Dan Williams is too biased to analyze the crucial facts & reactions of the US to the single most substantial false information promulgated in the last 10 years, based on these facts:
1-HR Clinton’s campaign worked to get true and false dirt on Trump in 2015, especially creating the mostly false Steele dossier.
2-This false info was sent to the FBI which failed to falsify it, and instead accepted it.
3-Using the false info, Obama’s FBI got a FISA court order to allow illegal spying on Trump.
(3b-Obama lied when he said he wasn’t spying on Trump) (3 more judges rubber stamped the illegal spying)
4-After Trump was elected, the false Steele info was used to justify the Special Prosecutor Mueller, who led a 2 year witch hunt on investigating Trump & his staff. Unsurprisingly, a couple were found guilty of other crimes, but not Russian Collusion.
5-Most elite news frequently and confidently predicted Trump being indicted and convicted of collusion, and when Trump called it Fake News, the elites said Trump was lying.
6-There was no illegal collusion.
Williams admirably alludes to some elite / blue tribe problems like the replication crisis, but totally fails to address the Russia Hoax smear against Trump. He claims, against the known actions of Trump as President, that the red tribe (Trump supporters) are unmoored from reality. He uses the recent “Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield” to show it.
Illegal actions by the Democratic Deep State, as did occur in 2016-2018, and might have occurred in 2020, are a far far bigger problem than Trump or Vance complaining about 20-15,000 (estimates have gone down) Haitian immigrants sent by Border Czar Harris to a small 60k Ohio town.
This also shows the taking Trump difference between R) seriously but not literally, and D) literally but not seriously. (Neither Blue nor Liberal are on ballots, but D & R are the real choices).
**all should look up the Kiffness YouTube video of Trump Eating the Cats
Vance claims that some constituents have complained. Claims have not been proven.
What is the T-truth? What do you believe? Legally our system presumes innocence, to avoid false guilty verdicts, but that means in practice more false not-guilty verdicts, as many believe was the OJ case.
I believe that most Haitians there are working hard, but some 1-5% are bad guys, 200-1000. It might well be true that a couple cats & dogs have been eaten, it’s very likely that more have been killed in car accidents-where is the proof that the number eaten is 0. If you believe the number is 0, because that’s your presumption, that assumption seems no better, and somewhat weaker, than actual local folk complaining. This issue of what one believes is different than the legal presumption of innocence. Those like Williams calling Trump a liar are doing so without evidence, more because they want to believe he’s a liar, and didn’t want to believe that Obama was lying about the more important illegal spying.
@Stu—this kind of anti-Trump near hysterics by Williams is in line with prior biased criticism of Trump.
Note that huge Dem deep state lies, like H Biden’s laptop being Russian disinformation, are accepted then never more brought up by Dem supporters (almost never). Since it’s elites, Dems, calling for the Human Right of free speech to be censored because of misinformation, the proven false info from Dems should be key issues to be discussed. Williams failure to do shows … significant bias.
Re the seemingly trivial cat eating business, it reflects the way certain specific instances serve as place-holders for issues. Remember Dukakis in the tank, looking like a bobble-head? The issue wasn't his appearance, it was whether his party was weak on national defense.
Or the Willie Horton case? The issue wasn't whether one thug on prison furlough from Dukakis's Massachusetts had committed a terrible crime, it stood as the symbol for Dukakis's party being weak on crime. George H.W. Bush's adviser Lee Atwater was a master with such memes. Now all politicians know this, and this is why there is a desperate effort to focus on and discredit the specific cat-eating instance - for fear it will become the talisman for the powerful immigration issue.
Well, I agree with all your points except the last.
IMO the focus on the cat-eating is simply that it’s a pretty easy one to discredit Trump and Vance on. The left-biased MSM has very few things (other than total abortion bans) where the public actually agrees with them, so it’s unsurprising they would focus on one where Trump and Vance don’t seem to have the facts in their favor, and where they at minimum made a small mistake in highlighting something where the facts aren’t clearly on their side.
So the media would rather the discussion be about this than about any other aspect of illegal immigration, where *both* the facts *and* public opinion* are overwhelmingly on Trump/Vance’s side.
Chris Rufo investigated and found an actual instance of cat-eating in a nearby town. Haitians in Haiti, near starvation, regularly eat any animal they can find. Would it be strange if they continue on arrival here? Also, animal sacrifice (and apparently, eating) is evidently part of voodoo religion. So I wouldn't be too certain that Trump and Vance have been "discredited," except in the eyes of those who take Democrat partisan media at face value. The meme, regardless of the underlying facts, has power.
I agree with most of that but certainly not all. Maybe my biggest disagree is with the claim he is labeled a liar without evidence. While I would agree that the left lies about what Trump has said and done, he has told plenty of lies that are blatantly false with excellent evidence.
As usual with Trump critics, "plenty of lies" without specifying any. Williams at least mentioned "biggest inauguration", but it was in reference to "influential" folk, so he can add other wrong stuff that wasn't Trump. And the evidence of biggest inauguration reference was a double picture showing Obama's huge crowd and almost nobody for Trump -- yet not noting the empty Trump photo was some 3 hrs before the ceremony.
There were huge crowds for both--and it's very in character for Trump to claim "best" rather than "very good". Yet it's not a serious difference.
Ok, but most of these are of the form “take him literally not seriously”
And some of the things he said that were supposedly lies (e.g. “the government is wire-tapping me”) turn out to have been explicitly *true*, and yet the MSM never acknowledges and apologizes, they instead just MoveOn.org…)
I agree some of his comments are better when taken seriously rather than literally. It is also true he makes sarcastic comments with the intent of irking the left r gardless of truth. Still, plenty are still outright lies.
I think it is generally a good idea to take what Trump says "seriously but not literally". The problem lots of people have is that the "literally" is often not true, and so not true that it is obvious. The MSM is happy to play those lies and the cumulative effect on a good number of people is that Trump is just not a reasonable choice. Especially since Kamala Harris is presented as a nice respectable alternative. If Trump loses, his succession of "literally untruths" will be a big part of the reason.
I agree with most of the rest of what you say, but not the last line. The MSM will diss Trump regardless.
But I do agree that the pet-eating line was a needless mistake. While he would never admit it publicly, I think he knows this is the rare case where it was actually not helpful that he did it.
Re: "Until more people care about truth rather than tribal status, we are likely to remain in a social epistemology slump"
True. However, there would remain crucial issues in *preferences* (distinct from beliefs) that cut across the divide between progressives and populists. For example, both political 'tribes' persistently prefer to kick the can down the road in public finance (deficits and debt); and both tribes tend to have ever lower birth-rates (via a complex set of revealed preferences).
Short-termism in preferences might be a deeper problem than cognitive tribalism in belief-formation in politics — and more fraught with negative long-term consequences..
I am glad you make the point about knowledge and evidence being used to justify prior beliefs instead of forming them; that is a far too often overlooked behavior, and seems to be primary role of messaging on political subjects (as well as many day to day practical subjects.) Most people, most of the time, are not interested in the truth but justifying their beliefs, which is why they decide what to believe by choosing who to believe instead of finding out for themselves. Then you can just find someone who makes a convincing case for what you want to believe and roll with that.
I think you, Arnold, do want to add the other aspect of knowledge generation, because while most people simply rely on others for most things, not everyone and not always is that true. There are first movers at the high status/visibility levels of society and we should ask how they are choosing what to believe, and of course in many instances individuals actually do find out for themselves and gather actual knowledge and beliefs that are no dependent on what other people say. That that isn't the majority of the time doesn't mean it isn't the more important. It is also the one we as a society rely on the most to actually get good things going.
The Problem is "Wrongness". You can choose to believe that the sun orbits the earth. It doesn't. You can believe that one religion is better than another. It's' debatable, arguable, but in general not provable. Exceptions are those involving human sacrifice. Though there will still be believers. In economics the question is does it work? Communism for example never has. It's' been tried and tried and tried. Never works. Yet people argue that "true Communism" has never been tried. When ask to define true Communism you receive an explanation that is down to one that works because it works. Not exactly circular logic, more like Möbius Strip Logic.
It isn't who do you believe or what do you believe. It's become what facts do you consider to be facts. The COVID labe leak was not a fact, until it was. Hunter's lap top was disinformation and that was a fact, until it wasn't. The Steele Dossier was a fact, until it wasn't . But people still believe it was\is a fact and you aren't going to change their minds.
As for the cats: When Vietnamese refuges started showing up in California after the defeat of South Vietnam there were reports of them eating pigeons in Golden Gate Park. People said it wasn't true. It was. Squab is regarded in many places as a delicacy. Annie Oakley use to shoot pigeons and sell them to restaurants. As for cats? As far as I'm concerned it's not a fact unless proven. Can't see it as they don't have much meat to make it worth it. Though on the other hand South Korea only recently outlawed the selling of dog meat. So people did eat pigeons and dogs. Cats? Maybe.
“We have become accustomed to choosing who to believe based on tribal signals. On the left, membership in the well-educated class is signaled by “luxury beliefs,” along with a press secretary who justifies opinions by appeals to expertise. See Michael Huemer’s Progressive Myths.
People on the right operate in their own reality-distortion fields. Until more people care about truth rather than tribal status, we are likely to remain in a social epistemology slump, if not a crisis.”
Two comments on this quite excellent piece.
Re: the different sources of information that shape beliefs, for those of us who at least try to keep well-informed, there is one asymmetry Arnold doesn’t mention:
Elites / highly “educated” folks on the left consume almost exclusively MSM media sources that are left-biased (about the only generalized exception here would be the minority who read the WSJ).
Elites / highly educated people who are on the right or moderate consume media sources from both the left and the right.
When I argue with my liberal friends, I tell them that my main advantage over them is that I am more informed than they are simply because I don’t get my info all from one side. Prior to 10 years ago, my information advantage would have been much lesser.
Re: the quite excellent press secretary analogy, the President’s press secretary’s job has always been to “spin” things favorably for the current administration. While I don’t doubt or deny that both Obama’s and Trump’s press secretaries likely told some lies, that was not their general modus operandi.
By contrast, both of Biden’s press secretaries, Psaki and KJP, have *regularly* told flat-out lies (Psaki was generally good at it, while KJP is bad at it), and the press has rarely called them on it.
Whether you claim this is a symptom or a cause of the current crisis (I think a bit of both), at minimum this change in MO of “the” press secretary is worth noting.
A great post, or at least one that I agree with 99%. The 1% is in Arthur C. Clarke's, "For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert." Although as the non-Left are excluded from the trough, all "experts" are losing in both public perception and reality.
Many tyrants, starting with Plato, have sought to control education. As someone certified as a middle-school teacher, I'd say the social studies curriculum is thin at best--even TAG students get pablum and the gods help the "community" kids. Maybe we should just aim to teach students to read primary sources before they listen to "interpreters." Madison is next on my list...
Lots of people who don't have kids in school probably don't know that "TAG students" are talented and gifted students. It is always bad manners to use an acronym that readers will not immediately recognize. Come on, just spell it out. Always. You've made the effort to write down a thought. Now make it so everyone understands.
conservatives treat as sacred their own common sense while liberals treat as sacred credentialed expertise.1
This strikes me as diametrically wrong.
Restricting immigration and cutting taxes to run up large deficits seems commonsensically wrong to me and "conservatives" believe it only becasue the have heard it from Foxy Newish pundits.
Epistemology strikes me as possibly something of a red herring. We do not live in a direct democracy in which elections are used to make policy decisions. We live in a representative democracy in which voters, theoretically at least, attempt to elect other individuals to represent their interests more or less and to express dissatisfaction when their interests are ill-served or neglected. The great search for truth has very little to do with an individual’s perception of changes in their quality of life. The real issue is principal-agent problems in governance. Populists believe such things exist. Establishment apologists deny them except when opportunism presents a strategic short term advantage. That is why the study of legitimation is probably a more helpful avenue of study than going down the epistemology rabbit hole, which, remember, Friedman’s Power Without Knowledge, ends with him talking uncontacted tribes, James C. Scott, and what to do if we “fail to exit from modernity.” Do we really want to go there?
For Friedman, the belief that government ought be expected to do something useful is technocratic and he rejects this conception of technocracy as populism, favoring instead a do-nothing approach to government:
“When populists object to governance by ‘elites,’ they are saying that there is a ruling class that governs in its own interests, not the interests of the country as a whole. This is their explanation for what they perceive as the failure of the government to solve the people’s problems.
But it isn’t just their explanation. Mainstream politicians and the mainstream media are responsible for propagating the basic tenets of the populist explanation for what ails us. The alternative explanation would entail radically questioning the capacity of anyone, mass or elite, to carry out the duties that we’ve all come to assume that the political system can perform.” (https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-legitimacy-crisis/ )
As far as I can tell Friedman never got around to forming his list of what he would consider the legitimate tasks of a government. But others, I’m thinking of others in a similar vein like Nozick and Randy Barnett have, but, it seems that pragmatic considerations never sullied their output. The Founders sold us a bill of goods in this regard with “enumerated powers” but it took no timoe at all for the legal guild to decide they could maximize billable hours by expanding “necessary and proper” to randomly and arbitrarily mean whatever they wanted it to.
Friedman started off Knowledge Without Power decently enough indeed by attempting to engage with Habermas and and his book Legitimation Crisis (https://www.wiley.com/en-sg/Legitimation+Crisis-p-9780745694153 ). But Friedman dismisses the issues Habermas introduces with a non sequitur, claiming that government can only operate efficaciously if human behavior can be predicted. Friedman thus ignores the dynamic conception of democracy and governance as an incremental discovery process that may in certain circumstances accommodate more, rather than less, competing interests.
“The idea of equal respect for persons, for their autonomy and sovereignty over their thoughts, utterances and personal choices, is a value distinct from concern for their general well-being, and it justifies the protection of individual rights of liberty, not just instrumentally but as something we owe to each person for its own sake. That is part of what it means to treat others as moral equals. But this is part of a continuing argument – an argument which has certainly not been won by either side.”
Brilliant post - one of Arnold's best. "Until more people care about truth rather than tribal status, we are likely to remain in a social epistemology slump, if not a crisis." And when will that happen? Unfortunately, never.
People care about the truth enough to influence their major life decisions, their brain just protects their social standing by making them unaware of their own hypocrisy when they claim to believe in totally contradictory, factually incorrect but politically correct beliefs.
Dan Williams is too biased to analyze the crucial facts & reactions of the US to the single most substantial false information promulgated in the last 10 years, based on these facts:
1-HR Clinton’s campaign worked to get true and false dirt on Trump in 2015, especially creating the mostly false Steele dossier.
2-This false info was sent to the FBI which failed to falsify it, and instead accepted it.
3-Using the false info, Obama’s FBI got a FISA court order to allow illegal spying on Trump.
(3b-Obama lied when he said he wasn’t spying on Trump) (3 more judges rubber stamped the illegal spying)
4-After Trump was elected, the false Steele info was used to justify the Special Prosecutor Mueller, who led a 2 year witch hunt on investigating Trump & his staff. Unsurprisingly, a couple were found guilty of other crimes, but not Russian Collusion.
5-Most elite news frequently and confidently predicted Trump being indicted and convicted of collusion, and when Trump called it Fake News, the elites said Trump was lying.
6-There was no illegal collusion.
Williams admirably alludes to some elite / blue tribe problems like the replication crisis, but totally fails to address the Russia Hoax smear against Trump. He claims, against the known actions of Trump as President, that the red tribe (Trump supporters) are unmoored from reality. He uses the recent “Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield” to show it.
Illegal actions by the Democratic Deep State, as did occur in 2016-2018, and might have occurred in 2020, are a far far bigger problem than Trump or Vance complaining about 20-15,000 (estimates have gone down) Haitian immigrants sent by Border Czar Harris to a small 60k Ohio town.
This also shows the taking Trump difference between R) seriously but not literally, and D) literally but not seriously. (Neither Blue nor Liberal are on ballots, but D & R are the real choices).
**all should look up the Kiffness YouTube video of Trump Eating the Cats
Vance claims that some constituents have complained. Claims have not been proven.
What is the T-truth? What do you believe? Legally our system presumes innocence, to avoid false guilty verdicts, but that means in practice more false not-guilty verdicts, as many believe was the OJ case.
I believe that most Haitians there are working hard, but some 1-5% are bad guys, 200-1000. It might well be true that a couple cats & dogs have been eaten, it’s very likely that more have been killed in car accidents-where is the proof that the number eaten is 0. If you believe the number is 0, because that’s your presumption, that assumption seems no better, and somewhat weaker, than actual local folk complaining. This issue of what one believes is different than the legal presumption of innocence. Those like Williams calling Trump a liar are doing so without evidence, more because they want to believe he’s a liar, and didn’t want to believe that Obama was lying about the more important illegal spying.
@Stu—this kind of anti-Trump near hysterics by Williams is in line with prior biased criticism of Trump.
Note that huge Dem deep state lies, like H Biden’s laptop being Russian disinformation, are accepted then never more brought up by Dem supporters (almost never). Since it’s elites, Dems, calling for the Human Right of free speech to be censored because of misinformation, the proven false info from Dems should be key issues to be discussed. Williams failure to do shows … significant bias.
Re the seemingly trivial cat eating business, it reflects the way certain specific instances serve as place-holders for issues. Remember Dukakis in the tank, looking like a bobble-head? The issue wasn't his appearance, it was whether his party was weak on national defense.
Or the Willie Horton case? The issue wasn't whether one thug on prison furlough from Dukakis's Massachusetts had committed a terrible crime, it stood as the symbol for Dukakis's party being weak on crime. George H.W. Bush's adviser Lee Atwater was a master with such memes. Now all politicians know this, and this is why there is a desperate effort to focus on and discredit the specific cat-eating instance - for fear it will become the talisman for the powerful immigration issue.
Well, I agree with all your points except the last.
IMO the focus on the cat-eating is simply that it’s a pretty easy one to discredit Trump and Vance on. The left-biased MSM has very few things (other than total abortion bans) where the public actually agrees with them, so it’s unsurprising they would focus on one where Trump and Vance don’t seem to have the facts in their favor, and where they at minimum made a small mistake in highlighting something where the facts aren’t clearly on their side.
So the media would rather the discussion be about this than about any other aspect of illegal immigration, where *both* the facts *and* public opinion* are overwhelmingly on Trump/Vance’s side.
Chris Rufo investigated and found an actual instance of cat-eating in a nearby town. Haitians in Haiti, near starvation, regularly eat any animal they can find. Would it be strange if they continue on arrival here? Also, animal sacrifice (and apparently, eating) is evidently part of voodoo religion. So I wouldn't be too certain that Trump and Vance have been "discredited," except in the eyes of those who take Democrat partisan media at face value. The meme, regardless of the underlying facts, has power.
I agree with most of that but certainly not all. Maybe my biggest disagree is with the claim he is labeled a liar without evidence. While I would agree that the left lies about what Trump has said and done, he has told plenty of lies that are blatantly false with excellent evidence.
As usual with Trump critics, "plenty of lies" without specifying any. Williams at least mentioned "biggest inauguration", but it was in reference to "influential" folk, so he can add other wrong stuff that wasn't Trump. And the evidence of biggest inauguration reference was a double picture showing Obama's huge crowd and almost nobody for Trump -- yet not noting the empty Trump photo was some 3 hrs before the ceremony.
There were huge crowds for both--and it's very in character for Trump to claim "best" rather than "very good". Yet it's not a serious difference.
Ok, let's agree the comparison photos were a lie. Does that mean Trump didn't lie about having the largest mall crowd? No.
I'm not saying all of these are accurate but certainly more than a few are. Be sure and look at the linked lists too.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/politics/fact-check-trump-march-may-part-1/index.html
Ok, but most of these are of the form “take him literally not seriously”
And some of the things he said that were supposedly lies (e.g. “the government is wire-tapping me”) turn out to have been explicitly *true*, and yet the MSM never acknowledges and apologizes, they instead just MoveOn.org…)
I put a list in under Tom Grey's comment.
I agree some of his comments are better when taken seriously rather than literally. It is also true he makes sarcastic comments with the intent of irking the left r gardless of truth. Still, plenty are still outright lies.
I think it is generally a good idea to take what Trump says "seriously but not literally". The problem lots of people have is that the "literally" is often not true, and so not true that it is obvious. The MSM is happy to play those lies and the cumulative effect on a good number of people is that Trump is just not a reasonable choice. Especially since Kamala Harris is presented as a nice respectable alternative. If Trump loses, his succession of "literally untruths" will be a big part of the reason.
I agree with most of the rest of what you say, but not the last line. The MSM will diss Trump regardless.
But I do agree that the pet-eating line was a needless mistake. While he would never admit it publicly, I think he knows this is the rare case where it was actually not helpful that he did it.
Sure the MSM will diss Trump regardless, but it's an own goal to provide them ammunition.
Rare case? Really?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BrCvZmSnKA&t=33s -- fun Kissness video
Re: "Until more people care about truth rather than tribal status, we are likely to remain in a social epistemology slump"
True. However, there would remain crucial issues in *preferences* (distinct from beliefs) that cut across the divide between progressives and populists. For example, both political 'tribes' persistently prefer to kick the can down the road in public finance (deficits and debt); and both tribes tend to have ever lower birth-rates (via a complex set of revealed preferences).
Short-termism in preferences might be a deeper problem than cognitive tribalism in belief-formation in politics — and more fraught with negative long-term consequences..
I am glad you make the point about knowledge and evidence being used to justify prior beliefs instead of forming them; that is a far too often overlooked behavior, and seems to be primary role of messaging on political subjects (as well as many day to day practical subjects.) Most people, most of the time, are not interested in the truth but justifying their beliefs, which is why they decide what to believe by choosing who to believe instead of finding out for themselves. Then you can just find someone who makes a convincing case for what you want to believe and roll with that.
I think you, Arnold, do want to add the other aspect of knowledge generation, because while most people simply rely on others for most things, not everyone and not always is that true. There are first movers at the high status/visibility levels of society and we should ask how they are choosing what to believe, and of course in many instances individuals actually do find out for themselves and gather actual knowledge and beliefs that are no dependent on what other people say. That that isn't the majority of the time doesn't mean it isn't the more important. It is also the one we as a society rely on the most to actually get good things going.
The current situation strikes me as normal and times when a relatively coherent elite can dominate all discourse as the aberration.
Interesting analysis.
The Problem is "Wrongness". You can choose to believe that the sun orbits the earth. It doesn't. You can believe that one religion is better than another. It's' debatable, arguable, but in general not provable. Exceptions are those involving human sacrifice. Though there will still be believers. In economics the question is does it work? Communism for example never has. It's' been tried and tried and tried. Never works. Yet people argue that "true Communism" has never been tried. When ask to define true Communism you receive an explanation that is down to one that works because it works. Not exactly circular logic, more like Möbius Strip Logic.
It isn't who do you believe or what do you believe. It's become what facts do you consider to be facts. The COVID labe leak was not a fact, until it was. Hunter's lap top was disinformation and that was a fact, until it wasn't. The Steele Dossier was a fact, until it wasn't . But people still believe it was\is a fact and you aren't going to change their minds.
As for the cats: When Vietnamese refuges started showing up in California after the defeat of South Vietnam there were reports of them eating pigeons in Golden Gate Park. People said it wasn't true. It was. Squab is regarded in many places as a delicacy. Annie Oakley use to shoot pigeons and sell them to restaurants. As for cats? As far as I'm concerned it's not a fact unless proven. Can't see it as they don't have much meat to make it worth it. Though on the other hand South Korea only recently outlawed the selling of dog meat. So people did eat pigeons and dogs. Cats? Maybe.
“We have become accustomed to choosing who to believe based on tribal signals. On the left, membership in the well-educated class is signaled by “luxury beliefs,” along with a press secretary who justifies opinions by appeals to expertise. See Michael Huemer’s Progressive Myths.
People on the right operate in their own reality-distortion fields. Until more people care about truth rather than tribal status, we are likely to remain in a social epistemology slump, if not a crisis.”
Two comments on this quite excellent piece.
Re: the different sources of information that shape beliefs, for those of us who at least try to keep well-informed, there is one asymmetry Arnold doesn’t mention:
Elites / highly “educated” folks on the left consume almost exclusively MSM media sources that are left-biased (about the only generalized exception here would be the minority who read the WSJ).
Elites / highly educated people who are on the right or moderate consume media sources from both the left and the right.
When I argue with my liberal friends, I tell them that my main advantage over them is that I am more informed than they are simply because I don’t get my info all from one side. Prior to 10 years ago, my information advantage would have been much lesser.
Re: the quite excellent press secretary analogy, the President’s press secretary’s job has always been to “spin” things favorably for the current administration. While I don’t doubt or deny that both Obama’s and Trump’s press secretaries likely told some lies, that was not their general modus operandi.
By contrast, both of Biden’s press secretaries, Psaki and KJP, have *regularly* told flat-out lies (Psaki was generally good at it, while KJP is bad at it), and the press has rarely called them on it.
Whether you claim this is a symptom or a cause of the current crisis (I think a bit of both), at minimum this change in MO of “the” press secretary is worth noting.
A great post, or at least one that I agree with 99%. The 1% is in Arthur C. Clarke's, "For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert." Although as the non-Left are excluded from the trough, all "experts" are losing in both public perception and reality.
Many tyrants, starting with Plato, have sought to control education. As someone certified as a middle-school teacher, I'd say the social studies curriculum is thin at best--even TAG students get pablum and the gods help the "community" kids. Maybe we should just aim to teach students to read primary sources before they listen to "interpreters." Madison is next on my list...
Lots of people who don't have kids in school probably don't know that "TAG students" are talented and gifted students. It is always bad manners to use an acronym that readers will not immediately recognize. Come on, just spell it out. Always. You've made the effort to write down a thought. Now make it so everyone understands.
conservatives treat as sacred their own common sense while liberals treat as sacred credentialed expertise.1
This strikes me as diametrically wrong.
Restricting immigration and cutting taxes to run up large deficits seems commonsensically wrong to me and "conservatives" believe it only becasue the have heard it from Foxy Newish pundits.
Epistemology strikes me as possibly something of a red herring. We do not live in a direct democracy in which elections are used to make policy decisions. We live in a representative democracy in which voters, theoretically at least, attempt to elect other individuals to represent their interests more or less and to express dissatisfaction when their interests are ill-served or neglected. The great search for truth has very little to do with an individual’s perception of changes in their quality of life. The real issue is principal-agent problems in governance. Populists believe such things exist. Establishment apologists deny them except when opportunism presents a strategic short term advantage. That is why the study of legitimation is probably a more helpful avenue of study than going down the epistemology rabbit hole, which, remember, Friedman’s Power Without Knowledge, ends with him talking uncontacted tribes, James C. Scott, and what to do if we “fail to exit from modernity.” Do we really want to go there?
For Friedman, the belief that government ought be expected to do something useful is technocratic and he rejects this conception of technocracy as populism, favoring instead a do-nothing approach to government:
“When populists object to governance by ‘elites,’ they are saying that there is a ruling class that governs in its own interests, not the interests of the country as a whole. This is their explanation for what they perceive as the failure of the government to solve the people’s problems.
But it isn’t just their explanation. Mainstream politicians and the mainstream media are responsible for propagating the basic tenets of the populist explanation for what ails us. The alternative explanation would entail radically questioning the capacity of anyone, mass or elite, to carry out the duties that we’ve all come to assume that the political system can perform.” (https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-legitimacy-crisis/ )
As far as I can tell Friedman never got around to forming his list of what he would consider the legitimate tasks of a government. But others, I’m thinking of others in a similar vein like Nozick and Randy Barnett have, but, it seems that pragmatic considerations never sullied their output. The Founders sold us a bill of goods in this regard with “enumerated powers” but it took no timoe at all for the legal guild to decide they could maximize billable hours by expanding “necessary and proper” to randomly and arbitrarily mean whatever they wanted it to.
Friedman started off Knowledge Without Power decently enough indeed by attempting to engage with Habermas and and his book Legitimation Crisis (https://www.wiley.com/en-sg/Legitimation+Crisis-p-9780745694153 ). But Friedman dismisses the issues Habermas introduces with a non sequitur, claiming that government can only operate efficaciously if human behavior can be predicted. Friedman thus ignores the dynamic conception of democracy and governance as an incremental discovery process that may in certain circumstances accommodate more, rather than less, competing interests.
I’m wondering myself if someone smart might be able to frame the crux of slump as a legimation issue maybe starting with Robert Michel’s Political Parties (https://archive.org/details/politicalparties00mich/page/n5/mode/2up )
coupled with a close reading of Legitimation Crisis coupled with Mark Suchman’s influential article
“Managing Legitimacy” (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273070350_Managing_Legitimacy_Strategic_and_Institutional_Approaches_Academy_of_Management_Review_20_571-611 ) with a nod to epistemology via Thomas Nagel’s value pluralism:
“The idea of equal respect for persons, for their autonomy and sovereignty over their thoughts, utterances and personal choices, is a value distinct from concern for their general well-being, and it justifies the protection of individual rights of liberty, not just instrumentally but as something we owe to each person for its own sake. That is part of what it means to treat others as moral equals. But this is part of a continuing argument – an argument which has certainly not been won by either side.”
(https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n18/thomas-nagel/getting-on-with-each-other ). Nagel’s perception of equal respect offers a humane, and, I believe more fundamentally truthful approach to negotiating social division than Lippmannite projection about herds being steered by the press.
no to 1.
we believe those people who tell us what we want to hear
influence is crowd pleasing
perhaps, but then this raises the question of where "what we want to hear" comes from
from our elephant
But where does the elephant in our brain get it?
Brilliant post - one of Arnold's best. "Until more people care about truth rather than tribal status, we are likely to remain in a social epistemology slump, if not a crisis." And when will that happen? Unfortunately, never.
People care about the truth enough to influence their major life decisions, their brain just protects their social standing by making them unaware of their own hypocrisy when they claim to believe in totally contradictory, factually incorrect but politically correct beliefs.