Links to Consider

John Psmith on leadership; Scott Alexander on non-profits; Nathan Cofnas on intelligence and ideology; Russ Roberts, pacifism, and the essay grader

John Psmith writes,

The greatest leadership superpower is actually caring about your subordinates. Many leaders pretend to care, but human beings have exquisitely tuned bullshit detectors, especially for people who want something from us, so there’s no substitute for the genuine article. Management books make this mistake all the time, with advice like “try acting like you care,” as opposed to “try actually caring.” This is partly because these books are all cargo cults,¹² partly because actually caring is hard. The people you’re supposed to care about are often disagreeable, unmotivated, selfish, or just plain smelly. The temptation is strong to treat them as tools, or as consumable resources that happen to be human beings. Why am I supposed to care again?

It occurs to me that the easiest way to care about subordinates is to hire people that you like. And that is actually a pretty good rule. But you need a team with diverse talents, so that makes it important for you to like different types of people. And I think that is important, also. As is usual with my links posts, there is much more of interest than just the excerpt.

Scott Alexander writes,

I agree that overall capitalism has produced more good things than charity. But when I try to think at the margin, in Near Mode, I can’t make this argument hang together.

…Compare this to a good charity, like GiveWell’s pick Dispensers For Safe Water. If I understand their claim right, per $1 million they can give 50,000 people clean water for ten years, which would probably save about 1,500 lives.

I get what Scott is saying, but I would not frame it as capitalism vs. charity.

My approach is to compare profit-seeking businesses with non-profits. The main difference is that profit-seeking businesses ultimately are accountable to customers, and non-profits are accountable to donors. I think that the incentives to produce benefits that exceed costs are much better in profit-seeking businesses. The incentive of a profit-seeking business is to solve the customer’s problem. The incentive of the non-profit is to keep the problem on the mind of the donor.

If, like many young people, you think that working for a non-profit is more morally righteous than working for a profit-seeking business, I think you have it backwards. Many non-profits are grifts. Many treat their employees badly, because they can. A profit-seeking business runs into trouble if good employees are unhappy and leave, but the head of a non-profit just has to stay in good graces with the donors, even he runs a dysfunctional organization. In terms of the previous link, an executive in a profit-seeking business has more incentive to care about his or her subordinates.

Next, we can compare donating to a non-profit vs. investing in a profit-seeking business. I’ll admit that old-fashioned charity, which finds needy people and helps them, is pretty compelling. Who would be against safe water dispensers? The only argument against charity is that it creates moral hazard—people who otherwise might go to work might choose instead rely on charity. I do not think that this is a practical concern with private charity, although it is with government handouts.

But old-fashioned charity seems to be a small and shrinking portion of the non-profit sector. If you just threw a dart at the non-profit sector, the chances are you would hit a grift, not a helpful charity. College graduates will donate to their alma mater, and do I have to tell you what happens to that money? I have many friends who work for think tanks, and I respect them, but I would not advise you to donate to think tank.

Nathan Cofnas writes,

To explain the appeal of leftism—which increasingly takes the form of wokism—you have to explain what wokism is. I argue that wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality. Both the mainstream left and right believe that innate cognitive ability and temperament are distributed equally among races

As long as they accept the taboo on recognizing race and sex differences, those on the right—and even anti-woke liberals—are powerless against woke encroachment. There is no way to argue effectively against those who call for drastic measures to equalize group outcomes unless you can say that those outcomes reflect natural differences. Within every institution, the ratchet goes one way: toward more wokism.

…The entire woke system collapses when it is recognized that disparities are due to nature. That’s why the left fights so hard to defend the taboo on hereditarianism. Leftists understand what is at stake: everything.

Pointer from Rob Henderson.

Cofnas concludes,

The priority for right-wing intellectuals should be disseminating accurate information about race and race differences, and devising a new political philosophy that is intellectually and morally appealing to the current left-wing elites.

But earlier he says rashly,

suppose … Harvard and Microsoft and every other prominent institution truly became colorblind. Overnight, blacks would virtually disappear from these places.

That is the sort of statement I find neither intellectually nor morally appealing.

What is the IQ threshold that you must meet in order to handle tasks at Harvard or Microsoft? Suppose it is 130. In that case, using the normal distribution formula, there are tens of thousands of black Americans who meet that threshold. And as I argued recently, the normal distribution formula may be seriously under-estimating the number of blacks with very high IQ’s.

It will be a fine day when we can treat people as individuals, not as members of a race. The social justice warriors are standing in the way of that. But I don’t think that “race realism” is necessary or sufficient to get to the point where we treat people as individuals.

Russ Roberts writes,

What do we say about ourselves if we make no attempt to bring the perpetrators of unspeakable crimes to justice and ignore the agency of those who did evil, treating them no differently than we do an act of nature? If we let cruel people indulge their cruelty, there will be more of it. But more than that, we risk becoming indifferent to cruelty. The very foundations of what it means to distinguish between cruelty and kindness may falter. In such a world, the innocent will pay the price.

He is arguing against the idea that Israel should have adopted a pacifist response to the October 7 pogrom. I thought he very directly addressed the pacifist view, so that this would earn an A. But my essay grader did not agree. It gave the essay an 85, saying in part,

Areas for Improvement:

1. Demonstration of Open-Mindedness: While the essay presents both sides of the argument, it leans heavily towards justifying a military response. Acknowledging potential flaws in this stance or showing more openness to the possibility that the pacifist approach might have merits in certain aspects would enhance the essay’s intellectual humility.

2. Clarity in Argumentation: The transition between the discussion of the biblical story and the modern-day scenario could be clearer. Ensuring that the parallels drawn are directly relevant and easily understandable would strengthen the essay’s coherence.

3. Addressing Counterarguments More Fully: The essay could benefit from a more detailed examination of the potential long-term consequences of a military response, such as the risk of escalating violence or international condemnation, to provide a more balanced view.

I think that the issue that the grader brings up of “international condemnation” is one that the essay needs to address. A pacifist could say that Hamas should be punished, but it should not be Israel’s responsibility to do the punishing. If international law is to mean anything, then Hamas should be punished by the United Nations. By responding militarily, Israel is unilaterally deciding what international law should be.

Personally, I think that the case for leaving it up to the “international community” is weak, and that brings up the problem of anti-Israel sentiment in the world. After all, the United Nations and the “international community” is what provided Hamas with the wherewithal to build its tunnel infrastructure and to use its civilians as human shields. My opinion, which I expressed early on, is that the self-styled “moderates” of the international community are the real war criminals here.

But Russ does not address the version of pacifism that would lean on the international community. And as a result he misses the important point that Israel’s mistreatment at the hands of the UN forces it to kill and die to defend rights that anyone should expect to have.

substacks referenced above:

@

Should a nation turn the other cheek?

@

Evolve Move Play, Sociopaths, Romantic Affairs

@

Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem

@

Does Capitalism Beat Charity?

@

REVIEW: Scaling People, by Claire Hughes Johnson