Re: "while the financial crisis is happening, you go down the hall and start talking to your economist colleague, and then you realize the economist colleague doesn’t actually know what a credit default swap is, but at the same time is giving you some long spiel about what’s happening in the economy."—Steven Hsu
Academics spend much of their time with students, who know little, and who tend to assent, at least outwardly, to a professor's pronouncements. It's unlikely that students provide a check on a professor's competence.
Academics also spend much of their time with peers, comparing research. Peer review is their 'market test;' but external, real-world tests rarely happen outside STEM. There is substantial risk that sound epistemic norms yield to peer conformity -- a mutual validation society.
Compare Richard Hanania's alternative to elitism in his latest SubStack essay, "How to Think about the 'Current Thing'":
"One thing I find odd about the anti-SJW crowd, say your median contributor to Quillette, is that they seem to believe that IQ is real and important and also that normal people with average IQs can be expected to think for themselves and reach reasoned conclusions about economics, geopolitics, and epidemiology. But the truth is you’re not going to be able to teach 'critical thinking' in schools, so you might as well decide in which direction you want people to be sheep.
[... ] you often have to choose between movements that are pro-current thing ('trust the experts') and the aforementioned knee-jerk contrarianism that is unhealthy in an intellectual but in practice can make for relatively sound policy.
[...] Of course, I advise you to think for yourself, seek out objective evidence, and proceed with intellectual humility. But if you’re going to be involved in politics at any level – from voting to campaigning or running for office – we all have to choose what movements, political parties, and programs to support. We also have to decide which priors we should start with when consuming new information and incorporating it into our worldview. As far as heuristics go, 'oppose the current thing' is probably pretty good as long as it’s not the only one you’re using."
That's a pretty good piece by Hanania. Here's another good line: "The likelihood that the dominant narrative is centering the most important issue and proposing the right solutions in any particular case is vanishingly small."
The Current Thing usually involves "Doing Something" at the state level. Also, that something is usually a radical break with the status quo. So in general Current Thing tends to violate both libertarian impulses and Chesterton's Fence, thus making it wrong more often than not.
There was a paper awhile back showing that ordinary police reform and ethics had positive impacts on policing and crime, but knee jerk reactions to social media events made both policing and crime worse. If you want to reform something its best done methodically and without hot tensions.
It's also interesting to me that "the unvaccinated" are the most anti-war escalation group on Ukraine. Not because they take a side, but because they are the only group to overwhelmingly respond "Don't Know." That must be sending him for a loop.
> When trapped in a group of lefties, it used to work to say, “I’m not a conservative. I’m a libertarian.” But now they hate libertarians as much as conservatives. Similarly, I fear that the point of a young capitalist talking up Effective Altruism is to try to signal to socialists that you’re not as bad as a real capitalist. To which I say, “Phooey.”
I've always found the best solution is to not label yourself. This is one of the biggest problems with Wokeism as a culture. Every discussion tends to be started with a statement of perspective "as a white/black/gay/straight/liberal/conservative/man/woman/transgender/salamander..." that is, I think, designed to preempt the discussion itself by giving cues to control thought.
It's not always possible, but I find that it's usually quite possible to make a "libertarian" or "conservative" case for most every subject. What's more, if you don't say it's "conservative" or "libertarian" to start out with, and just say, "here's a way to help Group or Situation X" many people will unexpectedly agree with it.
Re: "I believe that right now you can find people in business who bring more curiosity and better scholarly habits in approaching subjects than you can find among professors in the social sciences."
Arnold Kling, Richard Hanania, and Samo Burja provide external critiques of academe, complementary to Steven Hsu's internal critique. Compare Samo Burja's podcast remarks about incentives and institutional decay in academe:
"Today the academic incentive gradient is you better be talking. You better be publishing papers, whether or not you have anything to say. [...]
I think there’s something very unusual about how we’ve bundled together, the funding of science and mass credentialing and something like life trajectory in education. [...]
By the time you’re deciding whether someone is worthy of tenure or not, they’ve often already spent decades of filtering, where this filtering was partially selecting for agreeableness, regular publication schedule, things that are not necessarily incompatible with intellectual progress, but they’re not really particularly conducive to it either.[...]
We are spending more than ever on a type of white collar careerism where you’re sort of trying to produce these very small, very defensible pieces of weaponized information, I even hesitate to call it knowledge. If right now you have a preferred policy position, for example, you can hunt for a white paper that supports your position, the think tank industry has you covered."
I'm not yet done with Hanania & Hsu, but came here exactly because I thought the favorite part would be in the next paragraph by Hsu meeting economists in 2008:
"And so when you meet them, on the one hand they’re giving these amazing quotes to The Wall Street Journal, New York Times about the crisis, and then you start questioning them in detail about, well, do you know how these mortgage-backed securities are constructed? No. Do you know what firms are buying, what firms are selling, what the incentive structure looks like for the guy who’s building the portfolio? No. Well, where does your opinion come from? Well from nowhere actually, honestly. So it’s absurd."
Very, very relevant to the ignorance, the arrogant ignorance, shown in The Big Short.
When I get more of a chance, I'll dive into the Hanania-Hsu interview to see whether they offer some examples of people, work, or insights they consider superior or more valuable. It would sure be helpful if you offered some examples of what you have in mind. You might even consider it a good scholarly habit to do so!
Re: "while the financial crisis is happening, you go down the hall and start talking to your economist colleague, and then you realize the economist colleague doesn’t actually know what a credit default swap is, but at the same time is giving you some long spiel about what’s happening in the economy."—Steven Hsu
Academics spend much of their time with students, who know little, and who tend to assent, at least outwardly, to a professor's pronouncements. It's unlikely that students provide a check on a professor's competence.
Academics also spend much of their time with peers, comparing research. Peer review is their 'market test;' but external, real-world tests rarely happen outside STEM. There is substantial risk that sound epistemic norms yield to peer conformity -- a mutual validation society.
Re: Hsu's elitist thoughts.
Compare Richard Hanania's alternative to elitism in his latest SubStack essay, "How to Think about the 'Current Thing'":
"One thing I find odd about the anti-SJW crowd, say your median contributor to Quillette, is that they seem to believe that IQ is real and important and also that normal people with average IQs can be expected to think for themselves and reach reasoned conclusions about economics, geopolitics, and epidemiology. But the truth is you’re not going to be able to teach 'critical thinking' in schools, so you might as well decide in which direction you want people to be sheep.
[... ] you often have to choose between movements that are pro-current thing ('trust the experts') and the aforementioned knee-jerk contrarianism that is unhealthy in an intellectual but in practice can make for relatively sound policy.
[...] Of course, I advise you to think for yourself, seek out objective evidence, and proceed with intellectual humility. But if you’re going to be involved in politics at any level – from voting to campaigning or running for office – we all have to choose what movements, political parties, and programs to support. We also have to decide which priors we should start with when consuming new information and incorporating it into our worldview. As far as heuristics go, 'oppose the current thing' is probably pretty good as long as it’s not the only one you’re using."
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/how-to-think-about-the-current-thing?s=r
That's a pretty good piece by Hanania. Here's another good line: "The likelihood that the dominant narrative is centering the most important issue and proposing the right solutions in any particular case is vanishingly small."
The Current Thing usually involves "Doing Something" at the state level. Also, that something is usually a radical break with the status quo. So in general Current Thing tends to violate both libertarian impulses and Chesterton's Fence, thus making it wrong more often than not.
There was a paper awhile back showing that ordinary police reform and ethics had positive impacts on policing and crime, but knee jerk reactions to social media events made both policing and crime worse. If you want to reform something its best done methodically and without hot tensions.
It's also interesting to me that "the unvaccinated" are the most anti-war escalation group on Ukraine. Not because they take a side, but because they are the only group to overwhelmingly respond "Don't Know." That must be sending him for a loop.
> When trapped in a group of lefties, it used to work to say, “I’m not a conservative. I’m a libertarian.” But now they hate libertarians as much as conservatives. Similarly, I fear that the point of a young capitalist talking up Effective Altruism is to try to signal to socialists that you’re not as bad as a real capitalist. To which I say, “Phooey.”
I've always found the best solution is to not label yourself. This is one of the biggest problems with Wokeism as a culture. Every discussion tends to be started with a statement of perspective "as a white/black/gay/straight/liberal/conservative/man/woman/transgender/salamander..." that is, I think, designed to preempt the discussion itself by giving cues to control thought.
It's not always possible, but I find that it's usually quite possible to make a "libertarian" or "conservative" case for most every subject. What's more, if you don't say it's "conservative" or "libertarian" to start out with, and just say, "here's a way to help Group or Situation X" many people will unexpectedly agree with it.
Re: "I believe that right now you can find people in business who bring more curiosity and better scholarly habits in approaching subjects than you can find among professors in the social sciences."
Arnold Kling, Richard Hanania, and Samo Burja provide external critiques of academe, complementary to Steven Hsu's internal critique. Compare Samo Burja's podcast remarks about incentives and institutional decay in academe:
"Today the academic incentive gradient is you better be talking. You better be publishing papers, whether or not you have anything to say. [...]
I think there’s something very unusual about how we’ve bundled together, the funding of science and mass credentialing and something like life trajectory in education. [...]
By the time you’re deciding whether someone is worthy of tenure or not, they’ve often already spent decades of filtering, where this filtering was partially selecting for agreeableness, regular publication schedule, things that are not necessarily incompatible with intellectual progress, but they’re not really particularly conducive to it either.[...]
We are spending more than ever on a type of white collar careerism where you’re sort of trying to produce these very small, very defensible pieces of weaponized information, I even hesitate to call it knowledge. If right now you have a preferred policy position, for example, you can hunt for a white paper that supports your position, the think tank industry has you covered."
https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-jim-rutt-show-transcripts/transcript-of-episode-117-samo-burja-on-societal-decline/
Most of the time, compared to the relevant alternatives, Capitalism IS effective altruism!
I'm not yet done with Hanania & Hsu, but came here exactly because I thought the favorite part would be in the next paragraph by Hsu meeting economists in 2008:
"And so when you meet them, on the one hand they’re giving these amazing quotes to The Wall Street Journal, New York Times about the crisis, and then you start questioning them in detail about, well, do you know how these mortgage-backed securities are constructed? No. Do you know what firms are buying, what firms are selling, what the incentive structure looks like for the guy who’s building the portfolio? No. Well, where does your opinion come from? Well from nowhere actually, honestly. So it’s absurd."
Very, very relevant to the ignorance, the arrogant ignorance, shown in The Big Short.
When I get more of a chance, I'll dive into the Hanania-Hsu interview to see whether they offer some examples of people, work, or insights they consider superior or more valuable. It would sure be helpful if you offered some examples of what you have in mind. You might even consider it a good scholarly habit to do so!