Daniel A. Cox and others report,

More than three-quarters (77 percent) of white Americans report that their core social network includes only people who are also white. More than six in 10 (64 percent) black Americans have social networks composed entirely of people who are also black. Less than half of Asian Americans (49 percent) and Hispanic Americans (43 percent) have core social networks that include only members of their own race or ethnic background.

Most partisans have close social ties that reflect their political predispositions. A majority (54 percent) of Republicans report that their core social network is exclusively composed of Donald Trump supporters. The pattern is nearly identical among Democrats.

Recall the cliche that you are the average of your five closest friends.

The Internet, smart phones, and social media (ISS) have set human communication back about 20,000 years. That is, we now rely more on gossip than we have since we lived in small tribes.

1. Human evolution produced gossip. Cultural anthropology sees gossip as an informal way of enforcing group norms. It is effective in small groups. But gossip is not the search for truth. It is a search for approval by attacking the perceived flaws of others.

2. As a social enforcement mechanism, gossip does not scale. Large societies need other enforcement mechanisms: government, religion, written codes.

3. Our ISS technology changes this. It makes it possible to gossip effectively at large scale. This in turn has revived our propensity to rely on gossip. Beliefs spread without being tested for truth.

4. We have increased the power of gossip-mongers and correspondingly reduced the power of elite institutions of the 20th century, including politicians, mainstream media, and scientists.

5. The result is that we are living through a period of chaos. Symptoms include conspiracy theories, information bubbles, cancel culture, President Trump’s tweets, and widespread institutional decay and dysfunction.

6. To escape from the chaos, we will need new norms of behavior that incline us away from gossip.

I will elaborate more below. Continue reading →

Nando Pelusi wrote,

Inequities are bound to occur; it is how we react to the perceived injustice that is key. “Natural” emotions such as the anger engendered by cheaters evolved for all sorts of reasons, but they aren’t perfect and they don’t necessarily improve our lives. So resist the all-too-natural tendency to nurse a grudge.

A reader forwarded me the essay, which is difficult to excerpt. The author writes of “injustice collecting” as a natural psychological program built to protect us from being cheated repeatedly but which becomes dysfunctional in many modern contexts. Some of my thoughts.

1. As a friend of mine once pointed out, at work, we naturally resent the people who get paid more and work less than we do. We almost never notice the people who are paid less and work more than we do.

2. Sometimes it seems that a person would rather collect injustices than do something about them. That can be really harmful.

3. It seems to me that in the political realm, sometimes groups would rather collect injustices than find a way to move past them.

Martin Gurri and Arnold Kling have a dialog. I say,

It seems to me that the decentralized nature of these protests is a weakness. By 20th-century standards, a movement needs to mature into having an institutional structure.

He says,

I’m going to make an act of faith and say that new institutions will arise that account for the digital environment and the web culture. With luck, they will embody our ideals of democracy and equality—maybe even nudge closer to these ideals. But it’s early days.

Luke Smillie and others write,

intellectually curious people–those who are motivated to explore and reflect upon abstract ideas–are more inclined to judge the morality of behaviors according to the consequences they produce. . .

individuals who are more curious, respectful, and adherent to salient social norms, tend to judge the morality of an action not by its consequences, but rather by its alignment with particular moral rules, duties, or rights.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I attach a lot of importance to the distinction between intentions and consequences, and my natural inclination is to focus on the latter. Some more comments:

1. Focus on intentions, and you blame the baker for “greed.” Focus on consequences, as Adam Smith does, and you enjoy your bread.

2. Good intentions motivate the rabbi and most congregants at our synagogue to support Black Lives Matter. For now, let us assume that everyone involved in BLM has good intentions (although obviously that is never completely true of any movement). But I cannot stop there. As I see it, the consequences of BLM thus far are bad, and they will be worse. I don’t think this is fixable within BLM. The assumption that racism is the most important factor (indeed, the only factor) in police killings of young black men is false.

I disapprove of racism. I disapprove of police killing young black men. But I also disapprove of overstating the link between the two.

3. In How Humans Judge Machines, Cesar Hidalgo finds that humans judge machines more by their consequences and humans more by their intentions.

In a complex society, I think we are better often better off looking at outcomes as if they came from a disinterested machine rather than as coming from an intentional human.

For example, I believe that social media has harmful consequences. However, these consequences were not the intentions of the people involved in creating smart phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They are the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design