Links to Consider, 11/12/2024

I do a substack "live";Dan Williams on outlandish accusations of censorship; Andrey Mir's theory of identity politics; I review a book on luck; Alberto Mingardi reviews a book on laws run amok

I had a surprisingly successful substack “live” event, spontaneously joined by Lee Bressler and then about 40 minutes in by Razib Khan. Some dead air, as this was my first try. But it was great fun, and went much better than expected. Lee posted the video. Transcript here. Unfortunately, the transcript does not distinguish between when Lee is speaking, Razib is speaking, or I am speaking.

Dan Williams writes,

Hysterical discourse about a totalitarian censorship industrial complex also has more sinister consequences. This discourse did not arise by accident, or through simple mistakes. There is a lucrative market for it.

Yes, I noticed many months ago that the most popular substack newsletters dealing with politics were almost all focused on “exposing” the other side’s evil conduct. (At the time, Matt Yglesias was the only writer in the top ten who was not playing that game.) Recall that when I wrote The Three Languages of Politics over a decade ago, it was in reaction to my observation that pundits mostly do not try to open minds, but instead behave as if they were out to close the minds of people on their own side.

Williams writes,

Intervening to reduce people’s exposure to content without removing it (typically justified by the slogan “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach”) could also reasonably be characterised as censorship. However, it is far less serious than the outright removal of content. To mark the distinction, I will call such removal “hard censorship” and the mere reduction in people’s exposure to content “soft censorship”.

I think that soft censorship is a serious problem. It contributes to selective attention on the part of the left. As an example, let me cite Joe Biden’s cognitive impairment—or Kamala Harris’, for that matter. In a more balanced media environment, this would not have been covered up for so long.

I find that people on the right are aware of stories that the left circulates. But there are other stories, or angles on stories, that circulate exclusively on the right. They only “break through” to the left when the mainstream media believes that it can expose them as totally false. The upshot is that my left-of-center friends are convinced that following right-wing media would only expose them to falsehoods, so they stay away.

You might describe the problem as lack of media balance, which is different from soft censorship. But soft censorship helps reinforce unbalanced media. It reinforces the left’s treatment of conservative perspectives as low status. If people on your side are praising soft censorship of the other side, that serves to justify your propensity to dismiss the other side without listening.

Andrey Mir writes,

Since the mid-1800s, media has increasingly targeted audiences rather than ideas, intensifying society’s focus on group identities—a trend that culminated in social media’s focus on personal data. Cultural settings began to reflect this development of media; this is why identity politics is a media effect.

…the basics of identity identification, along with the belief that identity is the fundamental principle of social interaction, first emerged in media and marketing—to increase revenue.

In a review of Mark Rank’s The Random Factor, I write,

The point is worth emphasizing that annual income varies a great deal relative to lifetime income. This is easily and often overlooked. For example, we regularly read that the home ownership rate in America hovers around 60 percent. However, people move back and forth between renting and owning. It was Rank and his co-authors who in an earlier book showed that close to 90 percent of Americans will have bought a home by the time they reach age 55.

…I believe that everyone interested in public policy, including Rank, should focus more on lifetime income and less on annual income.

Rank includes an anecdote in which he was lucky to leave the Washington U sociology department just before it was abolished. He does not explain why it was abolished, but I know a bit of the story from my father, who was acquainted with some of the administrators making the decision. The department had some star researchers, but their methods and conduct were somewhat…unusual.

In a review of Overruled, by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze, Alberto Mingardi writes,

One of the reasons we have too many laws in the United States and throughout the Western world is that people want them. If a society believes that any problem has a solution known to the lawmaker, it will end up with more and more laws as more problems surface. Gorsuch and Nitze point out how this attitude is jeopardizing the whole of the legal system that the Founding Fathers built on British common law.

I suspect that the late Jeffrey Friedman had the explanation for the public’s excess desire for laws: the belief that there is an expert with perfect knowledge in the subject area. Friedman called this “naive third-person realism.” The naive realist is convinced that his own perspective on a policy issue is completely accurate. The naive third-person realist believe that there is a technocrat whose perspective is completely accurate.

Mingardi, whose affiliation is with the Bruno Leoni Institute, fittingly cites Leoni, albeit only briefly. Several years ago, I wrote,

His thesis was that cumulative legal precedent, or common law, is adequate for providing citizens with the rule of law. In Leoni’s view, enactment of laws by legislators is unnecessary and in fact harmful. His criticisms of the legislative process would apply even more strongly in today’s environment, in which much of the legislative power of writing rules has been assigned to regulatory agencies.

Imagine that we had no hard-coded rules, but instead we had only legal decisions made by judges and jurors consulting precedent and common sense. Could this work in a complex modern society, with issues like the question of whether Large Language Models are stealing intellectual property from creators? Returning to common law would not yield perfect results. But the attempt to use legislation and administrative law is certainly not perfect, either.

substacks referenced above:

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Why Does Identity Matter More than Ideas? Blame It on Media

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There is no "censorship industrial complex"