Links to Consider, 11/16/2024

Gre Lukianoff on scout mindset; Scott Sumner on Christianity's rise and fall; Devon Eriksen on each political party's preferred media; The Zvi on sports gambling

Greg Lukianoff writes,

As Tyler Austin Harper put it in a piece for The Atlantic, higher education created this problem by favoring applicants who are interested only, or primarily, in engaging in activism. Indeed, they made activism a part of their marketing and recruitment materials.

…Activism is an important part of free speech and public participation. My organization and I go to great lengths to protect and defend it. But by explicitly recruiting activists, and by creating an academic environment that encourages activism, our universities have forgotten the importance and the value of a scholarly mindset.

…The ideal student should think more like a field anthropologist, someone who is trying to figure out where the other side is coming from, rather than a strident warrior in a battle of good versus evil. That open, curious, intellectually humble, and receptive mindset is the foundation of actual learning, and is critical to fostering an educational environment that lives up to its intended purpose.

As a quibble, why doesn’t he come out and say “scout mindset vs. soldier mindset” given that he has reviewed Julia Galef’s book?

As you know, the deterioration of intellectual quality in higher education is my number one issue.

In a buried-lede post, Scott Sumner writes,

It seems to me that for its first 1800 years, Christendom mostly ignored the teachings of Jesus. Europe had a basically aristocratic culture, where the elite were especially respected if they engaged in warfare, and the poor were treated like dirt. That doesn’t seem very Christian!

In the 19th century, the West began to have a greater empathy for those at the bottom. Slavery was abolished. Democracy began to spread. Socialist ideas like income redistribution were adopted.

…But Christianity in an institutional sense seems to be declining in the West. It’s as if the public is saying “We thank the Church for preserving the teachings of Jesus for 1800 years, but we don’t need you any longer. We have made these ideas a part of our secular philosophy, our social science, our politics, our culture. You’ve done your job, now please go away.”

Devon Eriksen writes,

The neo-democrats are the party of television. The neo-republicans are the party of the internet.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who labels it “speculative.” Eriksen goes on ad nauseum (what ever happened to Twitter being a concise medium?), but the short version is that contemporary Democrats need/want to control what is said, which is easier to do with legacy mass media than with the Internet. Contemporary Republicans have fled to podcasts and social media.

Recall that Richard Hanania wrote Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch Television. What should we do about their apparent disagreement? We can say that Hanania is wrong, Eriksen is wrong, or they are both partially right. I put the probabilities at 30 percent, 20 percent, and 50 percent, respectively.

Hanania could be wrong because he relies on data from four years ago. Many pundits have pointed out that in the recent election the influence of podcasts and Twitter seem to have waxed, while the influence of legacy television waned.

Eriksen could be wrong because he makes it sound like modern Republicans are way more sophisticated than Democrats in their ability to seek out and process alternative information sources. I am willing to substantially discount the intelligence of the college-educated Democrat, but I have a hard time crediting the notion that the median Republican voter is a far superior media consumer than the median Democratic voter.

They could each be partially right. Hanania is talking about preferences for media consumption, and Eriksen is talking about preferences for media production. Maybe the median Democratic voter is more likely to choose new media (or print) as a source of news, while the median Republican voter is more likely to choose television. But Democratic elites have a preference for using mass media to communicate, because they want to control the narrative. Republican elites feel empowered by Internet media.

This would imply that there is a mismatch between consumption preferences and production preferences. Democratic elites’ preferred broadcast media take them into territory with a large conservative population. Republican elites can speak to younger, more media-savvy voters, but they miss out on older conservative voters.

Which brings me to the interesting part of Eriksen’s thesis. What if the parties will lose their ideological distinctiveness as they cater to their preferred media? Mr. Trump jettisoned economic libertarians, foreign policy hawks, and pro-lifers in order to pick off some traditional Democratic constituencies. The symmetrical move from some future Democrat would be to jettison social justice activists in order to better appeal to married adults and other traditional Republican constituencies.

Zvi Mowshowitz writes,

Legalized mobile gambling on sports, let alone casino games, has proven to be a huge mistake. The societal impacts are far worse than I expected.

I would caution that we do not know what the alternative path would have looked like. The Internet was bringing about the de facto legalization of gambling on sports, regardless of what legislators did. But it does seem that sports gambling is under-regulated. It would have been good to come up with a scheme that protected people from harmful gambling addictions in legal venues without driving them to illegal sites.

I would say the same thing about marijuana. We went from a legal regime that was not enforceable to a regime that is not well regulated. In many places, legal marijuana has difficulty competing with the black market. And substance abuse appears to be rampant.

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