Links to Consider, 3/15

John Cochrane on the challenges for female economists; Rod Dreher on The Defeat of the West; Keith E. Stanovich on myside bias; Rob Henderson and Jordan Peterson on luxury beliefs

John Cochrane writes,

The current standard career track then goes on to 1-2 years as a postdoc, 6-10 years assistant/associate professor, often with “delay the clock” visits to other institutions or “restart the clock” lateral moves. And the current ethic strongly pressures women to delay child-bearing until tenure. It’s also hard to have children when your job lasts 1-2 years so you know you will have to move.

…In the 1980s, an economists’ career was straightforward: 4 years undergrad, 4 years maximum grad school, 6 years assistant professor, and a pretty good chance of tenure at the first job.

Academic careers in general now come with a much longer on-ramp. This selects against people who want to have children. Women especially. That might explain why the gulf between professors and normies is widening.

Rod Dreher alerts us to a new book by Emmanuel Todd, called The Defeat of the West. I gather that it describes the Ukraine war as a defeat that reveals Western weakness. Dreher links to a NYT review by Christopher Caldwell, which Dreher appears to have liberated from the paywall.

I do not think that the book has an English translation. Meanwhile, there is this interview with Todd. He speaks of

the inadequacy of engineering training and, more generally the decline of the level of education, which began in 1965 in the United States.

the recent collapse of Protestantism has triggered an intellectual decline, a disappearance of the work ethic and mass greed (official name: neoliberalism)

The third factor in the West’s defeat is the rest of the world's preference for Russia. It has discovered discreet economic allies everywhere. A new conservative (anti-LGBT) Russian soft power was in full swing as it became clear that Russia was holding the economic shock. Our cultural modernity indeed seems quite insane to the outside world

Western diplomats are part of the Woke culture. Todd sees this as a source of weakness, because most of the world rejects that culture, even as Washington and Brussels think of it is superior.

You may recall my attempt to read Todd’s previous book, along with our YouTube discussion of it.

Keith E. Stanovich wrote,

Suppose the professor knows the evidence on the substantial heritability of intelligence, but because of an attraction to the blank-slate view of human nature, wishes that were not true—in fact, wishes it were zero. The question is, what is the prior belief that the professor should use to approach the new data? If the professor uses a prior belief that the heritability of intelligence is greater than zero and uses it to evaluate the credibility of new evidence, that would be the proper use of a prior belief. If instead they projected onto new evidence the prior belief that the heritability of intelligence equals zero, that would be an irrational display of myside bias, because it would be projecting a conviction—something that the professor wanted to be true, rather than a prior expectation based on evidence. Projecting convictions in this way is the kind of myside bias that leads to a failure of society to converge on the facts.

This should remind you of my Bayesian interpretation of confirmation bias.

A passage to ponder:

different beliefs vary reliably in the degree of myside bias that they engender. In short, it might not be people who are characterized by more or less myside bias, but beliefs that differ in how strongly they are structured to repel ideas that contradict them. These facts about myside bias have profound implications because they invert the way we think about beliefs. Models that focus on the properties of acquired beliefs, such as memetic theory, provide better frameworks for the study of myside bias. The key question becomes not “How do people acquire beliefs?” (the tradition in social and cognitive psychology) but instead, “How do beliefs acquire people?”

When you find yourself believing in something very strongly, so that you operate in Soldier Mindset, to use Julia Galef’s term, you might consider trying tell the story of how this belief acquired you.

In a podcast with Rob Henderson, Jordan Peterson says,

once you've identified the oppressor you have a valid Target for your darkest desires so you got three three attractions to that dread Doctrine right stupid people can understand it quickly with no effort … so it's very attractive if you're not very bright and that's also attractive to your teachers if they're also not very bright and I'm talking about you faculties of Education professors and so and then you are morally virtuous because you're standing for the oppressed … can even claim oppression for yourself at least by proxy and so there you get to have the advantage of being in the oppressor class which you clearly are if you're in Elite University but because you're an ally you … don't have to pay any attention to that plus now you have a target for your this is where I think the anti-Semitism is really instantly understandable right because there's nothing more fun than being anti-semitic with with a moral twist but if you read the history of anti-Semitism it's always been that way … you identify the Jews as oppressors and then you're moral for persecuting them and that's perfect right if you're if you're resentful and bitter and you need a target for your for your bile and spite that that oppressor oppressed narrative it just gives you all of that at once

In terms of the previous link, the belief in an extreme oppressor-oppressed narrative acquires people who are relatively low IQ within their institutions. People in schools of education at universities. HR departments at tech companies.

Henderson says,

people will lie to Advantage themselves and people who score highly in the dark Triad are especially likely to do so and they note that in modern Western societies um we have this attitude towards people who are victimized that they should be um compensated and treated well and sympathized with and people who are high in the dark Triad are very good at sort of monitoring their environment and looking at what strategies they can execute to extract some kind of social or professional or sexual reward and now more and more it's um you know claiming the mantle of of victimhood which is I mean I guess it's important to be clear that it's not that people who are actually victimized are likely to score high in the- dark Triad is that people high in the dark Triad are very manipulative and aware that now pretending like wearing the the camouflage of victimhood can be advantageous and you know it's It's Tricky as a society because we want to sympathize with victims but also we want to be aware of the dark Triad types

One way to think about personal psychology is that society is an ecosystem in which people with different traits occupy various niches. For example, there is may be a natural balance between productive people and predators. If the productive people become overly prevalent, this will make predation profitable, attracting predators. But if predators become overly prevalent, they run out of productive people to prey on.

substacks referenced above:

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US Decadence & The Facts/Wishes Distinction

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Modest Proposal