Links to Consider, 8/26

Mark Perry's chart of the non-patriarchy; Ro Khanna on industrial policy; Dan Williams on social belief spirals; Tanner Greer on Silicon Valley intellectuals

Five years ago, Mark Perry posted a chart that includes the following:

for every 100 women enrolled in US graduate schools, there are 73 men

…for every 100 women who are homeless or unsheltered, there are 242 men

…for every 100 women who are in adult correctional facilities, there are 1000 men

Pointer from Aaron Renn.

Congressman Ro Khanna writes,

An intellectual framework is emerging from thinkers like Oren Cass on the right and Ezra Klein on the left.

God help us.

Against the Republican vision for industrial policy, Khanna writes,

across-the-board tariffs, including on allies, make it hard for American manufacturers to get the raw materials and parts they need. Mercantilism and autarky isn’t the American way. Massive corporate tax cuts for Apple and General Electric result in stock buybacks and do nothing to encourage investment in Johnstown or Youngstown. And reducing legal immigration won’t help produce new steel or aluminum plants in America

Fair points. But then

If we want to lead in the industries of the future, the government must provide seed capital to help factories scale in the U.S., along with procurement guarantees, to ensure there is a market for American-made goods.

The most important part of markets is the feedback mechanism. Better firms earn profits and expand. Worse firms incur losses and go out of business.

The “intellectual framework” of industrial policy is to eliminate this feedback mechanism. Politicians will determine which firms expand. They will give poorly-run firms the means (“procurement guarantees”) to keep wasting resources.

Dan Williams writes,

When communities are motivated not to form accurate beliefs but to spread or adopt beliefs for social reasons, a very different epistemic reward system emerges. People are punished for challenging, disagreeing with, or communicating evidence against the community’s preferred beliefs and rewarded for generating and sharing information that supports them.

Consequently, the evidence and arguments that communities are exposed to become systematically skewed towards confirming favoured beliefs and narratives. …individuals can achieve forms of self-deception they would never be able to achieve independently.

We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. In a society with well-functioning liberal institutions, including science and freedom of speech and a competitive free press, false and crazy beliefs tend to get weeded out.

How does a false or crazy belief survive? It has to get past the defenses of the social institutions that filter ideas. It helps if those defenses are weak in the first place, either because the society is pre-Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment.

Second, my guess is that bespoke ideas survive as a way of raising a group’s sense of its status. What we mean by tribalism in this context is that beliefs are connected to the group’s sense of status. Therefore, members of the group will be highly motivated to rationalize those beliefs.

Beliefs that denigrate the status of another group might be particularly attractive. Beliefs that are testable and true are relatively easy to copy, so they will not do much to raise status. But beliefs that are not testable in the world and instead must be held on faith can be more difficult to copy, and hence can confer status. For example, one can have faith that systemic racism is the cause of inequality, and the faith can be strong enough that there is no way to test it. And if this belief also serves to raise a group’s status (allowing college-educated whites to feel superior to non-college-educated whites) then the belief can have real survival value.

Tanner Greer writes,

The operatives and the media men of DC are of a different species. They will freely talk of anything, regardless of how much they know about it. But by and large the pundits and politicos are not intellectuals, and little intellectual work is expected of them.

Then you have the folks who do the grunt work for think tanks and agencies.

Out of humanity’s many billions there are only a handful of individuals who know their chosen domain as well as they do. They have mastered their mountain: they know its every crag, they have walked its every gully. But it is a small mountain. At its summit their field of view is limited to the narrow range of their own expertise.

Nowadays, that also could describe a lot of academics.

Greer argues that, in contrast, Silicon Valley executives have genuine intellectual curiosity. With help from Patrick Collison, he offers a list of books that seem popular with that crowd. I have read many of them. I think he also should include The Revolt of the Public, which I know is popular with that crowd (and I wrote the foreword).

Looking over the list, Greer summarizes,

You can divide most of these titles into five overarching categories: works of speculative or science fiction; historical case studies of ambitious men or important moments in the history of technology; books that outline general principles of physics, math, or cognitive science; books that outline the operating principles and business strategy of successful start-ups; and finally, narrative histories of successful start-ups themselves.  

Do go and read the post.

substacks referenced above:

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The Silicon Valley Canon

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The social construction of bespoke realities

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Why Churches Aren't Credible With Men