Links to Consider, 2/18
Kevin Corcoran on Jeffrey Friedman on technocracy; Michael Tomasello on Social Cognition; Gurwinder Bhogal on individual cognition; Inquisitive Bird on mental disorders
To be a technocrat is to deny that a problem is too complex for you to understand, to believe that there is a “correct” solution, that you in particular know what that solution is, and that you can effectively use policy to implement that solution by altering the behavior of people you’ve never met in ways you can reliably predict. If you reject the simple-society ontology of a naive realist, you see these kinds of claims as incredibly hubristic. But these are the claims one has to make to advocate a technocratic policy.
He is summarizing the thinking of Jeffrey Friedman in Power Without Knowledge.
Michael Tomasello talks about his work in evolutionary psychology. He says that it helps to think of human capacities as having evolved to solve the problems of cooperative food-foraging. We need to get good at reading one another’s minds, communicating with one another, and enforcing norms of fairness. He emphasizes human interdependence, so you know that I found the podcast interesting.
In the end, rationality is not about intelligence but about character. Without the right personal qualities, education and IQ won’t make you master of your biases, they’ll only make you a better servant of them. So be open to the possibility that you may be wrong, and always be willing to change your mind—especially if you’re smart.
Sound advice, of course. But I keep coming back to knowledge as a social process. We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. The social credentials that are supposed to make people believable nowadays are malfunctioning. The Fantasy Intellectual Teams project was a hail-Mary attempt to change that. The idea of a network university is another.
The extreme burden of schizophrenia means that nearly all affected individuals are downwardly mobile, resulting in an overrepresentation of people with schizophrenia in the lower socioeconomic classes. Unemployment and homelessness are common outcomes. Indeed, schizophrenia and intellectual disability are both highly overrepresented among the homeless population. A review found that an estimated 76% of homeless people in high-income countries suffered from a mental disorder, with substance use disorders and schizophrenia being the most common.
If I were to choose a belief of Bryan Caplan’s to contest, it would be his endorsement of Thomas Szasz’ dismissal of mental disorders as socially constructed. I am willing to stipulate that many alleged mental disorders are not “real.” But schizophrenia, for example, is best regarded as a real mental disorder.
Substacks referenced above:
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> We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe.
This is why I am convinced of the importance of making students (both school and college) interact with the real world. A good physics lab course both grounds one's beliefs in this area and induces a bit of humility about one's own observations and conclusions. You relearn, at a hopefully more mature age than when you learned that fire hurts and bricks fall down, that reality exists and is not just all social constructionism and doxastic voluntarism. Or to take an example from a different area, which came up on Twitter last week, many key observations in biology made 100-150 years ago are now easy to repeat in a high school lab, for instance the existence of viruses (apparently a segment of anti-vaxxers does not believe in viruses). A lot of high school curriculum could be usefully replaced with such stuff. It has the additional advantages of being more concrete, hands-on and relatable than Algebra II or XIX century French and Russian novels, not to mention diversity studies. Many kids don't have the raw power of abstraction to do more than make the motions of learning calculus and most don't yet have the life experience to appreciate high literature, so they just tend to be turned off the subject. What if instead they were brought to appreciate Feynman's conclusion of the Challenger disaster report - "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"?
The best technocrats in the world are in Singapore. And the technocrats in Singapore appear to understand that limits of their knowledge in many ways. They don't over-regulate the economy for instance. They understand the importance of markets. For a country that exercises massive cultural control, they are OK with essentially cordoning off sections of the city to be regulated by the individual ethnicities as they see fit, like a "special cultural zone".
At the same time, we are talking about a state that owns nearly all the real estate on the island, assigns living space by race, forcibly conscripts people for two years of their lives, has a universal healthcare system with state regulated hospitals, has draconian social regulations, has extremely tight immigration control, etc. And all of it works really well!
I'm not saying that model can be exported, but at the end of the day if some entity is going to have power over others (the party, the leader, the democratic mob, the committee of midwits, the elite technocrat) they are either going to have a healthy respect for markets, choice, and the information problem or not.