Micha Goodman on Israel's political crisis; Bryan Caplan's media fantasy; Kevin Corcoran on Jeffrey Friedman's case against epistocracy; Amanda Ripley on a "dignity index" for political discourse
Re: "The mainstream media has to provoke conservatives day after day to keep them engaged and enraged. Conservatives’ natural state is complacency." - Bryan Caplan
My intuition is that Bryan underestimates conservative demand for news about wokeness, borders, etc. One must first tune in, in order to be provoked.a
MSM is also a business; and the customer is always right.
What the MSM supports becomes policy. If those policies negatively impact conservatives then they are going to care.
My parents watched a lot more MSM news then usually during the pandemic. Once they finally decided that COVID wasn't a big deal they stopped watching the news as much. They tuned into the news not to be entertained but because they were scared a virus would kill them and wanted "trusted authorities" to help them navigate that risk.
People care about wokeness because they don't want their children propagandized or to be discriminated against at school or work. They also didn't like six months of deadly and destructive BLM rioting, which the MSM chose to ignore and downplay (*mostly peaceful*). I cared a lot about wokeness when "equity" was used as a justification by the CDC to delay my fathers access to the COVID vaccine for months.
People care about the border because mass demographic replacement is a big deal. I understand that Bryan views this differently, but I also think he's wrong about the impact of immigration as do most people.
One thing Caplan on low-skill immigration to the 21st century US has in common with SBF on running a crypto exchange[1] is unusual openness about their reasoning. Caplan openly despises ordinary Americans -- see e.g. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/03/my_beautiful_bu.html . Given this, how can one be surprised that he hasn't moderated his views on US immigration, even though it's now obvious that Indians can be efficiently lifted out of poverty in-place, and the "double world GDP" pretext is hogwash?
In other words, Caplan's mental model of the impact of mass low-skill immigration might not be very wrong[2]. He just openly doesn't care about limiting the harms that we care about, similar to how SBF openly didn't care about traditional risk management (I've seen multiple people claim that they withdrew all their money from FTX after they saw his conversation with Tyler).
Fortunately, people who didn't trust SBF were basically unharmed by him. Caplan and his fellow travelers posed more of a threat to the rest of us because there's only one national immigration policy[3], but that threat basically ended when the 2016 election killed both DAPA and the prospects for similar acts of executive fiat for a generation. I'm no more thrilled by Title 42 than I was with Roe vs. Wade before it (I'm pro-choice), but I am relieved that the tolerated legal hacks continue to be explainable by the median voter theorem.
1: Yes, this analogy is imperfect. SBF now seems to be consciously trying to deceive, in a way that is worse than anything I've ever seen from Caplan.
2: I do think he's somewhat clueless about the likely geopolitical effects -- I'd expect some harm to things he actually cares about, not just the interests of ordinary Americans -- but as e.g. Thiel has noted, China's leadership is "profoundly uncharismatic" and not a likely threat to displace the US even if there is a large decline in the US military's power projection capabilities.
3: I'd actually be fine with e.g. open borders for Alaska; not sure how you'd get enough existing Alaskans on board, but if you somehow did I'd expect that policy to be broadly net-positive. On a real frontier, self-selection is almost all you need. But that kind of federalism isn't what was offered.
Much of right wing commentary is a reaction to mainstream reporting. If the MSM were to filter from reporting all stories of left wing radicalism and insanity, the right wing media would need to change.
What would shatter right wing popular media would be if the MSM were to uniformly recognize left wing extremism as radical and unacceptable. Conservative media will persist, but it would be a good thing if the "shocked reaction" story was eliminated as clickbait.
And you and I are not customers of the MSM. The advertisers pay their bills.
The Twitter Files leaks have revealed that the FBI has agents-in-place making the moderating decisions at Facebook and YouTube, and before Elon they did the same on Twitter. So all the BS about "misinformation" by the Right and its minor media is propaganda, and the MSM is pravda.
So let's stop calling the MSM "mainstream" since no one who uses his brains trusts a word they say any longer. And then make a concerted effort not to consume what they sell. Especially alleged emergencies.
I didn't follow Arnold's admonition to read the whole thing but it seems to me this analysis leaves out at least one group of news consumers, liberals who tune in for their 'conservative outrage of the day' fix. (Look at what MTG just said!)
I don't know that he's talking about 'conservative' so much as, if I can use the term, 'right wing' interest in the MSM. Complacency is the default for the muddled middle who are looking for direction on what to think about the Current Thing, as referenced by forumposter.
There is a glaring problem with the dignity index that immediately jumps out: What does a proper, dignified person do when there are political disputants actively promoting evil? To say that is never the case is to simply erase the notion of evil, to imagine people never do or promote evil things. Yet at the same time, it makes calling someone out for promoting evil the lowest of low status.
Now, in general I would agree that jumping right to someone having evil motives is a questionable move, but recognizing that what they are proposing, what they openly say and not what secretly motivates them, is evil is a question of judgement.
The problem with judging the messenger is it invariably makes the argument personal and this corrupts further conversation.
With COVID policies, I differentiated between there being evil policies and those who backed them. Curiously, I was often not provided the same deference - more than once I had persons label me evil in response to me saying the program was morally and scientifically wrong.
I think the benefit of doubt means that a person should not be judged evil until it is discerned they understand the harm their position is causing, and they nevertheless persist in that position.
One problem is "culpable ignorance". If a *reasonable person* should be aware that their policies are promoting evil, but remains ignorant nonetheless, they can be still be held liable for promoting evil.
You might think "discussing this nicely with the person" might be the best way to break their ignorance, but sometimes ignorance is of the "its hard to reason someone out of what pays their bills." In that case, calling out the underlying motivations and making it clear that there may be social consequences for them may be a better way to break down ignorance.
Agreed on judging the messenger, but note that isn't what is described in the index. The dignity index references "promoting evil", which is different from "being evil". Granted, the two tend to be correlated, but one can promote evil out of simply being wrong about what is being described. Anti-racism is evil, but not every college freshman who says "It seems like a good idea" is evil.
I would like the dignity index a little better if it specified calling your interlocutor evil instead of promoting evil as a low dignity move. (Although, then again, some ARE evil... at some point people need to just agree generally on what is evil behavior and what isn't, and to give high/low dignity assessments based on how good the judgement is.)
Bryan Caplan's comment is both an interesting hypothetical regarding reaction to the other side being less visible and a silly misunderstanding of what would happen. Clearly Fox would not go away and they'd still find plenty to complain about. And secondary liberal political news sources would fill the void left by (liberal) MSM anyhow. They tend to be even more outrageous so conceivably things would get worse, not better.
Surely 4 admits of degrees. It doesn't mean "has mocked or attacked the other side at least once." Do you think Obama mocked and attacked the other side as much as Trump did?
I notice there's no entry for "makes up shit about the other side's birth certificate being fake"
It’s a fantasy that people will give up profitable and influential business models and not just be replaced by someone that will pick up the $100 bill.
Still, I think Bryan is basically correct that if the MSM stopped trolling and pushing a narrative that it would be a better world.
I remember one of plenty of examples, the Nick Sandman affair. Some 16 year old kid became for the entire MSM “the worlds most punchable face”. Btw, Nick lost most of his defamation cases and got tiny settlements in two others. All for his life being destroyed by a lie.
It’s difficult for me to see how, had the MSM simply ignored the story, that wouldn’t have been a superior outcome.
On a less anecdote note, the NYTimes recently published a fawning biography of Fauci, urging the next generation of public health officials to emulate him. So clearly they learned nothing from two years of stoking pandemic fears.
Had the NYtimes not fear mongers covid it seems likely to me that the damage it caused would have been greatly reduced.
I don’t know if a crazed media is inevitable, but it seems to me that Bryan is correct that if they simply didn’t run with certain stories that it would improve public discourse.
You are correct that the Sandman story as "news" was completely fabricated. Nothing that happened in that encounter justified MSM attention. And yet it was made into a national story, and a very divisive one, by the deliberate carelessness of the MSM.
That said, since the worse the pundits could ever say about Sandman is he smirked proved very beneficial to Sandman and his reputation. He is fine and his Future is entirely in his hands.
I agree that Jordan Peterson tends to discuss evil promoted by liberals more than evil from conservatives but I'm not at all convinced he doesn't see as much or more evil from conservatives and I'm not at all convinced he sees liberals as the other side.
It seems worth noting that Jonathan Haidt also discusses evils promoted by liberals more than evils from conservatives. I don't think any reasonable person would argue he sees liberals as the other side.
I like the Dignity Index. I remember hearing John Boehner discuss his book on Book TV. He instructed his staff to follow this guidance: "You can disagree without being disagreeable." That sounds like a "6" on the Dignity Index. How many 6's are still out there?
Points 1 - 6 are legitimate. Points 7 and 8 are counterproductive and indicate a political and social naivite.
Consider the question "Do Liberal policies help or hurt urban minorities?" One could reach common ground that there is a shared desire for all people to prosper (point 6). But in context of the question, what is the common ground? And what would be the application of points 7 and 8 for all parties involved in the discussion?
Re: "The mainstream media has to provoke conservatives day after day to keep them engaged and enraged. Conservatives’ natural state is complacency." - Bryan Caplan
My intuition is that Bryan underestimates conservative demand for news about wokeness, borders, etc. One must first tune in, in order to be provoked.a
MSM is also a business; and the customer is always right.
What the MSM supports becomes policy. If those policies negatively impact conservatives then they are going to care.
My parents watched a lot more MSM news then usually during the pandemic. Once they finally decided that COVID wasn't a big deal they stopped watching the news as much. They tuned into the news not to be entertained but because they were scared a virus would kill them and wanted "trusted authorities" to help them navigate that risk.
People care about wokeness because they don't want their children propagandized or to be discriminated against at school or work. They also didn't like six months of deadly and destructive BLM rioting, which the MSM chose to ignore and downplay (*mostly peaceful*). I cared a lot about wokeness when "equity" was used as a justification by the CDC to delay my fathers access to the COVID vaccine for months.
People care about the border because mass demographic replacement is a big deal. I understand that Bryan views this differently, but I also think he's wrong about the impact of immigration as do most people.
One thing Caplan on low-skill immigration to the 21st century US has in common with SBF on running a crypto exchange[1] is unusual openness about their reasoning. Caplan openly despises ordinary Americans -- see e.g. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/03/my_beautiful_bu.html . Given this, how can one be surprised that he hasn't moderated his views on US immigration, even though it's now obvious that Indians can be efficiently lifted out of poverty in-place, and the "double world GDP" pretext is hogwash?
In other words, Caplan's mental model of the impact of mass low-skill immigration might not be very wrong[2]. He just openly doesn't care about limiting the harms that we care about, similar to how SBF openly didn't care about traditional risk management (I've seen multiple people claim that they withdrew all their money from FTX after they saw his conversation with Tyler).
Fortunately, people who didn't trust SBF were basically unharmed by him. Caplan and his fellow travelers posed more of a threat to the rest of us because there's only one national immigration policy[3], but that threat basically ended when the 2016 election killed both DAPA and the prospects for similar acts of executive fiat for a generation. I'm no more thrilled by Title 42 than I was with Roe vs. Wade before it (I'm pro-choice), but I am relieved that the tolerated legal hacks continue to be explainable by the median voter theorem.
1: Yes, this analogy is imperfect. SBF now seems to be consciously trying to deceive, in a way that is worse than anything I've ever seen from Caplan.
2: I do think he's somewhat clueless about the likely geopolitical effects -- I'd expect some harm to things he actually cares about, not just the interests of ordinary Americans -- but as e.g. Thiel has noted, China's leadership is "profoundly uncharismatic" and not a likely threat to displace the US even if there is a large decline in the US military's power projection capabilities.
3: I'd actually be fine with e.g. open borders for Alaska; not sure how you'd get enough existing Alaskans on board, but if you somehow did I'd expect that policy to be broadly net-positive. On a real frontier, self-selection is almost all you need. But that kind of federalism isn't what was offered.
Much of right wing commentary is a reaction to mainstream reporting. If the MSM were to filter from reporting all stories of left wing radicalism and insanity, the right wing media would need to change.
What would shatter right wing popular media would be if the MSM were to uniformly recognize left wing extremism as radical and unacceptable. Conservative media will persist, but it would be a good thing if the "shocked reaction" story was eliminated as clickbait.
MSM report the stories that they do, about left-wing radicalism, partly because such news is what their audiences seek.
And you and I are not customers of the MSM. The advertisers pay their bills.
The Twitter Files leaks have revealed that the FBI has agents-in-place making the moderating decisions at Facebook and YouTube, and before Elon they did the same on Twitter. So all the BS about "misinformation" by the Right and its minor media is propaganda, and the MSM is pravda.
So let's stop calling the MSM "mainstream" since no one who uses his brains trusts a word they say any longer. And then make a concerted effort not to consume what they sell. Especially alleged emergencies.
I didn't follow Arnold's admonition to read the whole thing but it seems to me this analysis leaves out at least one group of news consumers, liberals who tune in for their 'conservative outrage of the day' fix. (Look at what MTG just said!)
I don't know that he's talking about 'conservative' so much as, if I can use the term, 'right wing' interest in the MSM. Complacency is the default for the muddled middle who are looking for direction on what to think about the Current Thing, as referenced by forumposter.
There is a glaring problem with the dignity index that immediately jumps out: What does a proper, dignified person do when there are political disputants actively promoting evil? To say that is never the case is to simply erase the notion of evil, to imagine people never do or promote evil things. Yet at the same time, it makes calling someone out for promoting evil the lowest of low status.
Now, in general I would agree that jumping right to someone having evil motives is a questionable move, but recognizing that what they are proposing, what they openly say and not what secretly motivates them, is evil is a question of judgement.
The problem with judging the messenger is it invariably makes the argument personal and this corrupts further conversation.
With COVID policies, I differentiated between there being evil policies and those who backed them. Curiously, I was often not provided the same deference - more than once I had persons label me evil in response to me saying the program was morally and scientifically wrong.
I think the benefit of doubt means that a person should not be judged evil until it is discerned they understand the harm their position is causing, and they nevertheless persist in that position.
One problem is "culpable ignorance". If a *reasonable person* should be aware that their policies are promoting evil, but remains ignorant nonetheless, they can be still be held liable for promoting evil.
You might think "discussing this nicely with the person" might be the best way to break their ignorance, but sometimes ignorance is of the "its hard to reason someone out of what pays their bills." In that case, calling out the underlying motivations and making it clear that there may be social consequences for them may be a better way to break down ignorance.
Agreed on judging the messenger, but note that isn't what is described in the index. The dignity index references "promoting evil", which is different from "being evil". Granted, the two tend to be correlated, but one can promote evil out of simply being wrong about what is being described. Anti-racism is evil, but not every college freshman who says "It seems like a good idea" is evil.
I would like the dignity index a little better if it specified calling your interlocutor evil instead of promoting evil as a low dignity move. (Although, then again, some ARE evil... at some point people need to just agree generally on what is evil behavior and what isn't, and to give high/low dignity assessments based on how good the judgement is.)
Shorter Caplan:
"If the media would stop talking about the policies they want to implement, there would be less pushback on those policies."
I don't doubt that Caplan is correct, so I have to hope the media doesn't listen to him.
Whatever # is Thomas Sowell is what I desire to be.
Bryan Caplan's comment is both an interesting hypothetical regarding reaction to the other side being less visible and a silly misunderstanding of what would happen. Clearly Fox would not go away and they'd still find plenty to complain about. And secondary liberal political news sources would fill the void left by (liberal) MSM anyhow. They tend to be even more outrageous so conceivably things would get worse, not better.
Surely 4 admits of degrees. It doesn't mean "has mocked or attacked the other side at least once." Do you think Obama mocked and attacked the other side as much as Trump did?
I notice there's no entry for "makes up shit about the other side's birth certificate being fake"
It’s a fantasy that people will give up profitable and influential business models and not just be replaced by someone that will pick up the $100 bill.
Still, I think Bryan is basically correct that if the MSM stopped trolling and pushing a narrative that it would be a better world.
I remember one of plenty of examples, the Nick Sandman affair. Some 16 year old kid became for the entire MSM “the worlds most punchable face”. Btw, Nick lost most of his defamation cases and got tiny settlements in two others. All for his life being destroyed by a lie.
It’s difficult for me to see how, had the MSM simply ignored the story, that wouldn’t have been a superior outcome.
On a less anecdote note, the NYTimes recently published a fawning biography of Fauci, urging the next generation of public health officials to emulate him. So clearly they learned nothing from two years of stoking pandemic fears.
Had the NYtimes not fear mongers covid it seems likely to me that the damage it caused would have been greatly reduced.
I don’t know if a crazed media is inevitable, but it seems to me that Bryan is correct that if they simply didn’t run with certain stories that it would improve public discourse.
You are correct that the Sandman story as "news" was completely fabricated. Nothing that happened in that encounter justified MSM attention. And yet it was made into a national story, and a very divisive one, by the deliberate carelessness of the MSM.
That said, since the worse the pundits could ever say about Sandman is he smirked proved very beneficial to Sandman and his reputation. He is fine and his Future is entirely in his hands.
I agree that Jordan Peterson tends to discuss evil promoted by liberals more than evil from conservatives but I'm not at all convinced he doesn't see as much or more evil from conservatives and I'm not at all convinced he sees liberals as the other side.
It seems worth noting that Jonathan Haidt also discusses evils promoted by liberals more than evils from conservatives. I don't think any reasonable person would argue he sees liberals as the other side.
I like the Dignity Index. I remember hearing John Boehner discuss his book on Book TV. He instructed his staff to follow this guidance: "You can disagree without being disagreeable." That sounds like a "6" on the Dignity Index. How many 6's are still out there?
Points 1 - 6 are legitimate. Points 7 and 8 are counterproductive and indicate a political and social naivite.
Consider the question "Do Liberal policies help or hurt urban minorities?" One could reach common ground that there is a shared desire for all people to prosper (point 6). But in context of the question, what is the common ground? And what would be the application of points 7 and 8 for all parties involved in the discussion?