According to an article written in 2012, 6 corporations then controlled 90% of the media in the USA. That is consolidated from 50 companies in 1983. Motley Fool says things haven't changed in that regard.
This whole business of 'controlling the narrative' is only possible when there are only a limited number of 'trusted news sources'. People who question the government's story won't get access to government sources in the future. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has given over 300 million dollars to media organisations over the years. (source, their own website) according to https://thegrayzone.com/2021/11/21/bill-gates-million-media-outlets-global-agenda/. This isn't anything that the Right hasn't been doing all along -- see, for instance Charles Koch's plan to weaponise philanthropy from the 1970s: see the link to Structure and Social change here: https://www.prwatch.org/news/2020/01/13531/right-wing-megadonors-are-financing-media-operations-promote-their-ideologies and they dumped more than 100 millions dollars into such efforts recently.
It's no wonder we live in a media landscape where news organisations are printing what they are paid to print. There is just too much money at stake, and there is no way that the classified ad revenue of a few thousand local businesses was ever going to be able to compete with this.
So, we need to do a few things. The first is to break up the media conglomerates under anti-trust. And the second is to seriously reform the philanthropy/NGO sector. Perhaps the Effective Atruism people have some suggestions for how to do this? I would start by serverly limiting what counts as a 'charity' for the purpose of a 'charitable deduction' in the USA (since I do not think you can go directly to what we have here in Sweden, where there aren't any), but limiting the money that governments are allowed to send to NGOs for 'consultation' seems another good bet to me.
I agree! I'm not sure how much skepticism we can expect from journalists - even in the heyday of newspapers, most reporters couldn't learn enough about the subjects they were covering to do more than ask the right questions - they generally couldn't tell whether the answers were good. Today, with cuts in newsroom staffs, and most media seemingly more committed to advancing the narrative than presenting the truth, I have little hope.
Fortunately, the internet, with multiple sources and lots of blogs and comments, offers far more voices from any conceivable point of view. Unfortunately, this compounds the error of figuring out who to believe. "Show your work", and finding people who can respond intelligently with their own work, will help. It can at least expose the people who aren't even doing the work. Which seems to be most of them.
People - including journalists - either have that necessary balance of curiosity-&-skepticism that makes for a reasonably well-informed independent-mindedness - or they don't. Truth is that only a MINORITY of people (including the highly schooled) have that intellectual balance. Other needs get in the way for most; the need to go with the flow; the need to be popular etc etc.
Perhaps the biggest 'lie' of all is the one that woke liberals tell themselves is the psychological motivation that underlies their woke opinionising. They 'really care' about race/gender/economic inequality, 'the environment' etc etc. Not really true in the vast majority of cases it seems to me. What they 'really care' about is feeling personally pious in a cost-free way. What they 'really care' about is feeling morally superior and more sophisticated than thou. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
I had two careers; first as a college lecturer and then as an architect. In that whole time I never met a single fellow conservative. So all my friends are on the Left.
I think that Yes our beloved Western civilisation is Slouching Towards Bethlehem. But I like to think I am one of those recusants who is still listening out for the falconer. (And thank you by the way for your kind comment on my latest post.)
Arnold wrote "I believe that the true motive for affirmative action in admissions was to assuage white guilt over past treatment of blacks." I doubt whether the Presidents and Trustees of elite institutions, all of them Left "Liberals," personally felt any guilt at all. Rather, what is euphemistically called "affirmative action," i.e., racial preference in admissions, was for the purpose of maintaining the moral authority of white elites by protecting them from spurious charges of racism based on the low presence of blacks admitted under objective standards. This was overcome by turning a blind eye to the cognitive limitations on average of this population. At first there was a hope, or pretense, that a little extra tutoring could bring these admittees up to standards, but that hope proved evanescent.
Or perhaps more insidiously, affirmative action was used as a cover for legacy admissions, so that legacy admissions would not appear as obviously discriminatory in impact as they are at most of the older/Ivy institutions. Legacy admissions also tend to have a fair amount of economic value for colleges, which is something that senior administrators are likely to be acutely aware of.
Legacy admissions pretty much pick among the great many applicants who are fully qualified, rather than grant admission at deeply lower scores characteristic of affirmative action. Few legacy progeny who are unqualified even apply. See https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2019/04/22/study-shows-significant-impact-legacy-status-admissions-and-applicants. Legacy admissions might be called a form of discrimination, but it is not one that is objectionable on civil rights grounds because it is not race-based. The Constitution and the Civil Rights Law do not prohibit any and all forms of discrimination, i.e., choice, which has to be made when there are more qualified applicants than spaces available. Under a merit system, legacies do not displace minority applicants who typically fall well below normal admission standards. In fact, there are also black, hispanic, and asian legacy admissions. There are of course a few egregious cases involving children of the mega rich or powerful. Ted Kennedy was re-admitted to Harvard after dismissal for cheating - he sent a ringer in to take his exam. As I recall, Harvard could not identify any other case in which a cheater had been re-admitted.
I find that people who like to explain why and how they know something – essentially, people who teach me what they know – are people I can trust. I suppose that this is your “show your work” point. Conversely, people who provide conclusions without showing their thinking deserve to be met with some skepticism. I find that people in the latter case usually haven’t thought through their positions very well and are instead relying on a position or posture of authoritative knowledge.
And it really is, I think, a personality trait – some people think that having position equals having authority, while others think that being able to explain your position correctly equals having authority. (Or rather, in the latter case, that the position itself has the “authority” standing on its own, having been demonstrated through fact, logic, argument.) I find a lot of former Ivy League students fall into the “position equals authority” camp, perhaps not coincidentally.
Silver has a more-recent article about bias in the media that somehow relates to the point you’re making in this article about Team Blue and Team Red, making a similar case that Team Blue has more of a problem with these sorts of assertions of fact based on position of authority because of its cultural dominance (very rough summary). It’s really interesting.
But, again, I think it comes back to this idea of, as you put it, “show your work”. For someone like Silver, the point isn’t “the point” itself. Rather, the point is “how do you know something is, in fact, true?”. I don’t agree with him politically, I suspect, but I do love his approach to thinking through things, to try to get out of his own head and show why he believes the things he claims in a way that stands outside of “I trust Nate Silver and therefore believe what he says is true”.
One thing I can attest to is that there have been many times when I have tried to explain to somebody why it is that I believe something, and through the explaining I have found flaws and problems in my original construction of the idea. If I had just said 'trust me, I'm an expert' I would never have found them.
Garrett Jones says the solution is 10% less democracy.
I would add a strong presumption for the principle of subsidiarity: decentralization of policy unless there are, in particular cases, (a) great economies of scale and scope or (b) major negative externalities of small jurisdictions.
And maybe 50% less democracy, i.e., a much stronger presumption in favor of markets and other forms of voluntary cooperation, rather than big government. (Caveat: Private orgs have their own governance issues, HR, etc.)
Wise deference might be somewhat more feasible under subsidiarity and decentralization. Decentralization of policy and a shift to markets and to voluntary cooperation might somewhat reduce the need for wise deference, if they make 'exit' options more accessible and thereby lessen the importance of 'voice'.
Less democracy usually means "more elite control". But if elites have worse opinions than the masses, that isn't an improvement. Your average person handled COVID better than the elites.
When I hear 10% less democracy I think of my state health board overriding the local school district that voted against making kids wear masks at school.
Well said. I have in mind 'exit' options (markets, voluntary cooperation), rather than rule by experts. However, as you indicate, there are worse alternatives also in play.
I suppose that Arnold is asking each of us to cultivate a healthy skepticism. I took the liberty of introducing the dimension of institutional reforms. I take Arnold's point to be that healthy skepticism is within the power of the bootstrapping individual. By contrast, institutional shifts towards subsidiarity, markets, and exit options would require a social movement and/or disruptive technology.
It seems you are defining a real problem for which there is of yet no realistic solution. It’s completely unrealistic to expect the average person (and even intellectuals) to “check the work”. There are just too many issues which require expertise to even understand what’s actually involved in evaluation. At the end of the day society and civilization are built on a certain degree of trust in institutions ( elites/experts). Asking everyone to “check the work” of these elites/scientists isn’t a real solution and could even exacerbate the problem. I have no realistic answer. When trust in everything and everyone is lost there is little that can be realistically proposed as a solution.
Part of this problem is caused by the lies from upon high and the other by the “democratization of access to information “ aka misinformation and disinformation.
This is now way beyond an issue of red and blue. Societal conflict and collapse is now a flourishing media and intellectual marketplace. It’s a huge conundrum when the very forces that could ameliorate the problem are more invested in creating doubt and distrust. All under the cover of the First Amendment. Distrust and conspiracy cults have become a new form of identity which paradoxically give confidence to those who prefer to disbelieve in everything but their own conspiracies. It is indeed an epistemic crisis which if left to fester will be a civilizational crisis.
Since self-teaching, curiosity to acquire greater knowledge, critical analysis and intelligent thinking has not been part of the school curriculum since the 1970s, current populations do not have the tools, the desire, or expectation to “check the work”. They are truly as lambs to the slaughter.
Let's put this another way. Suppose you think your wife is cheating on you. Is the problem that you can't prove it, or the fact that she's cheating on you?
Obviously, it's the fact of her infidelity. And even if you can't prove it to scientific certainty, no amount of her throwing true facts at you ("I just went to my business conference and then went back to my room and fell asleep etc") is going to offset that you thought you saw her posting a personals ad to hook up with some random stranger during the trip. Even though just posting the ad doesn't mean she actually went through with it. Or the fact she turned her phone off instead of calling to say goodnight like she usually does. Or whatever.
Point is... it's a trust issue, and the trust isn't lost because of scientific investigation on the part of the average person. It's lost when they see that the story doesn't add up, and that's something that reveals itself to everyone over time.
To the extent there's a solution, it's
1. Don't cheat. Don't lie in the first place.
2. If trust is in question, it's incumbent on both sides to work to build it. Elites keep getting caught cheating and keep coming up with more and more elaborate retellings of facts ("Look, use your phone to verify I was in my hotel room and not out with some other guy!") instead of just rebuilding trust by being open and verifiable about what they're doing.
I think it's completely realistic to expect the average person to "check the work". After all, we know we're being lied to about X, Y and Z now. It's hardly controversial.
The problem isn't knowing we're lied to, it's what do can we do about it.
I don’t know about you but I am not about to check the work of vaccine scientists or any other scientists. The average person has a job, family and other things to do than “check the work” of scientists (who don’t always agree). Are you serious?
He didn't say "Check the work." He said "Show your work."
"There's no way covid came from a lab" . . . "Show your work." If the person says, "Well that's what the experts say," you know he has no "work" to show. He might list say, three arguments from the bullshit article, but then at least you know what he's working with. You don't have to "check" them (like "fact check"). Just "look" at them first .
Yeah, and I think you’re being too literal and looking at the specifics too much instead of the big picture view of how people think.
It’s an unnecessary to prove the exact truth in most situations to know you’re being lied to. in these kinds of cases isn’t really the facts at all. 990 truths are said and 10 lies. Exposing even one lie tends to call into question the other truths.
On the subject of vaccines, we had people claiming the Covid vaccine would prevent infection. It turned out it didn't. Then, they claimed the vaccine would prevent transmission. It turned out it didn't.
I don't know whether the vaccine scientists made the misstatements, or politicians or activists who tried to appropriate the authority of the scientists. I don't expect that anyone deliberately lied (i.e., knew they were telling untruths), but nevertheless lied by implying a great deal more certainty than anyone could reasonably have.
Laymen certainly couldn't evaluate the scientific claims in real time. But we can demand accountability for the lies, and understanding of how they were developed and propagated. When scientists (like Anthony Fauci), and their apologists (like Ezra Klein) claim that they had to tell "noble lies" to get people to do what was good for them, the liars destroy their credibility forever.
The vaccines did "prevent infection (with 9X% efficiency)" within the confines of "the original variant" and "within the very short time window after vaccination in the clinical trials".
Of course it would behoove someone communicating the information to point out that mutation of the virus was likely and that the immunity from the vaccine wore off quickly, but a gigantic lie by omission of these critical contexts was conducted for political reasons.
The stuff about it preventing transmission was more egregious (not even tested in the clinical trials), but the transmission claim was key to the vaccine mandate logic, and the vaccine mandate was the political desire (so that the disease could be blamed on non-vaxxers for political gain).
People either have that balance of curiosity-&-skepticism that makes for a reasonably well-informed independent-mindedness - or they don't. Truth is that only a MINORITY of people (including the highly schooled) have that intellectual balance. Other needs get in the way for most; the need to go with the flow; the need to be popular etc etc. As you say there is no solution to this fact about human nature. Maybe democratic liberalism has its limitations....big ones as well as, of course, big benefits.
It is important not to conflate falsehoods and lies. In the Vietnam era lots of members of the elite sincerely believed we had to prevent the takeover of South Vietnam to "halt the relentless march of communism." That was a wrong opinion, but it was not a lie. They actually believed it. We need a word to describe knowingly false statements, and "lie" used to be that word, but now the meaning of the word "lie" is changing to simply mean false, just as the meaning of words like "incredible," "unbelievable" "crisis," etc. has changed. This is unfortunate because our common language is becoming poorer - what word do you use now if something is really not credible? - and important distinctions are being lost.
We fought against commie genocide in Vietnam, slightly from '56 - '64; strongly 'till '73 Paris Peace Accords. Which commies signed and lied about and then invaded in '75. With 2.5-3 million commie murders after that.
It was a good and right opinion to fight against genocide.
How many would have to be murdered by commies for you to accept that the fight was good?
It was a shame, and wrong, to NOT support our client/ puppet in S. Vietnam in '75; "we" being the Democrats in Congress who stopped Pres. Ford from sending US planes back to bomb the invaders.
The only thing you can do is to try and pay attention to those who have a demonstrated track record of not being partisan hacks. Slightly off topic-- anyone know of any legal analysts who suffer neither from Trump Derangment Syndrome nor excessive Trump enthusiasm? I would like to read some dispassionate analysis of the most recent round of indictments...
That first sentence contains wisdom, theoretical and practical. As far as the "off-topic," just take a quick look at the Grand Indicter's background. You don't need no expertise.
It is commonplace for geneticists, for example, to (routinely) utter things they must know to be untrue in their popular treatments. So sometimes the motivation is obvious: they say certain things because they believe it aids the cause of being antiracist, or being seen as having done so.
But why lie about one's knowledge of the origins of Covid? Obviously it must have had something to do with Trump, but it's really not very clear.
Sometimes the answer is easy: the elite pretends to love soccer, as a body - it does not - because it knows Americans hate soccer.
The interest to me lies in the things they lie about for which there is no obvious motivation. When they lie about crime, for instance - I mutter something about their wanting to turn the world upside down. But really, what that means is - we're in some deep and very murky waters.
I think in the case of COVID-19's origin the motivations are quite obvious. The field of virology was going to be execrated by the public if the public ever came to believe virologists were responsible for COVID-19. You can see that in the early e-mails- they were clearly worried about the blowback in their discussions among themselves as they discussed the truly damning evidence that it was lab-modified by someone.
At the higher levels, though, I think Fauci learned early on that NIAID and the NIH had directly funded the most likely scientists to have performed this modification in other words, his and Collins' metaphorical fingerprints were on the actual weapon- he might have even been alerted to this by Daszak and Baric privately. Put yourself in Fauci's, Daszak's, and Baric's shoes- you strongly believe the work you did/funded led to COVID-19- do you admit this openly right from the start, or do you play for time hoping against hope that you are wrong? If the latter, you buy time. After time has passed and you still can't really demonstrate that the natural origin theory is even in the +1% probability (the actual situation the data shows), you are stuck, aren't you? You feel like you can't ever admit the truth because you started off denying it by omission, so in for an ounce, in for a pound.
During my 1950s childhood, one of my mom's favorite sayings was a quote from Marmion, an epic poem by Sir Walter Scott:
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."
=> heaven forefend you should ask, "Why?" she may have had cause to quote that line -- what well brought up child even today is not taught this more recent version: "It's not the crime; it's the coverup"?
That makes sense, I suppose, though I for some reason thought that this early "consensus" had spread throughout the scientific community - but maybe that was just solidarity with their brethren. Supposedly the number of people who understand what to look for in the genetics as to modified or wild - is so small. That they chose not to leave the subject alone, without actually presenting us with an explainer - [things should be explicable, I feel instinctively, and this is why I am (admittedly probably wrongly) sceptical of the modern physics community's grasp of its own subject - with its insistence on the "language of math only"] - only inclines me a little further in the direction of mistrusting them, and putting gain-of-function research (a term I was blissfully unaware of) on my list of discontents.
This, this thing you have said here. American elites must pretend to love soccer. I feel that you are on to something profound. Is it just a coincidence that Ted Lasso was such a big hit? I think not!
I'm surprised one of the most recent, and most salient, examples of elite lies goes unmentioned in this piece: the terrorist sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. If there was ever an example of elite opinion closing ranks around a flagrant falsehood, the Nord Stream sabotage is it.
2) Reduce the ability of elites to force their POV on others.
During COVID when you didn't force people they mostly made decent decisions, or at least better decisions then the average politician/institution.
Private schools made better decisions than public schools.
Most people got vaccinated, and it followed a pattern that mirrored actual disease risk (unlike elites that were giving vaccines to 20 year olds before 70 year olds).
People tend to work things out, sometimes it takes trial and error, but they work it out.
---
I think there are two "real" reasons for AA at Harvard, both self interested:
1) You need a critical mass of minority elites aligned with Harvard in order to Harvard to have control over that group.
I would also note that many of the minorities are foreign elites, you can understand how that would be important for expanding Harvard's influence.
2) I think they genuinely are afraid of having too many Asians. As in keeping Asians below X% isn't a byproduct of wanting blacks to be Y%, but the main point.
Both of those goals are very self serving and bad PR, so of course they lie.
---
On foreign policy I'm thoroughly convinced that it's hopeless. I lived through The War on Terror and thought we learned something from it, but it doesn't seem so. I can read something in the news about Ukraine, find out its a lie on Twitter within a day, and then months later the news will admit it was a lie (or just ignore it).
"I believe that the true motive for affirmative action in admissions was to assuage white guilt over past treatment of blacks. Let’s stipulate that such guilt is legitimate, and then we can argue over whether race-based admissions are an effective means to deal with it."
This might be true, but the reasoning from the Court in Brown which later informed Bakke and Grutter (the big AA cases) is that, quoting directly from Brown, "[education is the] principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment." While racial balancing plans for the purpose of remediation for past discrimination is considered a *requirement* for lower schools, the existence of past discrimination by the institution in question has not heretofore been necessary to justify affirmative action in higher education. You can see the Court discuss this in Community Schools v. Seattle https://www.oyez.org/cases/2006/05-908. There are two carve-outs that the Court has recognized as "compelling state interests": remedying past identifiable discrimination by the institution, or achieving racial diversity in higher education. This the Court considers separate and identifies it as a different motive.
Before SFAA, university AA had a carve-out in Constitutional law as serving a "unique and compelling state interest" so long as it is "narrowly tailored." Typically, the Court takes the "narrow tailoring" test seriously, but pre-SFAA it put on whiskey goggles for what the universities were doing and deferred to how the universities represented their policies to the Court. The pre-SFAA reasoning is that basically the US contains many races, universities are crucial for forming the leadership classes of the country, and we cannot effectively maintain the loyalty of all these races without peppering our leadership formation institutions with people from them, irrespective of past discrimination or lack thereof. Versions of this reasoning also applied to the many cases that broke down single sex higher education as well.
Should the "elite" represent the population (roughly in proportion on things like race) or should it be a pure meritocracy.
I personally have no problem with an elite with only 1% blacks, but some do.
Similarly I could see how having an Asian dominated elite when they are less then 10% of the population could be an issue.
I take the view that it's more about self interest then reparations. Blacks have votes and they are pretty good at using them as a unified block. Those votes are disproportionately in many important cities. And there is still a lot of cultural cache they can mobilize (white guilt). I can see how an elite or faction of the elite would think that offering a few token elite positions to some well off blacks would be a small price to capture all that power.
From a strictly results oriented view, plenty of societies (England included) have not felt the need to have either the masses or even large minorities represented in the elite. Most of Chinese history is like that, with a small foreign elite ruling over the vast masses. Same story in South Asia, England under the Normans, etc.
If certain (B)lacks are guaranteed positions within an integrated elite in a way that is beholden to politics rather than nature -- a political integration rather than a natural Talented Tenth leadership over mere blocs of blacks -- then they understand that their authority derives from a political faction rather than from nature. At the time these decisions were made, the settled postwar society was quite rattled by race riots and could be easily persuaded that this was jazz-infused danegeld that had to be paid and that segregation was no longer practical anyway.
This is the best part of the "rationalist" community in my opinion- the lack of requirement to believe in a particular set of beliefs, or to play according to a different set of rules depending on who you are. The rules of logic and proof are equally applicable to everyone.
According to an article written in 2012, 6 corporations then controlled 90% of the media in the USA. That is consolidated from 50 companies in 1983. Motley Fool says things haven't changed in that regard.
https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6?op=1&r=US&IR=T
https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/communication/media-stocks/big-6/
This whole business of 'controlling the narrative' is only possible when there are only a limited number of 'trusted news sources'. People who question the government's story won't get access to government sources in the future. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has given over 300 million dollars to media organisations over the years. (source, their own website) according to https://thegrayzone.com/2021/11/21/bill-gates-million-media-outlets-global-agenda/. This isn't anything that the Right hasn't been doing all along -- see, for instance Charles Koch's plan to weaponise philanthropy from the 1970s: see the link to Structure and Social change here: https://www.prwatch.org/news/2020/01/13531/right-wing-megadonors-are-financing-media-operations-promote-their-ideologies and they dumped more than 100 millions dollars into such efforts recently.
It's no wonder we live in a media landscape where news organisations are printing what they are paid to print. There is just too much money at stake, and there is no way that the classified ad revenue of a few thousand local businesses was ever going to be able to compete with this.
So, we need to do a few things. The first is to break up the media conglomerates under anti-trust. And the second is to seriously reform the philanthropy/NGO sector. Perhaps the Effective Atruism people have some suggestions for how to do this? I would start by serverly limiting what counts as a 'charity' for the purpose of a 'charitable deduction' in the USA (since I do not think you can go directly to what we have here in Sweden, where there aren't any), but limiting the money that governments are allowed to send to NGOs for 'consultation' seems another good bet to me.
"Show your work."
I agree! I'm not sure how much skepticism we can expect from journalists - even in the heyday of newspapers, most reporters couldn't learn enough about the subjects they were covering to do more than ask the right questions - they generally couldn't tell whether the answers were good. Today, with cuts in newsroom staffs, and most media seemingly more committed to advancing the narrative than presenting the truth, I have little hope.
Fortunately, the internet, with multiple sources and lots of blogs and comments, offers far more voices from any conceivable point of view. Unfortunately, this compounds the error of figuring out who to believe. "Show your work", and finding people who can respond intelligently with their own work, will help. It can at least expose the people who aren't even doing the work. Which seems to be most of them.
But maybe I'm too cynical.
People - including journalists - either have that necessary balance of curiosity-&-skepticism that makes for a reasonably well-informed independent-mindedness - or they don't. Truth is that only a MINORITY of people (including the highly schooled) have that intellectual balance. Other needs get in the way for most; the need to go with the flow; the need to be popular etc etc.
Perhaps the biggest 'lie' of all is the one that woke liberals tell themselves is the psychological motivation that underlies their woke opinionising. They 'really care' about race/gender/economic inequality, 'the environment' etc etc. Not really true in the vast majority of cases it seems to me. What they 'really care' about is feeling personally pious in a cost-free way. What they 'really care' about is feeling morally superior and more sophisticated than thou. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
I had two careers; first as a college lecturer and then as an architect. In that whole time I never met a single fellow conservative. So all my friends are on the Left.
Maybe that's why you are slouching towards Bethlehem...
I think that Yes our beloved Western civilisation is Slouching Towards Bethlehem. But I like to think I am one of those recusants who is still listening out for the falconer. (And thank you by the way for your kind comment on my latest post.)
Recusants of the world unite!
Arnold wrote "I believe that the true motive for affirmative action in admissions was to assuage white guilt over past treatment of blacks." I doubt whether the Presidents and Trustees of elite institutions, all of them Left "Liberals," personally felt any guilt at all. Rather, what is euphemistically called "affirmative action," i.e., racial preference in admissions, was for the purpose of maintaining the moral authority of white elites by protecting them from spurious charges of racism based on the low presence of blacks admitted under objective standards. This was overcome by turning a blind eye to the cognitive limitations on average of this population. At first there was a hope, or pretense, that a little extra tutoring could bring these admittees up to standards, but that hope proved evanescent.
Or perhaps more insidiously, affirmative action was used as a cover for legacy admissions, so that legacy admissions would not appear as obviously discriminatory in impact as they are at most of the older/Ivy institutions. Legacy admissions also tend to have a fair amount of economic value for colleges, which is something that senior administrators are likely to be acutely aware of.
Legacy admissions pretty much pick among the great many applicants who are fully qualified, rather than grant admission at deeply lower scores characteristic of affirmative action. Few legacy progeny who are unqualified even apply. See https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2019/04/22/study-shows-significant-impact-legacy-status-admissions-and-applicants. Legacy admissions might be called a form of discrimination, but it is not one that is objectionable on civil rights grounds because it is not race-based. The Constitution and the Civil Rights Law do not prohibit any and all forms of discrimination, i.e., choice, which has to be made when there are more qualified applicants than spaces available. Under a merit system, legacies do not displace minority applicants who typically fall well below normal admission standards. In fact, there are also black, hispanic, and asian legacy admissions. There are of course a few egregious cases involving children of the mega rich or powerful. Ted Kennedy was re-admitted to Harvard after dismissal for cheating - he sent a ringer in to take his exam. As I recall, Harvard could not identify any other case in which a cheater had been re-admitted.
I find that people who like to explain why and how they know something – essentially, people who teach me what they know – are people I can trust. I suppose that this is your “show your work” point. Conversely, people who provide conclusions without showing their thinking deserve to be met with some skepticism. I find that people in the latter case usually haven’t thought through their positions very well and are instead relying on a position or posture of authoritative knowledge.
And it really is, I think, a personality trait – some people think that having position equals having authority, while others think that being able to explain your position correctly equals having authority. (Or rather, in the latter case, that the position itself has the “authority” standing on its own, having been demonstrated through fact, logic, argument.) I find a lot of former Ivy League students fall into the “position equals authority” camp, perhaps not coincidentally.
Silver has a more-recent article about bias in the media that somehow relates to the point you’re making in this article about Team Blue and Team Red, making a similar case that Team Blue has more of a problem with these sorts of assertions of fact based on position of authority because of its cultural dominance (very rough summary). It’s really interesting.
But, again, I think it comes back to this idea of, as you put it, “show your work”. For someone like Silver, the point isn’t “the point” itself. Rather, the point is “how do you know something is, in fact, true?”. I don’t agree with him politically, I suspect, but I do love his approach to thinking through things, to try to get out of his own head and show why he believes the things he claims in a way that stands outside of “I trust Nate Silver and therefore believe what he says is true”.
One thing I can attest to is that there have been many times when I have tried to explain to somebody why it is that I believe something, and through the explaining I have found flaws and problems in my original construction of the idea. If I had just said 'trust me, I'm an expert' I would never have found them.
Garrett Jones says the solution is 10% less democracy.
I would add a strong presumption for the principle of subsidiarity: decentralization of policy unless there are, in particular cases, (a) great economies of scale and scope or (b) major negative externalities of small jurisdictions.
And maybe 50% less democracy, i.e., a much stronger presumption in favor of markets and other forms of voluntary cooperation, rather than big government. (Caveat: Private orgs have their own governance issues, HR, etc.)
Wise deference might be somewhat more feasible under subsidiarity and decentralization. Decentralization of policy and a shift to markets and to voluntary cooperation might somewhat reduce the need for wise deference, if they make 'exit' options more accessible and thereby lessen the importance of 'voice'.
Less democracy usually means "more elite control". But if elites have worse opinions than the masses, that isn't an improvement. Your average person handled COVID better than the elites.
When I hear 10% less democracy I think of my state health board overriding the local school district that voted against making kids wear masks at school.
Well said. I have in mind 'exit' options (markets, voluntary cooperation), rather than rule by experts. However, as you indicate, there are worse alternatives also in play.
I suppose that Arnold is asking each of us to cultivate a healthy skepticism. I took the liberty of introducing the dimension of institutional reforms. I take Arnold's point to be that healthy skepticism is within the power of the bootstrapping individual. By contrast, institutional shifts towards subsidiarity, markets, and exit options would require a social movement and/or disruptive technology.
It seems you are defining a real problem for which there is of yet no realistic solution. It’s completely unrealistic to expect the average person (and even intellectuals) to “check the work”. There are just too many issues which require expertise to even understand what’s actually involved in evaluation. At the end of the day society and civilization are built on a certain degree of trust in institutions ( elites/experts). Asking everyone to “check the work” of these elites/scientists isn’t a real solution and could even exacerbate the problem. I have no realistic answer. When trust in everything and everyone is lost there is little that can be realistically proposed as a solution.
Part of this problem is caused by the lies from upon high and the other by the “democratization of access to information “ aka misinformation and disinformation.
This is now way beyond an issue of red and blue. Societal conflict and collapse is now a flourishing media and intellectual marketplace. It’s a huge conundrum when the very forces that could ameliorate the problem are more invested in creating doubt and distrust. All under the cover of the First Amendment. Distrust and conspiracy cults have become a new form of identity which paradoxically give confidence to those who prefer to disbelieve in everything but their own conspiracies. It is indeed an epistemic crisis which if left to fester will be a civilizational crisis.
Since self-teaching, curiosity to acquire greater knowledge, critical analysis and intelligent thinking has not been part of the school curriculum since the 1970s, current populations do not have the tools, the desire, or expectation to “check the work”. They are truly as lambs to the slaughter.
Let's put this another way. Suppose you think your wife is cheating on you. Is the problem that you can't prove it, or the fact that she's cheating on you?
Obviously, it's the fact of her infidelity. And even if you can't prove it to scientific certainty, no amount of her throwing true facts at you ("I just went to my business conference and then went back to my room and fell asleep etc") is going to offset that you thought you saw her posting a personals ad to hook up with some random stranger during the trip. Even though just posting the ad doesn't mean she actually went through with it. Or the fact she turned her phone off instead of calling to say goodnight like she usually does. Or whatever.
Point is... it's a trust issue, and the trust isn't lost because of scientific investigation on the part of the average person. It's lost when they see that the story doesn't add up, and that's something that reveals itself to everyone over time.
To the extent there's a solution, it's
1. Don't cheat. Don't lie in the first place.
2. If trust is in question, it's incumbent on both sides to work to build it. Elites keep getting caught cheating and keep coming up with more and more elaborate retellings of facts ("Look, use your phone to verify I was in my hotel room and not out with some other guy!") instead of just rebuilding trust by being open and verifiable about what they're doing.
I think it's completely realistic to expect the average person to "check the work". After all, we know we're being lied to about X, Y and Z now. It's hardly controversial.
The problem isn't knowing we're lied to, it's what do can we do about it.
I don’t know about you but I am not about to check the work of vaccine scientists or any other scientists. The average person has a job, family and other things to do than “check the work” of scientists (who don’t always agree). Are you serious?
He didn't say "Check the work." He said "Show your work."
"There's no way covid came from a lab" . . . "Show your work." If the person says, "Well that's what the experts say," you know he has no "work" to show. He might list say, three arguments from the bullshit article, but then at least you know what he's working with. You don't have to "check" them (like "fact check"). Just "look" at them first .
Yeah, and I think you’re being too literal and looking at the specifics too much instead of the big picture view of how people think.
It’s an unnecessary to prove the exact truth in most situations to know you’re being lied to. in these kinds of cases isn’t really the facts at all. 990 truths are said and 10 lies. Exposing even one lie tends to call into question the other truths.
Well have to agree to disagree.
On the subject of vaccines, we had people claiming the Covid vaccine would prevent infection. It turned out it didn't. Then, they claimed the vaccine would prevent transmission. It turned out it didn't.
I don't know whether the vaccine scientists made the misstatements, or politicians or activists who tried to appropriate the authority of the scientists. I don't expect that anyone deliberately lied (i.e., knew they were telling untruths), but nevertheless lied by implying a great deal more certainty than anyone could reasonably have.
Laymen certainly couldn't evaluate the scientific claims in real time. But we can demand accountability for the lies, and understanding of how they were developed and propagated. When scientists (like Anthony Fauci), and their apologists (like Ezra Klein) claim that they had to tell "noble lies" to get people to do what was good for them, the liars destroy their credibility forever.
The vaccines did "prevent infection (with 9X% efficiency)" within the confines of "the original variant" and "within the very short time window after vaccination in the clinical trials".
Of course it would behoove someone communicating the information to point out that mutation of the virus was likely and that the immunity from the vaccine wore off quickly, but a gigantic lie by omission of these critical contexts was conducted for political reasons.
The stuff about it preventing transmission was more egregious (not even tested in the clinical trials), but the transmission claim was key to the vaccine mandate logic, and the vaccine mandate was the political desire (so that the disease could be blamed on non-vaxxers for political gain).
The problem of imperfect knowledge--the "epistemic crisis"--can't be solved. It can at best be mitigated.
People either have that balance of curiosity-&-skepticism that makes for a reasonably well-informed independent-mindedness - or they don't. Truth is that only a MINORITY of people (including the highly schooled) have that intellectual balance. Other needs get in the way for most; the need to go with the flow; the need to be popular etc etc. As you say there is no solution to this fact about human nature. Maybe democratic liberalism has its limitations....big ones as well as, of course, big benefits.
It is important not to conflate falsehoods and lies. In the Vietnam era lots of members of the elite sincerely believed we had to prevent the takeover of South Vietnam to "halt the relentless march of communism." That was a wrong opinion, but it was not a lie. They actually believed it. We need a word to describe knowingly false statements, and "lie" used to be that word, but now the meaning of the word "lie" is changing to simply mean false, just as the meaning of words like "incredible," "unbelievable" "crisis," etc. has changed. This is unfortunate because our common language is becoming poorer - what word do you use now if something is really not credible? - and important distinctions are being lost.
We fought against commie genocide in Vietnam, slightly from '56 - '64; strongly 'till '73 Paris Peace Accords. Which commies signed and lied about and then invaded in '75. With 2.5-3 million commie murders after that.
It was a good and right opinion to fight against genocide.
How many would have to be murdered by commies for you to accept that the fight was good?
It was a shame, and wrong, to NOT support our client/ puppet in S. Vietnam in '75; "we" being the Democrats in Congress who stopped Pres. Ford from sending US planes back to bomb the invaders.
'calumny' does not appear to be overused now.
The only thing you can do is to try and pay attention to those who have a demonstrated track record of not being partisan hacks. Slightly off topic-- anyone know of any legal analysts who suffer neither from Trump Derangment Syndrome nor excessive Trump enthusiasm? I would like to read some dispassionate analysis of the most recent round of indictments...
Jonathan Turley (one of my FIT picks). https://jonathanturley.org/
Also lots of smart commentary by Neo at https://www.thenewneo.com/
That first sentence contains wisdom, theoretical and practical. As far as the "off-topic," just take a quick look at the Grand Indicter's background. You don't need no expertise.
It is commonplace for geneticists, for example, to (routinely) utter things they must know to be untrue in their popular treatments. So sometimes the motivation is obvious: they say certain things because they believe it aids the cause of being antiracist, or being seen as having done so.
But why lie about one's knowledge of the origins of Covid? Obviously it must have had something to do with Trump, but it's really not very clear.
Sometimes the answer is easy: the elite pretends to love soccer, as a body - it does not - because it knows Americans hate soccer.
The interest to me lies in the things they lie about for which there is no obvious motivation. When they lie about crime, for instance - I mutter something about their wanting to turn the world upside down. But really, what that means is - we're in some deep and very murky waters.
I think in the case of COVID-19's origin the motivations are quite obvious. The field of virology was going to be execrated by the public if the public ever came to believe virologists were responsible for COVID-19. You can see that in the early e-mails- they were clearly worried about the blowback in their discussions among themselves as they discussed the truly damning evidence that it was lab-modified by someone.
At the higher levels, though, I think Fauci learned early on that NIAID and the NIH had directly funded the most likely scientists to have performed this modification in other words, his and Collins' metaphorical fingerprints were on the actual weapon- he might have even been alerted to this by Daszak and Baric privately. Put yourself in Fauci's, Daszak's, and Baric's shoes- you strongly believe the work you did/funded led to COVID-19- do you admit this openly right from the start, or do you play for time hoping against hope that you are wrong? If the latter, you buy time. After time has passed and you still can't really demonstrate that the natural origin theory is even in the +1% probability (the actual situation the data shows), you are stuck, aren't you? You feel like you can't ever admit the truth because you started off denying it by omission, so in for an ounce, in for a pound.
During my 1950s childhood, one of my mom's favorite sayings was a quote from Marmion, an epic poem by Sir Walter Scott:
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."
=> heaven forefend you should ask, "Why?" she may have had cause to quote that line -- what well brought up child even today is not taught this more recent version: "It's not the crime; it's the coverup"?
That adage was actually in my mind as I wrote the comment.
That makes sense, I suppose, though I for some reason thought that this early "consensus" had spread throughout the scientific community - but maybe that was just solidarity with their brethren. Supposedly the number of people who understand what to look for in the genetics as to modified or wild - is so small. That they chose not to leave the subject alone, without actually presenting us with an explainer - [things should be explicable, I feel instinctively, and this is why I am (admittedly probably wrongly) sceptical of the modern physics community's grasp of its own subject - with its insistence on the "language of math only"] - only inclines me a little further in the direction of mistrusting them, and putting gain-of-function research (a term I was blissfully unaware of) on my list of discontents.
You just expressed elegantly what I have come to believe.
This, this thing you have said here. American elites must pretend to love soccer. I feel that you are on to something profound. Is it just a coincidence that Ted Lasso was such a big hit? I think not!
I'm surprised one of the most recent, and most salient, examples of elite lies goes unmentioned in this piece: the terrorist sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. If there was ever an example of elite opinion closing ranks around a flagrant falsehood, the Nord Stream sabotage is it.
Excellent piece, thanks for writing.
The only solution is more Public’s, Racket News, and others who are willing to do the work to expose the BS. This means more conflict not less
More polite disagreement, verbal, isn't quite the same as conflict, physical.
We need more open, polite disagreements about what is known, and how it is known; as well as what are facts vs. opinions.
+1
As a practical matter I think its best to:
1) Encourage people not to consume "news".
2) Reduce the ability of elites to force their POV on others.
During COVID when you didn't force people they mostly made decent decisions, or at least better decisions then the average politician/institution.
Private schools made better decisions than public schools.
Most people got vaccinated, and it followed a pattern that mirrored actual disease risk (unlike elites that were giving vaccines to 20 year olds before 70 year olds).
People tend to work things out, sometimes it takes trial and error, but they work it out.
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I think there are two "real" reasons for AA at Harvard, both self interested:
1) You need a critical mass of minority elites aligned with Harvard in order to Harvard to have control over that group.
I would also note that many of the minorities are foreign elites, you can understand how that would be important for expanding Harvard's influence.
2) I think they genuinely are afraid of having too many Asians. As in keeping Asians below X% isn't a byproduct of wanting blacks to be Y%, but the main point.
Both of those goals are very self serving and bad PR, so of course they lie.
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On foreign policy I'm thoroughly convinced that it's hopeless. I lived through The War on Terror and thought we learned something from it, but it doesn't seem so. I can read something in the news about Ukraine, find out its a lie on Twitter within a day, and then months later the news will admit it was a lie (or just ignore it).
"I believe that the true motive for affirmative action in admissions was to assuage white guilt over past treatment of blacks. Let’s stipulate that such guilt is legitimate, and then we can argue over whether race-based admissions are an effective means to deal with it."
This might be true, but the reasoning from the Court in Brown which later informed Bakke and Grutter (the big AA cases) is that, quoting directly from Brown, "[education is the] principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment." While racial balancing plans for the purpose of remediation for past discrimination is considered a *requirement* for lower schools, the existence of past discrimination by the institution in question has not heretofore been necessary to justify affirmative action in higher education. You can see the Court discuss this in Community Schools v. Seattle https://www.oyez.org/cases/2006/05-908. There are two carve-outs that the Court has recognized as "compelling state interests": remedying past identifiable discrimination by the institution, or achieving racial diversity in higher education. This the Court considers separate and identifies it as a different motive.
Before SFAA, university AA had a carve-out in Constitutional law as serving a "unique and compelling state interest" so long as it is "narrowly tailored." Typically, the Court takes the "narrow tailoring" test seriously, but pre-SFAA it put on whiskey goggles for what the universities were doing and deferred to how the universities represented their policies to the Court. The pre-SFAA reasoning is that basically the US contains many races, universities are crucial for forming the leadership classes of the country, and we cannot effectively maintain the loyalty of all these races without peppering our leadership formation institutions with people from them, irrespective of past discrimination or lack thereof. Versions of this reasoning also applied to the many cases that broke down single sex higher education as well.
Should the "elite" represent the population (roughly in proportion on things like race) or should it be a pure meritocracy.
I personally have no problem with an elite with only 1% blacks, but some do.
Similarly I could see how having an Asian dominated elite when they are less then 10% of the population could be an issue.
I take the view that it's more about self interest then reparations. Blacks have votes and they are pretty good at using them as a unified block. Those votes are disproportionately in many important cities. And there is still a lot of cultural cache they can mobilize (white guilt). I can see how an elite or faction of the elite would think that offering a few token elite positions to some well off blacks would be a small price to capture all that power.
From a strictly results oriented view, plenty of societies (England included) have not felt the need to have either the masses or even large minorities represented in the elite. Most of Chinese history is like that, with a small foreign elite ruling over the vast masses. Same story in South Asia, England under the Normans, etc.
If certain (B)lacks are guaranteed positions within an integrated elite in a way that is beholden to politics rather than nature -- a political integration rather than a natural Talented Tenth leadership over mere blocs of blacks -- then they understand that their authority derives from a political faction rather than from nature. At the time these decisions were made, the settled postwar society was quite rattled by race riots and could be easily persuaded that this was jazz-infused danegeld that had to be paid and that segregation was no longer practical anyway.
This is the best part of the "rationalist" community in my opinion- the lack of requirement to believe in a particular set of beliefs, or to play according to a different set of rules depending on who you are. The rules of logic and proof are equally applicable to everyone.