Martin Gurri on the elite bubble; Erik Hoel on thin prediction markets; Matthew Crawford on post-WWII sexual psychology policy; Harold Robertson on systems degraded by Midwits
"It basically suggests pretty explicitly that the vast majority of the public are lambs that can be led to the slaughter by these wolves. And of course the head wolf is Donald Trump, but Elon Musk is not too far behind. These are people who by basically telling persuasive lies can bamboozle millions into acting against their own interest and that the role of government therefore is to intervene in the conversation."
I wouldn't say that that's entirely wrong; there are plenty of lambs out there and plenty of wolves. What's frustrating to me is that none of these same people seem to recognize or are willing to concede that there might be any wolves that work for the federal government or its vendors, contractors, and various other financial dependents. It's all cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians with these people.
Note that Gurri in this passage is not agreeing with the characterization of voters as lambs being led astray. This is the story that elites tell themselves to justify their actions and their rule more broadly. Quite to the contrary, Trump is seen as a particular instrument of what Gurri characterizes at greater length elsewhere (e.g. his book and his writing on Discourse) as a nihilist fury attendant to populism that is directed against these elites. By this characterization of the populist reaction, elites repeatedly mistake the symptoms for the disease. They are quite blind.
Yeah, I considered adding "although one could quibble about who the lambs and who the wolves are" to the end of my first sentence. Suffice it to say, though, that there are quite a few influential people out there hawking what I deem to be demonstrably bogus narratives that they nevertheless deem to be in their interest.
To be clear, Gurri is not saying that populism is the disease. That too is a symptom as he makes very clear in his most recent Discourse piece that I linked in a separate post. The disease is deeper and more systemic: see Jacques Barzun for example. Many have taken note and written of it: Read the first 100 pages of "The Blank Slate" by Pinker. Helen Dale - who has written quite a lot about the Roman Empire - and Lorenzo Warby have been repeatedly linked by AK and are feeling parts of it. Louise Perry is grasping at an aspect of it in "We are Repaganizing" (https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/10/we-are-repaganizing). Peter Turchin develops quantitative historical analyses with his Cliodynamics that sees another aspect. But of them all, Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence" is the most comprehensive overview. Gurri, perhaps unknowingly, picks up where Barzun left off in his final chapter: "Demotic Life and Times: A view from New York around 1995."
The government itself this the biggest purveyor of the most dangerous mis- and dis-information there is- full stop. Government officials will lie to you even when they don't have to for any obvious reason and even if the lie is so obvious even the biggest morons in our society know it is a lie. Sure, they are qualified to suppress information from other parties.
The repression angle is still strong enough that the publishing industry has produced several *children's books* about Lizzie Borden. For some reason even though it has shock value aplenty for children, they never produce a juvenile book about the bogeyman that haunted the children of my hometown, Dean Corll. They don't like to delve too deeply into these things. They are not serious people.
Arnold & friends: "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation"
The capacity of a nation to misuse resources and to waste time, energy & people seems unlimited. Not enjoyable to be reminded that leaders have an unquenchable desire to probe the limits of futility.
It's worth noting that capitalism has a lot of waste too. It doesn't make it a failure. If anything, quite the opposite. One could reasonably argue the analogy fits here too. It's at least worth considering the possibility with some humility.
Fair point. However, I don't think basic government services should be run like a biotech firm - spending great amounts of capital hoping for one huge product out of dozens of failed products. Yet we see government trying "new things" that make zero sense except when viewed with the political lens.
I wasn't thinking of govt expenditures but it applies there too. There is plenty of reason to think broadly applicable incentives to invest in capital and innovation have increased progress. Plenty of failures and some that maybe never should have been tried but new ways like the DARPA challenge certainly have their merits.
I'm thinking of keeping social order and educating children. These are not difficult tasks. But governments in certain American cities have a devil of a time figuring out how to do what works, despite there being centuries of experience showing what methods do work!
Well in Maryland the officials decided to stop disciplining kids both for bad behavior in school and for breaking the law. What happened is what common sense indicates would happen: School performance declined and kids are getting involved in more crimes, including violent crimes that are putting more kids lives in jeopardy.
Some novel ideas are just bad ideas and hurt people.
It's clearly just a fact that wolves like Donald Trump can bamboozle millions of idiot sheep. That doesn't make it ok to regulate the flow of information though.
This sounds exactly like ... the elite bubble Gurri talks about. When Trump said "lock her up" - he didn't create the desire for actual justice for HR Clinton's crimes, he just expressed what millions of America loving folk wanted. Same with trade with commie-slave state China and the globalization free trade that Kling and most economists like - millions wanted more protectionism, and Trump merely articulated that desire.
Same with the illegals.
Many Christians voted for Trump knowing he cheated on his wives - because he promised to appoint pro-life conservatives to the SC. Which he did, more than Bush or Bush did.
I don't believe Trump bamboozled many voters - but I do believe Dem deep state lies and false info were successful in wrongly demonizing Trump. From his "women allow [the famous] to do anything ... grab them by the pussy", to his bragging about the great economy, it is the Trump haters, sometimes including Kling, who seem to have been gullibly bamboozled by hundreds of lies and half-truths against Trump by thousands of famous elites.
Obama was a wolf - increased racism & crime, staring with Trayvon Martin; lied "You can keep your doctor" to get Obamacare.
Biden is a wolf - stopping US drilling to increase oil prices (prices which Trump's policies reduce); running away from & losing Afghanistan (which Trump wanted to do without losing - and in 4 years didn't find out how to leave and not lose); thus provoking Russian's invasion of Ukraine. That's a clear fact, as was Russian Crimea & Donbas interference & occupation in 2014 under Obama, and Russian occupation of Ossetia (north Georgia) under Bush 43.
No Russian expansion under Trump - who maybe did flatter Putin personally, and seemingly gratuitously, yet in practice effectively.
What facts show Pres. Trump as a wolf? (I'm really interested your specific answer)
When I say he's a "wolf" I don't mean he's lying! He genuinely believes 2020 was stolen (and that there were millions of illegal votes for Hillary in 2016)
Gurri has been a very interesting writer. The elite bubble Gurri discusses is a symptom and not the disease. For the disease, read his recent Discourse article "The World Before the Thaw: Welcome to the World of Pseudo-ideology": https://www.discoursemagazine.com/ideas/2023/09/12/the-world-before-the-thaw/ . He is seeing and describing the present state of a process which Jacques Barzun described at length in his magisterial "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life."
Crawford is 100% on target by identifying Reich as the true godfather of this movement and to connect it with the attempt to "cure" the so-called Authoritarian Personality.
May also be worth pointing out that the phenomenon of psychiatric casualties was unique to the American side during the second World War. Either you believe that the other belligerents (including the two that did most of the fighting and dying) were just repressing it, that they were unusually psychiatrically resilient, or that psychiatry can only make cognizable claims in certain cultures like America -- the choice is up to the reader.
I know this is peanut gallery behavior to criticize but Crawford should not have cited Adam Curtis for facts that can be found from more reputable sources.
Interesting about the 50s. If it's true, the idea that repressed sexuality leads to fascism, isn't that a better explanation for why incels are so looked down and hated, instead of pitied as if dogs from an SPCA commercial? They are budding fascists.
Of course that doesn't explain why they could be cuddly funny outcasts in the 80s (Revenge of the Nerds etc.) but only now dangerous and not at all worthy of empathy.
Lots of talk on crypto currencies. Guess there's a market here to make money but I for one don't use it as the current money system serves me well. I see myself using othevr forms of currency when I travel or purchase products from places other than USA. The Euro the pound the yen. Why the fuss with crypto? How would it serve me better than what's available now?
Thanks if you can give me practical reasons for using crypto..
Against their own interest - I have heard this often and it seems so incredibly absurd. They know someone else's interest? Really?
On a similar topic, I'm reading McWhorter's book, Woke Racism. I surprised how clunky his arguments are and I don't really like his term, "the Elect" but he has some good insights. (Tim Urban's new book has a wider scope but I think he writes better and I like his term "social justice fundamentalists" better too.) Anyway, he argues books by Coates, DiAngelo, and Kendi are treated something like the Bible but aren't in the best interest of blacks, or anyone else.
Calamities, emergencies, failures and so forth have been part of human history through the ages, so Robertson’s complexity accusation doesn’t hold water IMHO, unless he wants to apply it to all of human history. Could rising complexity coupled with promotion of dunces be blamed as the “core issue” behind the breakdown of America’s systems? I’d concede it could be one factor but not the primary. Pick almost any era of human activity and you’ll find crisis. Try the 18th century – South Sea Company bubble, British credit crisis in 1772, US panic of 1792, etc. One could argue, I suppose, that any period that experiences technical and economic innovation is going to have a hard time figuring out how to maximize those innovations without shooting themselves in the foot. The human track record speaks for itself. Empires rise, empires fall.
"It basically suggests pretty explicitly that the vast majority of the public are lambs that can be led to the slaughter by these wolves. And of course the head wolf is Donald Trump, but Elon Musk is not too far behind. These are people who by basically telling persuasive lies can bamboozle millions into acting against their own interest and that the role of government therefore is to intervene in the conversation."
I wouldn't say that that's entirely wrong; there are plenty of lambs out there and plenty of wolves. What's frustrating to me is that none of these same people seem to recognize or are willing to concede that there might be any wolves that work for the federal government or its vendors, contractors, and various other financial dependents. It's all cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians with these people.
Note that Gurri in this passage is not agreeing with the characterization of voters as lambs being led astray. This is the story that elites tell themselves to justify their actions and their rule more broadly. Quite to the contrary, Trump is seen as a particular instrument of what Gurri characterizes at greater length elsewhere (e.g. his book and his writing on Discourse) as a nihilist fury attendant to populism that is directed against these elites. By this characterization of the populist reaction, elites repeatedly mistake the symptoms for the disease. They are quite blind.
Yeah, I considered adding "although one could quibble about who the lambs and who the wolves are" to the end of my first sentence. Suffice it to say, though, that there are quite a few influential people out there hawking what I deem to be demonstrably bogus narratives that they nevertheless deem to be in their interest.
To be clear, Gurri is not saying that populism is the disease. That too is a symptom as he makes very clear in his most recent Discourse piece that I linked in a separate post. The disease is deeper and more systemic: see Jacques Barzun for example. Many have taken note and written of it: Read the first 100 pages of "The Blank Slate" by Pinker. Helen Dale - who has written quite a lot about the Roman Empire - and Lorenzo Warby have been repeatedly linked by AK and are feeling parts of it. Louise Perry is grasping at an aspect of it in "We are Repaganizing" (https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/10/we-are-repaganizing). Peter Turchin develops quantitative historical analyses with his Cliodynamics that sees another aspect. But of them all, Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence" is the most comprehensive overview. Gurri, perhaps unknowingly, picks up where Barzun left off in his final chapter: "Demotic Life and Times: A view from New York around 1995."
Wolves have become so good at dressing up like sheep that they actually BELIEVE they are sheep.
The government itself this the biggest purveyor of the most dangerous mis- and dis-information there is- full stop. Government officials will lie to you even when they don't have to for any obvious reason and even if the lie is so obvious even the biggest morons in our society know it is a lie. Sure, they are qualified to suppress information from other parties.
American elite loved it some Freudian psychology in the 50s - it makes some of the movies of the period near-unwatchable.
Much like, according to my abundant TV watching as a kid, the rest of us apparently loved quicksand!
Quicksand was the more harmless passion.
The repression angle is still strong enough that the publishing industry has produced several *children's books* about Lizzie Borden. For some reason even though it has shock value aplenty for children, they never produce a juvenile book about the bogeyman that haunted the children of my hometown, Dean Corll. They don't like to delve too deeply into these things. They are not serious people.
Arnold & friends: "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation"
The capacity of a nation to misuse resources and to waste time, energy & people seems unlimited. Not enjoyable to be reminded that leaders have an unquenchable desire to probe the limits of futility.
It's worth noting that capitalism has a lot of waste too. It doesn't make it a failure. If anything, quite the opposite. One could reasonably argue the analogy fits here too. It's at least worth considering the possibility with some humility.
The difference being, of course, that in capitalism, losses due to failure accrue only to the people who fail, not to the taxpayers.
That is true in every respect, including one I'm doubting you intended. There are losses from not trying new ways of doing what is already being done.
Fair point. However, I don't think basic government services should be run like a biotech firm - spending great amounts of capital hoping for one huge product out of dozens of failed products. Yet we see government trying "new things" that make zero sense except when viewed with the political lens.
I wasn't thinking of govt expenditures but it applies there too. There is plenty of reason to think broadly applicable incentives to invest in capital and innovation have increased progress. Plenty of failures and some that maybe never should have been tried but new ways like the DARPA challenge certainly have their merits.
I'm thinking of keeping social order and educating children. These are not difficult tasks. But governments in certain American cities have a devil of a time figuring out how to do what works, despite there being centuries of experience showing what methods do work!
I haven't a clue what you think works.
Well in Maryland the officials decided to stop disciplining kids both for bad behavior in school and for breaking the law. What happened is what common sense indicates would happen: School performance declined and kids are getting involved in more crimes, including violent crimes that are putting more kids lives in jeopardy.
Some novel ideas are just bad ideas and hurt people.
It's clearly just a fact that wolves like Donald Trump can bamboozle millions of idiot sheep. That doesn't make it ok to regulate the flow of information though.
This sounds exactly like ... the elite bubble Gurri talks about. When Trump said "lock her up" - he didn't create the desire for actual justice for HR Clinton's crimes, he just expressed what millions of America loving folk wanted. Same with trade with commie-slave state China and the globalization free trade that Kling and most economists like - millions wanted more protectionism, and Trump merely articulated that desire.
Same with the illegals.
Many Christians voted for Trump knowing he cheated on his wives - because he promised to appoint pro-life conservatives to the SC. Which he did, more than Bush or Bush did.
I don't believe Trump bamboozled many voters - but I do believe Dem deep state lies and false info were successful in wrongly demonizing Trump. From his "women allow [the famous] to do anything ... grab them by the pussy", to his bragging about the great economy, it is the Trump haters, sometimes including Kling, who seem to have been gullibly bamboozled by hundreds of lies and half-truths against Trump by thousands of famous elites.
Obama was a wolf - increased racism & crime, staring with Trayvon Martin; lied "You can keep your doctor" to get Obamacare.
Biden is a wolf - stopping US drilling to increase oil prices (prices which Trump's policies reduce); running away from & losing Afghanistan (which Trump wanted to do without losing - and in 4 years didn't find out how to leave and not lose); thus provoking Russian's invasion of Ukraine. That's a clear fact, as was Russian Crimea & Donbas interference & occupation in 2014 under Obama, and Russian occupation of Ossetia (north Georgia) under Bush 43.
No Russian expansion under Trump - who maybe did flatter Putin personally, and seemingly gratuitously, yet in practice effectively.
What facts show Pres. Trump as a wolf? (I'm really interested your specific answer)
The short answer to your question is stop the steal
Wow, Dave.
When I say he's a "wolf" I don't mean he's lying! He genuinely believes 2020 was stolen (and that there were millions of illegal votes for Hillary in 2016)
What an interesting link between authoritarianism and attempting to make a freer culture.
Gurri has been a very interesting writer. The elite bubble Gurri discusses is a symptom and not the disease. For the disease, read his recent Discourse article "The World Before the Thaw: Welcome to the World of Pseudo-ideology": https://www.discoursemagazine.com/ideas/2023/09/12/the-world-before-the-thaw/ . He is seeing and describing the present state of a process which Jacques Barzun described at length in his magisterial "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life."
Crawford is 100% on target by identifying Reich as the true godfather of this movement and to connect it with the attempt to "cure" the so-called Authoritarian Personality.
May also be worth pointing out that the phenomenon of psychiatric casualties was unique to the American side during the second World War. Either you believe that the other belligerents (including the two that did most of the fighting and dying) were just repressing it, that they were unusually psychiatrically resilient, or that psychiatry can only make cognizable claims in certain cultures like America -- the choice is up to the reader.
I know this is peanut gallery behavior to criticize but Crawford should not have cited Adam Curtis for facts that can be found from more reputable sources.
Interesting about the 50s. If it's true, the idea that repressed sexuality leads to fascism, isn't that a better explanation for why incels are so looked down and hated, instead of pitied as if dogs from an SPCA commercial? They are budding fascists.
Of course that doesn't explain why they could be cuddly funny outcasts in the 80s (Revenge of the Nerds etc.) but only now dangerous and not at all worthy of empathy.
Lots of talk on crypto currencies. Guess there's a market here to make money but I for one don't use it as the current money system serves me well. I see myself using othevr forms of currency when I travel or purchase products from places other than USA. The Euro the pound the yen. Why the fuss with crypto? How would it serve me better than what's available now?
Thanks if you can give me practical reasons for using crypto..
You’re hearing more about relationships because the first internet native (me) generation is approaching mid-30s.
Look at a population pyramid, the first echo of the baby boomers are 32-33, approaching do or die time for serious family formation.
Against their own interest - I have heard this often and it seems so incredibly absurd. They know someone else's interest? Really?
On a similar topic, I'm reading McWhorter's book, Woke Racism. I surprised how clunky his arguments are and I don't really like his term, "the Elect" but he has some good insights. (Tim Urban's new book has a wider scope but I think he writes better and I like his term "social justice fundamentalists" better too.) Anyway, he argues books by Coates, DiAngelo, and Kendi are treated something like the Bible but aren't in the best interest of blacks, or anyone else.
Calamities, emergencies, failures and so forth have been part of human history through the ages, so Robertson’s complexity accusation doesn’t hold water IMHO, unless he wants to apply it to all of human history. Could rising complexity coupled with promotion of dunces be blamed as the “core issue” behind the breakdown of America’s systems? I’d concede it could be one factor but not the primary. Pick almost any era of human activity and you’ll find crisis. Try the 18th century – South Sea Company bubble, British credit crisis in 1772, US panic of 1792, etc. One could argue, I suppose, that any period that experiences technical and economic innovation is going to have a hard time figuring out how to maximize those innovations without shooting themselves in the foot. The human track record speaks for itself. Empires rise, empires fall.