Links to Consider, 2/18
Dan Williams on misinformation; Scott Alexander on libertarianism unloved; Kevin Corcoran on the nature of political beliefs; Bronski and Archer on mutational load
once misinformation experts start classifying content as misinformation on the grounds that it’s misleading, they will inevitably be picking and choosing content in ways that are highly biased and frequently self-serving.
On the issue of who to trust, he writes,
experts often give opinions way outside their area of expertise, experts often disagree, and self-proclaimed experts in some areas are absurdly overconfident, partisan, and untrustworthy. But still, the ideal of reliable experts informing a public that trusts their expertise is a good one.
…the most important thing for leaders in such institutions to do in this area is to try to win public trust - most importantly by becoming more trustworthy.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, the highly partisan nature of the liberal establishment’s post-2016 panic about misinformation, fake news, “post-truth”, and so on, which frames dissent from establishment views as a form of brainwashing by viral misinformation and disinformation campaigns, is likely to have the very opposite effect.
In short,
selective and biased communication is the norm in modern democracies. It’s not confined to online conspiracy theories, fake news, or right-wing populists. It’s pervasive, including within many of our elite epistemic institutions.
We won’t be epistemically better off by elite control over information flows. We will be better off if our elite epistemic institutions (the academy, journalism) stop becoming degraded and corrupt.
The most fragile thing in the world is a social consensus in favor of freedom. Thirty years ago, it sounded horrifying and dystopian to think that the government could monitor everyone’s phone calls and read their emails. Now the government does this all the time, and if you don’t like it you’re soft on terror, or far-right extremism, or whatever it’s bad to be soft on this year. The basic libertarian experience is to go to sleep confident that some freedom is rock-hard and universally-agreed upon, only to wake up the next morning and find that every newspaper in the country has simultaneously declared it Problematic.
I think there is a significant element of noncognitivism in most people’s political speech. People rarely update their stated political beliefs in light of new facts because their stated political beliefs were never meant to express propositional beliefs about the state of the world. They are simply a form of political, expressive noncognitivism – a declaration of attitude and alignment to a tribe.
This has many implications. One of them is that trying to persuade people to change their beliefs using reason is likely to fail. Instead, get them to change their alignment—who they think of as the friendly tribe and who they think of as the enemy tribe. I suggested yesterday that Jews may become more favorable to capitalism because progressives are acting like an enemy tribe toward Jews.
Joseph Bronski and Matthew Archer write,
Leftism correlates with paternal age (the age of someone’s father at birth). This finding is robust to controlling for the father’s politics, participant age, and birth order. Which means the correlation is not due to older fathers having more-leftist genes, the homes of older fathers being in more leftist environments, older people (who could be more conservative for some other reason) having younger fathers, or people with older fathers having lower quality womb environments.
This is important because mutational load correlates with paternal age.
…It thus seems possible that a non-trivial part of the rise of leftism since 1960 is due to mutational pressure – that is, the accumulation of harmful mutations in the gene pool.
Without some numbers, I do not know how much credibility to assign to the words. I used Google and ChatGPT to try to locate the literature on father age and child disabilities and did not find much. This source answered some of my questions.
the age at which many men are becoming fathers in the U.S. has increased by 3.5 years – from an average of 27.4 years to 30.9 years between 1972 and 2015. About 9% of all births in the U.S. are connected to men over 40.
…Although advanced paternal age does bear some risk, there is a very low likelihood that becoming a father late in life will adversely impact the future health of your baby.
Even if Bronski is correct about the causal chain running from more older fathers to more mutational load to more leftism, I am skeptical of the numerical impact. The proportion of births to older fathers increased by a small amount between 1960 and 2000. Say from .06 to .09, or an increase of .03
The proportion of babies born to older fathers who develop disabilities is small, say 0.1. Multiplying two small numbers gives a really small number. I’m thinking .03 times .1 = .003, which does not account for much of the increase in leftism.
substacks referenced above:
@
@
@
Re: "trying to persuade people to change their beliefs using reason is likely to fail. Instead, get them to change their alignment—who they think of as the friendly tribe and who they think of as the enemy tribe."
Arnold Kling throws in the towel?!
Arnold, You often succeed in persuading various readers by argument and evidence. Please keep at it!
Here's an alternative explanation for a correlation between paternal age and inclination toward leftism. Presumably, as most adults age, they transition from self-reliance to increasing dependence on government entitlements, and thus are increasingly inclined to support such entitlements and the taxation that funds them.
Let's play with some toy numbers. We'll assume that from the time someone joins the labor force until about 55 years of age, they chiefly perceive the entitlement system as 'taking money away from me to give to other people'. As they draw closer to Social Security and Medicare, they become increasingly favorable toward those major economic-redistribution programs. When they reach an age at which Medicare's paying the considerable costs of that hip replacement, much of their opposition to governent entitlements evaporates.
Now let's consider their children. If I'm born to a 25-year-old father, then up to about the time I'm 30, I'll be exposed to his opposition to entitlements and the associated taxation. I won't actually see him benefit from those programs until I'm 40 or more, by which time my position on a conservative-progressive continuum will be largely fixed.
On the other hand, if I'm born to a 40-year-old father, then by the time I reach my late teens, he'll have begun to transition toward a more favorable view of entitlements; before I'm 30, he'll be on Social Security and will probably be deriving substantial benefit from Medicare. That will almost certainly affect my attitude toward such social programs.