Links to Consider, 8/12

Ashley Rindsberg on Wikipedia's ownership; Cremieux Recueil on classic social psychology; Greg Lukianoff treads into social psychology; Alice Evans on women vs. profit; Ruxandra Teslo on same

Ashley Rindsberg writes,

The controversy was ultimately about who would control the site containing “all the world’s knowledge,” and hundreds of millions in Wikipedia funding. Would the site’s community of decentralized, uncompensated editors continue to govern it according to its principles of openness, transparency, and neutrality, or would a handful of highly paid NGO technocrats re-orient Wikipedia toward endorsing and promoting the ever-shifting currents of the Western elite social justice regime?

She talks about the transfer of power from Wikipedia’s volunteer editors to the WikiMedia Foundation, controlled by left-wing non-profits.

There is no doubt that the future is bright for WMF. It is flush with money and has positioned itself at the very center of global governance — the epitome of top-down centralization. But this shining new outlook on controlling who gets to create, spread, own, and even define information is a fundamental philosophical shift from the decentralized vision set out by Wikipedia at its birth as not an entity, but a process for creating knowledge accessible to all — and owned by none.

Cremieux Recueil writes,

If it seems like someone was trying to tell a story and they came up with an experiment that did, it’s probably fake. If a set of findings matched up too perfectly with received wisdom or popular-but-unsupported beliefs, then it’s not too much of a stretch to think someone wanted it that way, and found a way to show it. That is—unfortunately—much of what classic social psychology amounted to.

He goes through the most famous experiments: Milgram obedience, Stanford Prison authoritarianism, Robber’s Cave tribalism, etc. They all involved way too much coaching of the experimental subjects by the experimenters, as well as other serious flaws.

Some of the findings mentioned in this piece were predetermined by motivated researchers looking to confirm something popularly believed and to make a name in doing so. If it wasn’t possible to abuse the field to do those sorts of studies popularly, or if it was impossible to make a killing doing it, then maybe so much fraud wouldn’t have happened. So maybe what social psychology needs to make it a field that helps us understand the complexities of the social world is for its researchers to be cordoned away from it.

Be wary of any study that makes it appear that a social problem can be solved by manipulating a single variable. Poverty is too complex to be addressed using one variable at a time. So is education. So is authoritarianism. When a study finds a one-variable solution, you should be skeptical. Instead, trust that attempts to replicate and scale the result will be thwarted by the Null Hypothesis.

Greg Lukianoff writes,

Any ideology that says you have very little influence over your own life is more likely to attract more anxious and depressed people and is more likely to make them more anxious and depressed.

Left-leaning people who tend to be more anxious and depressed now have an unparalleled ability to group together, thanks to things like technological advancements, social media, and affinity groups of various kinds. As a result, people who tend to be a little bit more depressed and a little bit more anxious surround themselves with people who tend to be a little bit more depressed and a little bit more anxious — and collectively spiral.

I am glad that he started with a selection model. That is, rather than say that the causality runs one way—from left-wing beliefs to anxiety and depression—he suggests that leftism tends to select for people with those tendencies.

Most people who are depressed and anxious don’t want to say that they are bringing on their own misery by ruminating and catastrophizing. Instead, they want to externalize the cause of their problems.

That doesn’t mean that you can dismiss progressivism as a mental disorder. You still have to deal with people’s beliefs on their own terms as legitimate points of view.

Alice Evans has a data-rich post on women’s choice of careers, and how it affects the so-called gender pay gap. She writes,

Women seem drawn to meaningful, socially responsible roles, but these often come with a financial penalty. Could addressing this disparity be key to further progress?

Yes, and not just for women. I have always said that I wish one of my daughters would work for a profit. And I mean that for moral reasons, not for financial reasons.

One important economic lesson is that profit-seeking firms are accountable to customers. They compete to satisfy consumers. Business innovation means coming up with new solutions to customer problems. Firms go out of business when they no longer do as well as competitors at meeting customer needs.

Another important economic lesson is that intentions do not always determine results. Whatever the stated intention of non-profits, they are often ineffective at best and corrupt at worst.

Ruxandra Teslo writes,

Alice is right on an important point: while women’s preference for so-called meaningful jobs might be hard to change, women do not make judgements on what careers are valuable in a void. On the contrary, especially at young ages, when big decisions like this are made, they are highly sensitive to what the culture at large portrays as “good.”

It will be a great day when women (and men) feel good about themselves when they work for profit-seeking businesses and feel guilty about working for non-profits.

substacks referenced above:

@

Pro-progress will win when it wins women

@

What do Women Want? Profit vs Purpose

@

A Q&A on sadness and social justice fundamentalism in ‘Plain English’

@

The Vast Emptiness of Social Psychology