Emily Oster on bad studies; Ed West on a cult takeover; Vinay Prasad on real science; Bryan Caplan on externalities; John Cochrane on coercion and banking; Robert Wright on coercion and media
Re: "There may be merit to both of these positions. There may be evidence for both of them. But that evidence isn’t enhanced by these papers."—Emily Oster
The burden of proof for efficacy of lockdowns and for mandates is on the authorities. The default is presumption of individual liberty. Have the authorities provided clear and convincing evidence of efficacy of lockdowns and mandates? Do the authorities "show their work"?
Why do you even need government to get involved in idea suppression when a Twitter mob is all that's really required to get the job done? If I were on the left, I would think it'd be better to keep the fig leaf of respect for the first amendment in place and simply keep doing what they're doing now, which is have these quasi-coordinated digital pressure campaigns to intimidate media platforms with the threat of boycotts, accusations of racism/other isms, and general reputation destruction into removing or shadow-banning content that the left doesn't like. This seems fairly effective, and allows the movement to pretend it respects people's rights to free speech since the digital platforms are private business and "censorship is only when the government tells people what they can say" or some similar rationalization.
"Oster suggests that one way to mitigate confirmation bias is to look to other side to find flaws in a study that you like, because they will be checking more carefully."
I.e., 'Adversarialism'. Confirmation bias, echo chambers, and the suppression of heresy are failure modes in trying to be a scout and figure things out for oneself. You can't make a pencil all by yourself, or even understand how it's made, because everyone relies on a lot of other people in the roundabout production of goods. Likewise, you can't be a good judge all by yourself, or evaluate the counterarguments you don't even know about because you never got to hear them, because everyone relies on a lot of people in the roundabout production of knowledge.
So, as in trials, to be a good judge you need good soldiers on the other side of any claim, with a strong incentive to look for and poke holes in the case. That in turn requires norms which raise the status and respect for of good soldiers doing their job appropriately, and which allow them to say anything and get a fair hearing, even when they are on the 'wrong' side of the war and the cause is socially undesirable.
Being a bad fan for a cause is really different from being a good soldier for it. A good soldier would care about Bryan Caplan's spreadsheets when trying to argue against his claims. A bad fan doesn't even look at the spreadsheets, and just says "Boo! Caplan is a bad person who hates children and stinks! Boo!" Indeed, the meta-level argument that Caplan made for the strength of his case was not just the absence of rigorous refutation, but the fact that all his critics resorted to being bad fans because they couldn't make headway as good soldiers.
"I, too, have wondered whether it is the case that Wokeism is destined to achieve dominance in the way that Christianity achieved dominance. Which makes me interested in exploring the topic of how Christianity achieved dominance. I am guessing that it is a complicated story."
There are parallels, as there are with most religions which became dominant in different times and places. But while the history of Socialism is also a complicated story, because the context is more modern and familiar, it's probably a better example.
"If he really hated government intervention, he could move to a less interventionist state. We libertarians complain a lot about state coercion, but in the end we just adapt and get used to it."
I'd guess that a lot of libertarians who used to live in the cities *didn't* adapt and *did* move out to the suburbs, not just because GMU is in the suburbs, but at the same time and for the same reasons that millions of other similar people did so, specifically, that bad government made the urban cores bad places to raise families.
Also, Caplan understates the degree to which a lot of people *are* now moving away from Los Angeles and other California locations. I was recently in a few spots in California, and literally the first thing I heard after leaving the airport was a young black woman venting that she couldn't take living there anymore and had to get out, and she was hardly the only one.
There have been a few mass migrations in American history, but most have been *toward* new economic opportunities, instead of *away* from some direct consequence of disliked government policies.
But since the Civil War there have been two long waves of escapist exist involving millions or even tens of millions of people, and both were 'white flight'. The first wave was during the Reconstruction Era and its aftermath, which populated the West disproportionately out of the Deep South, which is what gave late 19th century life all across the former frontier a slightly Southern flavor. Indeed, the perceived danger of this process continuing until it became one of total racial exodus was one of the arguments used to support the compromise that put Hayes in office to end Reconstruction.
But the white flight of the 'urban decay' and suburbinazation era from after WWII until the 'gentrification reversal' of the 1990s (though just for a few lucky places), involved tens of millions of people abandoning choice real estate in practically every major city in the country which for a time was considered all but radioactive having gone through the policy-insanity equivalent of nuclear bombardment.
Indeed, one of the several major problems with many of the 'decreased mobility' studies that have gotten a lot of attention lately is the fairly common sense point that not all mobility is created equally or done for positive reasons, and that when looking at the purportedly glorious past when so many people were moving around so much, often time it was because they felt they had to move *away*.
Re Weiss Unfortunately, both Christians and pagans operated with the idea that proper worship (one God or multiple) was needed for the preservation of the Empire. THAT made mutual toleration difficult more than the relative weakness (?) of pagan belief.
“If he [Bryan Caplan] really hated government intervention, he could move to a less interventionist state.” The main reason to hate government intervention is its effects on *other people*. As for moving to a less interventionist state, they are all almost peas in a pod. (Maybe California is a bit of an outlier.) But you are right to protest Caplan’s remark about failure to move out of LA, or into a low-immigration area, which may show only that one’s stated hatred is outweighed by other considerations.
Wokeism may be able to dominate a country for some time, but I have zero fear of it dominating the globe. The CCP in particular strikes me as a natural predator of Wokeism; and while affirmative action has if anything been even more significant in India than the US in the past, Indian nationalists are reining it in since they understand how it can prevent their nation from becoming strong.
Granted, neither the CCP nor Hindutva are exemplars of classical liberalism today; I think most or all people here would agree either of those "cures" would be worse than the current "disease" if they became globally dominant. So we do still have our work cut out for us. But both the CCP and the Hindu nationalists have practically no global appeal. Classical liberalism has some major timeless advantages that the Roman gods did not, and I predict that, even at the darkest times, there will be plenty of space to maneuver between the behemoths.
"Could we see the relationship between government and large media platforms become similar to that between government and large financial institutions?"
It will be even closer than that. See China. The combination of narrative control and inescapable mass spying is incredibly valuable to the state and too tempting (or dangerous in other hands) not to have those capabilities merged into it, one way or another.
Media platforms get paid by advertisers, 'users' are not customers but 'the product', and the way to squeeze the most value out of this situation is digital panopticon, to track and collect as much information about people as possible, as intrusive of their privacy and intimate details as possible. Hence 'surveillance capitalism'.
That means that the top internet, tech, media, and telecom companies are all some of the most capable intelligence agencies the world has ever seen. And they don't need FISA courts or warrants or anything. Law enforcement and the intelligence community increasingly just outsource a lot of their capability to these private companies, and give them special treatment because of it, and also because of the first world corruption mode of post-government employment.
There's just no way such entities won't be "government adjacent", which is one reason why they must be constrained by the same limits as the state, else it will be child's play for the state itself to evade them.
"On the other hand, we do not want government to be able to deny financial services to people who hold dissenting views."
You can try to stop the government from doing this, but if you let """private""" (government-favor-dependent) banks do it, then when the government wants them to, they will do it on the government's behalf anyway. As will most companies, which can't afford to get in trouble with the state, and so are happy to act as arms of the government to launder state action, but free of, thus circumventing, constitutional constraints. One has to be pretty naive to think this is not already happening all the time.
I understand the libertarian principle behind the skepticism of imposing common carrier nondiscrimination requirements. I don't understand why people imagine that would be worse than the danger we already face.
Re: "Perhaps we want to have government able to deny financial services to criminal organizations (but think carefully about this before you agree). On the other hand, we do not want government to be able to deny financial services to people who hold dissenting views."
Calomiris and Haber, "Fragile by Design", establish an empirical generalization: Governments and banks in history typically have had each other's backs. The books is quite timely: The title of Chapter 9 is, "Durable Partners: Politics and Banking in Canada."
If I understand correctly, some social scientists also make a normative case, that the cozy relationship between governments and banks is necessary to avoid financial instability -- a normative case for corruption at the commanding heights, re: the financial sector.
I won't be surprised to learn that some social scientists also make a normative case, that the cozy relationship between governments and establishment media is necessary and justified to avoid political and cultural instability!
Re: "For now, it seems to me that only the crybullies on the left are ready to treat alternative voices as outlaws."
Counter-evidence: The application of the Emergencies Act by Canadian authorities, with complicity of the banks *and* of the establishment media in Canada, to repress the Truckers Convoy and the freedom protests in Ottawa.
Re: "I, too, have wondered whether it is the case that Wokeism is destined to achieve dominance in the way that Christianity achieved dominance. Which makes me interested in exploring the topic of how Christianity achieved dominance. I am guessing that it is a complicated story."
Causal judgments are the weakest link in historical inquiry. For example, historians haven't achieved consensus about the causes of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the causes of World War I, the causes of the Holocaust, or the causes of the collapse of Communism. Is there consensus among historians about the causes of the rise of Christianity?
It's hard to establish causal judgments in historical inquiry because (a) causes cannot be isolated by experimental design, (b) evidence (the historical record) doesn't organically track causes, and (c) many causes are inner mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions), inaccessible to contemporaries and historians. Clever, resourceful historians devise indicators (indirect evidence), but conclusive causal judgments about complex historical processes of change remain elusive.
"only the crybullies on the left are ready to treat alternative voices as outlaws. Will they ultimately succeed in suppressing dissent?"
The crybullies win if they are not "taught" that their ideas are bad. The most effective way to teach them this is to punish them by anti-crybullies on the right. It is certain that they win if the individualists fail to fight for power, and use such power to support those who are NOT in the currently dominant groups you've named:
"government, legacy media organizations, corporate HR, university administrations, and Twitter."
For government, my Big Idea is gov't employee Term Limits - 10 years in gov't, and you have to leave.
For universities with "diversity" departments or recruitment, the Republicans should specify that "political diversity" is the single most important type of diversity - and any organization that advertises, or has advertised, diversity, without encouraging Republicans, is subject to false advertising penalties.
Our courts need to enforce legal penalties against the currently dominant intolerant folk who falsely claim to favor tolerance.
"We libertarians complain a lot about state coercion, but in the end we just adapt and get used to it." Also most non-Libertarians complain, and usually adapt. Look how most HK Chinese are adapting, and even Tibet is becoming just another (mostly Han) Chinese province.
Look at the freedom truckers in Ottowa, and how the fascist Trudeau is using gov't and financial companies against them. There should be greater penalties for "violating the rights of an individual".
Unfortunately, there seem very few ways for a Republican dominated elected legislature, politicians, to stop the non-elected Democratic big-gov't Deep State from ratcheting up the gov't power. A few more bureaucrats whose only power is to monitor and check for gov't problems is likely to help. The Inspector General should be empowered to prosecute, and required to do so in far more cases for "abuse of power", "obstruction of justice", and "destruction of evidence".
Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself, nor did his colleague in a high security Paris jail - but few of the rich and powerful pedophiles, like Pres. Bill Clinton, have yet been punished. I'm glad Prince Andrew got some punishment - loss of privilege. Lots of small but real punishment is better than just a few big guilty verdicts. The FBI lost (allowed others to take) all the DVDs & CDs from the Epstein safe which, the FBI opened. What a disgusting mess.
You write: "We libertarians complain a lot about state coercion, but in the end we just adapt and get used to it." Hahaha. You say that because you are too old (this was very clear in the past two years when you wrote about how you were taking Covid decisions). You should know that at some point Voice is not enough and Exit is the only option (read what Albert Hirschman and Gordon Tullock wrote decades ago), and that point depends on age.
Let me remind you the hundreds of millions of people that exited from state coercion in the past 100 years. A few days ago, in a letter to El Mercurio (the oldest newspaper in Santiago, Chile) a Chilean wrote that the country's current immigration problem (mainly Venezuelans running away from Maduro) will be solved once the new government (it assumes on 3/11) endorses the Constitutional Assembly's proposals (they should be approved on July, and if approved, they will be submitted to a popular referendum on September): if it endorsed it, immigration will stop immediately and emigration will soon exceed the accumulated immigration of the past 5 years.
Re: "There may be merit to both of these positions. There may be evidence for both of them. But that evidence isn’t enhanced by these papers."—Emily Oster
The burden of proof for efficacy of lockdowns and for mandates is on the authorities. The default is presumption of individual liberty. Have the authorities provided clear and convincing evidence of efficacy of lockdowns and mandates? Do the authorities "show their work"?
Why do you even need government to get involved in idea suppression when a Twitter mob is all that's really required to get the job done? If I were on the left, I would think it'd be better to keep the fig leaf of respect for the first amendment in place and simply keep doing what they're doing now, which is have these quasi-coordinated digital pressure campaigns to intimidate media platforms with the threat of boycotts, accusations of racism/other isms, and general reputation destruction into removing or shadow-banning content that the left doesn't like. This seems fairly effective, and allows the movement to pretend it respects people's rights to free speech since the digital platforms are private business and "censorship is only when the government tells people what they can say" or some similar rationalization.
"Oster suggests that one way to mitigate confirmation bias is to look to other side to find flaws in a study that you like, because they will be checking more carefully."
I.e., 'Adversarialism'. Confirmation bias, echo chambers, and the suppression of heresy are failure modes in trying to be a scout and figure things out for oneself. You can't make a pencil all by yourself, or even understand how it's made, because everyone relies on a lot of other people in the roundabout production of goods. Likewise, you can't be a good judge all by yourself, or evaluate the counterarguments you don't even know about because you never got to hear them, because everyone relies on a lot of people in the roundabout production of knowledge.
So, as in trials, to be a good judge you need good soldiers on the other side of any claim, with a strong incentive to look for and poke holes in the case. That in turn requires norms which raise the status and respect for of good soldiers doing their job appropriately, and which allow them to say anything and get a fair hearing, even when they are on the 'wrong' side of the war and the cause is socially undesirable.
Being a bad fan for a cause is really different from being a good soldier for it. A good soldier would care about Bryan Caplan's spreadsheets when trying to argue against his claims. A bad fan doesn't even look at the spreadsheets, and just says "Boo! Caplan is a bad person who hates children and stinks! Boo!" Indeed, the meta-level argument that Caplan made for the strength of his case was not just the absence of rigorous refutation, but the fact that all his critics resorted to being bad fans because they couldn't make headway as good soldiers.
"I, too, have wondered whether it is the case that Wokeism is destined to achieve dominance in the way that Christianity achieved dominance. Which makes me interested in exploring the topic of how Christianity achieved dominance. I am guessing that it is a complicated story."
There are parallels, as there are with most religions which became dominant in different times and places. But while the history of Socialism is also a complicated story, because the context is more modern and familiar, it's probably a better example.
"If he really hated government intervention, he could move to a less interventionist state. We libertarians complain a lot about state coercion, but in the end we just adapt and get used to it."
I'd guess that a lot of libertarians who used to live in the cities *didn't* adapt and *did* move out to the suburbs, not just because GMU is in the suburbs, but at the same time and for the same reasons that millions of other similar people did so, specifically, that bad government made the urban cores bad places to raise families.
Also, Caplan understates the degree to which a lot of people *are* now moving away from Los Angeles and other California locations. I was recently in a few spots in California, and literally the first thing I heard after leaving the airport was a young black woman venting that she couldn't take living there anymore and had to get out, and she was hardly the only one.
There have been a few mass migrations in American history, but most have been *toward* new economic opportunities, instead of *away* from some direct consequence of disliked government policies.
But since the Civil War there have been two long waves of escapist exist involving millions or even tens of millions of people, and both were 'white flight'. The first wave was during the Reconstruction Era and its aftermath, which populated the West disproportionately out of the Deep South, which is what gave late 19th century life all across the former frontier a slightly Southern flavor. Indeed, the perceived danger of this process continuing until it became one of total racial exodus was one of the arguments used to support the compromise that put Hayes in office to end Reconstruction.
But the white flight of the 'urban decay' and suburbinazation era from after WWII until the 'gentrification reversal' of the 1990s (though just for a few lucky places), involved tens of millions of people abandoning choice real estate in practically every major city in the country which for a time was considered all but radioactive having gone through the policy-insanity equivalent of nuclear bombardment.
Indeed, one of the several major problems with many of the 'decreased mobility' studies that have gotten a lot of attention lately is the fairly common sense point that not all mobility is created equally or done for positive reasons, and that when looking at the purportedly glorious past when so many people were moving around so much, often time it was because they felt they had to move *away*.
Re Weiss Unfortunately, both Christians and pagans operated with the idea that proper worship (one God or multiple) was needed for the preservation of the Empire. THAT made mutual toleration difficult more than the relative weakness (?) of pagan belief.
“If he [Bryan Caplan] really hated government intervention, he could move to a less interventionist state.” The main reason to hate government intervention is its effects on *other people*. As for moving to a less interventionist state, they are all almost peas in a pod. (Maybe California is a bit of an outlier.) But you are right to protest Caplan’s remark about failure to move out of LA, or into a low-immigration area, which may show only that one’s stated hatred is outweighed by other considerations.
Wokeism may be able to dominate a country for some time, but I have zero fear of it dominating the globe. The CCP in particular strikes me as a natural predator of Wokeism; and while affirmative action has if anything been even more significant in India than the US in the past, Indian nationalists are reining it in since they understand how it can prevent their nation from becoming strong.
Granted, neither the CCP nor Hindutva are exemplars of classical liberalism today; I think most or all people here would agree either of those "cures" would be worse than the current "disease" if they became globally dominant. So we do still have our work cut out for us. But both the CCP and the Hindu nationalists have practically no global appeal. Classical liberalism has some major timeless advantages that the Roman gods did not, and I predict that, even at the darkest times, there will be plenty of space to maneuver between the behemoths.
"Could we see the relationship between government and large media platforms become similar to that between government and large financial institutions?"
It will be even closer than that. See China. The combination of narrative control and inescapable mass spying is incredibly valuable to the state and too tempting (or dangerous in other hands) not to have those capabilities merged into it, one way or another.
Media platforms get paid by advertisers, 'users' are not customers but 'the product', and the way to squeeze the most value out of this situation is digital panopticon, to track and collect as much information about people as possible, as intrusive of their privacy and intimate details as possible. Hence 'surveillance capitalism'.
That means that the top internet, tech, media, and telecom companies are all some of the most capable intelligence agencies the world has ever seen. And they don't need FISA courts or warrants or anything. Law enforcement and the intelligence community increasingly just outsource a lot of their capability to these private companies, and give them special treatment because of it, and also because of the first world corruption mode of post-government employment.
There's just no way such entities won't be "government adjacent", which is one reason why they must be constrained by the same limits as the state, else it will be child's play for the state itself to evade them.
"On the other hand, we do not want government to be able to deny financial services to people who hold dissenting views."
You can try to stop the government from doing this, but if you let """private""" (government-favor-dependent) banks do it, then when the government wants them to, they will do it on the government's behalf anyway. As will most companies, which can't afford to get in trouble with the state, and so are happy to act as arms of the government to launder state action, but free of, thus circumventing, constitutional constraints. One has to be pretty naive to think this is not already happening all the time.
I understand the libertarian principle behind the skepticism of imposing common carrier nondiscrimination requirements. I don't understand why people imagine that would be worse than the danger we already face.
Ehrman's recent Triumph of Christianity may assist your study of Christianity's adoption.
Re: "Perhaps we want to have government able to deny financial services to criminal organizations (but think carefully about this before you agree). On the other hand, we do not want government to be able to deny financial services to people who hold dissenting views."
Calomiris and Haber, "Fragile by Design", establish an empirical generalization: Governments and banks in history typically have had each other's backs. The books is quite timely: The title of Chapter 9 is, "Durable Partners: Politics and Banking in Canada."
If I understand correctly, some social scientists also make a normative case, that the cozy relationship between governments and banks is necessary to avoid financial instability -- a normative case for corruption at the commanding heights, re: the financial sector.
I won't be surprised to learn that some social scientists also make a normative case, that the cozy relationship between governments and establishment media is necessary and justified to avoid political and cultural instability!
Re: "For now, it seems to me that only the crybullies on the left are ready to treat alternative voices as outlaws."
Counter-evidence: The application of the Emergencies Act by Canadian authorities, with complicity of the banks *and* of the establishment media in Canada, to repress the Truckers Convoy and the freedom protests in Ottawa.
Re: "I, too, have wondered whether it is the case that Wokeism is destined to achieve dominance in the way that Christianity achieved dominance. Which makes me interested in exploring the topic of how Christianity achieved dominance. I am guessing that it is a complicated story."
Causal judgments are the weakest link in historical inquiry. For example, historians haven't achieved consensus about the causes of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the causes of World War I, the causes of the Holocaust, or the causes of the collapse of Communism. Is there consensus among historians about the causes of the rise of Christianity?
It's hard to establish causal judgments in historical inquiry because (a) causes cannot be isolated by experimental design, (b) evidence (the historical record) doesn't organically track causes, and (c) many causes are inner mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions), inaccessible to contemporaries and historians. Clever, resourceful historians devise indicators (indirect evidence), but conclusive causal judgments about complex historical processes of change remain elusive.
"only the crybullies on the left are ready to treat alternative voices as outlaws. Will they ultimately succeed in suppressing dissent?"
The crybullies win if they are not "taught" that their ideas are bad. The most effective way to teach them this is to punish them by anti-crybullies on the right. It is certain that they win if the individualists fail to fight for power, and use such power to support those who are NOT in the currently dominant groups you've named:
"government, legacy media organizations, corporate HR, university administrations, and Twitter."
For government, my Big Idea is gov't employee Term Limits - 10 years in gov't, and you have to leave.
For universities with "diversity" departments or recruitment, the Republicans should specify that "political diversity" is the single most important type of diversity - and any organization that advertises, or has advertised, diversity, without encouraging Republicans, is subject to false advertising penalties.
Our courts need to enforce legal penalties against the currently dominant intolerant folk who falsely claim to favor tolerance.
"We libertarians complain a lot about state coercion, but in the end we just adapt and get used to it." Also most non-Libertarians complain, and usually adapt. Look how most HK Chinese are adapting, and even Tibet is becoming just another (mostly Han) Chinese province.
Look at the freedom truckers in Ottowa, and how the fascist Trudeau is using gov't and financial companies against them. There should be greater penalties for "violating the rights of an individual".
Unfortunately, there seem very few ways for a Republican dominated elected legislature, politicians, to stop the non-elected Democratic big-gov't Deep State from ratcheting up the gov't power. A few more bureaucrats whose only power is to monitor and check for gov't problems is likely to help. The Inspector General should be empowered to prosecute, and required to do so in far more cases for "abuse of power", "obstruction of justice", and "destruction of evidence".
Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself, nor did his colleague in a high security Paris jail - but few of the rich and powerful pedophiles, like Pres. Bill Clinton, have yet been punished. I'm glad Prince Andrew got some punishment - loss of privilege. Lots of small but real punishment is better than just a few big guilty verdicts. The FBI lost (allowed others to take) all the DVDs & CDs from the Epstein safe which, the FBI opened. What a disgusting mess.
You write: "We libertarians complain a lot about state coercion, but in the end we just adapt and get used to it." Hahaha. You say that because you are too old (this was very clear in the past two years when you wrote about how you were taking Covid decisions). You should know that at some point Voice is not enough and Exit is the only option (read what Albert Hirschman and Gordon Tullock wrote decades ago), and that point depends on age.
Let me remind you the hundreds of millions of people that exited from state coercion in the past 100 years. A few days ago, in a letter to El Mercurio (the oldest newspaper in Santiago, Chile) a Chilean wrote that the country's current immigration problem (mainly Venezuelans running away from Maduro) will be solved once the new government (it assumes on 3/11) endorses the Constitutional Assembly's proposals (they should be approved on July, and if approved, they will be submitted to a popular referendum on September): if it endorsed it, immigration will stop immediately and emigration will soon exceed the accumulated immigration of the past 5 years.