Thanks for a concise and insightful column. Reading the introductory paragraph, I had trouble deciding whether to be puzzled, amused, or outraged by Leiter's premise - that the problem with the internet era is that we no longer have authorities who are widely believed. To pick the topics he mentions, which supposedly have no controversy among experts:
Climate change: What, exactly, is the agreement among experts? I think that experts believe that the climate is changing (primarily warming), and that human activity is a major cause, if not the only significant cause. But if we can believe the meta-epistemic authorities in the media, the epistemic authorities also believe that we must immediately and drastically curtail all emissions of greenhouse gases, in order to prevent global catastrophe that threatens civilization itself. But the actual scientific publications of the actual experts recognized by the IPCC (supposedly the epistemic authority on the subject) don't support these beliefs.
Effects of vaccines: What, exactly, do the experts agree on? I assume that experts agree that many vaccines (polio, smallpox, rubella, pertussis, tetanus for example) are safe (meaning minimal risk of side effects) and effective (preventing recipients from getting the disease), and that high levels of immunization in the population produce "herd immunity" that essentially eradicates these diseases in the population. How much of this applies to other vaccines, like COVID? When the experts tell us that COVID vaccines are "98% effective," does that mean that 98% of recipients will not get COVID, or that 98% of recipients will get some benefit, or something else? Our meta-epistemic authorities in the media told us the former, but they were apparently wrong. Why were they wrong? Did they apply the smallpox model inappropriately because they didn't understand? Did the epistemic authorities try to correct them, or were the epistemic authorities also wrong?
The role of natural selection in the evolution of species: This topic seems different, at least for the Western world, because disagreement with the experts seems primarily driven by religious belief. But in that sense, there has always been a significant part of the population that didn't accept the experts, and the internet hardly caused that disagreement.
The biological facts about race: I'm not sure what the "experts" agree on here. I expect generalizations like "differences within racial groups are larger than any possible differences between groups," but so what? There was a time when "scientific racism" was adopted by the epistemic authorities, but has now been discredited, replaced by an axiomatic belief that there are no differences. How much of this agreement among experts is based on quantifiable evidence, and how much on politically imposed orthodoxy enforced by social and professional ostracism? It is generally accepted that all humans share approximately 99.9% of DNA, but we also share 98.8% of our DNA with chimpanzees, and 40-50% with cabbages. Do these numbers mean anything?
It may well be true that there was less disagreement and controversy in the halcyon years between World War II and the internet, but that doesn't mean there were more true beliefs and less ignorance.
We should always be skeptical of experts and even more skeptical of meta sources. No doubt we weren't skeptical enough in the past and plenty of examples of error, intentional or not, but Id argue it was a relatively small number of issues and a much smaller number where the negative impact on society was more than tiny. We have crossed over into a situation where a large number of people (of both "sides," depending on the issue) not only no longer believe the experts but do so in the name of activism, based on contrarianism, or on the word of non-experts which more often than not is baseless.
It's unfortunate that some people reflexively reject the knowledge of experts. It's more unfortunate that some people embrace the experts to justify their preferred policies, even if the experts' conclusions don't support the policies. This again is not exactly new. Eugenics was justified based on the expertise of the "scientific racists." Population restriction and economic regression were justified based on the expertise of people like Paul Ehrlich and groups like the Club of Rome.
I agree with Kling that we need a process that gives higher status to people who pursue truth using careful reasoning. I don't see a process that can consistently do that, so I try myself, following the reasoning and evidence on issues that matter to me, and deciding which is more credible. Helped by people whose judgment I've learned to respect. I then try to share my understanding with people who might be interested.
Sorry - I wasn't clear. Population restriction and economic regression were advocated by people of a certain disposition that might today be called "green."
Population restriction was enacted in China's one-child policy and India's forced sterilization programs. I'm not aware of others, but there may have been some.
Economic regression was enacted by Cambodia's Khmer Rouge. Also, arguably by Mao's China, but that wasn't for ecological reasons.
Thanks for the kind reply. Ah yes, though China was definitely not doing so for environmental reasons since it was embarking on a program of environmental destruction. And triumphant economic progress: I’ve never seen a reckoning of how the one-child policy helped or hindered that. I’m sure the economists know.
I didn’t know about India’s forced sterilizations. I guess it had no or a counter effect on population.
I weary of hearing the words “Paul Ehrlich” as though it were some sort of brilliant riposte. A couple of virtually indistinguishable dudes made a silly bet. Nobody cares about the ways he was ultimately right, nor about the myriad people who were concerned about population for utterly non-humanist reasons. Those latter people have of course been thoroughly and sadly vindicated, as people filled all the niches. But that doesn’t really play well into the alt-right or libertarian right’s - or whatever you want to call it - fave pastime of scoring the same dumb points over and over against dumber people on the internet.
And I say that as basically a potential friend of the alt-right, or at least someone who would see them not disappear but grow up.
Ah, but do more people mean more per capita wealth?
Of course, more people have more ideas, more possibilities for improvement. But ideas and improvements don't come automatically. China and India have had large populations for centuries but only recently have started becoming wealthy.
No, China's one-child policy was not enacted for environmental reasons, at least as most people understand "environmental". It was based on Malthusian economics, viewed in a way that was popular among a lot of supposedly forward-thinking people in the 1960s and 1970s. I mentioned Ehrlich because his "The Population Bomb" (1968) was considered by many to be brilliantly insightful, leading to much silly advocacy for "zero population growth," while the real hero, Norman Borlaug, got busy on solving the problems of feeding more people.
India's steriization (along with suffocating Socialist restrictions on the economy) was probably the proximate cause of the assassination of Indira Ghandi. And eventually of the Nehru/Ghandi family losinf their grip on Indian politics and the government.
Certainly, there is more to Paul Ehrlich than his bet with Julian Simon. But I'm not a fan. To oversimplify, one can say, "I like the earth as it is. Humans change it. So I want less human change and probably less humans. I even want to change some things back." That is forthright and honest. (It is also, in a very real sense, conservative--even reactionary.)
Alternatively, one can say, "Humans are destroying the earth. We don't have much time left. So we must do less with less. And probably be less." That is dishonest. Hiding a moral/aesthetic judgment behind bad science. I see Ehrlich as doing a lot of the latter.
I don't see the first sentence "Humans are destroying the Earth" as particularly controversial, even among the camp for whom conservationists are the (needed, to sell books, to unite around, to raise $) enemy (in the case of these folks, or in their defense, the destruction, species loss, and of course aesthetics are unimportant *to them*). But it is disingenuous in the extreme to suppose that we understand what will follow on from that. And it is of course, breathtakingly radical, to be indifferent to nature. Very Marxist in its reductionist materialism.
Paul Ehrlich is 92? His moment in the sun was 5 decades ago. He is useful to the radicals, because it means they never have to reckon with actual details, with the real physical world (which in any case does not interest them).
What's interesting (kinda) about the latter-day Simon-ites is how paranoid they are - equally as much or more as that other dude, who was pretty worried; they really are cut from the same cloth - so that while proclaiming that it's illegitimate to worry about say the environment, while being rah-rah about population growth in all parts of the globe - they somehow see threats everywhere. It's like there's 8 billion people on the planet and yet people are Not Okay, they are under threat! Under threat in this very comment section! Something like the Endangered Species Act is not merely a matter of indifference to the Koch brothers types - but a mortal threat. Not an expression of prosperity but the thing that will do us in! From reading them you'd think it was they who find that people are in a very precarious position haha. Maybe you could get one of them to take the other side of the bet now.
Maybe the gap between experts and laypeople has widened, and that has something to do with it? IE, 50 years ago, not even virologists knew much about spike proteins, but now they're examining their RNA in detail to understand the origin of viruses, how they spread, and how to treat them. The knowledge gap between the two groups may mean anointed experts are increasingly incomprehensible to the average person on the street.
I don't think that's the explanation at all. To take the example of RNA vaccines, the public was originally told that the vaccines were 97-98% effective. The term was never explained, but I assume most people interpreted that to mean that 97-98% of people who got the shot would be immune to the disease. It turned out that wasn't true.
They recommended mandating vaccines for anyone entering public spaces, in order to build up "herd immunity." Then it turned out that the virus mutated too fast for the vaccine to give the kind of immunity that could build up herd immunity.
The experts originally recommended against masks for the general public, on the grounds that they wouldn't be effective. Then they recommended mandating masks for everyone. And said that the original guidance was a "noble lie" to keep people from panicking and buying all the available masks and keeping first responders from getting them.
The experts said the objective was to "flatten the curve" of transmission to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed as too many people got sick at the same time. Then they recommended mandatory multi-month lockdowns.
The experts said that the people most at risk from COVID were older people in poor health (such as nursing home residents), then the public health authorities recommended allocating vaccine doses to "underserved communities" to advance social justice.
The experts said that public gatherings should be banned. Then they said that social justice protests were important enough to warrant exemptions from the bans.
It's very hard for the average person to distinguish between errors from the epistemic authorities, errors from the meta-epistemic authorities, misinterpretations by the communicators, or motivated misapplication by people who have an agenda irrelevant to the subject at hand. I've seen no effort in the conventional media (our would-be meta-epistemic authorities) to sort out the changing stories, aside from one question to Anthony Fauci concerning masks, to which he gave the "noble lie" answer.
If experts change their stories without explanation, or give recommendations that make no sense given their reasoning, then laypeople will lose confidence in the experts.
I agree with all you wrote, but the answer is beyond and worse than what you cite.
You gave examples of potentially “noble” lies.
But the meta-epistemic authorities -have been caught repeatedly dealing in multiple clearly ignoble lies over the last several years, all while telling us to “trust the experts” that they cite, and distrust any experts who disagree with their POV.
This on top of elected authorities repeatedly lying in office (a much different thing than merely lying on the campaign trail), and it’s a wonder half the country trusts authorities at all.
I would add to that the fact that as experts' depth of knowledge increases, the breadth decreases. I think it is easier and more common for them to get out of their lane, intentional or not.
If that's true, I think it's because expert authority is invoked more often to justify contentious policies. Back in the early decades of the 20th century, expert judgment was invoked to justify eugenics - I'm not sure how much active reflexive rejection there was, but there was certainly some ill-considered policy implemented. Perhaps reflexive rejection would have been better at the time.
As more instances of "experts" being both wildly wrong AND producing disastrous effects (prefrontal lobotimies, e.g.) became more widely know, trust in experts dwindled aming those who truly thought.
I often told my studwnts that at least some judgment of experise could be gained by 1) comparing statements made to results achieved, or 2) making a series of small wagers by the expert in the area of claimed expertise.
I was one a jury once, where and $800/hr,portal-to-portal expert claimed the ability to predict "bad baby" outocmes by reading the fetal heart monitor strips. I desperately wanted to give him 100 of those different strips,some or none from a "bad baby, and have him show his expertise by pointing out, accurately, and above chance, which ones had resulted in a bad baby event.
Expert witnesses in the judicial system have way too many horror stories. There are people sitting in prison because of totally unfounded testimony on subjects like bite marks and blood drop splatter analysis. Even fingerprint identification has never been demonstrated to be as infallible as claimed.
The whole point is to differentiate between the real experts and the baby monitor reader. I agree a test of his skills would be instructive. A similar test was performed on spine surgeons to ascertain whether they could tell who was in pain. Reportedly they failed.
It's been touched on elsewhere but there are experts who go outside their area of expertise. Krugman comes to mind. He is no doubt an expert but often uses his perch to make claims he is no more likely expert than anyone else with moderate economic understanding. His misses would seem to confirm that.
I'd say that in the past (19th century), contentious policies were invoked based on naked and unapologetic self-interest. Slavery, tariffs, port development, road construction, railroads, canal building, and military facilities were the contentious issues of the day, and there wasn't a lot of expertise involved aside from the actual construction.
The Progressive Era ushered in the deference to Experts, who would know and implement the best policies. To an extent, this approach was followed up till the 1970s or so. Then, many of the policies were revealed as disasters, and the experts were revealed as charlatans.
Re Covid vaccines being '98% effective' or some such, the value is a relative risk of getting covid without vaccination vs getting covid given being vaxxed. It is confusing that efficacy values look like proportions, but they are not.
Thanks - could you explain that in more detail, or point me to a resource that explains it?
It seems that the confusion on such topics, and the inability or unwillingness of our would-be meta-epistemic authorities to explain it, undermines the authority of both the epistemic authorities and the people who claim to represent them.
Hello Brian, Maybe a made-up example is simpler to explain. Suppose you run a clinical trial with 1000 subjects in 'Active' and 'Placebo'. Suppose also there are 2 cases of disease in the Active group. Then the risk of disease is 2/1000 = 0.2% in the Active group. Suppose the Placebo group has 100 cases of disease. Then the risk of disease in the Placebo group is 10%. The Relative Risk is the ratio of these two risks. Conventionally the relative risk is calculated as Active/Placebo = 0.2%/10% = 0.02. Also it is convention to present efficacy as 1 minus the relative risk. In this case, vaccine efficacy would be 1 - 0.02 =0.98 = 98%. Reference? Sorry, none comes to mind. I am a retired statistician with experience in a few different vaccines, and this was how efficacy was presented to the FDA and other authorities. Please let me know if anything is not clear. Regards, Joe PS Please note that if Active has way more cases than Placebo, your calculated efficacy will be less than zero. That is why I say efficacy looks like a proportion, but it is not.
Thanks. But doesn't that imply that *at least* 98% of patients who got the vaccine would not get COVID? Since the infection rate for the active group was only 2% as large as the placebo group. So, if everyone in the placebo group got the disease, then 2% of the active group got the disease. If half the placebo group got the disease, this would imply only 1% of the active group got the disease, right?
Everyone in my family got the vaccine in 2020/2021, and my wife and I got every booster/new version as they came out. Yet, my entire family got COVID a few months ago. Obviously, this could happen with any probability distribution, but I've noticed that the current story from the public health community is that the vaccine greatly reduces the risk of hospitalization. Which is no small thing, but a long way from "Get the vaccine and you won't get polio, smallpox, rubella, tetanus, etc."
I think that 98% might be true of the initial variant, but we are several generations past that now. The first vaccine is nowhere near 98% for the most common ones circulating now. The new variants seem to be more catchable but much less deadly.
Arnold - Thank you for defining the philosophical jargon in this piece. Much appreciated for those of us with engineering and economics backgrounds. I’m going to make my sermon short today. The problem that you’re now trying to solve is an engineering problem. I suggest that we use systems engineering processes to speed up development of solutions. This probably means meeting in person, using the white board, and doing presentations. It means being methodical, rigorous and in accordance with disciplined systems engineering protocols.
Let’s start by define the problem, list our assumptions and clearly state our goals. What are the knowns? What are the unknowns? What experiments do we need to perform? What test beds need to be developed?
You’re on the right track.
I want to also emphasize this very basic point from a previous comment.
Probably the biggest improvement that Substack offers is the direct payment from student to teacher, from reader to writer, from learner to educator. It is the closest model to Adam Smith’s vision for students paying professors directly. This promotes good teaching. This is one of the most important facts we have when it comes to understanding what’s wrong with higher education. Government and other third-party funding has messed it all up.
Substack has oodles of 'professors', each running a one-man newspaper. I can't afford to pay each one £5 per month, and can't afford the time to read them all. I have to choose two, and the rest miss out. Surely £1 per month would be better, since more people would subscribe to more substack pages and get a more balanced view, since a lot substack writers are single issue people.
It does add up doesn’t it. I’m curious why Substack isn’t allowing lower price subscriptions. I forget what percentage they get. Is it 10%? Is that on top of the Stripe transaction fee?
While I’m confident many Substack readers could tap into their beer fund to be able to afford a few more £5 per month subscriptions, the Substack pricing floor is worth investigating.
If you’re truly limited by both time and income, to only two Substacks, then I guess that’s where you’re at. Even if you had more money it wouldn’t help since you’re time limited — right? I suppose, you’ll have to find a way to earn more money in less time. And that may take years of skill building or a career/job change.
I think we’re just at the beginning stages of these pricing models. In the future there will be countless subscription levels and packages available for every level of demand, including hybrid in-person, online interactive with one-on-one feedback, and even scholarship for good commenters.
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I would prefer to have 10 substack subscriptions for £1 each rather than only two for the same money. That way it adds up to a newspaper's worth of reading rather than two narrow-focussed viewpoints.
The Daily Sceptic and The Free Press, Robert Malone, Brownstone, Ann Coulter, Matt Goodwin, John Hale, Laura Dossworth, Gareth Roberts. There's nine, and a day's reading if you receive the longer paid versions. I would like to support these people and a few others. The first two are multi-articled newspapers of a sort. The other seven could form a similar multi-articled production, then there would be less pressure on them to produce an article each day regardless of inspiration.
Or they could each have a £1/$1 monthly subscription which may bring them more money.
Let authors decide if they want to go the high margin, low-volume router, or the lower-margin, higher volume route! Or something in between
I can afford it, but I’m not currently paying $8/month to anyone. And I’m highly unlikely to.
But like Noel, I would surely pay $1/month to 10 or 15 people (Arnold being one of them) immediately, and possibly two or even 3 - 4 times as many eventually.
Maybe this is a dissident opinion around these parts, but I think you can make a case that the US had somewhat biased but nonetheless responsible meta-epistemic authorities in the pre-social media era, and that this was superior to our current situation. These authorities became more biased and less responsible over time, which is bad, but on the other hand, their competition consists of a lot of people who are just demagogues who tell people what they want to hear, which is also bad. I'm glad people with dissident views like Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan or whoever can find an audience online, but does whatever positive impact these people have had offset the negative impact the influence of the Real Raw News, Jacobin, Alex Jones, Robert Reich, etc. have also had?
I thought it was funny that Jacobin - I am not that familiar with who those people are, or why that organ was inclined to engage in an intranecine-leftist feud over this, of all things - was the home, essentially, of pushback to the 1619 project, one of the most brazen propaganda efforts that ever emerged from academia/media/government in holy trinity (yes, government propaganda, because it was to be distributed in the public schools; presumably some non-profit was also involved, but I like the number three).
I guess it all depends on whether you think George Washington needed rescuing or not.
“Maybe this is a dissident opinion around these parts, but I think you can make a case that the US had somewhat biased but nonetheless responsible meta-epistemic authorities in the pre-social media era, and that this was superior to our current situation.”
I actually agree with your statement and claim, until its conclusion (”this was superior to our current situation”).
On the narrow point of the MSM as meta-epistemic authority, arguably it was.
As a bundle, were we better off as citizens and as consumers and as pursuers of happiness in 2002 than today? I suspect few people (not in the MSM, anyway) would make the trade.
And as government grows larger and larger, said “somewhat biased”-ness becomes a bigger and bigger factor that those of us of a libertarian/ limited government bent would not appreciate, even if you could cap the level of biased-ness. But if you were willing to permanently cap the total size/reach of government at the same time, then perhaps I would indeed accept your claim.
P.S. Robert Reich *did* have influence back then 😏
"The key is to have in place a process that gives higher status to people who pursue truth using careful reasoning."
I have called this an "Epistemic Security System" in analogy to "Cybersecurity System". Just like a hacker can gain credentials and then abuse the status of trusted access and authority to take over your computer network, epistemic hackers can do likewise to take over the set of ideas believed by your social network. Just like any security system, biological, physical, digital, etc. summons constant evolutionary attempts at circumvention and gets more vulnerable over time, the old western epistemic security system used to work ok but got hacked and now needs a major update. There is at least a temporary need for the epistemic (and governmental) equivalent of "zero trust architecture", to crush the social 'botnet' ABC restore good habits and weed out the worst dysfunction and abuses.
One issue with Leiter's essay is that it is of a piece of hundreds of others written down the history of advances in information technology and currently in a full-court press to get anti-misinformation powers established and entrenched, using the cloned argumentative style of, "usually this kind of supervision and censorship would be inappropriate and abused, sure, BUT NOW these new innovations mean that This Time Is Different, and we are in an emergency / "crisis", and the Revolt Of The Public has gone too far and means that the masses won't belive even the true things they need to believe, and so THIS TIME the state can - nay must - legitimately intervene to save us all from the bad effects of too many naive people believing bad actor liars, and don't worry about the whole who watches the watchers problem, which doesn't exist and only stupid crazy conspiracy nuts think it would, trust me, I would know, I'm a journalist."
At any rate, if "one decides what to believe by deciding who to belive" there is then the outstanding upstream question of how the whos at top of the chain come to the beliefs which trickle down the social waterfall. The answer is the "power-ideology feedback", that is, people at the top of the food chain tend to believe things which fit into patterns and narratives that help their interests and help them gain and maintain status, influence, and power, that better solves the optimum solution of the equation of the political formula in the particular political context. That's how the content and status ranking of modern woke progressive ideology evolved from core leftist principles.
Take the Sri Lanka example, which he cites with seeming approval (his points are somewhat unclear to me).
So the government could shut down the internet tomorrow, permanently, and this would probably restore my faith in God, Santa, and mankind.
But we know that would only happen in some sort of Sri Lanka situation. If another 9/11 happened, the fine folks that brought you forever Covid would hit that social media "off" button so fast. (Unless #1: we are pretending that the Sri Lankans originated this sort of thinking, instead of borrowing it from American intellectuals and their obsession with "backlashes" that as far as I know have never materialized in any significant degree - indeed, if an honest history of 9/11 is written in the far future, the fact of their being vanishingly little in the way of a domestic "backlash" against Muslims (or I may as well say brown people, since it was a fond trope of academics that Americans are too dumb to tell foreigners apart, but also - don't ever ask anyone where they are from, in order to learn something, because that is rude and Othering and so, so American. Unless (very likely) #2: they believe their kool-aid and hope to God that there *will be* backlash which they can employ for their ideological purposes - a fever dream I would not attribute to all on the left, but I would certainly not attribute to none.)
Here's how it played out in the last couple decades: the "backlash" talk was just garden-variety anti-Americanism. Before 9/11 I don't recall any really prominent Muslim-forward politicians in America. I don't remember a lot of identity badges all around.) There were some Arab or other ME ethnics, Wikipedia has the list. There may have been some Black Muslims, of course, mostly on soapboxes and not in power, but - again, unless we need to pretend otherwise, which is a weird thing for epistemic authorities to continually demand in their defense of truth - those were basically just a strand of 60s radicals, cosplaying Islam out of rejection of Xianity.
Now and for some time past, two prominent members of the "Squad", a group that can only be considered a "media-darling" in terms of the coverage their utterances get, when most Americans myself included, could name but few Congresspeople - are Muslim women who have been elevated to their roles because they hate America. They are the real result of the "backlash" talk (which became so parodic even Norm McDonald joked about it), in which it was predicated before it even had a chance to happen, that Americans would mistake a whole religion for its worst actors, would then mistake individual practitioners of said religion for the whole religion, and would finally end by mistaking all foreigners for said practitioners. And do horrible things. All because they are misinformed by the hate-filled.
Crazy people of course occupy the highest height in the "world upside down" logic of the left.
So when occasionally a deranged, very possibly drugged-up individual does exactly such a bad "backlash-y" crime, the right-thinkers refuse to acknowledge he/she was crazy, instead performing a kind of inversion of what they accuse Americans of: crazy people are the best people, representing alienation from bourgeois norms, representing Romanticism (let's not even get into the non-scientific nature of this True and Approved Information); thus they are not violent. Therefore, the crazy person cannot have committed a crime. The crime happened though, and so its perpetrator who did in fact harm the Muslim, &etc. must be identified with Everybody Else. Therefore all Americans harbor violent tendencies against foreigners. QED: see Reddit. The young people have learned their catechism remarkably well, though they seem to have to repeat it a lot to keep its magic strong.
You will recognize that this formula is of course not confined to this context, of "backlash to terrorism". In fact, that's a relatively rare - though not trivial - use of it. And while utter nonsense, it is the orthodoxy of those who would tell us what "we know".
So whenever I hear about the knights of government and media going out to do battle with mis-information, I remember that whatever it is that they are going on about - which may be more and may be less important; for instance, continued harping on that *very* hit-and-miss vaccine (that was taken, swiftly, in enormous numbers) and vaccine-derived malcontents is a sign of someone who has nothing real to think about - whatever they are going on about, there's something else they are trying to accomplish, like pushing the America-hate out of its longtime home, say Harvard and Yale, and into the big leagues, into Congress.
Finally, anyone who throws around these terms beloved of modern philosophers who deploy them in place of coming up with anything better than the Greeks - is not trying to communicate, sincerely.
Yes, I know what epistemic/epistemology means. But that’s because I had to look it up about ten times years ago before it finally stuck - and I realized that writers were not going to tire of it any more than the other terms of no great art.
The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex is spurred to action by any new place people can now get exposed to the heresies crushed in existing information dissemination networks and for which application of the current set of tools, tactics, and procedures is much less effectively suppressive. For those who want the DISC to S those Is, when a new outlet like that comes around, it is literally a crisis: its emergence is an emergency.
One quibble... As you noted obliquely it was The Reformation not Enlightenment that destroyed the power of the Pope as a meta-epistemic authority. The media (writ large) became a meta-epistemic authority because of the resources it took to popularize any one epistemic authority. You could almost say Leiter is looking for a second Enlightenment to generate the new meta-epistemic authority he desires (and wants his tribe to control)
No, the cathedral is the collection of institutions which naturally align left and symbiotically cooperate and which one might say have 'hacked' the system of social epistemology, commandeered it, distorted it, and deployed it for ideological purposes, as part of the political formula of influencing public opinion to gain, maintain, legitimate, and use political power.
‘The Internet has eroded the meta-epistemic authority of the mainstream media, making beliefs even more contestable.“
You make the point well elsewhere in the piece, but this sentence rings untrue.
The mainstream media, by exhibiting some egregious biases that “the Internet” (and also talk radio, btw) was able to publicize, undermined some of its meta-epistemic authority.
The mainstream media, in particular since the rise of Donald Trump, has now completely eroded its own meta-epistemic authority by abandoning the objectivity - and further its previous efforts to at least attempt to *appear* objective - over the last several years.
You can argue that business model “destruction” caused by the Internet played a factor in the MSM’s decision to abandon objectivity and even the pretense of objectivity, and that would be fair enough.
But ultimately it was the MSM itself that decided to erode the meta-epistemic authority it had built up in the second half of the 20th century.
Blaming it impersonally on “the Internet” denies the agency that the MSM played in its own downfall.
While they would never have maintained their near-total monopoly on this authority, they themselves chose to completely erode it.
I am still pondering the relationship between “we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe” and human agency. My impression, or perhaps wishful thinking, is that more and more people are adopting a quietist approach to what to believe, not taking hard positions on issues, exposing themselves to multiple points of view, and are more open minded and willing to modify their positions based upon their consideration of the information that they acquire and process, than the self-styled nouveau aristoi, are willing to give them credit. Average people everyday are using AI, search engines, google scholar, and even going directly to primary sources for the information they feel they need. And the ranks of the non-aligned, non-activist independent voters swell and swell.
Perhaps it is this disintermediation that accounts for the patent insecurity exposed in both Leiter’s essay and in Dreher’s comments on it? The personal aspect of this is perhaps the weakest explanation, so let’s get it out of the way. Dreher, whose persona is built on his religious submission to the Orthodox Church, might naturally be expected to be anxious about the great mass of people not submitting to a pastoral hierarchy. Leiter is “the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago Law School” and his new book out September entitled Marx is ranked #74,937 in books on Amazon. Might his feelings be hurt that his credentials entitle him to exactly nothing from his fellow human beings, in particular any claim to an expertise relevant to public policy? Indeed, perhaps if our our ersatz nouveau aristoi were less ersatz might they be able to gain recognition as experts and their thoughts taken into consideration without having to rely upon the appeal to authority?
Steve Sailer’s substack today provides a good example of what happens so often when someone actually engages with the ersatz nouveau aristoi: https://substack.com/inbox/post/149743737 It is not pretty and their misplaced certitude on virtually every issue will never withstand the terror of a curious and open mind. Matt Taibbi’s recent speech provides a fine illustration of the emotional response that the ersatz nouveau aristoi inevitably provoke when anyone bothers to take them seriously: https://www.racket.news/p/my-speech-in-washington-rescue-the
But the Sailers and Taibbis miss the point of the obfuscation of the Leiters of the world: free speech is already nothing but an indulgence granted for the purpose of bread and circuses. TikTok is about to be banned. RT already was. People are doing prison time for posting memes. The Supreme Court has ruled that nobody has standing to sue against government censorship if the government keeps it intimidation and threats sufficiently covert. The FBI apparently has an army of agents available 24/7 to show up on your door step if you publish anything remotely controversial on social media. People who question the veracity of any approved government narrative are dragged into court and subjected to what can be a decade of costly litigation. Indeed the civil litigation over speech in the US is the punishment itself. Its all just a vile, repellent farce. The US, China, and Russia are all just regressing to an absolutist mean, perhaps at different rates, and perhaps from different starting points. So people realize this and are just shutting up.
And this perhaps is the more compelling argument for the angst of the ersatz nouveau aristoi. People are simply tuning out. And if people are tuned out where is Leiter going to find his little platoons to throw soup on van Gough paintings?
Nothing is more abhorred by the ersatz nouveau aristoi than a quietist public. Chapter 1 of Part IV of Robert Michels classic work Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchial Tendencies of Modern Democracy explains:
“The masses are not easily stirred… ...For decades, and even for centuries, the masses continue to passively endure outworn political conditions which greatly impede legal and moral progress… ...It is not the simple existence of oppressive conditions, but it is the recognition of these conditions by the oppressed, which in the course of history has constituted the prime factor of class struggles… ...It is the involuntary work of the bourgeoisie to arouse in the proletariat that class consciousness which is necessarily directed against the bourgeoisie itself.”
Thus, perhaps, the greatest and most powerful act of subversion against the ersatz nouveau aristoi is simply to withdraw. The plebs’ secession. Avoid their manipulation. Don’t donate to their charities, don’t march in their parades. Refuse their demands for attention. Ignore their media. Don’t use their social media, search engines, or chatbots. Stay at home and read old books. This may be what forces them out of their subterfuge and to aspire to an authority willingly granted.
Even if the Network University succeeded at displacing the regular university in the teaching domain, pure research will still be necessary to fuel the engine of progress. Without a solution to the research problem, the Network University world could easily turn out to be worse than the traditional university world we have now.
"pure research will still be necessary to fuel the engine of progress."
This seems like an assertion promoted by people whose interests are aligned with a support structure for their pure research. For historical reference, pure research was mostly pursued by private individuals with their own resources, and their results shared with other interested people. This situation certainly wasn't ideal - research was essentially done only by people with the means to allow discretionary activity, and possibly on a scale that was less than optimal.
We should probably distinguish between "pure research" in different spheres. "Pure research" in literature and philosophy, it seems to me, doesn't require a great infrastructure of support, and might do well supported only by private organizations and sales of books. The scale would probably be smaller than what's currently done, but I don't see how that would necessarily be worse than our current system.
Likewise, "pure research" in history or economics doesn't require specialized facilities, but does need some level of material support (for history) and has some implications for public policy (for economics), so they might deserve some level of support beyond private organizations.
"Pure research" in many biological and medical fields has obvious applications, but for this reason can be supported by commercial activities. Commercial support comes with the potential for conflicts of interest, but we have conflicts of interest in our current system as well.
"Pure research" in physics may have applications, and may have implications for public policy, and may deserve some level of support, but it isn't obvious to me that universities are the optimal support structure.
No doubt some fields require less money than others and, for that reason and other reasons, some have less need for ties to research universities but I don't think it's simply correlation that the US has both one of the strongest research university systems and one of the strongest economies.
My first thought, which you anticipate a bit, is that this sounds great if you think the pace of pre-19th century scientific progress was good enough. I agree that there's more research happening in the humanities than would be ideal, but funding that is also very cheap so it's a small price to pay for the scientific stuff.
Part of the issue is that pure research needs to be able to attract talent away from the for profit sector in order to thrive. Whatever their faults, universities are good at that.
"funding [research in the humanities] is also very cheap so it's a small price to pay for the scientific stuff."
Humanities research by professors is mostly cheap in a narrow accounting sense, but rather extravagant in professors' time (in some universities). If a Classics professor teaches one class, one semester, and spends the rest of his time advising graduate students and finding new interpretations of Sophocles, that contributes mightily to the cost inflation of university education.
"pure research needs to be able to attract talent away from the for profit sector in order to thrive."
I suppose this is true for some values of "thrive," but I'm not sure why we should prefer the best talent work in university research rather than the private field, at least for topics like mechanical engineering, chemistry, neurobiology, or computer science.
I'm not advocating for the abolition of the university - I doubt anyone would care about such advocacy. For the present, universities' position is secure as the grantors of an important badge of Prestige, which I think is their primary function. But it's an irrelevant function for most students, and most people who don't attend college. I just point out that, should the Network University replace the current university, it wouldn't necessarily be a disaster for the larger society.
My model is one that I think stu is alluding to above: the people most able to contribute to pure research are not usually the best suited to contributing to for profit work. It would be a tragedy if Terrence Tao had ended up in the private sector, for example.
Faculty salary is very cheap compared with overall university spending on research and admin, so actually the classics professor you're talking about is not costing the students very much.
Now that women substantially control academia, universities no longer pursue truth, they now pursue and value the quality of relationships. Unless men can regain control of social spaces, and are again able to value truth/reality, society will continue to decline.
In wealthy societies, there is no serious penalty for failing to recognize and respond to reality. Fantasies can abound, and everyone still eats, gets medical care, housing, etc. Once enough people are killed by feminine fantasies, then masculine reality value-sets can again dominate, as they should.
A part of the change has to be for science practitioners to regain the once-widely practiced virtue of saying "I don't know". A whole lot of the erosion of credibility of the sciences it that, pressed to produce answers when there are none, too many scientists have succumbed to the temptation to rely on their "authority" as scientists to give their opinion and let it be taken as fact. A generation ago, "I don't know" was heard a lot more often.
The key to scientific T-truth is predictability. Theory, prediction about result, measure actual result. Science doesn’t prove truth, it only falsifies untruth. Einstein’s theories predicted effects, like gravity bending starlight, so most physicists think his theories are true—and no experiments have falsified them.
7 different IPCC climate change models were published over 20 years, all showing strong global warming. Actual measured temperatures are lower than any of those models—to me, all have been falsified. I believe CO2 is going up, but most folks I ask about how much CO2 is in the air, what percentage is there, have little knowledge and their guesses are terrible*. We need truth seekers to say “we don’t know” rather than give wrong model “estimates”, yet with great confidence.
Arnold is so correct that we to focus on the process of searching for truth. But we also need much more acceptance of truths we don’t like: rent-control is bad to terrible over the long term, the US intel community LIED about H Biden’s laptop to interfere with the 2020 election, avg Black IQ is lower than Asians or whites and there is a significant genetic influence, ever increasing national debt thru money printing doesn’t always cause a crash as 34 years of Japan shows (250% debt/GDP). As Williams notes, there’s a Marketplace of Rationalizations any can go to challenge any of these truths. But it’s not reasoning that’s so important, it’s truth based theory that makes accurate predictions. AI that simulates reasoning and makes accurate predictions, more accurate than humans, is the engineering goal of AGI.
In courts, the best yet highly imperfect process we use is disagreement between two advocates, who are using steelman arguments for their side. In colleges, the open secret discrimination against Republican professors has meant few actual steelman conservative arguments are allowed. Requiring 30% Rep professors and Trustees to qualify for tax exemptions would hugely reduce that problem, despite inevitable later gaming.
I have spent 30 years or more disbelieving just about everything Brian Leiter writes or says. So far that hasn't often steered me wrong.
On top of that the "meta-experts" (journalists and their ilk) are generally so deficient in knowledge of the sunjects that they pontificate (you know, like the Pope telling you what to believe) on thay they are not only untrustworthy to judge "the experts" but their stance as activists means they are totally biased in who they choose to boost as "experts."
Thanks for a concise and insightful column. Reading the introductory paragraph, I had trouble deciding whether to be puzzled, amused, or outraged by Leiter's premise - that the problem with the internet era is that we no longer have authorities who are widely believed. To pick the topics he mentions, which supposedly have no controversy among experts:
Climate change: What, exactly, is the agreement among experts? I think that experts believe that the climate is changing (primarily warming), and that human activity is a major cause, if not the only significant cause. But if we can believe the meta-epistemic authorities in the media, the epistemic authorities also believe that we must immediately and drastically curtail all emissions of greenhouse gases, in order to prevent global catastrophe that threatens civilization itself. But the actual scientific publications of the actual experts recognized by the IPCC (supposedly the epistemic authority on the subject) don't support these beliefs.
Effects of vaccines: What, exactly, do the experts agree on? I assume that experts agree that many vaccines (polio, smallpox, rubella, pertussis, tetanus for example) are safe (meaning minimal risk of side effects) and effective (preventing recipients from getting the disease), and that high levels of immunization in the population produce "herd immunity" that essentially eradicates these diseases in the population. How much of this applies to other vaccines, like COVID? When the experts tell us that COVID vaccines are "98% effective," does that mean that 98% of recipients will not get COVID, or that 98% of recipients will get some benefit, or something else? Our meta-epistemic authorities in the media told us the former, but they were apparently wrong. Why were they wrong? Did they apply the smallpox model inappropriately because they didn't understand? Did the epistemic authorities try to correct them, or were the epistemic authorities also wrong?
The role of natural selection in the evolution of species: This topic seems different, at least for the Western world, because disagreement with the experts seems primarily driven by religious belief. But in that sense, there has always been a significant part of the population that didn't accept the experts, and the internet hardly caused that disagreement.
The biological facts about race: I'm not sure what the "experts" agree on here. I expect generalizations like "differences within racial groups are larger than any possible differences between groups," but so what? There was a time when "scientific racism" was adopted by the epistemic authorities, but has now been discredited, replaced by an axiomatic belief that there are no differences. How much of this agreement among experts is based on quantifiable evidence, and how much on politically imposed orthodoxy enforced by social and professional ostracism? It is generally accepted that all humans share approximately 99.9% of DNA, but we also share 98.8% of our DNA with chimpanzees, and 40-50% with cabbages. Do these numbers mean anything?
It may well be true that there was less disagreement and controversy in the halcyon years between World War II and the internet, but that doesn't mean there were more true beliefs and less ignorance.
We should always be skeptical of experts and even more skeptical of meta sources. No doubt we weren't skeptical enough in the past and plenty of examples of error, intentional or not, but Id argue it was a relatively small number of issues and a much smaller number where the negative impact on society was more than tiny. We have crossed over into a situation where a large number of people (of both "sides," depending on the issue) not only no longer believe the experts but do so in the name of activism, based on contrarianism, or on the word of non-experts which more often than not is baseless.
It's unfortunate that some people reflexively reject the knowledge of experts. It's more unfortunate that some people embrace the experts to justify their preferred policies, even if the experts' conclusions don't support the policies. This again is not exactly new. Eugenics was justified based on the expertise of the "scientific racists." Population restriction and economic regression were justified based on the expertise of people like Paul Ehrlich and groups like the Club of Rome.
I agree with Kling that we need a process that gives higher status to people who pursue truth using careful reasoning. I don't see a process that can consistently do that, so I try myself, following the reasoning and evidence on issues that matter to me, and deciding which is more credible. Helped by people whose judgment I've learned to respect. I then try to share my understanding with people who might be interested.
Where was population restriction enacted? (asking for a friend)
Sorry - I wasn't clear. Population restriction and economic regression were advocated by people of a certain disposition that might today be called "green."
Population restriction was enacted in China's one-child policy and India's forced sterilization programs. I'm not aware of others, but there may have been some.
Economic regression was enacted by Cambodia's Khmer Rouge. Also, arguably by Mao's China, but that wasn't for ecological reasons.
More generally in the Third World, "population restrictions" consist of at least attemped genocide of your (triabal) opponents. As in Rwanda.
Thanks for the kind reply. Ah yes, though China was definitely not doing so for environmental reasons since it was embarking on a program of environmental destruction. And triumphant economic progress: I’ve never seen a reckoning of how the one-child policy helped or hindered that. I’m sure the economists know.
I didn’t know about India’s forced sterilizations. I guess it had no or a counter effect on population.
I weary of hearing the words “Paul Ehrlich” as though it were some sort of brilliant riposte. A couple of virtually indistinguishable dudes made a silly bet. Nobody cares about the ways he was ultimately right, nor about the myriad people who were concerned about population for utterly non-humanist reasons. Those latter people have of course been thoroughly and sadly vindicated, as people filled all the niches. But that doesn’t really play well into the alt-right or libertarian right’s - or whatever you want to call it - fave pastime of scoring the same dumb points over and over against dumber people on the internet.
And I say that as basically a potential friend of the alt-right, or at least someone who would see them not disappear but grow up.
More people = more wealth.
If you doubt it, you haven't been paying attention to the last 200 years.
Ah, but do more people mean more per capita wealth?
Of course, more people have more ideas, more possibilities for improvement. But ideas and improvements don't come automatically. China and India have had large populations for centuries but only recently have started becoming wealthy.
Wealth = what you can afford to leave alone. But I get it, effects are hard to tell from causes sometimes.
No, China's one-child policy was not enacted for environmental reasons, at least as most people understand "environmental". It was based on Malthusian economics, viewed in a way that was popular among a lot of supposedly forward-thinking people in the 1960s and 1970s. I mentioned Ehrlich because his "The Population Bomb" (1968) was considered by many to be brilliantly insightful, leading to much silly advocacy for "zero population growth," while the real hero, Norman Borlaug, got busy on solving the problems of feeding more people.
Creating more people, yes.
India's steriization (along with suffocating Socialist restrictions on the economy) was probably the proximate cause of the assassination of Indira Ghandi. And eventually of the Nehru/Ghandi family losinf their grip on Indian politics and the government.
Certainly, there is more to Paul Ehrlich than his bet with Julian Simon. But I'm not a fan. To oversimplify, one can say, "I like the earth as it is. Humans change it. So I want less human change and probably less humans. I even want to change some things back." That is forthright and honest. (It is also, in a very real sense, conservative--even reactionary.)
Alternatively, one can say, "Humans are destroying the earth. We don't have much time left. So we must do less with less. And probably be less." That is dishonest. Hiding a moral/aesthetic judgment behind bad science. I see Ehrlich as doing a lot of the latter.
I don't see the first sentence "Humans are destroying the Earth" as particularly controversial, even among the camp for whom conservationists are the (needed, to sell books, to unite around, to raise $) enemy (in the case of these folks, or in their defense, the destruction, species loss, and of course aesthetics are unimportant *to them*). But it is disingenuous in the extreme to suppose that we understand what will follow on from that. And it is of course, breathtakingly radical, to be indifferent to nature. Very Marxist in its reductionist materialism.
Paul Ehrlich is 92? His moment in the sun was 5 decades ago. He is useful to the radicals, because it means they never have to reckon with actual details, with the real physical world (which in any case does not interest them).
Notice they never engage with E.O. Wilson.
What's interesting (kinda) about the latter-day Simon-ites is how paranoid they are - equally as much or more as that other dude, who was pretty worried; they really are cut from the same cloth - so that while proclaiming that it's illegitimate to worry about say the environment, while being rah-rah about population growth in all parts of the globe - they somehow see threats everywhere. It's like there's 8 billion people on the planet and yet people are Not Okay, they are under threat! Under threat in this very comment section! Something like the Endangered Species Act is not merely a matter of indifference to the Koch brothers types - but a mortal threat. Not an expression of prosperity but the thing that will do us in! From reading them you'd think it was they who find that people are in a very precarious position haha. Maybe you could get one of them to take the other side of the bet now.
"It's unfortunate that some people reflexively reject the knowledge of experts."
Maybe nothing is new but I believe the level to which experts are reflexively rejected has increased dramatically in the last 50+ years.
Maybe the gap between experts and laypeople has widened, and that has something to do with it? IE, 50 years ago, not even virologists knew much about spike proteins, but now they're examining their RNA in detail to understand the origin of viruses, how they spread, and how to treat them. The knowledge gap between the two groups may mean anointed experts are increasingly incomprehensible to the average person on the street.
I don't think that's the explanation at all. To take the example of RNA vaccines, the public was originally told that the vaccines were 97-98% effective. The term was never explained, but I assume most people interpreted that to mean that 97-98% of people who got the shot would be immune to the disease. It turned out that wasn't true.
They recommended mandating vaccines for anyone entering public spaces, in order to build up "herd immunity." Then it turned out that the virus mutated too fast for the vaccine to give the kind of immunity that could build up herd immunity.
The experts originally recommended against masks for the general public, on the grounds that they wouldn't be effective. Then they recommended mandating masks for everyone. And said that the original guidance was a "noble lie" to keep people from panicking and buying all the available masks and keeping first responders from getting them.
The experts said the objective was to "flatten the curve" of transmission to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed as too many people got sick at the same time. Then they recommended mandatory multi-month lockdowns.
The experts said that the people most at risk from COVID were older people in poor health (such as nursing home residents), then the public health authorities recommended allocating vaccine doses to "underserved communities" to advance social justice.
The experts said that public gatherings should be banned. Then they said that social justice protests were important enough to warrant exemptions from the bans.
It's very hard for the average person to distinguish between errors from the epistemic authorities, errors from the meta-epistemic authorities, misinterpretations by the communicators, or motivated misapplication by people who have an agenda irrelevant to the subject at hand. I've seen no effort in the conventional media (our would-be meta-epistemic authorities) to sort out the changing stories, aside from one question to Anthony Fauci concerning masks, to which he gave the "noble lie" answer.
If experts change their stories without explanation, or give recommendations that make no sense given their reasoning, then laypeople will lose confidence in the experts.
I agree that the Covid episode was not a good one as far as demonstrating the trustworthiness of experts. I should have picked a different example.
I agree with all you wrote, but the answer is beyond and worse than what you cite.
You gave examples of potentially “noble” lies.
But the meta-epistemic authorities -have been caught repeatedly dealing in multiple clearly ignoble lies over the last several years, all while telling us to “trust the experts” that they cite, and distrust any experts who disagree with their POV.
This on top of elected authorities repeatedly lying in office (a much different thing than merely lying on the campaign trail), and it’s a wonder half the country trusts authorities at all.
Yes, I agree.
I would add to that the fact that as experts' depth of knowledge increases, the breadth decreases. I think it is easier and more common for them to get out of their lane, intentional or not.
If that's true, I think it's because expert authority is invoked more often to justify contentious policies. Back in the early decades of the 20th century, expert judgment was invoked to justify eugenics - I'm not sure how much active reflexive rejection there was, but there was certainly some ill-considered policy implemented. Perhaps reflexive rejection would have been better at the time.
As more instances of "experts" being both wildly wrong AND producing disastrous effects (prefrontal lobotimies, e.g.) became more widely know, trust in experts dwindled aming those who truly thought.
I often told my studwnts that at least some judgment of experise could be gained by 1) comparing statements made to results achieved, or 2) making a series of small wagers by the expert in the area of claimed expertise.
I was one a jury once, where and $800/hr,portal-to-portal expert claimed the ability to predict "bad baby" outocmes by reading the fetal heart monitor strips. I desperately wanted to give him 100 of those different strips,some or none from a "bad baby, and have him show his expertise by pointing out, accurately, and above chance, which ones had resulted in a bad baby event.
Expert witnesses in the judicial system have way too many horror stories. There are people sitting in prison because of totally unfounded testimony on subjects like bite marks and blood drop splatter analysis. Even fingerprint identification has never been demonstrated to be as infallible as claimed.
The whole point is to differentiate between the real experts and the baby monitor reader. I agree a test of his skills would be instructive. A similar test was performed on spine surgeons to ascertain whether they could tell who was in pain. Reportedly they failed.
It's been touched on elsewhere but there are experts who go outside their area of expertise. Krugman comes to mind. He is no doubt an expert but often uses his perch to make claims he is no more likely expert than anyone else with moderate economic understanding. His misses would seem to confirm that.
So in the past contentious policies were invoked based on non-expert authority?
I wasn't speaking on whether there were more contentious issues or not, just that more people reflexively reject the experts' input on an issue.
I'd say that in the past (19th century), contentious policies were invoked based on naked and unapologetic self-interest. Slavery, tariffs, port development, road construction, railroads, canal building, and military facilities were the contentious issues of the day, and there wasn't a lot of expertise involved aside from the actual construction.
The Progressive Era ushered in the deference to Experts, who would know and implement the best policies. To an extent, this approach was followed up till the 1970s or so. Then, many of the policies were revealed as disasters, and the experts were revealed as charlatans.
Re Covid vaccines being '98% effective' or some such, the value is a relative risk of getting covid without vaccination vs getting covid given being vaxxed. It is confusing that efficacy values look like proportions, but they are not.
Thanks - could you explain that in more detail, or point me to a resource that explains it?
It seems that the confusion on such topics, and the inability or unwillingness of our would-be meta-epistemic authorities to explain it, undermines the authority of both the epistemic authorities and the people who claim to represent them.
Hello Brian, Maybe a made-up example is simpler to explain. Suppose you run a clinical trial with 1000 subjects in 'Active' and 'Placebo'. Suppose also there are 2 cases of disease in the Active group. Then the risk of disease is 2/1000 = 0.2% in the Active group. Suppose the Placebo group has 100 cases of disease. Then the risk of disease in the Placebo group is 10%. The Relative Risk is the ratio of these two risks. Conventionally the relative risk is calculated as Active/Placebo = 0.2%/10% = 0.02. Also it is convention to present efficacy as 1 minus the relative risk. In this case, vaccine efficacy would be 1 - 0.02 =0.98 = 98%. Reference? Sorry, none comes to mind. I am a retired statistician with experience in a few different vaccines, and this was how efficacy was presented to the FDA and other authorities. Please let me know if anything is not clear. Regards, Joe PS Please note that if Active has way more cases than Placebo, your calculated efficacy will be less than zero. That is why I say efficacy looks like a proportion, but it is not.
Thanks. But doesn't that imply that *at least* 98% of patients who got the vaccine would not get COVID? Since the infection rate for the active group was only 2% as large as the placebo group. So, if everyone in the placebo group got the disease, then 2% of the active group got the disease. If half the placebo group got the disease, this would imply only 1% of the active group got the disease, right?
Everyone in my family got the vaccine in 2020/2021, and my wife and I got every booster/new version as they came out. Yet, my entire family got COVID a few months ago. Obviously, this could happen with any probability distribution, but I've noticed that the current story from the public health community is that the vaccine greatly reduces the risk of hospitalization. Which is no small thing, but a long way from "Get the vaccine and you won't get polio, smallpox, rubella, tetanus, etc."
I think that 98% might be true of the initial variant, but we are several generations past that now. The first vaccine is nowhere near 98% for the most common ones circulating now. The new variants seem to be more catchable but much less deadly.
Arnold - Thank you for defining the philosophical jargon in this piece. Much appreciated for those of us with engineering and economics backgrounds. I’m going to make my sermon short today. The problem that you’re now trying to solve is an engineering problem. I suggest that we use systems engineering processes to speed up development of solutions. This probably means meeting in person, using the white board, and doing presentations. It means being methodical, rigorous and in accordance with disciplined systems engineering protocols.
Let’s start by define the problem, list our assumptions and clearly state our goals. What are the knowns? What are the unknowns? What experiments do we need to perform? What test beds need to be developed?
You’re on the right track.
I want to also emphasize this very basic point from a previous comment.
Probably the biggest improvement that Substack offers is the direct payment from student to teacher, from reader to writer, from learner to educator. It is the closest model to Adam Smith’s vision for students paying professors directly. This promotes good teaching. This is one of the most important facts we have when it comes to understanding what’s wrong with higher education. Government and other third-party funding has messed it all up.
Substack has oodles of 'professors', each running a one-man newspaper. I can't afford to pay each one £5 per month, and can't afford the time to read them all. I have to choose two, and the rest miss out. Surely £1 per month would be better, since more people would subscribe to more substack pages and get a more balanced view, since a lot substack writers are single issue people.
It does add up doesn’t it. I’m curious why Substack isn’t allowing lower price subscriptions. I forget what percentage they get. Is it 10%? Is that on top of the Stripe transaction fee?
While I’m confident many Substack readers could tap into their beer fund to be able to afford a few more £5 per month subscriptions, the Substack pricing floor is worth investigating.
If you’re truly limited by both time and income, to only two Substacks, then I guess that’s where you’re at. Even if you had more money it wouldn’t help since you’re time limited — right? I suppose, you’ll have to find a way to earn more money in less time. And that may take years of skill building or a career/job change.
I think we’re just at the beginning stages of these pricing models. In the future there will be countless subscription levels and packages available for every level of demand, including hybrid in-person, online interactive with one-on-one feedback, and even scholarship for good commenters.
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I would prefer to have 10 substack subscriptions for £1 each rather than only two for the same money. That way it adds up to a newspaper's worth of reading rather than two narrow-focussed viewpoints.
The Daily Sceptic and The Free Press, Robert Malone, Brownstone, Ann Coulter, Matt Goodwin, John Hale, Laura Dossworth, Gareth Roberts. There's nine, and a day's reading if you receive the longer paid versions. I would like to support these people and a few others. The first two are multi-articled newspapers of a sort. The other seven could form a similar multi-articled production, then there would be less pressure on them to produce an article each day regardless of inspiration.
Or they could each have a £1/$1 monthly subscription which may bring them more money.
Could not agree more!
Let authors decide if they want to go the high margin, low-volume router, or the lower-margin, higher volume route! Or something in between
I can afford it, but I’m not currently paying $8/month to anyone. And I’m highly unlikely to.
But like Noel, I would surely pay $1/month to 10 or 15 people (Arnold being one of them) immediately, and possibly two or even 3 - 4 times as many eventually.
Maybe this is a dissident opinion around these parts, but I think you can make a case that the US had somewhat biased but nonetheless responsible meta-epistemic authorities in the pre-social media era, and that this was superior to our current situation. These authorities became more biased and less responsible over time, which is bad, but on the other hand, their competition consists of a lot of people who are just demagogues who tell people what they want to hear, which is also bad. I'm glad people with dissident views like Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan or whoever can find an audience online, but does whatever positive impact these people have had offset the negative impact the influence of the Real Raw News, Jacobin, Alex Jones, Robert Reich, etc. have also had?
I thought it was funny that Jacobin - I am not that familiar with who those people are, or why that organ was inclined to engage in an intranecine-leftist feud over this, of all things - was the home, essentially, of pushback to the 1619 project, one of the most brazen propaganda efforts that ever emerged from academia/media/government in holy trinity (yes, government propaganda, because it was to be distributed in the public schools; presumably some non-profit was also involved, but I like the number three).
I guess it all depends on whether you think George Washington needed rescuing or not.
“Maybe this is a dissident opinion around these parts, but I think you can make a case that the US had somewhat biased but nonetheless responsible meta-epistemic authorities in the pre-social media era, and that this was superior to our current situation.”
I actually agree with your statement and claim, until its conclusion (”this was superior to our current situation”).
On the narrow point of the MSM as meta-epistemic authority, arguably it was.
As a bundle, were we better off as citizens and as consumers and as pursuers of happiness in 2002 than today? I suspect few people (not in the MSM, anyway) would make the trade.
And as government grows larger and larger, said “somewhat biased”-ness becomes a bigger and bigger factor that those of us of a libertarian/ limited government bent would not appreciate, even if you could cap the level of biased-ness. But if you were willing to permanently cap the total size/reach of government at the same time, then perhaps I would indeed accept your claim.
P.S. Robert Reich *did* have influence back then 😏
"The key is to have in place a process that gives higher status to people who pursue truth using careful reasoning."
I have called this an "Epistemic Security System" in analogy to "Cybersecurity System". Just like a hacker can gain credentials and then abuse the status of trusted access and authority to take over your computer network, epistemic hackers can do likewise to take over the set of ideas believed by your social network. Just like any security system, biological, physical, digital, etc. summons constant evolutionary attempts at circumvention and gets more vulnerable over time, the old western epistemic security system used to work ok but got hacked and now needs a major update. There is at least a temporary need for the epistemic (and governmental) equivalent of "zero trust architecture", to crush the social 'botnet' ABC restore good habits and weed out the worst dysfunction and abuses.
One issue with Leiter's essay is that it is of a piece of hundreds of others written down the history of advances in information technology and currently in a full-court press to get anti-misinformation powers established and entrenched, using the cloned argumentative style of, "usually this kind of supervision and censorship would be inappropriate and abused, sure, BUT NOW these new innovations mean that This Time Is Different, and we are in an emergency / "crisis", and the Revolt Of The Public has gone too far and means that the masses won't belive even the true things they need to believe, and so THIS TIME the state can - nay must - legitimately intervene to save us all from the bad effects of too many naive people believing bad actor liars, and don't worry about the whole who watches the watchers problem, which doesn't exist and only stupid crazy conspiracy nuts think it would, trust me, I would know, I'm a journalist."
At any rate, if "one decides what to believe by deciding who to belive" there is then the outstanding upstream question of how the whos at top of the chain come to the beliefs which trickle down the social waterfall. The answer is the "power-ideology feedback", that is, people at the top of the food chain tend to believe things which fit into patterns and narratives that help their interests and help them gain and maintain status, influence, and power, that better solves the optimum solution of the equation of the political formula in the particular political context. That's how the content and status ranking of modern woke progressive ideology evolved from core leftist principles.
All of our history will be rewritten and/or memory-holed over the next quarter century if we allow it.
Take the Sri Lanka example, which he cites with seeming approval (his points are somewhat unclear to me).
So the government could shut down the internet tomorrow, permanently, and this would probably restore my faith in God, Santa, and mankind.
But we know that would only happen in some sort of Sri Lanka situation. If another 9/11 happened, the fine folks that brought you forever Covid would hit that social media "off" button so fast. (Unless #1: we are pretending that the Sri Lankans originated this sort of thinking, instead of borrowing it from American intellectuals and their obsession with "backlashes" that as far as I know have never materialized in any significant degree - indeed, if an honest history of 9/11 is written in the far future, the fact of their being vanishingly little in the way of a domestic "backlash" against Muslims (or I may as well say brown people, since it was a fond trope of academics that Americans are too dumb to tell foreigners apart, but also - don't ever ask anyone where they are from, in order to learn something, because that is rude and Othering and so, so American. Unless (very likely) #2: they believe their kool-aid and hope to God that there *will be* backlash which they can employ for their ideological purposes - a fever dream I would not attribute to all on the left, but I would certainly not attribute to none.)
Here's how it played out in the last couple decades: the "backlash" talk was just garden-variety anti-Americanism. Before 9/11 I don't recall any really prominent Muslim-forward politicians in America. I don't remember a lot of identity badges all around.) There were some Arab or other ME ethnics, Wikipedia has the list. There may have been some Black Muslims, of course, mostly on soapboxes and not in power, but - again, unless we need to pretend otherwise, which is a weird thing for epistemic authorities to continually demand in their defense of truth - those were basically just a strand of 60s radicals, cosplaying Islam out of rejection of Xianity.
Now and for some time past, two prominent members of the "Squad", a group that can only be considered a "media-darling" in terms of the coverage their utterances get, when most Americans myself included, could name but few Congresspeople - are Muslim women who have been elevated to their roles because they hate America. They are the real result of the "backlash" talk (which became so parodic even Norm McDonald joked about it), in which it was predicated before it even had a chance to happen, that Americans would mistake a whole religion for its worst actors, would then mistake individual practitioners of said religion for the whole religion, and would finally end by mistaking all foreigners for said practitioners. And do horrible things. All because they are misinformed by the hate-filled.
Crazy people of course occupy the highest height in the "world upside down" logic of the left.
So when occasionally a deranged, very possibly drugged-up individual does exactly such a bad "backlash-y" crime, the right-thinkers refuse to acknowledge he/she was crazy, instead performing a kind of inversion of what they accuse Americans of: crazy people are the best people, representing alienation from bourgeois norms, representing Romanticism (let's not even get into the non-scientific nature of this True and Approved Information); thus they are not violent. Therefore, the crazy person cannot have committed a crime. The crime happened though, and so its perpetrator who did in fact harm the Muslim, &etc. must be identified with Everybody Else. Therefore all Americans harbor violent tendencies against foreigners. QED: see Reddit. The young people have learned their catechism remarkably well, though they seem to have to repeat it a lot to keep its magic strong.
You will recognize that this formula is of course not confined to this context, of "backlash to terrorism". In fact, that's a relatively rare - though not trivial - use of it. And while utter nonsense, it is the orthodoxy of those who would tell us what "we know".
So whenever I hear about the knights of government and media going out to do battle with mis-information, I remember that whatever it is that they are going on about - which may be more and may be less important; for instance, continued harping on that *very* hit-and-miss vaccine (that was taken, swiftly, in enormous numbers) and vaccine-derived malcontents is a sign of someone who has nothing real to think about - whatever they are going on about, there's something else they are trying to accomplish, like pushing the America-hate out of its longtime home, say Harvard and Yale, and into the big leagues, into Congress.
Finally, anyone who throws around these terms beloved of modern philosophers who deploy them in place of coming up with anything better than the Greeks - is not trying to communicate, sincerely.
Yes, I know what epistemic/epistemology means. But that’s because I had to look it up about ten times years ago before it finally stuck - and I realized that writers were not going to tire of it any more than the other terms of no great art.
AI is the intended method/weapon to recorral the recalcitrant masses looking for their own information sources.
The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex is spurred to action by any new place people can now get exposed to the heresies crushed in existing information dissemination networks and for which application of the current set of tools, tactics, and procedures is much less effectively suppressive. For those who want the DISC to S those Is, when a new outlet like that comes around, it is literally a crisis: its emergence is an emergency.
One quibble... As you noted obliquely it was The Reformation not Enlightenment that destroyed the power of the Pope as a meta-epistemic authority. The media (writ large) became a meta-epistemic authority because of the resources it took to popularize any one epistemic authority. You could almost say Leiter is looking for a second Enlightenment to generate the new meta-epistemic authority he desires (and wants his tribe to control)
'social epistemology' looks like the moldbugian 'cathedral' cleaned up for center left use
No, the cathedral is the collection of institutions which naturally align left and symbiotically cooperate and which one might say have 'hacked' the system of social epistemology, commandeered it, distorted it, and deployed it for ideological purposes, as part of the political formula of influencing public opinion to gain, maintain, legitimate, and use political power.
‘The Internet has eroded the meta-epistemic authority of the mainstream media, making beliefs even more contestable.“
You make the point well elsewhere in the piece, but this sentence rings untrue.
The mainstream media, by exhibiting some egregious biases that “the Internet” (and also talk radio, btw) was able to publicize, undermined some of its meta-epistemic authority.
The mainstream media, in particular since the rise of Donald Trump, has now completely eroded its own meta-epistemic authority by abandoning the objectivity - and further its previous efforts to at least attempt to *appear* objective - over the last several years.
You can argue that business model “destruction” caused by the Internet played a factor in the MSM’s decision to abandon objectivity and even the pretense of objectivity, and that would be fair enough.
But ultimately it was the MSM itself that decided to erode the meta-epistemic authority it had built up in the second half of the 20th century.
Blaming it impersonally on “the Internet” denies the agency that the MSM played in its own downfall.
While they would never have maintained their near-total monopoly on this authority, they themselves chose to completely erode it.
I am still pondering the relationship between “we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe” and human agency. My impression, or perhaps wishful thinking, is that more and more people are adopting a quietist approach to what to believe, not taking hard positions on issues, exposing themselves to multiple points of view, and are more open minded and willing to modify their positions based upon their consideration of the information that they acquire and process, than the self-styled nouveau aristoi, are willing to give them credit. Average people everyday are using AI, search engines, google scholar, and even going directly to primary sources for the information they feel they need. And the ranks of the non-aligned, non-activist independent voters swell and swell.
Perhaps it is this disintermediation that accounts for the patent insecurity exposed in both Leiter’s essay and in Dreher’s comments on it? The personal aspect of this is perhaps the weakest explanation, so let’s get it out of the way. Dreher, whose persona is built on his religious submission to the Orthodox Church, might naturally be expected to be anxious about the great mass of people not submitting to a pastoral hierarchy. Leiter is “the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago Law School” and his new book out September entitled Marx is ranked #74,937 in books on Amazon. Might his feelings be hurt that his credentials entitle him to exactly nothing from his fellow human beings, in particular any claim to an expertise relevant to public policy? Indeed, perhaps if our our ersatz nouveau aristoi were less ersatz might they be able to gain recognition as experts and their thoughts taken into consideration without having to rely upon the appeal to authority?
Steve Sailer’s substack today provides a good example of what happens so often when someone actually engages with the ersatz nouveau aristoi: https://substack.com/inbox/post/149743737 It is not pretty and their misplaced certitude on virtually every issue will never withstand the terror of a curious and open mind. Matt Taibbi’s recent speech provides a fine illustration of the emotional response that the ersatz nouveau aristoi inevitably provoke when anyone bothers to take them seriously: https://www.racket.news/p/my-speech-in-washington-rescue-the
But the Sailers and Taibbis miss the point of the obfuscation of the Leiters of the world: free speech is already nothing but an indulgence granted for the purpose of bread and circuses. TikTok is about to be banned. RT already was. People are doing prison time for posting memes. The Supreme Court has ruled that nobody has standing to sue against government censorship if the government keeps it intimidation and threats sufficiently covert. The FBI apparently has an army of agents available 24/7 to show up on your door step if you publish anything remotely controversial on social media. People who question the veracity of any approved government narrative are dragged into court and subjected to what can be a decade of costly litigation. Indeed the civil litigation over speech in the US is the punishment itself. Its all just a vile, repellent farce. The US, China, and Russia are all just regressing to an absolutist mean, perhaps at different rates, and perhaps from different starting points. So people realize this and are just shutting up.
And this perhaps is the more compelling argument for the angst of the ersatz nouveau aristoi. People are simply tuning out. And if people are tuned out where is Leiter going to find his little platoons to throw soup on van Gough paintings?
Nothing is more abhorred by the ersatz nouveau aristoi than a quietist public. Chapter 1 of Part IV of Robert Michels classic work Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchial Tendencies of Modern Democracy explains:
“The masses are not easily stirred… ...For decades, and even for centuries, the masses continue to passively endure outworn political conditions which greatly impede legal and moral progress… ...It is not the simple existence of oppressive conditions, but it is the recognition of these conditions by the oppressed, which in the course of history has constituted the prime factor of class struggles… ...It is the involuntary work of the bourgeoisie to arouse in the proletariat that class consciousness which is necessarily directed against the bourgeoisie itself.”
Thus, perhaps, the greatest and most powerful act of subversion against the ersatz nouveau aristoi is simply to withdraw. The plebs’ secession. Avoid their manipulation. Don’t donate to their charities, don’t march in their parades. Refuse their demands for attention. Ignore their media. Don’t use their social media, search engines, or chatbots. Stay at home and read old books. This may be what forces them out of their subterfuge and to aspire to an authority willingly granted.
Steve Sailer has taken much of his writing behind a Substack paywall. The url you gave only returns a paragraph to non-subscribers.
Even if the Network University succeeded at displacing the regular university in the teaching domain, pure research will still be necessary to fuel the engine of progress. Without a solution to the research problem, the Network University world could easily turn out to be worse than the traditional university world we have now.
"pure research will still be necessary to fuel the engine of progress."
This seems like an assertion promoted by people whose interests are aligned with a support structure for their pure research. For historical reference, pure research was mostly pursued by private individuals with their own resources, and their results shared with other interested people. This situation certainly wasn't ideal - research was essentially done only by people with the means to allow discretionary activity, and possibly on a scale that was less than optimal.
We should probably distinguish between "pure research" in different spheres. "Pure research" in literature and philosophy, it seems to me, doesn't require a great infrastructure of support, and might do well supported only by private organizations and sales of books. The scale would probably be smaller than what's currently done, but I don't see how that would necessarily be worse than our current system.
Likewise, "pure research" in history or economics doesn't require specialized facilities, but does need some level of material support (for history) and has some implications for public policy (for economics), so they might deserve some level of support beyond private organizations.
"Pure research" in many biological and medical fields has obvious applications, but for this reason can be supported by commercial activities. Commercial support comes with the potential for conflicts of interest, but we have conflicts of interest in our current system as well.
"Pure research" in physics may have applications, and may have implications for public policy, and may deserve some level of support, but it isn't obvious to me that universities are the optimal support structure.
"possibly on a scale that was less than optimal."
Ya think?
No doubt some fields require less money than others and, for that reason and other reasons, some have less need for ties to research universities but I don't think it's simply correlation that the US has both one of the strongest research university systems and one of the strongest economies.
My first thought, which you anticipate a bit, is that this sounds great if you think the pace of pre-19th century scientific progress was good enough. I agree that there's more research happening in the humanities than would be ideal, but funding that is also very cheap so it's a small price to pay for the scientific stuff.
Part of the issue is that pure research needs to be able to attract talent away from the for profit sector in order to thrive. Whatever their faults, universities are good at that.
And maybe universities are good at attracting talent better not directly "contributing" to the for-profit sector.
"funding [research in the humanities] is also very cheap so it's a small price to pay for the scientific stuff."
Humanities research by professors is mostly cheap in a narrow accounting sense, but rather extravagant in professors' time (in some universities). If a Classics professor teaches one class, one semester, and spends the rest of his time advising graduate students and finding new interpretations of Sophocles, that contributes mightily to the cost inflation of university education.
"pure research needs to be able to attract talent away from the for profit sector in order to thrive."
I suppose this is true for some values of "thrive," but I'm not sure why we should prefer the best talent work in university research rather than the private field, at least for topics like mechanical engineering, chemistry, neurobiology, or computer science.
I'm not advocating for the abolition of the university - I doubt anyone would care about such advocacy. For the present, universities' position is secure as the grantors of an important badge of Prestige, which I think is their primary function. But it's an irrelevant function for most students, and most people who don't attend college. I just point out that, should the Network University replace the current university, it wouldn't necessarily be a disaster for the larger society.
My model is one that I think stu is alluding to above: the people most able to contribute to pure research are not usually the best suited to contributing to for profit work. It would be a tragedy if Terrence Tao had ended up in the private sector, for example.
Faculty salary is very cheap compared with overall university spending on research and admin, so actually the classics professor you're talking about is not costing the students very much.
Men value truth over relationships.
Women value relationships over truth.
Now that women substantially control academia, universities no longer pursue truth, they now pursue and value the quality of relationships. Unless men can regain control of social spaces, and are again able to value truth/reality, society will continue to decline.
In wealthy societies, there is no serious penalty for failing to recognize and respond to reality. Fantasies can abound, and everyone still eats, gets medical care, housing, etc. Once enough people are killed by feminine fantasies, then masculine reality value-sets can again dominate, as they should.
A part of the change has to be for science practitioners to regain the once-widely practiced virtue of saying "I don't know". A whole lot of the erosion of credibility of the sciences it that, pressed to produce answers when there are none, too many scientists have succumbed to the temptation to rely on their "authority" as scientists to give their opinion and let it be taken as fact. A generation ago, "I don't know" was heard a lot more often.
The key to scientific T-truth is predictability. Theory, prediction about result, measure actual result. Science doesn’t prove truth, it only falsifies untruth. Einstein’s theories predicted effects, like gravity bending starlight, so most physicists think his theories are true—and no experiments have falsified them.
7 different IPCC climate change models were published over 20 years, all showing strong global warming. Actual measured temperatures are lower than any of those models—to me, all have been falsified. I believe CO2 is going up, but most folks I ask about how much CO2 is in the air, what percentage is there, have little knowledge and their guesses are terrible*. We need truth seekers to say “we don’t know” rather than give wrong model “estimates”, yet with great confidence.
Arnold is so correct that we to focus on the process of searching for truth. But we also need much more acceptance of truths we don’t like: rent-control is bad to terrible over the long term, the US intel community LIED about H Biden’s laptop to interfere with the 2020 election, avg Black IQ is lower than Asians or whites and there is a significant genetic influence, ever increasing national debt thru money printing doesn’t always cause a crash as 34 years of Japan shows (250% debt/GDP). As Williams notes, there’s a Marketplace of Rationalizations any can go to challenge any of these truths. But it’s not reasoning that’s so important, it’s truth based theory that makes accurate predictions. AI that simulates reasoning and makes accurate predictions, more accurate than humans, is the engineering goal of AGI.
In courts, the best yet highly imperfect process we use is disagreement between two advocates, who are using steelman arguments for their side. In colleges, the open secret discrimination against Republican professors has meant few actual steelman conservative arguments are allowed. Requiring 30% Rep professors and Trustees to qualify for tax exemptions would hugely reduce that problem, despite inevitable later gaming.
* few folk say “less than 1%”, which is 10,000 ppm (parts per million).
CO2 is about 0.04% or 400 ppm, after rising from some 250 ppm.
Plants are breathing a lot better and growing more, many greenhouses add CO2.
Water vapor is the biggest greenhouse gas, by far, and climate models remain poor at predicting water vapor amounts & locations.
Climate alarmists should be more worried about floods, droughts, wildfires, & storms, along with ways to minimize damage.
I have spent 30 years or more disbelieving just about everything Brian Leiter writes or says. So far that hasn't often steered me wrong.
On top of that the "meta-experts" (journalists and their ilk) are generally so deficient in knowledge of the sunjects that they pontificate (you know, like the Pope telling you what to believe) on thay they are not only untrustworthy to judge "the experts" but their stance as activists means they are totally biased in who they choose to boost as "experts."
"the "meta-experts" (journalists and their ilk) are generally so deficient in knowledge of the sunjects that they pontificate "
Far from always true but scary that it seems so more often than not.