What’s wrong with books?

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Andy Matuschak writes,

Picture some serious non-fiction tomes. The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns, Germs, and Steel; etc. Have you ever had a book like this—one you’d read—come up in conversation, only to discover that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences? I’ll be honest: it happens to me regularly. Often things go well at first. I’ll feel I can sketch the basic claims, paint the surface; but when someone asks a basic probing question, the edifice instantly collapses. Sometimes it’s a memory issue: I simply can’t recall the relevant details. But just as often, as I grasp about, I’ll realize I had never really understood the idea in question, though I’d certainly thought I understood when I read the book. Indeed, I’ll realize that I had barely noticed how little I’d absorbed until that very moment.

…All this suggests a peculiar conclusion: as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it.

I think that there are two groups to blame: readers and writers.

As Matuschak points out, readers do not read actively enough. I have pointed out that I read a nonfiction book with an eye toward reviewing it. As I read, I am thinking in terms of summarizing each idea in my own words and of coming up with a critique.

Book authors pad too much. Sometimes, I will finish writing a book review and say to myself, “If people read this review, they don’t have to read the book.”

In my opinion, the educational return on investment for the consumer is highest on essays and blog posts. Books are next.

Podcasts are difficult to compare with written materials. One of their advantages is that you can listen while doing something that keeps you from reading, which means that the opportunity cost can be low. Another advantage is that sometimes a conversation is more stimulating than a monologue. But when you could be reading, that is more likely to be educational than listening to a podcast.

One thing about books is that a lot of effort goes into them. Authors spend time working on them. Editors spend time screening them. Editors and others spend time making suggestions about them.

Another thing about books is that they are focal. People can use heuristics like “What are the best-selling books”? or “Who are the authors I’ve heard of?” But even if you do that, before you read the book you should search for an essay by the author that is based on or is the basis for the book.

My guess is that writers could contribute more at the margin by blogging than by composing books. But perhaps blogging is a more difficult skill.

A non-virtue of nationalism

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Alberto Mingardi writes (in an email to followers of the Bruno Leoni Institute that he heads),

Nationalism, as political rhetoric, is quite incompatible with a concept which is key to classical liberal. That of the sovereignty of the consumer, as it has been called perhaps with an infelicitous term. It is difficult to ‘nationalize’ consumers, very easy to ‘nationalize’ producers.

In Specialization and Trade, I pointed out that we are much more concerned with conditions in the one market in which we produce than with conditions in any one of many markets in which we consume. If we are going to use our political voice in a market, it is going to be as a producer rather than as a consumer. Economic nationalism, by strengthening political voice rather than markets, is bound to favor producers rather than consumers. In short, Mingardi has a point.

I worry about what deplatforming signifies

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Tyler Cowen writes,

I worry about deplatforming much less than many of you do. I remember the “good old days,” when even an anodyne blog such as Marginal Revolution, had it existed, had no platform whatsoever. All of a sudden millions of new niches were available, and many of us moved into those spaces.

In recent times, a number of the major tech companies have dumped some contributors, due to a mix of customer and employee protest. So we have gained say 99 instead of say 100, and of course I am personally happy to see many of the deplatformed sites go, or move to other carriers. Most of the deplatformed sites, of course, I am not familiar with at all, but that is endogenous. I would say don’t overreact to the endowment effect of having, for a while, felt one had literally everything. You never did. You still have way, way more than you did in the recent past.

Suppose we grant that we should not worry about a few uncouth individuals losing platforms on major web sites. We still might want to pay attention to what deplatforming signifies about the inclinations of the zealots of the new religion.

Those who seek to eliminate blasphemy see themselves as cleansing society of its impurities. It is a short step from cleansing society of blasphemy to cleansing society of “impure” people themselves.

Imagine that it’s 1931 and Tyrone is telling the Jews of Germany that he worries much less than many of them do. He reminds them that they still have way, way more than they did in the recent past.

Pro-Trump rhetoric

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Thomas D. Klingenstein writes,

Multiculturalism conceives of society as a collection of cultural identity groups, each with its own worldview, all oppressed by white males, collectively existing within permeable national boundaries. Multiculturalism replaces American citizens with so-called “global citizens.” It carves “tribes” out of a society whose most extraordinary success has been their assimilation into one people. It makes education a political exercise in the liberation of an increasing number of “others,” and makes American history a collection of stories of white oppression, thereby dismantling our unifying, self-affirming narrative—without which no nation can long survive.

. . .Trump is the only national political figure who does not care what multiculturalism thinks is wrong. He, and he alone, categorically and brazenly rejects the morality of multiculturalism. He is virtually the only one on our national political stage defending America’s understanding of right and wrong, and thus nearly alone in truly defending America. This why he is so valuable—so much depends on him.

In an interesting rhetorical move, he equates the fight against multiculturalism with the fight against slavery.

multiculturalism, as with abolition, has the potential to energize the conservative movement.

His essay is a counterpoint to an essay from two years ago by Yuval Levin. Levin contrasts conservatism with alienation.

Conservatives incline to be heavily invested in society and its institutions, even when deeply concerned about their condition and their fate. When these institutions are threatened from the left, conservatives tend to be defensive of them. Even when they are dominated by the left, as so many of our institutions are, conservatives by instinct and reflection tend to argue for reclamation and recovery—for building spaces within these institutions more than for rejection and contempt of them. If our traditional ways of doing things speak to yearnings that arise anew in every generation, then there is always reason to hope for a resurgence of orthodoxy and to work for it.

Alienation denies or rejects the possibility of such resurgence and therefore the importance of working to keep that possibility open. The work of keeping it open is the work that conservatives can often be found doing, particularly outside politics, as in the service of religious missions or of liberal education, among other causes.

Think of academia, the chief bastion of multiculturalism. A conservative would seek to reform it, by pursuing efforts such as Jonathan Haidt’s Heterodox Academy. The more alienated opponent of academia would place little hope in such attempts.

In that regard, I am probably closer to the alienated frame of mind. I doubt that Haidt has enough support among professors born after 1975.

Politics of the future?

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Uri Harris writes,

On the left, appeals to identity and structural oppression have become increasingly mainstream, while on the right, criticisms of these appeals have become similarly popular.

Harris suggests that this is the primary political division going forward, and this places the Intellectual Dark Web squarely on the right. He says it like it’s a bad thing.

Polygenic score for obesity. . .and?

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Coverage of a recent study.

The adults with the highest risk scores weighed on average 13 kilograms more than those with the lowest scores, and they were 25 times as likely to be severely obese, or more than 45 kilograms overweight. “What’s striking is not just the weight,” says Sekar Kathiresan, a cardiologist and geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the study. “If you have a high risk score for obesity, you’re at high risk for heart attack, stroke, diabetes, hypertension, heart failure, and blood clots in the legs.”

And what else? The polygenic score is a result of a statistical fishing expedition. We do not know whether the genes in the score govern physical characteristics, such as metabolism and food preferences, or whether they affect psychological traits, such as conscientiousness. I would be willing to bet that a lot of it is the latter.

If my intuition is correct, then the “obesity score” would predict a lot of other behavioral traits as well. Propensity for getting into financial difficulty. Grades in school. etc.

Question from a reader

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He writes,

I have not been able to find a causal account as to why information failures (particularly with regards to quality) lead to market failures

In textbook economics, a market failure is when the private incentives lead to either too little or too much of a good being produced.

In terms of information, consumers make purchases based on what they can observe. If what they observe is highly correlated with quality, they should do well. But not necessarily otherwise.

Consider a high school student making a college visit. The appearance of the facilities can be observed relatively accurately, but it is not very highly correlated with quality. The quality of classroom instruction cannot be observed so accurately, because the high school student will not sit in on very many classes. But suppose that the quality of classroom instruction is highly correlated with the value that the student gets out of college.

We can predict that colleges will over-spend on the appearance of facilities, because that factors heavily into the decision of the high school student. We can predict that colleges will under-spend on classroom instruction. Market failure.

The public policy response should be to tax college facilities and/or subsidize quality classroom instruction.

I am not offering this as a realistic picture of a market failure in the market for higher education. My point is to answer the reader’s question about connecting information failure to textbook market failure.

Worth re-reading on Internet regulation

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I recently noticed that one of the most favorably-viewed essays of mine on medium is the one about How the Internet Turned Bad. It says many things, including

I compare IETFs with government agencies this way:

— IETFs are staffed by part-time or limited-term volunteers, whose compensation comes from their regular employers (universities, corporations, government agencies). Agencies are staffed by full-time permanent employees, using taxpayer dollars.

— IETFs solve the problems that they work on. Agencies perpetuate the problems that they work on.

— A particular group of engineers in an IETF disbands once it has solved its problem. An agency never disbands.

When I hear calls for government regulation of the Internet, to me that sounds like a step backward. The IETF approach to regulation seems much better than the agency approach.

The whole essay is worth a re-read.