Play Fantasy Intellectual Teams and change the world!
I am excited by the way people who are aware of FITs have started to read commentaries and listen to podcasts with our scoring categories in mind. I find myself doing this (Balaji just gave the odds for a bet! Great research summary [a version 2.0 category] by Scott!). When we can get a lot of people thinking in terms of our scoring categories, we change the world. So help the project by becoming an owner. Send me a message at arnoldsk at us dot net or leave a comment with your email address.
one way to test FIT versions is to pick a public intellectual with views one hopes become higher status, and to see whether your FIT-scoring system would tend to capture their style.
Views and style are not the same thing. I can be sympathetic with the views of Victor Davis Hanson , but his style tends to be uncharitable toward those who disagree. I tend to disagree with Ezra Klein’s views, but often his style is fair to other points of view.
When I came up with the Fantasy Intellectual Teams idea, in my mind I was not differentiating views from style. But now I want to put all of the focus on style.
Imagine you came to a town and you found fistfights breaking out everywhere. Two people accidentally brush into one another on the sidewalk, and fists fly. A road rage incident occurs, and people get out of their cars and start throwing punches. In a restaurant, if a patron has to wait too long for the waiter, the she smacks the waiter. If the waiter is unhappy with his tip, he throws a haymaker.
This culture is reinforced, because whenever a fight breaks out, especially when it is between someone wearing a red shirt and someone wearing a blue shirt, people gather and cheer. They award high status to the meanest people. They like to see someone get poked in the eye or kneed in the groin.
We have a town like this, called Twitter. But it’s not just Twitter. Rude, abusive, and nasty discourse predated Twitter. Talk radio has had it at least since Rush Limbaugh. Paul Krugman has engaged in it for close to twenty years, ever since he joined the NYT.
I aim to clean up this town by raising the status of politeness. Start cheering for those who say “please” and “thank you” and “excuse me” until manners improve.
I don’t equate being polite with being soft, or with letting “them” abuse “us.” In the end, views matter. And I think that with higher-caliber political discourse, our views will do better than they do in Twitter town.
That is how I am thinking about the scoring catetories in FITs version 2.0.
I love your goals.
You should have a name for the kind of “style” you are promoting. Something that is catchy. “Fair and Balanced” is as good catch phrase but it has already been defiled. “Trustable and Memorable” captures some of your goals.
These could get a bit subjective, I suppose, but perhaps there ought to be point deductions for the negative behaviors you described? IE, ad hominem attacks, straw-manning, what-abouting, etc? I’m just thinking that yes, it helps to elevate amicable people like Scott Alexander, but the converse might work, too, where guys like Krugman are penalized when they behave like petulant children.
Cheers to all of this! Thank you Arnold for initiating, maintaining, and refining this project. While I don’t have the bandwidth to commit as an owner, I will follow along as a diehard fan – not of any team, but of the “sport” in general.
“I aim to clean up this town by raising the status of politeness.”
It doesn’t seem to me that ‘politeness’ is what you’re getting at with the FIT2 scores. More like intellectual best practices. You are handing out more points for forthrightness, integrity, and rigor than you are for being nice, and you’re not penalizing, suspending, or disqualifying anyone for being nasty or dishonest, which is something common to all major sports.
It would be like saying you are trying to encourage good sportsmanship, but at the same time, you are scoring points for athleticism and performance.
So let’s meta-score the COLD PBRS scoring factors themselves as being more Best Practice (BP), Civil Discourse (CD – i.e., politeness), or Impressive Influence (II) in character.
C – Caveats – BP (like Brady Disclosure)
O – Open to Reconsideration – BP (like Bayesian Updating)
L – Lucifer’s Advocate – Mostly BP (Dialectic), maybe a quarter CD if done is a nice vs nasty way.
D – Discussion Material – II
P – Pair Off – Maybe half BP (Dialectic) and half CD (One is unlikely to match with pairing partners without staying friendly, civil, and professional.)
B – Bets – BP (Bayesian Estimating, sufficient intellectual self-discipline to impose the the incentive for rigor ex ante via accountability ex post.)
R – Research Review – BP
S – Steel-manning – I will score this full CD, though it’s at least a little BP too.
So I get a FIT2 meta-score of 5.25 BP, 1.75 CD, and 1 II. More practices than politeness.
Arnold, Charles Murray, Sam Harris, and Richard Haier would not agree with your opinion that Ezra Klein is fair to other points of view.
Klein is a exhibit A in the case for adding penalties. His writing can seem nice much of the time , but he occasionally deserves a red card. Without penalty, he can get away with infamously outrageous personal fouls and still rack up points elsewhere.
He is also a good example of how to deploy specious and hollow R and S (i.e., ‘tin-manning’), but I’ll defer that to another time.
There is another problem that is, in my view, a bit too subtle and complicated to explain adequately here, but one can see it pop up in many online communities where there is an attempt to elevate discourse to a higher standard level.
What you get are varieties of “cargo cult” participants who are gaming the standard (either intentionally or subconsciously) and ape the appearance and form of that kind of discourse, but then either, on the one hand, aren’t making any real contributions or moving the conversation along demonstrating a lack of genuine comprehension, or, on the other, lacking sincerity, doing the equivalent of openly violating the spirit of the law while making a conspicuous show of following it to the letter.
If you think about the world of public intellectual commentary, you can probably already identify a few personalities who know how to craft their work so that it follows the right forms and uses the right techniques and phrases to *seem* respectable, rational, civil, etc. but all of that is camouflage for the murder weapon tucked beneath their tuxedo jacket.
Re your last paragraph, I think I know what you’re talking about. And a few people come to mind. I am curious who pings your radar on this. Would you be willing to share a few names and/or examples?
When someone makes the movie about FIT and the sheriff coming to clean up Twittertown, I think an actor like Jimmy Stewart should play the character of Arnold Kling.
Listen to Ezra Klein explain the GOP health care plan in 2017. This is quite uncharitable.
https://youtu.be/ZKk4uwFw3oM
Ezra Klein featured a Vox video on his Facebook, “Why white supremacists love Tucker Carlson”. This doesn’t strike me as remotely charitable.
Jonah Goldberg wrote, “Ezra Klein tries to say something mean about my book”
Regarding the question of packing the supreme court, Klein’s article is sub-titled, “Democrats need to squarely face the question: Are you willing to give up democracy in order to keep the current structure of the Court?”. That doesn’t seem to be charitable towards the other side at all.
Ezra Klein says Stacy Abrams lost her 2018 Gubernatorial run due to “rampant voter suppression”.
In Ezra Klein’s NYT op-ed this week on April 8, he argues: “The collapse of the Republican Party as a negotiating partner.”, that Mitch McConnell is not “… in any way, in any context, a good-faith actor.”. Klein advocates against compromise with Republicans or attempts at bipartisanship.
Today, Cooke wrote about Vox-ism but is clearly implying Ezra Klein in particular: “This is straight-up Vox-ism. Your side loses an election? The system must be “broken.” A legislative chamber defies the editorial board at the New York Times? Broken. America still has states? Broken. The Supreme Court follows the law as written? Broken. Anything in the entire world happens that displeases you. Broken, broken, broken, broken.”
*Sometimes* being charitable to other views is a very low bar to clear. Even the most bitter partisans can have a mellow moment, especially if they are riding a string of victories, it can be easy to be gracious for a moment in victory.
Klein is one of the worst offenders in vicious partisanship and uncharitably representing rivals. Citing him as an example, makes the goal of respectful debate unserious.
Part of what is needed is an Intellectual Scorecard, which the intellectuals themselves could follow, not have it hidden by the FI Team.
We need owners of Teams in order to … get self-interested point-counters.
It’s really hard and time consuming. I’m glad I chose intellectuals who I mostly like, and WANT them to score higher.
Who is going to give intellectuals the Red Flags? Deep Thought Jonathan? He gets an [absolute] point for giving Ezra a Red Flag?
Or somebody else?
Ezra is often vicious, like Trump, but also often insightful. Even vicious folk can have insight.