James Kirchick writes,

“My successor, and the board of directors that have supported him, have basically tried to transform the organization from a politically neutral, nonpartisan civil liberties organization into a progressive liberal organization,” Glasser says about Anthony Romero, an ex-Ford Foundation executive who continues to serve as the ACLU’s executive director. According to former ACLU national board member Wendy Kaminer in her 2009 book Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU, Romero and his enablers routinely engaged in the sort of undemocratic and unaccountable behavior practiced by the individuals and institutions the ACLU usually took to court, like withholding information (concerning a breach of ACLU members’ privacy, no less), shredding documents in violation of its own record-preservation and transparency procedures, and attempting to muzzle board members from criticizing the organization publicly. (“You sure that didn’t come out of Dick Cheney’s office?” remarked the late, great former Village Voice columnist and ACLU board member Nat Hentoff of this last gambit). Eerily prescient, Worst Instincts foreshadowed the hypocrisy and fecklessness that has since come to characterize the leadership of so many other, previously liberal institutions confronted by the forces of illiberalism within their own ranks.

Read it and weep.

The goal of the Fantasy Intellectual Teams project is to improve public discourse by highlighting writers and podcasters who model high-quality discourse. Version 1.0 has been in progress since April 1. I am excited by the way that the initial buzz has shown that it is a viable method for working toward that lofty goal. We have also learned enough to be able to plan a much-improved version 2.0 for May 1.

The initial set of scoring categories, while a good start, will be improved. Because these categories are so important to achieving the goals of this project, we will develop new versions until we are satisfied. In that sense, the project is in Beta.

For those of you who are interested in the project–and I hope that many of you are–I plan to roll out version 2.0 in about a week, with a new draft around May 1. I encourage you to participate as a team owner by picking a team in the next draft. Leave a message in the comments if you are willing to play.

We will be having each owner pick a team of 7 intellectuals to follow. This is down from 15 in version 1.0, which was too much of a burden on owners. Also, as long as the project is in Beta, seasons will last just one month each. Longer seasons will be desirable once the scoring categories have stabilized.

As an owner, you have two responsibilities. One is to follow the team that you draft and submit claims when intellectuals on your team score points. Another is to provide feedback on improving the way that the project works, especially in defining the scoring categories. The experience of scoring your own team is a valuable basis for feedback.

Below are some initial ideas for scoring rules for version 2.0.
Continue reading →

John Alcorn pointed out to me that I have two beliefs that appear to be inconsistent.

1. The Null Hypothesis, which is that educational interventions have no durable effect on average outcomes.

2. K-12 educators and college professors and administrators have adverse cultural effects.

It may be tough to reconcile these, but let me try.

Humans have a lot of cultural knowledge to acquire, and we do it by copying others. The Null Hypothesis is true because we do not have interventions that reliably improve one’s copying process. If Jill is better at learning than Jack, we do not have techniques that will produce equal outcomes between Jack and Jill.

But the content of what Jack and Jill learn is affected by educational institutions. If we teach them a heroic narrative of the United States, then they are likely to absorb that narrative. If we teach them a dark narrative of the United States, then they are likely to absorb that narrative. Not everyone who goes through the educational system will support its dominant narrative to the same degree, but the dominant narrative will tend to be absorbed.

I would not say that educators are totally free to impose cultural beliefs on their students. Educators need some support from other influential adults and from students’ peers. Education takes place within a culture, and it has to resonate with that culture to a fair degree. But I think that this leaves room for me to justifiably complain about the cultural influence of K-12 and higher education in the United States these days.

I linked to Ross Douthat’s substack on decadence and the intellectuals the other day, but today I want to comment on its main theme.

Which brings us back to the question of traditionalism and dynamism, and their potential interaction: If you’ve had a cultural revolution that cleared too much ground, razed too many bastions and led to a kind of cultural debasement and forgetting, you probably need to go backward, or least turn that way for recollection, before you can hope to go forward once again.

He thinks that starting in the 1960s, our culture threw away too much that was of value. We will have to rediscover it or else suffer from bad ideas.

I certainly think that this will be the case in economics, which as you know I believe is on the Road to Sociology. This will mean a great forgetting of the ideas of Hayek, Buchanan, and Sowell. Those few students who seek out those ideas will have insights into the horrid policy regimes under which they will have the misfortune to live.

Ross Douthat writes,

if called upon to name the most important thinkers since the year 2000, assessed purely for their influence, with no comment on quality, I might list (working my way backward in time) Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Jordan Peterson (14), Peter Thiel (70), Yuval Noah Harari, Steven Pinker (110), Tyler Cowen (2), Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Alexander, Slavoj Žižek, Andrew Sullivan (35), Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (10), Peter Singer, Samantha Power, my colleague Thomas Friedman … at now we’re back at the turn of the millennium. Religious thinkers? Well, Dawkins and Pinker and Kendi, of course — but okay, more exactly, perhaps James Martin, Rod Dreher (104), Charles Taylor, David Bentley Hart and Tim Keller. (In another ten years I might add a post-liberal Catholic, but not yet.)

Some of these writers are impressive; some less so. Many are journalists, in practice or in spirit — an important occupation, but maybe not the ideal one for generating great works. Will many of them adorn a Great Books curriculum in 2075, if such an antiquated thing exists? I’m doubtful.

The numbers in parentheses are the numbers that they were chosen in the Fantasy Intellectual Teams draft I held on Saturday. Douthat himself was the 44th pick. Among columnists, he was picked ahead of Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, David Brooks, Paul Krugman, and Peggy Noonan, but behind Megan McArdle.

Of course, he does not use quantitative scoring criteria. His idea of “influence” probably correlates best with my “meme” category.

In a podcast with Russ Roberts (pick 5), Megan McArdle (pick 38) says,

I can go back and say, yeah, I can’t smooth away into memory and conveniently misremember how I felt about the Iraq war, how I felt about what we should do about the Financial Crisis, and on and on and on and on and on. And, in fact, I wrote a very embarrassing column about the Financial Crisis when the Bear Stearns collapse happened: that we just we’re involved in a garden-variety recession; don’t freak out. This is not that big a deal, we shouldn’t bail them out. Well. So, I think that that is healthy, but most people obviously don’t do that. And so, you end up in a place where most people think that they know better than they actually do, what’s going to happen in the world.

Reading this, I thought of a new FITs scoring category for a future season: admissions of past errors (A’s). But admissions of the type “I was wrong. X is even more of an idiot than I thought” would not count.