Category Archives: culture

What is the future of journalism?

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One element of Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public is the collapse of trust in journalism as practiced by newspapers and mass media. There are various diagnoses of this.

1. Gurri himself would say that the Internet has made the knowledge distribution more egalitarian. People are not as dependent on the media for knowledge, so that professional journalists cannot just stand on their authority.

2. Someone on the left would say that the problem is that bad actors have appeared on the scene: Fox News, the Internet’s right-wingers, etc. We could get back to the golden age if we could just get rid of censor these evil, “post-truth” outlets.

3. Eric Weinstein would say that we are living through a time in which our “sense-making apparatus” (one of his favorite terms) is up for grabs. He would say that he always was suspicious that the New York Times was feeding us a narrative and covering up stuff. Of course, since he is on the left, what he complains about mainstream media covering up is not what someone on the right would complain that mainstream media is covering up.

4. Yuval Levin (his book will finally be out shortly) would say that the institution of journalism no longer functions well. The institution of journalism ought to form journalists by giving them a sense of obligation to report truthfully and objectively. Instead, journalists see their organizations as platforms from which to pursue their individual careers, primarily by enhancing their personal “brands.” This leads them to take sides and play the outrage-stoking game.

5. Many of us point to the incentives of advertising-obsessed media to amplify those who stoke outrage and stifle those who are moderate and/or reasonable.

My thoughts are these:

I don’t think we are going back to the Age of the Single Narrative, when the left-wing media were more centrist and the right-wing media did not exist. Nor is that necessarily the age we would want to go back to if we could.

I think that mainstream media outlets like the Times are behaving in a manner that is nearly suicidal. On the one hand, they are taking up the silliest causes of the campus left. On the other hand, they are insisting that they should be taken seriously. They seem to think that any day now, the country will come to its senses and accept their narrative as definitive. I think that they will be lucky to retain as much of a following as they currently have.

It could be that a new sense-making apparatus will emerge. This will produce a new set of observers and analysts to replace traditional media. This will be highly decentralized.

Some people will specialize on gathering observations. Think of the people who have written books on the Opioid Crisis. Some have looked at the characteristics of users. Some have looked at the actions of pharmaceutical companies. Some have looked into the illegal Opioid production and distribution system.

Some people will specialize in analysis. Think of someone like Scott Alexander.

Some people will specialize in calling attention to good ideas and debunking bad ones. Think of someone like Tyler Cowen.

The question is whether this decentralized process will lead to consensus or fracturing. I am guessing a bit of both. That is, I think that weird opinion niches will thrive. But in a best-case scenario we will reach a point where some narratives are widely accepted. Even more ideally, where narratives are contested, most people will be familiar with the best arguments on each side, and not be rigidly committed to their preferred narrative.

Prestige hierarchy and dominance hierarchy

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Humans have two types of hierarchies–prestige hierarchies and dominance hierarchies. I admit that there are some cases where a hierarchy is not clearly one or the other, but bear with me.

A prestige hierarchy is positive sum. Those at the bottom of, say, the chef hierarchy or the guitarist hierarchy, can learn from those higher up. We get better at doing things by copying what prestigious people do. When we need help, it is useful to have an idea who the real experts are.

A dominance hierarchy is negative sum. The more resources I obtain at gunpoint, the less for you. And the fight to get to the top wastes resources.

The business world has elements of both. Your boss may have prestige but also has the ability to threaten you.

Marxists see capitalism as a dominance hierarchy. Non-Marxists see capitalism differently. A mesh of prestige hierarchies? Or a competition that is not interpretable in terms of hierarchy?

In our Martin Gurri world, some important prestige hierarchies are under stress. Elites don’t enjoy the prestige they once had.

Elites who lose prestige tend to resort to dominance. China in Hong Kong. Journalists who want Internet censorship. But making dominance moves is no way to recover prestige. It does the opposite.

Cancel culture uses dominance moves. From a prestige perspective, it is a poor tactic. As Peggy Noonan wrote,

The past decade saw the rise of the woke progressives who dictate what words can be said and ideas held, thus poisoning and paralyzing American humor, drama, entertainment, culture and journalism. In the coming 10 years someone will effectively stand up to them. They are the most hated people in America

Assuming that our erstwhile elites are not going to recover their prestige, where are we headed? Will a new stable prestige hierarchy emerge? Or will we have to settle for either chaos or a dominance hierarchy?

Norms and unwed motherhood

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Dale Brumfield writes,

Martha had what she may have considered numerous good reasons to conceal her pregnancy and childbirth — she was almost 40 years of age and had divorced her husband in 1950 after a 16-year marriage. She may have also been painfully aware of the struggles of a single working mother in a socially oppressive post-war era that lionized couples, marriage, God and family and especially, conformity. Accidental childbirth to an unwed woman was not only maligned but frequently received with ostracism from families and employers and in a few rare cases, criminal charges.

He accurately describes the moral norms that existed at the time and the harsh consequences that those norms had for unmarried women who became pregnant, and in this particular case the harsh consequences for the baby. Implicitly, he sees the change in social norms as all for the good.

But in the 1950s, the percentage of children growing up in single-parent households was much smaller than it is today. I don’t know the figure for the 1950s, but I believe that today it is over 50 percent. I wish we could arrive at norms that steered us away from both the harms of the 1950s norms and the harms of current norms.

Race and higher education

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Heather MacDonald writes,

Social-justice pedagogy is driven by one overwhelming reality: the seemingly intractable achievement gap between whites and Asians on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other. Radical feminism, as well as gay and now trans advocacy, are also deeply intertwined with social-justice thinking on campus and off, as we have just seen. But race is the main impetus. Liberal whites are terrified that the achievement and behavior gaps will never close. So they have crafted a totalizing narrative about the racism that allegedly holds back black achievement.

Starting from a premise that racial gaps are due entirely to white oppression, the social justice movement is deforming higher education. Even if it is true that white oppression is the root cause of the racial achievement gap, that gap is not going to be closed at the college level by social justice methods. Colleges cannot manufacture successful graduates out of unprepared students, where successful means learning according to standards of excellence and preparation means a combination of ability, conscientiousness, and knowledge.

If Harvard takes minority students who are not prepared for Harvard (in addition to those minority students who are sufficiently prepare), but who might be prepared for the University of Michigan, then Michigan has to take minority students who are not prepared for Michigan but might be prepared for Nebraska, etc. The result is racial gaps everywhere, and a perpetual-motion machine of social justice complaints.

ICYMI: sex differences and personality

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Scott Barry Kaufman writes,

On average, males tend to be more dominant, assertive, risk-prone, thrill-seeking, tough-minded, emotionally stable, utilitarian, and open to abstract ideas. Males also tend to score higher on self-estimates of intelligence, even though sex differences in general intelligence measured as an ability are negligible [2]. Men also tend to form larger, competitive groups in which hierarchies tend to be stable and in which individual relationships tend to require little emotional investment. In terms of communication style, males tend to use more assertive speech and are more likely to interrupt people (both men and women) more often– especially intrusive interruptions– which can be interpreted as a form of dominant behavior.

Pointer from Alex Tabarrok. I think that the fact that women are relatively more likely to be in charge of small businesses than large corporations has something to do with personality differences.

See also Tyler Cowen’s post on gender differences in word use in research papers.

Martin Gurri watch

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Was 2019 the year of Martin Gurri? Consider the list of countries where protests took place, as he points out in a review post.

when the whole world is watching, a local demand for political change can start to go global in an instant. At a certain point, the process becomes self-sustaining and self-reinforcing: that threshold may have been crossed in November, when at least eight significant street uprisings were rumbling along concurrently (Bolivia, Catalonia, Chile, Colombia, Hong Kong, Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon – with France, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, and Venezuela simmering in the background).

But

This would be a good time to bring up the pessimistic hypothesis. It holds that the loss of control over information must be fatal to modern government as a system: the universal spread of revolt can be explained as a failure cascade, driving that system inexorably toward disorganization and reconfiguration. Failure cascades can be thought of as negative virality. A local breakdown leads to the progressive loss of higher functions, until the system falls apart. This, in brief, is why airplanes crash and bridges collapse.