Arnold is using the standard pejorative definition of a troll, that is someone who makes intentionally inflammatory, rude, or upsetting statements online to elicit strong emotional responses in people or to steer the conversation off-topic. Arnold puts President Trump in this category, which I think is a mistake. Trolling can also be an effective means of political communication. President Trump's tweets had serious purposes, among which was the elicitation of responses from political opponents that would tend to discredit them in the eyes of people who might be brought to support him. Arnold is a nice guy with an irenic temperament, and no doubt wishes we could all communicate in a sincere and respectful manner, but that is an unrealistic expectation given the requirements for political success. It is perhaps a measure of the cultural domination of the Left that we only hear outrage about Trump's social media, but not about those who called him Hitler, a fascist, an anti-Semite, racist, etc.
Thank you for the review! I haven't read Rauch's book yet, and it is pretty low in the queue. After listening to him on Econtalk, I suspect you don't go far enough with regard to his ignoring the rot of institutions and ... blindspot when it comes to the behavior of the left and right. Hearing him talk, I got the impression that he thought if only we could go back to the early '90's and only read the NYT and watch CNN we would be fine. He doesn't seem to quite understand that the rise of Limbaugh, Fox News and eventually Trump were reactions to the rot that had set into the mainstream media by the 70's. My suspicion is that he wouldn't see it as rot.
One could go back quite a lot further and ask if the mainstream media and academia ever performed the gatekeeper/arbiter of truth functions Rauch (another others) seem to want to return to.
When I try to pin down 20th century "golden age" period. I come up pretty blank. Leaving aside the performance of European institutions (ahem... world war, communism, fascism, genocide, colonialism) the American media goaded the country in to the Spanish American war and World War I. During World War II, the depression, and after, the worst sort of excesses of those times (Japanese-American Internment, McCarthyism, the Tuskegee Experiment, the Vietnam War etc) were supported or obscured with few questions.
I'd have to guess that he's talking about the sweet spot at which the people started to question the wisdom of many of these policies, but I think it's being generous to say that's a very small target period- maybe 10 years of (debatably) good institutional performance amongst 90 or so years of poor performance.
Agreed. Looking back to the pre-WW2 progressives, eugenics and forced sterilization were considered very academically respectable. I am also given to understand that Orwell's inspiration for writing 1984 was going back to England after his time in the Spanish civil war and finding ALL the news papers were lying about what was happening there, with the communists slaughtering the socialists etc. Not to mention 30 odd years in the middle of the century where economics textbooks were constantly reporting "The USSR is going to catch up to the US GDP within 3-4 more years" with every new yearly edition.
I think your guess is being too generous, I am afraid. I get the sense that Rauch, and really just about everyone else to be fair, really does believe everything was fine till just recently. At some point we, Americans at least, developed a really unhealthy respect and implicit trust in authority and the media. I think that is why the modern loss of trust is so shocking to most people; the notion that you wouldn't just trust the news or academics or government to be truthful is genuinely shocking.
I think it's worse than that. Rauch is also pwned, and thus fails to properly diagnose the general disease and ascertain the necessary treatment.
When you see one ordinary institution that seems to have gone haywire in a random direction, you chalk it up to rare things: bad luck or bad actors. When you see lots of top institutions all seem to go bad *simultaneously and in exactly the same way*, then you should infer that what has been discovered is a generally effective strategy for capturing and corrupting *any and all* key epistemic institutions and thus capable of shredding the 'constitution of knowledge' anywhere it's used by easily plowing thorough all the usual sources of resistance. Unless you realize that, you won't then conclude that without an equally general and effective counter, any attempt to salvage old or build new institutions is doomed to failure. They will succumb to the same disease.
If epistemic security is like cybersecurity, then this is like a hacker discovering how to pwn every server at the root level. It's no use describing what how a healthy computer properly functioned in the era before this hack was discovered. From now on, every system is worthless if it can't easily repel that kind of attack, even if that means that the new systems are not quite as easy to use as the old ones which inspired such nostalgic but naive sentiment.
I noted the first stages of rot in academia while I was an undergraduate in the early 60s when I began to see self professed “liberals” seldom willing to consider opposing points of view. It worsened while in grad school as opponents to the Viet Nam war routinely shouted down speakers with opposing points of view, and sentiments concerning the importance of self reliance for success were dismissed out of hand. Now that the progressives have essentially eliminated classical liberals from consideration when hiring, diverse opinions dare not be openly expressed.
Thank you for writing this. After reading your review, I came away with two insights that led me to re-think the problem of how "institutions" should supporting the truth.
1. It's touched on by others already, but I'd argue that "knowledge" should be replaced with "belief" and truth should be replaced with "agreement". Rausch is too partisan to reach the obvious conclusion that in the technical sense, most of the political information put out on both sides is partly true but mostly false.
The act itself of "defending 'the truth'" is conformity with a paradigm we know doesn't work. That is, in this view of the world knowledge is scarce. Partisans need only reveal "the truth" and shut down the lies of their opponents, and reasonable, knowledge-seeking people will be swayed to the partisans' side.
I think that this paradigm doesn't work is obvious, but in case it's not, it doesn't work because we know in reality that the sort of "truths" we argue about politically are irrelevant. For example, the true unemployment rate being 4% or 8% or whether the percentage of kids who go hungry in the US is 4% or 8% doesn't guide many people's policy beliefs. If you think think 4% is tolerable, you likely don't think 8% is all that bad, let alone what policy is needed to fix it.
This is obviously also true for things like masks and vaccination. Literate, numerate people will disagree even if the basic nature of facts are accepted.
What I'm saying is, the nature of the debate as one over truth and knowledge skews the whole affair into an unproductive direction. There's no need to make the argument one of truth, which explicitly calls your opponent a liar, when you could make the argument one of value.
Belief and agreement are better terms to use because they are directly related to political action. Our beliefs and whether others agree with them or not, are how we make political decisions. Thus the import of, say, the 1619 Project. There are some literal truths (and untruths) there. But this knowledge by itself means almost nothing. The meaning comes from whether it shapes our beliefs and destroys our general agreement that the US approach to government can work for everyone.
2. It's inherent in the word "institution" that such a thing is an anti-evolutionary structure. An institution is by definition designed for permanence. To hold something against the evolutionary torrent of ideas. Recognition of this fact is important because with any institution, you should be able to identify what it's trying to preserve. Like, the US Constitution is obviously set up to preserve the basic decision-making process and rights of the government's citizens. On the other hand, most institutions, businesses, the CDC, etc, aren't really set up to preserve anything except themselves.
Which is fine, it's human nature, but it's also why the rot Arnold describes in endemic to institutions and why institutional reform is something that's so frequently a fool's errand.
That is, institutions are designed to preserve something and erode over time. Look at what they're designed to preserve and see if it's truly what you wish to preserve now, and whether it's worth carrying along the institutional baggage with it. Most of the time, I think, it's probably better to start fresh with a new institution rather than trying to build off an old one. (going back to the administrative debate, a great reform would be that many, if not most administrative bureaus have specific sunset provisions. That is, wind down the CDC (or the useless 90% of it) automatically, with the knowledge that, in time of need, a replacement organization can be spun up pretty quickly.
John Kerry: " “I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia." Nixon won the Nov 68 (since so many racist Democrats voted for 3rd party Wallace instead of HH Humphrey) election, but didn't take office until ... Jan 20.
Didn't Rauch support Kerry, the liar, 2004?
1987 Allan Bloom: "The Closing of the American Mind" >> the underlying problem: the belief that values are relative, an idea imported from Germany in the 1940s despite its fundamental antithesis with American ideals.<<
Did Rauch ever read or react to this book? I think not so much - about 35 years ago.
Is it true that Blacks, today, have lower IQs on average? Yes, this fact is true. How big an influence is genetics, parental raising, Socio-Economic Status (SES) is not clear.
Didn't Rauch reject this truth?
Democrats and elites today seem to believe, and are pushing all to affirm, two big lies:
1) Men and women are equal,
2) All races are equal.
True Reality is sexist; and racist.
We need a rule of law and an American culture where every individual's American Dream can be realized, within reasonable limits. We can only get this with elevation of Individual Rights, and individual results, dominate considerations of groups.
A few thoughts - in The Constitution of Knowledge, it seems largely that knowledge means 'public knowledge.' There are other kinds - local knowledge and embodied knowledge, for example. Local is only relevant in a certain geospatial context. Embodied knowledge is that space of skills, capabilities, and awarenesses that are subconscious. You have talked quite a bit about organizations above and below the Dunbar number; Isaac Asimov famously translated the notion (in Foundation) that some kinds of knowledge only were relevant at certain social scales - statistical at the largest, personal/private at the level of an individual; some organizations are 'walkable,' others are 'legible,' and still others are statistical.
What are we missing by not having a somewhat nested hierarchy of knowledges at different scales and governed by different standards or rules? Where are disconnects and misunderstandings of scale causing system failures?
Arnold is using the standard pejorative definition of a troll, that is someone who makes intentionally inflammatory, rude, or upsetting statements online to elicit strong emotional responses in people or to steer the conversation off-topic. Arnold puts President Trump in this category, which I think is a mistake. Trolling can also be an effective means of political communication. President Trump's tweets had serious purposes, among which was the elicitation of responses from political opponents that would tend to discredit them in the eyes of people who might be brought to support him. Arnold is a nice guy with an irenic temperament, and no doubt wishes we could all communicate in a sincere and respectful manner, but that is an unrealistic expectation given the requirements for political success. It is perhaps a measure of the cultural domination of the Left that we only hear outrage about Trump's social media, but not about those who called him Hitler, a fascist, an anti-Semite, racist, etc.
Thank you for the review! I haven't read Rauch's book yet, and it is pretty low in the queue. After listening to him on Econtalk, I suspect you don't go far enough with regard to his ignoring the rot of institutions and ... blindspot when it comes to the behavior of the left and right. Hearing him talk, I got the impression that he thought if only we could go back to the early '90's and only read the NYT and watch CNN we would be fine. He doesn't seem to quite understand that the rise of Limbaugh, Fox News and eventually Trump were reactions to the rot that had set into the mainstream media by the 70's. My suspicion is that he wouldn't see it as rot.
One could go back quite a lot further and ask if the mainstream media and academia ever performed the gatekeeper/arbiter of truth functions Rauch (another others) seem to want to return to.
When I try to pin down 20th century "golden age" period. I come up pretty blank. Leaving aside the performance of European institutions (ahem... world war, communism, fascism, genocide, colonialism) the American media goaded the country in to the Spanish American war and World War I. During World War II, the depression, and after, the worst sort of excesses of those times (Japanese-American Internment, McCarthyism, the Tuskegee Experiment, the Vietnam War etc) were supported or obscured with few questions.
I'd have to guess that he's talking about the sweet spot at which the people started to question the wisdom of many of these policies, but I think it's being generous to say that's a very small target period- maybe 10 years of (debatably) good institutional performance amongst 90 or so years of poor performance.
Agreed. Looking back to the pre-WW2 progressives, eugenics and forced sterilization were considered very academically respectable. I am also given to understand that Orwell's inspiration for writing 1984 was going back to England after his time in the Spanish civil war and finding ALL the news papers were lying about what was happening there, with the communists slaughtering the socialists etc. Not to mention 30 odd years in the middle of the century where economics textbooks were constantly reporting "The USSR is going to catch up to the US GDP within 3-4 more years" with every new yearly edition.
I think your guess is being too generous, I am afraid. I get the sense that Rauch, and really just about everyone else to be fair, really does believe everything was fine till just recently. At some point we, Americans at least, developed a really unhealthy respect and implicit trust in authority and the media. I think that is why the modern loss of trust is so shocking to most people; the notion that you wouldn't just trust the news or academics or government to be truthful is genuinely shocking.
I think it's worse than that. Rauch is also pwned, and thus fails to properly diagnose the general disease and ascertain the necessary treatment.
When you see one ordinary institution that seems to have gone haywire in a random direction, you chalk it up to rare things: bad luck or bad actors. When you see lots of top institutions all seem to go bad *simultaneously and in exactly the same way*, then you should infer that what has been discovered is a generally effective strategy for capturing and corrupting *any and all* key epistemic institutions and thus capable of shredding the 'constitution of knowledge' anywhere it's used by easily plowing thorough all the usual sources of resistance. Unless you realize that, you won't then conclude that without an equally general and effective counter, any attempt to salvage old or build new institutions is doomed to failure. They will succumb to the same disease.
If epistemic security is like cybersecurity, then this is like a hacker discovering how to pwn every server at the root level. It's no use describing what how a healthy computer properly functioned in the era before this hack was discovered. From now on, every system is worthless if it can't easily repel that kind of attack, even if that means that the new systems are not quite as easy to use as the old ones which inspired such nostalgic but naive sentiment.
I noted the first stages of rot in academia while I was an undergraduate in the early 60s when I began to see self professed “liberals” seldom willing to consider opposing points of view. It worsened while in grad school as opponents to the Viet Nam war routinely shouted down speakers with opposing points of view, and sentiments concerning the importance of self reliance for success were dismissed out of hand. Now that the progressives have essentially eliminated classical liberals from consideration when hiring, diverse opinions dare not be openly expressed.
Thank you for writing this. After reading your review, I came away with two insights that led me to re-think the problem of how "institutions" should supporting the truth.
1. It's touched on by others already, but I'd argue that "knowledge" should be replaced with "belief" and truth should be replaced with "agreement". Rausch is too partisan to reach the obvious conclusion that in the technical sense, most of the political information put out on both sides is partly true but mostly false.
The act itself of "defending 'the truth'" is conformity with a paradigm we know doesn't work. That is, in this view of the world knowledge is scarce. Partisans need only reveal "the truth" and shut down the lies of their opponents, and reasonable, knowledge-seeking people will be swayed to the partisans' side.
I think that this paradigm doesn't work is obvious, but in case it's not, it doesn't work because we know in reality that the sort of "truths" we argue about politically are irrelevant. For example, the true unemployment rate being 4% or 8% or whether the percentage of kids who go hungry in the US is 4% or 8% doesn't guide many people's policy beliefs. If you think think 4% is tolerable, you likely don't think 8% is all that bad, let alone what policy is needed to fix it.
This is obviously also true for things like masks and vaccination. Literate, numerate people will disagree even if the basic nature of facts are accepted.
What I'm saying is, the nature of the debate as one over truth and knowledge skews the whole affair into an unproductive direction. There's no need to make the argument one of truth, which explicitly calls your opponent a liar, when you could make the argument one of value.
Belief and agreement are better terms to use because they are directly related to political action. Our beliefs and whether others agree with them or not, are how we make political decisions. Thus the import of, say, the 1619 Project. There are some literal truths (and untruths) there. But this knowledge by itself means almost nothing. The meaning comes from whether it shapes our beliefs and destroys our general agreement that the US approach to government can work for everyone.
2. It's inherent in the word "institution" that such a thing is an anti-evolutionary structure. An institution is by definition designed for permanence. To hold something against the evolutionary torrent of ideas. Recognition of this fact is important because with any institution, you should be able to identify what it's trying to preserve. Like, the US Constitution is obviously set up to preserve the basic decision-making process and rights of the government's citizens. On the other hand, most institutions, businesses, the CDC, etc, aren't really set up to preserve anything except themselves.
Which is fine, it's human nature, but it's also why the rot Arnold describes in endemic to institutions and why institutional reform is something that's so frequently a fool's errand.
That is, institutions are designed to preserve something and erode over time. Look at what they're designed to preserve and see if it's truly what you wish to preserve now, and whether it's worth carrying along the institutional baggage with it. Most of the time, I think, it's probably better to start fresh with a new institution rather than trying to build off an old one. (going back to the administrative debate, a great reform would be that many, if not most administrative bureaus have specific sunset provisions. That is, wind down the CDC (or the useless 90% of it) automatically, with the knowledge that, in time of need, a replacement organization can be spun up pretty quickly.
"Rausch is too partisan to reach the obvious conclusion" about anything of real importance.
So many liberal lies, for so long.
John Kerry: " “I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia." Nixon won the Nov 68 (since so many racist Democrats voted for 3rd party Wallace instead of HH Humphrey) election, but didn't take office until ... Jan 20.
Didn't Rauch support Kerry, the liar, 2004?
1987 Allan Bloom: "The Closing of the American Mind" >> the underlying problem: the belief that values are relative, an idea imported from Germany in the 1940s despite its fundamental antithesis with American ideals.<<
Did Rauch ever read or react to this book? I think not so much - about 35 years ago.
1994 Charles Murray: "The Bell Curve" http://www.sullivan-county.com/id5/bc.jpg
Is it true that Blacks, today, have lower IQs on average? Yes, this fact is true. How big an influence is genetics, parental raising, Socio-Economic Status (SES) is not clear.
Didn't Rauch reject this truth?
Democrats and elites today seem to believe, and are pushing all to affirm, two big lies:
1) Men and women are equal,
2) All races are equal.
True Reality is sexist; and racist.
We need a rule of law and an American culture where every individual's American Dream can be realized, within reasonable limits. We can only get this with elevation of Individual Rights, and individual results, dominate considerations of groups.
Arnold;
A few thoughts - in The Constitution of Knowledge, it seems largely that knowledge means 'public knowledge.' There are other kinds - local knowledge and embodied knowledge, for example. Local is only relevant in a certain geospatial context. Embodied knowledge is that space of skills, capabilities, and awarenesses that are subconscious. You have talked quite a bit about organizations above and below the Dunbar number; Isaac Asimov famously translated the notion (in Foundation) that some kinds of knowledge only were relevant at certain social scales - statistical at the largest, personal/private at the level of an individual; some organizations are 'walkable,' others are 'legible,' and still others are statistical.
What are we missing by not having a somewhat nested hierarchy of knowledges at different scales and governed by different standards or rules? Where are disconnects and misunderstandings of scale causing system failures?