Noah Smith reads books on China and talks with Tyler Cowen; Glenn Loury, Ed West, and Robert Wright worry about tribalism; Freddie deBoer reviews Julia Galef
"Loser's consent is a vital component of democracy". True of succession. But civil disobedience may be crucial to counter tyranny of the majority in policy-making, as well as tyranny of experts.
Individual liberties are vital components of constitutional democracy. A wise polity greatly restricts the scope of majority rule and of rule by experts, and second-guesses majorities and experts in rule-making, always by checks and balances, and occasionally by civil disobedience.
Beware paternalistic or authoritarian tyranny of the majority and rule by experts: The minority gets the government that the majority and/or experts think the minority deserves.
Political decentralization is a vital component of constitutional democracy. It enables local policy experimentation. A minority can exit a local tyranny of majority or expert rule by migrating to a more favorable jurisdiction.
What are the optimal scale and optimal scope of majority rule and of rule by experts? These are contested issues that depend partly on changes in technology and social density, complexity, diversity. A presumption of liberty should carry great weight in the debate.
Despite being incredibly heterodox himself, Taleb enforces one of the tightest and most arbitrarily enforced orthodoxies I've ever seen around his own set of views. If you deviate from his perspective one iota on certain topics (GMOs, IQ, Covid) he becomes absolutely unglued.
"the Democratic Party will want to try to arrest this development and instead encourage ethnic identity politics", as they've been doing for at least a decade.
The children's books of Kendi, and slogans such as BLM actively discourage non-racial politics and encourage an extremely race-centric view of politics. Kling speaks about this as some future direction the Democrats might explore, but that has been the Democrat's dominant platform and messaging.
I'm still reasonably optimistic for the future. But any good outcomes won't be due to good behavior or intentions on the part of Democrats.
"Freddie reviews Julia. Self-recommending, as Tyler would say."
Eh, maybe one of those cases when a self-recommendation is bad advice.
Seemed to me as if Freddie had reluctantly accepted a crappy assignment to write the only review out there that would be both prominent and even mildly critical.
And then he really couldn't think of anything critical to say, so he phoned it in and praised with faint-damning and petty complaints buried at least halfway in about 'tone' and the need for some sharper editing, and about the 'execution style', and then rambled on about tangents unrelated to the book's contents, I guess for the purpose of 'contextualization', but who knows.
He made a good (albeit trivial) point about her overdoing it to 'prove' how 'soldiery' our mindsets tend to be in terms of characterizing too many of the metaphors we tend use for ideas and arguments as 'martial'. But then he fails to go the final inch and point out the obvious which is that metaphor usage doesn't prove anything*. Disagreement is rivalrous, so people will naturally use the language of rivalry to describe it. So what? There is a whole line of cynical and abusive accusation out there making too much of metaphors, in which your use of metaphors is dangerous violence whereas our use of the same metaphors is totally innocent and just how normal people talk.
But again, the metaphor thing is totally minor and since not essential to anything else, not even really a criticism of Galef or the book at all.
I've read the book and there is nothing objectionable or controversial, which is why she gets invited to talk to all sorts of people. People may learn new things, but they don't have to believe different things. Indictments are general and balanced, we are all sinners, after all. It doesn't ask anyone to change a currently-held strong opinion, just to 'try to be better'. And there's nothing bad to say about it, which is why no one - not even Freddie who kinda tried - says anything bad about it.
Nobody, except me.
And I have two objections.
My first objection is that I believe Galef seriously underrates the value - even necessity - of argument for truth-discovery and knowledge generation. I think this is because she - and her audience - has spent a lot of her life on the internet or consuming media or paying attention to politics, and those are the areas where things are the worst. With very rare exceptions, the internet is just not a place where productive, high quality debate happens.
Maybe had she spent more time in trial courts or in markets, she might think, "You know, it's good that both sides had an opportunity to make their case, and to poke holes in the other side's case, like soldiers, but with rules of the game," or, "it's better when businesses face open competition than if they can find excuses to get the other guy shut down."
And second, I object to is its very unobjectionability.
Because, as David Brooks will be happy to tell you, what always happens when an author appeals to unobjectionable virtues, e.g., "try to overcome bias and be a fair judge", and creates terms that substitute for good and bad with stark contrast and zero moral ambiguity, is that it just creates a language the negative side of which becomes immediately corrupted and weaponized by partisans.
Because no one even applies these terms to themselves or to their own side, they end up using these weapons not to become better thinkers or be open-minded and expose themelves to and engage with different ideas, but *to psychologize* the explanation for the very existence of opposition.
This ends up always just providing an excuse to dismiss, dispose and suppress anything that opposition says, because the cynical grunts of mere soldiers are not just suspect but fundamentally *illegitimate and thus unworthy* of consideration, being mere manifestations of reptile-brained uncivil impulses and tribal warrior instincts or some kind of barely intellectualized rationalization for genetically-determined moral foundations or arbitrary preferences, or whatever.
So many ways to say the same thing, which is that we think good, they don't, and what they say is at best nonsense, and at worst, an existential danger. So, you don't have to listen to those guys, they don't deserve a 'platform' or a 'signal boost', and you can and should safely ignore them, and also, as you know, we are totally in the right in silencing their harmful, evil idiocy.
Like Galef, I've been on the internet a lot too. I've seen 'debate' go bad - very, very bad, you have no idea how bad - but I've also seen plenty of the above as well, over and over, and at the level of the elite commentators that are all giving Galef interviews. When they think about themselves, they think they are already scouts, and like everyone can resolve to try to be more athletically fit, they can all resolve to try to be better scouts too, but it's on the margin. Maybe they recognize that some of their friends are letting themselves go and are out of shape, and so have a little further to go on the road to fitness, but they're still more or less 'healthy'. On the other hand, when they think of their opponents, soldiers one and all. So unfit, it's a wonder they're even alive.
My point is, while Galef is full of good intentions, that's how the road to hell is paved, and a book about better thinking which just ends up helping these people further rationalize their bad behavior is counterproductive. No one is going to change how they think, they are just going to use her terms to change the words they use to dunk on people who think differently. This always happens. If you give people boo-words for bad-thinkers, this is what they do. It's not her fault, but that's how it is.
My position is that things have gone way, way too far in that direction, and what would be more helpful are books and terms that encourage these same elite commentators to raise the status of opposition (ETA: AND TO GET OFF TWITTER, which is an ocean of scout-killing poison, bad for them, and everybody).
Terms like 'good sportsmanship' or 'fair play' would be better to emphasize the point that there is nothing wrong with arguing, on the contrary, we should and sometimes we must to get to the truth, but that there is a civil and honorable way to go about it, and also dishonorable ways, and that one should try one's best to be virtuous and responsible.
*I will accept it proves something if someone can show me how frequency of use of the metaphors correlates with being better soldiers or worse scouts or whatever.
"Loser's consent is a vital component of democracy". True of succession. But civil disobedience may be crucial to counter tyranny of the majority in policy-making, as well as tyranny of experts.
Individual liberties are vital components of constitutional democracy. A wise polity greatly restricts the scope of majority rule and of rule by experts, and second-guesses majorities and experts in rule-making, always by checks and balances, and occasionally by civil disobedience.
Beware paternalistic or authoritarian tyranny of the majority and rule by experts: The minority gets the government that the majority and/or experts think the minority deserves.
Political decentralization is a vital component of constitutional democracy. It enables local policy experimentation. A minority can exit a local tyranny of majority or expert rule by migrating to a more favorable jurisdiction.
What are the optimal scale and optimal scope of majority rule and of rule by experts? These are contested issues that depend partly on changes in technology and social density, complexity, diversity. A presumption of liberty should carry great weight in the debate.
Despite being incredibly heterodox himself, Taleb enforces one of the tightest and most arbitrarily enforced orthodoxies I've ever seen around his own set of views. If you deviate from his perspective one iota on certain topics (GMOs, IQ, Covid) he becomes absolutely unglued.
"the Democratic Party will want to try to arrest this development and instead encourage ethnic identity politics", as they've been doing for at least a decade.
This is, not a bug, but a feature.
The children's books of Kendi, and slogans such as BLM actively discourage non-racial politics and encourage an extremely race-centric view of politics. Kling speaks about this as some future direction the Democrats might explore, but that has been the Democrat's dominant platform and messaging.
I'm still reasonably optimistic for the future. But any good outcomes won't be due to good behavior or intentions on the part of Democrats.
"Freddie reviews Julia. Self-recommending, as Tyler would say."
Eh, maybe one of those cases when a self-recommendation is bad advice.
Seemed to me as if Freddie had reluctantly accepted a crappy assignment to write the only review out there that would be both prominent and even mildly critical.
And then he really couldn't think of anything critical to say, so he phoned it in and praised with faint-damning and petty complaints buried at least halfway in about 'tone' and the need for some sharper editing, and about the 'execution style', and then rambled on about tangents unrelated to the book's contents, I guess for the purpose of 'contextualization', but who knows.
He made a good (albeit trivial) point about her overdoing it to 'prove' how 'soldiery' our mindsets tend to be in terms of characterizing too many of the metaphors we tend use for ideas and arguments as 'martial'. But then he fails to go the final inch and point out the obvious which is that metaphor usage doesn't prove anything*. Disagreement is rivalrous, so people will naturally use the language of rivalry to describe it. So what? There is a whole line of cynical and abusive accusation out there making too much of metaphors, in which your use of metaphors is dangerous violence whereas our use of the same metaphors is totally innocent and just how normal people talk.
But again, the metaphor thing is totally minor and since not essential to anything else, not even really a criticism of Galef or the book at all.
I've read the book and there is nothing objectionable or controversial, which is why she gets invited to talk to all sorts of people. People may learn new things, but they don't have to believe different things. Indictments are general and balanced, we are all sinners, after all. It doesn't ask anyone to change a currently-held strong opinion, just to 'try to be better'. And there's nothing bad to say about it, which is why no one - not even Freddie who kinda tried - says anything bad about it.
Nobody, except me.
And I have two objections.
My first objection is that I believe Galef seriously underrates the value - even necessity - of argument for truth-discovery and knowledge generation. I think this is because she - and her audience - has spent a lot of her life on the internet or consuming media or paying attention to politics, and those are the areas where things are the worst. With very rare exceptions, the internet is just not a place where productive, high quality debate happens.
Maybe had she spent more time in trial courts or in markets, she might think, "You know, it's good that both sides had an opportunity to make their case, and to poke holes in the other side's case, like soldiers, but with rules of the game," or, "it's better when businesses face open competition than if they can find excuses to get the other guy shut down."
And second, I object to is its very unobjectionability.
Because, as David Brooks will be happy to tell you, what always happens when an author appeals to unobjectionable virtues, e.g., "try to overcome bias and be a fair judge", and creates terms that substitute for good and bad with stark contrast and zero moral ambiguity, is that it just creates a language the negative side of which becomes immediately corrupted and weaponized by partisans.
Because no one even applies these terms to themselves or to their own side, they end up using these weapons not to become better thinkers or be open-minded and expose themelves to and engage with different ideas, but *to psychologize* the explanation for the very existence of opposition.
This ends up always just providing an excuse to dismiss, dispose and suppress anything that opposition says, because the cynical grunts of mere soldiers are not just suspect but fundamentally *illegitimate and thus unworthy* of consideration, being mere manifestations of reptile-brained uncivil impulses and tribal warrior instincts or some kind of barely intellectualized rationalization for genetically-determined moral foundations or arbitrary preferences, or whatever.
So many ways to say the same thing, which is that we think good, they don't, and what they say is at best nonsense, and at worst, an existential danger. So, you don't have to listen to those guys, they don't deserve a 'platform' or a 'signal boost', and you can and should safely ignore them, and also, as you know, we are totally in the right in silencing their harmful, evil idiocy.
Like Galef, I've been on the internet a lot too. I've seen 'debate' go bad - very, very bad, you have no idea how bad - but I've also seen plenty of the above as well, over and over, and at the level of the elite commentators that are all giving Galef interviews. When they think about themselves, they think they are already scouts, and like everyone can resolve to try to be more athletically fit, they can all resolve to try to be better scouts too, but it's on the margin. Maybe they recognize that some of their friends are letting themselves go and are out of shape, and so have a little further to go on the road to fitness, but they're still more or less 'healthy'. On the other hand, when they think of their opponents, soldiers one and all. So unfit, it's a wonder they're even alive.
My point is, while Galef is full of good intentions, that's how the road to hell is paved, and a book about better thinking which just ends up helping these people further rationalize their bad behavior is counterproductive. No one is going to change how they think, they are just going to use her terms to change the words they use to dunk on people who think differently. This always happens. If you give people boo-words for bad-thinkers, this is what they do. It's not her fault, but that's how it is.
My position is that things have gone way, way too far in that direction, and what would be more helpful are books and terms that encourage these same elite commentators to raise the status of opposition (ETA: AND TO GET OFF TWITTER, which is an ocean of scout-killing poison, bad for them, and everybody).
Terms like 'good sportsmanship' or 'fair play' would be better to emphasize the point that there is nothing wrong with arguing, on the contrary, we should and sometimes we must to get to the truth, but that there is a civil and honorable way to go about it, and also dishonorable ways, and that one should try one's best to be virtuous and responsible.
*I will accept it proves something if someone can show me how frequency of use of the metaphors correlates with being better soldiers or worse scouts or whatever.
I was happy to see Joan Coaston get a bigger stage at the NYTimes. I think she is a pretty heterodox black (bi-racial) woman thinker.