Keeping up with the FITs, 12/29

Robert Wright is unhappy with social media; Eric Topol is unhappy with COVID policy; Richard Hanania is unhappy with the blob; Brian Klaas is unhappy with the powerful; Heather Heying on higher ed

Robert Wright writes,

These days there are way more people who can have that on-stage feeling, because there are way more people who are on stage. They’re on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or somewhere else where they make public declarations.

He says that once you articulate a belief while “on stage,” you become more defensive about it and less open-minded.

He notes a conversation between Julia Galef and Philip Tetlock.

As Galef summarized this discovery: “You found an inverse correlation between fame and accuracy. So the more famous an expert was, the less accurate he was. Why would that be?”

Tetlock’s answer was that reality is complex, and complex stories are hard to sell. “Experts who interweave lots of buts and howevers and althoughs into their speech are less charismatic and compelling than experts who are telling an emphatic causal story pointing in one clear direction.”

If Tetlock is correct, then the public arena selects against important Fantasy Intellectual Teams scoring categories, including Thinking in Bets (which requires indicating less than 100 percent certainty) , Caveats (pointing out possible weaknesses in one’s own position), and Open Mind (showing a willingness to change one’s mind if conditions warrant).

Wright points out that the speed at which social media operates makes it easier for the overconfident individuals to rise to the top. I would point out that speed is also conducive to System 1 thinking and goes against reflection.

Eric Topol writes,

The CDC is apparently unable to track hospitalizations and deaths by vaccine status, timing, age of the patient and their relevant co-existing medical conditions. Secretary Xavier Becerra of HHS hasn’t yet shown up for the pandemic but has authority to mandate such data collection across the country. We are trying to determine the clinical severity of Omicron but have no ability to track the data here! . . . In not a single speech that President Biden has given since taking office has he mentioned any effort to improve data collection and reporting. Just crickets on this issue. How can you navigate in a pandemic without data?

For me, the U.S. government during COVID is reminiscent of the government during the Vietnam war. Back then, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon each were unwilling or unable to overcome the intellectual lethargy and strategic incompetence that was embedded in the foreign policy establishment. Same with Trump and Biden on COVID. I can’t bring myself to read the Scott Atlas book. I am afraid that an inside account of the machinations of the public health authorities would give me too much stress and pain.

Richard Hanania has harsh things to say about Graham Allison’s The Thucydides Trap and the book’s embrace by what Robert Wright would call “the blob.”

Take a look at the blurbs on Amazon, and then actually read it if you want to understand the hollowness of the kinds of arguments that are used as justification for the American global empire. Allison receives praise from Kissinger, Biden, Petraeus, Michael Hayden, Ban-Ki Moon, Samantha Power, and even Klaus Schwab, who I once thought was a Twitter meme but is apparently also a real person (in their defense, I’m sure almost none of them read it).

. . .Unsurprisingly, official Washington never latches on to a theory that says the US is safer from foreign threats than any other country in the history of the world, and our meddling abroad causes more harm than good. While such a theory isn’t useful to powerful interest groups, it happens to be true.

Brian Klaas writes,

power-hungry narcissists are actively seeking out positions that give them control over others.

Such people certainly appear to be well represented in positions of leadership, from the highest offices of state down to the most junior roles in company management. More worryingly still, for deep evolutionary reasons, the rest of us do our very best to help them achieve the power they then abuse.

…We can recruit more intelligently. We can remind leaders of the weight of their responsibility. We can make them see people as human beings, not abstractions.

We can rotate personnel to deter and detect abuse. We can use random tests to catch bad apples.

And if we’re going to watch people, we can focus on those at the top who do the real damage, not the rank-and-file.

He has a book coming out in a couple of weeks. He mentions the dark triad, which I wrote about at the end of this post.

I am late to Heather Heying’s substack. On the topic of higher education, Heying writes

Many scientists thus become grant writers more than actual science doers. Those who do so most prolifically rise quickly through the academic ranks—which should not be conflated with doing the best science—and thus have little interest in upsetting the status quo.

I get the general impression that the large amounts of money that have been thrown at higher education via government support, alumni, and tuition have created perverse incentives. They no longer reward excellence at anything other than gaming the systems.

Later, on what makes a good educator, she writes

my simple rubric for what need be true of them is this:

1. Know real things.

2. Be able to communicate those things.

3. Fundamentally believe in the humanity of your students.