Social Learning Links

John Mac Ghlionn on social media regulation; Greg Lukianoff on higher education hopes; Scott Alexander on credentialed elites; Rob Henderson on the role of schools of education

John Mac Ghlionn writes,

a Cyber Bill of Rights should demand unprecedented transparency from the tech giants that dominate our digital landscape. In today’s world, the algorithms that govern platforms like Google, Meta and X operate as opaque black boxes. They quietly dictate whose voices rise to prominence and whose are silenced, often without users having any understanding of how or why these decisions are made.

He alleges that the platforms’ ability to boost or suppress people’s content poses a problem. If it is a problem, I worry that government solutions would only make it worse.

Greg Lukianoff writes,

thanks to the work of organizations like FIRE and many others, as well as a general cultural shift toward exposing and criticizing these problems in academia, the veil of silence and conformity that allowed the problems in these institutions to fester has been significantly torn. More and more we are hearing from news outlets like the New York Times and others about the rampant dysfunction in higher education, and we are seeing a groundswell of public demand for reform.

I would say that the near future of higher education depends on how college presidents react to the current environment. The optimistic case would be that they have always preferred a less ideological university, and all they needed was permission/pressure to push back against the activists. The pessimistic case is that college presidents either are woke ideologues themselves or still feel that most of the pressure from key constituents on campus is to implement woke policies.

Scott Alexander writes,

The priesthoods don’t exactly hate the public. But they hate the idea of letting the public’s ideas mix with their own. It’s not just that they discount the public’s ideas insofar as the public is less sophisticated than themselves. Their whole identity comes from their separation from the public. Ideas that seem too similar to the public’s get actively penalized

…Only the priesthoods that inculcated the most powerful contempt for the public survived to have good discussions and output trustworthy recommendations.

One remark:

GMU is only the 74th best economics department in the country, but more than half of the econbloggers I like are affiliated with it in some way

…When I asked academics about this, they didn’t find it mysterious at all. The average high-ranked economics department doesn’t care that you have a popular blog. They might even count it against you. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters.

Another remark:

to a first approximation, 1950s psychologists were not only wrong about everything, but even wronger than the average member of the public (I’m thinking mostly of psychoanalysis and behaviorism here, but a full list would take all day). Whole fields like anthropology or sociology turned on a dime to become 100% Marxist

Finally, his main point:

I don’t fully understand why wokeness succeeded at conquering the priesthoods so much more thoroughly than any previous political fad.

His guess:

Wokeness is a beautiful resolution between contempt for the public and wanting to stay in touch with the public. …

Now in-touch-ness is no longer about pleasing the “barbaric yawps” and their middlebrow tastes. It’s about pleasing all the identity groups who each require a special language that only smart people can learn. In fact, you don’t even need to actually please them! You can call Latinos “Latinx”, which they are known to hate, and you will be even more in touch than the Latinxes themselves!

He concludes with a question:

When should we continue to trust priesthoods, on the grounds that at least they require their mistruths to be subtle (which limits the amount of damage they can do and ensures some correlation with truth)? And when should we trust non-priest public intellectuals / bloggers / influencers / etc, on the grounds that at least they have a million uncorrelated failure modes instead of one big one?

Rob Henderson writes,

The prevailing ideas on college campuses, in fact, came from elementary school, middle school, and high school teachers. And they originated from education departments at universities, who spread these ideas to the educators of children, who then inculcated these views into their students.

Many people blame the professors for the current state of affairs. But they’re blaming the wrong ones. The academics responsible aren’t the ones currently teaching college students. Rather, the ones responsible are those in education departments who taught primary school teachers.

We have somehow created a status hierarchy in which professors and students in schools of education, who are among the least intelligent and rigorous people in academia, used the DEI fad to take power away from the traditionally intelligent and rigorous people. In addition, we created grievance studies departments as havens for intellectual lightweights.

The DEI fad took off in part because of white guilt (who wants to self-identify as anti-anti-racist?). It took off also because the “critical theory” denies that arguments can be used against it. Supposedly, rationality and logic are just tools of oppression.

We need to put the best thinkers back to the top of the status ladder in academia. Or we need to blow up academia and start over. A society that elevates midwits to the top of the intellectual status hierarchy is in trouble.

substacks referenced above: @

The Point is to Steadily Advance Toward Power While Appearing Not to Move at All

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On Priesthoods

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Why We Need a Cyber Bill of Rights