Eric Kaufmann writes,

between a fifth and a half of academics would discriminate against the Right in grants, papers, or promotion bids. On a four-person panel, this means that the likelihood of a conservative encountering at least one biased assessor is pushing toward certainty.

The essay is a useful attempt to document the problem. Kaufmann’s solution consisting of more government intervention, strikes me as a bad idea in the current environment. The Democrats will not want to intervene, and the Republicans will only provoke backlash from the institutions if they intervene.

I look at it this way. The intimidators are anti-intellectual, and they deserve low status. Conservative intellectuals deserve higher status. Our best hope is that the we achieve cultural change that gives people the status they deserve.

Ross Douthat writes,

So American virtualism, Maçaes might reasonably argue, has actually done a better job of mastering the coronavirus challenge than European realism. Yes, the American tendency to make war on reality can look ridiculous and embarrassing, it can produce all kinds of weird partisan myths and extreme behaviors … but it’s also connected to greater optimism and wider imaginative horizons, both of which have contributed to America’s unfinished but faster-than-expected escape from the coronavirus era.

I think this is a plausible interpretation of recent events. But that’s as far as I can go with Maçaes, because merely proving that America is less decadent than Europe doesn’t prove that we’re on the cusp of a general American renaissance. In the particular case of the Covid vaccines, yes, our war on reality cashed out in actual real-world solutions to the pandemic. But I don’t see that achievement necessarily being duplicated in other realms where virtualism holds sway. What I see instead, relative to the American past, is a consistent failure to make the leap back to reality, to apply the fantasy to the world as it exists, in a way that succeeds in leaving an undeniable alteration, a fundamental mark.

This probably qualifies as a steel-manning. But the season has not started.

Scott Alexander writes,

The best we can hope for is people with a good win-loss record. But how do you measure win-loss record? Lots of people worked on this (especially Philip Tetlock) and we ended up with the kind of probabilistic predictions a lot of people use now.

He points to a paywalled substack post by Matt Yglesias which demonstrates thinking in bets. If that post had gone up during the Fantasy Intellectual Teams season, Yglesias would have scored a whole bunch of B’s for his owner.

A reader asks,

How would you encapsulate Martin’s thesis?

1. Starting around 2000, the amount of information on the Internet doubles in a year. If that goes on for ten years, there would have been 420 one thousand times the information in 2010 as in 2000. Even if that number is imprecise (and it has to be imprecise), there is way more information out there than there used to be. The increase is staggering.

2. 20th-century elites and institutions relied on having a much less chaotic and engulfing information environment. Politicians, journalists, and academics now are overwhelmed by: (a) what they don’t know that others do know. Think of citizens using cell phones to cover events sooner and more completely than paid journalists; and (b) by the amount that others know about them that they used to able to keep secret. Think of President Kennedy trying to get away with his sexual escapades today.

3. The elites cannot accept the new reality that there is so much information that they cannot control. They see new competitors as illegitimate (“fake news”) and they blame others for elites’ loss of status and respect.

4. The general public is frustrated by the arrogance of the elites, and they have the means to assemble revolts. This has happened everywhere, from the Arab Spring to the Yellow Vests to the January 6 riot. These revolts have no organization and so they end up not accomplishing much.

5. Society requires authority. But the existing authorities can seemingly do nothing other than hope for a return to the 20th century when they had closer to a monopoly on information. And they seem to be completely incapable of dealing with the digital world. They cannot operate at Internet speed (it takes the bureaucracy too long to react to events) or at Internet scale (the Obamacare web site fiasco).

6. Maybe a new generation of elites and/or institutions will emerge that is more adept at dealing with technology and sufficiently humble to deal with a situation in which information is more dispersed than it was last century.

Michael Muthukrishna wrote,

One key insight from cultural evolution is that our behaviour is rarely a function of causal understanding. Cultural evolution explains how our species creates and thrives in a world too complicated for any of us to understand. For at least the last 50,000 years and probably longer, we have lived in a world of accumulated technology, know-how, and ways of thinking that surpass the abilities of even the smartest among us—cumulative culture. Our lack of causal understanding is masked by an illusion of explanatory depth; we assume we understand and have reasonable causal models for our beliefs, behaviours, and technology. That illusion is shattered only when we’re asked to explain specifics. For example, you may have some sense that you understand: (a) how a flushing toilet works, until you’re asked how the water flushes everything away and returns to the same level. . .All of this is to quickly illustrate that the world is not only complicated, but even more complicated than our psychology allows us to believe. Instead, our beliefs and behaviours are shaped by our incentives and by those around us. We prefer to believe things that align with our self-interest and we internalise the beliefs and copy the behaviours of those who are successful or those who others copy. As this process filters beliefs and behaviours over generations, most people acquire the accumulated package of past successes, and so conforming to the majority also becomes a successful strategy. [links omitted]

. . .In the cacophony of opinions on the COVID-19 crisis, how do people deploy their many social learning strategies to decide whom to listen to? How do we identify who has relevant expertise if we’re listening to experts at all? Are the learning strategies themselves learned? What is the role of trust, costly and sincerity displays? And how does a psychology evolved for vicarious information acquisition with little direct access to the truth, nor sufficient causal models, interact with a world in which evidence is easily manufactured and electronically disseminated? How do we decide which fact checkers to trust and how do we know what is and isn’t so?[again, links omitted]

I put it this way: We engage in behaviors and hold beliefs without understanding why we behave the way we behave or why we believe what we believe. This is not a failure of rationality. It is the human condition.

Cultures are preserved because humans are copiers. Cultures differ because we do not all copy the same people. Cultures evolve because copying is imperfect, people innovate, and changes in the competitive environment cause some cultural practices to become extinct and others to survive.

I recommend gorging yourself on Muthukrishna. My first taste was on The Podcast Browser, who also recommends Muthukrishna talking with The Dissenter.

Of the many links in the essay above, I followed one on the topic of innovation, by Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich.

Our societies and social networks act as collective brains. Individuals connected in collective brains, selectively transmitting and learning information, often well outside their conscious awareness, can produce complex designs without the need for a designer—just as natural selection does in genetic evolution. The processes of cumulative cultural evolution result in technologies and techniques that no single individual could recreate in their lifetime, and do not require its beneficiaries to understand how and why they work ([12]; electronic supplementary material, for further discussion). Such cultural adaptations appear functionally well designed to meet local problems, yet they lack a designer.

. . .By our account, IQ is a measure of access to a population’s stock of know-how, techniques, tools, tricks and so on, that improve abilities, skills and ways of thinking important to success in a WEIRD world. IQ tests are useful as a measure of cultural competence, which may require cultural learning (and there may be differences in this), but not as a universal test of ‘intelligence’ as a generalized abstract problem-solving ability. The Flynn effect (for recent meta-analyses, see [141,142]) describes the steady increase in mean IQ since IQ tests were developed, approximately three points per decade. If taken at face value, then the Flynn effect renders large proportions of previous generations barely functional, but by this account, the Flynn effect becomes a measure of increased mean cultural complexity.

It’s a difficult paper to excerpt. Read the whole thing.