Can the academy be saved? part one

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Can it be restored as a home of free speech and free inquiry? The Open Mind conference, put on by Heterodox Academy, says yes. At the very least, I would recommend watching the video of the wrap-up session with Jonathan Haidt and Deb Mashek.

I think that the very name “heterodox” is a give-away that their prospects or success may be slim.

I have liked Wendy Kaminer for many years, ever since I read I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional. She recently had an op-ed on the ideological turn of the ACLU. In her panel remarks at the conference, she indicates that she is worried that she is part of a generation of liberals who is aging out of the system, to be replaced by a generation that has grown up to expect and embrace speech codes. I fear that on campus, demographics is destiny. The diversity uber alles crowd is going to drive out the truth-seeking uber alles crowd. The HxA’ers may not realize it, but they could just turn out to be a tenured version of the IDW.

Null hypothesis watch

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Several readers spotted a story on the results of a Bill Gates initiative to improve teaching. The null hypothesis won.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/06/29/bill-gates-spent-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-to-improve-teaching-new-report-says-it-was-a-bust/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e24c304f9896

Thoughts on tribalism

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from Jonah Goldberg.

one reason I think a global sense of ethical or tribal solidarity is very difficult to achieve is that one of the key ingredients of tribal solidarity is opposition to an “other.” Global religions still define themselves — in practical terms — as opposed to some other religious view or group. Johnson’s point about cosmopolitanism is a good one, but it overlooks the fact that many of the cosmopolitans, or “globalists,” very much act like a tribe pitted against what they consider to be the populist rubes beneath them. As Ross Douthat notes, the cosmopolitans are a tribe, too.

He is not the first person to make these points. Nor will he be the last. The essay and the several of the links are worth your time.

Further (final?) thoughts on Pollan

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Concerning his recent book, How to Change Your Mind, which touts the value and potential of psychedelics.

As I wrote earlier, I am not convinced that taking a trip inside your head is a useful way to expand your mind. Think of our culture as something like a vast archaeological mound. When they are excavating a site where humans have lived for thousands of years, you know how at the top layer they find the artifacts of the most recent inhabitants, and below that are those of inhabitants from a couple hundred years before, and so on, all the way down?

Well, all of humanity has this enormous mound. It’s unfathomably big, and getting bigger all the time (think of all the YouTube videos that are being posted while you’re reading this.)

There are so many ways to explore the mound. You could be like Tyler, and travel the world, reading books, walking through various cities and villages, sampling the street food. Or you could develop deep knowledge about a sport or a craft.

With all those ways to delve into the mound and explore it, I can’t get excited about using a drug that takes some of your sensory experiences and memories and plays them back to you in “shuffle” mode.

As for searching for meaning, I have a joke. There are people who struggle with the existential problems of finding purpose and meaning in their lives. We can label them “seekers.” There are other people for whom such problems are not salient. We can label them “grandparents.”

The grandparents that I know seem to have found peace of mind. There is something very calming about having descendants that you can look forward to watching and maybe guiding a bit as they find their way in the world.

There seems to be a trend toward greater social anxiety and more people expressing political hostility. There could be many reasons for this, but I wonder if part of it is a decline in the proportion of people who are counting on grandchildren.

What is post-modernism?

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Daniel Klein writes,

I find Peterson, Saad, Dennis Prager, and other PoMo-bashers stimulating, charismatic, often inspiring. I share a classical liberal political outlook. But in making sense of challenges facing liberalism, the PoMo bashing is misleading. It dumbs down understanding of the challenges. By positing a demon that believes an absurdity (“no interpretation better than another”), PoMo-bashing gives easy hope of correcting the belief and undoing the demon.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Klein cites Deirdre McCloskey, who is a long-time opponent of logical positivism and hence sympathetic to post-modernism.

Let me try to take a position between two extremes. The extremes are:

1. Truth is truth. It can be judged impersonally, using logic and empirical methods. Decoupling, if you will.

2. Truth is relative. It can be judged from the perspective of the individual’s location in social space. “As an African-American woman, my reality is that. . .”

One problem with (1) is that it denies the reality that emotions and social circumstances do affect people’s beliefs. Another problem with (1) is that it does not include a category (other than dogma) for beliefs that cannot be evaluated scientifically. It risks biasing you toward a faith that “social science” can be used to rationally construct human affairs. I think that these concerns, particularly the last one, incline McCloskey and Klein to have some sympathy with post-modernism.

One problem with (2) is that it is overly nihilistic. There are plenty of objective truths. Another problem is that it is too power-conscious. People abuse it to try to exercise power in conversations where truth-seeking, not power-seeking, ought to be the nature of the discussion.

In general, when a label is deployed as a boo-word, it has lost its usefulness. “Neoliberalism” falls into that category. It seems that “post-modernism” does, also.

Unloading on Posner and Weyl

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Greg Ip writes,

Messrs. Posner and Weyl argue these companies’ advertising-based businesses elevate quantity over quality. Content on Netflix Inc., which is subscription based, is a lot better than videos on YouTube, and as a result earns about 10 times as much per minute per viewer. If digital companies treated users as employees and paid them, it would improve the quality of online content while massively boosting labor income.

Ip gives favorable coverage of their book Radical Markets. David Henderson’s review is more mixed. I was sent a review copy, and I had a negative reaction, which I limited to one relatively minor criticism. Ordinarily, I try to avoid reviewing a book that I hate, but when it receives a lot of favorable coverage I become less inhibited. It’s time to unload on this one.

1. The writing is just atrocious. They make it difficult to extract the ideas from the fluff and rhetoric.

2. The title, Radical Markets, is a 180-degrees head-fake. What they actually advocate is radical despotism. That is, rather than try to improve markets by going out as entrepreneurs and doing things better, they play the role of fantasy despot. They want to back their experimental notions not with “skin-in-the-game” entrepreneurship but with state power.

3. For example, if Weyl and Posner think that social media would be better if companies paid users for data, then they should start a social media company that operates that way. If their intuition is correct, then this will be more efficient than the way that Facebook and Google operate, and the new competitor will eventually come out the winner.

4. In fact, my intuition is the opposite. I think that social media would be improved if the users paid the companies. But when I articulated that idea, I did so in an essay entitled Let’s Compete with Facebook. I explicitly rejected government intervention. In fact, the main purpose of the essay was to argue against fantasy despotism.

If I had anything nice I could say about Radical Markets, I would. But I haven’t felt so compelled to unload on a book since Phishing for Phools.

The Night of Two Dreams

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Here, I am going to give my views on (a) how the conscious mind and the unconscious mind relate; and (b) the state of the economy today and how it got there. I am going to choose a roundabout approach, based on two dreams. I had these dreams and remembered them while I was in the middle of reading Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your mind. The dreams occurred the night after I wrote the previous post. As of this writing, I am somewhat farther along in the book, but still not finished. My theory of dreams is that they allow the unconscious mind to play with stuff that they have picked up during the day. Continue reading →

Michael Pollan on psychedelics

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Russ Roberts recently interviewed Pollan.

I will have finished the book by the time this post goes up. Meanwhile, the WSJ reviews an autobiography of the late John Perry Barlow. The review includes,

Barlow writes that his first acid trip, in 1965, was possibly the most important experience he ever had. “I went someplace overwhelmingly different that night and, to a large extent, I have stayed there throughout the rest of my life.”

According to Pollan, the research on psychedelics is consistent with this. He quotes researcher Roland Griffiths as saying that if you do a controlled experiment in which the experimental group receives a psychedelic, “70 percent will say they have had one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives.” Pollan also mentions Barlow as one of the notable people who took LSD during the 1960’s phase of research. But Pollan is most interested in the latest phase, which began in the 1990s.

Pollan also quotes a skeptic, Paul McHugh, who wrote that what trippers experience “are sadly familiar symptoms doctors are called to treat in hospitals every day.” The terms are “temporary psychosis” or “delirium.”

My cynical take is that if you have bad memories of a dissociated state, it is temporary psychosis, and if you have exalted memories, it is psychedelic. I’ve talked before about my personal Minsky cycle. I can recall the “Ponzi phase” culminating in temporary psychosis, and my memories of that could not be worse. I have no desire to try to induce anything like it by taking a drug.

My wife has a saying, “I prefer my bike stationary.” That is, she is content to ride a stationary bike in the gym, where she does not have to deal with the many obstacles that could cause her to fall off a bike while riding outside. Similarly, I will say that I prefer my psychedelic experiences vicarious. If someone else wants to explore “higher consciousness,” that’s fine for them. I’ll stick with ordinary consciousness as long as I have a choice.