The best Rauch summary

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Jonathan Rauch writes in Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion Community.

If we care about knowledge, freedom, and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: Anyone can believe anything, but liberal science—open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network—is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community. Other communities, of course, can do all kinds of other things. But they cannot make social decisions about objective reality.

The overall essay is the best summary of Rauch’s Constitution of Knowledge that I have seen. Read it. I like this particular essay better than I like the book.

I am fine with Rauch’s rules for social epistemology. What bothers me about the book is the assumption that he makes implicitly–and often explicitly–that we can look to twentieth-century institutions to revive what he calls the reality-based community. He writes as if Harvard and the NYT are basically ok, and all that we need is for Google, Facebook, and Twitter to do a better job of moderating content on their platforms.

In Rauch, you won’t find anything like what I wrote in academic corruption 1, academic corruption 2, or academic corruption 3.

9 thoughts on “The best Rauch summary”

  2. It occurs to me that the academic corruption series follows a similar pattern and belong to the abstract generalization containing a lot of the more sophisticated anti-immigration argumentation.

    That also includes some anti-gentrification / NIMBY arguments which also fall under that generalization, all being of an essentially precautionary, small-c conservative nature in the sense of being wary of the radical, that is, big, fast changes to things that seem to work or that one likes the way that they are. The academic corruption series is complaining about the negative side-effects of movements in the direction of “institutional open borders”.

    That is: Just like “personnel is policy” and “people are performance”, institutions, communities, and so forth are not just some special operating system design or programming code that will operate the same way with as much effectiveness and harmony no matter what mix of human hardware you try to run them on, because humans are all really different, both naturally, and in terms of the cultural baggage and attitudes they bring with them. Low-friction human interchangeability is the fatal conceit of liberalism.

    Unless there is an assimilation process which is both nearly perfect and to which one can reasonably expect nearly perfect, confident, and perpetual commitment, the stresses and strains of integration from quickly bringing lots of different people in will overwhelm the institution and divert attention to managing the absorption of the ‘immigrants’ and distract from its ability to focus on its traditional functions.

    At some point of difficulty this inherently political and ideological absorption process occupies so much attention that it takes over and captures the institution itself, it’s self-conception of its values, ends, and purposes, and the former functions and missions must necessarily be made subordinate to this goal.

  3. “He writes as if Harvard and the NYT are basically ok, and all that we need is for Google, Facebook, and Twitter to do a better job of moderating content on their platforms.”

    Oof.

    Harvard Medical is so far gone that (for example) not only do they use terms like ‘birthing people’ and ‘pregnant people’ on their blog, but they incoherently use them alongside terms that are specifically feminine such as ‘women’s health’ and ‘maternal’.

    https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/advancing-maternal-justice-on-both-sides-of-the-atlantic-2020100821100

  4. What bothers me about the book is the assumption that he makes implicitly–and often explicitly–that we can look to twentieth-century institutions to revive what he calls the reality-based community.

    It was nice while it lasted, but those things are now ruined forever and we can’t go back to the way things were.

    A while ago I pointed out that the centrality of issues of trust and the potential and strong incentives for abuse make “epistemic security” intellectually a lot like cybersecurity.

    What has happened with the those “twentieth-century institutions” (more like 18th century, really) is that they had the equivalent of a design flaw and a failure-mode baked into their basic programming, and that these could work very well, but *only* until, after lots of hacking away at the problem, someone discovered how to exploit the vulnerability. After that, there is no hope of salvaging the situation without a completely new approach.

    There are lots of examples from the history of software and the internet of systems which were *excellent and deservedly dominant* for a long time, until someone discovered security flaws deriving from the fundamental architecture of the programming that proved, in practice, to be effectively insurmountable and infeasible to mitigate by any reasonable amount of effort. Such that the only thing that made sense was to start over from scratch or abandon the project altogether.

    They were simply incurably compromised from that point onward. You couldn’t use these things for a minute without a security breach, and eventually newer systems wouldn’t let you run them even if you wanted to. It’s just like when a pesticide or antibiotic no longer works at all because all the target organisms are now 100% immune: there is nothing to be done except to abandon the use of that chemical.

    To be sure, these are all sad losses, but there is no sense denying it or crying over spilt milk and one should just try to figure out the best way to move on doing something new and different.

    • I logged on to post this exact article Benjamin!
      In particular, I have been engaging in a Twitter exchange with Bergstrom, Bak Coleman and Santa Fe regarding the article. I pointed out that it takes a pro-expert and censoring view, which wasn’t received particularly well.
      https://twitter.com/sfiscience/status/1409582891051339777?s=20

      I’d like to steer them towards Martin Gurri and Andrey Mir:
      https://twitter.com/JoeRini6/status/1409813699691487233?s=20

      However I have the distinct feeling they know better what’s good for us all, and will happily nudge us along the way

      • The article itself is worth checking out for yet another group of social scientists who clearly, deeply believe:
        “assumption that he makes implicitly–and often explicitly–that we can look to twentieth-century institutions to revive what he calls the reality-based community. He writes as if Harvard and the NYT are basically ok, and all that we need is for Google, Facebook, and Twitter to do a better job of moderating content on their platforms.”

        In this case they come from a ‘cross-disciplinary, complexity-inspired’ set of views, but the result is the same:
        The left-leaning media, big tech (social media), academia and experts should regulate the “misinformation & fake news”…

  6. The Left has spent the last half century destroying the institutions built in Victorian times and reaching a peak near the mid-sixties. In an effort to get changes on the few really disgraceful things that remained (like genuine racism) they have been willing to throw everything else out, including free inquiry, American individualism, patriotic pride, Western industrial civiilzation as the pinnacle of the world’s achievement in the material sphere, technological innovation, merit based science, equality before the law, rational discussion, and the English legal tradition. Even libertarians have been complicit by supporting gay marriage and are unwilling to take responsibility for the sudden shift from gay partnership to saying there are no fixed sexes and no limits to what leftists can say they are — except in matters of race. And of course, those who push open immigration with no constraints are basically saying institutions are independent of who creates or enforces them and assumes that modern property rights are easy to maintain no matter how alien the cultures living are under Western institutions. Some even maintain that our policies should place as much weight if not more on non-citizens than citizens (including many of the GMU crowd). I call both trends — Left Liberalism and Extremist Libertarianism a metastasis of abstract individualism that is free of history, institutions, culture, or loyalty to one’s fellow citizens and patrimony. All societies whose ideas of government are taken ONLY from abstract principles will eventually be corrupted by those who will exploit the politics of changing demographics, and increasingly dependent beneficiaries of the welfare administrative state. No good liberal has an answer that works for the trends of the last half century.

  7. This seems like a good enough summary of the book that … I don’t have to read the book to get more than the 80% (60%?) of important meaning from just the summary.

    The academic corruption has been on an exponential S curve since before the 60s – with some discrimination against Republicans/ conservatives/ Christians in hiring and promoting Professors. Hating Trump/ Bush/ conservatives/ Christians/ Republicans … now all Whites, has become too dominant in colleges to expect any reform.

    Republicans, perhaps more Christians, need to explicitly build a parallel “on-line” college set of courses and exams to educate at a college level without the current college indoctrination.

    And Christians need to start more businesses, and hire folk w/o “college degrees”.

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