Choose your city

Choose one:

Jobopolis: the economy is booming with lots of well-paying jobs in your field. Tons of great restaurants and boutiques. If you move here, you won't know anyone. While the economy is great, if there is a recession and you lose your job, there is no social safety net, no unemployment insurance or public healthcare option. There are high levels of inequality. Even though you will make more money than most people in the country, your day-to-day interactions will mostly be with people who make more money than you.

Communitysburg: all your friends and family live here. You can hang out with them anytime you'd like. You and your spouse's parents are always available to babysit. The jobs don't pay particularly well and there isn't much of a social safety net. However, if you fall on hard times, there are numerous family and friends who will open their house to you. They also tell you about job opportunities before they become publicly known. Most people share your political and moral views.

St. Socialism: All citizens have universal healthcare and free education, including college; robust unemployment insurance; and a nice retirement plan, all regardless of employment status. The jobs don't pay that well and the taxes are high. Plus, you don't know anyone in the city. There is low inequality, most people make about the same as you and the ones who make more don't make much more.

Better yet: Imagine you are creating your ideal city. What percent should it reflect each of the above scenarios? I would say 55% Communitysburg, 30% Jobopolis, 15% St. Socialism.

Underpants Gnomes as a Categorical Imperative

Beware of Bull

There are two separate but closely related movements to change public schools. One is to teach all of U.S. history, including the messy parts, most notably the treatment of Blacks and Native Americans. The other is to teach Critical Race Theory to our students.

I am against the latter but I'm torn on the former.

The way we teach American history in public schools involves lies. Not just lies, but a certain mythology.

We mythologize our founders as brave inspiring men who fought against the evil British empire. We mythologize our "cordial" relationship with Native Americans (they taught us how to grow corn!) while yada yada-ing over the whole genocide thing. We mythologize Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, ignoring his detestable views of blacks.

These things are, at best, half-truths. So why not tell it like it really is? That is the question that has led to a growing movement to chip away at the American Mythology and expose the darker truth.

My worry is that this is a Chesterton's Fence scenario, where we are tearing down a fence just because we don't understand why it is up. And now we are staring down the face of a bull who is about to gore us to death.

The goal of primary education

The goal of education evolved over the years. In The Third Pillar, Rajan describes how it changed from a way to draw the community together, to a way to build more productive workers during the Industrial Revolution, to a way to close the inequality gap by ensuring equal access to education, and finally a way of signalling class status (since most poor families could not afford to have their kids in school and not working on the farm).

In Free to Learn, Peter Gray has a more cynical outlook.

"By the early nineteenth century ... the primary educational concern of leaders in government and industry was not to make people literate, but to gain control over what people read, what they thought, and how they behaved. Secular leaders in education promoted the idea that if the state controlled the schools, and if children were required by law to attend those schools, then the state could shape each new generation of citizens into ideal patriots and workers."

A more generous interpretation might be that a uniform public education was made to build up national pride.

But in order to do so, you need to create a myth. It's the same technique every cult, religion, and successful tribe, movement, or ideology ever has figured out.

So we told our children a simple story.

Columbus discovered America by being brave and crossing the Atlantic when everyone thought he would fall off the end of the flat world. We made friends with the Indians. We fought the British for our independence. We created the best government ever and made freedom cool.

But what if the reason we told these lies was because it was the only way to unify a large, growing, diverse group of people? What if tearing down that fence means tearing apart the social order?

Truth or Unity

I guess we have to decide what the goal of education is. For college, the goal is/was truth. That is where most people learned "the real story" about America. Is it possible that Truth Without Myth set the stage for today's civil unrest; a whole generation of educated citizens with no common religion, no common myth, no common story of triumph that builds a shared sense of civic pride?

Or are today's activists simply replacing the American myth with a new one?

The 1619 Project seemed to take a very unscientific approach to history. They started with a conclusion, America is and always has been racist, and selected the facts that fit that narrative. Despite the pleas from actual historians who saw that they have the facts wrong, the New York Times staff doubled down. Why? Because they are creating their own narrative. But in this one America isn't the hero, it is the villain.

But what is the goal of this new mythology? Is it seeking truth by highlighting neglected stories or is it seeking to unify the antiracists and social justice activists by creating a new mythology they can all believe in?

If the latter, then I can't see how this new myth, villainizing the foundation of this country while ignoring all its great accomplishments, will lead to the creation of something better. It falls prey to the same old myth by ignoring the positive aspects of our history, like all the ways the tools of the Enlightenment have brought more rights and raised the standard of living of women, minorities, and the poor; more than any movement ever.

If the goal is to seek truth by complimenting the traditional teachings of history with a more holistic view, I worry that giving up on the concept of mythology will lead to further disunity. But maybe my mistake is in thinking the antiracists are consequentialist to begin with.

Ends or Means?

I'm starting to think the goal of successor ideology is an even more rudderless plan than the South Park underpants gnomes.
Phase 1: call out racism, cancel all racists, shame white people for their privilege.
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: ?

Omar Wasow, a professor at Princeton, was criticized by Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson for a study he released that showed violent protests hurt Democrats at the polls and nonviolent protests help them. Here is part of his reply on Twitter.

The most generous interpretation I can give of Robinson’s critique is that he views my research as shifting attention away from a critical focus on white supremacy to “framing the facts” in a way that “blames” Black activists for resisting white domination. 10/

— Omar Wasow (@owasow) June 18, 2020

Robinson concedes that Wasow's research is "true empirically." But he doesn't like how it frames the conversation away from what Robinson thinks it should be about. In other words, the potential negative consequences of violent protests do not matter to activists like Robinson. Just like the health professionals support of the George Floyd protesters in spite of increased COVID-19 risk. The consequences of ignoring social distancing measures did not matter. All that matters is Phase 1: call out racism.

Take another example: the Bernie Sanders campaign tweeting a video of Joe Rogan saying he will probably vote for Bernie. How did that work out with Sanders' supporters?

This is a pathetic response and I’m done. It is clear the Bernie Sanders campaign does not care about holding transphobia accountable, among the many other awful things Joe Rogan has perpetuated on his program.

I am a human being and a trans person. I am not “another belief”. https://t.co/QCwpRCDb09

— Charlotte Clymer 🏳️‍🌈 (@cmclymer) January 24, 2020

Briahna Joy Gray, who worked on the campaign, gave a consequentialist response, but it fell on deaf ears. To the Charlotte Clymers of the world, keeping the campaign pure is more important than building a coalition that leads to winning and putting Sanders' policies in place. The ends do not justify the means. It's like speaking in different languages.

So maybe consequentialist arguments are pointless for these activists like Clymer. The ends will never justify the means because Phase 1 is a categorical imperative.

Kant would say you should not steal even to feed your starving family because stealing is categorically wrong. For certain activists, telling their story is a categorical imperative even if it stretches facts beyond credibility (1619 authors), even if it is a net harm (Nathan Robinson), even if it destroys society (dismantling American mythology).

(FWIW, I'm not saying that all racial policies should be viewed through a utilitarian lens. Even if stop-and-frisk policies do reduce crime, and there isn't much evidence it does, just because there is no way to measure the dehumanizing effect it has on all the innocent, false-positive citizens that the policy victimizes is no reason to justify its brutal nature. When deciding between more dignity or more crime, choose dignity.)

Unity Via Canceling

But what if there is a purpose to the successor ideology's public shaming? What if the goal isn't ending racism but unifying the tribe? In this sense, the villain is the racists (however broadly applied that term might be) and the purging of them from society (via cancel culture) is the activists' Revolutionary War.

I began this post by disagreeing with the push to teach Critical Race Theory in schools, or to put it more selfishly, to teach it to my kids. I originally disagreed with it because it does more harm than good.

But I've come to entertain the idea that the harm might be the point. It might be the new American mythology that attempts to unite us all in a hatred of White Supremacy.

It will obviously fail, but that does not diminish the point that we, as a country, are desperate for something to believe in. It doesn't make intuitive sense to lie, but if we pursue the messy truth, we become tribal and vicious. If we tell selective stories with clear villains and heroes, we can unite in our hatred of the other and the adoration of our mythical Gods.

For a while we believed in the American myth and shared high levels of trust. This came at the cost of alienating our fellow citizens with a historical connection to our dark past. As more people went to college and learned the truth, the myth began to fade. Chesterton's fence came down. The result has been growing levels of distrust, partisanship, and hatred.

We don't know how to put the fence back up and it might be too late. But even if we can find a way, it has become clear to me that the new fence should look nothing like the old one.

Searching for Moral Clarity in all the Wrong Places

I gave my best effort to understand people's reactions to the Tom Cotton editorial, but I'm not sure I quite had my finger on the pulse.

Here is a tweet from Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowrey that's made me rethink things:

American view-from-nowhere, "objectivity"-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment. We need to fundamentally reset the norms of our field. The old way must go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity

— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) June 4, 2020

I'm really hung up on his usage of "moral clarity." In that same blog post, I also wrote a lot about formative institutions, but I didn't spend a lot of time writing about the most prominent, yet declining, institution: religion.

If you can excuse my stereotyping for a moment, I would guess that most of the people who are happy to see James Bennett resign in the wake of the Tom Cotton brouhaha are under forty, coastal-living, well-educated, mostly white people who do not attend church.

They likely have not been a part of any formative institution. And this is why that matters:

Everybody worships...

I imagined taking my objections to these reactions and placing them in the context of a Catholic Mass. The priest gives his homily, then he invites his Hindu friend to tell the congregation about why they should worship Shiva. Then a Muslim cleric comes up and tells them they need to pray to Allah.

When the congregants object, the priest responds: "Hey, we're just trying to give both sides!"

The response of the hypothetical priest is so absurd, and would fall so flat on the ears of the people in that church, that I think I finally understand how these activists must feel. The New York Times is the place where they come for preaching, ahem, moral clarity.

When a priest gives his homily, he will often talk about current events and how the community of believers should approach them, how they should respond as people of a particular faith. He gives them moral clarity.

In the absence of such an institution, people are forced to look elsewhere for morality and community. Many of them have placed that need at the alter of the NYT op-ed page.

I chastise this type of purity and promote diverse viewpoints in institutions. But sometimes exclusion seems like the only logical conclusion. If it doesn't make sense for churches to promote both sides of a religion debate, then why should newspapers present both sides of a topic?

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.

I want to believe that the objections to the Cotton op-ed are just about preventing harm to black people and not a quest for ideological purity. Heather Mac Donald tried to make the case that the supposed "War on Cops" was preventing them from doing their jobs and driving up crime, leading to an increase in violent crimes in black neighborhoods. Predictably, things did not end well with her on the college tour since her solution was to stand up for cops.

Choose your God
The problem I have is that these activists have taken an institution, which plays a valuable role in society, and are trying to turn it into a moral community without replacing the institution they are attempting to usurp.

I understand your need for "moral clarity" but what about society's need for the institution of journalism to inform our citizenry?

So where does that leave the rest of us who hold onto the traditional view of media? I hate to keep coming back to it, but I think Jonathan Haidt is right. We can adapt his proposal for higher education to news.

Newspapers should choose their telos: social justice/antiracism/moral clarity for liberals, or a more traditional objective and curious approach that seeks to put events and facts into context. And they should be upfront about what their mission is and let the readers decide.

Institutions: Performative vs. Formative

This post is kind of a mess. I probably put more work into it than anything else I've written. It started out as 3 different posts but I felt they were all reaching toward the same idea, so I merged them. I hope it makes sense.

I.
I have not read the NYT op-ed from Senator Tom Cotton about why the military should be deployed to restore order among the riots and looting. But, like most people who have not read it, I have opinions anyway.

Apparently, this led to the highest cancellations in a single hour ever for the Times. It's even caused a schism in the editorial board.

A bad argument for the cause of the backlash would be to say that the readers are in an echo chamber and don't like hearing different opinions. I think a better argument is to understand how some people view the purpose of an editorial page.

The "old guard" believes it should present multiple viewpoints. I put myself in this category because I like being able to understand how people I disagree with think. It helps me refute their points better.

But a growing view is that an editorial page presents ideas endorsed by the newspaper. Therefore, the Cotton piece is an endorsement of the New York Times. If his argument is an Obviously Bad Idea, then it would make sense to distance yourself from the Times for endorsing such an Obviously Bad Idea.

Now that the Times has walked it back, reacting to the reaction but pretending like it was a rushed job, conservatives are calling them out for liberal pandering. But conservatives fall into the same trap. They were quick to call out publications like the Times or the Washington Post for denigrating the anti lockdown protesters for spreading the virus, while now justifying the George Floyd protests as necessary.

While it is certainly a double standard, aren't conservatives doing the same thing, conflating an explanation of a viewpoint with the publisher's endorsement? Aren't these newspapers just publishing viewpoints, helping people understand how an individual sees the two protests differently and not necessarily endorsing the hypocrisy?

We know that trust in institutions has been in decline for decades now, with people putting more faith in individuals. But institutions still matter when it comes to blame and I'm starting to see a transition in how media institutions see their role.

II.
Here's a thought: do we need major media? If all major publications disappeared tomorrow, what would happen?

There would still be journalists. They would still do writing and reporting and you would access their work through Twitter, blog posts, and YouTube. Maybe you subscribe to their newsletter or Patreon, but how much different would it be?

Do we really need newspapers at all? I say yes. The main purpose they serve right now is as gatekeepers. There is still some type of editorial standard that would be nonexistent in the absence of institutional media.

The fact that people's response was not "Did you see what Tom Cotton wrote?" and was instead "Did you see what the New York Times ran?" tells me that people still see media as an institution and expect it to serve as a gatekeeper.

But the gatekeeping was for quality journalism. That gatekeeping is starting to change and now newspapers are faced with two growing concerns.

• The Prisoner's Dilemma: The media has a nash equilibrium problem. The old guard knows that the Right Thing to Do is to be objective, informative, and fact-based. They also know that sensationalizing and partisan pandering will garner more clicks, more page views, and thus make more money. The first newspaper to defect to stories that seek to sensationalize rather than inform, will make money at the expense of everyone else.
  We're slowly seeing the effects of everyone defecting; more and more clickbait headlines. In a world with no media institutions serving as a check on one another, there will be no incentive for individual journalists to not write click bait articles.
• The Purity Dilemma. The second problem stems from the result of younger journalists conflating their views with righteousness. This growing ideology seeks purity. The antiracists want their narrative to dominate because the other side is not just wrong but harmful to minorities.
  Leaning into this direction also seems to have the effect of holding on to their most loyal readers, so there is a financial incentive as well. (Of course, I've read some news that many cancellations come from people upset about the "resignation" of James Bennett, the old guard editor who took credit for the Cotton piece.)

III.
I think about the Purity Gatekeepers of Media and can't help but be reminded of this line from Yeval Levin.

"We now think of institutions less as formative and more as performative, less as molds of our character and behavior, and more as platforms for us to stand on and be seen. And so for one arena to another in American life, we see people using institutions as stages, as a way to raise their profile or build their brand. And those kinds of institutions become much harder to trust. ..."

He says the purpose of formative institutions, which could be anything from joining the Boy Scouts to graduating from Harvard, is to form character and identity that allows you to answer a question:

"As a parent, as a neighbor, as a member of the PTA, as a member of Congress, as a CEO, what should I do in this situation? Not just what do I want, not just what would look good, but given my role here, what should I do? It is a question you ask when you take the institutions that you're part of seriously."

He says that many people don't want to be formed. They have their ideals and only want to use institutions as a platform.

I frequently see this on social media. In the wake of the George Floyd protests, everyone is quick to show their selfie from a rally, change their profile to black, or worse, link to a Robin DeAngelo book. Very few people focus on serious solutions to ending police brutality (it should go without saying that defunding the police is not a serious solution).

What's wrong with Robin DeAngelo's work? For starters, it's probably a scam. More importantly, it doesn't work (nor, unsurprisingly, does calling people "racist" work).

Study: Reading about white privilege doesn't make people any more concerned about the plight of poor black people; it just makes them less concerned about the plight of poor white people. https://t.co/VgmuMKRLa8 pic.twitter.com/5vbF5peQWM

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) June 6, 2020

I can think of no easier way to fall into the trap of Maslow's Hammer than adopting an outlook based on being against something. If you are anti blue dots, you're going to end up hammering some purple ones.

That's why the problem with institutions and ideologies like Antifa, Antiracism, and even No Lables, is that they define themselves by something they are not. It's a clever word game, sort of a motte and bailey. You say you are against something everyone agrees is bad, then expand your mission to something more narrow and partisan, and anyone who tries to critique you will be labeled a Nazi or racist.

IV.

Based on all available evidence, I have no reason to believe that racism, being defined as a motivation or belief, played a role in the death of Ahmaud Abrery, George Floyd, or Breonna Taylor. Better yet, I have no reason to believe that their fates would have been different if they were white.

In most instances, I see a policy or incentive failure that requires a policy or incentive solution. If it's viewed as a racism problem, people will seek anti-racist solutions, which I believe are doomed to fail.

In Against Murderism, Scott Alexander talks about a schizophrenic patient who thought Jews secretly controlled the world.

"by totally ignoring the anti-Semitic aspect, I was able to successfully treat this guy with Seroquel, whereas if you tried to read him Elie Wiesel books, he’d still be in that psych ward today."

My worry is that if the anti racism crowd controls the narrative, they will do something similar, like requiring police officers to read Ta-Nehesi Coates essays, instead of something practical, like requiring de-escalation training, banning chokeholds, requiring warnings before shooting, or any other tactic in this study that correlates with a lower rates of police shootings.

In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdor writes:

"The results of a poll conducted May 29 and May 30 by YouGov and Yahoo News do suggest, though, that police-reform advocates can win huge victories quickly if they choose the right battles...
If activists focus on proposals such as these, they might just achieve lasting change. If they choose or are dragged into a national debate that centers the propriety of riots, or abstract attitudes about policing, or white supremacy, or critical race theory, they are far less likely to achieve the urgent reforms that could reduce the frequency of police killings and brutality."

Campaign Zero is an example of advocacy that is serious and focused. (Activist DeRay Mckesson talks about his work on the Bill Simmons Podcast.) Their website does a great job of showing which policies work and includes an interactive graphic that shows which cities use which policies.

The goal of the campaign is to reduce police killings to zero, hence the name Campaign Zero. Notice that it isn't called Racism Zero.

V.
Performative groups are really good at getting media attention, but the energy is usually too diffuse and directionless to achieve any meaningful change. In fact, it's probably better to think of them as movements than institutions.

MLK was a pacifist. He practiced nonviolence, which is not anti-violence, or being against violence. Nonviolence is purposeful. It is telling someone "Do what I say or I'm going to make you hurt me."

King was able to answer Levin's question "As a Christian, as a pacifist, how do I respond to this situation?" He had a plan, he had leadership, he had a prophetic vision ("I have a dream ...").

The Founders didn't call this country Anti Britain. They had a vision for creating something better.

Today's activists have passion but they have not been formed by institutions that lead them to answer Levin's question, and largely, they lack prophetic vision. To answer Levin's question, you have to be for something.

To be fair, Robin DeAngelo's work does seem to be somewhat formative, shaping white people to be better versions of themselves. But its prescriptions lack efficacy and it falls into the trap of defining itself by what it is against, rather than painting a picture of utopia and how we can strive for it.

Black Lives Matter does seem to have a prophetic vision. It's website states "we’ve committed to struggling together and to imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive."

But is it a formative institution that seeks to shape people so they can answer Levin's question? I'm not sure, but I am hopeful. It has local chapters. It encourages positive things like voter registration. I guess it depends on whether the people seeking to join want to use it as a platform or as an opportunity to become a better version of themselves.

VI.
At this point, I'm sure that I sound like an institution stan, but the truth is I have been formed by nothing. I dropped out of Cub Scouts. I lost my faith in religion. I've never been affiliated with a political party. My alma mater is not a part of my identity.

Like many people in my generation, I resent the notion that I need some institution to transform me, that I need help in any way. But I keep coming back to a simple quote from David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water" speech: Everybody worships.

I believe that in the absence of formative institutions--ones with a history, some social infrastructure, a vision of a better tomorrow--people will give in to movements and performative ideologies that cater to our worst tribal impulses. They are bound to worship something.

When the media ceases to be a formative institution, it will completely devolve into tribal journalism. When higher education ceases to be a formative institution, it will devolve into performative students and activist professors.

And when important movements seeking necessary change are not led by people from formative institutions, it will attract the anarchists, looters, and performative demonstrators who lack the discipline and commitment to build a better society. It will attract the "anti" people who make it harder for the DeRay McKesson's of the world to enact change.

When more than a thousand U.S. citizens are killed by police each year, the stakes are too high to let this movement be carried by people with their own agenda.

The Weinstein Citadel

I like Eric Weinstein but I have trouble engaging in some of his ideas. During an episode with Ross Douthat on Eric's podcast, he frequently made references to those, like himself, who are kept outside the "Citadel."

He often talks about institutional gatekeepers that he finds elitist and working to undermine rogues such as himself. And while some of that might be true, it bothers me that he never attempts to engage in some good faith reasoning about why those institutions exits.

They are another classic Type I/Type II error scenario. I believe that there are more bad ideas than good ideas. A tightly guarded Citadel keeps out many bad ideas at the cost of a few good ones. I'd like to hear Eric, instead of his usual institution-bashing, offer a solution to opening up the Citadel while still keeping out bad ideas.

Ticks, Diets, and Double-Blind Studies

My wife had a chronic condition for many years. She had numerous tests, including for Lyme, that came back negative. It seemed that no one could help us as her condition continued to deteriorate.

We made the decision to explore options outside the Citadel, the circle of specialists and doctors we had been referred to within our healthcare insurance network.

First, we saw a doctor in Pittsburgh that my mother-in-law found through researching ILADS recommended specialists. He ran some tests, affirmed my mother-in-law's suspicion that my wife had Lyme Disease, and put her on long-term antibiotics. He was very positive, telling my wife she will start feeling better in no time. (She didn't.)

When we moved to Massachusetts, we saw a different doctor, an infectious disease specialist. She made no promises and told us that my wife was going to have to make some difficult changes if she was going to have a chance of improving her condition, which she called "probably something closer to Lyme."

The biggest difference between the two doctors is that the latter put my wife on a low glycemic diet. She also took my wife off some unnecessary medication that Pittsburgh doctor had prescribed and changed the antibiotics my wife was taking. She started to feel better in a few weeks, although it took a few years before she began feeling like herself again.

Good Rogue/Bad Rogue

Now, both doctors are outside the medical community's Citadel, which does not approve of long term antibiotics for Lyme Disease and doesn't even recognize the condition Chronic Lyme Disease. To my knowledge, long-term antibiotic treatment has not been shown to work better than a placebo. Sure, some people get better but who's to say that would not have improved on their own. Also, long-term antibiotics can be very damaging to a patient's health.

So both doctors' approach puts them outside the Citadel. The Massachusetts doctor, however, also promotes a diet change. Generally, diets are not approved by the Citadel. But not because they are harmful, like long-term antibiotics. Simply because they cannot pass a double-blind study. There is no way to give someone a placebo diet; people know what they are eating.

(Here is a great read about a mother who's daughter becomes diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Through her own research, she discovers a very effective diet treatment from a rogue doctor. The Citadel advises her against it: mainly because it cannot pass a double-blind random controlled trial even though it is more successful than Citadel-approved treatment and has no side effects.)

Help, I need a referral, not just any referral

If my wife had continued to see the Pittsburgh doctor, I worry about how poor her health would be right now. Not only might she still be in pain, the damage to her immune system from the medication might have been irreparable.

I want to live in a world in which people have access to the helpful doctors outside the Citadel but are warned about the dangerous ones. The Citadel made if difficult for me to find the good rogue doctor, but I had no way of distinguishing her from the bad rogue doctor.

I wonder if Eric Weinstein thinks about this when he complains about how mean the Harvard professors were to him.

Slack and Barbells

I.
Another excellent post from Scott Alexander on the concept of slack. I'll try to summarize: Slack is a low competitive environment that allows for weird ideas or mutations to emerge that might become useful in the long run.

In what Elizer Yudkowsky calls Inadequate Equilibria, poorly designed systems are ones without enough slack; any dime spent innovating for the long term is wasting a dime spent competing now, and that loss will drive you out of business.

I'm trying to figure out why Nassim Taleb's barbell investment strategy seems to rely on slack and yet doesn't crumble in what should be a highly competitive environment: trading.

Writing on Slack, Scott notes:

"Imagine an alien planet that gets hit with a solar flare once an eon, killing all unshielded animals. Sometimes unshielded animals spontaneously mutate to shielded, and vice versa. Shielded animals are completely immune to solar flares, but have 1% higher metabolic costs...When the flare comes, only the few spontaneous mutants survive."

So there is enough slack in the imagined scenario for the shielded animals to survive. But their mutation only comes into play once an eon.

Taleb's strategy says to make 80-90 percent of one's portfolio investments in low risk, low return bonds. The rest should be put in high risk/reward stocks. In the short term, this strategy will underperform portfolios with more stock. If you're an investment manager with this strategy, you should be outcompeted by more aggressive investors who get their customers higher returns.

In order for the barbell strategy to work, you have to hit on one of those stocks in the 10-20 percent of your portfolio. (And you'll beat your competition when a recession hits and most of your money is tied up in safe investments while most of their's vanishes in risky stocks.)

II.
So what are low slack, inadequate environments? Both Yudkowsky and Alexander mention academic research and its "publish or perish" ethos. If we apply the barbell method, 10-20 percent of research projects would be put toward projects with a low chance of publication but a reward that is extremistan.

This puts the onus on academia to create rewards and incentives for publication. One publication of groundbreaking research should be worth five papers about who-gives-a-shit.

What else is low slack? How about criminal justice? One of the main themes of The Wire is that investigators are pressured to make low-level arrests instead of taking the time necessary to build cases that take down whole drug organizations.

Here again, the onus should be on the policymakers to create incentives to make these bigger arrests. So you spend time making busts on the street, but allocate a small percent of resources to building a big case that will yield the proper reward when the time comes.

Sometimes funding is the issue. Similar to detectives, think of investigative reporting. The unfortunte change in the media is that they get paid by web visits, incentivizing them to produce click-baity content.

The work of the Boston Globe's Spotlight team was great, but not every piece is getting turned into a Hollywood movie. Winning awards is great, but they don't pay the bills. Some combination of the government or private philanthropists should create greater monetary prizes for journalism deep dives. It should be enough that it is worth the investment of publishers to allocate 10 to 20 percent of their resources on the off chance it might win them a prize.

III.
It seems like we could fix a lot if we just got the right incentives in place. But some systems just won't budge, like housing.

The first locality to allow for new housing developments will take a hit to the local tax base (since residential development is a net negative) and be outcompeted by neighboring towns and their zoning restrictions.

I guess the longterm benefit is that you don't have a bunch of disillusioned Gen Zers who start voting in socialists because they can't find affordable housing. This is more like the solar flare where most people today will take the hit of increased costs of new housing and not benefit from absence anti-capitalist politicians.

Still, I don't know how to fix it. You can't create a great enough incentive to convince people to allow more housing, especially low income. It's not like there is a spectrum of options; it's build vs. don't build.

Review: Sapiens

I started reading Sapiens more than a year ago. It even prompted a blog post of mine. But I got distracted and never finished until I returned to it a few months ago and now that I've finished it, I have thoughts.

Some of Sapiens reads like a textbook but without the dreary prose. From time to time, Harrari will extrapolate and go off on some interesting observation about what makes us a unique species. These observations are the best parts of the book.

I've always felt that a post-religious society is a trap because we cannot escape the traits that led humans to believe in religion in the first place. So I felt at home reading about Harrari's observations on secular humanism and how even the supposed progeny of the Enlightenment will abandon the scientific method when it's convenient.

He starts by breaking down Humanism into three categories.

• Liberal Humanism: Humanity is individualistic and resides within each individual homo sapiens. The supreme commandment is to protect the inner core and freedom of each individual homo sapiens.
• Socialist Humanism: Humanity is collective and resides within the species homo sapiens as a whole. The supreme commandment is to protect equality within the species homo sapiens.
• Evolutionary Humanism: Humanity is a mutable species. Humans might degenerate into subhumans or evolve into superhumans. The supreme commandment is to protect humankind from degenerating into subhumans, and to encourage its evolution into superhumans.

(I got excited to learn more about Evolutionary Humanism until I discovered that he was talking about Nazis.)

Harrari sets up his critique of humanism with the foundations of the scientific revolution. Rather than summarize, I'll let Penn Jillette speak (start at 1:21):

Hararri writes:

“Our current assumption that we do not know everything, and that even the knowledge we possess is tentative, extends to the shared myths that enable millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. If the evidence shows that many of those myths are doubtful, how can we hold society together? How can our communities, countries, and international system function?"

So the Scientific Revolution is about admitting we don't know most things and looking for ways to prove our beliefs so they become Truth. But an adherence to truth and the scientific method does not unite people, myths do. This goes back to my original Sapiens post about our ability to tell a story and how that binds us as a species.

Harrari then turns to the flaws in secular humanism.

"All modern attempts to stabilize the sociopolitical order have had no choice but to rely on either of two unscientific methods:

1. Take a scientific theory, and in opposition to common scientific practices, declare that it is a final and absolute truth. This was the method used by Nazis (who claimed that their racial policies were the corollaries of biological facts) and Communists (who claimed that Marx and Lenin had divined absolute economic truths that could never be refuted).
2. Leave science out of it and live in accordance with a non-scientific absolute truth. This has been the strategy of liberal humanism, which is built on a dogmatic belief in the unique worth and rights of human beings - a doctrine which has embarrassingly little in common with the scientific study of Homo sapiens.”

This really helps me understand socialists and even critical race theorists. The fact that America is a country where Obama became president and Oprah made billions means nothing if the black race as a whole still lags behind whites. To them, it's the collective that matters.

And sure, you can poke holes in the theories of postmodernists, like Foucault, or Marxists, like Marx. But the fact is that liberal humanism, with all its personal freedom and individualism, has just as shaky of a foundation. There is no scientific method that proves it is the correct view.

Of course, I would argue that religion, whether in a traditional theistic sense or secular humanism, is something we decide as a community and not something we come to know through the scientific method. Just as art is something we judge on a personal level. The Good, the True, the Beautiful: all separate and distinct.

So you can still be an Enlightenment thinker when it comes to things like medicine or climate change, but believe, as a group ethic, in Marxism, Christianity, or the Holiness of Individual Liberty  - even if it cannot be proven to be true. The point isn't to believe in a myth because it's true; it's because it unites us. Myths always have.

So if sapiens have used myths to unite multiple tribes, do today's partisan problems arise from a society in which there are too many competing tribes with their own myths? We would either need a super meta myth to unite them all or a more decentralized plan that quarantines the myths and keeps them at stable levels.

The Abandonment of Community and Family
The other section that struck my interest was the topic of community. It very closely resembled arguments from The Third Pillar.

“When a person fell sick, the family took care of her … if a person wanted to build a hut, the family lent a hand… if a person wanted to marry, the family chose … if conflict arose with a neighbor, the family muscled in.

“When my neighbor was in need, I helped build his hut and guard his sheep without expecting payment in return. When I was in need, my neighbor returned the favor … Village life had many transactions but few payments … less than ten percent of commonly used products and services were bought in the market. Most human needs were taken care of by the family and the community.”

Harrari gives a sobering analysis of how the state and the market evolved to destroy families and communities. Libertarians and socialists are equally at fault here:

“Over time, states and markets used their growing power to weaken traditional bonds of family and community ... They approached people with an offer they could not refuse: ‘Become individuals. Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead. We will provide food, shelter, education, health, welfare and employment. We will provide pensions, insurance and protection.’"

He then goes on to explain how the state or market provide everything from mortgages to home health aides, all the things families and communities used to do. Forget that we evolved over millennia to be a tribal species, we can now live a comfortable life without interacting with anyone. Your services are no longer required.

Health insurance via subsidiary
The internet has turned every topic to be racist or sexist or somehow problematic. Also, everything is somehow related to healthcare, including this blog post. Watch this:

The topic of healthcare is of particular interest to me. No American is happy with our current status and the dominant solutions are either more market (transparent prices!) or more state (Medicare for all!).

Not that long ago there was a third pillar in the health care industry. Rather than call it community or family, I prefer the term subsidiary.

Yuval Levin once wrote:

"a hyper-individualist culture is likely to be governed by a hypercentralized government, and each is likely to exacerbate the worst inclinations of the other...

“This would seem to make subsidiarity—the entrusting of power and authority to the lowest and least centralized institutions capable of using them well—a key to addressing the particular problems of our age of individualism."

This article from Reason traces the history of healthcare in America and shows the role subsidiaries, community-based institutions, used to play.

“For example, during the first decades of the 20th century, the nation had thousands of mutual aid societies, also known as lodges or fraternal orders...  They functioned as social clubs, usually with distinctive uniforms and regalia. At the local lodge, bar, or church where they met, immigrants could speak their native language and share food from their home country. Fraternal orders also offered members, in return for regular dues payments, financial security products. Most supplied life insurance. Many contracted with physicians and hospitals to provide medical care.

African Americans created a massive network of these associations, some of which evolved into black-owned insurance companies and banks. One such society in Mississippi—the Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor—constructed a hospital. Dues-paying members received burial insurance and up to 31 days of medical and surgical care."

The article goes on to recommend something called the Direct Primary Care model, where people pay a flat monthly rate to a local independent health care provider who then covers basic services. No insurance, no deductibles, no co-payments.

There are a lot of problems with U.S. healthcare. I don't know if the DPC model will fix them. I don't know if working through a subsidiary like the Elks or some other local civic organization will fix them. I'm just convinced that more market or more state will not. If there is a better solution, it will be designed by someone who understands homo sapiens and what it is that makes us unique.