off by him.

So what you have in the post on technocracy is the world’s leading intellectual grandmaster dispensing with a patzer. To take just one illustrative passage from Alexander,

Did you notice none of Weyl’s examples of technocracy fit this definition at all? Robert Moses had zero formal training in urban planning or anything related to city-building. The Soviet leadership wasn’t “meritocratically chosen”. And Oscar Niemeyer didn’t construct a High Modernist planned village and a control village, test which one performed better on various metrics, and scale the winner up into Brasilia.

64 thoughts on “My Number One Pick”

      • My wife had a “virtual MLK march” recently as part of the corporate D&I programs of her Big Pharma employer. All sounded just fine until she realized that MLK is no longer recognizable. Content of character type themes are now a form of white supremacy (even though she isn’t white).

        Going out on a limb here, but kinda sure that McWhorter would object to this nonsense. How are things over at the hospice?

        • MLK went full SJW in the last few years of his life. He didn’t believe in content of character and fully endorsed hardcore Kendi style platform. It’s literally in books he wrote near the end of his life.

          • You are most likely missing the point. It’s not so much what MLK said or wrote and how that may have evolved over time. Rather, it’s the message that was received by the masses and how that message gets transmitted over time. Most people aren’t intellectual enough to understand or dig into the nuance. They just don’t care.

            For my entire life, up until a year or so ago, the message received has been the about content of character. I can get behind that 100%. All of the other stuff is toxic nonsense.

            On a practical level, I need to know which message my child’s school is going with so that I can counter balance it (if needed).

          • My point is that the MLK view isn’t a stable equilibrium, it wasn’t even stable for MLK.

            At some point the fact that, having been judged by the content of their character, blacks will be at the bottom of nearly every metric by which we judge success due to their genes is simply an intolerable reality. MLK couldn’t accept it. He assumed that blacks had “untapped black intellectual horsepower” that if not for racism they would be X% of say doctors in line with their X% of the population. He even wrote that that was metric to judge things by and it should be enforced by the state (Kendi style).

            And so unable to accept this reality, one is left with full SJWism, because its “racism must be that bad to explain this poor performance” is the only thing left after you eliminate “maybe we just suck from birth and you can’t really do much about it.”

            Even if you somehow got people to accept the Charles Murray view, which I haven’t seen any evidence we can get people to accept, that doesn’t mean that every single person on the planet is judged based only on what is in their control rather then what isn’t. Murray understood, for instance, that you can’t maintain a first world western democracy and import lots of low skill third world migrants. Which is heresy if you believe all people have equal human rights and dignity and should only be judged based on what is in their control and not what isn’t. How do you deny them the right to be in this country based on their IQ? What universal principal is that based on?

            Of course Murray simply said that he wasn’t applying a universal moral impulse. He was applying a particularist aesthetic standard. He liked America, he wanted it to continue to be America as he understood Americaness, and if that meant that people in the third world had to have their universal moral right to “accept job offers” as Bryan Caplan would say, so be it. Tough. That’s life.

            So its not clear to me that “judge by the content of ones character” is something that can survive long term. Too many individuals and groups have low character judged on an objective scale of meritocratic results for them to accept. And judging based on a relative scale (of how well you do with what you got) has hard objective limits of how far it can be taken without disastrous consequences.

            1964 MLK didn’t even last a few years. It’s just not sustainable given human nature.

        • I think you’d be pretty happy with McWhorter’s views on racial issues Hans. If you’d like to confirm that, he’s been pretty active discussing the topic on the podcast circuit lately.

          I have been a fan ever since I bought one of his Teaching Company courses on linguistics quite a few years ago. His day job involves being one of the very best linguists in the world. It’s interesting seeing how he brings this training to bear on the many subtle and not so subtle changes in the language conventions surrounding racial issues. His ability to bring a laser like focus and interest to linguistic details combined with his unique ability to enter racial controversies without ever becoming emotionally triggered by criticism makes me suspect that he might be a little bit out there on the Aspergers spectrum in a way that he is able to use to great advantage. I could be wrong about the Aspergers. It’s just an intuition. Ordinarily you would expect someone on the spectrum to be less tuned into people’s emotional reactions but because the subtleties of language are his object of fascination, he actually seems much more tuned into the connections between emotions and language around race than anyone else. In a good way.

          Covid has meant a temporary halt to all in person Hospice patient/volunteer contact for now. I hope to be able to resume it after everyone is as vaccinated as they want to be. I’m pretty sure very few Covid patients wind up on Hospice unless they are hospital run programs.

          • I guess I was a little surprised to see him as your first pick. You’ve provided quite a bit of pushback (which is good), whenever I’ve complained about corporate and school woke. My complaints seem very mainstream McWhorter.

            The good news: McWhorter indicated over the summer (somewhere in my YouTube feed) that he was writing a new book on all things woke. It will for sure make my essential reading list if/when it gets released.

      • Ty for the tip. I clicked on that link thinking I’d just give his page a once-over and bookmark it for later. I started reading yesterday’s post and the hook was sunk after just a couple of lines. Definitely want to read more of his stuff.

      • The Bret Weinstein episode (I think that is where the first tweet goes) has an all-star cast of black intellectuals, including many FITs candidates.

        • How could untapped black analytic horsepower help us triumph over the CCP?

          If we triumph over the CCP it will be because our economy/military is stronger. That will largely be based on our human capital and its ability to do difficult cognitive tasks like engineering, which is largely genetic. Chinese got it. Blacks don’t.

          Yeah, I get it that places like China can shoot themselves in the foot with things like Communism, but that appears to be over and done with. We have a peer competitor now that has largely adopted the same mixed market economy we have for all intents and purposes. If a shooting war starts in the South China Sea, I can guarantee it won’t have been black analytical horsepower that makes the missiles do what each side wants them to do.

          It’s just really asinine to be talking about untapped black intelligence at a time when we are shuttering our best STEM schools because they are too Asian and then whining about how we have failed to unlock black potential. We didn’t fail at anything. It’s not there! Stop blaming people and making dumb decisions based on a fabrication. Yes, implying there would be black geniuses if only we did the right things is blaming people.

          “musical and STEM intelligences are largely fungible”

          No, they aren’t. Rappers are not in fact going to design driverless cars or network architecture anytime soon.

        • When I watched the all star cast shortly after the video was released, I thought that Kmele Foster stole the show.

          Then he went on Maher on 1/28…feel sorry for the guy that had to take the other side.

          https://youtu.be/_5_AihSZtmI

  2. Sorry, Arnold. I’ll be polite so some readers don’t get upset. I think, however, you are wrong again. I’m going to ignore that you don’t have a diagnostic to support your premise (we don’t have socially trusted authorities anymore). I want to point out the nonsense of your proposal to elect great thinkers rather than power-grabbing barbarians. You point to SA as a great thinker, but to persuade others you have to prove that SA –indeed, a brilliant teacher– can handle presential classes of hundreds of crazy students rather than the small crowd of virtual, converted students. Do you think that SA approved the relevant ability test implicit in Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions when he closed his blog under the threat of being identified by the NYT barbarians?

    • BTW, and for entertainment, how many times have you heard in your long life what a Great Leader (a great thinker with great abilities to lead) our friend Jimmy would be rather than the crazy, pathetic incumbent? In the places I used to work for decades, it was a daily assertion by idiots who have never understood history.

    • SA is manifestly too weak for political office or other positions resembling tribal chiefship. However in our beurocratic world, such weakness and even cowardice is already priced in. Let’s have actual brilliant, diffident pencil-necks in the jobs that nominally require them.

      Now how to evolve institutions that elevate them rather the BS artists? That’s the real quest.

      • No. The real quest is to design effective systems of checking and balancing the legitimate power of coercion that defines government.

      • There are probably plenty of people at the FDA that knew they should have moved faster, but were too weak and cowardly to do so. Maybe the weakness and the cowardice is the problem, not a lack of domain knowledge.

    • You make a valid and important point, but you suffer from a lack of imagination.

      > You point to SA as a great thinker, but to persuade others you have to prove that SA –indeed, a brilliant teacher– can handle presential classes of hundreds of crazy students rather than the small crowd of virtual, converted students.

      This is true under current circumstances and norms, but these things aren’t immutable. Reality can be bent, and *is bent*, on a regular basis.

  3. “I believe that a necessary and sufficient condition for pulling society out of the ditch is to come up with a cure for intellectual status inversion.”

    Arnold, I am curious: how long ago do you think that this status inversion began? Was the top of the status hierarchy in the US ever comprised mostly of great thinkers? What about other societies? For what it’s worth, my first blush reaction to your post was to agree with you.

    “I would argue that the number one pick should be Scott Alexander. He is the most careful thinker out there, by a noticeable margin.”

    If you were my GM, that pick would earn you a rather lucrative contract extension. Careful is an excellent word choice there. I think that carefulness is very much an “underrated” trait for great thinkers. At the top of the current status hierarchy, I suspect its IUCN status would be, at best, critically endangered.

    • When the high status people in society were the mediocre WASP sons of rich elites, America became a super power, got through the depression without revolution, and won two world wars.

      When it was run by the people with the smartest test scores and the best grades…we got what we got. It had its plusses and minuses. The mediocre WASP model managed to inoculate NYC for small pox a lot faster than we are doing COVID.

      I like Scott’s blog a lot, but it’s not particularly clear to me that he or the greater Less Wrong community would do a great job running the country. His personal life is a total mess. Many of his ideas aren’t that great. Even if you made him dictator, he’d be under all the normal pressures normal dictators have to deal with, and it’s not clear he would handle that well.

      • The people in charge during the smallpox epidemic were way less risk averse and had much more discretionary authority (basically less red tape) than their counterparts today, I think that’s the big difference. If you’d put the academics back then in charge, they probably would’ve been no more risk averse; if you put mediocre WASPs in charge today they wouldn’t be any more daring than whoever is currently in charge.

        Not sure this is really a disagreement but I don’t think class or education is the key issue. You have on the one hand a society without seatbelts and where people smoke at the doctors office, and on the other one unpasteurized milk is often illegal where you need a masters degree to teach kindergarten. That imo sort of illustrates the key difference that explains why it’s ‘harder’ for modern society.

        • Well, on the issue if inoculation, we do see some pretty big differences in performance. Both between developed countries and between states and localities here in the USA. Granted it all gets holed up in an FDA/CDC box, but there is a lot of room in that box.

          Matty Yglesias of all people pointed out that while its obvious that the FDA screwed up big and we could have had $5 instant at home tests and early vaccines by the summer, there was never any push for the FDA to change. He didn’t mean wonks complaining on Twitter. He meant why weren’t there protests outside FDA HQ every single day.

          I certainly don’t believe it’s because Americans don’t like a good protest. Nor that people weren’t incentivized to protest the handling of the pandemic (there were huge anti lockdown protests as early as April). Nor can we really blame it on the ignorance of the plebs. Why didn’t some ideological or political entrepreneur figure out a way to organize such a protest? Why wasn’t Bryan Caplan getting on TV and imploring people to show up on such and such a date to rally for the FDA to allow at home instant testing?

          And if not in the USA, why did nothing happen in any of the major developed countries? I mean sure the UK has done a better job then the EU or whatever, but none of them acted by the summer on these big things and by act all I really mean is “get out of the way.”

          I find it all bizarre. If you’re a public intellectual that deserves more status, the easiest way to convince me is to have started a movement that successfully changed the pandemic fundamentally. Otherwise, even people who have some good ideas but not idea how to get them implemented in real time in the real world are kind of a dime a dozen.

          • > Why didn’t some ideological or political entrepreneur figure out a way to organize such a protest? Why wasn’t Bryan Caplan getting on TV and imploring people to show up on such and such a date to rally for the FDA to allow at home instant testing?

            You’ve just answered the question,. Libertarians have banged that drum for decades and it is common knowledge that nobody will listen, not even while they are being proved right as spectacularly as possible. Such is the ideological consensus of the western world.

          • What does “banged the drum” mean.

            Like, all they did was tweet and write blog posts. And if people didn’t listen to them, they just ho hum complained and went on like this wasn’t the biggest thing happening in their lifetime and it really fucking mattered to get it right.

            Let me be specific:

            Why wasn’t Bryan Caplan protesting outside FDA HQ every day? Why wasn’t he on doing interviews with news reporters about his hunger strike in front of the FDA? He’s a professor right. He’s not going to lose his job for taking a little sabbatical. If he did, he’s written books right. I would have to think if he’s published this many books he’s made enough money to get by if he needed to. I don’t know if he’s got a wife that works, but if she does I bet she’s an UMC professional to. One UMC salary not enough?

            There were people of all backgrounds protesting the lockdowns near me every week since April. If they can do it, why can’t he? There is obviously a huge upswell of potential support out there. My God, if people can storm congress, why can’t they storm the FDA.

            I mean I pick on him just because the language he uses on these issues is very extreme and moralistic. But I already know the answer. He doesn’t really care. Like he really does not care what happens. He’s safe either way, and all the concern for random ass people all over the world is just a posture. He’s basically had posts were he says more or less “I don’t see myself a part of any community and I don’t really give a shit about anyone, not enough to stick my neck out.” Which is basically how everyone is. It’s how I am. It’s how you are. It’s why the same question I posed could be addressed to any of us. We might all have different levels of pragmatic excuses, but the bottom line would be that we just didn’t care enough. We might do it for our family, but not anyone else.

            At other times and with other people, “I might do it to my family” extended to a wider swath. Both in terms of who you would do it for and what you would do. Lacking that feeling, it really doesn’t matter what your theoretical opinions are on anything.

            Why do we have asshole leaders? Maybe its a combination of people too dumb to know it and people who know but don’t give a shit because they are even more at home with a give no fucks attitude than you could ever imagine. Opposed to them are people just trying to stay off the radar enough to pay the mortgage or protect their little “bubble”.

          • @asdf

            > I mean I pick on him just because the language he uses on these issues is very extreme and moralistic. But I already know the answer. He doesn’t really care. Like he really does not care what happens. He’s safe either way, and all the concern for random ass people all over the world is just a posture. He’s basically had posts were he says more or less “I don’t see myself a part of any community and I don’t really give a shit about anyone, not enough to stick my neck out.” Which is basically how everyone is. It’s how I am. It’s how you are. It’s why the same question I posed could be addressed to any of us. We might all have different levels of pragmatic excuses, but the bottom line would be that we just didn’t care enough. We might do it for our family, but not anyone else.

            Bang on. 11/10.

            > Why do we have asshole leaders? Maybe its a combination of people too dumb to know it and people who know but don’t give a shit because they are even more at home with a give no fucks attitude than you could ever imagine. Opposed to them are people just trying to stay off the radar enough to pay the mortgage or protect their little “bubble”.

            I would say, the reason why we have asshole leaders, and all the rest of the hilarious nonsense in this joke of a world, all fundamentally derives from one root cause: the flawed manner in which we perceive and conceptualize reality. We’ve allowed the world to be dumbed down to the degree that we’ve allowed ourselves to be tricked into outsourcing these most important skills to third parties like Politicians, The Trustworthy Media, The Experts, and so on – and we haven’t the slightest clue that this has happened.

            I propose that we undo this.

      • “The mediocre WASP model managed to inoculate NYC for small pox a lot faster than we are doing COVID.”

        What time are you choosing for the starting point? Before Covid, I thought the fastest a vaccine was ever developed was 4-5 years. I’m pretty sure that everyone that wants it will receive a Covid vaccine before 2024.

        “When it was run by the people with the smartest test scores and the best grades…we got what we got.”

        Post-WW2 victory over global communism, a majority of the world’s population living under democracy for the first time in human history, and Pax-Americana?

        • “Before Covid, I thought the fastest a vaccine was ever developed was 4-5 years”

          The COVID vaccine was developed in a single weekend. It was held up by the FDA for nearly a year.

          In the 1950s a bad batch of polio vaccine killed a crippled some kids, and we were right back vaccinating people within weeks. People back then could understand basic statistics and not get hysterical I suppose.

          “Post-WW2 victory over global communism”

          I mean the academics loved communism and bought into the Soviet Union till the end. Some of the smartest people in the room also gave us Vietnam.

          I think what gave us the Pax Americana is that communism is weak and there were no peer competitors left. We’ll see how we handle a peer competitor that isn’t hobbled by communism now that China is on the rise.

          • China is more communist than we assumed a decade ago. Chairman Xi is convinced that the Soviet Union collapsed because it liberalized, with the first mistake being attacking Stalin(!). So there is quite a push back on liberalization. It’s an attempt to have the prosperity of capitalism and the political control of a dictatorship, in a very real sense a left fascism.

            You might be interested in Tanner Greer’s The World That China Wants I and The World That China Wants II.

        • “Post-WW2 victory over global communism, a majority of the world’s population living under democracy for the first time in human history, and Pax-Americana?”

          I dunno, America by now arguably has something worse than global communism (but quite possibly grown from it). Pax Americana, is that what they call the endless wars and totally spontaneous color revolutions now? And ‘democracy’ itself is getting a bit shopworn by now, wouldn’t you agree? #Winning!

      • Lol great first two paragraphs.

        As far as Scott goes– I don’t want anyone to be a dictator. I am referring only to the quality of his ideas/writing, although upon reflection, I should admit that I am not terribly familiar with his entire body of writing. I just know that he is responsible for a handful of the best pieces of analysis/argumentation that I have ever read, so when I saw Arnold endorse him, I got a little excited. Like Al Davis when he hears that one of the prospects on his draft board ran a 4.2 40 (if you are a football fan).

        I don’t know much of anything about “the Less Wrong community,” although I strongly suspect that I share your reservations about how they’d do running the country. My aversion to group labels like that is trending towards reflexiveness.

    • >how long ago do you think that this status inversion began? Was the top of the status hierarchy in the US ever comprised mostly of great thinkers?

      Not Arnold, but I’ll answer in reverse order:
      Yes, go read the writings of the founders. They were clearly men (and in some cases women!) where were great thinkers. They didn’t have an a monopoly on it, but anyone from Paine to Jefferson to Gouverneur Morris were clearly great thinkers.

      I think it was the progressive era. Reading the Supreme Court cases sealed the deal for me on this opinion. The justices gave up getting it right to getting it the way they want it. They were a reflection of what was going on in the rest of society.

  5. Ibram X. Kendi says things that those who dominate American culture want to hear and Coleman Hughes doesn’t.

    Thomas Sowell has been a one-man Fantasy Intellectual Team for well over a half century and both academia and the media have basically ignored him. They gave up trying to refute his arguments and trying to shout him down, so they did their best to air brush him out of existence.

    • Isn’t the point of Arnold’s post that if you can’t solve for “gain power to change things even when you don’t tell people everything they want to hear” then you haven’t solved anything no matter how good you think your ideas are.

      • Boris Johnson elevated top-tier heterodox thinker Dominic Cummings – who as much as anybody could be credited with successfully engineering and shepherding Brexit to completion against all odds and expectations – to Chief Advisor to the Prime Minister, after many years working as a big brain in British politics.

        Unfortunately he was not able to successfully maneuver around an inner circle soap opera as it involved Boris’ fiancee (the “Princess Nut-Nut” affair), though rumor has it that he still plays some kind of prominent role in secret after having to give up the position officially and publicly.

        But back when his star was highest in the sky, he tried to recruit and elevate other similar world-class minds into the Johnson administration in part by means of his “Two hands are a lot” blog post.

        Certainly its some of the highest status and power that’s been afforded to the type Kling is describing in recent times in any similar country, and so an example worth studying in detail.

        • I was about to mention Dominic Cummings, though my conclusion was that the derp mandarins and oligarch media were out for him from day one, and did after long effort neutralize him. Jolly good, pip pip old shoe!

          Could be he still has a behind the scenes role (codename: Q).

  6. This sounds like an outgrowth of your content aggregation club idea except focused on individual content producers rather than the content itself. Because all-rounders uniformly excellent across all topics are fairly rare and sometimes a hack’s slog scores six, it seems as if the content might be the the more rewarding focus: ideas over personality.

    It seems as if magazine editors run the pairings that you suggest all the time in deciding who to publish and on the content when doing their editing. Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion, seems to me particularly adept in putting together solid monthly issues that are worth the price, keeping a stable of elite writers yet including good work from relative unknowns.

    It might be entertaining as a side experiment, to pair content aggregators as well, for example The Federalist versus The Bulwark. I noticed this morning that both have carried pieces asserting that the top three weaknesses of Republicans are immigration reform, health care reform, and cutting the deficit. Yet the authors don’t really say how. Penalize platitudes.

    Perhaps as a non-Twitter poster you will be better positioned to fairly assess the Tweets of the paired intellectuals as part of their claim to greater status. And if you were to include an across-the-board penalty for tweeting you would likely be eliminating a great of frivolousness. A tweet is frivolous.

  7. I think Arnold thinks this country is a debating society. What we need and what we had for awhile is Trump. He pushed back. I work as a government contractor and I remember how glad I was when he nixed the CRT efforts beginning to cascade through the Federal government. Now I expect a mandatory Implicit Bias training requirement along with the usual computer security course.

  9. I guess the question is what gave rise to “intellectual status inversion” in the first place, i.e., is the “status hierarchy” endogenous or exogenous? If the former, then we need to focus our efforts upstream on the factors that determine status hierarchy. I suspect that when one (individually, not collectively) bears the cost and gains the benefits of incorrectly or correctly conferring status, e.g., when choosing advisors or hiring employees for oneself, then intellectual status inversion is minimized. Decisions to confer public status, like all collective decisions, are the result of contests among factions whose goals are to gain benefits for themselves while pushing costs onto other factions. There is no reason to believe that such contests result in anything socially optimal. The solution seems to be to limit the scope of factional competitions, i.e., of collective decision making.

  10. Like all great fantasy sports, I will refuse to select my team and allow them to be picked at random from whoever remains. And I’ll outperform most teams!

  12. My top three: Jeffrey Friedman, Charles Murray and Reihan Salam.

    (And, sorry to all of them for being a silly MAGA conservative. It’s not their fault, I promise).

  13. I am also a psychiatrist like Scott. He is absolutely correct about dimensionality of psychiatric illness consistent with known polygenetic causality of most mental illness. Its just math…..Law of Large Numbers and the resultant Gaussian.

    Autism, autism, autism…..autism. Our intellectual class (writers) is ecologically selected for categorical thinking and abstraction which maps poorly with the reality of the world. He isn’t an academic type. He has gotten his hands dirty treating patients and watching his beautiful theories die after contact with reality. Mike Tyson was correct: “everyone has a plan until they get punched.”

    I think the comment about a random 200 people from the phone book in Boston rather than a degree from Harvard applies…..

    • “Our intellectual class (writers) is ecologically selected for categorical thinking and abstraction which maps poorly with the reality of the world.”

      I think most intellectuals are quite comfortable with distributions and spectra. I’d attribute more of the trouble of over-categorization to our legal system which (some argue by necessity) makes a large number of clumsy Boolean distinctions with significant differences in consequences depending on those “Yes or No” determinations, or whether one is above or below some threshold, has or doesn’t have a diagnosis of a particular recognized disorder, etc.

      The big problem is that every time big consequences or potential exercises of power are said to depend on some objective fact or expert consensus, it generates a corrupting temptation to manipulate those “facts”, processes, beliefs, etc. and when the stakes are high that temptation always proves irresistible.

      One tries to control passions with reason, but like Hume said, reason is actually “slave to” our passions. (Well, more like “lawyer for” or “press secretary of”). Horace said, “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.” The exercise of power also cannot be cast out, it just swims upstream until it can manipulate the inputs to achieve the downstream result.

      So, while you may try to control power by making it slave to science and our attempts to investigate and learn the truth about nature using logic and evidence, instead, one finds that science becomes slave to power.

      Since power works through law, and law imposes the legal fictions of hard categories as a matter of convenience or social and practical necessity, those categories end up contaminating and corrupting the framework of ideas most people use to understand their world.

    • Lindsay, at least his twitter persona, has gone off the rails and, IMHO, can no longer be taken seriously. Even his collaborator Helen Pluckrose has severed their relationship

  15. Complicated disagreements between Scott Alexander and Glen Weyl are second- or third-decimal issues. The first-decimal problem is that it’s hard for anyone to fill the shoes of Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell, ever incisive and straightforward.

    New communications technologies seem to foster niche affiliations and polarization.

    How will making lists of underrated public intellectuals help and change culture? Are pleas for status-inversion any kind of Archimedean point?

    • PS: Steven Pinker and Philip Tetlock have the right stuff — they are giants in their fields, incisive, straightforward, tireless — but seem mostly prefer just to let their research do the talking.

    • > How will making lists of underrated public intellectuals help and change culture?

      This is an excellent question – will this initiative be any different or bear any more fruit than new intellectuals like the IDW, Rebel Wisdom, and all the others? Not to say these these groups and activities are bad or unhelpful, but at best, all your are going to get is some minor incremental change.

      I propose Arnold sets his sights higher by expanding the scope of this initiative.

      • Fix:

        …all *you are* going to get is some minor incremental change, *most likely*. (Better than nothing, but if you’re going to do a job, why not do it right?)

  16. I claim that the reason that we don’t have socially trusted authorities any more is that we suffer from intellectual status inversion. The people at the top of the status hierarchy in the bureaucracy, journalism, and academia are not great thinkers.

    This explanation is correct, elegant, and concise. When authorities choose to elevate figures like Ibram X. Kendi, the public reaction of losing trust in authorities is quite understandable and justified.

    I believe that a necessary and sufficient condition for pulling society out of the ditch is to come up with a cure for intellectual status inversion. We need to reverse the status levels of Coleman Hughes and Ibram X. Kendi, for example.

    My preferred solution is reform the underlying institutions: Get government out of higher ed. Let the masses purchase job training where they want. Let people invest in research that they want.

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