Thursday, December 23, 2021

Updating my Priors: Short Takes Part V

Short takes are supposed to be about new information I've read that confirms or disconfirms my prior beliefs. Lately I feel they have been doing too much confirming so I want to focus and things I've read that make me less confident in my beliefs. 

I've complained about a lot of things that schools are doing under the Critical Race Theory umbrella. Because of the writing of Matt Yglesias, I now am a big supporter of culturally relevant pedagogy, which has empirical support in reducing inequity. If this makes me a social justice warrior then slap some pronouns in my bio and call me an ally.

Although I've never directly criticized The 1619 Project on its merits, I haven't framed it in the most flattering terms. At the urging of another Yglesias post, I read Hannah-Jones' lead essay and was struck by how patriotic it was. Even if some of the foundations for the argument are shaky, if reading this causes African Americans to have warmer feelings about their country I think that is a good thing. 

I've also become slightly less confident in coalition building. Antiwokes, like James Lindsay, and conservative Christians, like Chris Rufo, have worked together to ban CRT in certain school districts. Now some of these school districts using these laws to stamp out books in a very Moral Majority-era, Pro Christianity way. This downgrades my priors on coalition building always being a good thing. It also upgrades my prior on classical liberalism being the proper solution; ie all banning is bad. This is also an opportunity for an anti-illiberalism coalition to stand up, as evidenced by this op-ed by Kmele Foster (libertarian), David French (conservative), Jason Stanley (progressive), and Thomas Chatterton Williams (center left).

I still believe in coalition building. It's just a reminder to me to be aware of the motivations of the people you partner with. Moderates like me want everyone to have access to healthcare and a higher minimum wage. But I don't want to partner with the DSA because I worry they will use their power to destroy private businesses. Likewise, I wouldn't partner with an anti-woke organization if they are comfortable using illiberalism to get their way.

This tweet reminds me of my credential free capitalism post, particularly the part about credit scores. I also need to do a deeper dive into this study on cash flow data, which is supposed to do a better job of predicting default than credit scores. I think its better for people on the margins to pursue new systems that allow them to circumvent traditional systems, rather than to force them into those traditional systems.

On the Jordan Peterson podcast, Jonathan Haidt said he was speaking to someone who said the authoritarianism aspect of Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory should actually be called something like "protectionism." It wasn't that conservatives necessarily like authoritarianism, just that they are comfortable invoking it when they feel protection is necessary.

This makes more sense and fits in with my dam metaphor. Instead of labeling things as right authoritarianism or left authoritarianism, it's better to think of things as "situations in which this group finds authoritarianism acceptable." 

I don't care much for the above tweeter, but I think this post explains something I write about a lot. I think "divisive" is a very important term, but that's because I am an Enlightenment liberal, so I see tribalism as humanity's default setting and liberalism as the dam holding back the flood of civil war. This guy is a progressive, so he doesn't give a shit about civility or actions that turn up the tribalism dial. He sees the world through an oppressor vs. oppressed lens, and "divisiveness" is no reason to stop fighting the oppressors or advocating for the oppressed.

I am totally comfortable acknowledging my bias and that it's not necessarily "better" than anyone else's bias. The thing that chaps my ass is when members of the credential class fail to recognize their own bias and conflate it with truth. To them, it's not a moral disagreement. It's: "I'm smarter than you. I have the facts. You are wrong."


Now we're entering the Confirmation Bias portion of Short Takes. This poll above made me think of my post about purple dots. If the lens you view the world is to look for oppression, you will fail to notice progress and broaden your definition of oppression.

This thread made me think of my post about bottomfeeders.  I wrote "Let's say CNN had a 60% liberal bias in 1996, and that meant that of the stories they did not report, 80% of the time it was false and the other 20% was because it had a conservative angle they did not consider because they were too orthodox."

But I never gave a good example of the bolded section. The Scientific American is what I mean. If you read the full thread, Singal notes the authors makes it sound like this ant-CRT bill will ban all these books. Singal points out that a link in the story "points not to the bill itself, but to testimony from a state rep who argues the terms in question *potentially* violate the bill." In fact, the bill is publicly available for anyone to read. The journalists and editor just didn't bother to do so.

Other than laziness or intentional disinformation, I think the more likely story is a liberal bias that confirmed their priors. They didn't feel a need to follow up. A more conservative staff member would have smelled bullshit and searched for a reason to confirm his prior that this wasn't true, and probably found it. This is the value of intellectual diversity.

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Thursday, November 11, 2021

Credential-Blind Capitalism

My general understanding of African American history was that everything was awful for them, then the Civil Rights Act was passed. Things gradually got better but there is still a lot of ground to make up.

One of the most interesting things I learned from reading Robert Putnam's The Upswing, is that some things actually got worse shortly after the 1960s, most notably the racial wage gap.

Starting around the 1920s, the racial wage gap got smaller each year, peaking in the 1960s. Since then it has gotten worse each year. One of the main explanations for the initial narrowing of the black-white wage gap is that African Americans were moving out of the Jim Crow south and into booming industrial cities in the Rust Belt where the only color that mattered was green. 

(There is even survey data that suggests a stronger bias against white southerners than against blacks in these cities, noting "When poor whites from the south moved north for work, ‘occasionally a white southerner would find that a flat or a furnished room had ‘just been rented’ when the landlord heard his southern accent.’”)

Along with white laborers, African-Americans enjoyed strong unions and friendly civic associations. They increasingly had access to the same opportunities as white Americans, and that was reflected in their wages.

The DSA doesn't want to admit it, but this colorblind capitalism did way more for African Americans than Affirmative Action and Civil Rights Legislation, at least in terms of wages. (This isn't an argument against government intervention; I'm just pointing out that the state and the market have a role to play in reducing inequity.) 

Part of the explanation for the widening of the gap since the '60s is the disappearance of many of these factory jobs (and civic associations) and their replacement with new jobs in the tech sector that require a degree. So it used to be as simple as moving to a city with a lot of jobs. Now it's getting your children into college from a school system whose funding has been hallowed out by white flight.

This explains the Antiracism push to change admission policies so that more black Americans can get those degrees and go after their jobs. 

But I think there might be a better way.

Credential-Blind Capitalism

I don't think the answer is more college degrees. If the previous solution to reducing the racial wage gap was colorblind capitalism, the contemporary solution will be credential-blind capitalism.

There is something to the above tweet. Or Mark Zuckerberg and the zip-up hoodie or him showing up to meetings in a bathrobe. Steve Jobs in his dad jeans and turtleneck. 

The tech industry draws people who don't feel the need to impress you with their looks because they know they have high-demand skills. And what is a college degree if not a way of impressing you with a look? It doesn't do anything to signify high-demand skills, just a way of saying "I look like the type of person you want to hire."

 The capitalism of the tech industry not only doesn't care what color your skin is, they don't care about your credentials. And they are starting to find ways around them.

At the basic level, you have places like Google and Apple dropping the college requirement. At the more aggressive level, you have Peter Theil paying people to not go to college and to work for him. Here is someone so disenchanted with higher education that he is literally paying you to forego it. He could just wait four years to hire you but actually believes it is a waste of your time.

Another innovative approach is Austen Allred's Lambda School. They are so confident in their ability to find you a good paying tech job that you don't have to pay tuition until you are hired.

Michael Lind followed this line of thinking in an anti-university rant:

"Why not just break up Big U? Why not apply the logic of antitrust to the bloated, wasteful nonprofit academic sector? Let corporations do their own vocational training, like McDonald’s with Hamburger University, or contract with free-standing trade and professional schools. Let research be done by independent science and engineering institutes, with apprenticeships for young scientists and engineers. Let gender and ethnic studies departments be left-wing nonprofits; there will be plenty of liberal and leftist donor money for them. Let the former college sports teams go professional and let their professional players unionize."

While the Gettin's Good

If this direction 1. is a more direct path to good paying jobs, and 2. leaves you with much less debt than a traditional degree, than it seems like a smarter path than lowering admission criteria so colleges can admit more BIPOC students into a system that churns out an increasingly weaker signal to employers.

If you are privileged enough to proclaim that "The enexamied life is not worth living," then by all means pursue a traditional liberal arts education. If you are concerned with finding a good paying job, then find a career that disregards credentials. You can worry about examining your life once you have a down payment on your new house.

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Friday, October 22, 2021

Updating My Priors: Short Takes IV

In my post "The Biggest Threat to Progress" I articulated what felt like an original idea. It's not. Matt Yglesias describes the idea here:

"One of Stimson’s big findings is that public opinion operates like a thermostat that acts to bring the political system into equilibrium, stopping it from moving too far to the left or the right. So while the sharply liberal Mood of the early 1960s set the stage for the Great Society, the actual enactment of the Great Society sent it in a rightward direction. The 12 years of Reagan-Bush governance later pushed the Mood steadily leftward."

I'm quite happy with my post "The Dam of Free Speech," (it even got a retweet from Conor Friedersdorf!). I think the dam/flood metaphor works better for what I was describing in my "On Worshipping and Compression" post. I drew my ideas from Arnold Kling's The Three Languages of Politics, but whereas he sees political views as an equilibrium (eg oppressor v. oppressed), I liken it to a default setting and a conscious effort to fight against it.

So the flood is the bad thing that humanity will do if left unchecked; for classical liberals it's authoritarianism, for conservatives it's barbarism, and for progressives it's exploitation. The dam is the thing that needs to be built and maintained so that the flood does not destroy us. So it might be liberalism, military/police/Christianity, or regulation/antiracism. I think a lot of cultural conflict comes from people protecting their dam from people who can't see the water on the other side and assume the dam people are just acting selfishly. 

Amanda Ripley wrote that every conflict has the surface-level argument ("vaccine mandates are government overreach!") and the understory, which is usually fear. It's important to get to the understory to move past the conflict. Maybe another way of saying this is to ask "What is your flood?"

In a recent podcast, Steven Pinker brings up the topic of Wikipedia, and just how good it is at producing knowledge and attracting editors who value objectivity and truth. It made me think of Parts I and II of my posts on the Disinformation Funnel. How is it that something that allows anyone to write and edit has not become a major source of disinformation?

Pinker mentions their code of ethics all editors agree upon, similar to my journalistic oath I recommend in Part II. Plus they have some added checks and balances to incentivize some equilibrium. But I think the other answer may be that it's just not that powerful. Despite it being one of the most visited websites in the world, it's not something people use to prove their point. It's more useful than influential. 

But maybe there is something there and the key to figuring out the disinformation problem is following the Wikipedia model.

In my post "Is Malcolm X Winning?" I talked about patents and how segregation cut Afrian Americans off from the social capital in white communities that led to a decrease in patents. Well, here's a cool analysis of a study about the impact prohibition had on patents. Banning alcohol didn't just make drinking illegal, it also banned saloons, which turned out to be a massive resource for social infrastructure. 

My post about the biggest threat to liberalism being voter backlash faces a new test. This story in The Atlantic seems to think the Texas abortion near-ban will rally pro-choice voters to a Democratic victory in the mid term elections. If true, the biggest challenge to Republican dominance has been pro-life Republicans pushing unpopular policies. 

My post about how Fox News and other fringe establishments became bottom feeders, picking up on the stories that mainstream outlets passed on. Now the same thing is happening on the left. Rolling Stone made a claim that a hospital was overwhelmed with ivermectin poisoned patients, which then got picked up by The Guardian, the BBC, Yahoo News, etc. Even though it's totally bogus and no one ever checked up on it. (Although, Scott Siskind demonstrates that the story gets even more complicated the more you dig).

My original worry was that mainstream outlets would lose credibility by passing on legit stories that were true but popular with fringe rightwing crowds. Now they're passing off their own crap. Race to the Bottomfeeders.

My post about bottomfeeders also related to my worries about screen time on my children. Recently, when I've been on my phone too much, I force myself to put it down. I've found that I often end up picking up my guitar instead. I also wrote a post about being a Xennial, meaning I remember the analog world even though I'm fully immersed in the current digital world. One way that manifests is that when I'm staring at my phone for too long, part of me feels that this isn't right. I don't think my children will ever feel that way; staring at screens has always been the norm for them. 

So if they don't feel guilt about screen time, and never feel the need to put their phone down, does that mean they will never pick up a guitar? I'd be interested to know if fewer children are taking music lessons today.

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Tuesday, October 19, 2021

The Disinformation Funnel Part II: Solutions

Michael Jackson, leaning in

I work in fundraising and each year we put on a Giving Day where we challenge our donors to make as many gifts as possible in 24 hours. In a prep meeting, we were looking at donations by the hour and noticed some patterns; lots of gifts at 7 am, noon and 5 pm. We were trying to decide when to promote incentives during the day and the data led to two conclusions that split the department in half.

One half thought we should push out our incentives when giving was low, to try to shore up the moments when we are weak. The other half thought we should lean into what we do well and put the incentives out when giving is high.

In my last post, I described what I see as the problem of disinformation and Jonathan Rauch's "funnel." I didn't make any great suggestions other than to say I put my trust in certain people to interpret for me what comes out of the funnel. I think most people do some version of this. When people say something like "I'm not one of those sheep who follow Fauci. I do my own research," I think they mean they look for people they trust to interpret what comes out of the funnel.

This is the familiar pattern of the 21st century; we lose trust in institutions and place it in people. And I totally agree with Yuval Levin that this is bad but maybe the solution is to just lean into it. 

PETA spent decades trying to shame people into giving up meat, doing things like throwing blood on ladies in mink coats. It didn't work because they couldn't solve the big problem, which is that hamburgers are delicious. Along comes Impossible Foods and decides to lean into the problem by creating a meatless burger that is also delicious. 

That is the challenge. How can we lean into the individuals that people already trust and sort out the grifters from the rogue geniuses? 

We need to create a funnel for public intellectuals.

Moral Accountability

So Twitter has a blue checkmark that verifies that people are who they say they are. How about a green checkmark for someone in the journalism/publishing industry who has taken the journalistic oath? They can police one another and decide to rescind green checkmarks. You're still allowed to tweet, you just lose that credential.

I'm looking to appropriate the Hippocratic Oath, but for media. The oath should be something agreed upon by heterodox journalists and they can hold one another accountable. People will still be able to choose whom they follow and whom they trust, but the green checkmark will lend more credibility. 

This doesn't involve occupational licensing, manipulative algorithms, or government oversight. Just the will of the industry to want to do better.

Forecasting on Record

In Scott Alexander's plan to improve the Republican party, he suggests they repeal all bans on prediction markets and give tax breaks for participating in them. 

"You'll get a decentralized, populist, credentialism-free, market-based alternative to expertise."

He then warns that if we continue to not trust experts, Republicans are at risk of not listening to people who are actually right. 

"Prediction markets - an un-biasable, decentralized form of aggregating expert and non-expert opinion correctly - are the only solution I can imagine working."

From there, we're looking at an expansion of the Good Judgement Project. Basically, influencers make their predictions public and their followers can see for themselves how often they are right and how often they are full of shit. And anyone who refuses to participate should be considered unreliable.

Arnold Kling has a similar idea with a draft. My only critique is that he judges people based on things he finds admirable, which will preclude other thinkers outside your ingroup. Better to open the funnel and give everyone a chance to prove their trustworthiness. 

The Spectrum of Approval

Scott has another idea but this one isn't about discerning trustworthy individuals, but rather a possible fix to the scientific funnel problem. He makes a suggestion to improving the FDA. Instead of giving the binary approved/not approved stamp (and the occasional "emergency authorization"), give drugs a rating system.

"Grant drugs one-star, two-star, etc approvals. Maybe one-star would mean it seems grossly safe, the rats we gave it to didn’t die, but we can’t say anything more than that. Two-star means it’s almost certainly safe, but we have no idea about effectiveness. Three-star means some weak and controversial evidence for effectiveness, this is probably where aducanumab is right now. Four-star means that scientific consensus is lined up behind the idea that this is effective, this is probably where the COVID vaccines are right now. Five star is the really extreme one where you’re boasting that Zeus himself could not challenge the effectiveness of this drug - the level of certainty around MMR vaccine not causing autism or something like that."

I remember going into restaurants in North Carolina and they had a placard displayed with a grade. The department of health would grade each restaurant, which I liked. My libertarian side hoped they wouldn't shut people down for failing but would have to put up an F and people could decide if it was worth it to them to eat there. 

The reason people like Scott like prediction markets is that there are penalties for being wrong. You literally lose money. There needs to be more of a penalty for misinformation. So instead of doing the FDA thing of saying this speech is/isn't allowed you give it a rating system and people are penalized via their rating when they're wrong.

So whatever we end up doing, it will only have a chance of success if we lean into where the trust already resides.

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Wednesday, September 29, 2021

The Disinformation Funnel


Nathan Robinson wrote an interesting piece for Current Affairs arguing that 1. there is a problem of disinformation, and 2. the root of the problem is an asymmetry of access. In other words, it's easy for yahoos to write a blog post about a crazy claim (microchips in the vaccines!) but the ACTUAL SCIENCE debunking these bad claims are behind paywalls. 

I like the idea but I don't think it totally explains the problem. First, the problem isn't just that the ACTUAL SCIENCE is behind a paywall but that it's written in vernacular only a small percentage of people can comprehend, and a larger percentage of people claim to have the ability to both comprehend and interpret. So influencers can read the same study and draw different conclusions, whether they are good-faith idiots or bad-faith manipulators.

Second, I would argue the problem isn't one of information vs. disinformation, or a problem of easy vs. secure access. I think the problem is too much information, or better yet, wicked problems.

In my town's Facebook group, there was a recent argument about whether or not students should have to wear masks. One antimask parent bolstered her argument by linking to a study that purported to show that masks were ineffective. She did everything that liberals accuse conservatives of being ignorant of. She linked to an ACTUAL SCIENCE study, and not some yahoo's blog. The study made it into an academic journal, published by people who went through the rigorous process of defending their dissertations and earning their PhDs. 

They made it through the funnel.

What funnel? I have yet to read Jonathan Rauch's The Constitution of Knowledge, but I assume it is an expansion of his essay of the same name. He uses a funnel as a metaphor for the production of knowledge, things like peer review. 

"To protect the wide end of the funnel, we disallow censorship. We say: Alt-truth is never criminalized. At the same time, to protect the narrow end of the funnel, we regulate influence. We say: Alt-truth is always ignored. You can believe and say whatever you want. But if your beliefs don't check out, or if you don't submit them for checking, you can't expect anyone else to publish, care about, or even notice what you think."

So here is a parent using the information that came out of the narrow end of the funnel to support her antimask beliefs. The next step for the interlocutor is usually looking to discredit the study, which means discrediting the funnel. This puts counterarguments in a bind.

For example, one parent started combing through the study and criticized its small sample size or high p-value. It's like critics of the Sokal Squared hoax who point out the academic journals that published their entries weren't SERIOUS JOURNALS. If this is true, then it's a BIG PROBLEM. Allowing bad institutions to operate within the funnel discredits the whole funnel.

For me, I've been skeptical of mask studies because I know a random controlled trial has never been done. But a lot of Asian countries have been dealing with viral outbreaks for a lot longer than us, and if they use masks I trust that they work. 

But then! What's this? A randomized controlled study out of Bangladesh!

Did I read the study? Of course not, but I trusted Lyman Stone's analysis because he seems to have earned the respect of ACTUAL SCIENCE people. 

Thank God this is settled ... oh, no. Please no. Ugh, fine, here is long-ass blog post in which the author worries "that because of statistical ambiguity, there’s not much that can be deduced at all," from the Bangladesh study. I tried to read the whole post but it made my brain hurt. I looked up the author, hoping to discredit him. Turns out he's an associate professor at UC Berkeley. Goddamnit.

So what we have is people who pass through the credentialed funnel, interpreting knowledge passed through the scholarship funnel, coming to different conclusions. Then everyday schmoes like me and the parents on my town's Facebook Group can find funnel-approved arguments that support our priors. 

I can't solve this problem on an institutional level. The Constitution of Knowledge needs to tighten its belt or add another layer, something like replication or meta analysis, and ignore things that don't make it all the way to the bottom. I know I'm not smart enough or have the proper training to comb through studies and distinguish the ACTUAL SCIENCE from the ones with poor methodology, small samples, p-hacking, or whatever disqualifiers people can come up with. 

Instead I put my trust in people. 

In a blog post, Richard Hanania wrote "you should always take good intellectual habits over credentials." He has yet to expand on what he means by "good intellectual habits" but I think I know what he means and I hope to one day better define and test what I consider to be good intellectual habits in others. Here are a few things right off the bat:

  • Is well-read in numerous areas (more fox than hedgehog)
  • Gives his convictions with stoicism rather than "passionate intensity"
  • Admits when he is wrong
  • Considers tradeoffs
  • Praises people in his outgroup when they are right
  • Expresses uncertainty
  • Can be found saying something like "I don't know enough about that to have an opinion"
  • Is cited (positively) by people from opposing ideologies

I also think about the person's incentives. I think Emily Oster checks off many of these boxes. And even though her background is in economics, I trust her more than Anthony Fauci when it comes to COVID-19. I don't think that Fauci is always wrong or completely useless, but his revealed lie about the effectiveness of masks showed that his position is as much political as it is scientific, so I always have to weigh that against whatever his position is in a way that I don't with Oster.

But I don't know if these heuristics are enough. One worry is that the bulleted list is mostly a description of how I view myself and I'm just giving extra weight to people who remind me of me. So I need some way of testing these heuristics objectively and I think the next step might be something like prediction markets or public participation in the Good Judgement Project. I want to see how the people I trust to analyze information that has made it through the funnel fare when asked to use their expertise to make real world forecasts. 

But until then I think science is in a real bind and I don't see a credible way out.


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Tuesday, September 28, 2021

The Dam of Free Speech

Photo credit:  Jekesai Njikizana / AFP / Getty

I was reading a frustrating Twitter thread the other day. Some students had complained that their white professor used the n-word while reciting a speech from Martin Luther King Jr. 

I'm all for free speech, but this isn't a hill I want to die on. But some people will. And on that day, Conor Friedersdorf was that person.

Conor's issue wasn't about whether or not it was okay for the professor to use the n-word but that the college should not investigate any situation involving free speech. He took issue with even having the conversation.

People like Isaac Bailey and Mansa Keita argued that you should never deny due process and this is a topic that we should not avoid. Black students had a right not to hear that word and there should be some process to  deal with this grievance. 

My general feel is that the professor should be afforded free speech but that the college should also have a chat with him about not using that word, like ever. But that doesn't feel like a consistent moral principle, which is what Conor appears to be trying to do.

This conversation really gave me better insight into the emotional perspective of civil libertarians like Conor.  I can see Arnold Kling's languages of politics bubbling up. I usually say traditional conservatives are the ones who view civilization as a thin veneer that could easily fall without its safeguards. But rather than police holding up civilization, people like Conor see the principles of the Enlightenment upholding civilization, freedom of speech chief among them.

I think Conor sees free speech as a mighty dam. It protects the villages below from a flood (authoritarianism) but if you prod at it long enough (challenge a professor's right to free speech), you can poke a hole and some water will pass through. That amount of water might be a benign thought, like "white people are never allowed to use the n-word." But what worries Conor is not how harmless that water is that got through, but that it's passing is going to widen the hole, weaken the dam, and eventually it will give way and destroy the villages downstream.

I can understand how African Americans don't give a shit about upholding civilization because they feel it never did anything for them. And saying "free speech protects us all" in this context just sounds like Southerners using Jim Crow to oppress African Americans or the current GOP using "voter security" to disenfranchise poor black voters.

I can also understand how African Americans see a history of being downstream from the flood. They've slowly built up a small dam with norms like "it's not okay for white people to use the n-word," and now a person in a position of power is using "freedom of speech" to poke a hole in their dam that isn't very strong to begin with. Is the hole harmless or will it lead to the dismantling of the entire dam?

Liberalism solved the religious wars of European nations, but it never solved the issue of slavery. In fact, it probably prolonged slavery in the U.S. and it took Lincoln's stroke of authoritarianism (war) to solve it. This is a problematic fact for me because it was absolutely the right choice and I don't know how to integrate that into my worldview, how to carve out exceptions for authoritarianism. I have to admit that authoritarianism can work if the right person is in charge, but I think we got lucky with Lincoln and things usually don't work out for the best when you use coercion or concentrate power to enact change against the unwilling.

Liberalism is the best idea we have until it isn't. And I think the greatest existential challenge we face today is acknowledging that the flood of authoritarianism held back by the dam of liberalism has externalities that disproportionately impact African Americans. And I do think that tearing down Conor's dam will be worse for everyone but I also think the status quo is not enough. 

It's up to us to build something better and I don't think the Successor Ideology has any good ideas but at least they are trying. 

The challenge for Conor is to convince the antiracists that two liberalism-approved core policies are antiracist: YIMBYism and ending the war on drugs.

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Tuesday, September 14, 2021

Educating for Conformity or Independence?

 Here is a photo of a US student wearing a dunce cap.


According to this article, it was a punishment for acting out and served as a warning for other children. It was used in America as recently as the 1950s. It reminded me of the Maoist-era China cap that poor saps had to wear during their struggle sessions. The Chinese government and the American school system had different ends in mind but they deployed the same psychological principle: using humiliation to encourage conformity.

American schools have banned this practice (and basically replaced it with detention), but I argue they are still designed to promote conformity: School uniforms. Standarized testing. rigid curriculum. Must raise hand to speak. Cannot use the bathroom without permission. Don't even think about microwaving that burrito.

Industrial Conformist Revolution

However, for most of the 20th century, learning conformity was probably a good thing. You get good behavior at the cost of stunting creative development in students. But most jobs were in manufacturing; you want people who can perform a rote task over and over again without thinking about it too much. You don't need creativity on an assembly line; you want people who can follow directions. The structure of public schools was good preparation for most jobs, even if it was terrible for kids who resisted conformity.

The problem with the modern school system is that it is still structured for conformity even though the culture and work environment has shifted. The majority of students who graduated from my high school (class of 2000) do not work in manufacturing; they work in white collar jobs that require more creativity, agency, and problem-solving skills that are never developed in public schools. (I realize that most high school graduates do not go to college, so my experience wasn't typical for the average American but it was probably typical for people who read this blog.)

When I was in school, I was a bit of a daydreamer, which is probably why I hated it. I did not want to learn about things I did not find interesting. 

One summer in college, I worked on a golf course. My job was to mow greens, which you do by making your first pass down the middle, finishing one side, then coming back to the middle to finish the other side. One day my boss stops me after one of the greens. He says, "Come here and look at this," and brings me back to a green I had just finished. I look at it and realize after finishing the first side, I forgot to go back and mow the other half. I can't tell you how often this happened. 

I was terrible at this kind of work because I spent my childhood resisting conformity and it made me really bad at rote tasks. My mind couldn't help but wander and stop paying attention to what was right in front of me. (Thank God I had privileged opportunities that lead me into a career in which my outside-the-box thinking is valued.)

Technological Individualist Revolution

But it isn't just the job landscape that's changed. In Robert Putnam's The Upswing, he traces the rise and fall of what he calls the I/we/I curve. Starting in the early 20th century, we became more and more communitarian and less individualistic. This peaked in the 1960s and then reversed. This upswing in communitarianism coincided with many improvements: less inequality, narrowing of the black/white wage gap, less polarization, etc. But, he writes, there is a dark side too.
“Conformity is the dark tin of community, for communitarianism almost by definition involves social pressure to conform to norms. If the communitarian “we” is defined too narrowly, however, then conformity to social norms punishes dissidents and deviants, whether political or sexual or racial.” 
As we moved into the 1970s we became a more individualistic culture and more permissive of dissidents and deviants. Growing up in the 80s, I remember watching The Neverending Story, a movie about a boy who gets picked on by bullies and hides out in a library reading a book. He gets caught up in a fantasy world in which he is special and valuable, rather than being a loner. I've seen this theme play out over and over again—from Harry Potter to The Matrix—the idea that it's not only okay to be different, it's encouraged. 

In 1997, Apple started their "Think Different" campaign. Movie characters like Tyler Durden in Fight Club and Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites became Gen X cultural icons for thumbing their noses at the sheep who opted in to corporate careers. Ben Stiller wasn't cool, the jobless Ethan Hawke who reads Sartre was cool. Finding your own identity was cool. Why do you think there are 58 genders now? Because no one wants to do the thing that everyone else is doing. 

The Missing Tradeoff of Individualism

In The Upswing, Robert Putnam is transparent in his belief that a communitarian America is preferable to an individualistic America. He acknowledges the tradeoffs of communitarianism (conformity) and he reveals the downsides of individualism (selfishness), but he never touts individualism's benefits.

I love to reference Paul Graham's conventional vs. independent-minded matrix. He's a fairly objective guy, but his writing shows an obvious preference for founders of start-up companies, or independent types. Maybe the tradeoff for individualism that Putnam never explores is that more selfishness leads to better innovation? I tried Googling some reliable data showing patents filed by year. A lot of blogs came up but then I found this at ResearchGate, which has a legit-sounding name:

This is almost too perfect for my thesis. Using patents as a proxy for innovation, we can see that US innovation was flat from 1900 until about 1980. Then it skyrockets. 

If we had continued our communitarian ethos, we might have closed the racial wage gap by now. But we also might not have a 90% effective vaccine for a novel virus. Or affordable Chromebooks and broadband internet that allowed our students to learn remotely.

Individualism is seflesh, yes. But it also means going against the grain and trying novel and unpopular ideas. Sometimes it produces grifters; sometimes it produces geniuses. There has to be some room for both.

Change on the Horizon?

So why don't schools upgrade their model? Probably because there is no incentive. Graduation rates remain high because people still need a diploma to work or enter college, the latter of which is less conformist. You spend 12 proving to admission departments that you know how to follow rules. Then you spend 4-6 years proving to employers that you are unique and a self-starter.

I don't think schools have much of an effect on whether people are conformist vs. independent, I think that's mostly pre-wired by genetics and partially influenced by peer effects. So what does that mean for independents in a conformist culture like public schools? Just that they will be unhappy while they are there. They might be at higher risk of dropping out but the stronger influence will be their biological parents and friends.

I still hope a school choice movement will allow more learning opportunities for different students. But for now I just don't think there is enough urgency to really force a change.





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Thursday, September 2, 2021

Being a Xennial

I'm a Xennial (est. 1982), which is a microgeneration stuffed between Generation X and Millenials. I know it sounds like frontier Millenials are just trying to put some distance between ourselves and the Millenial generation that we find loathsome, but I think there is legitimacy here. My sister is 10 years younger than me and I feel like we had very different childhoods.

I think Xennials are marked by a transition: from analog to digital and from locally-owned businesses to national chains.

Business

I was too young to realize it at the time, but a revolution occurred during my youth in which the market severely disrupted the community. When I was about 8 or 9, my dad built a treehouse for me and my brother. I went with him to the local hardware store in town and to a local lumber yard a town over to pick up supplies. Both of those places went out of business a few years later and are currently empty.

Now, you can drive 15 minutes in either direction and get everything at Home Depot or Lowe's.

If you wanted a movie, there were three locally owned video rental stores in town. If you wanted to rent a Nintendo game, you had to know which store carried it. Kid Icarus was only at the store on the north side of town, and you had to hope no one else had rented the only copy.

By the time I was in high school, a Blockbuster moved in and all of those stores went out of business. Blockbuster carried multiple copies of everything, you could rent it for longer, it cost less, and you could get a trial version of America Online on CD-ROM. (Of course, Netflix has put Blockbuster out of business but that narrative is Major Chain disrupting Major Chain, rather than Major Chain disrupting Local Business Owner.)

In the center of town, an old Victorian home had been converted into a clothing store. A few miles away a Walmart came in a put an end to that.

The weird thing is, Xennials welcomed the new chainification of America. I had warm feelings toward Home Depot, Blockbuster, and even Walmart. I wasn't alive long enough to have an emotional connection to the Mom and Pop stores that got driven out. This is what makes Xennials unique.

But here is what I do miss: My town is a post-agricultural bedroom community. About 17,000 residents. A farm or two. A liberal arts college campus. A marina along a river. The aforementioned Walmart, Home Depot, and Blockbuster? None of them are in my town. I have to travel to a larger, neighboring town to use their services. All the locally-owned businesses they disrupted were a bike ride away. I miss that convenience.

Technology

Although I don't think I ever used a typewriter for a book report, I did use a PC  with no internet connection, which is a weird thing to think about. It's like the opposite of a Chromebook.

In high school, we didn't have social media but we did have AOL messenger, which was pretty close. But we were limited because in order to use it you had to be on the family desktop and tying up the phone line. So for the most part, if you wanted to talk to peers, you had to call them or meet up somewhere.

I don't think today's youth experience aimless driving like we did. Since we weren't attached to cell phones, we couldn't always be reached. That means we spent a lot of time just driving around, hoping to run into someone out and about.

When I entered college in the fall of 2000, two of my friends had cell phones. By the time I graduated in 2004, everyone had one. Prior to my first cell phone, I kept a paper in my wallet with everyone's phone number. Either that or you had to commit it to memory, and let me tell you: I probably knew 20 phone numbers by heart.

Our Place

Even though I'm closing in on 40, I'm still below the median age in my office. Which means that sometimes I'm the guy who has to explain technology to people. I'm talking people only 15 years older than me sometimes. And it isn't difficult technology, it's things like doing screenshots or using the find function (control+F).

Part of me used to think "This will be me someday. Technology will pass me by and some youngin' will have to help me." But maybe it won't. Maybe swift change and disruption has been a part of my life for so long that it has become the norm. 

I actually get excited about learning new technology. I'm never so comfortable with existing tech that I don't want to learn something new.

Moore's law states that the number of transistors in a circuit doubles every two years. We see similar patterns with population growth. It took 127 years for the world population to double from one billion to two and only 47 years to double from two billion to four. Since 1960, world population has grown by about one billion every 13 years. 

Eamonn Healy, talks about this exponential growth in Waking Life. 

"Two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid, 100,000 years for mankind as we know it ... And then when you get to agricultural, when you get to scientific revolution and industrial revolution, you're looking at 10,000 years, 400 years, 150 years ... What that means is that as we go through the new evolution, it's gonna telescope to the point we should be able to see it manifest itself within our lifetime." (watch the whole scene here.)

Maybe that is already happening. I'm used to paradigm shifts and disruptive changes because they happen within my lifetime. But I'm also sensitive to my elders because I remember the old analog world.

This is what it means to be a Xennial; to have one foot in the past while excitedly finding my footing in an protean future.


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Wednesday, August 11, 2021

The Gatekeeper Effect, Bottomfeeders, and Specialization Journalism

My nine-year-old son is lying on the floor of our living room, Nintendo Switch in hand. But he's not playing a video game, he's got the YouTube app open and he's watching someone named BeckBroJack narrate as he (BBJ, not my son, who has Minecraft on four different devices, which is information that will be relevant once you finish this sentence) plays Minecraft.

Meanwhile, my almost-four-year-old daughter is curled up on our couch, Kindle in hand. She too is watching YouTube. An adult's hand comes into the screen, opens one of those plastic easter eggs, and describes what is inside.

Whatever word can be used to describe what they are doing right now (YouTubing?), they will continue to do until I stop them or they complain that they are hungry. They will never get bored or run out of content.

In the background, my new 48" Smart TV—equipped with Netflix, Disney+, Hulu Live, HBO Max, and Amazon Prime—sits idly on the home screen and I cannot help but wonder: with all the resources, talent, and incentives, why can't these Entertainment moguls develop programming that can compete with the trash my children watch on YouTube?

I think the answer is what I call the Gatekeeper effect. 

YouTube, for the most part, has no gatekeeper. As long as you don't violate community standards, which are tough to enforce given the quantity of videos uploaded each day, anyone can upload almost anything. No one from YouTube has to greenlight anything and most of the uploaders are not getting paid.

YouTube programming works not too differently than viruses. A virus, like COVID-19, wants to copy and spread itself. Each time an infected person coughs, it's like a buckshot of tiny mutations of the virus swimming through the air, looking for a new host. The virus does not know which mutation will be more contagious so it just chooses randomness over and over again until one sticks and now you need a new vaccine booster.

In essence, YouTube is different than Netflix because it does not pay its content creators and therefore has no expectation for the quality of the content they produce. It allows for a bunch of crap to pass through, hoping something sticks. When it does, the creator gets immediate feedback and reproduces (ie copies) that type of content over and over. Since there is no oversight, each content creator is able to respond to the changing tastes of their subscribers. 

I know these billion dollar enterprises like Netflix and Disney are not known for their moral standards, but one thing they have that the YouTube model does not is the ability to say "We can't put this out there." 

YouTube has no such gatekeeper.

So the reason Netflix and Disney cannot compete with YouTube for my children's attention is that they cannot respond quickly enough to what youth are into and they care too much about their institutional brand to allow their content creators to produce whatever they want without a gatekeeper's approval.

The tradeoff is that ever so often I catch my son watching something on YouTube with a swear in it. Using parental settings, that is not a problem on Netflix or Disney+. (I know about YouTube Kids but my kids complain that it doesn't have the shows they like.)

Rise of the Bottomfeeders

Media companies used to compete by trying to be the first to break a story. Fox News found a better way to compete. Instead of trying to do a better job of reporting what the other companies were reporting, they focused on reporting what the other guys were not reporting. 

They became bottomfeeders.

What they realized is that if everyone ignores a story because it's false you can report on it under the guise of "this is what the mainstream media won't tell you." And as long as the liberal media is the enemy, your conservative audience won't penalize you when your story ends up a lie. All you have to do is get 1 out of 100 underreported stories right to confirm what your viewers already believe: the mainstream media is biased against people like you.

This phenomenon has accelerated since Fox News launched in 1996. Every year there are more and more bottomfeeders publishing false stories, and more and more legacy media companies ignoring true stories. Even Alex Jones, who is mostly wrong and mostly crazy, is right about the gay frogs thing. And he's right that no one else reports it.

Let's say CNN had a 60% liberal bias in 1996, and that meant that of the stories they did not report, 80% of the time it was false and the other 20% was because it had a conservative angle they did not consider because they were too orthodox. Now it's probably a 75% bias and 60% of unreported stories are bullshit and the other 40% they just missed because of that bias. That's more food for the bottom feeders.

More and more journalists are leaving legacy media for Substack newsletters or Spotify podcasts, which have the same model as YouTube; low barrier for entry, most make no money, and there is no gatekeeper. But now the bottomfeeder model has morphed into specialization journalism; they aren't exactly reporting false or misleading stories but they're only telling you one angle and audiences are self-selecting the angle they prefer.

Consider Bari Weiss, who can be described as "antiwoke." After leaving the New York Times, she started her own podcast. Here are her most recent episodes:

"The Real Story of 'The Central Park Karen'"
"The Truth About Testosterone"
"A 21st Century Witchhunt"

Her angle is to tell the side of the story the mainstream media left out, as evidenced by the Central Park Karen story. Weiss and Kmele Foster tell Amy Cooper's side of the story, which broadened my understanding of the event without necessarily exonerating her. Their point wasn't necessarily to paint her as the real victim and Chris Cooper as the bad guy, but to fill in the missing blanks left by the mainstream media's reporting.

Typical responses to her work do not attempt to disprove her reporting, they just focus on the facts she (Bari) left out.

This is the tradeoff of specialization reporting and the lack of institutional gatekeeping. There is no incentive to complicate a narrative and tell the whole story. There is no one to tell Bari that she might sound too dismissive of Amy Cooper's perceived racism. Instead, the incentive is to specialize in one area that you find sticks with your audience and spoonfeed it back to them over and over again.

A World Without Credentialed Doctors

Imagine a world in which there is no barrier to becoming a doctor. You don't need a medical degree, a residency program, or to pass an entrance exam. You can just call yourself a doctor and start treating people.

First off, costs will come way down. Simple supply and demand. Struggling Americans will seek out the lowest credentialed doctor because they charge the least.

But what happens in a world in which the medical profession is not an institution? There is no Hippocratic oath. The doctors become completely responsive to their patients' most base desires. Hypochondriacs will receive whatever treatment they want. There is no gatekeeper practice telling doctors "this is unethical."

We also get into the Tragedy of the Commons problem. In an "every doctor for himself" world, what's to stop doctors from prescribing antibiotics to everyone for every problem? Before long bacteria has built up enough resistance so that antibiotics no longer work. The point of institutions is to solve the Tragedy of the Commons and it usually works.

I agree with the libertarian take that occupational licensing is mostly harmful, especially as it relates to social mobility for struggling Americans. But the medical profession is one that I think we have right. Technology has yet to disrupt it the way it has journalism and entertainment.

Technology has made journalism and entertainment more democratic and accessible and has had a lot of positive effects. But it's also amplified our worst impulses and challenged the limits of liberalism.

Temperance 

One of the best essays I've read in the last year is Aaron Sibarium's response to Francis Fukuyama's defense of liberalism. Essentially, Aaron states that mass communication is at a place we've never had to deal with before. Liberalism worked when there was still some gatekeeper who could filter mass media. The printing press had a massive effect on the rise of Protestantism, but printing companies were still gatekeepers. 

YouTube and Substack, and their lack of a gatekeeper, are testing the limits of liberalism like never before. How can we "live and let live" when there is so much dangerous information freely available?

"Let the platforms police themselves, and you’ll end up with either a dangerous free-for-all or an arbitrary regime of censorship, enforced by bots and billionaires rather than the public.
Police the platforms through the state, and you’ll end up limiting freedom of association, either by requiring platforms to host speech with which they disagree or by preventing them from hosting speech deemed indecent, mendacious, or hateful.
Destroy the platforms by revoking Section 230, and you effectively concede that some forums are so dangerous that they can’t be allowed to exist—a conclusion that contradicts liberalism’s spirit, if not its explicit premises."

YouTube's Pleasure Lever

I told my son he needed a break from screens and he asked me why. I relayed to him the story about the lab experiment on rats where scientists installed a lever in the rats' cage that, when pushed, would stimulate the reward system in their brains. 

Some rats pushed the lever 7,000 times in a day.

"rats preferred pleasure circuit stimulation to food (even when they were hungry) and water (even when they were thirsty). Self-stimulating male rats would ignore a female in heat and would repeatedly cross foot-shock-delivering floor grids to reach the lever. Female rats would abandon their newborn nursing pups to continually press the lever. Some rats would self-stimulate as often as 2000 times per hour for 24 hours, to the exclusion of all other activities. They had to be unhooked from the apparatus to prevent death by self-starvation." 

I explained that watching YouTube was the equivalent of pushing that lever. It's a shortcut to that reward feeling that slowly kills your soul because you're denying yourself the labor, socialization, exercise, reading, or some form of intimacy that should naturally lead you to that same feeling.

There has to be some type of societal reckoning where we realize that specialization media feels good but is bad for us. If we don't actively do the work to temper it, it will destroy us, much like a virus. All it wants to do is copy and repeat, find a new host and spread. It cares nothing for the damage it leaves behind.

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Friday, July 23, 2021

The Diffusion of Rhetoric

 

There is a theory called the diffusion of innovation that looks at how to capture market share. A certain group of the public (innovators, early adopters) will be the first in line to get the first-ever iPhones. The last group, the laggards, won't give up their flip phone until Samsung stops making it.

Most others are somewhere in between. Maybe it's like Mark Granovetter's concept of the riot rock threshold.

"In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them."

So the first person to throw a rock has a threshold of zero. The second person has a threshold of one, he never would have thrown the rock until someone else did. On and on until you get to the hundredth person who never would have joined the riot if 99 people before didn't step in.

I think this model is helpful for understanding rhetoric. If there is a cause you care about, your message should depend on whom you are speaking to.

Activists, Unengaged, Stubborns, and Persuadeables

Say your cause is climate change. The early adopters are the Greta Thunberg's of the world, the people who care as much as you. Let's call them The Activists. You don't need to convince them of the severity of climate change, you just need to give them direction on how to mobilize and take action.

The second group is The Unengaged. They don't have a stance and don't really care. Your message needs to be one of education. If they understood more, some will care as much as you and will join your cause. (In the case of vaccinations, this is the group that isn't motivated to get a free life-saving vaccine until you entice them with a $1 million vaccine lottery.)

The third group opposes you. Maybe they think climate change is a hoax. Maybe they think the threat is overblown. Maybe they just oppose anything progressives support.

This group has two subgroups; those open to changing their mind and those who are not. For the latter, don't even bother. In fact, the best you can do is not piss them off so they turn into activists who oppose your cause and make life harder. For the other sub-group, your message is one of persuasion. You have to know their beliefs and have good counterpoints. Let's call these subgroups The Stubborns and The Persuadeables. 

Winning Converts

If these groups are anything like the rioters, the most efficient method will probably be to target the second group, The Unengaged. Not only are they the largest, but they likely have a domino effect. Once one of them becomes joins your cause, a second person, with a conversion threshold of one, will join him. Then another and another. As I noted in a previous post, the biggest change in support of Black Lives Matter came from people who had no opinion of the group (i.e. The Unengaged); there was little movement among people who opposed BLM.

But then again, it might make more sense to target The Persuadables. Jetty Taylor is a conservative who made frequent media appearances where he expressed his skepticism toward climate change. In The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef describes how climate activist Bob Litterman was able to persuade Jetty by speaking his language. Now, Taylor is an activist for environmental causes. 

It might be easier to convince The Unengaged that you are right, but the most they will do is vote or donate in your direction. You cannot convince someone to become an activist, it's more of a personality type. That is why it might be more efficient to convert a Persuadable activist like Jetty, he will do more for your cause than 100 converted unengaged types.

The problem is targeting the message. If anyone outside The Activists hears an activist message, it will come across as preachy and condescending at best. At worst, it will mobilize The Stubborns to oppose you. Even a message for The Unengaged can sound preachy and condescending. For the uneducated on climate change, you need to create a simple story. The Stubborns and The Persuadables are often educated on the topic, or at least think they are, and will poke holes in your simple story and create their own narrative.

For The Persuadeables, you have to leave activism out of your message if you even want to engage. Then you have to know their side of the argument better than them. Then you have to deliver your message in a way that makes it easy for them to change their mind.

Controlling the Narrative

The other challenge is not letting The Activists take control of the narrative. They know the messaging that works for them, but they do not realize how ineffective it is against everyone else. They are unable to distinguish The Uneducated from The Stubborns so they think a simple message of education should work on everyone. They don't know how The Stubborns and Persuadables think.

Matt Yglesias wrote a great post called "Who is the racial justice case for zoning reform for?" He writes about zoning regulations and shows how they have empirically slowed economic growth, in addition to contributing to racial disparities. 

If your focus on racial justice, you can motivate The Actvists. If you focus on economic growth, you can motivate The Persuadeables who support free markets. But if social justice activists hear the latter message, they might oppose you since the benefits of housing conflict with their anti-market beliefs.

"the people I am trying to convince are generally ideologically motivated college-educated professionals ... They conceive of urban land use politics as pitting activists or regulators against developers and are disinclined to side with the developers...
"The problem is that the very same racial angles that help zoning reformers win intra-progressive arguments have the opposite impact on the right... A struggle against white supremacy sounds a lot more righteous than a struggle against inefficient regulation."
Someone who really gets this is David Shor; a socialist who keeps urging Democrats to stop talking about socialism. I've even seen him tweet that liberals should not publicly denigrate moderate Republicans because the few sane members left in the GOP might be holding society together.

Leveraging Unity

The diffusion of innovation chart is a nice visual but not a perfect metaphor for rhetoric because it only measures people who e.g. end up buying an iPhone, rather than all potential consumers. In the diffusion of rhetoric, you have to consider the impact of people who oppose you.

In that sense, there are two charts I like to think about. They both show sharp increases in the support and they also measure the decrease in pushback.


The first chart is support for Black Lives Matter. The blue line shoots up when the George Floyd video surfaces. The second chart is George W. Bush's approval rating. The blue line shoots up after 9/11.

Wesley Morris wrote a long thinkpiece about how we should use this moment when the national narrative is focused on racial justice. The most similar moment of a tragic event that created some unity was 9/11. Unfortunately for Wesley, the "moment" has been squandered. The 9/11 moment was not squandered, which makes me wonder why?

Nassim Taleb likes to say that you don't ask your barber if you need a haircut. Well, after 9/11 we collectively asked our barber (the military) if we needed a haircut (foreign invasion) and that is how we ended up in a very unpopular war with a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. This time when we asked our barber (social justice advocates) if we needed a haircut, they told us the answer was to defund the police. 

First, this was not a popular response. Second, the principles of democracy and the separation of powers prevented this unpopular idea from becoming policy. Bush, however, did not need to play by these rules. He did not need Congressional (or UN) approval to invade Iraq, which is a big hole in our democracy and a good example of what can happen when we try to leverage a nation's emotional unity.

So even though I had hoped the George Floyd video would lead to serious police reform (think "end qualified immunity" and not "defund/abolish"), I'm still happy with the way things played out. I would rather live in a world in which politics prevents meaningful police reform if it also prevents unnecessary wars. 

I also believe that reform is possible if we get the messaging right. (I wish I was as hopeful that we could end the president's power to unilaterally get us into a war.)

Blueprint

Here is how things should have gone. Activists cannot control the narrative, but you still need them. They are great at action and getting attention, but it has to be tactical.

The spokesperson to the public needs to be someone like Persuasion Man. It has to be someone who understands his audience. Racial justice advocates should have given a bigger platform to Killer Mike. 

Persuasion Man reads the polls and understands what ideas are popular, like unbundling the police or investing in social services, and sticks to those. You cannot allow people in your movement to be talking about abolishing the police or saying ACAB.

In the background, you have to target Persuadable activists and try to convert those with a big audience. They will do a lot of heavy lifting for you.

A Final thought re: The Unengaged

The controversy about teaching critical race theory or systemic racism in public schools is really an effort to present an education message to The Unengaged (school children not already indoctrinated by their woke parents).

It's important to correct any curriculum that still teaches falsehoods like "The War of Northern Aggression". But I've read many think pieces about how much of the details of things like lynchings and slavery are left out of our K-12 history, and how this needs to be corrected. What I don't see is a justification for teaching these details, other than truth for the sake of truth. Why not focus on the systematic oppression of Irish immigrants, antisemitism, or Native American slaughter? Why increase the spotlight on this one group? 

I think the answer has to do with rhetoric. 

I read an interview with Richard Rothstein about his book The Color of Law. He says we have to teach about systemic racism, specifically w/r/t housing, so the next generation can make the necessary changes. If more progressives share this view, then the reason for including the bloody details in K-12 curriculums is for rhetorical purposes; i.e. to create activists. The charts I posted above show that the bloody details of George Floyd's murder warmed support for BLM, just like the bloody details of 9/11 spiked fear of Islamic terrorism.

If so, even if the facts are facts, I can understand why conservatives push back. They don't want their kids to become liberal activists. These same conservatives can recite in detail all the worst features of Islam; misogyny, homophobia, female genital mutilation. If hawskish conservatives had their way, these details would be included in K-12 curriculum for the sole purpose of creating anti-foreigner activists.

Maybe this is why people say bias is written into any curriculum. Any facts you choose to present or leave out can cull an emotional response that orients the learner in a particular direction. 

(Of course, I don't believe this will have the intended effect. Kids are more influenced by their families and peers than what their teacher says.) 

This is how people adapt a war mentality; opposing activists think the fate of society depends on whether The Unengaged gets the message from The Activists or The Stubborns, when the reality is that their aggressive messages just make people hate both groups. The stakes feel so high that they end up talking themselves into illiberal ideas like censoring speech, fearing what will happen if The Unengaged hear disinformation or hateful rhetoric from the bad guys.

Hopefully my blueprint is a way out of this hellhole. Illiberalism is illiberalism, whether it comes from the left or the right.

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Friday, July 16, 2021

Updating my Priors: Short Takes pt. III

So my BLM forecast was wrong. Support has dropped 2 points and opposition has risen 1. My confidence was only at 55%. In retrospect, I should have forecasted that the opposition would fall, rather than support would rise, but I still would have been wrong. 

This study finds that "Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven entirely by large differences in wages and employment rates between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and white women."

Indeed, the following chart shows that for those living in poverty, who are disproportionately black, the gender wage gap goes the other way. Read more.



I've written about this several times but I still don't know what to make of it. If the racial wage gap is caused by past and/or present discrimination, why does it affect boys and not girls? Intersectionality suggested that racism + sexism should equal worse outcomes for black girls but that does not seem to be the case.

FiveThirtyEight made a really good case for ranked choice voting and proportional representation.

"This also echoes something social psychologists have found in running experiments on group behavior: Breaking people into three groups instead of two leads to less animosity. Something, in other words, appears to be unique about the binary condition, or in this case, the two-party system, that triggers the kind of good-vs-evil, dark-vs-light, us-against-them thinking that is particularly pronounced in the U.S.

Ultimately, the more binary the party system, the stronger the out-party hatred."

Will promotion of a non binary system lead to less animosity? 

"in proportional democracies, multiple parties can still win seats in geographically unfriendly areas, with coalition governments including some balance of both urban and rural representation.

It’s not just the lack of a stark urban-rural divide that makes proportional democracies less polarized, though. There is also less of a clear strategic benefit to demonizing the opposition in an election that has more than two parties. For instance, in a multiparty election, taking down one party might not necessarily help you. After all, another party might benefit, since negative attacks typically have a backlash. And because parties can take stronger positions and appeal more directly to voters on policy, there’s less need to rally your supporters by talking about how terrible and dangerous the other party is. Moreover, in systems where parties form governing coalitions, demonizing a side you’ve recently been in a coalition with (or hope to be in the future) doesn’t ring quite as true."

In my post, "In Defense of Violating Social Norms," I gave examples of Jackie Robinson and Copernicus as people who violated a social norm that was unpopular and now is celebrated. I wish I had thought to include Harvey Milk, who was openly gay at a time when it had very little public support. Coming out violated a social norm that is now popular.

I wrote a post about how teaching a "patriotic" education might have been an attempt to create a myth about America since mythology is the only way to unite a large, diverse body. I suggested that the antiracist group was attempting to create a new myth that makes America the villain. I think I misinterpreted the motives of the antiracists. The goal isn't to villainize America, it's just an unintended consequence. The goal is to create a hero via a minority-as-victim narrative, since we have moved into a society that grants the highest status to the victim.

I recall seeing a progressive friend at a Black Lives Matter rally. He had a sign that spelled out his Mt. Rushmore: Tamir Rice, Emmit Till, Ruby Bridges, and Trayvon Martin. Not Frederick Douglas or Harriet Tubman. Not Barak Obama or Ta-Nahesi Coates. No, with the exception of Bridges, the people he chose as the most revered icons were all famous for being victims. 

It reminded me that progressives live in the victimhood culture, while I'm stuck in the dignity culture. If the icon of honor culture is John Wayne, the tough guy who responds to insults with violence, and the icon of victimhood culture is Tamir Rice, the innocent minority oppressed by a White member of a violent institution, then the icon of dignity culture would be a stoic like, I dunno, Teddy Rosevelt.

I came across this quote about a blogger describing her writing "not as her permanent opinions, but instead as ‘a stream of thoughts, caught in the middle of updates." That is how I view this blog and why I keep up old takes I no longer hold. Case in point, I wrote a blog about why I hold to Truth and call out lies (part VI) even if they are moving in a direction I agree with. A few posts later I wrote a post about Persuasion Man and how it's sometimes better to just let people be wrong if they aren't hurting anyone.

I recently had a Truth vs. Justice conflict. JD Vance wrote a column about daycare and linked to a study that purportedly showed how daycare can be worse for some children than staying at home. I looked at the study, which was actually a Christain think tank's analysis of the study. Then I read the actual study and found that the supposed negative impacts of daycare disappear when you control for income. 

So Vance is wrong, or at the very least dishonest. But I decided to let it go because his final conclusion is that we should not be subsidizing daycare, we should just give people cash and let them decide how to use it (eg spend it on daycare or use it as income so one parent can stay home). And I agree with his conclusion, so why waste time calling out his dishonesty when we could be building a coalition.

In my post "Balancing Theory and Action" I wrote about how I'm more theory than action because I'm so concerned with getting to the truth of the matter before deciding if acting on it is the right decision. I regret that I only now realize the perfect metaphor for what I was trying to describe would be the Ents (talking trees) from The Lord of the Rings. War is raging around them and they're still taking their slow-ass time to make a decision.

"It takes a long time to say anything at all in Entish and we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say."

In "Through the Lens of Salience" I wrote of Dr. King "His prescription (which later became more nuanced and antiracist) was a color-blind humanism ... We will reach equality when we see past color."
I think I got this backward. I think he saw colorblindness as the goal, not the process. You need something like reparations to level the playing field, then you could have something like a colorblind society.
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