Friday, May 19, 2023

Updating my Priors: Short Takes 5/23

Two Matt Yglesias points reflect the Transparency Effect, the idea that things only seem to be getting worse because they are more transparent so we're just seeing more bad shit that was previously hidden. In fact, Steven Pinker might be right that things are actually better than ever.

"Officers were usually chosen based on political connections and bribery. There were no civil service exams or even formal training in most places. They were also used as a tool of political parties to suppress opposition voting and spy on and suppress workers’ organizations, meetings, and strikes. If a local businessman had close ties to a local politician, he needed only to go to the station and a squad of police would be sent to threaten, beat, and arrest workers as needed. Payments from gamblers and, later, bootleggers were a major source of income for officers, with payments increasing up the chain of command."
Second, newspapers used to be insanely corrupt.
“As Louis Menand explains in a recent review essay, back in “the good old days,” the press was often willfully deceptive and saw collaborating with government officials to mislead people as part of its job.”
And yet, both institutions are much less trusted than ever even though this level of corruption would seem unimaginable today!

Robin Hanson writes a post about why modernity seems so boring that seems to agree with the Gossip Trap theory.
“With friends, family, and close co-workers, we are around people that mostly want to like us, and know us rather well. Yes, they want us to conform too, but they apply this pressure in moderation.

Out in public, in contrast, we face bandits eager for chances to gain social credit by taking us down, often via accusing us of violating the sacred.”

“I see roughly three typical public stances: boring, lively, or outraged. Either you act boring, so the bandits will ignore you, you act lively, and invite bandit attacks, or you act outraged, and play a bandit yourself." 
The last part about acting boring was where I got my theory that Survivor is the best metaphor for how modern celebrities try to behave.

I saw a Tik Tok video of a young Gen Z woman saying something to the effect of “You don’t hate Mondays. You hate capitalism.” It reminded me of my post about how dialogue about conflict is usually an argument about aesthetics. For the Marxists and Marxist-adjacent, like the capitalism-hating woman in the Tik Tok video, the core of the belief might simply be that labor is ugly and society should be optimized around making the ugliness of labor as tolerable as possible.

I heard something similar on the Plain English podcast. Derek Thompson said that there is a group of people who believe that they cannot solve their own problem (eg depression) until they solve some society-wide problem (eg universal health care).

Not necessarily true, Neil. You might just have really good heuristics!

I made the case that higher education should stay away from public comments on the subject of morality, as it will hinder their credibility when it comes time to weigh in on topics of science. Now it looks like I have some evidence to back me up.


This article from The Atlantic shows that suicide rates went down during the pandemic. Confirms my priors based on the Sebastian Junger theory that tragic events that level hierarchies (ie the pandemic) can give a stronger sense of meaning and community. Plus, less school bullying. But I’m surprised it hasn’t been reported on until now, especially with all the other bad things that went up during the pandemic.

I thought this was interesting. My guess is that 40 years ago the bias would be in the opposite direction. I wonder how much the "boys are falling behind" narrative creates this bias, with teachers developing a prior that boys aren't as smart.

I once got into an online argument with someone regarding the topic of using shame as a method of persuasion. He referenced a study that showed shame worked for getting people to quit smoking, which I dismissed as that idea doesn't scale, i.e. it only works when used by family members. You can't shame some rando online into changing his mind about, say, systemic racism.

But I don't think I should have been as dismissive. If you can convince some non-trivial number of Republicans to, I dunno, support green energy initiatives, then their ability to shame their peers is more impactful than anything a Democrat could do.

This post by Lindy Man touches on a lot of the topics I wrote about here, even using the same references to Reality Bites and Fight Club to illustrate the non-conformity ethos of the ‘90s. But what I really want to draw attention to is the chart he cites from this Axios report.
People mean many things when they complain about “snowflakes.” But generally, I think they are talking about an increased sensitivity to emotional harm and favoring censorship as a remedy. A common thing you hear about regarding comedies, in what Lindy Man calls The Vulgar Wave (the period from 1990 to 2008) is that “you can’t make a movie like that anymore.” 

And maybe the Axios report offers the simplest explanation: women hold more cultural power than ever and their tastes are dictating art. This is a simpler answer than the Gossip Trap and so for now, I kinda have to favor it.

"A moral community seems like the one place where we can all agree that outsiders have no right to intrude. Just as Christians agree that Jews should be able to have their own temple to worship, woke NYT readers would have no problem with the National Review running the Tom Cotton piece. It's not that the column was wrongthink and harmful to minorities, it's where it appeared, in the sacred New York Times."
In recent news, Stanford Law School students shut down a speaker for his views. In the past, I've made the mistake of responding to this the same way as the following image. 


In other words, I viewed the students as Idea Supremacists, motivated to stop the talk from happening. But then I remembered that a lot of times in these campus situations, it ends not with the cancellation of the speech, but moving it off-site. 

This is important.

The next time you roll your eyes as some Gen Z student goes on about the need to create a safe space for vulnerable populations, try this experiment. Replace the word "safe" with "sacred."

This isn’t about censoring speech, it's about sacredness, the moral foundation of sanctity. These don’t students don’t want the speech to take place on their campus. Move it to a conservative church and watch the activists go home.  

And I don't blame the students. This is our fault as a society for failing to provide moral communities to people. 

It's like Derek Thompson's workism theory.
“work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose... 
In the past century, the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings—from necessity to status to meaning.



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