Links to Consider
Martin Gurri on our current problems; Katherine Boyle on same; Robin Hanson on stubbornness; Lorenzo Warby on how societies thrive and decay
American passivity on the world stage has yielded predictable consequences. As the U.S. has tiptoed away from crises—in post-invasion Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Crimea, North Korea, the eastern Mediterranean, the South China Sea—tyrannical regimes hostile to our interests, under the flag of disorder and misrule, have inexorably advanced.
I should note that Peter Zeihan predicted as much, but he thought that the United States itself would do fine. That is not how Gurri sees it.
while the Democratic Party has split over the war in Gaza, it can be expected, in the fullness of time, to resume a worshipful attitude toward designated victim groups. Progressive Democrats, after all, are the bishops and cardinals of the church of identity. The Republican Party, on the other hand, is really a two-word label posing as a serious organization.
But he tries to sound a hopeful note:
A solid majority of Americans strongly supports Israel and feels comfortable using the word terrorist when applied to Hamas. And the course correction the country so desperately needs, if it is to happen, will be propelled not by our corrupt elites or by our broken institutions but by an impatient public. The incipient barbarism of the identitarians has been revealed to anyone with eyes to see. With luck, the tide of history may soon be ebbing from this destructive ideology.
It does seem that the American people (except for the young ones) are better informed than the New York Times, wiser than Harvard, and stronger than our political leaders.
You win a war against America when many in our media and universities seem more aligned with the propaganda of Hamas than the interests of this country. When we forget about hostages because the news cycle thundered to some other Current Thing. You win a war against America when the debate is no longer about security versus privacy but our modern and more dangerous debate of security versus grievance.
…America is order—the order we want, the order our allies want. And we shouldn’t be afraid to say that.
…Dynamism is life. And we embrace dynamism and the values upon which the country was founded because they are true and worth defending. Dynamism makes America the country people want to be from, to immigrate to, and to build a life, career, or company in.
how can it be a valid inference for members of each culture to hold their culture’s differing estimates of moral truth, especially when they are aware of the very different estimates of other cultures?
…while Bayesians should draw the same conclusions regardless of what order they learn their evidence, in fact the further evidence that we learn later in life about the different views of other cultures are not typically capable of moving us back to a culturally-neutral position of great uncertainty on moral truths. That earlier evidence in fact counted for a lot more for our final views.
This post strikes me as a shorter, less technical version of a paper Robin once wrote with Tyler Cowen arguing that disagreement is rational dishonest. If your information set includes my opinions, and my information set includes yours, then we should converge on the same set of beliefs.
The new post by Robin suggests the answer. Suppose that my opinions are mostly a weighted average of the opinions of my reference group. The weights I put on my reference group are higher than the weights I put on your reference group. So even though I am aware of your opinions, I do not give them much weight. That keeps me from being Bayesian, and it keeps our opinions from converging.
unlike rural existence—which seeks to wrest resources and survive in a potentially hostile natural environment—cities tend to be dominated by interactions with other humans in human-created environments. They make human choices more dominant.
Warby says that you get more innovation in an urban environment, but people in cities can lose touch with reality.
they produce structures whose connection to wider reality is either inhibited or broken, so that internal feedback structures come to domina
te. This effect is increased when bureaucratisation increases the number of people who do not bear the costs of their decisions.
He argues that feedback mechanisms have lost force in recent years, allowing bad ideas to flourish. Also, selection mechanisms have been gamed.
the standard way meritocracy decays: selecting for capacity (intelligence and executive function) but not for character. Over time, more-and-more manipulative personalities are selected for, undermining norm-coherence, and making institutions and organisations less pro-social in their operation
I think that in recent decades this has happened in academia, journalism, and media in general. Some of the worst people get ahead, and some of the best people get sidelined.
Overall, this is one of his longer and better essays.
substacks referenced above:
@
@
@
Thanks for the links. Warby’s in particular hits home for me as I see now, more than ever, there is a pervasive, unhappy disconnect from nature, especially in urban settings. Children are more familiar with fictional characters than wildlife species. Even on a farm there is more nearness to nature. I always liked Edward Abbey, especially Desert Solitaire - “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”
With reference to Gurri and, to a lesser extent Boyle, the key difference between the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel is that Ukraine never had a chance of prevailing in a military conflict with Russia regardless of the military aid provided by the US and NATO, whereas Israel's military goals (specifically, the elimination of Hamas) are feasible, but the Biden Administration (with the support of its European allies) is creating obstacles to Israeli victory. As critics of US foreign policy in the Ukraine war have argued, that policy appears to have been based on the premise that sanctions, in combination with military aid, would be sufficient to weaken Russia and engineer 'regime change,' but that premise proved to be erroneous. Indeed, I largely agree with critics who argue that the Biden administration made little effort to stop the Ukraine war, and it intervened to prevent a negotiated settlement in early 2022, because policymakers welcomed the opportunity to deal a 'knockout blow' to Russia by imposing sanctions and providing military aid to Ukraine. So much for that theory. If there is any linkage between the wars in Ukraine and Israel, it is the one identified by a blogger I won't name (someone who is extremely uncharitable to those with whom they disagree) -- namely, by engineering an unwinnable proxy war in Ukraine and failing to knock out Russia (and perhaps creating the impression that we had run out of ammo to supply our Allies), the Administration may have inadvertently encouraged Hamas in the belief that it was a propitious time to launch an attack on Israel.