Michael Shermer on free speech

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He writes,

Flynn asks rhetorically, “Does academia really want to ally itself with those who reserve free discussion to Philosopher Kings, and create dogmas to deaden the minds of all others?” The answer for many academics, I’m sorry to say, is a resounding yes. They see themselves as Philosopher Kings who know what is best for the masses, whom they believe are incapable of thinking as deeply as themselves.

This narcissistic arrogance goes a long way to explaining the recent and disturbing trend on college campuses to censor unwanted speech and thought (yes, thought crimes!), well documented by Greg Lukianoff, President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), in his 2014 booklet Freedom From Speech.11 Readers may recall the wave of ‘disinvitations’ at universities who invited controversial (or simply interesting) speakers to enlighten their students, only to disinvite them after waves of protest from some students and faculty that the speakers’ words might offend. FIRE has documented 257 such incidents since 2000, 111 of which were successful in preventing the invited speakers from delivering their speeches (75 disinvitations, 20 speaker withdrawals, and 16 ‘heckler’s vetoes’ in which student hecklers shouted down the speakers or chased them off-stage).

The whole essay is a statement of a point of view that is hard-core truth for libertarians and seems clearly correct to the IDW but which seems to be in danger on college campuses.

Pointer from Charles Chu.

The Disputation of Vancouver

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As this is being written, Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris were supposed to have a discussion of religion at a theater in Vancouver the nights of June 23rd and 24th. This post is going up the following day.

The Disputation of Barcelona took place about 750 years ago. My guess is that it’s been quite a while since we’ve had a disputation. The Peterson-Harris battle is so highly anticipated that tickets cost a fortune. And it may have been sold out!

I find this very encouraging. I would much rather see people going for this than reading newspaper columns and twitter feeds.

Although Harris is not a fan of what he sees as the baggage of religion, he is a fan of psychedelics and altered states of consciousness. Peterson is a fan of Jungian views of a sort of universal unconscious.

My own view is that the value of insights that we might get from altered states of consciousness is low and getting lower.

Let me start with a metaphor in which we have a physical layer, an operating system, and an application layer. So when you eat, your digestive system is the physical layer. Your cravings and your inclination to enjoy sugar and fat come from the operating system, which is your brain as shaped by evolution and your particular genetic inheritance. But at the application layer–how you find food, how your food is prepared, what you choose to eat, and so on–that is all cultural. You copy others, you learn from others, you experiment within the context of the people and technology around you.

I am not saying that this is a scientifically useful metaphor. But I use it to point out that most of what we are is cultural. We come into the world knowing nothing at all about pizza or french fries or sushi. Over many generations, humans have built up this vast storehouse of cultural paraphernalia–buildings, equipment, social norms, organizations, books, electronic devices, art, music, dance, sports, science. We put tremendous effort into communicating with one another, teaching with one another, and exchanging with one another in order to share access to the contents of this vast cultural supermarket.

Is there stuff sitting in altered states of consciousness that we can’t find in the rest of our cultural supermarket? Is that stuff really so important that we should devote a lot of our lives to exploring it through Biblical stories or Buddhist meditation or psychedelics? I am not dismissing that such exploration is worthless, just questioning whether it is of great value to more than a few people.

I understand that people want there to be meaning in their lives. But you don’t necessarily need altered states of consciousness to find meaning. You can find meaning from caring–about family, friends, art, science, sports, philosophy, religion, politics, nature, you name it. My guess is that the more you care about what you are close to, like your family, and the less you try to derive meaning from caring about distant phenomena, like celebrities or politics, the better off all of us are.

Cautious vs. disruptive

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The WSJ reports that Atul Gawande is to head the Amazon-Berkshire-Morgan health venture.

In addition to running the new venture, Dr. Gawande will continue to practice surgery and keep his position as a professor at Harvard, as well as retain a role at Ariadne Labs as chairman, according to Ariadne Labs.

I smell a nothingburger. You don’t disrupt an industry with a part-time CEO whose claim to fame as a health care reformer is advocating that doctors use checklists.

On the same day, Scott Alexander writes,

Cheap-O Psychiatry wouldn’t have an office, because offices cost money. You would Skype, from your house to mine. It wouldn’t have a receptionist, because receptionists cost money. You would book a slot in my Google Calendar. It wouldn’t have a billing department, because billing departments cost money. You would PayPal me the cost of the appointment afterwards

If you want political cover, you pick Gawande, who is revered by all. If you want to have an impact, you pick someone like Scott Alexander.

Kling on post-industrial economics

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The opening paragraph of my essay on post-industrial economics.

Over the past several decades, our economy has come to be driven less by tangible inputs and outputs and more by intangible factors. As workers and consumers, we have become much more specialized than was the case 150 years ago, when the conceptual framework of modern economics was developed. Yet most mainstream economists have not properly acknowledged this transformation, remaining committed to models and concepts that served to explain an economy that no longer exists. Understanding the world we now inhabit will require letting go of many established methods, and acknowledging the complexity of an economy that responds to new, and still evolving, strategies and incentives.

Handle is skeptical of Yimbyism

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He writes,

Right now Libertarians and some Progressives are on a pro-density “just build more housing” kick, and tend to dismiss and disparage the motives of local residents who try hard to stop it. What I’ve tried to point out is that a legitimate reason for protest is the fact that our system government – especially in big winner city centers – is simply no longer capable of “preserving infrastructural adequacy” let alone at anything approaching reasonable costs and timescales.

Read the whole comment.

The thing is, Boston is capable of undertaking infrastructure projects. It now has bike lanes galore.

Technology and Autocracy

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Tyler Cowen writes,

the governance technologies and strategies of authoritarian regimes have become much more efficient.

I’m not sure that this holds in general. Venezuela?

I am willing to speculate that right now autocrats have a comparative advantage at staying in power. That is, in a Martin Gurri world, where the public is in revolt in many places (Italy, Germany, the U.S., Iran, various countries in Latin America), it is easier for an official to remain in power if he has the tools to suppress the most challenging forms of opposition.

How did Bangladesh escape from extreme poverty?

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Timothy Taylor is on the case. He quotes from Kaushik Basu:

“One notable point is that the main garment firms in Bangladesh are large—especially compared to those in India, owing largely to different labor laws. All labor markets need regulation. But, in India, the 1947 Industrial Disputes Act imposes heavy restrictions on firms’ ability to contract workers and expand their labor force, ultimately doing more harm than good. The law was enacted a few months before the August 1947 independence of India and Pakistan from British imperial rule, meaning that both new countries inherited it. But Pakistan’s military regime, impatient with trade unions from the region that would become Bangladesh, repealed it in 1958.

“Thus, having been born without the law, Bangladesh offered a better environment for manufacturing firms to achieve economies of scale and create a large number of jobs. And though Bangladesh still needs much stronger regulation to protect workers from occupational hazards, the absence of a law that explicitly curtails labor-market flexibility has been a boon for job creation and manufacturing success.”

De-coupling vs. post-modernism

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Jacob Falcovich writes,

scientists depend on what rationality researcher Keith Stanovich calls “cognitive decoupling.” Decoupling separates an idea from context and personal experience and considers it in the abstract. It is the approach used in the scientific method, when performing thought experiments, and when generalizing principles from individual examples. . .

The contrary mode of thinking sees every argument embedded in a particular context. The context of an idea includes its associations, implications, and the motivations and identities of those who advance it.

Pointer from a commenter. I recommend the entire article.

My thoughts:

1. The “contrary mode of thinking” strikes me as post-modernism.

2. It seems to me that “decouplers” and post-modernists must unavoidably talk past one another. The decoupler thinks that decoupling is necessary for rationality. The post-modernist thinks that decoupling is impossible.

3. This language can be used to re-cast my 2003 essay criticizing Paul Krugman. We might now say that my claim was that economists are trained to decouple, and instead he was doing the opposite.

4. The term “outgroups”in the article is illustrated by a chart in which coastal progressives are the primary outgroup for the Intellectual Dark Web. Of course, since coastal progressives wield the post-modernist cudgel.

5. In fact, I had come to think of the left as always refusing to decouple. But there are those on the left who are ardent decouplers, and they are in the IDW. I suppose that by the same token there must be people who, even though they are on the right, routinely deploy post-modernist arguments.

I still have not finished processing the Falcovich piece, and again I thank the commenter for the pointer. This will not be my last word on the topic.

Ahead (set) of my time?

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Ian Bogost writes,

even though it seems like a small matter — just a wireless headset — the device could fundamentally alter the way people interact with machines, and with one another.

He is talking about the Apple Airpods. It’s another article that to me suggests that we are asymptotically approaching a vision that I proposed in 2001, in an essay I called Headsets.