Category Archives: culture

Martin Gurri watch

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Megan McArdle writes (WaPo, paywalled),

The media’s pronouncements about fighting “misinformation” often sound perilously close to declaring that the common presumptions of a handful of major media outlets should define the bounds of accepted truth for everyone. That’s both arrogant and impossible, and I don’t blame anyone for recoiling. But I do question those who have reacted by casually (and publicly!) suggesting that they’ll use their entrepreneurial mojo to destroy journalism and replace it with something better.

She refers to discussions on Clubhouse. I have observed the same thing. In fact, her description of Clubhouse as like a big conference with lots of panel discussions going on fits with my experience.

In rooms discussing media where tech people are on the panel, the tech people complain about journalists of having abandoned objectivity. In rooms with mainstream media on the panel, the journalists complain about consumer having abandoned tradition news outlets for social media and fake news. I see both sides as trying to click their heels together three times, hoping to be transported back to the 20th century. I want to shake everyone by the collar and make them read Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public, or at least his essay about the NYT.

As an aside, Bret Weinstein seems to have observed more dramatically the militant black-power element that first struck me (Dick Gregory’s Clubhouse).

Also, listen to Heather Heying’s take in the podcast with Bret. I personally place her above Bret in my FITs rankings. Bret reminds me of the story I read about the KC quarterback in the Super Bowl racking up 497 yards behind the line of scrimmage, running back and forth to try to evade defenders. She instead runs straight at you. I would draft her to pick up some W’s.

As another aside, room population size on Clubhouse is a great illustration of an autocatalytic process. The more people who are drawn to a room, the more additional people will be drawn. If you have only a handful of people in the room, you are going to be stuck at a low level. If you have close to 1000, you room will keep growing. That is because of the way the “feed” algorithm works. You get alerted when people you follow are in a room. So if 1000 people are in a room, it is much more likely that one of them is someone I follow than if the room has only 5 people. In addition, other things equal it seems that the algorithm shows rooms in population-size order. So if I am just scrolling through the rooms, the first one I see will be the one with the most people.

I can easily imagine a dynamic where if someone with thousands of followers leaves room A and goes to room B, then room A pretty much empties out and room B fills up. This could be regardless of what the panel discussion is like in room A vs. room B.

Status and power

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Gertjan Steede writes,

status is, first and foremost, something that we claim, give and receive in everyday interaction. As a result, a status hierarchy develops in society and in every group within society. Depending on the group’s activities, that hierarchy could be more or less obvious. It will simultaneously be expressed in all kinds of currency: kindness, power, beauty, skill, daring, money – to name a few. I am claiming status by writing this blog, and if you read it to the end, you are giving me status.

While status is about voluntary acts, power is about everything that people coerce one another into. We use power when we receive status insults, or if we have learned that this is a good way of obtaining what we want.

. . .In fact, we people play the status-power game all our lives. If something “gives us energy”, it means it gives us status. We like those whom we can count on to give status to us. In contrast, we long to give status to those we love. We claim status, by being nice or showing off. The status-power game is our life. We do nothing else.

Read the whole post. I think his concepts of status and power map to the distinction between a prestige hierarchy and a dominance hierarchy that I learned from Joseph Henrich.

The post also supports my intuition that people turn to dominance moves when they cannot attain status through prestige. Regulating other people’s speech is an example.

Rationalist epistemology

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Tom Chivers writes,

According to Paul [Crowley], the thing that distinguishes a cause from a cult is when it becomes taboo to criticise the cult.

From The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy, p. 191

This leads to the following train of thought.

1. Good thinkers engage with ideas that question their beliefs. Bad thinkers instead engage in emotional blackmail against those who would question their beliefs.

2. Of course (1) is an instance of emotional blackmail. The terms “good” and “bad” are emotionally loaded. This is reminiscent of Quine’s point that the claim that “propositions that cannot be tested against logic or observation are dogma” is itself a dogma. I am willing to say that “there is one example of emotional blackmail that is acceptable, and that is the insinuation that it is bad to otherwise use emotional blackmail.”

3. I am not against emotions. You should pay attention to your emotions and choose an appropriate response. Many years ago, I was playing a game in an Othello tournament and noticed myself feeling frustrated that the game was not quickly resolving itself in my favor. Your natural reaction is to become impatient. But instead you need to do the opposite. I noticed my emotions, stopped, thought a long time, and made a course-correcting move.

4. More deeply, I do not believe that we can rationally calculate our daily lives. This point is expressed very well by Moshe Koppel in his book Judaism Straight Up. You can find out more about the book here or here, although I don’t think either article gets quite to the heart of what Koppel is saying.

The way I put it is this: 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.

5. If I were asked to reduce the criteria for a fantasy intellectual to just one, it would be something like “the ability to constructively deal with criticism of one’s beliefs.” Part of doing that is anticipating what a critic might say.

6. Unfortunately, colleges nowadays seem to teach the opposite. Countering criticism with rational arguments seems to be “out,” and emotional blackmail seems to be “in.”

On racism and racial disparities

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1. Glenn Loury writes,

Anti-racism advocates, in effect, are daring you to notice that some groups send their children to elite colleges and universities in outsized numbers compared to other groups due to the fact that their academic preparation is magnitudes higher and better and finer. They are daring you to declare such excellence to be an admirable achievement. One isn’t born knowing these things. One acquires such intellectual mastery through effort. Why are some youngsters acquiring these skills and others not? That is a very deep and interesting question, one which I am quite prepared to entertain. But the simple retort, “racism”, is laughable—as if such disparities have nothing to do with behavior, with cultural patterns, with what peer groups value, with how people spend their time, with what they identify as being critical to their own self-respect. Anyone actually believing such nonsense is a fool, I maintain.

Pretty much every paragraph in the essay is as powerful as that.

This essay needs to escape the confines of Quillette and find its way to readers of the NYT and into schools of education.

Or is that hopeless?

2. John McWhorter writes,

Of a hundred fundamentalist Christians, how many do you suppose could be convinced via argument to become atheists? There is no reason that the number of people who can be talked out of the Third Wave Antiracism religion is any higher. As such, our concern must be how to continue with genuine progress in spite of this ideology. How do we work around it? How do we insulate people with good ideas from the influence of the Third Wave Antiracists’ liturgical concerns? How do we hold them off from influencing the education of our young people any more than they already have?

My interest is not “How do we get through to these people?” We cannot, at least not enough of them to matter. The question is “How can we can live graciously among them?” We seek change in the world, but for the duration will have to do so while encountering bearers of a gospel, itching to smoke out heretics, and ready on a moment’s notice to tar us as moral perverts.

Of all the essays I have read about the new anti-racism, McWhorter’s is my current favorite.

The masculine/feminine dimension in culture

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The late Geert Hofstede wrote,

Masculinity describes a society in which emotional gender roles are clearly distinct – men are supposed to be assertive, tough and focused on material success, women are supposed to be more modest, tender and concerned with the quality of life – versus Femininity, a society in which emotional gender roles overlap – both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life . . .The Masculinity/Femininity dimension is the only one of the four in which gender affects the scores: women on average score higher in Femininity than men

Lotta Stern pointed me to Hofstede’s work as relevant to my thoughts on emasculated culture. His work seems fascinating, and all of his cultural dimensions appear to be relevant to my distinction between the older culture and the newer culture. Here is his Wikipedia entry. Here is his web site, now maintained by Hofstede the younger.

Stern herself has written,

These differences between men and women in competitiveness, personality, IQ, and preferences are common findings in some parts of sociology and in neighboring fields. All of them are reported as stable results over time and contexts. Yet in sociological studies of labor market differences between men and women, they are ignored.

She points out that one can have a libertarian feminism that supports equal rights and opportunity for women without embracing the view that all inequalities in labor market outcomes between men and women ought to be eliminated.

Academic corruption 2: Emasculated culture

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Saturday summers, when I was a kid
We’d run to the schoolyard, here’s what we did
Pick out the captains, choose up the teams
It was always a measure of my self-esteem
Cause the fastest, the strongest, played shortstop and first. . .

“Right Field,” Willy Welch (popularized by Peter, Paul and Mary)

I enjoyed this podcast with Joyce Benenson, about her book, Warriers and Worriers. She and Roy Baumeister are the rare social scientists who see that (a) men and women differ on average in their behavioral tendencies and (b) male tendencies are not all bad.

Her book is grounded in observations of young boys and girls. My memories of my boyhood align perfectly with her picture of boys, and with the song lyrics above. We played team sports without supervision, put a lot of effort into setting rules, and competed to demonstrate skill. When we weren’t playing sports, we imagined ourselves fighting the “bad guys,” either in the Old West or in World War II.

One of her ideas is that men have a social strategy that works well in war: organize unrelated males, fight other groups overtly according to rules, then reconcile after battle. Women have a social strategy that works well for protecting their individual health and the health of their children: emphasize safety, covertly undermine the status of unrelated females, and exclude rivals rather than reconcile with them.

This leads me to speculate on the consequences of adding a lot of women to formerly male domains. Over the past several decades, a number of important institutions that were formerly almost exclusively male now include many women: academia, journalism, politics, and management positions in organizations. These institutions increasingly are discarding the values that sustained them when the female presence was less.

1. The older culture saw differential rewards as just when based on performance. The newer culture sees differential rewards as unjust.

2. The older culture sought people who demonstrate the most competence. The newer culture seeks to nurture those who are at a disadvantage.

3. The older culture admires those who seek to stand out. The newer culture disdains such people.

4. The older culture uses proportional punishment that is predictable based on known rules. The newer culture suddenly turns against a target and permanently banishes the alleged violator, based on the latest moral fashions.

5. The older culture valued open debate. The newer culture seeks to curtail speech it regards as dangerous.

6. The older culture saw liberty as essential to a good society. The newer culture sees conformity as essential to a good society.

7. The older culture was oriented toward achievement. The newer culture is oriented toward safety. Hence, we cannot complete major construction projects, like bridges, as efficiently as we used to.

I think that in each case, the older culture was consistent with male tendencies (what Benenson calls “warriors”); the newer culture is consistent with female tendencies (what she calls “worriers”). Keep in mind that men can have worrier personalities and women can have warrior personalities, but those are not the norm.

Overall, we have made institutions harder for warriors to navigate. College no longer helps men to make the transition to adulthood. It keeps them sheltered and controlled, and after graduation they end up living with their parents.

Why did opening up opportunities for women lead to this outcome? One can imagine other outcomes. Perhaps women would have assimilated into the male culture, adopting some male tendencies in the process. Perhaps women and men would have retained their different behavioral tendencies but agreed to accommodate one another.

Instead, both men and women seem to have agreed that a purge of male tendencies is in order. Some women scorn male values as tools of oppression, and most men would rather accommodate this view than voice disagreement.

I note that the readership of this blog appears to be overwhelmingly to be male, at least based on those who leave comments. Note also that this is the long-postponed “cancel-bait” post.

Cancellation bets

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Bryan Caplan writes,

I bet Todd Proebsting $50 at even odds that I will NOT be “clearly mistreated” by George Mason University before January 1, 2031.

I think that the chances that the Woke mob will come for Bryan are pretty low, because he is under their radar. So at even odds I think he has once again made a bet he is likely to win. And I don’t think that extending the date out to 2031 helps Proebsting’s chances very much.

The Woke Tyranny train is moving very rapidly. I think that within two or three years the Woke mob will either have trampled its opposition or started to fade away. Completely trampling the opposition means that it is able to inflict what Bryan would call clear mistreatment on Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, Peter Thiel, and Ross Douthat. I would not bet on that at this point. A better bet would be that there will be clear mistreatment of at least one of the them or one of the following between now and January 1, 2023: Coleman Hughes, Tyler Cowen, Megan McArdle, Joseph Henrich, John Cochrane, Ezra Klein.

Dick Gregory’s Clubhouse

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I experienced an odd juxtaposition late last month. I started reading Shelby Steele’s White Guilt, and I used the hip new audio-only social media app Clubhouse for the first time.

Steele writes about going to hear Dick Gregory in 1967. The young Steele was totally captivated by Gregory’s hip, Marxist black power rhetoric. But years later Steele came to view as harmful what he saw as the exploitation of white guilt over slavery and segregation.

The first “room” I went into in Clubhouse had at least 100 listeners in it, mostly African-American. The speaker was a soft-spoken but supremely self-confident black woman, who resembled an updated version of Dick Gregory. Her theme was that after the Civil War, Reconstruction failed to transform the former Confederacy, and that after the election and the Capitol riot we must not make the same mistake again. I assume that the audience found her captivating, while I found her quite frightening. She showed no recognition of anyone’s humanity. Instead her world view seems to be that it is imperative for the Woke to stifle the un-Woke. Probably if she could have her way, everyone who is to the right of Ibram X. Kendi on race would be treated as a domestic terrorist.

I remember when Medium was the hip new platform a few years ago. I saw it degenerate into an echo chamber for narrow-minded, self-righteous young progressives. I get the sense that Clubhouse is starting out even more left-dominant than Medium or Twitter.

The timing for launching Clubhouse is perfect. With the pandemic, people need something to do. And young people are particularly restless and in need of social interaction. A lot of profile photos show generous cleavage.

The question for Zoom or Clubhouse is what happens to demand once the pandemic is behind us. In six months, even though there will be more people receptive to video conferencing than there were before the pandemic, a lot of folks will be happy if they never look at heads in squares again. Clubhouse will have less time to establish its value before we are back to meeting in person. It may have difficulty expanding beyond its current user base.

Is the resistance getting organized?

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1. Bryan Caplan quotes a proposal.

What is required is administrative reform, where attacks on academic freedom, free speech, and intellectual diversity are treated with at least the same degree of seriousness as other offenses at universities. Specifically, every university should have an “Office of Free Speech” where faculty can lodge complaints when their academic freedom or free speech rights are violated, or when policies are put in place to limit the possibilities for intellectual diversity. This office must have adequate funding to complete independent investigations of such allegations, and it should report directly to the highest authority governing the university, either the board of trustees or regents for most private universities or the regents or state legislature for public universities. These investigations must have teeth; attacking academic freedom (not simply criticizing speech with speech) cannot be allowed to stand as acceptable behavior for administrators, faculty, or students. The same sorts of consequences available for other offenses should be applied to those who use their position at the university to deprive others of their institutional or constitutional rights.

Read the whole thing. Let me argue against the idea: More college administrators are the problem, not the solution. And the Office of Free Speech will evolve very quickly into an office of censorship. Conquest’s Second Law and all that.

2. Helen Pluckrose and others have started Counterweight Support, to fight back against cancel culture.

3. The folks at Legal Insurrection have started a project to track Critical Race Theory on college campuses. I think we should be tracking it at elementary schools.

4. Maybe all the resistance needs is more John McWhorter. If you already saw this post, go ahead and read it again.

FITs update

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I already have a list of over 200 intellectuals for the Fantasy Intellectual Teams draft. Thanks for your suggestions. More are still welcome. You are not limited to any proposed team.

I should say that the way a fantasy draft works, owners take turns drafting players. You cannot just say “Tyler is on my team.” Somebody else could pick him first. So if there were 10 owners of these 18-intellectual teams, and there are 200 to choose from, then you can be sure to wind up in the last rounds drafting some folks that were put on the draft list by me or someone else but who you would not have intended to draft as of now.

One scoring issue that I am wrestling with is name recognition. The goal of FITs is to increase name recognition for intellectuals that deserve it. That might suggest downgrading anyone who has high name recognition among, say, Ivy League social science professors. So David Brooks, Jared Diamond, or Daniel Kahneman would not help your score, because they already have plenty of name recognition among Ivy League social science professors. Someone like Joe Rogan, who enjoys mass name recognition, does not lose points, because I guess he has low name recognition among Ivy League social science professors. And Rand Paul has name recognition among elites, but not as an intellectual, so he does not lose points for that. Note that I am not pushing Joe Rogan or Rand Paul for high draft choices.

But another possibility is to ignore that issue. I want my FITs to be people who are great role models as thinkers. I want my children to model their thought processes after my FITs team. If that means Steven Pinker or Joseph Henrich, so be it.

In fantasy sports, a “sleeper” is someone gets overlooked by other fantasy owners during the draft, so that you can pick the player up in a late round. As one commenter pointed out, in fantasy baseball you win the draft by picking good sleepers. In FITs, Jim Manzi is an outstanding sleeper.

But somebody who has a cult following in a particular realm is not necessarily a helpful sleeper. How to score Gary Taubes, for example? He gets credit for going against conventional wisdom in the field of diet, but otherwise I don’t think he has much value in the draft.

I am not inspired by FITs candidates that you like for “mood affiliation” reasons. I enjoy Victor Davis Hanson as a writer, but I know what one of his columns is going to say before I even read it. That is a bad sign. And he is too uncharitable to those with whom he disagrees.

One reason that my choices skew so far to the right is that I see those on the left relying much more heavily on mood affiliation. Few left intellectuals are charitable toward, or even aware of, important conservative arguments.

FITs who have influenced my view of the world are way up there in terms of draft choices. This can be true even though I reject important parts of their view of the world. Robin Hanson has never convinced me that uploading someone’s brain into a computer is going to be a big thing, but he has convinced me of all sorts of other important ideas.

Handle’s criteria are also on target.