Links to Consider, 9/13
Michael Strong on using predictions to evaluate intellectuals; N.S. Lyons on managerialism; Rob Henderson looks at an ambitious research paper; Tim B. Lee on driverless trucks
What if, instead of distorted academic reputation systems such as peer review and institutional prestige, we required reputational bets or formal forecasts of future events in order to regard an academic as a credible source of information?
…We can’t afford another century in which our leading academic institutions elevate intellectuals who support beliefs that led to more than a hundred millions of unnecessary murders along with billions in unnecessary poverty and misery. (We need to hold Joe Stiglitz responsible for Venezuela now).
Strong has claimed that in the 20th century academia was the world’s leading social problem. I would say that it has gotten much worse in the 21st.
In any case, I am not the only one who thinks that the academic status system has gotten hopelessly gamed.
Essential to understanding this total state is the concept of managerialism, an idea first pioneered by an older generation of political thinkers, like National Review’s James Burnham, recovered from relative obscurity and re-employed by this emerging New Right. In this framing, America is today effectively run by a managerial elite, which presides over a broader professional managerial class—think college administrators, corporate HR managers, and nonprofit activists. Fundamentally, the business of such people is not producing or building anything, providing any essential service, or even making critical leadership decisions, but the manipulation and management—that is, surveillance and control—of people, information, money, and ideas.
He is reviewing the book The Total State, by Auron MacIntyre.
New Right thinkers like MacIntyre are pessimistic that anything can be accomplished without a focused, disciplined, and sustained assault on the strongholds of the managerial regime—not only the administrative state but also the universities, the philanthropic-NGO-industrial complex, and also woke financial giants like BlackRock. Meantime, the more orthodox MAGA faithful remain optimistic that Trump himself can fix things, ushering in meaningful political change by traditional means and his force of personality. Many on the New Right would call this naïve.
In a recent paper titled “Beyond Populism: The Psychology of Status-Seeking and Extreme Political Discontent,” a team of researchers investigated whether the desire to obtain status underlies extreme political discontent.
My impression is that the authors of the paper bit off more than they could chew. Devising survey questions to capture notions of populism, dominance, prestige, and various political orientations is too much. For example,
To measure the desire for status, researchers administered the Status-Driven Risk Taking scale to participants.
This scale measures the pursuit for money, power, and social prestige.
Participants rated how strongly they agreed with statements like “I would enjoy being a famous and powerful person, even if it meant a high risk of assassination” and “I would take a very high-status job even if I had to live in a place where there are many deadly diseases.”
I think that is a shaky way to get at one variable. When you do it for a lot of variables and then do correlation analysis, I call baloney sandwich.
The conclusion, if you choose to trust it:
The populists want a strong leader to liberate them from the dominance-oriented status seekers and rule according to the populists’ preferences.
The dominance-oriented status seekers want to be liberated from the population and strong leaders, preferring to rule according to their own preferences.
If Aurora’s first driverless trip down I-45 goes well, there will be dozens, then hundreds, and eventually thousands, of trips like it. With hundreds of thousands of long-haul truck drivers in the United States alone, this is a huge and potentially lucrative market.
The idea will be to use human drivers to take trucks to and from staging areas near highways. The driverless truck just does the long-distance high way travel, avoiding urban areas.
substacks referenced above:@
@
@
Arnold - Thanks for linking to the Michael Strong essay. I can’t do much to change education in general. I can however have a huge impact on the education of my three children, and that’s what matters most to me. First I can put them in a school like Thales Academy or Challenger School that develops their critical thinking skills and exposes them to classical liberal ideas. These schools aren’t perfect, but they are the best I’ve found—at least the best that my wife and I can agree on. Second, I can address any deficiencies of these schools by supplementing them with my own activities and lessons. This might include basic life skills such as cooking, cleaning, writing, reading, exercise, self-defense, positive thinking, and manners. It might also include a strong dose of engineering, science, technology and mathematics in combination with an array of practical, hands-on activities—building robots for example or starting a business. Third, I can emphasize the importance of family, grandparents, marrying the right person, and having children.
I don’t need higher education for many of these things. It isn’t until graduate school that it becomes much more helpful to be in the presence of a professor, his laboratory and his unique set of lecture notes. But you and I both know, graduate school isn’t that important to living a full life. We can become expert at something without graduate school and that something will likely be more inline with our other life goals. Graduate school might even push us to live in a city with people we’d rather not be around. I say, given the academic milieu we’re in, a good strategy is to i) focus on your child’s K-12 education, including character education, preparing them for life in general, with less emphasis on college prep; ii) discuss the importance of living near family, friends, like-minded neighbors and classical liberal K-12 schools; and iii) discuss the importance of geography and place in their life. Without these discussions, college, graduate school, and capitalism tend to separate families and separate individuals from land that holds meaning for them. I believe one of the reasons Jews have thrived in Israel is because they are connected to a land that has meaning to them. I admire Strong’s desire to improve higher education, but a first step in that pursuit might be to recite the Serenity Prayer or a secular version of it.
"Strong has claimed that in the 20th century academia was the world’s leading social problem."
Sounds like capitalism - worst system there is except all the others.
Besides that, here's three other concerns:
1 I get that he is concerned about highly public academics whose predictions and plans drive policy. But much of what academics do is opinion that isn't a prediction so those bets aren't going to help find the best.
2 How does one decide what test bets are relevant to this expert? Does an academic design the test?
3 I'd argue most academics aren't stating opinions and predictions that influence policy and most academic work is based on scientific method. (Rigor in following scientific method is a different issue.)