Patrick Collison on life influences

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Patrick Collison says,

There’s a quote about how you end up the average of your five closest friends. I think there’s a very deep truth to that. But if you accept that, then of course who your five closest friends are, choosing that, and we do, though we may not think of it this way, we do choose those people. Like, you are choosing who you are. And of course that’s a bidirectional process where who you want to be is determined by who you’re around, which determines who you want to be around, and so on.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. There is a lot of interesting material, and I may have another post on it.

As I read this portion of the interview, Collison is saying that your personality is correlated with that of your peers, but we have to be agnostic about causality. Maybe we could improve our personality by choosing better peers, or maybe we just select peers that fit with an innate personality.

My reaction was to try to relate it to my own life.

1. Right now, I don’t have five close friends. (Note: reading Jonathan Rauch’s new book, this is not so unusual for old people, who tend to trim their relationships.) But at my age, if you want to look for influences on my personality, presumably you would want to look back at my friends when I was younger.

2. I see my life as very compartmentalized. One reason I don’t have close friends now is that my worlds don’t overlap. The people who read my books don’t know that I go Israeli dancing three nights a week, and the people who I dance with have not read any of my books. My social friends and my intellectual friends would not get along with one another.

3. Also, the time periods of my life have been very different. Typically, someone matters to me very intensely for a few years, but hardly at all apart from that. In the late 1990s, I talked with my main business partner several times a day. Now we communicate about once a year. If you don’t count family members, it is hard to think of anyone I have been in close touch with for as long as ten years. My “best” long-term friend is someone I speak with for an average of about an hour a month.

4. If I were to say that my intellectual life is an average of other people, I would list my father (a political science professor), Bernie Saffran (who was an economics professor at Swarthmore), and Russ Roberts. All three rank much higher in wisdom than their place in the academic hierarchy would indicate. All I would describe as much more open-minded, capable of lifelong learning, and able to change their mind more than typical academics. In general, I have found that people in business (such as Collison) are much more oriented toward learning than are academics. Many professors by age 30 have narrowed their intellectual world to a few peers that operate within their narrow sub-field. In business, you fail if you do that.

But in other aspects of my life I wish I were closer to an average of: my wife (and dance partner), who is constantly asking herself how she ought to act and trying to follow that; Dave, a former Freddie Mac colleague who has the same traits; and dancers with whom I have no personal connection but who on the dance floor can be inspiring, natural, balletic, athletic, regal.

At all points in my life, the key people in my life have been very high in conscientiousness. Compared with others around them, they have been far more averse to recreational drugs or sexual adventures. You might accuse them of being inhibited. They are very conservative with personal finances and could live on much less than what they have. They would never allow career ambition to jeopardize family cohesion. They have a strong sense of agency–they would never celebrate victimhood. (In new-age jargon, they are “at cause” as opposed to “at effect.”)

Polling illustrates three-axes model

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Matt Grossman writes,

Liberals perceive more racism and sexism than racial minorities and women say they experience. Experiments show that liberals perceive tests where men or whites perform better as less credible than equivalent tests showing women or minorities doing better, even though conservatives rate them equally credible. Liberals are thus predisposed to believe discrimination is the cause of disadvantaged group disparities.

Pointer from a reader, who saw this as saying that progressives are inclined to the oppressor-oppressed axis. The overall article is somewhat rambling and indecisive. For me, the most interesting point is that progressive academics design surveys that with questions that they think measure people’s sensitivity to oppression when conservatives interpret those surveys in terms of civilization vs. barbarism. This survey results are meaningful, but the survey-takers provide biased interpretations. When a conservative says that racism is not the main problem holding back minorities, the progressive academics say that the conservative is showing “racial resentment.’

De-politicize college?

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Six essays can be found here. For example, Tom Lindsay writes,

On both constitutional and prudential grounds, what is required to depoliticize our schools are measures that reduce the federal role in higher education.

Think of higher education as a church, and Federal government involvement in higher education as joining church and state.

Debra Mashek, of the Heterodox Academy (Jonathan Haidt’s project), writes,

In a world as complex as ours, it is unlikely that any one person holds a full and accurate understanding of problems, much less solutions. Intellectual humility compels us to at least question the completeness of our understanding while curiosity compels us to seek out and to try to understand the views of others. Resilience, in turn, helps individuals depersonalize difference. Resilient individuals are well-practiced at questioning and reframing their initial reactions to critique and challenge, and finding ways to read people and their actions with generosity and compassion.

It sounds to me like we should raise the status of the Intellectual Dark Web and lower the status of politically active professors.

Comments on the Intellectual Dark Web

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There were several interesting ones, starting with this.

In fact they are Recusants : “a person who refuses to submit to an authority or to comply with a regulation.” Most notably Catholics in England who refused to attend Anglican services. Not perfect, but more apt than IDW.

And then this.

The deep problem here is that to the extent it’s possible to change anyone’s minds about any moral, political, or ideological belief, it almost never happens by persuasion via rational arguments, and instead social pressures and tactics which exploit instincts of social psychology are immensely more powerful. Any society in which power and policy depends on opinion, and in which one is free to use these tactics to try and change opinion, will inevitably see the health of its intellectual life and discussions succumb to the pathology generated by these incentives.

And also this.

Paul Gottfried’s essay “Why today’s conservatives are useless debaters” is worth reading also. He goes back to Max Weber and says we must chose between “Politics as a Calling” and “Science as a Calling.” In that regard, we do have a Cathedral sort of situation in which the cathedral tells us what we are supposed to believe. Gottfried says “Big Conservativism” has hobbled itself by “driving out heretics, many of whom have been rhetorically gifted deviationists, since the 1980s and in some cases since the 1950s.”

I wonder if there is a significant bonding role in a group that comes from having dogmatic beliefs. A belief like “1 + 1 = 2” or “the sun rises in the East” has no bonding effect, because you cannot find a group of non-believers to oppose. But something that requires dogmatic belief allows you to identify and stigmatize the recusants.

I think of the IDW as bonding over old-fashioned empiricism. Our dogma is that we do not accept other people’s dogmas.

Thoughts on the need for governance

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A commenter writes,

I still believe the Poli Sci theory that if the government can not govern all parts of society that other institutions will step in and perform the governing.

My first thought is “Bring it on!” In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the U.S. government has collapsed into a pathetic joke, and territories all over the world are governed privately. I call this the “snow crash scenario.” It is dystopian in the novel, but not in my mind.

My second thought is that conservatives make the converse point that when the central government steps in, this undermines civil society and local government.

I think that the point that governance is needed from some institution is absolutely correct. But the institution does not have to be a corporate entity. It can be a standards-setting body, or a set of common-law precedents, or a popular religion, or a set of norms enforced in a decentralized manner by people who are passionate about those norms.

So what we might call the “law of conservation of governance” likely holds. Where governance is needed, what government fails to supply will be supplied by other institutions.

It is also worth thinking about what determines the need for governance. My thoughts are these:

1. Population density is a factor.

2. Interdependence is a factor. That gets back to the Alchian-Demsetz theory of the firm.

3. Complexity is a factor. The Internet requires a lot of governance. Fortunately, the Internet Engineering Task Forces handle the plumbing issues. Unfortunately, many people look to Facebook to govern their attention. I think you are better off using blogs for that purpose.

Scott Alexander on the process of arguing

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He offers this pyramid:

He writes,

If you’re intelligent, decent, and philosophically sophisticated, you can avoid everything below the higher dotted line. Everything below that is either a show or some form of mistake; everything above it is impossible to avoid no matter how great you are.

I would emphasize this point. Don’t bother responding against arguments below the higher dotted line. And certainly don’t endorse such arguments.

I think of Russ Roberts, who often is trying to argue above the higher dotted line and gets hit by people who instead argue below the lower dotted line.

The Internet in 1997

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I finished reading Wendy M. Grossman’s Net Wars, which came out in 1997. The specific examples are no longer interesting, but the larger issues seem rather current. A couple of interesting excerpts:

p. 7:

I’d argue instead that what makes a community is a mark of difference between the community members and the rest of the world and, more importantly, an external threat, real or imagined.

…The Net started like that, as a loose group of people who all used computers but knew that other people were desperately bored by them.

p. 160:

an interesting battle lies ahead between two net.obsessions: freedom of information and privacy. Commercial interests don’t want to give their information away; if advertising is going to pay all those costs, then Net users must be prepared to give up their demographic secrets. If users want privacy and anonymity, they may have to pay extra for it.

City inhabitants as amenities

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Nick Rowe writes,

People like crowding, so move towards the more crowded location, until everyone lives in the same location.

You have to read the whole post. He is not claiming that people like crowding, but if they do want to be around more people, then they will tend toward a single city.

My thinking is a bit more nuanced, but it pushes in a similar direction. I think that to some extent other people are amenities. For me, having enough folk dancers in an area is an important amenity. If you have young children, then other people with young children are important amenities. If you like pro sports, then having other sports fan in an area is an important amenity–otherwise, there won’t be local pro sports teams. If you like bluegrass music, then other bluegrass music fans become an important amenity. You get the idea.

In general, the more people an area has, the more likely you will find the people-as-amenities that you are looking for. So that is one factor in creating cities that are in some sense larger than they need to be. Of course, at some point, the negative externalities of crowding start to kick in. That is why we don’t all move to one big city.

IDW discovered by NYT

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Bari Weiss writes,

First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.

I wish that her piece had honed in more closely on some basic questions:

1. Is the Intellectual Dark Web important?

2. If so, why?

3. Why does it seem to fit the format of long-form YouTube videos and podcasts?

I see the IDW as an attempt to model dignified, open-minded discussions. Perhaps the answer to (3) is that this goal is better achieved in long-form conversations or lectures than tweets or Facebook posts.

Really, the principles of good intellectual debate are not that obscure. Just make arguments as if you were trying to change the mind of a reasonable person on the other side. I believe that the reason that we don’t observe much of this is that most people are trying to raise their status within their own tribe rather than engage in reasoned discourse. It’s sad that reasoned discourse does not raise one’s status as much as put-downs and expressions of outrage.

The current situation is that the left’s bullying tactics have migrated from college campuses to corporations. President Trump answers left-wing bullies in kind, but that does not move us in the direction of dignified, open-minded discussions. I think that the effort of the IDW is worthwhile, but I am pessimistic that we will see an improvement in the quality of intellectual debate overall.

Yuval Levin on Jonah Goldberg’s latest book

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Levin writes,

And ingratitude, he argues, is the spirit of our age, on the left and right alike. This is why the task of restoration must be a labor of love, and why its character must be fundamentally intellectual. Taking up the terms of Deirdre McCloskey, Goldberg suggests that we can protect the Miracle only by making the case for it. We are essentially called to the task of argument. “Our civilization, like every civilization, is a conversation,” he suggests. “Therefore the demise of our civilization is only inevitable if the people saying and arguing the right things stop talking.”

Read the whole review. I, too, have written a review, but it will not appear for at least several weeks.

I think that if Goldberg wanted to recycle a book title, instead of Suicide of the West he should have picked Civilization and its Discontents. He sees our civilization as threatened by those who are ungrateful and resentful toward the institutions that have brought us prosperity and individual freedom.