Social Learning Links
Michael Huemer on getting suckered; Dan Williams on populism; Yascha Mounk on Bluesky; Marc Andreessen on elites
a. If you’re on the left, you’re biased toward stories about oppression and prejudice.
b. If you’re on the right, you’re biased toward stories about dangerous foreigners.
c. If you’re libertarian, you’re biased toward stories about evil or incompetent governments.
This would align with my three languages of politics, if for (b) one substituted “you’re biased toward stories about threats to our civilization.”
Outlets like the New York Times and the BBC are deeply flawed in many respects. Although even their critics acknowledge that they typically get narrow matters of fact right, they select, omit, frame, package, interpret, and comment on those facts in ways that support establishment narratives. This is bad—but, again, compared to what? The thriving world of alternative media, from Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson to Elon Musk’s Twitter feed, can’t even get the narrow matters of fact right.
He is tackling the question of why there is populist backlash against elites, when the populist alternatives are themselves flawed.
I think he misses some important factors:
Elites who are in power are held to higher standards than counter-elites who are out of power.
Elites that are arrogant are setting themselves up for backlash.
Elites who suppress dissent are really setting themselves up for backlash.
Look at all of the Democratic officials and legacy media outlets that vouched for Mr. Biden’s capacity and attacked anyone who raised questions. How can there not be backlash against that?
Finally, there is the aspect of elites crying “wolf” about the awful things will be if the populists gain power. But in fact, Meloni, Milei, and Orban seem to be doing much better than Trudeau, Starmer, Macron, and Scholz.
When a platform or political subculture allows anyone to portray themselves as victims without any real evidence, bad actors will recognize an opportunity to swoop in. And then these bad actors will quickly weaponize false claims to victimization as an excuse to harass or physically threaten people who supposedly have it coming to them. In a culture of victimhood that has no inbuilt defenses against bad actors, things will—as the recent blowup on Bluesky reminds us—always eventually get out of hand.
Every community, however noble its stated intentions and however progressive its purported values, needs a mechanism for defending itself against the small minority of people who are prone to exploit and manipulate their social environment. If yours doesn’t have one, it’s inviting the sadists, the narcissists and the psychopaths to run the show.
His essay provides a lot of analysis and literature citations that reinforce my speculations in If the doctrine fits.
In an interview with Erik Torenberg, Marc Andreessen says,
To paraphrase Burnham, if you want to replace the elite you have today, you need to have a better elite. So then you're a thought experiment territory, which is, okay, what would be a superior elite to the elite we have today? Well, a bunch of things.
So, one is they would presumably have a set of ideas that would be better because that would presumably be the whole point of doing this. Then, they’d need a superior story, sometimes called a political myth. Then they’d need fashion, status, prestige, right? Hey, I would need legitimately to be able to do the project. If you belong to our elite, you are a higher status, higher prestige person than if you belong to that elite. Right? Then you’d need the perpetuation method, the recruitment method, funding, an education system, media organs, and the ability to get your message out.
The interview gets at how Andreessen came to arrive at his current views. Along the way, he was influenced by Nietzsche’s “master morality/slave morality” and James Burnham’s critique of egalitarianism (also Burnham’s concept of managerialism).
I have to say that I have never been able to get through either Nietzsche or Burnham.
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Arnold writes: Finally, there is the aspect of elites crying “wolf” about the awful things will be if the populists gain power. But in fact, Meloni, Milei, and Orban seem to be doing much better than Trudeau, Starmer, Macron, and Scholz.
GPT helps add some worthwhile insight for those of us who are not able to skips as many steps as Arnold (thankfully Arnold is very smart):
This sentence highlights the recurring warnings from elites about the dangers of populist leaders gaining power, suggesting that such concerns may be exaggerated or misplaced. It contrasts the actual performance of notable populist leaders—Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Javier Milei in Argentina, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary—with that of more centrist or establishment figures like Justin Trudeau in Canada, Keir Starmer in the UK, Emmanuel Macron in France, and Olaf Scholz in Germany.
The underlying argument seems to be that the dire predictions associated with populist governance—economic instability, authoritarianism, or social unrest—haven’t necessarily materialized to the extent warned about, and, in some cases, these leaders might even outperform their centrist counterparts in key metrics like governance, public approval, or economic management. Meanwhile, the leaders of more traditionally centrist or liberal democracies are facing challenges such as stagnating approval ratings, policy gridlock, or public dissatisfaction, which could indicate that the “wolf” of populism isn’t as threatening as initially claimed.
This contrast invites a closer examination of the biases in elite narratives and the complexities of evaluating political leadership beyond ideological labels.
Long live Arnold and his valuable insights!
Arnold is as usual being too charitable to Williams who claims alternative media can't even get facts right. They got the Russian collusion hoax right, the Hunter Biden laptop right, the Wuhan Lab origin of Covid right, the ineffectiveness and risk of the mRNA vaccines right, Biden's cognitive state right, and many other things as well. Meanwhile, his institutional media not only didn't get things right, they weren't even interested in the truth, and in some cases were knowingly lying in support of partisan goals. Williams seems to have no idea how ludicrous his attempted defense is.