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.
Arnold, you want to play fantasy soccer. I hope your beloved grandkids play soccer.
Today the Spanish newspaper El Mundo published the contract that the great player Leo Messi signed with FC Barcelona for 2017-2021. Messi is expected to earn just over us$ 600 million in the 4 years but after income tax only us$ 300 million. Most likely, the pro-Real Madrid El Mundo published the contract to push Messi out of FC Barcelona at the end of June: they argue that Messi is responsible for the club’s bankruptcy, although an updated estimate of the marginal income earned by the club thanks to Messi is over us$1.0 billion (in mid-2017, most likely the club’s managers expected their marginal income to be well over us$1.2 billion).
It’s an open question, whether (or how much) higher education shapes culture beyond the Ivory Tower. My intuition is that technology (the internet, social media) has disrupted and shaped culture much more than has higher ed.
Within the Ivory Tower, another mechanism, besides the demographic changes that you mention, has been crucial: Thomas Schelling’s ‘tipping point’ mechanism. Academic departments have discretion in hiring. Academics like to have opinions about everything. (Compare Robin Hanson’s rule of cognitive humility.) The criterion of collegiality becomes a preference for affinity. At some margin, the result is ideological self-cloning in hiring, within demographic constraints, which in turn shape ideology. Eventually, many academic departments become ideologically homogeneous, narrow. The decentralized constitution of academe rules out any external hiring mechanism, which would downgrade the primacy of internal, departmental expertise. There is no check on Schelling’s tipping point. Lopsidedness spreads and becomes equilibrium.
If you are still taking nominations, I would add Bret Devereux and Agnes Callard for historical and philosophical insight.
So will the fantasy league be restricted to the living? And to USA based public intellectuals? How would someone past their prime be judged against younger contenders? For example, Martha Nussbaum versus Robin Hanson? I might be wrong but I think Nussbaum’s book on disgust predated and influenced Hanson, should she be higher ranked ? But does she get passed over because she is highly regarded already and perhaps counters your notion of inversion? Personally I think she might be perhaps at the top of the liberalism is cosmopolitanism school, for which I would downgrade her in favor of someone from the currently unpopular liberty and equality is libetalism school. The village versus city intellectual conflict will influence scoring I am afraid.
Do you think Martha Nussbaum is intellectually honest?
http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9609/stand.html
Thanks very much for sharing that. Good scouting report. George was actually someone that I should have been thinking of as a top pick. I am undecided as to whether Nussbaum knowingly lied to the Court or if she was convinced in the truth of what she was saying. Probably won’t have time to thoroughly study the matter as thinking about this challenge has induced me to buy a dozen books I should have read long ago. The article points to an important factor that contributes to the degradation of public institutions: the adversarial system of litigation. Add it as a 4th cause to Dr. Kling’s list of causes. As more and more of life is drawn into the purview of the courts, the more and more arguing merely to win a case becomes the norm. Can we even have anything approximating a liberal society when every thought is subject to a totalitarian judicial review?
How does this team keep score? What are the positions on this team?
Can’t wait to find out.
Curtis Yarvin. I would definitely not want him running the world, but his understanding of politics is incredible.
Just his article about Gamestop taught me an enormous amount about the tradeoffs of a free market:
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/gamestop-the-natural-experiment
I second or third Scott Alexander’s nomination. Even if he were wrong about every single thing, he’s still a superlative example of how to reduce polarisation through treating your opponents with respect.
Then, and I’m sure I’m not the first, I would nominate Arnold Kling.
Finally, Ben Thompson of Stratechery. For understanding the foundational issues at work in technology, I have not found anyone else as perceptive as he is.
Maybe I just don’t get what “status” means. Like when the NYTimes publishes a bunch of op-eds saying “believe this” or “do this” that often actually happens. Politicians legislate, companies boards donate money or implement programs, schools get renamed and have their curriculums changed. Like we can all see the graphs that show the NYTimes talking about race a bunch and the flowering of CRT, SJWism and BLM this summer. There is a cause and effect relationship I can understand. They aren’t dictators, but the actual little dictators listen to them more often than not.
But when Scott Alexander makes a blog post, things don’t happen.
Like, I’m still doing a google search all the time to try and find out how to buy instant at home covid tests, and I can’t find them. Lots of people have been posting about that for a long time with no impact.
I once saw a GMule claim that his tweeting changed the CDC guidelines on vaccines, but I see no evidence of this. The CDC changed because ordinary public backlash and Trump ordered his HHS secretary to ask them to change it.
And it didn’t even change things on the ground. Technically, my parents are signed up for the vaccine because of the change. In actuality, there isn’t a single provider giving it out to age 65+ in my county right now, and I can’t go outside of my county. My Dad got an appointment based on his twelve co-morbitities, but they couldn’t secure more vaccine. Meanwhile, they have vaccinated as many 20 year olds as the elderly, and they just took their most recent allotment of vaccines and gave it away to teachers (who are not going to use that to re-open schools until all of the kids are vaccinated maybe six months from now but who knows, no luck bud).
So like, what is it that this person thinks they accomplished? People like the De Santis did what they were going to do because they don’t CARE about the status hierarchy that decided and just used their power to act against it. People that follow that status hierarchy like my governor have more or less just continued to do whatever they were going to do before the change, but now you can go to a website and get on a list that doesn’t actually put you into any fair queuing system because the vaccine still goes to whatever power broker can get the favor of the local politician or official.
If not clear to me how this project gets us to a world where Scott has the kind of status/power that the NYTimes editors have.
I don’t understand your complaint. Nothing you (or I or any of us) write in blog comments sections has any effect on the world, we’re all nonentities talking about things we’d each like to happen. This seems no more or less pointless than commenting on politics on a blog in general.
Kling says that status inversion is the main problem ailing society.
But I don’t get what he means by status. Or if I do, I don’t see a plan for how to change the inversion.
It seems to me that the only meaningful bucking of the dumb decisions of high status people with bad ideas comes not from people arguing for a different status hierarchy, but from people that completely ignore it and do their own thing.
Let me phrase another way.
It doesn’t take a deep thinker to come up with “vaccinate the old first”. In in fact takes a great deal more rationalizing horsepower to come up with dumber ideas than that.
De Santis didn’t perform drastically better then governors that choose poorly on this question because he is a deep thinker. Or because he listened to an alternate set of deep thinkers. He just combined common sense with courage.
Maybe the political situation in his state made that a bit easier, but who knows. I’ve seen Dem areas that made the right decision too, even if its rarer.
So when the CDC vaccine body first recommended racial equity as the guideline for vaccination, why didn’t any of the twelve people in that meeting speak up. “This is bullshit, we aren’t going to kill a bunch of people to be woke are we? Let’s just vaccinate the old first, we all know it’s the right decision.” Not a single one. They sat through that boring ass meeting and just swallowed the poison. Knowing it would kill lots of people and cause trillions in damage. They didn’t care. All of that happened to other people. Speaking up carried a tiny degree of personal risk. Why take the chance?
I was in a similar situation during the summer. We were asked by our corporate woke department to alter our drug formulary to make it more woke? How the hell do you make a drug formulary more woke? The best that the person in charge of the formulary could come up with is that we should make drugs that alleviate the negative effects of personal vice cheaper, because blacks disproportionately were sick due to their own personal vices. Is it dumb to reward people for being fat, using recreational drugs, smoking, and getting STDs. Yes. But that’s what being woke meant in that context. Nobody spoke up. I didn’t speak up. I went through the same personal cost/benefit analysis as everyone else on that call.
We ended up adopting dumb formulary decisions for the same reason that the vaccine committee endorsed woke vaccination protocols. We didn’t care who was negatively impacted and we didn’t want to take even the slightest amount of personal risk on their behalf.
There are degrees of this. I had a lot less control over our formulary then that vaccine committee had over the most important decision of their entire lifetimes. I think I would have spoken up in that context, but then again I doubt someone with my level of tact would have gotten close to being on a committee like that. Being in that kind of position requires a lifetime of toadying compliance. By the time you get there, you can be relied on not to speak up.
If we need to raise the status of anyone, its people of common sense that engage in common acts of courage in a way that gets results. If blog posts aren’t doing that, it’s a sideshow.
“I didn’t speak up. I went through the same personal cost/benefit analysis as everyone else on that call.”
For the sake of all of us, please get some cojones. I’m not asking for an Ayn Rand speech here or anything like that, but please do something subtle to break-up the group think in the room. Without the courage at the grassroots, we are completely f*cking doomed.
“Without the courage at the grassroots, we are completely f*cking doomed.”
BTW – this why Arnold’s fantasy team idea will never ever work. The “intellectuals” at the top got there for a reason and it’s got nothing to do with intellectual rigor. The masses don’t care about rigor and they mostly get to choose who gets to fill the top spots in the intellectual hierarchy along with the other elites that do the actual drafting. Until the 74+ million have the courage to speak up and vote with their feet, then their ideas will continue to operate on the fringe or underground. I thank god daily for Fox News…say what you will, but this is the only mainstream outlet left to provide some counter balance.
Hopefully it will not be remiss to suggest a re-reading of Robert Nozick’s “Why Do Intellectuals Hate Capitalism?” (which Cato has published), which can be found in his “Socratic Puzzles.”
There is something resonant of Nozick’s “Wordsmiths” (Schumpter: “scrivenors”) in this concept.
The creation of a different arena, for a different type of “gladiators” (more elegant “wordsmiths”) is intriguing, but less likely to draw the interest of that large crowd that seeks reinforcement of its own instincts, however base.
“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.”
I look forward to seeing the argument, but you may not be in that much danger, as you’ve been able to stick your toes in the water a few times and, so far, no piranhas have swarmed to bite it off.
Consider, you’ve argued for lowering the status of Kendi as a terrible thinker, but actually, any truly world class thinker – perhaps even yourself – would produce mostly similar content in terms of conclusions, given that you accepted his same assumptions about the world as true enough to be presumed demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt, perhaps still technically contestable, but only rebuttable upon a showing of the absolutely strongest evidence.
Which means that his confidence in his assumptions are wrong and unjustified by the evidence, which leads him in turn to a lot of terrible, malevolent thinking, though extremely high status and remuneration!
At that point, the piranhas start to smell something tasty in the water, and ask, “Oh yeah, well, which of those assumptions do you think he’s wrong about, huh?” Better then to take your toe out of the water, and never get closer than the edge of the river.
I think the case against Kendi is more robust than you give it credit. Let’s even start from the assumption that most racial disparities are the result of past racism. Even then the ‘corrective’ racist policies he favors aren’t morally justified. Why, for example, do we have more of an obligation to uplift someone who is poor because his grandparents were subject to racism than someone who is poor because his grandparents were degenerate gamblers who left their progeny with nothing? Both are poor for reasons equally beyond their control. Attitudes toward race, on this topic, actually deviate from common moral intuition and values. We normally don’t see it as necessary to recreate the world as though all our ancestors left us the same inheritance and opportunities. This exception is made for essentially collectivist reasons: we pretend that there’s a transgenerational moral continuity across racial groups that we’d not likely accept in other circumstances.
So I think Kendiism requires as a premise either 1) outright moral collectivism with respect to race, or 2) that disparities be due to primarily ongoing discrimination, not just past discrimination.
This was supposed to be a reply to handle just above.
This is probably not the best place to go deep into the whole Kendi thing. All I’m saying is that there is the intellectual equivalent of “fruit of the poisoned tree”. If you take the poison for granted, it doesn’t matter how careful, rigorous, deep, or intelligent a thinker you are, you will still come to wrong and unjust conclusions.
The question is what is the right thing to criticize when you are complaining about poisoned fruit. Should you get to the root cause, as it were, of the problem, and identify and blame the poison? Or should you blame the tree, as if it is somehow a “poor fruit producer”.
To me, and to be quite frank about it, it is simply a (perfectly understandable, though still not logically valid) evasion and a species of uncharitable ad hominem to blame the tree, when there is nothing wrong with the tree *except* the poison, and, were it not for the poison, there’s no reason to believe that the tree wouldn’t bear perfectly fine fruit.
If you call it a bad tree, but can’t identify what step in the fruit-making process it failed to perform well, then you are not making a proper argument.
Kendi is certainly no great thinker, but he is toxic not because he is a bad thinker, but because he is drinking poisoned kool-aid, and pumping out venom to great applause. If you make Kling or Hanson or Scott Alexander drink the same kool-aid, it would be coming out their pores and you could likewise rub their sweat on blow gun darts to make them instantly lethal, and try as they might they would have no good way to avoid it.
Not sure if the following nomination is in the spirit of the fantasy team. Annie Duke strikes me as a true intellectual in the sense of being a truth seeker. I like it that she dropped out of grad school to pursue a career as a professional poker player, succeeded at the latter fabulously, and then turned to being a “public intellectual” by applying lessons learned from poker to the study of decision-making. Her books are for popular consumption, or more precisely, for educated lay people, but not focused on public policy or political philosophy, so perhaps not quite right for the FIT.
FITs reminds me of something Andrew Sullivan used to award on his old blog: the Yglesias Award. That award goes to a post that accomplished the following: “This award, named after blogger Matthew Yglesias, is for writers, politicians, columnists or pundits who actually criticize their own side, make enemies among political allies, and generally risk something for the sake of saying what they believe.”
The difference between this award and FITs: instead of a single post, you want to promote thinkers. (The Yglesias Award seemed to do this indirectly, but only for Matthew Yglesias.) I think Matt Yglesias *might* fit on a FIT–he gets too snarky on Twitter though. His blog posts since going independent on Substack have been good–Vox apparently really held him back.
Tyler Cowen, Ross Douthat, Glen Loury, and Razib Khan perhaps deserve a place.