Ironically, I agree with the big picture of this article (frustration with people who have certainty in the face of big complicated questions and offer simplistic assessments), but I think this piece over-simplifies the actual situation (hah!). Perhaps I am also falling into the trap described, and if so I would appreciate a reality check.
There seems to be a continuum that starts at "simple an has worked". You could identify 3 points on that continuum:
1. Ones which really have no known situation, such as homelessness.
2. Ones which have arisen because of the current focus on oppressor/oppressed. Trans rights and Isreal / Palestine fall into this category. A coherent position is that the solution is simple yet would reduce the power of the oppressed groups, and that tradeoff seems like an extremely easy one to take. For Trans, I think the conservative position is "how it was in 2014", which is simple and constrained, or "Stop aid to Palestine, and stop pressuring Israel to go easy on them".
3. Ones where the direction of development seems clear but I have not seen anyone espose anything like a complete vision. On Education I think a reasonable position which would nonetheless be "unconstrained" is that the currently-mandated 12 years + university as generalist education for all is a good fit for elites and a poor fit for a majority of the population. I think a typical conservative position is that reducing government intervention in education and increasing the prevalence of teaching kids specific things (e.g. trades) would be a big improvement in their lives and improve overall productivity in society.
I think the problem of mapping points to this continuum is not a simple one. And welcome a check on this reality-check :)
1. "No known solution" is accurate. Though it does not mean current best practices do not exist (see for example Rosanne Haggerty) or that we should repeat solutions that have been known not to work or worst of all, simply give up and accept it as a fact of life.
2. Situate this thought in 1965. Why all this fuss about Civil Rights, whats wrong with 1955? And then in 1955, whats wrong with 1945.
3. The idea of "luxury beliefs" is common in these parts. I've had a hard time believing any of it matters much, but the opinion stated here may be the ultimate luxury belief. College education for me (and my children) but not for thee. I need a college degree (a PhD even!) to pontificate on naive realism. You learn some useful trade so I have someone to call if my plumbing needs fixing.
2. This argument proves too much, since it could justify any policy at all. If I say "Civil rights was a good idea" does that give a pass to anything the Left wants to do? I think a better lens to think about it is that "equality of an individual's rights under the law" is a worthy endeavour that most people in today's age would get behind. Trans rights / pronouns is not that, since they already had equality under the law.
3. That is quite a strawman. I never suggested someone should not be able to get a college degree. High school and college would remain as available as they are today. The thing which would change is that students would have additional options for their life, if they choose it. Do you know truancy rates for inner city high schools? Turning them into criminals to maintain the illusion of helping them get their PhD makes you feel better but their lives worse. Lots of people have great lives and make a lot of money without being great students, and I think the current society does not allow that to be presented as an option. That luxury belief causes policy changes which keep kids in classes which are useless to their future.
Your framing of position 3 is an example of why policy based solutions fail -- "No one should have to live in an apartment less than 1000 sq ft!" => Apartment rents rise, hurting the people you intended to help.
2 & 3 were merely to illustrate that the "conservative position" as articulated is "naive realism" too.
For 3 in particular, just like "school and college would remain as available as they are today", I'd say no one is forcing you or anyone to get a higher education. Indeed lots of people have great lives and make a lot of money without being great students. This shows the existence of additional options!
I'll try again: Higher education is within the average human's reach. If a monkey like me can get a college degree, so can any one else. Yes, no matter how hard I try I'm not going to come up with a proof of the Riemann hypothesis. But logic, rhetoric, and grammar? Basics of rigorous thinking? The liberal arts are for all of mankind -- not for use in a profession or to make money. As C.S. Lewis said it is to transform us from “unregenerate little bundle of appetites” to “the good man and the good citizen”.
I'm talking about the law that says "You must attend high school". Kids are not permitted to do anything else with their lives until they are 18 by law. Don't people talk about how we need more e.g. welders in the country? It seems like a clear relationship between the legality of pursuing a trade like that in your high school years vs sitting in a classroom reading old books. (Or in most cases, not reading them).
You are listing reasons that you find college interesting. That's great, you would probably enjoy and benefit from it. But do you think that everyone shares your views? People have different preferences, which are also valid, and some of those include not having to wait until the age of 22 to get on with life, without paying a heavy price in the labor markets. Do you really think that the humanities majors learn more at college than in the workplace? I'm a STEM major and I certainly learned more on the job than at college, despite having a positive college experience.
I'm entirely advocating for the removal of distorting policies. I don't think it is net beneficial to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to help mediocre students get humanities degrees. If they want to do that themselves, they are very much welcome to do so.
Ah, I naively (!) understood the "12 years + university" to mean its the University bit you were arguing against.
So the argument is against compulsory high school? primary school? any literacy at all? I suppose we should never consider anything truly settled, and it is good to revisit the arguments from time to time.
"Fearful that too many parents and masters were neglecting their child-rearing responsibilities, the Puritan elders on June 14, 1642, passed what might be viewed as the first compulsory education law in American history, transforming a moral obligation into a legal one. "Taking into consideration the great neglect of many parents and masters in training up their children in learning and labor," the General Court appointed selectmen to "take account from time to time of all parents and masters, and of their
children, concerning their calling and employment of their children, especially of their ability to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of this country." Thus, the law of 1642 established a group of educational supervisors, the selectmen, charged with the task of judging parental neglect in child rearing and reporting these offenses to the court. Moreover, it established minimal standards by which parents and masters could be judged in their educational responsibilities"
From "A History of Compulsory Education Laws" by Michael S Katz.
And over time, the focus shifted to non-sectarian schooling.
To me it rings true in all ages, in all civilizations, but YMMV!
Although you quote something from 1642, I believe mandatory high school is not nearly that old a practice.
It is a coherent position to think that requiring elementary school (reading, writing, arithmetic) is good because the skills learnt apply to everyone's life, but not high school (old english lit, foreign language, geometry & algebra). Again, I am not saying that high school is bad, just that it does not align with everyone's life plans and should not be mandated by the state. I believe a majority of children would continue to attend, to their benefit.
For an in-depth exploration of the topic I would recommend Caplan's "The case against education".
Yes. The classical liberal position is: live your life however you choose as long as you don’t hurt others and as long as you don’t force others to affirm, celebrate, or pay for your choice.
I share your dislike of the term "sexualizing young children" or "groomers". Mainstream Democrats are just confused by them. And I certainly agree that the majority of Dems that support their party policies don't like that idea any more than conservatives.
In defense of the term -- if the Left fights vigorously to put books describing anal sex, BDSM, and other fetishes into schools and invites children to question their gender & adopt pronouns, and the outcome is that nearly half of children identify as non cis/straight, then it's clearly moving the needle on something about sex and children.
The left would say it's just education and avoiding children to grow up into cis/straight-biased adults, but that seems like a flimsy excuse for the amount of intervention and the objective levels of discrimination seen in the real world, which were already so low that it's arguable about whether this should be seen as a top problem that requires vigorous intervention to solve.
Don't forget having these sexuality based clubs and whatnot and explicitly not telling parents about it. The fact that all these things are done in a manner so as to keep them secret from the children's parents is a huge problem, and a huge red flag. Generally we tell children "If anyone asks you to keep a secret from mommy and daddy, don't trust them and tell mommy and daddy immediately." There's a good reason for that.
The claimed reason for this, at least, is that a significant % of kids have abusive, bigoted ultraconservative parents who would beat them, disown them, drive them to suicide, etc if they knew their child was LGBT. Maybe you've seen evidence that that's not the real reason, but I haven't.
This also may not be sufficient reason to overcome the strong general presumption to trust parents and be honest with them-- as you say, we have good larger reasons for that presumption. But abusive bigoted parents are a real problem, as are abusive parents generally.
"a significant % of kids have abusive, bigoted ultraconservative parents who would beat them, disown them, drive them to suicide, etc if they knew their child was LGBT. Maybe you've seen evidence that that's not the real reason, but I haven't."
I have seen zero evidence that this is actually a significant problem as compared to sexual predators who tell their victims "Don't tell your parents our little secret." If you are trying to guess who is a greater danger to a child, there should be an extremely strong presumption on "Stranger who wants to talk about sex with minors without telling their parents" and not "the parents".
Especially considering the fact that if the teachers thought there was any danger to the kid at home they would be calling child protective services, not just talking the kids about sexuality without telling the parents and leaving everything else as is. The claim that they think the parents are abusive and that is why they have all the secrecy but do nothing else to protect the kid is ridiculous on its face.
Another risk of abuse is people abusing the legitimacy of rare exceptions to swallow the rule by declaring almost all claims for secrecy to be such exceptions. We actually have some good systems to determine whether some particular case falls within a narrow exception for extreme circumstances, but the trouble is that the advocates of teacher-child secrecy want to just bypass that whole legal system.
For the sake of argument let's say there should be exceptions in extreme cases. The question is always, "Who decides?"
The teenager should not decide. If they want to have secret conversations with somebody without making a federal case out of it, then don't do it with public school teachers, there are plenty of other options out there.
Some random public school teacher should also not decide. How would he or she do so? On pure personal opinion based on on a teenager's unsworn say-so? This is actually happening in many areas, and rightfully provokes a great deal of outrage when parents discover this is being done not just behind their backs, but in a loose and informal manner.
Is every teacher going to be trained and as-needed deputized as a competent administrative judge of such difficult legal questions? Do they get to make these decisions without keeping records of conversations and articulating explanations and evidence reviewed by district lawyers explaining why as a public employee they have the authority to keep very important matters and interactions secret from a child's parents?
At the very least you would want an investigation, collection of evidence in addition to the minor's mere assertion, regular standards for how to make decisions about whether there is a high likelihood of abuse based on that evidence, neutral and disinterested decision-makers experienced in applying those standards, a written opinion laying out the rationale, and after masking of personal information, release to the public so that the public can be informed about what is going on and how decisions are made, and the opening up of all parties involved in the process to personal liability to the parents should they seriously err and infringe on core parental rights without adequate cause.
Point is, when there is real danger or threat, there are established and reviewable legal mechanisms whereby child protective services officials, school officials, medical personnel, the police, and judges can in rare and extreme cases keep certain proceedings and activities secret from exceptionally bad parents of guardians. These systems should not be circumvented just because some child claims, "My folks will freak out". That's not good enough.
Nah, it’s all just an outgrowth of the sexual revolution, that is to say - feminism. It began with the sex ed we had a semester of in high school, taught by a coach, which we kids treated, rightly, as an utter joke.
That class, if it had a justification by the administrators, who would have been more Silent generation than Boomer, was to try to get us not to get pregnant or for the boys to not make us pregnant.
Pregnancy = bad was the shifting of the earth there, though we’d not yet understood how fundamental that was.
Needless to say, though actually in truth I can’t remember if this was like 8th or 9th grade (high school? or middle?) there was none of the, uh, education in sex (from Coach Tedder!) that is the norm now! That is to say, all this instruction in the ways of porn and so on.
There are no good intentions here; this is a crack in the foundations, which has been exploited, iteratively, until we are where we are now, epater la bourgeoisie with the bonus pleasure of forcing the bourgeoisie to pretend it is not that epater-ed by all this.
You make a valid point but that leaves the question of the approach taken. Is the goal to work toward informing as many parents as possible about the group(s) existence and the child telling them about their sexuality or is there a presumption it is easier to keep it all a secret? I suspect there is some of both but the issue is when secrecy is the default with no process for how or when to inform parents.
I am saying there are some parents who want their children exposed to sexual deviancy in grade school. Probably not a large fraction of parents, but certainly some. However, my main point is the people driving these policies, teachers, government apparatchiks, and special interest groups definitely make up a large fraction of their professions, and definitely want children sexualized. It is impossible to explain the explosion of self-identifying transgenders in school-age children by any other means- the children are being brainwashed by the system educating them, and the people doing it are reveling in it- they even brag about it openly these days.
I agree with you but maybe it needs clarified why they revel in it. I believe it is because they think the kids are finding their "true" identity. While I think that is probably true in some cases, I would agree with you that more often than not, the kid is worse for being exposed to something they aren't mature enough to understand about themselves.
I completely agree with this analysis, but I think the Elephant in the Brain -- Robin Hanson's term -- is that many people _aren't_ professing these beliefs because they believe in the unconstrained vision, but because they are pushing it even though they don't believe it. They're in it for some other reason. And sometimes there _is_ or _might be_ a simple solution to a problem, but the people who won't look at it have some other sort of agenda.
For instance -- about 50 years ago, my grandmother read -- I believe in that in that esteemed medical journal *Readers Digest* -- that lack of vitamin D contributed to both your likelihood of catching a respiratory infection in the winter and how severe it would be if you caught it. She bought supplements, took them, and had me promise to take them too. But, when I went away to university I thought that this was one of those promises I could let lapse.
My peer group thought that people who popped vitamins and supplements were irrational -- neurotic hypochondriacs. Any benefit would come from the placebo effect. So, in part because I didn't want to come across as irrational, and in part because I wanted to save on the expense, I stopped taking them. That winter I came down with a terrible cold. "Co-incidence!" I thought loudly to myself. Next winter, I caught bronchitis that kept me in bed for a week. I went back to taking vitamin D, and winter colds went back to being mild things. This still could be a co-incidence. Or the placebo effect. But I know what trade-off I want to make. :)
But when covid came around, many people thought that I should *stop* taking the vitamin D. Otherwise people might confuse me with those low-status uneducated people who were suddenly becoming vitamin-D advocates. I thought that the hospitals around here should see if the people who were being hospitalised for severe covid were also low in vitamin D. Learning that there was no relationship would advance knowledge a lot. Finding one would be grounds for more study. I also thought that people in nursing homes should be part of randomised trials. Half of them get vitamin D supplements and Half of them get placebo. Surely some of the nursing homes will be stricken with covid in the future. When this happened we would see if it had any effect.
But the pushback on that idea astonished me. So many, many, many people didn't want to find out that there was a simple way to prevent severe covid that didn't involve the planned vaccines, which we didn't have. Even if people were dying now. I managed to get several of them on record. *Even if it were the case that vitamin D supplements lowered the risk of severe covid a whole lot, they didn't want people taking them because if they worked, the future demand for the vaccines would dry up*. It's really hard for me to not think of these people as evil. But I was the one that got castigated for 'naive realism'. 'If something as simple as vitamin-D worked, we would already be doing it' they said. And remember, I wasn't arguing that it worked, only that we had a chance to find out, and should use it.
Vitamin D has been said to be the bane of the Pharmaceutical industry. I suspect they are glad to support research rigged to show it is ineffective. However, there was one study during Covid of some 87,000 hospital admittees (all tested postive). Among those with Vitamin D blood levels 55 ng/ml, zero mortality. A little bit more at each 5 level down, and most mortality was found in those down at 20.
First thing to mention is that even without looking at the data, it's at least facially plausible Vitamin D could help with something like covid. There is quite a long history of use of "Vitamin D" to cure not just rickets* but to boost immune response to both viral and bacterial respiratory infectious diseases severely affecting the pulmonary system, with some early successes against Tuberculosis before the American Civil War, well before the arrival of antibiotics.
Chemical techniques at the time were not yet sufficiently sophisticated to isolate and identify the particular compounds involved (that was about 100 years ago), but the mid 19th Century scientists were were still able to tease out some of the big picture relationships in terms of it having something to do with cholesterol and exposure to sunlight (and not much later, specially to the ultraviolet component of that light) and of it being concentrated in certain fish oils, despite the fact that fish apparently don't make it themselves and must get it from things they eat.
Unfortunately it is not easy to evaluate the various claims about this class of substances because the underlying mechanisms are quite complicated with many interactions that are a challenge to disentangle. (See, e.g., https://www.wikipathways.org/pathways/WP1531.html)
While "vitamin" is a legacy term with no technically precise meaning, in truth the "Vitamin D" compounds are more like hormones (which turn our to modulate the whole endocrine system in a number of ways) and which can fall below healthy levels for various reasons but which deficiency can sometimes be conveniently cured by oral ingestion. Melatonin is another example. As hormones that regulate the increase or decrease in production of numerous other impactful substances, both in human cells and apparently also in some organisms with which the human is infected, the attempts to figure out how well supplements might work for which people and which illnesses are fraught with difficulties.
*One hundred years ago in Wisconsin, Harry Steenbock figured out that by merely shining UV on certain foods some cholesterol compounds would get converted to Vitamin D, in a way that could cure rickets in rodents. He spent his own money to patent it and in just two decades that technique eliminated rickets in the US, so that now, 80 years later, few even know the name of that disease anymore.
I no longer have that specific reference, however, you can find many studies showing the link between Vitamin D deficiency and bad Covid outcomes by doing a search using key words Covid and Vitamin D. (I used the Brave browser search feature.)
I'm aware of no conclusive evidence for or against most vitamin supplements but some deficiencies are very real. Sailors routinely suffered scurvy from Vitamin C deficiency. Even the worst Western diets typically avoid this, even if there are unproven benefits to higher levels of Vit C. Vitamin D deficiency (especially in the winter when sunlight is insufficient) is very real and very easy to measure with a simple blood test. There are proven negative symptoms. Anyone saying vitamin D supplements aren't needed (absent blood tests showing it isn't) is simply wrong. Period. I'm not aware any studies proving vitamin D deficiency leads to colds, bronchitis, or Covid (or not) but that is entirely irrelevant to the need for vit D supplementation.
Scott Alexander had an essay a few years back about how irrational or highly questionable beliefs actually work better than rational ones for building a group or coalition. Hardly anybody reasons their way to such beliefs, so professing them essentially function as a loyalty oath, and helps to divide ingroup members from outgroup members.
I had a similar thought the other day when I saw something Kari Lake said, that was not, let’s say, very nuanced or thoughtful…
The thought was that a significant part of our politics today isn’t about proposing solutions, using logic, etc. but rather is about announcing, in the most dramatic unambiguous way possible, what side you’re on. The more it stands out as making any sense or being decent or reasonable, the better at signaling, apparently.
It’s weird to me and I wouldn’t have thought it was a thing, but I can’t understand in any other way why so many people say things that stand up to approximately zero scrutiny or thought.
I don’t mean to pick exclusively on the MAGA right, either: take “the gender binary is a socially constructed myth.” I mean, no. That doesn’t stand up to 15 seconds of thought if you have a very basic understanding of animal and plant evolution over the past billion years… and yet books will be published and fawningly reviewed in left-leaning news outlets.
But, again, the only way I can make sense of all of this is that people say things because they signal certain things about who the speaker is, rather than providing some actual information or facts or thought about the real world.
We ought to have a general term for beliefs that someone chooses to exempt from any use of his faculty of critical thinking, for no better reason than that he really wants to believe them. All sincere religious beliefs fit this description, but so do things like trust in certain people to be "experts" or to have your best interest at heart. The term I propose is "willful blind spots." They do not always deserve to be shunned, but they should all be reexamined from time to time.
Kind or ironic you would use that example, given Kling's post is on naïve realism.
Other than a tiny percentage of intersex individuals, sexuality is certain. Gender is not the same as the sex of an individual. Gender is not only influenced by other factors such as hormones, it also includes social constructs.
I somewhat randomly picked this explanation from a google search. I'm not saying it's perfect but a quick skim suggests it's a fairly reasonable explanation.
Given that the word gender was not used that way until approximately the early 60s - and not because of any advance in the hard sciences - I’m not sure how germane any of that is. And when it was so used, it was in the hands of those same kind of folks who told us sex was invented in 1964 or whatever … yeah, I’ll take the previous dunno, thousands of millennia.
Where it came from is an entirely different issue.
I'm much more concerned by how words such as racist, systemic racism, and white supremacist have very different meanings depending on who you talk with and there are no alternatives with more clear meaning.
I wasn't sure what your point was and I wasn't sure whether I was agreeing or disagreeing with your view. I was just pointing out that there are two sexes but gender isn't define as the same thing and there don't have to be two and only two. Being sure there are just two genders is naïve realism.
I believe there is something deeper at work in naïve realism in addition to the factors mentioned. In a post-religious age, we seek consolation in the hope that there could easily be a collective rational management of human affairs that would ward off tragedy and contingency from our lives. British philosopher John Gray wrote about this years ago in his Enlightenment's Wake.
One political advantage to the aspect of "naive realism" that tends to dismiss the possibility of important trade-offs is that trade-offs can show some activity to be zero-sum or negative-sum and even openly discussing them will tend to marshal the forces of a constituency alerted to their pending harm to oppose your efforts. It really helps to slip past these trenches by fooling at least some of these people and insisting big changes can be accomplished with little cost or harm to their existing interests.
Every day I wake up to people not taking seriously enough the consideration that the evolutionary / game-theoretic equilibrium involves harming other people as much as possible, so long as one can avoid being perceived as intentionally harming them.
My "naive realism" is that everything is a trade off and we should try to center our political disagreements on the parameters of the trade off function. To _ME_ that is the obvious solution and people who disagree just flunked econ 101! :)
"if you dare to disagree with a commonly-held simplistic belief about the solution to a complex social problem...you will be regarded as evil."
The need for 'social justice' is a case in point. "It has become (for everyone other than intellectual contrarians) a 21st c. article of faith; existing on a rarefied plane beyond the scope of political/philosophical interrogation. Disrespecting it is blasphemy...as in “So you don’t care about injustice then?!” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/love-of-the-people
While I understand Mr Sowell's origination of the phrase, it might be useful to recognize that the 'unconstrained' often simply want to constrain different things.
Take health care funding for an example. Those of us with constrained vision recognize many of the problems with access to health care. Our proposals for changes, however, are bounded by the realization that there is some limit to the amount of care that can be provided overall as well as other constraints such as the fact that we can't make health care providers work for free nor expect medical developments to occur without the developers getting remuneration. You can make health care delivery more efficient, and provide people with limited means access to some kind of health care but you are never going to provide everyone with every bit of care they may want.
The 'unconstrained' view is often that we have plenty of health care resources to provide everyone with care but the problem is the wrong people aren't constrained from using 'more than they need', and if we'd just punish the hoarders and wreckers then everything would be resolved.
Throughout most of history, people weren’t trying to solve as big of problems as we are now. So, simple solutions to problems like “how are we going to stave off starvation” often worked. Nobody was even attempting to solve problems like “how can we provide healthcare to everyone”.
#1 What is the *social* problem to which "go green" is the answer? What does "go green" mean here, to you or to whomever you are referencing?
#2 The simple-solution seekers. I think some people - maybe especially, women? - really do feel a genuine tug of the heart, which has in it no room for judgment or rationality, about an amorphous mass of people they will never know or interact with. In fact, some of them feel it so strongly they go out of their way *to* interact with members of those groups. My women friends spout no leftist nonsense and are by no means clueless but must believe, in order to attempt the Christian interventions and activities they do, that social problems are amenable to simple solutions *even as their private efforts make no difference at all* except in some Middlemarch way ("life was not so bad for you or for me or for total random stranger" due to such as she).
They *must* act. It is their nature. They are active people; others who feel similar concerns and do not act may simply be more lazy - not more realistic.
I can see this tendency clearly as I am a sort of failed woman in this regard. Not wholly: I cannot read a news story about the abuse or worse of a little child, particularly accompanied by a picture of the small vulnerable creature, without a rending of the heart.
But I can read about - and necessarily see with my own eyes - any number of social problems you mention - such as the homeless, or drug abusers - without caring one whit. I am not: caring-but-lazy. This is true indifference, but also a sort of feeling that - who speaks for the commons? Who speaks for the civic fabric? (Who speaks for aesthetics!) Doesn't anybody remember it didn't used to be this way? I guess in this scenario, I place myself in the role of the little vulnerable child, psychologically, and say, what the hell have you done to my world? And maybe a little bit of - if you really cared, you would do some harder thing than you are all doing/saying, that may not look like caring ...
A curious instance: once after a long drive to the shore, we had no sooner set out umbrella and towels, than somebody, not the parent, walked by on the crowded beach and asked, have you seen a little girl of such or other description, her family can't find her, some notion telegraphed that she might be mentally challenged. Everyone else about seemed to be able to answer in the negative and go on with their leisure - but after a minute of trying to do so, I found I could not. So I set off to look for an unattended little girl. I felt a pang for a mother, being next to the great ocean, with a child missing.
I did find the child, who appeared non-verbal and unfavored by nature, in the parking lot behind the sand, and walked her the quarter mile to the park headquarters, having no other notion of where to take her. They did not say, oh good, you found the lost child, but rather wanted to take down my name, as if I had spirited her away myself. I declined lol.
I have thought of that in connection with my inability to care about the mass of humanity. I am utterly wedded to the particular - and even that is extremely intermittent. I had no sooner dropped her off than I thought, uuugh: people.
In a way, understanding that this is a failure of empathy on my part, it makes me think you should not be so quick to dismiss the motives of those mindless bleeding hearts. I think there may be something fundamental and good there - only it's gotten distorted by ideology, as have so many things.
Another factor in what you're describing I think is that people tend to be naive realists about issues they care most about. Like I don't care very much about Israel and Palestine, and this is part of why I can sit back and view the problem as having no good option aside from politically infeasible ones. Whereas those who are strongly cheering for Palestine want global intifada and those cheering for Israel backed a war with no endgame.
So when people look at someone who isn't a naive realist, and say that person doesn't care so passionately, a lot of the time they're not wrong. It's a tragic truth.
An ancillary problem (or maybe this is the causal MoA) is that the more one cares about an issue, the more likely one is to be emotional about it, so that rational thought about solutions is blocked by lower-circuit beliefs (religious attachment or group identification).
If you say a problem is complex, this suggests that solving it may prove difficult, if not insurmountable. Perhaps the problem cannot be ever solved. In the case of the frustrated, perhaps it’s a lack of cognitive complexity, a black-and-white view of the world, where they believe their perspective is the only correct one, coming from self-imposed, limited exposure to diverse viewpoints or an inability (or unwillingness) to consider alternative perspectives. Or, even more fundamentally, their frustration is simply a lack of immaturity having grown up in a world where they always get their way and when they don’t get their ice cream, lay on the floor kicking and crying.
Just because something has a tradeoff doesn't mean it doesn't have a simple solution.
Let's take something I think everyone in this comment section probably supports, school vouchers. There are tradeoffs to school vouchers. Some parents will through ignorance or malice not give their children as good an education as they would have gotten in public schools. You can find examples publicized in the Florida press about this or that parent that "wasted" their school voucher. And of course many will claim that parents are indoctrinating their children (with religious education or whatever) that is harmful to the children.
Let's grant all that is a true tradeoff, who cares? I think everyone in this comments section more or less thinks the benefits are a complete slam dunk over the costs and it's not even close. Most would really like their states to adopt what Florida has adopted.
When we come up with reasons why not, we can't come up with any good ones. You basically get status quo bias, partisanship, and the teachers union. That's it.
Channeling Rufo, if you want to get things done at a certain point you need to stop hemming and hawing about complexity and tradeoffs and just get something done.
I strongly support school vouchers, but as someone who has several friends who strongly oppose them, let me try to steelman the case against.
The voucher opponents I know would argue/have argued that:
1. Vouchers will increase school segregation and inequality, because the ability of poor parents to use them to get their kids out of bad public schools will be outweighed by the middle and upper classes, whose kids would have done fine in the local public schools, using them to pay for private schools which get their kids away from "undesirables".
2. Voucher availability will particularly disadvantage kids with special educational needs, because the vast majority of private schools will turn them away, and the few that won't will be harder for parents of those kids to find and stick with, compared with the current situation where all public schools must educate all comers.
3. Having education be dominated by a government-run public school system which (at least in theory!) provides an egalitarian education to all kids is a social good in itself, and vouchers undermine the provision of that social good, which is bad.
Much of this is about different values: voucher opponents tend to place a higher value than supporters on equality vs excellence. That is a value difference where people on both sides tend to demonize each other and have pretty poor theory of mind about those on the other side. But (2) for example is a real tradeoff, though in theory at least it could be mitigated by e.g. giving more voucher money to special-needs kids.
Freddie deBoer would also probably argue that vouchers won't make any difference to outcomes because ~nothing does, it's all selection bias-- he is also someone who values equality more than most, but from a different empirical worldview.
1) Segregation transfers from schools to zip codes. People drive up real estate and become NIMBYs to protect not just their property but their school district, which is now de facto their property. I could easily make the case that a lot of our real estate problems are exacerbated by tying property and schooling together.
And no, school busing tried to get around this and failed.
2) You've already addressed this.
3) Equality is much easier to achieve by dragging down then lifting up, and that seems to be mostly what public schools accomplish. "Done fine" is a good summation of this.
I think that the focus on "outcomes" is a huge part of the problem here. When we sent our kid to a private school we didn't expect it to shift her "outcomes" at all. We just saw that she was a lot happier. They spent more time outside. The teachers were more flexible and communicative. There were no screens or phones. None of this cost money, they spent 1/2 what my local school district spends per kid, but they are a business and care.
I've never gotten the impression any of the people at my local public school care, and it's a blue ribbon rich exurb school. And my kid clearly is a lot less happy there now that her old school had to move (something they wouldn't have had to do if they had Florida school vouchers).
Let me give you a microcosm of the issue. The school doesn't want anyone below 3rd grade playing on the playground structure during recess (which is a measly 30 min). Apparently for "safety". But I've been taking my kids to play on that playground since before they were in kindergarten. Meanwhile, her private school would let her take hikes in the woods, climb trees, wade through shallow creeks.
A lot is lost in public schools that doesn't relate to "outcomes" at all. It's got nothing to do with selection or equality or anything. It's just a question of private human beings with human will versus "the machine."
All of the discussions of school choice (and many about quality of public schools as well) seem to end up foundering on the issue of special-needs kids. This is not something I have really given any thought to, but maybe we just need to have separate public schools for special-needs kids and stop trying to keep them together with everybody else.
“Special needs” commands an outsized amount of school budgets, compared to any benefit that will be netted from it. So if disadvantaging it means a correction in that regard - that’s no argument against. One can see that charter schools for special needs kids (truly special needs) will surely spring up if there’s money to be made. And that may more closely approximate a rational approach to their care.
I don’t support vouchers because I don’t see that it changes the raw materials at all, demand or supply side.
It will be another failed educational fix - in the dustbin like open concept (which I actually think I would have liked! - based upon my twin cousin’s description, 45 years ago; especially if it had been outdoors) - and only delay the collapse of the whole edifice.
Which is not to say this won’t be throwing away something that was good, pretty good, once better anyway.
I was too late for that better time, but my mother and my mother-in-law both speak of high school as a fun, generally happy period. Neither needed what further education they got, beyond it.
So I would judge from their capabilities, which are *very* high in the case of the latter, that that is not only enough for most but probably more than is now needed.
Let it be optional after say 15, if we must continue with the same setup and centralization.
My father has never spoken of high school, but he was inclined to get in trouble and to rebel and yet sailed through. My father-in-law is the only one who attended fancy pants East Coast prep school; that too, he now realizes, was excellent - was almost out of another age in its rigor.
I suggest a modest first step: Expel disruptive students, but don't criminalize their failure to attend school after that. Let them go to work in the nearest gas station or Burger King. If they come back next year with changes of attitude, let them reenroll.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -H.L. Mencken
Exactly.
Ironically, I agree with the big picture of this article (frustration with people who have certainty in the face of big complicated questions and offer simplistic assessments), but I think this piece over-simplifies the actual situation (hah!). Perhaps I am also falling into the trap described, and if so I would appreciate a reality check.
There seems to be a continuum that starts at "simple an has worked". You could identify 3 points on that continuum:
1. Ones which really have no known situation, such as homelessness.
2. Ones which have arisen because of the current focus on oppressor/oppressed. Trans rights and Isreal / Palestine fall into this category. A coherent position is that the solution is simple yet would reduce the power of the oppressed groups, and that tradeoff seems like an extremely easy one to take. For Trans, I think the conservative position is "how it was in 2014", which is simple and constrained, or "Stop aid to Palestine, and stop pressuring Israel to go easy on them".
3. Ones where the direction of development seems clear but I have not seen anyone espose anything like a complete vision. On Education I think a reasonable position which would nonetheless be "unconstrained" is that the currently-mandated 12 years + university as generalist education for all is a good fit for elites and a poor fit for a majority of the population. I think a typical conservative position is that reducing government intervention in education and increasing the prevalence of teaching kids specific things (e.g. trades) would be a big improvement in their lives and improve overall productivity in society.
I think the problem of mapping points to this continuum is not a simple one. And welcome a check on this reality-check :)
1. "No known solution" is accurate. Though it does not mean current best practices do not exist (see for example Rosanne Haggerty) or that we should repeat solutions that have been known not to work or worst of all, simply give up and accept it as a fact of life.
2. Situate this thought in 1965. Why all this fuss about Civil Rights, whats wrong with 1955? And then in 1955, whats wrong with 1945.
3. The idea of "luxury beliefs" is common in these parts. I've had a hard time believing any of it matters much, but the opinion stated here may be the ultimate luxury belief. College education for me (and my children) but not for thee. I need a college degree (a PhD even!) to pontificate on naive realism. You learn some useful trade so I have someone to call if my plumbing needs fixing.
1. Certainly, agreed.
2. This argument proves too much, since it could justify any policy at all. If I say "Civil rights was a good idea" does that give a pass to anything the Left wants to do? I think a better lens to think about it is that "equality of an individual's rights under the law" is a worthy endeavour that most people in today's age would get behind. Trans rights / pronouns is not that, since they already had equality under the law.
3. That is quite a strawman. I never suggested someone should not be able to get a college degree. High school and college would remain as available as they are today. The thing which would change is that students would have additional options for their life, if they choose it. Do you know truancy rates for inner city high schools? Turning them into criminals to maintain the illusion of helping them get their PhD makes you feel better but their lives worse. Lots of people have great lives and make a lot of money without being great students, and I think the current society does not allow that to be presented as an option. That luxury belief causes policy changes which keep kids in classes which are useless to their future.
Your framing of position 3 is an example of why policy based solutions fail -- "No one should have to live in an apartment less than 1000 sq ft!" => Apartment rents rise, hurting the people you intended to help.
2 & 3 were merely to illustrate that the "conservative position" as articulated is "naive realism" too.
For 3 in particular, just like "school and college would remain as available as they are today", I'd say no one is forcing you or anyone to get a higher education. Indeed lots of people have great lives and make a lot of money without being great students. This shows the existence of additional options!
I'll try again: Higher education is within the average human's reach. If a monkey like me can get a college degree, so can any one else. Yes, no matter how hard I try I'm not going to come up with a proof of the Riemann hypothesis. But logic, rhetoric, and grammar? Basics of rigorous thinking? The liberal arts are for all of mankind -- not for use in a profession or to make money. As C.S. Lewis said it is to transform us from “unregenerate little bundle of appetites” to “the good man and the good citizen”.
I'm talking about the law that says "You must attend high school". Kids are not permitted to do anything else with their lives until they are 18 by law. Don't people talk about how we need more e.g. welders in the country? It seems like a clear relationship between the legality of pursuing a trade like that in your high school years vs sitting in a classroom reading old books. (Or in most cases, not reading them).
You are listing reasons that you find college interesting. That's great, you would probably enjoy and benefit from it. But do you think that everyone shares your views? People have different preferences, which are also valid, and some of those include not having to wait until the age of 22 to get on with life, without paying a heavy price in the labor markets. Do you really think that the humanities majors learn more at college than in the workplace? I'm a STEM major and I certainly learned more on the job than at college, despite having a positive college experience.
I'm entirely advocating for the removal of distorting policies. I don't think it is net beneficial to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to help mediocre students get humanities degrees. If they want to do that themselves, they are very much welcome to do so.
Ah, I naively (!) understood the "12 years + university" to mean its the University bit you were arguing against.
So the argument is against compulsory high school? primary school? any literacy at all? I suppose we should never consider anything truly settled, and it is good to revisit the arguments from time to time.
"Fearful that too many parents and masters were neglecting their child-rearing responsibilities, the Puritan elders on June 14, 1642, passed what might be viewed as the first compulsory education law in American history, transforming a moral obligation into a legal one. "Taking into consideration the great neglect of many parents and masters in training up their children in learning and labor," the General Court appointed selectmen to "take account from time to time of all parents and masters, and of their
children, concerning their calling and employment of their children, especially of their ability to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of this country." Thus, the law of 1642 established a group of educational supervisors, the selectmen, charged with the task of judging parental neglect in child rearing and reporting these offenses to the court. Moreover, it established minimal standards by which parents and masters could be judged in their educational responsibilities"
From "A History of Compulsory Education Laws" by Michael S Katz.
And over time, the focus shifted to non-sectarian schooling.
To me it rings true in all ages, in all civilizations, but YMMV!
Although you quote something from 1642, I believe mandatory high school is not nearly that old a practice.
It is a coherent position to think that requiring elementary school (reading, writing, arithmetic) is good because the skills learnt apply to everyone's life, but not high school (old english lit, foreign language, geometry & algebra). Again, I am not saying that high school is bad, just that it does not align with everyone's life plans and should not be mandated by the state. I believe a majority of children would continue to attend, to their benefit.
For an in-depth exploration of the topic I would recommend Caplan's "The case against education".
Yes. The classical liberal position is: live your life however you choose as long as you don’t hurt others and as long as you don’t force others to affirm, celebrate, or pay for your choice.
Sexualizing young children? Is that really the motivation of parents and policy makers?
I share your dislike of the term "sexualizing young children" or "groomers". Mainstream Democrats are just confused by them. And I certainly agree that the majority of Dems that support their party policies don't like that idea any more than conservatives.
In defense of the term -- if the Left fights vigorously to put books describing anal sex, BDSM, and other fetishes into schools and invites children to question their gender & adopt pronouns, and the outcome is that nearly half of children identify as non cis/straight, then it's clearly moving the needle on something about sex and children.
The left would say it's just education and avoiding children to grow up into cis/straight-biased adults, but that seems like a flimsy excuse for the amount of intervention and the objective levels of discrimination seen in the real world, which were already so low that it's arguable about whether this should be seen as a top problem that requires vigorous intervention to solve.
Don't forget having these sexuality based clubs and whatnot and explicitly not telling parents about it. The fact that all these things are done in a manner so as to keep them secret from the children's parents is a huge problem, and a huge red flag. Generally we tell children "If anyone asks you to keep a secret from mommy and daddy, don't trust them and tell mommy and daddy immediately." There's a good reason for that.
The claimed reason for this, at least, is that a significant % of kids have abusive, bigoted ultraconservative parents who would beat them, disown them, drive them to suicide, etc if they knew their child was LGBT. Maybe you've seen evidence that that's not the real reason, but I haven't.
This also may not be sufficient reason to overcome the strong general presumption to trust parents and be honest with them-- as you say, we have good larger reasons for that presumption. But abusive bigoted parents are a real problem, as are abusive parents generally.
"a significant % of kids have abusive, bigoted ultraconservative parents who would beat them, disown them, drive them to suicide, etc if they knew their child was LGBT. Maybe you've seen evidence that that's not the real reason, but I haven't."
I have seen zero evidence that this is actually a significant problem as compared to sexual predators who tell their victims "Don't tell your parents our little secret." If you are trying to guess who is a greater danger to a child, there should be an extremely strong presumption on "Stranger who wants to talk about sex with minors without telling their parents" and not "the parents".
Especially considering the fact that if the teachers thought there was any danger to the kid at home they would be calling child protective services, not just talking the kids about sexuality without telling the parents and leaving everything else as is. The claim that they think the parents are abusive and that is why they have all the secrecy but do nothing else to protect the kid is ridiculous on its face.
Another risk of abuse is people abusing the legitimacy of rare exceptions to swallow the rule by declaring almost all claims for secrecy to be such exceptions. We actually have some good systems to determine whether some particular case falls within a narrow exception for extreme circumstances, but the trouble is that the advocates of teacher-child secrecy want to just bypass that whole legal system.
For the sake of argument let's say there should be exceptions in extreme cases. The question is always, "Who decides?"
The teenager should not decide. If they want to have secret conversations with somebody without making a federal case out of it, then don't do it with public school teachers, there are plenty of other options out there.
Some random public school teacher should also not decide. How would he or she do so? On pure personal opinion based on on a teenager's unsworn say-so? This is actually happening in many areas, and rightfully provokes a great deal of outrage when parents discover this is being done not just behind their backs, but in a loose and informal manner.
Is every teacher going to be trained and as-needed deputized as a competent administrative judge of such difficult legal questions? Do they get to make these decisions without keeping records of conversations and articulating explanations and evidence reviewed by district lawyers explaining why as a public employee they have the authority to keep very important matters and interactions secret from a child's parents?
At the very least you would want an investigation, collection of evidence in addition to the minor's mere assertion, regular standards for how to make decisions about whether there is a high likelihood of abuse based on that evidence, neutral and disinterested decision-makers experienced in applying those standards, a written opinion laying out the rationale, and after masking of personal information, release to the public so that the public can be informed about what is going on and how decisions are made, and the opening up of all parties involved in the process to personal liability to the parents should they seriously err and infringe on core parental rights without adequate cause.
Point is, when there is real danger or threat, there are established and reviewable legal mechanisms whereby child protective services officials, school officials, medical personnel, the police, and judges can in rare and extreme cases keep certain proceedings and activities secret from exceptionally bad parents of guardians. These systems should not be circumvented just because some child claims, "My folks will freak out". That's not good enough.
There's a theocratic fascist hiding in every cul de sac.
Nah, it’s all just an outgrowth of the sexual revolution, that is to say - feminism. It began with the sex ed we had a semester of in high school, taught by a coach, which we kids treated, rightly, as an utter joke.
That class, if it had a justification by the administrators, who would have been more Silent generation than Boomer, was to try to get us not to get pregnant or for the boys to not make us pregnant.
Pregnancy = bad was the shifting of the earth there, though we’d not yet understood how fundamental that was.
Needless to say, though actually in truth I can’t remember if this was like 8th or 9th grade (high school? or middle?) there was none of the, uh, education in sex (from Coach Tedder!) that is the norm now! That is to say, all this instruction in the ways of porn and so on.
There are no good intentions here; this is a crack in the foundations, which has been exploited, iteratively, until we are where we are now, epater la bourgeoisie with the bonus pleasure of forcing the bourgeoisie to pretend it is not that epater-ed by all this.
The latter is the interesting new wrinkle.
You make a valid point but that leaves the question of the approach taken. Is the goal to work toward informing as many parents as possible about the group(s) existence and the child telling them about their sexuality or is there a presumption it is easier to keep it all a secret? I suspect there is some of both but the issue is when secrecy is the default with no process for how or when to inform parents.
Yes- that is exactly the motivation of the some of the parents and the policy makers pushing this stuff into elementary schools.
You're saying parents want their kids to have sex? Or that the parents want to have sex with children?
Are beauty pageants sexualizing? Majorettes and dance teams? The homecoming queen?
I am saying there are some parents who want their children exposed to sexual deviancy in grade school. Probably not a large fraction of parents, but certainly some. However, my main point is the people driving these policies, teachers, government apparatchiks, and special interest groups definitely make up a large fraction of their professions, and definitely want children sexualized. It is impossible to explain the explosion of self-identifying transgenders in school-age children by any other means- the children are being brainwashed by the system educating them, and the people doing it are reveling in it- they even brag about it openly these days.
I agree with you but maybe it needs clarified why they revel in it. I believe it is because they think the kids are finding their "true" identity. While I think that is probably true in some cases, I would agree with you that more often than not, the kid is worse for being exposed to something they aren't mature enough to understand about themselves.
I completely agree with this analysis, but I think the Elephant in the Brain -- Robin Hanson's term -- is that many people _aren't_ professing these beliefs because they believe in the unconstrained vision, but because they are pushing it even though they don't believe it. They're in it for some other reason. And sometimes there _is_ or _might be_ a simple solution to a problem, but the people who won't look at it have some other sort of agenda.
For instance -- about 50 years ago, my grandmother read -- I believe in that in that esteemed medical journal *Readers Digest* -- that lack of vitamin D contributed to both your likelihood of catching a respiratory infection in the winter and how severe it would be if you caught it. She bought supplements, took them, and had me promise to take them too. But, when I went away to university I thought that this was one of those promises I could let lapse.
My peer group thought that people who popped vitamins and supplements were irrational -- neurotic hypochondriacs. Any benefit would come from the placebo effect. So, in part because I didn't want to come across as irrational, and in part because I wanted to save on the expense, I stopped taking them. That winter I came down with a terrible cold. "Co-incidence!" I thought loudly to myself. Next winter, I caught bronchitis that kept me in bed for a week. I went back to taking vitamin D, and winter colds went back to being mild things. This still could be a co-incidence. Or the placebo effect. But I know what trade-off I want to make. :)
But when covid came around, many people thought that I should *stop* taking the vitamin D. Otherwise people might confuse me with those low-status uneducated people who were suddenly becoming vitamin-D advocates. I thought that the hospitals around here should see if the people who were being hospitalised for severe covid were also low in vitamin D. Learning that there was no relationship would advance knowledge a lot. Finding one would be grounds for more study. I also thought that people in nursing homes should be part of randomised trials. Half of them get vitamin D supplements and Half of them get placebo. Surely some of the nursing homes will be stricken with covid in the future. When this happened we would see if it had any effect.
But the pushback on that idea astonished me. So many, many, many people didn't want to find out that there was a simple way to prevent severe covid that didn't involve the planned vaccines, which we didn't have. Even if people were dying now. I managed to get several of them on record. *Even if it were the case that vitamin D supplements lowered the risk of severe covid a whole lot, they didn't want people taking them because if they worked, the future demand for the vaccines would dry up*. It's really hard for me to not think of these people as evil. But I was the one that got castigated for 'naive realism'. 'If something as simple as vitamin-D worked, we would already be doing it' they said. And remember, I wasn't arguing that it worked, only that we had a chance to find out, and should use it.
Vitamin D has been said to be the bane of the Pharmaceutical industry. I suspect they are glad to support research rigged to show it is ineffective. However, there was one study during Covid of some 87,000 hospital admittees (all tested postive). Among those with Vitamin D blood levels 55 ng/ml, zero mortality. A little bit more at each 5 level down, and most mortality was found in those down at 20.
Please send me that reference, if you can find it.
Here's one long review: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8052476/
First thing to mention is that even without looking at the data, it's at least facially plausible Vitamin D could help with something like covid. There is quite a long history of use of "Vitamin D" to cure not just rickets* but to boost immune response to both viral and bacterial respiratory infectious diseases severely affecting the pulmonary system, with some early successes against Tuberculosis before the American Civil War, well before the arrival of antibiotics.
Chemical techniques at the time were not yet sufficiently sophisticated to isolate and identify the particular compounds involved (that was about 100 years ago), but the mid 19th Century scientists were were still able to tease out some of the big picture relationships in terms of it having something to do with cholesterol and exposure to sunlight (and not much later, specially to the ultraviolet component of that light) and of it being concentrated in certain fish oils, despite the fact that fish apparently don't make it themselves and must get it from things they eat.
Unfortunately it is not easy to evaluate the various claims about this class of substances because the underlying mechanisms are quite complicated with many interactions that are a challenge to disentangle. (See, e.g., https://www.wikipathways.org/pathways/WP1531.html)
While "vitamin" is a legacy term with no technically precise meaning, in truth the "Vitamin D" compounds are more like hormones (which turn our to modulate the whole endocrine system in a number of ways) and which can fall below healthy levels for various reasons but which deficiency can sometimes be conveniently cured by oral ingestion. Melatonin is another example. As hormones that regulate the increase or decrease in production of numerous other impactful substances, both in human cells and apparently also in some organisms with which the human is infected, the attempts to figure out how well supplements might work for which people and which illnesses are fraught with difficulties.
*One hundred years ago in Wisconsin, Harry Steenbock figured out that by merely shining UV on certain foods some cholesterol compounds would get converted to Vitamin D, in a way that could cure rickets in rodents. He spent his own money to patent it and in just two decades that technique eliminated rickets in the US, so that now, 80 years later, few even know the name of that disease anymore.
Thank you.
I no longer have that specific reference, however, you can find many studies showing the link between Vitamin D deficiency and bad Covid outcomes by doing a search using key words Covid and Vitamin D. (I used the Brave browser search feature.)
I'm aware of no conclusive evidence for or against most vitamin supplements but some deficiencies are very real. Sailors routinely suffered scurvy from Vitamin C deficiency. Even the worst Western diets typically avoid this, even if there are unproven benefits to higher levels of Vit C. Vitamin D deficiency (especially in the winter when sunlight is insufficient) is very real and very easy to measure with a simple blood test. There are proven negative symptoms. Anyone saying vitamin D supplements aren't needed (absent blood tests showing it isn't) is simply wrong. Period. I'm not aware any studies proving vitamin D deficiency leads to colds, bronchitis, or Covid (or not) but that is entirely irrelevant to the need for vit D supplementation.
My PhD advisor used to tell a joke about philosopher-baseball umpires:
The naive realist says, "I call 'em like they are."
The logical positivist says, "I call 'em like I see 'em."
The solipsist says, "Until I call 'em, they ain't."
So Angel Hernandez is a solipsist? Good to know. :)
Scott Alexander had an essay a few years back about how irrational or highly questionable beliefs actually work better than rational ones for building a group or coalition. Hardly anybody reasons their way to such beliefs, so professing them essentially function as a loyalty oath, and helps to divide ingroup members from outgroup members.
Moldbug compared the espousal of such beliefs to the wearing of a uniform; a good way to let everybody know whose side you were on.
I had a similar thought the other day when I saw something Kari Lake said, that was not, let’s say, very nuanced or thoughtful…
The thought was that a significant part of our politics today isn’t about proposing solutions, using logic, etc. but rather is about announcing, in the most dramatic unambiguous way possible, what side you’re on. The more it stands out as making any sense or being decent or reasonable, the better at signaling, apparently.
It’s weird to me and I wouldn’t have thought it was a thing, but I can’t understand in any other way why so many people say things that stand up to approximately zero scrutiny or thought.
I don’t mean to pick exclusively on the MAGA right, either: take “the gender binary is a socially constructed myth.” I mean, no. That doesn’t stand up to 15 seconds of thought if you have a very basic understanding of animal and plant evolution over the past billion years… and yet books will be published and fawningly reviewed in left-leaning news outlets.
But, again, the only way I can make sense of all of this is that people say things because they signal certain things about who the speaker is, rather than providing some actual information or facts or thought about the real world.
We ought to have a general term for beliefs that someone chooses to exempt from any use of his faculty of critical thinking, for no better reason than that he really wants to believe them. All sincere religious beliefs fit this description, but so do things like trust in certain people to be "experts" or to have your best interest at heart. The term I propose is "willful blind spots." They do not always deserve to be shunned, but they should all be reexamined from time to time.
Kind or ironic you would use that example, given Kling's post is on naïve realism.
Other than a tiny percentage of intersex individuals, sexuality is certain. Gender is not the same as the sex of an individual. Gender is not only influenced by other factors such as hormones, it also includes social constructs.
I somewhat randomly picked this explanation from a google search. I'm not saying it's perfect but a quick skim suggests it's a fairly reasonable explanation.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/232363#gender
Given that the word gender was not used that way until approximately the early 60s - and not because of any advance in the hard sciences - I’m not sure how germane any of that is. And when it was so used, it was in the hands of those same kind of folks who told us sex was invented in 1964 or whatever … yeah, I’ll take the previous dunno, thousands of millennia.
You can malign the change in definition all you want but the definition is what it is. Not what it once was.
I would concede that if the definition didn't itself rely on new definitions courtesy of post-modern mumbo jumbo.
Where it came from is an entirely different issue.
I'm much more concerned by how words such as racist, systemic racism, and white supremacist have very different meanings depending on who you talk with and there are no alternatives with more clear meaning.
They all have in common that they are top-down coinages, so distinct from language as such.
To you it's ironic; to me you're proving my point.
I wasn't sure what your point was and I wasn't sure whether I was agreeing or disagreeing with your view. I was just pointing out that there are two sexes but gender isn't define as the same thing and there don't have to be two and only two. Being sure there are just two genders is naïve realism.
I believe there is something deeper at work in naïve realism in addition to the factors mentioned. In a post-religious age, we seek consolation in the hope that there could easily be a collective rational management of human affairs that would ward off tragedy and contingency from our lives. British philosopher John Gray wrote about this years ago in his Enlightenment's Wake.
One political advantage to the aspect of "naive realism" that tends to dismiss the possibility of important trade-offs is that trade-offs can show some activity to be zero-sum or negative-sum and even openly discussing them will tend to marshal the forces of a constituency alerted to their pending harm to oppose your efforts. It really helps to slip past these trenches by fooling at least some of these people and insisting big changes can be accomplished with little cost or harm to their existing interests.
Yes; politicians may often be less naive realists than they let on.
Every day I wake up to people not taking seriously enough the consideration that the evolutionary / game-theoretic equilibrium involves harming other people as much as possible, so long as one can avoid being perceived as intentionally harming them.
My "naive realism" is that everything is a trade off and we should try to center our political disagreements on the parameters of the trade off function. To _ME_ that is the obvious solution and people who disagree just flunked econ 101! :)
"if you dare to disagree with a commonly-held simplistic belief about the solution to a complex social problem...you will be regarded as evil."
The need for 'social justice' is a case in point. "It has become (for everyone other than intellectual contrarians) a 21st c. article of faith; existing on a rarefied plane beyond the scope of political/philosophical interrogation. Disrespecting it is blasphemy...as in “So you don’t care about injustice then?!” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/love-of-the-people
While I understand Mr Sowell's origination of the phrase, it might be useful to recognize that the 'unconstrained' often simply want to constrain different things.
Take health care funding for an example. Those of us with constrained vision recognize many of the problems with access to health care. Our proposals for changes, however, are bounded by the realization that there is some limit to the amount of care that can be provided overall as well as other constraints such as the fact that we can't make health care providers work for free nor expect medical developments to occur without the developers getting remuneration. You can make health care delivery more efficient, and provide people with limited means access to some kind of health care but you are never going to provide everyone with every bit of care they may want.
The 'unconstrained' view is often that we have plenty of health care resources to provide everyone with care but the problem is the wrong people aren't constrained from using 'more than they need', and if we'd just punish the hoarders and wreckers then everything would be resolved.
Throughout most of history, people weren’t trying to solve as big of problems as we are now. So, simple solutions to problems like “how are we going to stave off starvation” often worked. Nobody was even attempting to solve problems like “how can we provide healthcare to everyone”.
#1 What is the *social* problem to which "go green" is the answer? What does "go green" mean here, to you or to whomever you are referencing?
#2 The simple-solution seekers. I think some people - maybe especially, women? - really do feel a genuine tug of the heart, which has in it no room for judgment or rationality, about an amorphous mass of people they will never know or interact with. In fact, some of them feel it so strongly they go out of their way *to* interact with members of those groups. My women friends spout no leftist nonsense and are by no means clueless but must believe, in order to attempt the Christian interventions and activities they do, that social problems are amenable to simple solutions *even as their private efforts make no difference at all* except in some Middlemarch way ("life was not so bad for you or for me or for total random stranger" due to such as she).
They *must* act. It is their nature. They are active people; others who feel similar concerns and do not act may simply be more lazy - not more realistic.
I can see this tendency clearly as I am a sort of failed woman in this regard. Not wholly: I cannot read a news story about the abuse or worse of a little child, particularly accompanied by a picture of the small vulnerable creature, without a rending of the heart.
But I can read about - and necessarily see with my own eyes - any number of social problems you mention - such as the homeless, or drug abusers - without caring one whit. I am not: caring-but-lazy. This is true indifference, but also a sort of feeling that - who speaks for the commons? Who speaks for the civic fabric? (Who speaks for aesthetics!) Doesn't anybody remember it didn't used to be this way? I guess in this scenario, I place myself in the role of the little vulnerable child, psychologically, and say, what the hell have you done to my world? And maybe a little bit of - if you really cared, you would do some harder thing than you are all doing/saying, that may not look like caring ...
A curious instance: once after a long drive to the shore, we had no sooner set out umbrella and towels, than somebody, not the parent, walked by on the crowded beach and asked, have you seen a little girl of such or other description, her family can't find her, some notion telegraphed that she might be mentally challenged. Everyone else about seemed to be able to answer in the negative and go on with their leisure - but after a minute of trying to do so, I found I could not. So I set off to look for an unattended little girl. I felt a pang for a mother, being next to the great ocean, with a child missing.
I did find the child, who appeared non-verbal and unfavored by nature, in the parking lot behind the sand, and walked her the quarter mile to the park headquarters, having no other notion of where to take her. They did not say, oh good, you found the lost child, but rather wanted to take down my name, as if I had spirited her away myself. I declined lol.
I have thought of that in connection with my inability to care about the mass of humanity. I am utterly wedded to the particular - and even that is extremely intermittent. I had no sooner dropped her off than I thought, uuugh: people.
In a way, understanding that this is a failure of empathy on my part, it makes me think you should not be so quick to dismiss the motives of those mindless bleeding hearts. I think there may be something fundamental and good there - only it's gotten distorted by ideology, as have so many things.
Another factor in what you're describing I think is that people tend to be naive realists about issues they care most about. Like I don't care very much about Israel and Palestine, and this is part of why I can sit back and view the problem as having no good option aside from politically infeasible ones. Whereas those who are strongly cheering for Palestine want global intifada and those cheering for Israel backed a war with no endgame.
So when people look at someone who isn't a naive realist, and say that person doesn't care so passionately, a lot of the time they're not wrong. It's a tragic truth.
An ancillary problem (or maybe this is the causal MoA) is that the more one cares about an issue, the more likely one is to be emotional about it, so that rational thought about solutions is blocked by lower-circuit beliefs (religious attachment or group identification).
If you say a problem is complex, this suggests that solving it may prove difficult, if not insurmountable. Perhaps the problem cannot be ever solved. In the case of the frustrated, perhaps it’s a lack of cognitive complexity, a black-and-white view of the world, where they believe their perspective is the only correct one, coming from self-imposed, limited exposure to diverse viewpoints or an inability (or unwillingness) to consider alternative perspectives. Or, even more fundamentally, their frustration is simply a lack of immaturity having grown up in a world where they always get their way and when they don’t get their ice cream, lay on the floor kicking and crying.
lack of maturity
Just because something has a tradeoff doesn't mean it doesn't have a simple solution.
Let's take something I think everyone in this comment section probably supports, school vouchers. There are tradeoffs to school vouchers. Some parents will through ignorance or malice not give their children as good an education as they would have gotten in public schools. You can find examples publicized in the Florida press about this or that parent that "wasted" their school voucher. And of course many will claim that parents are indoctrinating their children (with religious education or whatever) that is harmful to the children.
Let's grant all that is a true tradeoff, who cares? I think everyone in this comments section more or less thinks the benefits are a complete slam dunk over the costs and it's not even close. Most would really like their states to adopt what Florida has adopted.
When we come up with reasons why not, we can't come up with any good ones. You basically get status quo bias, partisanship, and the teachers union. That's it.
Channeling Rufo, if you want to get things done at a certain point you need to stop hemming and hawing about complexity and tradeoffs and just get something done.
I strongly support school vouchers, but as someone who has several friends who strongly oppose them, let me try to steelman the case against.
The voucher opponents I know would argue/have argued that:
1. Vouchers will increase school segregation and inequality, because the ability of poor parents to use them to get their kids out of bad public schools will be outweighed by the middle and upper classes, whose kids would have done fine in the local public schools, using them to pay for private schools which get their kids away from "undesirables".
2. Voucher availability will particularly disadvantage kids with special educational needs, because the vast majority of private schools will turn them away, and the few that won't will be harder for parents of those kids to find and stick with, compared with the current situation where all public schools must educate all comers.
3. Having education be dominated by a government-run public school system which (at least in theory!) provides an egalitarian education to all kids is a social good in itself, and vouchers undermine the provision of that social good, which is bad.
Much of this is about different values: voucher opponents tend to place a higher value than supporters on equality vs excellence. That is a value difference where people on both sides tend to demonize each other and have pretty poor theory of mind about those on the other side. But (2) for example is a real tradeoff, though in theory at least it could be mitigated by e.g. giving more voucher money to special-needs kids.
Freddie deBoer would also probably argue that vouchers won't make any difference to outcomes because ~nothing does, it's all selection bias-- he is also someone who values equality more than most, but from a different empirical worldview.
1) Segregation transfers from schools to zip codes. People drive up real estate and become NIMBYs to protect not just their property but their school district, which is now de facto their property. I could easily make the case that a lot of our real estate problems are exacerbated by tying property and schooling together.
And no, school busing tried to get around this and failed.
2) You've already addressed this.
3) Equality is much easier to achieve by dragging down then lifting up, and that seems to be mostly what public schools accomplish. "Done fine" is a good summation of this.
I think that the focus on "outcomes" is a huge part of the problem here. When we sent our kid to a private school we didn't expect it to shift her "outcomes" at all. We just saw that she was a lot happier. They spent more time outside. The teachers were more flexible and communicative. There were no screens or phones. None of this cost money, they spent 1/2 what my local school district spends per kid, but they are a business and care.
I've never gotten the impression any of the people at my local public school care, and it's a blue ribbon rich exurb school. And my kid clearly is a lot less happy there now that her old school had to move (something they wouldn't have had to do if they had Florida school vouchers).
Let me give you a microcosm of the issue. The school doesn't want anyone below 3rd grade playing on the playground structure during recess (which is a measly 30 min). Apparently for "safety". But I've been taking my kids to play on that playground since before they were in kindergarten. Meanwhile, her private school would let her take hikes in the woods, climb trees, wade through shallow creeks.
A lot is lost in public schools that doesn't relate to "outcomes" at all. It's got nothing to do with selection or equality or anything. It's just a question of private human beings with human will versus "the machine."
"Equality is much easier to achieve by dragging down then lifting up"
This seems to be the inevitable end result of all the equality/equity stuff.
All of the discussions of school choice (and many about quality of public schools as well) seem to end up foundering on the issue of special-needs kids. This is not something I have really given any thought to, but maybe we just need to have separate public schools for special-needs kids and stop trying to keep them together with everybody else.
“Special needs” commands an outsized amount of school budgets, compared to any benefit that will be netted from it. So if disadvantaging it means a correction in that regard - that’s no argument against. One can see that charter schools for special needs kids (truly special needs) will surely spring up if there’s money to be made. And that may more closely approximate a rational approach to their care.
I don’t support vouchers because I don’t see that it changes the raw materials at all, demand or supply side.
It will be another failed educational fix - in the dustbin like open concept (which I actually think I would have liked! - based upon my twin cousin’s description, 45 years ago; especially if it had been outdoors) - and only delay the collapse of the whole edifice.
Which is not to say this won’t be throwing away something that was good, pretty good, once better anyway.
I was too late for that better time, but my mother and my mother-in-law both speak of high school as a fun, generally happy period. Neither needed what further education they got, beyond it.
So I would judge from their capabilities, which are *very* high in the case of the latter, that that is not only enough for most but probably more than is now needed.
Let it be optional after say 15, if we must continue with the same setup and centralization.
My father has never spoken of high school, but he was inclined to get in trouble and to rebel and yet sailed through. My father-in-law is the only one who attended fancy pants East Coast prep school; that too, he now realizes, was excellent - was almost out of another age in its rigor.
I suggest a modest first step: Expel disruptive students, but don't criminalize their failure to attend school after that. Let them go to work in the nearest gas station or Burger King. If they come back next year with changes of attitude, let them reenroll.