Epistemology is social. We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. When we believe the wrong people, bad things happen. On race relations, for example, the wrong people have tremendous influence in academia, and this has spilled out into schools of education, corporate human resource departments, and elsewhere. I think that some (much?) of the loss of trust in news media and other important institutions is due to a general suspicion that the wrong people have achieved high status within those institutions. Therefore, I think that the problem of intellectual status inversion is worth trying to solve. Not by politicians, but by replacing academic credentialism and cronyism with a more rigorous process for evaluating intellectual quality.

I need to emphasize again that I do not want to put FITs in positions of political power. My thinking is that the political garden grows in cultural soil. Because of intellectual status inversion, that soil is only suitable for growing ugly weeds. If we can raise the status of intellectuals that really deserve our admiration and lower the status of those who don’t, then I think that the soil will be more hospitable to better plants.

Here is the idea for a game of FITs. You are the owner of a FIT. You compete with other owners to draft the best fantasy team of intellectuals. A team consists of the following positions. The number in parentheses is the number of each position that will be on your team.

(p) podcaster and/or blogger (2)
(b) from the world of business (1)
(e) academic economist (4)
(o) academic other than economist (4)
(t) think tank person
(c) regular columnist for newspaper or magazine (can be an online magazine)
(u) utility (5)

A total of 18 players on your team. All players must be currently alive. You can’t pick Hayek.

To be eligible as an academic economist or other academic the player has to have tenure.

Some players are eligible at multiple positions. You can treat Tyler as eligible to play t, e, p, or c. You can treat anyone as eligible to play u, including Tyler and others who are eligible at other positions.

I am not eligible to be on anyone’s team. I will be judging the teams.

Note that I don’t have a position for “tweeter.” Perhaps there are some good players on Twitter, but they are as rare as Korean baseball players who can make it in the major leagues in the U.S. Of course, you are welcome to draft a player at the u position based on tweets if that’s what you want to do. Same with politicians.

I do not yet have a formal scoring system. My goal in the short run is to get a better idea of what my criteria are for judging intellectuals. As of now, I would say that I value players who monitor their thought process, admit when they have been wrong, steelman other points of view, and show some humility. Good players are judicious about challenging conventional wisdom; they pick their heterodox points of view carefully. I am inclined to give low ratings to narrow specialists, unless they ask big questions that are of pressing interest to those outside of their narrow field. The “small ball” that is good to play if you want tenure does not help you in FITs.

The scoring criteria problem is not going to be easy. Sometimes when faced with a problem like that, it helps to invert it. What would constitute a bad score? Straw-manning; refusal to acknowledge any strong points of the other side or weak spots in your preferred theory; carelessly tossing around epithets, like “market fundamentalist” or “neoliberalism” or “cultural Marxism” that nobody uses to describe themselves; predictably speaking in just one of the Three Languages of Politics.

If some of you want to play, maybe we can hold a draft before the baseball season starts. If you have any questions about the rules, or you have questions about which positions certain players are eligible for, feel free to put them in the comments. I have over 50 FITs candidates, based on names people have left in the comments plus people I thought of off the top of my head. Feel free to suggest more.

1. Aaron Sibarium writes,

provided elites maintained their monopoly on the presses, they could maintain a monopoly on the narrative. That’s part of what made “his realm, his religion” a viable settlement after the Thirty Years’ War. Because princes had print and peasants didn’t have iPhones, the former retained some degree of epistemic dominance over the latter—more than would be possible today.

He argues that modern technology has the effect of creating outlets for more points of view while making us feel more threatened by other points of view. Something has to give.

2. Daniel Bessner and Amber A’Lee Frost write,

As became clear once QAnon-ers entered the Capitol, they had no genuine strategy and no genuine program, instead relying on a millenarian faith that Trump would deliver them from the rule of elite pedophiles, heal the sick, comfort the poor, and establish a New Jerusalem.

A classic revolt of the public, then. But the rest of the article gets even more interesting. Read the following excerpt, and in your mind substitute anti-racism for QAnon:

Q makes people feel good. We don’t mean merely that it makes them “feel good” by delivering the dopamine jolts that come from the embrace of a community, the thrill of discovery, the satisfaction of enlightenment, and the comfort of a worldview that brings hope, though QAnon does provide all of that. What we mean is that it makes them feel “Good,” as in righteous, heroic, noble, and benevolent. So why would a QAnon-er stop believing, especially given that a return to a pre-Q worldview likely invites back all the pre-Q fear, confusion, and feelings of powerlessness that engendered an individual’s turn to QAnon in the first place, only this time there’s the added pain of shame and the shattering of one’s self-image as a wise and virtuous person.

3. Martin got his chance on cable TV.

Finally, it was my turn. My host introduced me and read a quotation from the City Journal piece, but he did it so aggressively and vociferously that, even though I had written them, the words terrified me.

“MARTIN GURRI, WHAT DO YOU THINK?”

I cleared my throat. “Well, you have to understand, the concept of post-journalism was actually developed by a brilliant media scholar called Andrey Mir –“

“THANK YOU AND GOODBYE, MARTIN GURRI. THAT’S ALL THE TIME YOU GET.”

I have never been invited to Cable TV, but I have been invited to very minor talk radio programs, with similar results.

One commenter suggested Eric Weinstein. Another suggested John McWhorter. Another suggested Tanner Greer. All good suggestions, and you seem to get the point of the game, even though I haven’t posted a broader description.

Another commenter points to a list of important intellectuals. I think importance is one criterion–I scorn many high-status economists for doing what I call “playing small ball.” But importance is not a sufficient condition for belonging on a FIT.

Another commenter said that he would not want Scott Alexander running the world. Neither would Scott Alexander. The worst intellectuals to put in charge of things are the ones who think that they should be in charge of things. The dream of FITs is to generate a better prestige hierarchy of intellectuals, not to find intellectuals to put in charge of the dominance hierarchy of government.*

Back to your suggestions. Eric is a particularly interesting case. If Scott Alexander models carefulness, Eric models fearlessness. Fearlessness means not being afraid of conventional wisdom or of anyone else based on their status. Carefulness is intellectual carefulness, which means giving the strongest consideration to other points of view.**

The very idea of Fantasy Intellectual Teams owes a lot to Eric. It was listening to Eric that led me to focus on the problem that I term intellectual status inversion. But one concern that I have with Eric is that he is inclined to make it seem as if the problem comes from the evil intentions of groups of individuals, and I am instead inclined to think of it as a problem that emerged out of three well-intentioned changes in higher education:

1. Expansion, driven by the GI bill and the post-Sputnik increase in government support.

2. Opening opportunities to women.

3. The attempt to give African-Americans proportionate representation.

In principle, all of these could have been handled without harm to intellectual culture. But I believe that indirectly and unintentionally they produced intellectual status inversion. I will have to spell out my argument in future posts. I predict that no matter how carefully I make the argument, these posts will be cancel-bait. I expect to be accused of being anti-democratic, misogynist, and racist.

Finally, I should mention that I recently joined Clubhouse, an invitation-only, audio-only, Iphone-only (no Android or PC version yet) social media app, and the first time I was invited onto a “stage” it was by Eric. He was leading a conversation about how economics needs to change. I don’t recall much of what I said (I stressed my points of agreement with him). I ducked out pretty early (I hope I was not too rude) to take a call from the grandkids in Boston.

A friend of mine describes Clubhouse as a sort of Anarchic Talk Radio. Users form rooms in which to hold conversations. In a way, it reminds me of the chat rooms in America OnLine around 1993, except that on AOL you used text chat and on Clubhouse you use voice. It seems that what the founders have in mind are rooms with many listeners and a few speakers. I myself prefer a seminar format, with about 10 people, with equal status–no distinction between speakers and audience. You could use Clubhouse that way, but for now I think that the talk radio format is dominant. I give it a less than 50 percent chance of appealing to me (AOL didn’t).

The invitation-only approach does two things. First, it allows the app to scale slowly as they figure out how best to execute it. Second, it creates a sense of exclusivity, the way Facebook started out as just Ivy League college students.

I was struck by the large number of African-Americans who are in Clubhouse. My friend says that the founders of Clubhouse decided to “seed” it with two groups that they think are culturally prominent in the U.S.: African-Americans and tech start-up nerds (my friend called them “techno-libertarians” but I think that term is anachronistic). That theory of cultural leadership sounds to me like real Bay-Area-think. My first impression is that it results in a culture that is so far to the left that it makes Twitter look like a MAGA hat.
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*In the history of our country as I understand it, the idea of putting intellectuals in charge of things originated with Progressive movement. It received a big boost under FDR, who claimed to have a “brains trust.” It was further glorified under the Kennedy Administration, until the “best and the brightest” got us Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. According to Helen Andrews, the TV show “West Wing” further glorifies power-seekers. (I have never seen the show.)

**You can be careful and fearless at the same time. Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education models both. He should be on the list, but is he a first-rounder? I value humility, and it is hard to put that word in the same sentence with “Bryan Caplan.” It would seem as though he runs the risk of becoming overly attached to a wrong idea. But he is very careful when he writes a book or makes a bet.

I have scheduled a post to go up in a week or so about “Fantasy Intellectual Teams.” I am trying to figure out how to make it sound serious rather than frivolous. In fact, it is an attempt to fix the main problem of our times, which is the demise of our key institutions and what Martin Gurri describes as the “post-truth” age and the loss of authority.

I claim that the reason that we don’t have socially trusted authorities any more is that we suffer from intellectual status inversion. The people at the top of the status hierarchy in the bureaucracy, journalism, and academia are not great thinkers. And the great thinkers are not at the top of the status hierarchy. I believe that a necessary and sufficient condition for pulling society out of the ditch is to come up with a cure for intellectual status inversion. We need to reverse the status levels of Coleman Hughes and Ibram X. Kendi, for example.

Once the really great thinkers are on top, then the people below them will be copying better examples. This will make the social process of searching for truth more functional.

You should ask, How are we to determine who are the really great thinkers? That is where the Fantasy Intellectual Teams contest fits in. If I were advising you to draft a fantasy intellectual team, I would argue that the number one pick should be Scott Alexander. He is the most careful thinker out there, by a noticeable margin.

He is like a lawyer who is the best at arguing either side of a case. This is illustrated in one recent post, Ontology of Psychiatric Conditions. The question is whether there is a clear distinction between being normal and having a condition, such as depression or schizophrenia. Read the post to see how well he formulates the question and how carefully he sifts through the evidence pertaining to the answer.

But at some point we should judge a thinker side by side against another thinker. And that is where another recent post, Contra Weyl on Technocracy, comes in. Let me leave aside the substantive issue and instead treat this as a contest between Alexander and Weyl.

In the grand scheme of things, perhaps Weyl is under-rated, in the sense that most of the public intellectuals who are more well known are worse than he is. (As an aside, you can think of the Fantasy Intellectual Teams project as an attempt to play out Tyler’s “over-rated or under-rated” game until the right people come out on top.) But Weyl is not on my list of very careful thinkers. In fact, I am very much put off by him.

So what you have in the post on technocracy is the world’s leading intellectual grandmaster dispensing with a patzer. To take just one illustrative passage from Alexander,

Did you notice none of Weyl’s examples of technocracy fit this definition at all? Robert Moses had zero formal training in urban planning or anything related to city-building. The Soviet leadership wasn’t “meritocratically chosen”. And Oscar Niemeyer didn’t construct a High Modernist planned village and a control village, test which one performed better on various metrics, and scale the winner up into Brasilia.

Peter T. Coleman writes,

given that many Americans feel left behind, the new leaders should begin by launching a listening tour during which they partner with local, trusted community groups to elicit grievances and proposed remedies. Research has shown that when members of disenfranchised groups feel heard by those in power, it can lead to constructive shifts in attitudes.

He also suggests strengthening local “bridge-building groups” that “fight against the pathologies of hate and can help citizens build bipartisan alliances that take on the structural incentives that divide us.”

He has a forthcoming book on the topic. Thanks to a reader for the pointer.

The suggestions are in line with what Yuval Levin wrote as the election was pending.

Americans have failed one another by failing to ask what the roles we each have in particular institutions — familial, communal, religious, educational, professional, civic and political — demand of us in key moments. Often what they demand is restraint and responsibility, doing your job rather than building your brand.

Robby Soave writes,

Nevertheless, the Niskanen Center fired Wilkinson and made it clear that they did so explicitly because of the tweet. “The Niskanen Center appreciates and encourages interesting and provocative online discourse, wrote Niskanen President Jerry Taylor in a statement. “However we draw the line at statements that are, or can in any way be interpreted as, condoning or promoting violence.”

Hence, Will Wilkinson evidently was fired for making a sarcastic tweet.

I see Wilkinson as a victim of what I call Zero Tolerance Culture. Zero Tolerance sets up a binary: stay on this side of the line and you’re ok; cross the line and we bring down the hammer!

Zero Tolerance creates zero tolerance for ambiguity, for mitigating circumstances, and for making the punishment proportionate to the crime. The popularity of the phrase “Zero Tolerance” actually serves to legitimate the arbitrary use of power.

I would rate members of the commentariat on a scale that is not so binary. Instead, imagine a scale from 1 to 100. If your score is 1, then in my opinion the world would be a better place if no one listened to you. If your score is 100, then I wish everyone listened to you. In my subjective rating system, the punishment for saying something wrong would be a reduction in score.

It might be fun some day to publish my ratings of public intellectuals. Off the top of my head, and leaving out people I know personally, those scoring in the high 90s would include Coleman Hughes and Jonathan Haidt.

Ten years or so ago, I would have scored Wilkinson somewhere in the 80s. More recently, I probably would have put him somewhere in the teens. But the offending tweet has no effect on his score, as far as I am concerned.

Note 1: In posting this instead of the post I was planning to put up today, I am violating a personal norm, which is that ordinarily I do not rush to comment on the latest kerfluffle. I am once again putting off a post with more cancel-bait than anything else I have written, much worse than anything said by Wilkinson or many others who have been canceled. You’ll know it when you see it, unless I come to my senses and trash it altogether.

Note 2: Jason Brennan comments,

Niskanen’s senior leadership is and has been unworthy of its quality staff.

If quality staff agrees with this assessment, then they should be able to do better elsewhere. I’m not saying that it is morally wrong to stay at Niskanen, but staying there may not be the wisest career move.

If you want to feel depressed, read this.

An elementary school in Cupertino, California—a Silicon Valley community with a median home price of $2.3 million—recently forced a class of third-graders to deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.”

California wants ethnic studies to be a required case for every public school student. The curriculum for this course is being designed by adherents of Critical Race Theory (is there anyone under 40 in the field of education who is not an adherent of CRT?). Jews objected to the way that Jews are depicted in the curriculum. Some cosmetic changes are being made, but CRT remains embedded in the curriculum and, more importantly, in the minds of the teachers who will be delivering it.

If you want to feel better, I recommend watching Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.

It is a conservative’s nature to believe that society has gone off the rails. I believe that we have gone off the rails by having lost sight of the importance of children and grandchildren. I predict that many people today between the ages of 25 and 40 will find themselves becoming lonely and depressed by age 60 as they see the past as having little meaning and the future as having little purpose.

Note that being an aunt or an uncle can have some of the same satisfaction as being a grandparent. But with fewer siblings these days, becoming an aunt or uncle will be rare.

I believe that grandparents are the happiest people. This is based on introspection and observation. Show me a grandparent who does not love their grandchild.

Although I know happy grandparents who are divorced, grandparenting is more satisfying if you managed to stay married. At worst, a divorce may alienate you from your children. At best, it pretty much forces your children to divide up their visits, so that you get half the time with your grandchildren that you would if you had stayed married.

Nobody in their twenties makes decisions based on a desire to end up as grandparents. That is too far to look ahead. Instead, young people respond to immediate cultural influences.

Consider a repressive culture vs. a liberated culture, or R vs. L.

In an R culture, sex outside of heterosexual marriage is frowned upon and difficult to obtain; abortion and birth control are frowned upon and difficult to obtain; and divorces are frowned upon and difficult to obtain. In an L culture, none of these apply.

We are in an L culture, and even if we wanted an R culture there is no squeezing that toothpaste back into the tube. But in an R culture more people are likely to become grandparents.

As an aside, perhaps an L culture is somewhat self-limiting. Imagine that there is a polygenic score that measures likely deviation from straight heterosexual preferences. A score close to 0 means you are very straight. A score close to 10 means you are very non-straight. In an R culture, people with high scores are pressured to conform, so they try to get by in traditional marriages and have children. In an L culture, only people with low scores are likely to have traditional marriages and children. It seems to me that this would lead to a gene pool that tends to reduce the proportion of children who are born with a propensity to deviate from straight heterosexuality.

As another aside, perhaps some other people also want to take themselves out the gene pool.

The official Black Lives Matter organization, which has received vast sums in corporate funding, has listed the abolition of the family among its demands. Left-wing publications like the slickly produced anarchist Commune magazine have explicitly advocated for it. Last year Verso Books, the influential leftist publishing house, released Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family, which made the case for family abolition amid glowing reviews in Vice, the Nation, the Outline, and elsewhere. The Open Society Foundation and Ford Foundation-funded publication Open Democracy recently published an opinion piece by Lewis headlined “The Coronavirus Crisis Shows It’s Time to Abolish the Family,” while the Nation ran with “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family.”

I believe that grandparents are the most socially forward-looking people. They want the best for their grandchildren. For the most part, I think that this means that grandparents will vote wisely. But when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, I suspect that most grandparents think, “Those entitlements mean that I won’t be a burden on my grandchildren, so it’s good for them,” even though in the aggregate this is not the case.

People who are not raising children or who have never raised children have very little stake in the future of society. Perhaps they should not vote? Raising children means being in the same household with them. So perhaps single mothers should vote, but absent fathers should not?

Geoff Shullenberger writes,

Taken as a whole, [Christopher] Lasch’s body of writing offers an account of the limitations of the American political panorama of his era. Conservatism, he suggests, tends to provide de facto ideological cover for the economic developments that have eroded the social values it claims to promote. Liberalism, for its part, has overseen the rise of a state bureaucratic apparatus that promises to compensate for the effects of this erosion. However, in the process, it further weakens the autonomy of individuals, families, and communities, and enables the substitution of democracy with technocratic elite rule. While the New Left of the 1960s rebelled against the expansion of corporate and bureaucratic power, the end result of its revolt was not a reassertion of the local and the communal, but the infusion of those structures with a new therapeutic sensibility.

Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated many of the economic, social, and cultural tendencies Lasch deplored. While small businesses have collapsed in record numbers and average families have found themselves destitute, the major tech companies and retail conglomerates like Amazon have reaped massive profits and the stock market has soared; in response, the political class has delivered aid packages that blatantly favor the interests of the latter. As Alex Gutentag recently argued, “the pandemic is a convenient scapegoat for the largest upward wealth transfer in modern human history.” Lasch’s work suggests that the roots of this crisis extend far back into the last century, during which both liberals and conservatives, for different reasons, became increasingly indifferent to the degradation of average people’s lives and livelihoods. He offers us no easy alternatives, but his writings reveal the scale of the problems anyone attempting to look beyond the failings of liberalism must confront.

Over the past 250 years we have gone from nation of yeoman farmers to a nation of industrial workers to a nation of white-collar workers in technology, government, and the non-profit sector. With each transformation, the sense of being able to determine our own fate declines, and the sense of dependence on those with concentrations of wealth and power increases.