Keeping up with the FITs, 2/7

Matt Yglesias on affirmative action; Bryan Caplan and Richard Hanania; Ed West on prisons and crime; Emily Oster on pre-K research; Zvi on trust heuristics; Jon Hersey on Galef; Douthat on democracy

Matt Yglesias writes,

It is obviously in the narrow interests of Harvard to keep fighting for a world in which Harvard gets tons of money and then wins social justice points by having a racially diverse class.

He is saying that affirmative action serves as progressive signaling while perpetuating a regressive structure in which institutions of higher education that serve the wealthy get disproportionately more resources than institutions that serve the middle class or the upwardly mobile. I gather that Vivek Ramaswamy says something similar about corporate social justice posturing in Woke, Inc.

Bryan Caplan interviews Richard Hanania. Around minute 30, Hanania points out some of the adverse impact on political science of left-wing bias.

One of Hanania’s most interesting observations, coming around minutes 45-50, is that people on the left care more about politics than people on the right. Thus, although elections may be close “the other 364 days of the year” the left dominates. Read that again. Earlier, and later, Hanania points out that people on the left tend to have weaker mental health I infer that 364 days of the year we are bullied by neurotics.

Ed West writes,

Obviously letting loads of criminals out of jail is going to lead to loads more crime, something anyone could tell you. Well, almost anyone.

He documents that this happens. Many people think that prison is inhumane. They also don’t like crime. To address the cognitive dissonance, they are attracted to the idea that “mass incarceration” does not reduce crime. But this is wrong.

One can imagine someone figuring out how to use modern surveillance technology to release prisoners without causing more crime. But then some government official is going to say, “Hey, we should use this technology to spy on everyone who is a potential threat to society.” And then one can imagine how “potential threat to society” comes to be defined.

Emily Oster writes,

Given how much variation there seems to be in the impact of pre-K across programs, children, and locations, it would be a big mistake to take the results from this study and apply them in an uncritical way to your own choices. At best, we learn from it that not all pre-K programs yield positive results on all dimensions. So there’s value in thinking carefully about the program you choose.

In other words, what my father called The First Iron Law of Social Science holds in this case. He phrased the First Iron Law as “Sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way.”

There is no generic intervention called “pre-K” that works the same everywhere. Sometimes programs help a little, and sometimes programs harm a little.

If the progressives ever get their universal pre-K wish, the number of pre-K programs will expand by an order of magnitude. As the law of diminishing returns kicks in, I would expect that most of the expansion would come in the number of harmful programs.

Zvi Mowshowitz writes,

the more you are pushing the same lies as others and breaking the same rules, especially as part of The Narrative, you are effectively protected, and thus the price of breaking the rules is far lower.

This is part of a very long commentary on Scott Alexander’s idea of a Bounded Trust heuristic. With bounded trust, you know that with certain stories the media source could be lying to you, but on other stories they will not be, and you can trust the latter.

Somehow, this reminds me of Descartes’ Meditations, the ones where he ends up saying “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes asks: what if there is an Evil Demon, who deceives all of my senses, so that I cannot trust sensory information? Well, even if all of my senses are deceived, I still know that I exist as the one to be deceived. Cogito Ergo Sum.

Could media sources be operating like the Evil Demon, so that we cannot trust them at all? When I read a story, can I trust nothing in the story? Can I only be sure that, because I am reading the story, I must exist?

Zvi goes on to write,

Centrally, most official, news and ‘expert’ are looking to balance the opportunity to show their loyalty to and support the Narrative that they’re getting behind, and the rewards for doing that, against the penalties that might be extracted if they are caught getting too far out of line and doing things that are out of line, and thus hammered down upon.

It is out of line to go too far and get caught, to be too far removed from the underlying physical reality in ways that can be observed or proven, and thus that weaken the Narrative and your reputation. You lose points for losing points, more than you lose points for anything else.

It is also out of line to not go far enough, and to adhere too well to what used to be ‘the rules’ rather than scoring sufficient Narrative points. One must stay on brand. This, too, is sticking one’s neck out in a dangerous way.

And he provides this aphorism:

If you want to find a ‘scientist’ or ‘expert’ to say any given thing, you can.

I think that the solution to the trust problem is to examine the manner of discourse. You can tell whether someone is operating in Scout Mindset rather than in Soldier Mindset. The Fantasy Intellectual Teams scoring categories work at separating the scouts from the soldiers.

In a different post, Zvi offers an example of how he was able to detect soldier mindset and infer that the people being attacked were probably more credible.

See my recent conversation with Robert Wright.

Speaking of Scout Mindset, Jon Hersey reviews Julia Galef’s book.

“If I find myself agreeing with someone else’s viewpoint, I do a conformity test,” writes Galef. “Imagine this person told me that they no longer held this view. Would I still hold it? Would I feel comfortable defending it to them?”

That is a fraction of the takeaways that Hersey includes in his review. My own review is here.

Ross Douthat writes,

the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.

But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.

The left believes in a democracy where the people elect to be ruled by experts. Populists believe in mutual flattery between the people and a demagogue.

I view of democracy as good for nothing more and nothing less than facilitating peaceful transitions of power. To keep tyranny at bay, we have to rely on formal institutions on top of a foundation of cultural libertarianism. Once the public has become seized with Fear of Others’ Liberty, the FOOLs will prevail.