The Well-Intentioned Abuse of "Equity"

 From an Inside Higher Ed story:

“And in 2020, an important report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce supplied contemporary and comparative evidence that general education helps “tame” authoritarian inclinations and thus protects democracy….

Policy and higher education leaders must become bold in making the case that democracy is the foundation of everything else we hold dear….”

Cool. I love democracy, and loathe authoritarianism. Tell me more.

"At most institutions, participation in civic and democracy learning remains optional rather than part of the degree-requirement fabric."

Sigh. So we're going to promote democracy and erode authoritarianism in students by taking away their freedom to choose what classes to take and requiring them to enroll in what we want. Great.

My hope is that the case for democracy teaches students how to lose with grace. How to, as Sebastian Junger put it, prefer a fair system in which you have no power to an unfair system in which you have all the power.

I think this also means separating how we fight against things we don’t like; choosing between legislation and social pressure/persuasion. I don’t like the CRT bans that remove from school libraries harmless and important books about Ruby Bridges. But those bans, although illiberal, were achieved through a democratic process that I have to agree to respect. 

Will examples like these be taught to students? Or is it just going to be about voter ID laws and all the bad things Republicans do.

But that’s not even my biggest gripe with the article. It's this:

“And we need to set equity goals and markers so that the civic learning movement becomes inclusive rather than, as it is today, often marked by deep disparities between who participates and who does not…

“the students least likely to “do optional” are America’s low-income, first-generation students and students from historically underserved communities.

"The result is deeply inequitable participation in college-level civic learning.”

My gripe is aimed at this obsession with equity, a term that is often a noble goal that is too often shoehorned into strategies without a thought of its usefulness.

Managing Risk

According to The Big Short, the mortgage backed securities that led to the Great Recession were once a popular investment tool. Once you pooled a bunch of mortgages together, you got a really safe investment with pretty good returns. The problem is that, as demand for them surged, investors began to run out of mortgages to fill them with. This led to taking on riskier and riskier mortgages.

I think something similar is happening in higher education. About 80 years ago the number of US colleges took off in response to increasing demand, fueled by the GI bill, draft dodgers, and the rise of most people’s standard of living, making affording college a possibility. The latter part is what I am interested in and will return to. 

Since we haven’t done much to expand immigration (numbers improved, but not as a share of the population) and coupled with infertility and rising tuition, there is a shortage of demand and colleges are starting to look like 2007-era mortgage backed securities, with more students enrolling who are likely to drop out.

Does that mean low-income students should be discouraged from pursuing higher education? No, but I think both students and colleges need to be more transparent about what they are looking for.

Life Examined

Baby Boomers went to college to get a better job AND become a better citizen. The latter part is what comes from a life of relative privilege. You care about citizenship once your basic needs are met. For Boomers of that era who did not pursue college, it wasn’t always because of costs. A lot of times there was enough good-paying, low-skilled manufacturing jobs that didn’t require a degree.

Let’s be honest, this push to teach citizenship and the value of democracy is something you only care about when your hierarchy of basic needs have been met. You have to be privileged to even be thinking about it.

So close to getting it

The sad thing is that the Inside Higher Ed's author is so close to getting it.

“Faced with such disparities, educators point out that community college students (and many four-year college students) often live very complex lives, balancing college study with work and family and frequently facing searing societal disparities as well.”

The first generation, low income community college student who we’re trying to force, in the name of equity, to pass a course about citizenship and the value of democracy, isn’t in college because he wants to have a broad-based liberal arts education. He wants to get a job so he doesn’t have to worry about his heat being shut off, how to afford his son’s baby formula, or how to take care of his ailing mother. And there isn’t a manufacturing job that pays enough so this is his only chance.

He is in school so he can make more money! That is it! And now you’re going to force him to take some class that isn’t going to make him more valuable in the workplace? 

You want equity? Let’s start with making it easier for low income people to find good paying jobs. Anything that isn’t doing that is just making their lives harder.

The End of (Believing in) Hate

 I no longer believe in hate as some type of motivational principle. Slogans like "End hate" always sounded so silly to me and I think the reason is: I never believed in hate. Such slogans are attempts to treat the symptom rather than the cause.

I believe that hate is the manifestation of the former of the "fight or flight" reflex. And I believe that reflex is ignited by fear. So you could say that I just believe that hate is a response to fear.

One of my idealist beliefs is that we all share certain human emotions. And when someone acts in a way that seems stupid or evil, you should look for the common human emotion that causes it rather than lazily relying on something banal like hate, racism, or power--things that only bad guys do. If the motives you attribute to someone's behavior are not motives that play out in your life, then they probably aren't their motives either.

I believe that the alt-right's nationalistic, anti immigrant sentiment isn't about hatred and racism. I think it's about fear. I think that what they call "patriotism" is the feeling that America is a sense of their identity and they fear that they are losing that sense of identity. It's probably a good place to explain to them how black people feel about cultural appropriation. 

When black progressives talk about “code switching” and “white spaces”, I think they are talking about the fear of losing their identity. I think it is the same fear nationalists have toward immigrants; they worry outside cultures are entering their spaces and threatening to erode their identity. Either people's behavior is rooted in the same human emotions, or we start to believe something that sounds like race science.

I don't think AOC's "Tax the Rich" sentiment is born our of a hatred of billionaires or jealousy of their success. I think she fears that people won't be able to escape poverty without help and that the 1 percent are sitting on piles of help that could change the lives of those living in poverty.

If you diagnose hate, you treat it with censorship. Which never works. If you diagnose fear, you treat it with understanding. Which is harder work than censorship, but it's win-win in the end.

File Under: Journalism working hard to earn our mistrust

I wrote a Facebook post about our biggest covid challenge right now: full capacity hospitals, filled with unvaccinated patients, having to turn away anyone needing emergency care. I used this as a basis for vaccine mandates being the least bad option. Someone responded that we should instead look for ways to increase the supply of hospital staff to meet this increased demand.

So imagine my surprise when I see this story on the homepage of the New York Times titled, “We Know the Real Cause of the Crisis in Our Hospitals. It’s Greed.”

I watch the video and it’s mostly interviews with nurses talking about the stress of being understaffed. Part of the segment explains how some states have tried to pass laws that require minimum nurse-to-patient ratios and then it shows a commercial from a lobbyist group that helped kill the bill. 

But as I zoomed out, I realized that I’m basically watching a commercial from a lobbyist group representing a nursing union. More depressing, nothing in the piece tried to fact check whether the “real cause” is, in fact, hospitals making money hand over fist by not hiring more nurses.

Knowing I have a full time job and a family, and lacking the highly-selective aptitude of a New York Times journalist, I decided to wing it and see what my very limited sleuth skills could uncover. 

After spending 15 seconds googling “hospital profit margins” I find this Moody’s report.

“nonprofit hospitals' profits declined significantly amid the pandemic. Specifically, nonprofit hospitals had a median operating margin of 0.5% in fiscal year (FY) 2020, down from 2.4% in FY 2019, and an operating flow margin of 6.7%, down from 8.4% in FY 2019…

“Moody's also found that nonprofit hospitals' expenses grew in FY2020 at a 4.7% rate—lower than the rate of expense growth in 2019 (5.9%), but still outpacing revenue growth, which was 3%.” 

From something called Becker’s Hospital Review:

“The steep decline resulted from a "tumultuous 2020," according to Kaufman Hall. For hospitals, financial stress in 2020 came from growing COVID-19 hospitalization rates, escalating expenses, declining elective care volumes and reduced outpatient revenue.”

Oh, so the reason hospitals aren’t spending more to hire more nurses isn’t because their CEOs like swimming in pools of all that fat profit, isn’t because they have no profit because of COVID-19.

Look, I don’t think this is an example of the MAINSTREAM MEDIA carrying water for the Democrats. But I think it’s lazy journalism and an example of why people are losing trust in institutions.

There are so many sources of disinformation out there. But there are also so many people choosing to listen to these sources over more credible ones and I feel like that is the part we don't talk about enough.

— Darkwater O'Scanlonski (@bayesianfox) January 16, 2022

You can blame people for choosing Joe Rogan interviewing a disgraced doctor peddling conspiracy theories rather than reading the New York Times. But at a certain point, legacy media needs to take a look in the mirror and ask themselves what they've done to drive so many people away.

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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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I've become obsessed w/a new investing thesis: products that let people exit or circumvent broken systems. A key freedom -- especially these days.

Examples:
fiat -> #Bitcoin
college degrees -> Lambda School
credit scores -> @wetradeup, @nova_credit
weak K-12 schools -> @Primer

— Leo Polovets (@lpolovets) November 24, 2021

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.

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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." 

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So tired of hearing people say "divisive." Utterly useless term.

— RIP CHARLES MILLS 🐐 (@deonteleologist) November 11, 2021

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."

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The drastic increases recorded in this poll are mind-blowing and provide strong empirical support for the claim that as oppression recedes, sensitivity to injury and indignity actually increases https://t.co/DgF43c0OpU pic.twitter.com/fUnJYIVVrZ

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) November 11, 2021

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.

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If I'm an editor at Scientific American, one of a small subset of mainstream publications devoted solely to, well, science, I definitely want to jump in with an aggressive take on each and every culture-war controversy. Very very good for the brand.https://t.co/CZAF4I6AbR

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) November 10, 2021

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.

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.

Why fancy restaurants in places with significant numbers of startups tend not to have dress codes. pic.twitter.com/68tmSyFkyv

— Paul Graham (@paulg) July 28, 2021

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.

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."

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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?"

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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.